“Her father,” Liang replied. “Her father was the Japanese Ambassador to Berlin, and on a holiday he met her mother in Paris. They were married, and came back to Japan, where Mariko grew up until she was twelve when her father was sent as Special Envoy from the Emperor. She speaks five languages equally well, but first of all she is an artist.”
Artist, he said, not woman! Yul-chun put his next question.
“And why is she here?”
“She is dancing in the Japanese theatre.”
“How can she be of use to us?”
“She is going to the United States to perform.”
“And you trust her?”
“As I trust myself.”
Yul-chun sighed deeply. He had known no dancers except the simple girls who danced in the Communist propaganda plays used for the landfolk in China and Manchuria. Cynic though he considered himself, of women he knew nothing, and a dancer, he believed as all Koreans did, was woman at her lowest level. He did not speak these thoughts lest he offend Liang, but Liang answered as though he had spoken.
“You have been so absorbed, Uncle, in your devotion to our cause that you have not had time to realize the change in the world. I assure you that she is a woman of dignity as well as beauty. Many men pursue her, of course, but I insist that she is trustworthy.”
“I must take your word for what she is,” Yul-chun retorted. “It is not likely that I shall ever be able to judge for myself.”
“Many men have also confided in her,” Liang replied. “She has been the confidante of prime ministers and kings. She listens, she keeps their confidence, she is partisan of none.”
“I wish to meet this paragon,” Yul-chun said drily.
For the first time Liang hesitated. “It would be easy enough,” he said slowly, “for she wants to meet you. She has heard of you, as who has not, and she has several times begged me to bring her here — it must be in secret, for she has the confidence even of the Governor-General—”
Yul-chun felt a chill at the heart. How could such a woman be trusted?
“There is one difficulty,” Liang was saying. “Sasha is in love with her.”
Yul-chun cried out, “Sasha! Does she respond?”
“She says no, but there is something of yes in the way she says it,” Liang replied thoughtfully. “Perhaps she feels something of both. Perhaps it is not love at all. Sasha is impetuous — importunate — very handsome—”
Impetuous — importunate!
“I see I do not know my own son,” Yul-chun said quietly.
Silence fell between them. He yearned to discover whether Liang also loved this woman, but he could not ask again. The young man had such natural dignity, with all his ease and grace, that the elder man could not cross the delicate barrier between the generations.
“Perhaps we should think of someone else. This young woman seems too complicated.”
Liang laughed. “Ours are complicated times, Uncle! She is not simple, but nothing is simple. No, she is the only one, and I will bring you both together somehow.”
He rose as he spoke, and whatever his inner mood, he appeared his usual benign self. The change had been only for a moment and he had restored himself. As for Liang, he bowed and left the room. At the same moment he heard a noise at the outer door, and Ippun’s voice scolding Sasha.
“Little master — little master, you are too late! There is mud on your coat.”
“I fell.” Sasha’s voice was thick.
“You have been drinking,” Ippun scolded.
“It is not your business to tell me!” Sasha shouted.
Liang went to the door. Sasha was leaning on Ippun’s shoulder, unable to walk.
“I will take care of him, Ippun,” Liang said. “See that the door is locked for the night. Make my uncle’s bed, and then go to your own.”
He put Sasha’s arm about his neck and half carrying him, he led him to the room which was now Sasha’s own. Ippun had made it neat, she had spread the bed and lit the night lamp on the low table at the head of the bed — and had put a thermos of tea there and a bowl. Liang lowered his cousin to the bed and then poured the bowl half full of tea.
“Drink this — it will help you.”
Sasha obeyed without protest and still without protest he let Liang undress him to his undergarments. Then he threw himself down and slept while Liang covered him with the quilt.
Liang sat in his usual seat in the theatre, in the middle of the fourth row. Somewhere in the shadows behind him he knew that Sasha was watching the performance, too. He had seen Sasha at the ticket window when he came in, but the crowd was dense and Sasha had not, he believed, seen him. He gazed intently now at the flying figure on the stage, Mariko in the closing scene. Her long sleeves waved like a bird’s wings and then whirled as she whirled, the slow rhythm quickening as she approached climax. Clever, clever these ancient dances, seeming religious, seeming reverent, and underneath the delicacy and the grace all the dark passion of mankind! And no one understood this better than Mariko. He had known her now for two years and still he had not fathomed her. She was a child of many races, the human emblem of mixed cultures, holding within herself the hostile drives of her ancestral past, brilliant and willful, lawless and tender, never to be trusted for the next emotion, the next impulse, the next decision to act, and yet she was deeply trustworthy because she could never be partisan. Such was Mariko. She would do nothing for a cause, of that he was sure, but she would do anything for him.
She was closing the dance. Slowly, slowly the silken wings of her wide sleeves descended to the dying movements of the end. He caught her eyes, those startling eyes, shining and dark, and he knew that she was telling him that he was to come to her. Not to her dressing room—
“Never come to my dressing room,” she had told him when they first met. “That is for everybody. Not for you!”
He had not known what to make of her directness, her boldness he would have said, except that it was not bold, only exquisitely shy and childlike, and he said nothing because he did not know what to say.
To his startled look she had replied. “We have no time, you and I. I must leave Seoul in twenty days, and I have never seen you before. There are only these twenty days. Then I fly to New York, London, Paris. I may never come back — who can tell? I thought I was safe in Peking because I have a Chinese godfather there, but when the Japanese came, the Chinese called me a spy. And in Tokyo I was nearly thrown into prison because I speak Chinese so well — I speak the language wherever I am. But I was never a spy. I cannot care enough about any country to be a spy. I dance. I am an artist. If I do anything else it is for a human being — not for a country. I belong to no country — and every country.”
All this she had poured out in her soft hurried voice, stripping off her costume as she spoke, revealing a skin-tight undergarment which she slipped from her shoulders before she drew a western dress over her head. He might not have been there for all she cared, it seemed, or he might have been a woman, except from the instant their eyes met they shared the knowledge that she was woman and he was man.
They had not met often since then. He had never made an advance toward her, nor she toward him. Yet when they were alone for the first time in her house, without invitation or hesitation they had embraced, though without words. They had never spoken of love but they were in the state of mutual love. To have put it into words would have been to enclose it and belittle it and define it.
Once when he had visited a monastery on Kanghwa island, he had called upon the abbot, and they had fallen into deep conversation. He had listened while the abbot explained the mysteries of Buddhism, of which he was not ignorant, for he had studied well the books in his grandfather’s library. Of all religions he was most drawn to Buddhism, and yet he had no wish to become Buddhist. There again he refused definition. To belong to one was to deny himself the privilege of belonging to all.