Time Is Noon (18 page)

She could not imagine Rose’s life away from Middlehope, far from everyone they had known. Together they planned Rose’s clothes, the things she would need for her marriage. They said, looking at each other in sisterly, practical fashion, “There must be this, and this—” “Surely a white satin wedding dress?” said Joan, pleading. But Rose shook her head. “What would white satin be afterwards? Brown, a brown crepe—” So Joan let it be brown crepe, though how could it be a real marriage without white satin? … “Miss Joan Richards was married today to—to—her gown was white satin with a train—” … “A thin dark dress for travel,” said Rose, with pencil and paper, “a voile or two for the heat—”

But then it was not so much getting ready for a wedding as getting ready for what was after it. That Rob and Rose were to be married seemed nothing but a convenience before they went away together to be missionaries. What were missionaries? … Joan, standing tall and irresolute beside Rose in Mr. Winters’ general store, let Rose choose the plain striped voile, the dark brown silk crepe. These were not chosen for Rose the bride. They were chosen for someone else, for Rose the helpmeet, neat, subdued, standing beside the young missionary.

Mr. Winters waited on them fussily, urging one thing and another. “Here’s some pretty newfangled things,” he said, hurrying from one cardboard box to another. “Doggone, where are they? I had my hand right on ’em a minute ago—costoom jewelry they call it. It looks almost real.”

“No, thank you, Mr. Winters,” said Rose. She did not call Rob’s parents Mother and Father. She was no warmer to them than she ever had been.

They cut and sewed the stuffs together, quiet plodding sewing. It was like sewing under a gray sky. Her mother would have hated these dull colors. “Where is that flowered lawn Mother made you?” Joan asked suddenly. That day it had slipped over Rose’s head like a shower of plucked flowers.

“I still have it,” said Rose. “I haven’t really worn it much. It wasn’t a very practical dress,” she added after a moment.

Joan did not answer. Rebellion against this sewing, against this marriage, this life Rob had chosen, rushed up, a heat in her body. Her hands felt stiff with unwillingness. She stood up suddenly and the stuff and the spool and the scissors fell to the floor.

“I’ve just remembered something I forgot,” she said abruptly to Rose’s calm, upturned eyes, and whirled out of the room in long-legged haste. But before she could get to her own room she heard the front door downstairs open and a voice shot clearly up to her ears. “Where’s Rose? Rose—Rose!” it called loudly.

It was Mrs. Winters. But when Rose came out of her room, she cried at Joan, leaning over the balustrade, looking down. Mrs. Winters was slapping a letter she held in her right hand with her plump left hand. It was so plump her gold wedding ring was deeply imbedded in her finger. “Joan, what’s this about Rob and Rose? I don’t say anything about their marrying and I didn’t say a word about Rob’s being a minister—he’ll always be poor, and I’ve nothing to leave him—Mr. Winters and I—but to go to China’s something else! I don’t believe Rob’d have thought of it by himself—it’s Rose—” Her voice filled the hall, strident, sharp, rising up the stairs. In the kitchen the dishes Hannah was washing stopped rattling. Then the door of the study opened and the priest of God stayed her angry voice. He stood, sudden and tall, his hand uplifted against her to silence her. “Do you mean you are not willing for your son to follow his call?” he asked.

Across the strident heat of her voice, his voice fell like a sword of ice, silencing her. But she was not used to silence. “You’re a good man,” she retorted, “but you don’t understand. Rob’s my only boy. Rob’s always been too enthusiastic—emotional—his father’s emotional. If it hadn’t been for me, Mr. Winters would have been here, there and everywhere. He wanted to go out on a gold rush once when he was a boy not any older than Rob is now—Why, once he wanted to throw up his good general store and go into automobiles! Rob’s just like him. They hate to listen.”

“Take care that you are not a hypocrite,” said the priest of God with slow, deadly coldness. “You lead the missionary meetings in the church but you will not give your own son to God.”

“Oh, Father, don’t,” cried Joan. “Please come in, Mrs. Winters—Oh, Rose, I didn’t know Rob hadn’t told her—”

“He’s afraid of her,” Rose said breathlessly. “He’s always been afraid of her.”

