Pearl Buck - Time Is Noon

Joan sat, smiling, remembering, forgetting for the moment why she had come. There was so much to remember here in this place — her mother, Francis, Rose, herself. It hurt most of all to remember herself. It was like remembering someone else, a young ardent girl. The door of the vestry opened and she looked up quickly, remembering her father. But instead a youngish bald-headed man came out in a dark business suit. He began to speak in a sharp practical voice.

“Today’s lesson is found in—”

He read quickly, plainly, without acknowledging any poetry in what he read, and sat down abruptly. A woman in the choir rose and sang in a sharp clear soprano. It was his wife. She remembered that definite high voice. “Is there only one bathroom in the manse? What sort of a kitchen stove do you have?”

She bent her head, waiting for the song to finish. When the congregation sang, she could go back to remembering. The soft murmuring of old voices, the muted organ — remembering, she might remember God. Her father could so invoke God in this place. Oh, that she might feel God true!

There was a short practical sermon, a few notices read. “There will be the usual meeting in the vestry after service. I shall discontinue the Wednesday prayer meeting while I am away on vacation during July.” A strange young man passed the collection plate and she shook her head. She had forgotten to bring money.

Then suddenly when they rose to sing the last hymn she could not face them. She could not bear the pressing questions, “Joan, what’s become of you?” “We never see you anymore.” “It’s nice to see you in the old home church again, Joan.” She was at their mercy, because they had all known her so well. She could not hide herself. She turned and hurried out of the church and went down the street. After her came the soft sound of their peaceful aged singing. The singing made the noon unreal.

… “Was Paul all right?” she asked Bart.

“Sure he was,” Bart answered. His voice sounded thick and queer, as though he had been drinking. But he could not have been drinking in this house. When a stranger asked Bart’s father for a match even, he would not lend it if he knew it was to light a pipe or a cigarette. “That’s flesh pander,” he said. And to drink even cider was wicked.

She looked at him closely. But he did not look at her. His red hair was tumbled and he smoothed it roughly. “You’ve been asleep,” she cried.

“Yeah,” he muttered.

“Asleep when you were to take care of Paul!”

“Well, he’s all right, isn’t he?”

Suddenly gorge rose in her. She could not bear to look at Bart. She let it pass. It did not matter, so long as Paul was safe.

She importuned Rose to pray for her, while she hung her own prayers on God. And she so prayed that she almost prayed herself into believing that her prayers must drive through the walls around her and reach an ear beyond. But in the night it was hard to believe. In the night, alone in her attic with Paul, the round-topped trunk pushed against the door, in the darkness of the deep night she might doubt and did often doubt. … “I must remember this is only because it is night and everything is so still, and because there is no one near me. I must remember that I believe in God and that the morning will come soon.”

She thought humbly of Rose who was so good, so sure. Rose’s prayers would count with God. In the night it was a comfort to think that far across the sea Rose was praying for her, too. And in the morning, when the sun came streaming through the treetops, it seemed to her that Rose’s prayers must be answered.

But it was a long time since she had heard from Rose. She went out one late summer morning to the mailbox at the road. When she saw the mail carrier there in his old Ford, she ran out. He seldom stopped, scarcely more than once a week to deliver the Sunday School Times or a farm circular.

“Good morning, Mr. Moore!” she called gaily. It was one of the moments of forgetting. The morning was clear over the hills, the earth was throbbing with sun and heat. The air was still and fertile with warmth. She felt her feet sure and vigorous upon the rich grass. It was impossible not to hope this morning. Paul was so well, so placid, so good.

Mr. Moore grinned at her, his gums toothless. “Foreign letter for you,” he said. He liked to bring her a foreign letter. “Makes your eyes shine!” he said, as he always did.

“Good!” she cried heartily. “I knew something nice would happen — it’s one of those mornings!”

“It’s not a bad day,” Mr. Moore admitted. It was so warm he had taken off his coat and was in his brown vest and gray chambray shirt. He was a little embarrassed as she reached out her hand freely for the letter. “I might have kept on my coat if I’d known you were coming out,” he apologized.

She took the letter and smiled at him warmly. It was Rose’s letter, the address neatly typed. Rob had never written. Rob was so busy, Rose said — and he had his own parents to whom to write. Rob was opening a new field often, Rob was pushing northwest among the Mohammedan peoples, over the deserts, into the high barren plateaus near Tibet, where the men looked like Indians, lean and dark and fierce.

“Well, you’ll be wanting to read your letter,” Mr. Moore said. His car set up a fury of noise and stirred a rush of dust. He jerked it into movement and urged the motor with a clatter of gears, and the car, choking, was on its way.

She thrust the letter into her dress and went upstairs to the attic. It was midmorning, and there was a pause in the work. In a few moments she must go to the kitchen and peel potatoes. But these few moments were empty. Paul was asleep in a clothes basket under an apple tree. She was always happiest when he was asleep. He was just a little boy asleep. The attic was beginning to seem a room of her own. It was her uncontrollable instinct to make a room pretty. She had made little ruffled green curtains for the gable window and a cover for the box. Last winter she had sewed rags into a round rug. Bart’s mother had showed her how. They were rags of colorless old work shirts too torn to wear, but she had dyed them green and brown. She sat down on a barrel chair she had found in the attic and had covered with the green curtain stuff. Now she tore open the letter.

It had always been a luxury to read Rose’s letters over and over slowly, to extract from them every picture. Slowly through Rose’s meager descriptions she had pieced the picture of a square mission house, dark servants coming and going, a garden thick with ferns and spotted lilies and quick-growing plants. “But, alas, there are snakes and centipedes,” Rose had written. “We have to keep continual watch over David.” David she saw clearly, a small, too thin, intrepid child. David was always running away. David was continually being sought for and found down by the riverside among the junkmen, or in the marketplace. Sometimes they found him first, but other times before they found him there would be knocking at the compound gate and a man would be there, a bare-legged farmer or a riksha coolie, holding the small boy firmly by the hand.

“He runs away in spite of everything,” Rose wrote anxiously. “Nothing will keep him inside the compound walls.”

She had read every letter absorbed, eager to see David, laughing at David, ten thousand miles away.

She tore open the thin Chinese envelope … But this was not true, not these words typed scantily here. A letter could not carry a message like this, a common letter! The lines ran together as her eyes read them. Now let her begin again carefully and quietly disentangle the words. The name of John Stuart — that was the doctor at the station — Rose had told her about John Stuart, a little. “He is a faithful worker,” Rose had said, “a man of few words.” Few words! In this handful of words he wrote, “And without warning bandits came into the town and forced the compound gates. Mr. and Mrs. Winters were killed almost immediately, we heard later from those who were watching in the crowd. The children were saved by their faithful nurse. The little girl was eleven days old. We escaped—” The lines were tangling and twisting again.