Pearl Buck - Time Is Noon

She loved them warmly. They were so dear and warm about her. They stopped even in their hurry to say, “Joan, I’m sorry about your mother. I’ll be over to see her tomorrow sure.” “I’m making yeasten rolls, Joan, tell your mother, and I’ll send her a pan.” “I’ll bring a jar of crab-apple jell. She’s always been partial to my jell.”—She felt comforted, so comforted that she forgot Miss Kinney until everyone was gone in the summer dusk, all except Miss Kinney and Rose and herself. Then she remembered and turned contritely to Miss Kinney.

“Oh, Miss Kinney, thank you so much. It’s always so interesting to hear about your experiences in Africa. I’ll tell Mother we had a good meeting.”

“Did you really think so, dear?” Miss Kinney’s voice came out of the twilight under the trees toned in delicate wistfulness. “I sometimes think — I’m afraid I talk — you see, it’s the only thing that ever really happened to me. I still hope to return, you know, some day, when dear Mother is safe in heaven. She’s eighty-two this year. Of course I couldn’t leave her. But I practice the Banpu words every day so that I don’t forget the language. I could pick up right where I left off.”

Rose had said nothing. She had stood, a younger quiet figure behind her sister. But now she spoke, her voice soft. “You made me see everything. I saw it all just as it is.”

Miss Kinney looked up at her, her face a pale emptiness in the shadows, and she gasped. She cried out, “Why — why — why — you dear child!” She began to weep a little and reached for Rose’s hand and squeezed it hard and hurried away into the shadows. They walked quietly across the lawn in silence until Rose said softly again. “How wonderful it must be to have served — like that !”

But Joan’s heart rose up. It rose against the sweetness in Rose’s voice. Suddenly she hated sweetness, Rose’s steady unvarying holy sweetness.

“I should hate it,” she said abruptly.

“But, Joan,” Rose protested with gentle reproach, “wouldn’t you go — if God called?”

Her mind glimmered with dark half-formed pictures shaped out of Miss Kinney’s words. She felt the heat, too fierce for health, forcing the strange dark jungles into fearful lush unnatural life. She saw the black people, their eyes gleaming whitely through the jungles.

“No,” she answered shortly, and ran into the house, into her home. She wanted always to stay where it was safe and warm and light. She wanted her own.

When she looked back upon that summer, months after it was over, she saw it was more holiday than she knew at the time. For her mother said no more of her illness. She rose as usual in the morning and when after days Joan put a question to her shyly, for she was still shy of flesh intimacy with her mother, the mother wore her accustomed cheerfulness and she answered, “I’m no worse, anyway. Don’t worry, child. Go on and have your fun this summer. I’m all right.”

And because it was what she wanted to believe Joan believed it and took her pleasure, falling easily back into the old happy dependence. They all leaned more than ever upon the mother. The house was full of their merriment. Tall half-grown boys stumbled up the wooden steps of the porch and shouted for Francis, and when he came roaring to meet them they clattered off to fish and to swim and to their own haunts by river and road. Older youths came shyly asking for Joan, and Rob Winters asked always for Rose. He was a tall fair grave boy, his parents’ only son, in school to be a minister, and careful and always anxious to be right. If Rose minded that only this one asked for her she did not show it. She met him with her invariable quiet smile and they went away alone together.

But Joan did not want to be alone with any of the ones who came to find her. She welcomed anyone. She was full of warmth, ready to live, hungry to laugh. All she did she did as though she starved for it. A small picnic of village boys and girls was a feast to her. She woke on the morning of a day set for pleasure and found her heart beating with pure joy and a song in her mouth ready. It did not matter who was to be there, whom she would meet or what she would do in this time of her life, this time when she waited, sure of what was to come. It was joyful to rise, to bathe, to dress, to eat, to run out of the house and cry out to other young who came to meet her, to run down the quiet street and plunge into woods and clamber up mountainsides and dive into deep cold pools. She lived in her body only, and all the rest of her lay sleeping, shut off alone and asleep. She scarcely read a book, or if she did it must be some easy story of summer love. For a while she was through with learning. Her body grew very beautiful. Her face rounded and the color of her skin grew dark and rich with sun and health. The hours of play made her eyes merry and her laughter quick and some nonsense was forever bubbling at her lips.

So during the short lovely summer she paid no heed to anyone while she lived for her own sake. Her father was a ghost to her. She kissed him gaily in passing and cried a greeting to him because it was a pleasure to be kind to everyone, and then he was gone from her mind. Rose she forgot except as they passed and then she laid a careless gay hand upon her sister’s cheek, and Francis was nothing to her except to give and receive teasing and laughter.

One would have said she was in love and yet she was not. She was not in love with anyone or anything except with the whole world. She was in love with the morning and the sun. She was in love with rain and moonlight. But she was not deceived by any hot young voice swearing his love by the moon. She smiled and listened gladly, because she liked to listen to love, to any love while she waited, and out of what she heard she made dreams. Ned Parsons, strumming his guitar under the wisteria and staring lovesick into her eyes, could make her smile. She could not love Ned, whom she had always known and whom as a little girl she had fought and conquered many times, poor Ned to whom his mother had given with her blood her foolish romantic imagination. He did not look like Emily, dusky, stocky Emily who was like her father. Emily was going to the city to get a job. “I’ve got to get away from here,” she told Joan tersely. “I want to make my own way.” But Joan said quickly, “I’ll never go away from home. I love it here in the village, with everybody always exactly the same.”

“I don’t,” said Emily shortly.

But then Emily never laughed. And Emily was ugly, with her long hard upper lip and coarse black hair and her decided way of saying even small things such as wanting the sugar passed to her. Joan liked Ned better, though she knew even in the moonlight that his pale gray eyes were a little popped and she heard in the midst of his loving how his big bony fingers faltered upon the strings and she winced at every discord. She was not deceived by him, but in his reedy voice she heard another voice. In his gangling body bent toward her she dreamed another devotion, and so she cried softly, “I love music under the moon!” And she cried it with such ardor that he felt it next to love for him. Meanwhile, she gazed across the lawn while he sang and saw with ecstasy the tall deep shadow the church threw among the lighter shadowing trees. Someday, somewhere, in a lovelier place upon this earth, she would hear a song, a great new song. Because of this she was tender to Ned, warm even to Jackie Weeks who was still in high school, warm to every voice she heard. So she enjoyed everything, a campfire beside a lake, a canoe darting down a stream, a bird’s call in the night.

And there was always about her the good steady warmth of her home. She accepted her mother’s ready smile and pushed away a foreboding that her mother grew thinner or that she seemed tired. Once in the night, near the end of the summer, she woke to hear the old subdued quarrel behind the bedroom door. Or was it a quarrel? She did not know; she did not want to know. She wrapped her braid about her ears and pushed her head into the softness of her pillow and slept again deeply. When the morning came she thought she had dreamed it. Surely she had dreamed it.