Pearl Buck - Time Is Noon

“Do you still play the guitar?” she asked suddenly.

He looked at her above a pile of flowered stuff, his eyes round. He laughed, embarrassed.

“Yes — I do.” He coughed and swallowed and fumbled at his ear for his pencil. “Say, I have to thank you a lot for something, Joan. I guess you didn’t know what you did when you told Netta and me to go off that time. We — I guess I saw she was a kid, too. But she was a little older — not enough to amount to anything now, but when you’re kids—” He laughed his high silly laugh.

“I’m very glad,” she said. She looked at him clearly and fully, but he was fumbling over the folds of the garish gingham.

“Yes — well—” He glanced at her furtively and grew very red and went on fumbling busily. “We’ve always expected great things of you, Joan. I always thought you were too good for us — your education and all — and your music writing.”

“Ned Parsons,” she said suddenly, “tell me what’s the matter with my father.”

He looked up at her then, startled by her suddenness. “Well, now—”

“Straight!” she commanded him.

“Oh, nothing, but some folks think he’s too old,” he blurted. She gazed at him intently, taking each word. “Then there’s some says he pays more attention to the niggers down at South End — they say that you have to be a nigger or a heathen or he has no interest in any body.” He began shifting piles of cloth.

“Then what?” she demanded, despising him.

“Oh, well — you know how people are in a little town. They want a young fellow — up-to-date and all that. There’s a fellow over to Lawtonville they’re talking about.”

“I see,” she said clearly. “Thank you, Ned.”

She turned, and he called after her, “Not that there isn’t a good strong handful that don’t want him turned out. I’m one of them — Netta and I both are, Joan!”

“Thank you, Ned,” she called back.

So now she knew what it was. She was like a child, bereft. Grown people, those whom she had trusted, had turned and left her. They stood alone, she and this old man.

People were tired of them. They had grown tired of the same face in the pulpit, saying the same things, the same eternal things. They wanted something brighter and more amusing. She began thinking of them one by one. Which of them would stand by her father, which of them would not? But when she began thinking and remembering how they had last looked, how they had last spoken, she could not be sure of any of them, not even of Miss Kinney, who would be swayed by the last person she heard. There was Dr. Crabbe, Mr. Pegler, Mrs. Mark. But they were not the church, and Mrs. Mark had her legs. There was no one of whom she could be sure.

She entered the house and went quietly to her room. Then it came to her that there was no more shelter in this room, no more safety in this house. All that she had thought was safety forever about her was gone, unreasonably gone and not to be regained. This house in which they had all made a home belonged to their enemies. It belonged to the church. It could not be a home, this house given and taken away at the whim of a crowd. They had built a home under foreign shelter.

She stood by the window, staring across the wintry garden. All these flowers her mother had planted in foreign soil, the lemon lilies, the ferns they had dug from woods and streams. Her mother had wandered through woods in spring with a trowel and a basket, crying aloud over bloodroot and trillium and feathery mosses. Before she went, Joan thought savagely, she would dig them all up and throw them away. She would chop the roses at the roots and hack the lily bulbs. Who could help growing old? They were all growing old. They were old — old — the church was nothing but old people. Yet who turned Mr. Parker out of his house because he was old, and who took bread away from Mrs. Kinney because she was over eighty years old? Then she was suddenly afraid. What did people do when the roof was taken from over them and wage was stopped and there was no more bread? What would she do with this old man? She had no one.

But they helped her to be proud. On Sundays before their strangeness she could pretend she knew nothing. She could receive coldly their meaningless friendliness. She sat in the pew where once they had all sat to hear a proud priest, listening fiercely now to an old mumbling man.

For it was impossible not to see that he was now nothing but an old man. He mounted the pulpit steps wearily and he clutched the handrail when he descended. Only for a moment, that first moment when he faced his failing congregation, did he throw up his head and straighten his shoulders. Soon he forgot. Soon he was poring aloud over his manuscript, reading strange dreamy stuff to which the few listened, bewildered or scornful.

“And I dreamed I saw as though the heavens were rolled away, a fair land, through which flowed serene a river. The name of the river was Peace, and there was room for everyone there on its banks, the young and the old, and they lived together safely. Dreams are not meaningless, not vagrant. Dreams—”

“I must take him away,” she planned passionately. She wanted to run up now and lead him away and shelter him.

Yet he would not be sheltered. In the house when they were alone it was necessary to pretend with him that everything was well. He came home from a meeting of his vestry, stricken and bewildered, muttering replies to himself. Waiting for him, standing at the dining room window watching for him, she wept when she saw him dragging himself across the gray frost-bitten lawn. His lips were moving and he made angry, futile gestures that were like weak blows.

But when, anguished with tenderness, she ran to the door, he pushed her feebly away, panting a little. “Is — is supper ready?” he asked. “I feel — a little faint”

“Oh, what has happened?”

“Nothing — nothing,” he replied with unusual irritation. “I’m just a little tired. I’d like to have supper right away — as soon as I wash—”

He went slowly upstairs. Standing at the foot, she heard him moan softly at the top step. “O, God—” But after a moment he went on and he did not call her. She must, she perceived, allow him to remain what he had always been. He must remain a priest or he would die. But a little later, out of the absolute silence in which they sat at the table, she asked again, “Father — can’t you tell me? Couldn’t you talk it over with me?” He answered, “Women do not understand these things. There is nothing in which you could help me. I trust in God.” She smiled at him, pitifully, and let him be. At night, lying awake, she could hear praying, in long stretches of monotone. He was still putting his trust in God …

And if he gave up his trust in God he would have nothing left. People had drawn away and left him. One by one they had all gone. Mary was gone. She used to lie here in this bed and in the night when he awoke to a strange aching loneliness he could look over and see her dark head or put out his hand and touch her warm breathing body. Now his own feeble warmth could scarcely change in a whole night the chill of the sheets. And in the night they all seemed to mock him. The members of his spiritual family! In the night he even wondered if what they said was true. Perhaps he was getting old. But if he was too old to preach, what could he do? There was the little insurance he had all these years in the Ministers’ Relief Fund. Mary had made him take it when Joan was born. It had seemed not trusting in God, but she kept at him. And he could draw it out in another two years. It would all be his, then. He planned in the darkness that he might rent a little room in South End and go and preach to the unsaved. “And the common people heard him gladly.” “For so persecuted they the saints before you.” He began murmuring the strong resolute words and after a while they helped him. He began to feel the old arrogant determination to make his people do God’s will. No, he would not retreat before his people. The Lord had appointed him — the Lord alone could dismiss him. He would not speak to anyone. He put his trust in God. He slept fitfully before dawn …