Like a flaw of wind on a summer night the revolution, a palace revolution of course, blew and was past. Chong Mongju was in the saddle. The Emperor ratified whatever Chong Mongju willed. Beyond gasping at the sacrilege of the king's tombs and applauding Chong Mongju, ChoSen was unperturbed. Heads of officials fell everywhere, being replaced by Chong Mongju's appointees; but there were no risings against the dynasty.
And now to what befell us. Johannes Maartens and his three cunies, after being exhibited to be spat upon by the rabble of half the villages and walled cities of ChoSen, were buried to their necks in the ground of the open space before the palace gate. Water was given them that they might live longer to yearn for the food, steaming hot and savoury and changed hourly, that was place temptingly before them. They say old Johannes Maartens lived longest, not giving up the ghost for a full fifteen days.
Kim was slowly crushed to death, bone by bone and joint by joint, by the torturers, and was a long time in dying. Hamel, whom Chong Mongju divined as my brains, was executed by the paddlein short, was promptly and expeditiously beaten to death to the delighted shouts of the Keijo populace. Yunsan was given a brave death. He was playing a game of chess with the jailer, when the Emperor's, or, rather, Chong Mongju's, messenger arrived with the poisoncup. "Wait a moment," said Yunsan. "You should be bettermannered than to disturb a man in the midst of a game of chess. I shall drink directly the game is over." And while the messenger waited Yunsan finished the game, winning it, then drained the cup.
It takes an Asiatic to temper his spleen to steady, persistent, lifelong revenge. This Chong Mongju did with the Lady Om and me. He did not destroy us. We were not even imprisoned. The Lady Om was degraded of all rank and divested of all possessions. An imperial decree was promulgated and posted in the last least village of ChoSen to the effect that I was of the house of Koryu and that no man might kill me. It was further declared that the eight seacunies who survived must not be killed. Neither were they to be favoured. They were to be outcasts, beggars on the highways. And that is what the Lady Om and I became, beggars on the highways.
Forty long years of persecution followed, for Chong Mongju's hatred of the Lady Om and me was deathless. Worse luck, he was favoured with long life as well as were we cursed with it. I have said the Lady Om was a wonder of a woman. Beyond endlessly repeating that statement, words fail me, with which to give her just appreciation. Somewhere I have heard that a great lady once said to her lover: "A tent and a crust of bread with you." In effect that is what the Lady Om said to me. More than to say it, she lived the last letter of it, when more often than not crusts were not plentiful and the sky itself was our tent.
Every effort I made to escape beggary was in the end frustrated by Chong Mongju. In Songdo I became a fuelcarrier, and the Lady Om and I shared a hut that was vastly more comfortable than the open road in bitter winter weather. But Chong Mongju found me out, and I was beaten and planked and put out upon the road. That was a terrible winter, the winter poor "WhatNow" Vandervoot froze to death on the streets of Keijo.
In Pyengyang I became a watercarrier, for know that that old city, whose walls were ancient even in the time of David, was considered by the people to be a canoe, and that, therefore, to sink a well inside the walls would be to scupper the city. So all day long thousands of coolies, waterjars yoked to their shoulders, tramp out the river gate and back. I became one of these, until Chong Mongju sought me out, and I was beaten and planked and set upon the highway.
Ever it was the same. In far Wiju I became a dogbutcher, killing the brutes publicly before my open stall, cutting and hanging the caresses for sale, tanning the hides under the filth of the feet of the passersby by spreading the hides, rawside up, in the muck of the street. But Chong Mongju found me out. I was a dyer's helper in Pyonhan, a gold miner in the placers of Kangwun, a ropemaker and twinetwister in Chiksan. I plaited straw hats in Padok, gathered grass in Whanghai, and in Masenpo sold myself to a rice farmer to toil bent double in the flooded paddies for less than a coolie's pay. But there was never a time or place that the long arm of Chong Mongju did not reach out and punish and thrust me upon the beggar's way.
The Lady Om and I searched two seasons and found a single root of the wild mountain ginseng, which is esteemed so rare and precious a thing by the doctors that the Lady Om and I could have lived a year in comfort from the sale of our one root. But in the selling of it I was apprehended, the root confiscated, and I was better beaten and longer planked than ordinarily.
Everywhere the wandering members of the great Peddlers' Guild carried word of me, of my comings and goings and doings, to Chong Mongju at Keijo. Only twice, in all the days after my downfall, did I meet Chong Mongju face to face. The first time was a wild winter night of storm in the high mountains of Kangwun. A few hoarded coppers had bought for the Lady Om and me sleeping space in the dirtiest and coldest corner of the one large room of the inn. We were just about to begin on our meagre supper of horsebeans and wild garlic cooked into a stew with a scrap of bullock that must have died of old age, when there was a tinkling of bronze pony bells and the stamp of hoofs without. The doors opened, and entered Chong Mongju, the personification of wellbeing, prosperity and power, shaking the snow from his priceless Mongolian furs. Place was made for him and his dozen retainers, and there was room for all without crowding, when his eyes chanced to light on the Lady Om and me.
