“There has been one called The Wild Plain.”
“We will make no poetry,” Yul-chun said bluntly. “We will call ours Revolution.”
Long into the night they talked and they ate again and at last they went to sleep. Before he slept, however, Yul-chun made up his mind that he would stay in Peking at least for a time and return to his best loved work, that of creating new literature for the revolution, his home here with his fellows. For this he needed only a pallet for bed, and he had in his knapsack his lacquer rice bowl and the silver chopsticks and spoon which his grandfather had given him a hundred days after he was born. He was happy again, safe among his kind, and he set himself to his chosen work.
“You make yourself blind!”
The sound of Hanya’s voice struck a blow across his brain. His hand, holding the chisel, hung motionless above the stone. He did not turn his head, but he knew that she was crossing the brick floor, though her straw-sandaled feet made no sound. She came to his side and snatched the chisel from his hand.
“They told me you were doing this stupid thing,” she cried. “Do you imagine yourself a god? Can you make miracles?”
“Give it to me,” he muttered between his teeth.
He put out his hand to take the chisel from her but she held the tool behind her back.
“I would not believe it when they told me,” she went on with the same passion. “‘He is making himself blind,’ they said—‘writing the magazine with his own hand, all of it,’ they said, ‘and then carving the letters into stone—’”
“I am compelled to use lithograph because I can find no printing press in the city, at least none that I can buy,” he retorted.
“So you will be blind because there is no printing press in Peking that you can buy!” she mocked. She threw the chisel on the floor and took a magazine from the table of rough unpainted wood. “Thirty-two pages! Twice a month! How many copies?”
“We began with eight hundred, but now we have more than three thousand. It goes to our own country, but also to Manchuria, America, Hawaii, Siberia—”
“Be quiet!” she cried. And stooping she took up the chisel, and walking to the door she threw it as far as she could into the street.
He was too surprised to move, not imagining that she could do such a thing. Then he sprang at her and twisted her out of his way but she clung to him and would not let him go. Try as he would, he could not rid himself of her. Arms about his neck, legs around his thighs, she clung, catching his arms when he flailed at her, kicking him when he pulled away. They fought in silence, their breathing hard, their faces set in angry grimace, their eyes furious.
He was shocked at her strength. Passive he had always said women were, passive and negative, weak frail creatures at best, but this woman he had to fight as though she were a man. He paused for a moment to get his breath and she seized the instant to wrap her arms around him under his shoulders and then he felt her teeth bite into his neck.
“You — you tiger,” he panted. “You — you — dare to—”
“Your blood tastes sweet on my tongue,” she murmured against his neck.
And he felt her lips soft against the spot where an instant before he had felt her teeth. He stood motionless, suddenly aware that she was no longer fighting him. Her body relaxed, she lay against him, yielding, her face in the curve of his shoulder. She was drawing him down slowly, gently, and he felt his head swim. She reached out her hand and between thumb and finger she pinched the wick of the candle by whose light he had been working, and they were in darkness. In darkness she drew him down until they lay on the floor, she beneath him. His whole body was warm and fluid, his will gone, his entire being one swelling urge toward her.
… This was the story of their love thereafter. He yielded to her and he fought her. When she insisted that he must stop printing the magazine he declared that he was by nature a writer, and never so happy as when he wrote, and he was fortunate that the revolution needed writers. He insisted that he would never yield to her and daily he did yield to her until in desperation he decided to leave Peking and go south again. This he did because she told him one day that she would have a child.
He forbade her to come with him. “There will be war,” he told her. “It will be dangerous for you. And I must not be hampered by a pregnant woman. I would think of you instead of the battle.”
They had been living together for more than a year, here in Peking and in villages of North China and Manchuria to which they wandered from time to time, but he had never ceased to believe that it would be better if he were alone and to tell her so. When she said that a child was coming, her black eyes soft with joy and her whole being radiant, he felt a strange new anger against her, a surge of love mixed with hatred, and he cried out now, against her joy.
“You know I said we must not have a child! You use this trickery to compel me to think of you — you and the child — you divide me! I am to pity you and the helpless child. You make a triumph of it.”
She heard this, her eyes wide, and she looked at him as though she had never seen him before. “You are not a man,” she said, her very voice wondering. “I have not wanted to believe it, but now I know. You are not a man, and I have loved you, thinking you were a man, believing that in your heart you loved me.”
She studied his angry face, dwelling upon its every feature.
“How I have loved you,” she said, still wondering.
And with these words she turned and left him standing there in the room which for this short time she had made into a home.
… He waited for her through twenty-three days and nights and he could not believe that she would not come back. When day passed into night and night dragged endlessly toward dawn again, he began to understand that she was never coming back. Then he had himself to battle. He longed for her. He yearned to go in search of her. He dreamed of taking her with him to Korea to his father’s house and staying with her at least until the child was born. He had told her of that house and of his family. Lying quietly side by side in the night after they had made love, she had often asked him to tell her about his childhood. She asked him of every small thing, as though she herself had lived in that house.
“Did you sleep in the room next to the kitchen, or in the one next your father?”
“We spread our beds in whatever room we wished,” he explained, “but never in my father’s room. My tutor slept with my brother and me, after we no longer needed a nurse. My brother was a good child, but I was not good.”
She laughed when he said that. “You are still not good!”
“Yet it is I who am alive,” he retorted, “and my poor brother is dead.” For Yul-chun knew, as all Koreans knew, how his brother and Induk had met their end, and with them their daughter who would not be separated from her mother and so Induk had taken her to the Christian church that day.
“Prudent and careful and good, it was he whom they killed,” Yul-chun now reminded Hanya. “You see why I say a man should not have a wife and children?”
“Be quiet,” she told him.
It was her usual rejoinder when he said what she did not like to hear. It had come to such a pass of love between them that what he had once said seriously he said at last in play, for he believed she knew that he loved her although he would never tell her so. Part of the play, or so he thought, was her pleading to be told and his refusal.
“Tell me you love me — tell me only once so that I have it to remember!” This was her plea.
“I will not,” he always replied, “for if I do, I have no defense against you. You will get so far inside me that I shall never be able to root you out. Words are like iron nails hammered into hard wood.”