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

many times your memorial. Why did you send it privately?”
    At this word “privately” he felt hot blood rise up from his breast to his neck and even to his ears, and he cursed the trick his blood could play on him to turn his ears scarlet.
    The Queen’s quick eyes, all observing, now noticed his confusion. “Do you hear what I ask, you with the two red ears?”
    She laughed and it was the first time he had ever heard that gay laughter. He dared not smile or reply and he felt his ears hotter than ever. In his confusion he let his eyes move toward her and saw the tips of her silver shoes beneath the crimson satin of her full skirts. Small silver shoes, so strangely like those of Turkish women. Where had they come from in the beginning? But who knew the wellsprings of his people? In that long struggle, covering how many centuries could not be known, the tribes of Central Asia who were his ancestors had mingled with others, and now these little silver shoes of a Korean queen were a lost symbol of woman’s grace.
    “And dare you dream in my presence?” the Queen now inquired. Her voice was playful but she put an edge into the words.
    He lifted his head, startled, and then blushed anew because inadvertently he had seen her face.
    “You need not turn so red,” the Queen said. “I am old enough to be looked at without fear by a young man.”
    “Forgive me, Majesty,” Il-han said. He fixed his eyes on her rounded firm chin and the royal lips went on speaking softly but with definition in shape and sound.
    “Will you answer my question?”
    “Majesty,” he replied, and because he was angry with himself for his confusion in her presence, and especially for his wayward thoughts concerning her shoes, he made his voice low and stern. “I sent the memorial to you because I know your loyalty to China.”
    He needed not to say what they both knew too well, that he came to her because the King was torn between his father and her. This was to say the King was torn between the Regent’s desire to balance one nation against another and so gain precarious independence for Korea, and the Queen’s resolute faith in China. Therefore he continued to skirt direct speech.
    “You have reason, Majesty, for your faith. Through centuries China has avoided anything that can alienate our people. But now when we must prevent Japan from landing soldiers on our soil can the Empress save us when it may be she cannot even save her own people? Remember the opium wars which China always lost to England, who is friendly to Japan, Majesty, and who will always take Japan’s part. And remember that France has cut a huge slice from the Chinese melon and claimed it for her own—Indo-China, Majesty! And China cannot prevent it or take it back again.”
    Now the silver shoe on the imperial right foot began to tap impatiently.
    “France! What is it? We have only seen French priests, bearing in one hand a cross, in the other a sword! I have heard that they are winebibbers, but they make their wine of grapes, not rice.”
    “I still regret, Majesty, that our people massacred the French Christians,” Il-han said, “and even more, that in our anger we attacked the American merchant ship, the General Sherman . And the worst folly was that we killed the American crew.”
    The Queen waved this off with her right hand. “What right had an American merchant ship in the inner waters of the Taedong River, near so great a city as Pyongyang? Are there Korean ships in the rivers of—of—of—what are some of the American rivers?”
    “Majesty, I do not know,” Il-han replied.
    “You see,” the Queen cried in triumph. “We do not so much as know the names of their rivers, much less sail our ships on foreign waters! I see no difference in these wild western peoples, and as for the Americans, who knows what they are? A mongrel people, I am told, made up of the cast-offs, the renegades, the rebels, the younger sons, the landless and the homeless of other