Pearl Buck - Time Is Noon

At the door she came upon Rose, dressed in white linen and with her wide straw hat already on her head. “Shall I go with you, Joan?” she inquired seriously.

“If you like,” Joan said. She walked across the lawn beside Rose, constrained. She was somehow very constrained with Rose now. She had not thought much about her these last years. She had been too busy feeling her own growth. But Rose had been growing, too. After the summer it would be her turn to go away to school.

“What shall you do after the summer, Joan?” Rose asked suddenly, turning her large sweet eyes upon her sister. “What do you plan for your life?”

Plan? She planned everything. But she answered vaguely, “I don’t know—” She could not tell Rose anything. But then it was true she did not know.

Besides, they were at the church. Miss Kinney came to them out of the side door, and she was softly anxious, her small nose trembling like a rabbit’s. “I’m always nervous before I speak,” she began breathlessly. “But somehow God gives me strength as I go on. I miss your dear mother. She did cheer me up always at the beginning — she always looked so interested—”

Under her arm was a portfolio of pictures. She had shown them many times, but still they were pictures of Africa and she had been there. Yes, she had walked among jungle trees and beneath swinging serpents and she had crept out of a hut on a tropical summer’s night and seen the moon red behind palm trees and she had heard the throbbing beat of deep-toned distant drums. Once for five years out of her life she had escaped from this village and from her father and her mother. She said the voice of God called her. No other voice could have enticed her, not love, not lust. But when she was thirty-three, “yet not too old to learn the language,” she always explained, she obeyed God’s call, as she put it, and became a missionary.

Mr. and Mrs. Kinney had been shocked and deserted in their dignified old house. But they could not in decency protest against God as they had against the voices of young men. Nevertheless they delayed her. They said, “Sarah is impetuous. She decides everything so quickly.” So year after year they delayed her, as they had delayed the two young men who had loved her childish ardent eyes, who came and waited and went away. Yet the parents could not drive away God. She kept him invisible but constantly beside her. “I have the call,” she reiterated with more firmness than she had ever said anything in her life.

She grew quite wildly firm after a year or two, so that Dr. Crabbe said gruffly, “Let the girl have her own way for once or she’ll have to be put into an asylum.”

Old Mrs. Kinney wailed aloud, “But what shall we do without her? Her father’s devoted to her. She’s all we have — our only child!”

“You ought to have had grandchildren ten years ago,” he replied with rudeness.

“Sarah’s delicate,” said Mrs. Kinney positively. She was old, but she was very pretty and fragile and her house was exquisite. Mrs. Kinney had inherited the house and some money with it, and neither she nor Mr. Kinney had ever needed to do anything.

So they never did anything, and Mrs. Kinney, who had always been afraid of everything, grew more afraid as the years went on. She would never, she said years ago, ride in one of these new automobiles. It was tempting God, it was suicide. She walked down the street every afternoon a little way, clinging to Mr. Kinney’s arm, and on Sundays they walked the three blocks to church and back. She always explained, “We are both rather delicate. We have to take care of ourselves. Sarah inherits my delicate constitution, I’m sorry to say.”

But for once Sarah was not delicate. She took ship and made the voyage breathless and arrived at the remote mission in the jungle and plunged intensely into the life. Hardship could not touch her and she was afraid of nothing, although always breathless.

After five years when she came on a furlough the old pair had her again. They clutched her with their love. They spoke piteously of their age, of their fragility. She heard her father’s cough. She saw her mother’s hand tremble with a palsy. Now they did not speak of her delicateness. Instead they spoke of her strength. They cried, “You are so young and strong and we will soon be gone. You will never miss a year out of your life. It will not be more than a year.”

She waited year upon year. She served six years’ waiting and her father died. Then her mother, trembling very much and grown as thin as a dried leaf, cried, “Sarah, can you bear to leave me alone? It will not be more than a year. I shall not live the year out.”

So Sarah Kinney waited a year and two years and then five years and now she was beginning the seventh year of her waiting, and the old woman lived fretfully on, thin to her bones, trembling so that she must be fed and dressed like a child, and each day death was no nearer. Of course Miss Kinney was tender with her and never even in her heart did she allow herself to hope for anything except her mother’s health. Her one self-indulgence was to remember the five years of her own life in Africa, to remember them and hope.

She stood before the two young girls now, happy because she could remember again, a narrow spare old-maidenly figure, so much taller than everyone else that she had stooped timidly since she was sixteen and first saw how she really looked in the mirror, her hair, now whiter than her mother’s, flaring about her small excited face. “Five blessed years, dear friends,” she began, her voice quivering. “I did God’s work. The African people came to me — the dear people. They were not afraid of me at all. I loved them. When they were ill it was such joy to me — joy to minister to them, I mean — the little babies especially were so sweet. They were not afraid of me, although I know I looked strange to them. You know we do look strange and pale in a country where everybody is black.”

Her gaze fluttered from one face to the other, all unbelieving because they remembered her as a small sickly child with protruding front teeth, upon Rose, sitting rapt and listening, her eyes downcast, her soft hands folded in her lap, and then she found Joan’s eyes. Joan felt the beseeching eyes like lighted lamps upon her face. Staring down at her the white-haired woman hesitated, and her voice deepened and trembled. “It wasn’t only the people,” she said.

In the bare quiet room no one knew what she was saying, not even Rose, dreaming Rose, who turned everything into her own thoughts. No one understood except Joan, and to Joan this misty-eyed woman, whose wild white hair would not lie smooth, talked. She talked on and on, the words rumbling out of her, trying to make Joan see. Mrs. Parsons leaned over to whisper to Mrs. Winters. “Poor Sarah Kinney!” But Mrs. Winters said aloud, “Joan, I think we ought to take up the collection and adjourn. I’ve got company coming for supper.”

Instantly Miss Kinney recalled herself. She began to gather up her pictures, her fingers shaking. Her voice quavered, shocked, apologetic, “Oh, is it late? Oh, I’m so sorry. When I get talking about my Africa—”

Joan started guiltily. Was it so late? She ought to have held the meeting better. She tore her eyes from Miss Kinney and gave a shudder of relief. She rose and said clearly as her mother might have done, “After the collection for the mission at Banpu — Rose, will you take the collection? — we will sing hymn number sixty-one and the meeting will be adjourned.”

The minute bits of copper and silver tinkled the plate that Rose passed quietly and they stood to sing. The women sang heartily and quickly. They were thinking of suppers to be set upon their tables, of men and children to be fed. If food were delayed a man might growl sourly, “Better be taking care of your own family!” They sang hastily, “The Son of God goes forth to war.” Joan heard their loud plain voices, slightly out of tune. She looked at their honest aging faces. No young women came to missionary meetings. It was one of her mother’s problems. “How shall we get the young ones interested?” She looked from one to the other of the kind abstracted faces, at the frank open mouths, at cotton gloves being slipped surreptitiously on roughened hands. Her heart warmed to them. She was glad to be back among them. She was safe with them. How good they all were, how dear, how kind they were to care about Africa! Why should they give their pennies to sick babies in Banpu? Their own babies were often ill — a hospital in Banpu when there was none in Middlehope. But they would go on giving, go on rolling bandages and sending soap and safety pins because they were so patiently kind. Any tale of sorrow would take their pennies from them in small steady streams — sorrows of people whom they would never see.