Pearl Buck - Time Is Noon

He answered very gently. “It’s not sneaking, sweetheart — it’s only being discreet.” He took her arm coaxingly and she could not answer. They walked pressed closely, together in the dusk along a roundabout road by the edge of fields to the other end of the village where he lived. She longed passionately for his arms. She was hungry for his touch upon her. She did not want to make him angry, because when he was angry he did not smile. He was silent then and took his arms away. If he were angry he could leave her with absolute silent suddenness. But her mother was doggedly with her.

“Why should we be discreet? We have nothing to hide.”

“Sweet …” he began, and he reached for her hand and thrust it into his overcoat against his breast. She felt her hand there alive with a separate life. But still her mother drove her hard against him. She had not been willing to hear what her mother said, but she had heard and was saying it over again.

“What’s the end of it all, anyway? Martin, aren’t we ever going to tell anybody?”

Now he stopped and in the lonely back road took her in his arms and kissed her. Against his kisses the voice of her mother struggled once more. “Isn’t our love ever coming to anything?” He gave her no answer except his kisses. He held her against his hot thin body and kissed her again and again and again, hard strong practiced kisses that played intolerably upon her young unused flesh. For a moment the thunder in her ears silenced her mother’s voice, the thunder of her own rising rushing blood. So she was silenced. She put her head down upon his shoulder and stood trembling against him.

In her home her mother said no more. Days passed and she said no more. She moved usually about her household tasks and if she were quiet, Joan would not speak of it. She would not ask why her mother was quiet because she did not want to be shaken in her love. She would not give up her love. She worked every day upon her music, long hours alone in her room, long hours alone in the empty church, but now she was never lonely. She had conceived the idea of a love sequence in music. Each day she would put into it some meaning of her love with Martin. But she had not yet really begun to write it into a shape. As yet it was only a drift of melodies in her imagination.

For now she lived entirely in the secret life of her sudden love. To her mother she was always pleasant, always ready to be helpful, to conciliate her. There was a quick cry always ready on her lips, “Let me do it for you, Mother!” Sometimes her mother would let her take a broom or a duster from her and sometimes she would not. Sometimes she answered tranquilly, “Thank you, child.” But sometimes she cried bitterly, “Go on and do something you really want to do.” Out of this bitterness once she looked at Joan and said hopelessly, “I expected too much — I seem always to have expected too much from my children.” Then Joan went away quickly and in silence, for she would not hear her mother speak of that one thing which now fed her.

Yet she still wanted the old family love about her and now she turned eagerly to her father, grateful for his guileless ignorance of all that went on about him. She knew her mother had not told him anything — why tell him who understood only the mysteries of God? So in the daytime, when she was waiting for the night and Martin, that she might escape her mother she went sometimes with her father along the country roads when he went to visit his people, and she sat silent in his silences or heard him talk of his far thoughts.

In the silence she thought of Martin. But it was not really thinking. It was not her brain saying words and making thoughts about him. It was only that if she were left alone for a moment without occupation, talk in her ears, tools in her hand, a task to be done, suddenly she was empty and in that emptiness there was only Martin. Nothing she could read in books, nothing she had once learned in school, had any meaning for her now. There must be something for hands and feet to do, a question to be heard and answered, or else she was empty and in the emptiness was Martin.

So when her father talked she listened, her upper surface hearing, answering what she scarcely heard. He said, not talking to her, but speaking aloud to himself as he often did riding along the country roads, speaking aloud to himself or to God, “I must enlarge the chapel at South End. I am grieved continually that in that village of several hundred souls there is no real church. People live together like savages without marriage laws and their children are not baptized. Even though they are black they are nevertheless souls in God’s sight. But I need help — I need help — the people in Middlehope don’t help me—”

She listened, and for a moment she heard. Black souls — she remembered. Miss Kinney and Africa. South End was like Africa. The people were black. They were savage — that meant they lived together without marriage laws. At missionary meetings no one spoke about South End. But since she was born she had known that people did not like to pass that way by night. Ever since the factory closed things had been worse, quarreling and feuds between families. Peter Weeks kept saying he was going to open the factory again, but meanwhile people lingered on, waiting and quarreling and drinking.

Her father’s voice continued gently and calmly.

“But if my people do not see it as I do, yet I can say as Christ said also, ‘I have other sheep not of this fold.’ I will tell them God has spoken to me of it. I will proceed upon God’s call and leave it to God that my people will hear his voice also.” He spoke as definitely as though what he had planned to do was done.

She did not answer, letting him talk. On their homeward way her father turned his small old car and they passed by South End. He drove slowly past the chapel, full of plans.

“It’s an ugly place,” she said, looking down the dirty broken street, the shabby people shambling out of doorways.

“It is ugly because it is full of sin,” he replied tranquilly.

But now she did not want to hear him. She wanted to hurry away from South End and get home, for the afternoon was late and she must be there to meet Martin.

Yet her father had his part in her, too. If her mother had made and fed her body, here was her father, and he had fed her spirit. Day by day, week by week, by his presence, by his words, he had shaped something in her. Her mother’s part in her was passionate and dark and strong and hard with good sense. “He will never marry you,” her mother cried in her continually now. But her father’s part in her was not weaker than her mother’s. He was not in her blood. He had not shaped her bones or created her flesh. But he had breathed into her life of a sort, a life not of this world. He had informed her spirit. He said, “It is ugly because it is sinful,” and she understood him.

She could not, therefore, forever live quite wholly in her body with Martin. Her soul had a hunger, too. Her father had not satisfied her soul, but he had fed it enough to keep it alive. It was alive and hungering in her so that she wanted to talk to Martin, to feel his mind and hers in communion. But he did not talk to her. When she talked he listened smiling, tolerant of her as of a child, and then he took her into his arms and kissed her again and again. It was his only answer to her, and after a while she foresaw, dimly, that this would not be enough. But as yet this was enough, or nearly enough for joy. The very strength she had from her mother’s share in her being, the dark earthy strength, made her hungry for joy and Martin was the only means that had come to her. She did not see him for himself, but only as a means of joy. For it was indeed joy to have him kiss her as often as he would, because it was a man’s lips upon hers. It was a joy to have his hands upon her hands, even though she was secretly ashamed because her hands were broader than his and harder in the palm. It was joy to have his touch smoothly upon her throat, delicately at her breast. She called these lips, these hands, this man’s shape that stirred her, Martin. That he could by his music also move her heart did not make the true Martin the more clear to her. He had her by the blood.