Pearl Buck - Time Is Noon

“It is all over for her, isn’t it?” she said. “Let’s go now and put his things into the closets and the drawers.”

EVERY DAY NOW AT THE MEALS SHE SAT IN HER MOTHer’s place. Her own place was gone and she had her mother’s. Without knowing it she even began to use her mother’s words and ways, to do all those things her mother used to do. About the house she saw as her mother would have seen. It did not occur to her to take down the pictures she had once despised. She was so mingled with her mother that the house, the family, became her own. She found herself watching each one possessively, jealous for the good of each. She had no life of her own.

Her father gave to her each week the small sum he had been used to giving her mother and out of it she wrested fiercely their food and clothing. And then one night in her bed, lying awake in the light of the cold clear moon, she planned that she would do more. She would save still more fiercely and build again that small store of silver, bit by bit. She would do it for her mother.

She leaped out of her bed and went to her little desk and wrote to her mother. She wrote an answer to the letter she had found. Mother, I do not know if you can see this or not, she wrote. But I am going to go on with the fund, and if Rose or Francis needs it, it will be there. She went back to bed planning where she might save a penny or two from, the meat, from the butter. Her father would not notice. The next day she put the two letters together in a little box her mother had used for handkerchiefs, a small sandalwood box someone had once brought her from Italy, and she took out of her housekeeping money twenty-five cents. She would save it somehow during the week.

So bit by bit each week, some weeks only a penny, some weeks as much as a dollar, she added to what was in the sandalwood box, where her mother’s letter lay with her own letter. She kept the box in the attic in the tray of the round-topped trunk. He would not look there again, thinking he had taken everything. It came to be a secret comfort to her, the knowledge of that small, steadily growing store, as it had been a comfort to her mother.

But it was not easy to be her mother. She had not the years it had taken to temper her mother, to make her patient. She was eager, too eager, to do for them. Her young boundless strength rushed out to do for them more than they wanted. She straightened Francis’ drawers and he scowled at her. “I wish you’d leave my things alone.” It hurt her amazingly. He never had minded when his mother had done the same thing. “Leave my drawers alone, will you?” he demanded again. “I can’t find my things.”

“I only put your clean collars—”

“I can put my own things where I want them,” he said.

And there was Rose with her strange, soft obstinacy. When the long Christmas holiday was nearly over Joan said briskly, “Now we’ll have to be getting you ready to go back to college. We’ll need to look at your clothes.” She thought of the sandalwood box warmly. If Rose needed a new hat or some little thing there’d be enough. Or she could give her something of her own. In the village she needed very little. There was a blue evening dress. She needed no evening dress here in Middlehope, where the gayest evening was to go with her father and have supper with one of the families in the church, a plain home supper. They would not have known what to make of an evening dress. They would have thought she was putting on airs. There was really no place to wear pretty clothes.

“I want you to take my blue dress back to college with you, Rose. I don’t need it.”

“I’m not going back to college, Joan,” said Rose.

They were alone, making beds, now in Francis’ room. She paused, astonished. “Not going back?” she said stupidly, staring at Rose.

But Rose tucked in the corners carefully. She did not look up. Her face was quite composed.

“No,” she said, calmly. “I have other plans.”

“You’ve not told me, Rose,” said Joan. She was hurt. She longed to reproach Rose. Rose never would come near — Rose never told anything — her only sister, just the two of them, working about the house together and Rose had never told her what she was planning.

“Rob Winters and I are going to be married,” said Rose, her voice placid and certain. “He finished seminary in June and we shall be married and go as missionaries. He has been accepted for the service in China.”

Joan did not move. “You didn’t tell me,” she said hostilely.

Rose stood erect, her eyes innocent, candid, clear. “I’ve only just had the call, Joan,” she said. “Only yesterday I heard God’s voice plainly saying, ‘Go ye into all the world.’ I was not sure until yesterday, when I was sewing. I was by myself in my room, thinking about Rob, and I had my call. Then I knew I was to go, with Rob.”

“But — you’re marrying him — just to be a missionary? You’re a child — you don’t know—”

“I’ll be twenty in September,” said Rose. “And don’t put it that way, Joan. You’ve never understood — how I feel about my life. I want to obey God — I want to save souls—” She paused, and repeated softly, “‘Go ye into all the world.’”

“Do you want to marry Rob, Rose?” asked Joan. She thought of Rob, tall, thin, ascetic, his eyes alive in his set, pallid young face.

“If God tells me to,” said Rose. A slight, exquisite flush crept into her creamy cheeks. She went steadily on with her work, trying to make the corners of the bed square. But she never could get them quite as square as her mother used to do.

It was so hard to talk to Joan. Joan was always wanting to probe into her and find out things, the things she told nobody, things she could not put into words, feelings not to be put into words. It was all mixed up in her, this warm sweet need for devotion. She wanted to offer herself up. She had offered herself to Jesus, giving herself up, feeling herself swept into Him, into His being. She and Rob had talked about it, Rob knew what she meant. He had looked at her with such worship that suddenly she wanted to cry. “You are a saint, Rose,” he whispered. “I never knew there could be a girl like you, so pure, so … so holy.” When he took her hand, that same familiar sweet rush of feeling had swept through her and she knew it was right for her to love him. They had kept their love so beautiful. When they had kissed each other, she said, “Let’s keep our love pure and beautiful, always.” And Rob kissed her gently. When she was in his arms, when he was holding her so purely, she could think about Jesus, too, in all the lovely misty warmth inside her. It made her know it was right for her to marry Rob.

Joan said shortly, “I don’t understand it — I don’t see what it has to do with Rob.”

She fell to work again. Now they were silent. But Joan was in a turmoil of surprise and discomfort. What was the discomfort? She paused, searching. Was it that she would miss Rose? No — strange, strange, it had nothing to do with Rose. It was Martin. Here was Martin’s face suddenly in her mind, the memory of his lips on hers. But surely Martin had nothing to do with marriage. She put the brief memory away again.

So it became an accepted thing that Rose was to marry, was to go to China. Her father heard it and grew unexpectedly cheerful. In the evening as they sat about the fire he told them what they had never known. “When I was a young man,” he said diffidently, “I also planned to go to the foreign field. The call came to me when I had been married a year and you were an infant, Joan. It came very clearly. I remember. Dr. Peter Davidson of China had my pulpit that Sabbath evening, and I remember the congregation was very small, for even then my people were not interested as I have wished in saving souls. And while I was troubled about this, God’s voice came through the preacher. He leaned over the pulpit — a great tall thin man he was, burned nearly black by eastern sun, and he pointed his finger at me and said, ‘Why not you?’ And I knew it was God’s voice. I came home to Mary and told her.” His face looked suddenly withered as he spoke. He finished very quietly. “She would not go. She said God had to call her, too. I have regretted it all my life.”