They stood in the late sunshine, a ragged crew of sun-browned men, their horny hands hanging while they bowed to him. None spoke, and all were anxious, for why should a landlord speak to his tenants except to tell them that the rent was raised?
He perceived their anxiety and made haste to allay it.
“I greet you,” he said, “to thank you for the harvests, which are good beyond the average. This I take it is at least partly because you have done your work well. For the rest, we must thank Heaven for rain and sun in proportion to the need.”
They still looked at him with sullen eyes, doubting his intent, and suddenly he was afraid of them. The distance between him and them was very far and there was no bridge.
“I will not keep you,” he said. “I wish only to tell you that your share of the harvests will be doubled this year.”
They could not believe him. They still gazed at him in fear mixed with doubt. Whoever heard of a landlord who doubled the share of the tenant? Such good fortune was too rare.
As for Il-han, he saw their doubt and he was angry at their ingratitude. No one spoke. He waited and when he saw that they had no intent to speak, he felt his heart grow cold and hard.
“This is all I have to say,” he told them, and he turned and strode into his house and barred the gate behind him.
Yet when he had time to think over their brief meeting, he blamed himself for his anger. Why should they feel gratitude? For years they had toiled only to receive a meager share of the harvest. Even to double that share was not enough. The injustice of their lives was the injustice of centuries. It could not be mended in a day by one man on one farm.
On one cold New Year’s Eve several years later, Il-han reckoned that all he had done and thought and felt, added together, showed only two accomplishments. One was that his sons grew well and he had developed their minds beyond expectation. They were passing from babyhood to boyhood, the elder edging into his youth, although at thirteen he was still turbulent and impatient and argumentative, and he chose to make many quarrels with his brother, who in defense drew apart from him and became solitary. In a way this was a comfort to Il-han, for his younger son sometimes sought his company alone, partly for protection against the elder brother, but also because he and his father were much alike in loving books and writing poetry. This younger son had besides a tender love of music and he learned to play upon the kono harp so well that this became a cause of jealousy in the older brother. The elder was the more handsome of the two, however, and a very handsome lad he was, tall and strong, his eyes bright and bold, his nose straight, his lips thin, and he made fun of his younger brother’s light build. When he was angry, he even taunted the younger one for the imperfection of the lobe of his ear until one day Il-han, himself in rage, took his younger son to the American physician who had saved Min Yong-ik’s life, and he asked him to make the ear right again.
The physician by this time was aged, and his hands trembled. Yet he examined the ear and then he called his assistant, a young Korean whom he had taught during the years.
“Your hand is better at this than mine,” he told the man. “I will stand beside you and help you, but you must hold the knife.”
Il-han stood watching. First they put his son to sleep, holding some liquid-soaked cotton to his nostrils as he lay on a table. Then when he was asleep, while Il-han was uneasy for the sleep was too much like death, the young doctor, his hands encased in thin rubber gloves such as Il-han had never seen before, took a small thin knife from a tray held by a woman aide, and he cut the boy’s ear lobe and split it cleverly. Next with a needle and thread he sewed it into shape and attached it to the head. When all was finished, he tied on a bandage.
“Come back after a few days,” the old American doctor said, “and in ten days or so, you will see your son’s ear as like the other as his two eyes are alike.”
Sunia made much ado when Il-han brought the boy home again, for he had not told her, knowing she would be fearful and forbid it. But the ear healed well, and then the boy was perfect. Il-han was glad, except that he thought the elder son was colder to him than ever after the younger son was made perfect.
So much for his sons. The second accomplishment was a book that Il-han had been writing all these years. In it he put down, day after day, every wrong deed he heard done in the capital or in the nation. Friends visited him, though not often, and always in secret, and unknown men came to tell him stories of their sufferings, and again and again unknown members of the Tonghak came to his house and he received them because of Choi Sung-ho, but Sung-ho himself never returned, and when Il-han asked a Tonghak where he was, that man shook his head or shrugged his shoulders and none seemed to know who he was or if any knew him, they did not know where he was.
From whatever he learned from such persons and from every other source possible to him now, Il-han wrote in his book. He wrote down what every yangban spent on bribes and trickeries, and what every soban connived. When new governors were appointed for the provinces, he found out what time they left and when they arrived, how much they spent on the way, what women they took with them, or slept with as they went, who was bribed for what, and who welcomed them when they came to their new places, and who paid for the feasts and the dancing girls, and whether Japanese spies talked with them, and whether they met in secret with Japanese or Chinese or Russians, and if they traveled and where and how long they stayed away from their posts and who were their hosts and what favors were asked and if they were granted. When each such evil was known and written down in his book, and he saw how corruption weighed more heavily year by year upon the miserable landfolk, Il-han then wrote pages of what he believed should happen and how righteousness and justice could still be saved.
In the long evenings Sunia, her day’s work done, sat listening while he read aloud to her what he had written. Sometimes she was so weary with her household cares that when he paused to ask what she thought, he saw she slept. He never waked her, for he saw, too, in her sleeping face how much she had aged. The youthful beauty was gone, the lines of middle-age were clear, the same lines that he saw in his own face in the mirror in his bedroom. Seeing her, he only sighed and closed the book softly and let her sleep.
Yet there were other times when she did not sleep and when she listened, admiring, yearning for the world he wrote of in contrast to what was. On one such night he saw her weeping when he looked up to ask her if he wrote well.
“Now, Sunia,” he said, “have I written something wrong?”
She shook the tears from her eyes and tried to smile. “No, you have written all too well. But — but — oh, why can you not be heard? Will anyone ever read this book? I cannot bear to think your life is wasted here under this grass roof.”
He did not answer. Her question was the one he asked himself many times. Was his life wasted? Perhaps for his times and for his people, but not for himself. He had set the task of knowing what he was — he, a Korean. Now he knew. He closed the book.
“It is time to sleep,” he said. “The night grows dark and there is no moon.”
In the early evening of a certain night a messenger came on foot to the gate of Il-han’s grass roof home. Since he was a stranger, the gatekeeper would not admit him until he had himself inspected the man’s appearance. When he had looked at the man from head to foot, he let him in, but held him in the gatehouse under the guard of three other servants until he went to find his master and report the presence and the appearance of this stranger.