Time Is Noon (6 page)

“Have you seen the doctor?” she asked. She went to the other window away from her mother and looked out. She should not have asked the question so coldly. Why was she cold to her mother now? She was afraid of something. She did not want her mother to come close like this. She wanted her mother as she had always been, cheerful and sure and surrounding them with warm pleasantness.

“Yes, I’ve seen Dr. Crabbe,” her mother answered unwillingly.

“Dr. Crabbe!” Joan repeated. “He’s nothing but an old country doctor.”

“He was with me when each of you was born and he knows me,” her mother replied simply.

Again she felt the throb of rushing repulsion. Her body—once it had been torn from her mother’s flesh, held in old Dr. Crabbe’s rough coarse hands. She knew his hands. She had felt the thick fingers pushing bluntly into her mouth when she was a child, to feel a loose tooth, to hold down her tongue when he looked at her sore throat. She remembered his peering red face coming hugely near, spotted with scars and badly shaved. He opened his mouth while he stared and his teeth were stained with tobacco and he breathed heavily through his hairy nostrils. His eyebrows were like yellow beards, and whiskers an inch long grew out of his ears. He was as short and thick as a topped tree.

“You ought to see somebody else,” she said, looking steadily out of the window. Now Mrs. Parsons was going down the street. She had been to the post office again and under her arm was a bulky package—a returned manuscript, of course. If this were her mother sitting here as usual in the rocking chair, her hands busy instead of lying loosely like that in her lap, she would cry, “Mrs. Parsons has her novel back again—I wonder which one it is?” and her mother would answer kindly, “Poor soul, don’t laugh at her. It’s been such a curse in that family, her wanting to write novels. I declare I don’t see how Ned and Emily have grown up so good. It’s really poisoned Ed’s life. He told me once he felt he’d never really had a wife or the children a mother. They don’t mean anything to her beside those novels she writes. She measures her whole life by them. If one were accepted I don’t believe she’d ask for heaven. She’s been like that ever since I knew her.”

But now it was trivial to speak of Mrs. Parsons. “What does Father say?” she asked.

There was no answer. She turned and saw her mother’s eyes downcast, but along the edges of the lids there were tears. “Mother!” she cried. She rushed to her mother and knelt beside her and put her arms about her. Strange—strange to feel her mother’s body relax in her arms! The repulsion was gone. She wrapped her arms about her mother and pressed her head down upon her shoulder. “Mother—Mother—Mother—” she said over and over. Oh, what was this disaster?

“There’s no use telling your father anything,” her mother said, choking. “He doesn’t understand anything—he never has.”

There was the closed door and the subdued passionate voices were behind it. Was this—but before she could ask the question her mother straightened herself and wiped her eyes.

“I’m a wicked woman,” she said suddenly. “I don’t know what came over me to say that. Your father is a wonderfully good man. I’ve a lot to be thankful for. I look at poor Mrs. Weeks and thank God—that awful Mr. Weeks—” she pushed Joan aside and got to her feet and took the pins out of her long hair. She went to the bureau and picked up a brush and began to brush her hair swiftly. “I haven’t anything to complain of,” she said. “Lots of women at my time of life don’t feel quite as strong as they did.”

So she pushed her daughter away, and Joan stood up quickly, shy to the heart, made ridiculous. She hesitated, and then said, “What shall I do this afternoon, Mother? I want to help.”

“Just go to the meeting for me, dear,” her mother said calmly. She coiled her hair on top of her head and thrust the gray bone pins in swiftly. “Just make a few remarks about Miss Kinney—anything you like—you know her. If you can, dear—I think I will just rest the once. I’ll be all right with an afternoon’s rest. And Rose will go—she always wants to go—”

She looked into the mirror at her mother’s face. Framed and in the bright light of the windows it looked whiter and more tired than it would when she turned around. “Of course I will,” she said to the white face. She went to the door, and there hesitated again. After all, there had been this half hour. “Just the same, you ought to see another doctor,” she said.

“Maybe I will one of these days,” her mother said tranquilly, busy about her hair.

She went out and left her mother standing before the mirror.