"The vermin there in the cornerclear it out," he commanded.
And his horseboys lashed us with their whips and drove us out into the storm. But there was to be another meeting, after long years, as you shall see.
There was no escape. Never was I permitted to cross the northern frontier. Never was I permitted to put foot to a sampan on the sea. The Peddlers' Guild carried these commands of Chong Mongju to every village and every soul in all ChoSen. I was a marked man.
Lord, Lord, ChoSen, I know your every highway and mountain path, all your walled cities and the least of your villages. For twoscore years I wandered and starved over you, and the Lady Om ever wandered and starved with me. What we in extremity have eaten!Leavings of dog's flesh, putrid and unsaleable, flung to us by the mocking butchers; minari, a watercress gathered from stagnant pools of slime; spoiled kimchi that would revolt the stomachs of peasants and that could be smelled a mile. AyI have stolen bones from curs, gleaned the public road for stray grains of rice, robbed ponies of their steaming beansoup on frosty nights.
It is not strange that I did not die. I knew and was upheld by two things: the first, the Lady Om by my side; the second, the certain faith that the time would come when my thumbs and fingers would fastlock in the gullet of Chong Mongju.
Turned always away at the city gates of Keijo, where I sought Chong Mong ju, we wandered on, through seasons and decades of seasons, across Cho Sen, whose every inch of road was an old story to our sandals. Our history and identity were widescattered as the land was wide. No person breathed who did not know us and our punishment. There were coolies and peddlers who shouted insults at the Lady Om and who felt the wrath of my clutch in their topknots, the wrath of my knuckles in their faces. There were old women in far mountain villages who looked on the beggar woman by my side, the lost Lady Om, and sighed and shook their heads while their eyes dimmed with tears. And there were young women whose faces warmed with compassion as they gazed on the bulk of my shoulders, the blue of my eyes, and my long yellow hairI who had once been a prince of Koryu and the ruler of provinces. And there were rabbles of children that tagged at our heels, jeering and screeching, pelting us with filth of speech and of the common road.
Beyond the Yalu, forty miles wide, was the strip of waste that constituted the northern frontier and that ran from sea to sea. It was not really waste land, but land that had been deliberately made waste in carrying out ChoSen's policy of isolation. On this fortymile strip all farms, villages and cities had been destroyed. It was no man's land, infested with wild animals and traversed by companies of mounted Tiger Hunters whose business was to kill any human being they found. That way there was no escape for us, nor was there any escape for us by sea.
As the years passed my seven fellowcunies came more to frequent Fusan. It was on the southeast coast where the climate was milder. But more than climate, it lay nearest of all ChoSen to Japan. Across the narrow straits, just farther than the eye can see, was the one hope of escape Japan, where doubtless occasional ships of Europe came. Strong upon me is the vision of those seven ageing men on the cliffs of Fusan yearning with all their souls across the sea they would never sail again.
At times junks of Japan were sighted, but never lifted a familiar topsail of old Europe above the searim. Years came and went, and the seven cunies and myself and the Lady Om, passing through middle life into old age, more and more directed our footsteps to Fusan. And as the years came and went, now one, now another failed to gather at the usual place. Hans Amden was the first to die. Jacob Brinker, who was his roadmate, brought the news. Jacob Brinker was the last of the seven, and he was nearly ninety when he died, outliving Tromp a scant two years. I well remember the pair of them, toward the last, worn and feeble, in beggars' rags, with beggars' bowls, sunning themselves side by side on the cliffs, telling old stories and cackling shrillvoiced like children. And Tromp would maunder over and over of how Johannes Maartens and the cunies robbed the kings on Tabong Mountain, each embalmed in his golden coffin with an embalmed maid on either side; and of how these ancient proud ones crumbled to dust within the hour while the cunies cursed and sweated at junking the coffins.
As sure as loot is loot, old Johannes Maartens would have got away and across the Yellow Sea with his booty had it not been for the fog next day that lost him. That cursed fog! A song was made of it, that I heard and hated through all ChoSen to my dying day. Here run two lines of it:
"Yanggukeni chajin anga
Wheanpong tora deunda,
The thick fog of the Westerners
Broods over Whean peak."
For forty years I was a beggar of ChoSen. Of the fourteen of us that were cast away only I survived. The Lady Om was of the same indomitable stuff, and we aged together. She was a little, weazened, toothless old woman toward the last; but ever she was the wonder woman, and she carried my heart in hers to the end. For an old man, three score and ten, I still retained great strength. My face was withered, my yellow hair turned white, my broad shoulders shrunken, and yet much of the strength of my seacuny days resided in the muscles left me.