“Tonghak!” Il-han cried. “Are you a Tonghak?”
“I am,” the young man said. He stepped back and folded his arms and looked straight into Il-han’s eyes.
“I cannot understand this,” Il-han exclaimed. “You have had ease and courtesy in my house. None has oppressed you or watched you. Why do you join with those Tonghak rebels?”
“Sir,” the man said, “I am a patriot. I take my place with our people. And who knows them better than you do, sir? The landfolk are the ones who pay for everything. They only are the taxed, for we have no industries such as you say the western nations have. Here all taxes fall upon the land. When the King wants money for these new ventures of his, the new army, the post office, the trips abroad, such as the one you made, not to speak of the diplomats and the delegations, the new machines he wants to buy, where does the King get the money? He taxes the landfolk! And as if this were not enough, who pays for the corruption inside the Court? And outside as well, for every petty magistrate has his little court, and the Queen has her relatives and her favorites, and who pays — who pays? The countryfolk who till the land, even the land they cannot own, which they can neither buy nor sell because it belongs to some great landlord, and he does not pay the tax, oh no, it is the lowly peasant who only rents the land who pays the tax! Sir, does your conscience never stab you in the heart?”
Il-han stared at the tutor as though he saw a madman. “Am I to blame?” he demanded.
“You are to blame,” the tutor said, his voice and his face very stern. “You are to blame because you do not know. You do not allow yourself to know. You traveled through the country for many months, did you not, and you saw nothing except mountain and valley and sea and people moving like puppets. Have you ever heard of a Russian named Tolstoy?”
“I know no Russians,” Il-han said.
“Tolstoy was a man like you, a landowner,” the tutor went on. “Yet his conscience woke. He saw his people, the people whom he owned because they belonged on his land, and when he saw them he understood that they were human beings and he began to suffer. Sir, you must suffer! It is for this that I have saved you.”
Il-han could not swallow such talk. It was enough for him to be amazed that the meek young man who he had thought was only a scholar, employed to teach his elder son, now showed himself a stranger.
“How have you saved me?” he demanded.
“I saved you as my father saved your father,” the tutor replied. “When angry people were about to kill your father in his time, my father persuaded them to let him retire to this grass roof.”
“My father was a good man,” Il-han said.
The tutor was relentless. “A good man, but he did not lift his voice when others were evil. And you too, you are a good man, but you do not lift your voice. You have access to the King and to the Queen but you have not raised your voice for your people.”
Il-han returned look for look. “What would you have me say?”
For the first time the man’s black eyes wavered. “I do not know.”
He waited a moment, biting his lip. Then he lifted his eyes again to Il-han’s eyes. “For that, too, I blame you. It is you who should know, and because you should know, because you must know, I have saved your life and the lives of your family. Today, in the congress of the Tonghak, I stood up and declared that among those who are to die you must not be killed. You — you are not to die! But I swore by my own life that you would be brave enough, when you knew, to speak against the corruption of the government, and against the taxes heavy as death, and the pushing men from Japan who are bringing their cheap goods here for our folk to buy because there are no other goods. And above all, you must speak bravely against the Japanese tricksters who by one means and another are buying land from the landowners because the landfolk can no longer pay even the taxes on their harvests.”
These words fell upon Il-han like blows from an iron cleaver. For a while he could not reply, and indeed for so long that the tutor could not endure the silence and he cried out again.
“I tell you, it is only for this that I have saved you and your sons!”
To which Il-han again after a long silence could only answer with deep sighs and few words.
“Tonight I must rest,” he said.
“But tomorrow?” the tutor insisted.
“Tomorrow I will think,” Il-han promised.
The tutor rose then and bowed and went away, and suddenly Il-han was so weary that he could only look at Sunia, begging for her help.
“You need not speak a word,” she said. “Your bath is hot, your supper is waiting and then you must sleep.”
He rose. “You who understand—” He felt her hand slip into his and hand in hand they went toward the rooms she had prepared for their life.
“What shall I call you?” he asked the tutor.
It was noon of the next day when he summoned the man to come to him alone. He had not yet seen his sons, and he had told Sunia that he would not until he had spoken again with the tutor. His older son was old enough to have been shaped by his tutor beyond knowledge, and he must know not only what the tutor had to say further but also what he was. It seemed to him, after his sleepless night, that all his years until now had been meaningless. He had lived at the beck of the Queen and the call of the King, conceiving this to be his duty. Even his long journeys into his own country and then into the foreign countries had been in service of the truebone royal house, rather than for the sake of the people. Was it indeed true that people and rulers must be separate? When he served one, must it mean that he did not serve the other?
“I can no longer think of you as my son’s tutor,” Il-han said when the tutor came again into his presence. “You are someone I do not know. Your surname is Choi but what is your name?”
“Sung-ho,” the man replied. He smiled half ruefully. “I wish I could call myself after the great Ta-san of the past, but I am not worthy. I must continue merely to use the name my father raised for me when I went to school.”
“Perhaps you will make a great name of it,” Il-han said.
Sung-ho only smiled again.
“I have a question to ask,” Il-han went on.
“Ask what you will,” Sung-ho replied.
Il-han saw how confident the man was, how bright his look, how straight his carriage. He sat on his cushion without diffidence, eager and ready.
“Is it you who have shaped my elder son so that he prefers to live here in the country under this grass roof rather than in the city?”
“Inevitably I have shaped him,” Sung-ho replied. “At first it was only that the city was hot in summer while here it is always cool. But as I shaped him, I shaped myself. Had I not spent summers here with your father under this grass roof I might never have come to know the landfolk.”
“Are the people on my land Tonghak?” Il-han asked.
“They are,” Sung-ho replied. “At least all who are young.”
Il-han smiled wryly. “Does this mean that you will all rise up in the middle of some night and behead me?”
“No,” Sung-ho said sturdily. “It means that we look to you to speak for us.”
Il-han was somewhat confounded at this. Was he then in duress? He poured two bowls of tea, so that he could have time to think, and he handed one to Sung-ho, but not with both hands as he would to an equal. To his surprise, Sung-ho also took the bowl with one hand, and not with both hands as he must from his superior.
Il-han went on. “Tonghak is a dumping pot for all sorts of rascals and rebels, debtors who will not pay their debts, thieves who will not pay their taxes.”
Sung-ho did not yield one whit. “You know very well how common people insist upon tricks and conjurings from those whom they love and admire, and who they think can protect them, and is it just to demand that every Tonghak be free from corruption when the yangban themselves are corrupt?”