She threw reproach at Rose in a look, then ran down the stairs, trembling in her large young haste. How she hated to see people hurt, even Mrs. Winters! She seized Mrs. Winters’ plump arm and drew her eagerly into the empty parlor and pushed her into a seat and closed the door. “Sit down—sit down—there—we can talk about it—not quarreling—I hate quarreling—”

She forgot how strong she was until Mrs. Winters fell into a chair under her strength. “Joan—I do declare,” she exclaimed breathlessly. Then she saw Joan’s moved, troubled face, and her lips trembled. “It’s awfully hard,” she whispered hoarsely, pulling her handkerchief from her belt. “Of course I believe in missions—I’ve been brought up to—I’ve been brought up a Christian—I can’t remember when I wasn’t a member of the Church. But I never thought it would happen to me. It was hard enough for my son to want to be a preacher—so poor preachers always are, and no help in the store—and Rob’s a sensible boy at heart. But he doesn’t listen to me—Still, I just don’t believe he’d have thought of such a thing himself. Rose’s always been a little queer. She’s had such an influence on him.” Her full purplish lips quivered beyond control and she put her handkerchief to them.

“I know,” breathed Joan. She towered over her, instantly understanding. “It’s terrible—it’s terrible for me too, letting Rose go.”

She hung over Mrs. Winters, yearning with comprehension. It would be like seeing them die on their wedding day, Rose and Rob. Her immense imagination leaped to the day, saw them upon the train, the train smaller and smaller in the distance until they were gone. In Mrs. Winters’ house there would be no child left, and in this house Rose would be no more. It was terrible as death, her mother gone in death and now Rose gone into life stranger than death. It was easier to understand death. Her eyes swam in tears. People ought to stay close, close together—families ought to cling together always until death came. They could not help death but they could help choosing in life to part. “Mrs. Winters,” she whispered, “Mrs. Winters, Mother wouldn’t have wanted Rose to go. I’m sure she wouldn’t.”

“Of course she wouldn’t,” Mrs. Winters whispered back, her fat cheeks shaking with the sobs in her throat. “Your dear mother—Joan, I’m not a hypocrite. I—I really did mean what I said in the missionary meetings, even though Chinese always did give me the creeps. I used to see them sometimes on the streets in New York when I went with Mr. Winters to get stock. But to put a nickel in the plate or even a dime once in a while—it isn’t the same thing as your only child wanting to go.”

“No—no,” said Joan. She knelt down and wrapped her long arms about Mrs. Winters’ large encased body, and Mrs. Winters leaned for a moment upon her shoulder and wept aloud.

“I haven’t done this—not since my little girl died before Rob could talk,” she gasped.

“There, there,” said Joan, patting her back gently. How could Rob be afraid of his mother? Under her hand she felt a hard full ridge of flesh above a corset. But it didn’t matter. She saw suddenly that this woman, this managing, bristling woman, was nothing but a child after all. Strange how nobody grew up—Her mother had died, really nothing but a little child, and she had never understood her mother wholly until she had seen she was a child. And now she would always really know Mrs. Winters. She would know her better than she did her own father, better than she did Rose, who never gave of themselves. Mrs. Winters sighed and sat up abruptly, and wiped her eyes.

“I don’t know when …” she said feebly.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Joan quickly. “I understand perfectly.”

“I know you do—I feel you do, though you’re only a girl and I’m sure—But I’ll always oppose it. Joan—so long as I draw breath. I’ve been a good woman and served the Lord and I oughtn’t to be asked to do this besides.”

Joan stood up, delicately conscious that Mrs. Winters was ashamed of her weeping.

“Yes, Mrs. Winters,” she said docilely. Mrs. Winters stood up also, and took out her side combs and combed up her pompadour and thrust the combs in again strongly on either side of the knob of hair on her crown. “But nobody listens to me,” she said. She scarcely looked now as though she had wept at all. “There—I’ve got to go—I left a cake in the oven. I don’t know what came over me. I shall write a good hot letter to Rob. And you speak to Rose, Joan. Tell her what your mother’d have told her. It’s that Kinney girl that’s started Rose, Joan, I’ll bet—a queer unnatural baby she was from the start. She had to be took, and I shouldn’t wonder if it made her a little queer. Well! I’m sure …” She moved toward the door and looked into the hall. It was empty.

Joan felt suddenly shy. “Good-bye,” she said gently. “I shan’t tell a soul how you’ve been feeling.”

Relief crept into Mrs. Winter’s small opaque gray eyes. She reached up her lips and kissed Joan under the ear. “You’re a good girl,” she said abruptly and went away. Joan, watching her, saw her march down the street, competent, determined. She saw her meet Francis, sauntering home from high school, swinging his books idly against the fence, and stop him a moment.

“What did she say?” Joan asked him as he came in, scorn upon his face.

“Said it wasn’t any way to treat my books,” he replied. “Old hen! Seems to think I’m a kid.”

But Joan went back upstairs smiling. Well, there it was—people! For she could understand that to speak so to Francis made Mrs. Winters whole again.

