Pearl Buck - Time Is Noon

There was a knock at the door and Hannah thrust in her rough red head. “Miss Joan, your pa says there’s a couple downstairs to be married and will you come and be a witness with your ma?”

She rose mechanically, used to the summons. But today there was acuteness in the moment. Downstairs she waited while her father drew off his study gown and put on his old frock coat. The groom was a young country fellow, a hired man, doubtless, upon some farm. His hands hung huge and misshapen and his great stooped shoulders were bursting his coat. The girl was his mate, a strong squat figure, her arms red and thick, her face broad and low-browed and burned red by the sun. They were foreign, sprung from some peasant soil in an older world. They stood awkwardly, closely together, their dull greenish eyes fixed faithfully upon the minister’s face. She could hear their heavy breathing, and on the man’s thick neck she saw the sweat stand out in coarse drops.

It was over in a moment, a few words, a halting promise interchanged, an instant’s suspense about the ring. He fumbled at the girl’s finger and she snatched the ring from him. “Here, give me it,” she said loudly, forgetting where she was. He watched absorbed while she worked the thing over her knuckle, and then sighed gustily in relief.

“Now come and have some cake and coffee,” her mother said with brisk kindness. It was her custom. They smiled sheepishly and followed her into the dining room with the stumbling docility of beasts. Behind them Joan saw their hands clasped, two rough knotty young hands, holding each other hard. They would go back to some house, some small wooden house in a field, and they would work and eat and sleep and make crude love and rear children together, mated. It was a life. She was suddenly very lonely. She turned abruptly and went back to her room.

In a night autumn came rushing. The wind blew cold across her sleeping and when she opened her eyes in the morning it was to find upon her bed a shower of leaves from the maple tree outside her window, dry leaves veined with yellow. She sprang up to shut out the cold and saw early frost upon the green grass. The chill woke her sharply and she did not go back to bed. She must get to work this day. As soon as breakfast was over she would work on the prelude she had begun last spring and never finished. She would go over to the church and work alone at the organ. She dressed resolutely and swiftly and ate her breakfast quickly.

Her mother worried, “Joan, you haven’t eaten enough.”

She answered, “I want to get to work, Mother, I must work this very day. I have an idea for my prelude.”

But her mother did not hear her. She sat listening, her head lifted, her hands hovering above the coffee cups. There was a clatter on the stairs and the door burst open and Francis fell into the chair beside her.

“Say, Mom, gimme my food quick, will you? Jackie Weeks said he’d help me with my math this morning if I got there early, and I want to get it done so’s I can go nutting. I’ll bet the frost was hard enough last night to make ’em drop. He’s a shark at math. Lord, how I hate math!”

“Perhaps Joan would help you, darling,” said his mother. “Here — let me butter your muffin. I wish you wouldn’t go so much with Jackie.”

But she would not wait, Joan told herself. She had her own work to do. Besides, her mother had not even heard her. “I’m not good in math, I’m afraid,” she said, and then hated her selfishness. “Of course I will help, Frank,” she said.

“Jackie’ll do it quicker,” he said carelessly, and she was released.

With her music under her arm she walked across the still frosty lawn and into the quiet church. Outside the air was pungent and fresh, electric with cold, but here in the church it was warm and still and untouched by freshness. There was a faint aged odor, the odor of old people, a little sweet, a little dying. She tiptoed through the empty aisle, past the empty pulpit, and sat herself at the organ and opened it and immediately the waiting keys invited her. She was tired of idleness — work was pleasure. She spread her pages and played the first bars softly and critically. She played on and then broke off. There she had stopped writing it down last spring just before Commencement. A melody had come to her and she had written it down in haste and then left it incomplete because they had called for her, Mary Robey and Patty, her roommates.

“Joan — Joanna! Practice — practice for the senior parade!”

The senior parade was the most important thing in the world to her then. It was nothing now — less than a memory. Strange how she could hear their voices and yet she did not want to see them — not really. They were over, somehow. She wanted — she wanted — not them — someone. She set herself resolutely to the music. Slip there into a fourth, now minor it in the left hand, now repeat the theme slowly and so through the variation to the last bar — the last chord — major, minor? A fifth, perhaps. She moved her fingers tentatively over the keys, humming the air softly — so — to a minor sixth. There let it be. Though it might sound unfinished, she could not find another end.

She tried it over again from the beginning. The church, empty as a shell, echoed deeply behind her. It flung back at her her own lonely music. The melody ran through the arches and came back again to her ears and she listened, absorbed. Not quite right somehow, not quite right. The minor note was not introduced soon enough into the melody of the right hand. It began too gaily for its end. The minor note must be sounded very soon, there in the beginning. She put her pencil to her lips and dotted in a note and then tried it over softly.

“That is right,” said a voice out of the church. She leaped up from the seat and turned. There beneath the pulpit in the front pew sat Martin Bradley. His hat was on his knee and in his hand was a roll of music. She remembered instantly that it was Friday morning. Of course he always practiced on Friday mornings. How could she have forgotten it when all through her childhood her Friday mornings had echoed with strains of his music from the church? She ran quickly to the choir rail.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she gasped, looking down at him.

He rose gracefully and smiled. “Why?” he asked simply. “It’s been delightful. That was a charming little thing — delicately sad. What is it?”

“I made it,” she answered shyly.

His face, upturned like this, was new to her, a narrow sensitive face. He did not look old at all, even with his gray hair.

“I can’t make up my mind where to introduce the fifth,” she added with impulsive confidence.

“Let me see.” He mounted the steps lightly, a spare, graceful figure, and came to the organ and sat down. Very precisely and clearly he began to play her prelude. Strange to hear her own music come like this from his hands! She was intensely conscious of him, his look, his presence; the church was full of his presence. Suddenly he began to vary it. “How’s this — and this—” He modulated softly, plainly. “Is it your idea still?”

“Yes, yes, that’s lovely,” she said eagerly. “Now bear upon that sixth and repeat it in the left hand. Yes!” she cried delightedly. “Why didn’t I see how to do it myself?” He played on. The fine black hair grew smoothly upon his neck, a little silvery at the edge. She was listening to the music, thinking about the music, but she saw his brown neck with the fine short clipped hair smoothly upon it, and the white about his ears, as smooth as though the white were brushed evenly over his hair. When he turned to her, questioning, she saw the dark skin wrinkled closely about his eyes, but he was not old, not as old as she had thought he was. She liked the spare distinguished line of his shoulder. “So — to the minor end,” he finished, and wheeled around and smiled at her.