“Come in, Mother,” he said when she stood in the doorway.
“What of the child?” she asked Yul-han.
Yul-han supposed she spoke of his daughter. “She seems unharmed, and she is with Ippun.”
“No, no,” Sunia cried at him, “I mean the one not born!”
“She holds it safely in her,” he said, and led the way to Induk’s bed.
Sunia had never been affectionate with her son’s wife, but now she knelt on the floor and gazed tenderly at Induk, her tears flowing down her thin cheeks. She took Induk’s swollen hand and held it gently, and she sobbed once or twice before she could speak.
“How is it here?” she asked softly and laid her hand on Induk’s belly.
“I shielded myself,” Induk said, her voice coming faintly. “I turned myself this way and that when the blows fell.”
“To think that we women go on bearing in such times,” Sunia sighed.
They said little more, the two women, but in the silence they came nearer together than they had ever been, and Sunia rose after a little while, saying that she was brewing a special ginseng soup with whole chicken broth and when it was done she would bring it.
“Sleep, my daughter,” she said, and went away again.
And Induk did sleep, for she could not keep herself awake. Part of her drowsiness was her body’s need to escape but part was the foreign drug which the American doctor had left.
Sunia went to the outer door then, Yul-han following her, and on the threshold they paused for a few words.
“Has my father told you what he will do?” Yul-han inquired.
“He has told me,” Sunia said.
“Can you bear it?” Yul-han asked.
“No,” Sunia said, “but I must.”
With this she went away, and Yul-han watched her as she went and saw how bent her body was these days as though it bore a heavy weight, the head drooping and the shoulders dropped. He remembered her straight and slender and her head held always high.
Yet when she was gone, his mind returned to its work. Whom should he send with his father? He cast about for someone he knew and reflecting upon this one and that his mind fixed on his fellow teacher, Sung-man, and he sent word to him by his father’s servant, inviting him to meet in the teashop where they had met before. He had pondered whether this was the safest place to discuss dangerous matters, but so vigilant were the police that he dared not seem to do anything hidden. Wherever he might go in secret with Sung-man some spy would discover it, either Japanese or a traitorous Korean.
The servant brought back word that Sung-man would meet him the next evening and so they met. In the midst of the full teahouse, and all the busy noise of men coming and going and servants running everywhere with tea and food, Yul-han put it to Sung-man whether he would go with his father to America. Sung-man, who seemed always careless of everything except his food, listened while he guzzled a bowl of noodles. Without changing the careless look on his face or the careless grin he wore as disguise, he filled his mouth and swallowed two great gulps and then, as though he told a joke, he said that he would go whenever Yul-han wished. Moreover, he could provide the money, for although he himself had no money beyond what he earned, yet he knew where money was.
“Are you a member of that—”
Yul-han put the half question, for he would not say the New Peoples Society, but Sung-man nodded.
“They are also in that country you have named,” he added.
The fighters for Korean independence were also in America! Yul-han received this news with surprise and comfort. His father would be among his own countrymen, there would be persons to welcome him and see that he was safe. He looked at Sung-man’s silly face with new respect. How much was hidden behind that grotesquerie!
“There remains only the matter of how to leave one place and enter another,” he observed.
“You are a Christian,” was Sung-man’s quick reply. “You can enter through the missionaries,” and laughing, as though he was telling a joke, Sung-man lifted his empty bowl and pounded the table and bawled to a waiter to fill it again.
… “They can’t go straight to America,” the missionary said to the doctor.
They sat together with Yul-han in the vestry of the church. He had feared that they would not help him, for he knew the orders from their superiors abroad was that they were not to mingle in the affairs of government. Yet these two Americans sat here in homely fashion, talking as calmly as though they discussed a matter of business. Looking from one plain face to the other, hearing the hearty voices, perceiving the good sense, which was their nature, he knew that whatever they were in race and nation, they were his friends and the friends of his people. He listened while they planned how his father and Sung-man would go to Europe and from there secretly to America, and how when they reached their destination, they, missionary and doctor, would see that the two Koreans were met by Christians and taken to private homes. Everywhere they would be met by Christians and sent on to others, and so all was planned to take place immediately.
“How can I thank you?” Yul-han said when he rose to leave.
The missionary clapped him on the back and made him wince. Never could Yul-han be used to such friendly blows, accustomed as he was to the tradition of his own countrymen that one did not lay hands on the person of another.
“We are Christian brothers,” the missionary shouted.
Yul-han went home, much moved by what had taken place, and he found Induk able to sit up, although she could not bear to move from her pillows so sore was her whole body. He knelt beside her and sent Ippun away and he told her everything. She listened, and then she put out her bandaged hand and he took it.
“This is why I was put to such suffering,” she said. “Out of evil good has come.”
He knew she spoke from Christian faith but he was still too new a Christian to believe that it was necessary for one to suffer in order that others might be saved. Yet he would not distress her now with his doubts. Let her have the comfort of her soul, and so he sat holding her bandaged hand.
“The American President is here,” Sung-man said. “We are fortunate. He leaves tomorrow for Boston.”
Il-han drew a deep breath. All morning he had sat waiting in his cramped room in a cheap hotel in Paris, where he had arrived two days ago from India. They had heard contradictory news. Wilson had already gone, he had not gone. He was failing in the Peace Conference, he was not failing. The Fourteen Points were being changed by the Allies, yet he was fighting bravely. No, he was not fighting bravely, he was allowing himself to be swayed. No one knew what was happening. Koreans, exiled in France as they were in many countries, had come together in Paris, anxious and trying to sift out the truth.
Il-han, listening the night before in their meeting here in his room, had said nothing until the end when he had heard everything. Then he had spoken firmly and quietly.
“I will go myself tomorrow, wherever the American President is, and face to face—”
He had been interrupted by half a dozen voices. “Do you think we are the only people? Every small nation in the world has sent its people to speak to Woodrow Wilson! And what will you say that they have not said?”
Il-han was unmoved. He felt dazed by the distance from home, he missed Sunia with a dull ache in his breast which he could not forget, he was homesick and ashamed of it, and yet his will held firm to its purpose. He must see Wilson face to face and tell him — tell him — What would he tell him? Sleepless in strange beds raised high from the floor so that he was afraid to turn himself over lest he fall to the floor, he had tried to plan what he would say.
“When I am face to face with him,” he had told them doggedly, “I shall know what to say. The words will come of themselves out of my heart where they have long been pent.”