In the afternoon before she went to the meeting she tiptoed to her mother’s room. The door was open and she went in softly. Her mother lay asleep on the bed, covered by an old knitted afghan the Ladies’ Aid had given her, once gay, but now faded into squares of faintly varied pallors. Above it her mother’s face showed darkly pale, the mouth a little open, and ashen shadows about the nostrils and eyes. She could scarcely believe this was the same face she had watched secretly at the table, for at the noon dinner her mother had been quite herself among them. A little quiet perhaps, but then they were used to her rare stillnesses, although they loved her laughter. When they were small children and she fell into stillness they were afraid and begged her, “Mother, what’s the matter? Mother, do please be funny again and laugh!” Sometimes she roused herself, but sometimes she turned her dark eyes on them in terrible gravity and said. “May I not be still sometimes in my life? I want to be still.”

So she would be still and they could scarcely bear it. The whole house was gray with her stillness and they were burdened with it until even the father noticed it.

“Are you ill, Mary?”

“No, Paul,” she answered serenely. “Just still.”

In her stillness they clung to her in misery, not able to leave her, not able to play. When she came out of it they began to live again, and everything took on its true color once more. They ran and sang and shouted and played busily, and they could leave her and run out into the village to look for pleasure.

Now, looking down at the sleeping face, Joan felt again the old dependence on her mother’s mood. Everything was wrong. She turned away frightened, and went softly from the room. The meeting suddenly became a burden to her. It would not be fun. She dreaded it—she did not like to hear sad things told, not even about people heathen and far away. She had not been to a missionary meeting for years, not since she was a little girl too small to leave at home alone. And she dreaded it because her mother had dreaded it always, too, although she made jokes about it. Still it had been one of her tasks, and when it was over she always came home sparkling and laughing and relieved. “There,” she would cry, “I’m done with the heathen for another month!”

Nevertheless she had always worked steadily, since she was the minister’s wife, at getting together the money the church promised. One hundred dollars each year they promised and the women planned and contrived and gave chicken suppers at which they sold bags and lace-edged handkerchiefs and embroidered towels and knit dishcloths and a score of such small things which they made and bought of each other, although they would have preferred neither to make nor to buy. Old Mrs. Mark regularly bought the same bag each year and donated it the next and bought it again, without pretense, and called it “my missionary bag.” … Her mother, Joan perceived with surprise as she went slowly downstairs, had done many things she hated.

At the door she came upon Rose, dressed in white linen and with her wide straw hat already on her head. “Shall I go with you, Joan?” she inquired seriously.

“If you like,” Joan said. She walked across the lawn beside Rose, constrained. She was somehow very constrained with Rose now. She had not thought much about her these last years. She had been too busy feeling her own growth. But Rose had been growing, too. After the summer it would be her turn to go away to school.

“What shall you do after the summer, Joan?” Rose asked suddenly, turning her large sweet eyes upon her sister. “What do you plan for your life?”

Plan? She planned everything. But she answered vaguely, “I don’t know—” She could not tell Rose anything. But then it was true she did not know.

Besides, they were at the church. Miss Kinney came to them out of the side door, and she was softly anxious, her small nose trembling like a rabbit’s. “I’m always nervous before I speak,” she began breathlessly. “But somehow God gives me strength as I go on. I miss your dear mother. She did cheer me up always at the beginning—she always looked so interested—”

Under her arm was a portfolio of pictures. She had shown them many times, but still they were pictures of Africa and she had been there. Yes, she had walked among jungle trees and beneath swinging serpents and she had crept out of a hut on a tropical summer’s night and seen the moon red behind palm trees and she had heard the throbbing beat of deep-toned distant drums. Once for five years out of her life she had escaped from this village and from her father and her mother. She said the voice of God called her. No other voice could have enticed her, not love, not lust. But when she was thirty-three, “yet not too old to learn the language,” she always explained, she obeyed God’s call, as she put it, and became a missionary.

