Pearl Buck - Time Is Noon

She turned her head slightly and looked about. It was early and the people were gathering. All her life she had come early with her family, to be, as her mother said, an example. The sun was streaming through the church in long bright metallic bars and the light, faintly colored by the stained-glass windows, shone upon the silvery heads of a few aged men and women who were early also. She caught old Mr. Parker’s eye and threw him her smile and felt her heart warm toward him. He had taught her music and from him she had learned how to write down the tunes that sang so easily into her head. He kept the little music store in the village by which he could not have lived unless he had tuned pianos and taught classes in singing in the district school. He taught faithfully, regularly, so that at the end he might sometime have a small pension. He could not sing much anymore, although once he had had a mild sweet baritone voice. But these days he could do little more than clear his throat and hum a note for the younger voices to catch from him.

Now the organ began to sound, deeply and quietly, the notes caught and held strongly. Joan turned her face toward the music and listened carefully. She could see a man’s back, straight and slenderly shaped. She knew him, at least she knew him like this in the church, sitting with his back to her, reaching and plucking the music out of the organ. She knew his back better than his face, his music better than his voice. At other times no one knew him very well, though he lived in the village and had been a child here. He had a law business of his own in the city to which he came and went almost daily. At night he slept in his mother’s house in the village where he had always slept except for the two years he had been away at the war. He was an only son, whose father had died when the son was a child. To the villagers he seemed to have no other life than this one in the village, to care for his mother, to walk sedately with her in their garden, to remark upon the flowers. She said to him, “I believe the lilac will be in bloom by tomorrow.” He replied, “I think it will, Mother.” She said to her neighbors, “Martin is all I have to live for.” So she clung to him that she might have something for which to live, and for him she kept the square red brick house rigidly dustless and ordered. He entered every night into the clean shadowy hall and moved in silence about the clean shadowy rooms.

Yet every morning he went away to Philadelphia and did his work and so well that he gathered a little fame about himself as a lawyer, a fame of which the villagers heard remotely and always with doubt and wonder, because they had known him since he was born. They had always said, “His father was no great shakes — he had big ideas about that shirt factory in South End, but he couldn’t keep it going — a good man, but not very bright.” So it was hard to believe in the son. “If Martin had come into the factory and helped me, things would have been different.” But Martin had gone early to his own life, and as soon as his father died he had sold the factory to Peter Weeks.

Of himself Martin Bradley never spoke. Silently, smiling a little to everyone, he came every Sunday morning to play the organ as he had begun to do when he was eighteen years old. On his first Sunday home from the war he was at the organ again. No one asked him what had happened between and he said nothing and soon it was forgotten that he had ever been away.

Now while Joan listened and looked at his straight back and narrow dark head, upon which the hair was beginning to turn gray, he played a Bach fugue meticulously and perfectly, making each note round and complete and valued. The choir door opened and four people came in irregularly as they chose and a little apologetically, as though they felt that everyone knew them in other guise than this. There were two women and two men, Mr. Winters and Mrs. Parsons and Mr. Weeks and Miss Kinney. They took their seats and stared earnestly and self-consciously in front of them, except Miss Kinney, who had once been a missionary in Africa. She smiled continually and her eyes darted here and there, as restless as pale blue butterflies.

Then the vestry door opened and the music softened. Joan’s father came in, a priest newly come from the presence of God to his people. Through thirty years this had never become stale in him or usual. He would not come unless from God. Once in her little childhood Joan remembered a delay. The people waited for him, at first patiently and then in surprise, their eyes fixed on the vestry door. Moments passed and the organ rolled on and on and wandered into bypaths of variation, but ready at any instant to come through to the final major note. She was only six years old, but she caught her mother’s wonder and then her anxiety. She heard her mother whisper, “I shall have to go and see what is wrong.” She felt her mother gather herself to rise.

Then the door opened as though on the wings of a wind, strongly and swiftly, and her father strode in with triumph and his voice rang out to his people, “Let us praise the Lord by singing—”

Later when her mother cried, “Paul, where were you? We were all waiting!” he said simply, “I could not get God’s blessing and I could not go to my pulpit until I did.”

But now, in the beginning of his age, his temper stilled, it seemed he had always God’s blessing. He moved tranquil and serene, tall, a little bowed, but his eyes were clear and blue and guileless as a child’s eyes are. He stood before his people and paused. The organ fell silent and the people looked at him, waiting. But before he could speak there was a sound at the door, a step in the aisle and a movement. It was Francis, come to sit beside his mother once again. His father waited for him.

They were complete now. The father was set above them in the pulpit and the mother and the three children were in their accustomed places. Their faces were turned to him, waiting for what they were about to receive.

So they received their food from God. The people rose in the bars of many colored sunshine, and were for the moment caught and held in the brightness. They sang together, and Joan sang, above them all, her big young voice soaring above their feeble old voices, carrying them along, gathering them in its full stream. Then they sat back comfortably and gave thanks and heard the reading of Scripture. They gave too at the due moment small bits of silver that tinkled into the old pewter plates.

In the choir loft Mrs. Parsons rose tall and gaunt, yet with sweetness in her disappointed eyes, and sang, “But the Lord is mindful of His own.” She sang it a little too slowly, clinging to the favorite words, and her voice faded upon the high notes, but she still sang with a touching hopefulness. What she longed for might yet be. So she sang, believing wistfully in what she had not received. She loved these moments of singing, when she could lose herself in vague hoping about the story she was writing.

Emily was so much like her father, so impatient of her mother’s “scribbling” as they called it. Edward had always been hard on her about it. When he came home and found things not quite ready for dinner because she had been writing, he was so hard. And now Emily, although she was only fifteen, was hard too. “You write such silly stuff, Mother!” Her voice was cold and she rattled the dishes in the sink. But Ned — dear boy — he was older than Emily but still he listened to her stories, and his eyes would grow wet. “Neddie, it’s only a story,” she said to him time and again. He helped her to keep on hoping. Some day someone would want her stories. One of the letters would not be a rejection, and Edward would say, “Well, well, Florrie — you were right and I was wrong.” Edward would say what he never had said about anything. “Forgive me, Florrie.” She would just be patient and keep on writing as nicely as she could.