Il-han read this as he read all else that was brought to him by his servant or told to him by those who passed his house, and his heart was cold as death itself. His mind knew, but his heart no longer felt. Sunia, too, neither spoke nor wept. She moved about her house slowly as though she were very old, beyond seeing or hearing or feeling. Her only thought was for Liang, and she stayed by him night and day and he was never out of her sight. Ippun, without request or permission, came to live with them, and she did the work of house and garden and they let her.
Some explanation must be made to his grandchild, Il-han told himself, yet what could he say? For the first few days he said nothing. Then he went to Sunia.
“What shall we tell the child?” he inquired.
She looked at him with lackluster eyes. “I will feed and clothe him, but do not ask me to do more.”
Yet the matter could not be put off, for Liang began to press.
“Where is my father?” he asked. “Why shall I not go home?”
He forgot to eat, and he sat with his chopsticks loose in his hand.
“When I go home—” he began again and then he paused. “When shall I go home?”
Il-han was hard put to it until he remembered that the Christians believed that all good souls went to heaven, and he seized upon the thought.
“Your father and your mother and your little sister have all gone to heaven,” he told the child.
Liang had heard of heaven, and he listened to this with a grave face. “Is heaven far?” he asked.
“No,” Il-han said, “it is no more than a minute away.”
“Then why do we not go, too?” Liang asked.
“We cannot go without invitation,” Il-han said. “When we are sent for, we go.”
“Shall I go with you and my grandmother and Ippun?” Liang asked.
“Yes,” Il-han said. “We will go together—”
All this he considered a lie, yet the more he considered it the more he was not sure whether it was altogether so. Who knew what lay beyond death’s horizon?
“Meanwhile,” he told the child, “we will live together.”
He had still one great comfort, his secret that now began to spread through the company of the underground, that the Living Reed had escaped. The cell in which he had lived so long was small, it was said, only a little larger than a coffin, the floor of stones laid close one upon the other. Yet one day guards found it empty. Empty? No, for up through those stones a green young bamboo shoot had forced its way!
Among the people the news spread, a ray of morning sun breaking through the darkness of the night, and nowhere was this light more bright than in Il-han’s heart. He still had a living son.
Part III
III
“WHY DO YOU FOLLOW ME?” Yul-chun demanded. He bent over the small refractory hand press. It was too old, this press, worn out years ago in an American newspaper office in a country town in Ohio. Without it, nevertheless, the Independence News of Korea could not be published. As it was, the sheet appeared irregularly, although he had been able to keep it weekly after the Mansei Demonstration had been put down at the end of the World War. It was well that the press was small for he had to move it from place to place now that the revolution had to go underground again. Only in America could the Koreans continue openly in rebellion against the invaders.
The bitter tonic of anger and disappointment had invigorated him and others like him. When he left Yul-han’s house that night, he had not gone to China as he had said he would. Somewhere, by someone, he had been betrayed. As he stepped into the street, he had been seized in the dark by rough hands, and bound. He never saw the face of his captors but he knew by their muttered words that they were Japanese although they spoke in Korean. They had beaten him with the butts of their guns until he was insensible. When he woke he was once more in a cell in an old prison, lying on a floor of uneven stones laid on the earth. He did not know why he was not dead, why they had not killed him. No one was within sight or hearing. He heard no sign of voice or footsteps except that once a day a guard brought a bowl of millet and a gourd of water. He saw nothing of this guard except his hands, sliding open an aperture in the iron door. Slowly he had recovered until he was able to think of life again, and escape. Yet perhaps he could never have escaped had it not been for the madness of the Mansei Demonstration. He would not have escaped then except that the guard, handing in his food as usual, handed in a steel file, and still without a word. A steel file! The guard could only be a Korean, a traitorous Korean whose conscience was moved for some reason. He had taken the file without a word and had compelled himself to eat the miserable food to which he was sternly accustomed. He must have time to think. Was the file a trick to tempt him to escape? Were his murderers waiting outside the window?
Then he had heard, far off, like the surf of a distant ocean, the uproar of human voices. That had decided him. He must chance his escape. He worked all day on the thick iron mesh of the hole in die wall that served for light and air, an aperture too small, one would have supposed, for a human body, but he was bone-thin, a collapsible skeleton, he had told himself grimly, and he had forced himself through it in the night, tearing the flesh from shoulders and hips. Immediately he had lost himself in the swarming crowds and then had hid in a ruined temple outside the city walls, where old and toothless monks were his faithful watchmen. From here he sent out the small printed sheet. Another young rebel, disguised as an acolyte, helped him here in the temple, sleeping by day and at night distributing the sheets throughout the city and to others throughout the country. Others, monks themselves, were also his messengers and his news-gatherers.
On this day, now drawing near its close, Yul-chun was making haste to finish his task, a warning to his fellow patriots that they were to take no heart in the proposals of Woodrow Wilson that there should be a League of Nations.
“If we cannot trust one nation, will twenty be more fit to trust?”
He was setting the type for these words when the girl appeared at the door. He had met her at a secret meeting, a strong slender figure in man’s trousers and jacket, and she had followed him from then on, appearing wherever he was, obedient, speaking little, persistent in offering herself to him. He would not have noticed her except she moved swiftly to obey his commands. Today she came in a blue cotton skirt beneath her jacket instead of trousers. She did not speak when he looked up. She was simply there at the door, and he remembered now that he had asked a question and that she had not answered. He straightened himself, pushed back a lock of hair and left a smudge of black on his forehead.
“Well?” he said impatiently.
She came in and stood leaning against the wall, her arms folded across her breast.
“You said you needed someone to help you.”
“Not you,” he retorted. “Not a woman.”
“Man or woman, it makes no difference in our work.”
“It makes a difference when it is you.”
“Can I help being a woman?”
“You can help pursuing me.”
She made her eyes wide at this, great dark eyes, the whites very clear.
“I have chosen you,” she said simply.
“I have no wish to be chosen,” he retorted. “I have too much to do. Ah, this wretched machine!”
He had worked as he talked, and now the press stopped. Ink ran over the paper in black streams. He tore out the paper, threw it on the floor and set the line of type again.
“I know how to set type,” she said.