Mr. and Mrs. Kinney had been shocked and deserted in their dignified old house. But they could not in decency protest against God as they had against the voices of young men. Nevertheless they delayed her. They said, “Sarah is impetuous. She decides everything so quickly.” So year after year they delayed her, as they had delayed the two young men who had loved her childish ardent eyes, who came and waited and went away. Yet the parents could not drive away God. She kept him invisible but constantly beside her. “I have the call,” she reiterated with more firmness than she had ever said anything in her life.

She grew quite wildly firm after a year or two, so that Dr. Crabbe said gruffly, “Let the girl have her own way for once or she’ll have to be put into an asylum.”

Old Mrs. Kinney wailed aloud, “But what shall we do without her? Her father’s devoted to her. She’s all we have—our only child!”

“You ought to have had grandchildren ten years ago,” he replied with rudeness.

“Sarah’s delicate,” said Mrs. Kinney positively. She was old, but she was very pretty and fragile and her house was exquisite. Mrs. Kinney had inherited the house and some money with it, and neither she nor Mr. Kinney had ever needed to do anything.

So they never did anything, and Mrs. Kinney, who had always been afraid of everything, grew more afraid as the years went on. She would never, she said years ago, ride in one of these new automobiles. It was tempting God, it was suicide. She walked down the street every afternoon a little way, clinging to Mr. Kinney’s arm, and on Sundays they walked the three blocks to church and back. She always explained, “We are both rather delicate. We have to take care of ourselves. Sarah inherits my delicate constitution, I’m sorry to say.”

But for once Sarah was not delicate. She took ship and made the voyage breathless and arrived at the remote mission in the jungle and plunged intensely into the life. Hardship could not touch her and she was afraid of nothing, although always breathless.

After five years when she came on a furlough the old pair had her again. They clutched her with their love. They spoke piteously of their age, of their fragility. She heard her father’s cough. She saw her mother’s hand tremble with a palsy. Now they did not speak of her delicateness. Instead they spoke of her strength. They cried, “You are so young and strong and we will soon be gone. You will never miss a year out of your life. It will not be more than a year.”

She waited year upon year. She served six years’ waiting and her father died. Then her mother, trembling very much and grown as thin as a dried leaf, cried, “Sarah, can you bear to leave me alone? It will not be more than a year. I shall not live the year out.”

So Sarah Kinney waited a year and two years and then five years and now she was beginning the seventh year of her waiting, and the old woman lived fretfully on, thin to her bones, trembling so that she must be fed and dressed like a child, and each day death was no nearer. Of course Miss Kinney was tender with her and never even in her heart did she allow herself to hope for anything except her mother’s health. Her one self-indulgence was to remember the five years of her own life in Africa, to remember them and hope.

She stood before the two young girls now, happy because she could remember again, a narrow spare old-maidenly figure, so much taller than everyone else that she had stooped timidly since she was sixteen and first saw how she really looked in the mirror, her hair, now whiter than her mother’s, flaring about her small excited face. “Five blessed years, dear friends,” she began, her voice quivering. “I did God’s work. The African people came to me—the dear people. They were not afraid of me at all. I loved them. When they were ill it was such joy to me—joy to minister to them, I mean—the little babies especially were so sweet. They were not afraid of me, although I know I looked strange to them. You know we do look strange and pale in a country where everybody is black.”

Her gaze fluttered from one face to the other, all unbelieving because they remembered her as a small sickly child with protruding front teeth, upon Rose, sitting rapt and listening, her eyes downcast, her soft hands folded in her lap, and then she found Joan’s eyes. Joan felt the beseeching eyes like lighted lamps upon her face. Staring down at her the white-haired woman hesitated, and her voice deepened and trembled. “It wasn’t only the people,” she said.

In the bare quiet room no one knew what she was saying, not even Rose, dreaming Rose, who turned everything into her own thoughts. No one understood except Joan, and to Joan this misty-eyed woman, whose wild white hair would not lie smooth, talked. She talked on and on, the words rumbling out of her, trying to make Joan see. Mrs. Parsons leaned over to whisper to Mrs. Winters. “Poor Sarah Kinney!” But Mrs. Winters said aloud, “Joan, I think we ought to take up the collection and adjourn. I’ve got company coming for supper.”