But no more than Joan could push away with her two hands her mother’s death could she push away this life Rose had chosen. Spring ended. The useful dark dresses were packed into the square trunk her mother had bought for her in college and which Rose had in turn. She had seen her mother kneeling before it—the last time to fold carefully the flowery dress. Now Joan knelt, feeling herself almost in her mother’s body, folding the useful clothes. She knelt, silent, taking the garments Rose piled ready on a newspaper on the floor. Where would these garments be unpacked again? She could not see—she could only feel that Rose was going very far, forever far away. She finished and stood looking down.

Rose called from her room. “Will there be room in the tray for a few more books?”

“There is a lot of room left,” Joan cried back. Yes, too much room—there was pitifully little in the trunk. Days before she had gone to the attic and taken out the few dollars she had saved to buy a wedding present for Rose. But it was so hard to give Rose a gift. She wanted nothing. “I want to buy you something pretty with it, darling,” Joan had pleaded. But Rose had been her soft, obdurate self. “It wouldn’t be suitable, Joan. Thank you ever so much, but it wouldn’t be really suitable.” So it had ended by her slipping the money into Rose’s hand. “Then here, darling—sometime you might want something—even something pretty.”

But now though all the little store was given, she could not close the somber trunk. She must put something in—something for her mother, if not for Rose. Her mother would not let a trunk go like that, full of nothing but useful things. Every year at college when she opened her trunk she found bits of surprise her mother had tucked in a corner, a lace-frilled sachet, a pair of silk stockings—but Rose had said no silk stockings, so they had bought lisle.

The door opened silently and her father stood there, a small solid, leather-bound volume in his hand. “Is there room for this?” he asked. He came to the trunk and stood hesitating above it. “I bought it small not to take up much room.” Joan took the book from him and put it into the tray. “It’s to start their life upon,” he said gravely. “‘Thy word is a lamp unto my feet.’”

But she did not answer. She left him and ran into her own room and began searching in her bottom drawer wildly, her throat tight. There she kept her few precious pretty things, the things she did not often wear, the few things she had too pretty to wear yet. There was a satin nightgown of palest peach. Mary Robey had given it to her at Commencement. “Wear it on your wedding night, Jo,” she had said, teasing her. Joan had put it away with the frilly sachet, half planning. Now she seized it and ran back to the trunk. From Rose’s room she heard her father’s voice talking to Rose. “In time of trouble …” he was saying. She lifted the dark useful traveling dress and thrust the peach-colored shining garment underneath. She ran back to her room and at her desk found a bit of paper and scrawled upon it,
Wear this your wedding night, darling, darling Rose.
She ran back and pinned the note upon the lace bosom of the folded gown.

It’s the prettiest thing I have, she thought, and covered it quickly with the dark dress, and suddenly she missed it intolerably.

But it was a comfort to her, even though she missed it. It was a comfort to her when the grave little wedding took place in the church. The church was full of the people gathered not so much to see the marriage as to see the leave-taking. They stared at this young man and this young woman, whom they had always known and not found worthy of wonder until now. They stared at the tall, pale, delicate-faced lad whose gray eyes seemed already too sunken in his face, and at the short, plump, composed girl beside him, brown as a wren in her plain dress. Marriage was not wonderful. But it was wonderful to stare at them and imagine them crossing seas and strange countries. Nobody in the village had crossed seas except Martin Bradley and Miss Kinney and they a long time ago. Besides, they had come back and stayed just as though they had never gone.

So from everywhere people gathered to the wedding. Let it be so, the priest of God said. Let the congregation see this dedication. God would move their hearts. Joan, entering the church with Rose, saw that everybody was there. People were here she did not know. Her eyes caught the direct stare of a tall, thick-necked, oafish young man, his eyes hot and small, fiery brown under rough red hair. She held Rose’s hand, hard, secretly, by her side. She mustn’t cry, not until after they were gone. There was Mrs. Winters, standing stout and stiff, staring out of a window. Joan understood at once that under that stare she also was saying she must wait to cry. The wedding march sounded delicately under Martin Bradley’s fingers, even perhaps a little scornful. He played it carefully, like an exercise, without expression, completing each phrase and flicking it from his fingers. She paused with Rose before their father, and Rob drew away from Francis, and Rose drew away from Joan, and Rob and Rose stood together. The father, priest of God, stood tall and solemn with his duty. But Joan, sensitive to him, could feel coming from him some force of ecstasy. It shone about him, electric in his face, in his silvery blue eyes, about his white hair. He was at sacrament. His voice rose, high and clear as light, above the two at whom he gazed. He drew them out of the world into the place where he stood and the three were alone.