The Living Reed: A Novel of Korea by Pearl S. Buck Page A

your house now and visit my grandsons,” his father said.
    It was not usual for father and son to live separately, but Il-han lived in the Kim house in the city, that he might be near the palace, and his father preferred to live outside the city in the ancestral country home of the Kim clan. Here he could indulge his love for meeting his friends and making poems, subject only to the occasional summons from the royal family.
    “I have only one grievance against your father,” his dying mother had once told Il-han. “He has never visited other women nor does he gamble, but he cannot live without his friends.”
    It was true that these friends, themselves idle gentlemen and poetasters, gathered every day in his father’s house to remember together the glories of ancient Korea, to recount the events of her heroes, to recall how even the civilizing influence of Buddhism reached Japan only through Korea, to repeat that sundry monuments of art and culture now in Japan had been stolen from Korea—was not the beautiful long-faced image of the Kwan Yin in Nara sculptured in Korea, although what Japanese would acknowledge it! And from such raptures came poems, many poems, none of them, Il-han thought bitterly, of the slightest significance for these dangerous busy times.
    Yet when he had complained in private to Sunia, she refused to agree with him.
    “Not so,” she declared. “We must be reminded of these past glories, so that we know how worthy of love our country is and how noble our people are.”
    He walked in silence with his father now along the stone-paved street until they entered the gate of Il-han’s home and there his father led the way to the main room while Il-han bade a servant bring the children to see their grandfather. “And invite their mother, also,” he called after the servant.
    His father sat himself down on a floor cushion and a maidservant bustled in with tea and small cakes, and Il-han sat in the lower place, as a son should. In a few minutes Sunia entered with the children, the elder clinging to her hand and the younger in the arms of his nurse. She made the proper obeisance and watched while the elder son made his and the grandfather looked on with pride and dignity.
    “Is it not time,” he said, “to set up a proper name for my elder grandson?”
    “Will you choose a name, Most Honored?” Sunia said.
    She sank gracefully to a floor cushion, well aware that in an ordinary household she would not have appeared so easily before her husband’s father, although it was true that here women were proud and never knelt before their husbands as women in Japan did, or had their feet bound small as Chinese women did, or their waists boxed in, as it was said that western women did. No, here husband and wife were equal in their places, nor were mothers browbeaten by their grown sons. In the royal palace, were the King to die and leave the heir too young to rule, the Queen Dowager ruled until the heir attained majority. Il-han, too, had accustomed Sunia to freedom, partly because he gave her respect as well as love and partly because he had heard that western women came and went as they wished. True, his mother, now dead, had talked much of the good and ancient times when women were neither seen nor heard, and she said often that she longed for the old custom of curfew when only at a certain hour could women walk freely through the streets. So severe was the custom in those days that if a man stole a secret look at the woman his head was cut off.
    “And would you be willing to have my head cut off if I stole a look at Sunia?” Il-han had once inquired.
    “I would have taught you better,” his doughty mother had retorted.
    Sunia kept her own modest ways, however, and now in the presence of her husband and his father she held her head down and did not look up to either face. Meanwhile the grandfather considered the name he would choose.
    “My elder grandson,” he said, at last, “is no usual child. He