He walked by night and slept by day until he reached the high mountains. Then, as the danger of meeting Japanese soldiers and spies grew less, he walked at dawn and after sunset, sleeping through the small hours under some rock. His was a country of mountains, four-fifths of the land area in high terrain, and he loved the heights. To rise when the first pale light broke over the lofty crests still black against the silvery sky, to breathe in the mists from the gorges, to hear the splash of waterfalls and the echoing voices of singing birds, cleansed his mind and renewed his spirit. Alone as he was, stopping near a house of a village only to buy food, he could not but remember Hanya, however unwillingly, and he reflected upon his relation to her. That there was a relation he could not deny, although he had never so much as touched her hand. Yet a man cannot hear a woman declare her love for him without knowing that a relationship is established, and this though he will not allow himself to respond or indeed wish to respond. He had a strong natural desire for women, and this he knew, but he would not yield to it. He had remained virgin in spite of much teasing and ribaldry among his fellow revolutionists, who took women wherever they went and left them behind. Sejin, for example, who was like a brother to him, had often argued women with him.
“It is dangerous for you to continue a virgin,” Sejin declared. He was a tall slim young man from a seacoast village, and he could swim in any sea and dive deeper than any woman abalone diver. “You are defenseless, you saint among men! You are afraid of love, but the only defense against the one great love is women-women-women! To have many makes it impossible to have only one. It is the one who is the tyrant. If you have many women they are all your slaves, rivals, and therefore eager to please.”
“Not so,” Yul-chun had replied. “A single love may be a tragedy but it is not a day-to-day, bit-by-bit destruction.”
“Ah, you innocent,” Sejin had retorted. “I agree that we should not marry. None of us should marry when we have a revolution to make. But it is not we who are destroyed, it is love that is destroyed. I daresay I could love one woman and write poetry and live obsessed, as you will do if you are not careful, but my safety is that when I think of many women, I lose the possibility of the one — and the dream. Thus I keep my freedom. You still dream, and even your dream enslaves you.”
Yul-chun had listened but remained unchanged, reflecting that it was Tolstoy who decided his mind and gave him strength to deny all women, even Hanya. He had been inspired by Tolstoy and when he discovered that Tolstoy had created his greatest novels only when he had ceased to occupy his time and his energy with women, he had determined to renounce women from the first. Why waste any part of his life? Nevertheless, he was too honest not to acknowledge to himself that in spite of resolution he found himself curious about women and what their place was, however he might decide that they had no place in his individual life. In the society of the future it was scarcely sensible to believe that a woman could be allowed only to do the slight work of her own household and her own few children. The problems and labors of the times were immense, and was it just that all solutions and labors should devolve on men while women were permitted to busy themselves with the small affairs of single households? But why was he thinking of women? He would not think of any woman. Since he had sacrificed everything for his country, he would also sacrifice desire.
… He walked northward through the mountains to Antung, a city at the mouth of the Yalu River but on the soil of Manchuria. Here he planned to rest for a while and learn of what was taking place in Russia before he made the long journey northwest. Since Antung was a city where many travelers met, he would hear news. He arrived at Antung in early summer and found many Koreans there, some in families eking out their livelihood as petty merchants and traders, but most of them solitary men like himself, restless and searching for a means to free their country. All advised Yul-chun against going to Russia.
“Go to China,” they told him. “The revolution is finished in Russia. In China it is only beginning. The Chinese leader, Sun Yat-sen, has invited Russians to help him, since Western powers have refused him help, and you will see their tactics. We Koreans are more like the Chinese than like the Russians.”
He followed this advice and after staying long enough in Antung to learn what he wanted to know, he packed his knapsack again and went deeper into Manchuria. In Manchuria he stayed with the escaped soldiers, and found them not dismayed by the failure of the Mansei Demonstration. Instead they were training themselves for the next world war, which they said was surely coming, for Japan was making ready to conquer China now while confusion was increasing in that country. A great new revolution, they told him, was shaping itself like a thunderhead out of the south.
“Sun Yat-sen needs an army,” they told Yul-chun, “and Russia is training Chinese soldiers for him. When all is ready they will make a second attack, marching along the Yangtse River to the southern capital of Nanking and then they will seize the country and set up a new government.”
Yul-chun listened to this and much more, and then without telling anyone where he went he headed south again to China.
… It was nearly winter before he reached Peking and there he was halted by a fierce storm, the wind blowing out of the cold desert and driving the snow in drifts along the country roads. Half frozen and his money gone, he was compelled to stay for a while in the city and he sought out the Koreans he had once known and who had fled there. Most of them were gone, some killed in the south, some killed or in prison in Korea, but he found one whom he had known, a monk who came first from the Chung Dong Monastery on the island of Kanghwa and later had gone as a mendicant monk to the Yu-lin Monastery in the Diamond Mountains.
The monk was also a Kim but not of Andong and he remembered Yul-chun from earlier days when they had worked together in their own country. Now when Yul-chun stood at the door of the small, poor house where Kim and his fellows lived in the Chinese part of the city, they cried out in joy each at the sight of the other.
“Come in, come in!” Kim cried. He shut the door quickly to bar the great drifts of snow that blew in with Yul-chun. “Say not one word until you have taken off those wet garments,” he went on, “and I daresay you have had nothing to eat all day.”
“I am empty as a bag,” Yul-chun confessed, “and a penniless beggar besides.”
As he changed into dry garments and ate the hot noodles that Kim prepared, they talked, exchanging news and hopes. In the year of Mansei, the young monk had become a member of the Monks’ Independence Movement, and with his fellows, some three or four hundred, they too had printed a declaration of independence. He had traveled among villages, wearing his monk’s robes, but when he came to the capital he was too late for the day of Mansei, and he was seized by the police and put into prison for a year. When he was free again he went on with his work. While he was in the capital he fell in with the young men and women who were reading Russian books, and so he read Karl Marx, for which Hegel, he said, had prepared him.
Last year, with seven fellow monks, he came here to Peking so that he might learn more about revolution, but after a few months, five of the seven monks returned to the monastery, where they said life was more pure and more safe than among these revolutionaries.
“What shall we do now?” Kim asked.
Yul-chun, remembering his printing press, made reply. “We must publish a magazine.”