Time Is Noon (7 page)

Instantly Miss Kinney recalled herself. She began to gather up her pictures, her fingers shaking. Her voice quavered, shocked, apologetic, “Oh, is it late? Oh, I’m so sorry. When I get talking about my Africa—”

Joan started guiltily. Was it so late? She ought to have held the meeting better. She tore her eyes from Miss Kinney and gave a shudder of relief. She rose and said clearly as her mother might have done, “After the collection for the mission at Banpu—Rose, will you take the collection?—we will sing hymn number sixty-one and the meeting will be adjourned.”

The minute bits of copper and silver tinkled the plate that Rose passed quietly and they stood to sing. The women sang heartily and quickly. They were thinking of suppers to be set upon their tables, of men and children to be fed. If food were delayed a man might growl sourly, “Better be taking care of your own family!” They sang hastily, “The Son of God goes forth to war.” Joan heard their loud plain voices, slightly out of tune. She looked at their honest aging faces. No young women came to missionary meetings. It was one of her mother’s problems. “How shall we get the young ones interested?” She looked from one to the other of the kind abstracted faces, at the frank open mouths, at cotton gloves being slipped surreptitiously on roughened hands. Her heart warmed to them. She was glad to be back among them. She was safe with them. How good they all were, how dear, how kind they were to care about Africa! Why should they give their pennies to sick babies in Banpu? Their own babies were often ill—a hospital in Banpu when there was none in Middlehope. But they would go on giving, go on rolling bandages and sending soap and safety pins because they were so patiently kind. Any tale of sorrow would take their pennies from them in small steady streams—sorrows of people whom they would never see.

She loved them warmly. They were so dear and warm about her. They stopped even in their hurry to say, “Joan, I’m sorry about your mother. I’ll be over to see her tomorrow sure.” “I’m making yeasten rolls, Joan, tell your mother, and I’ll send her a pan.” “I’ll bring a jar of crab-apple jell. She’s always been partial to my jell.”—She felt comforted, so comforted that she forgot Miss Kinney until everyone was gone in the summer dusk, all except Miss Kinney and Rose and herself. Then she remembered and turned contritely to Miss Kinney.

“Oh, Miss Kinney, thank you so much. It’s always so interesting to hear about your experiences in Africa. I’ll tell Mother we had a good meeting.”

“Did you really think so, dear?” Miss Kinney’s voice came out of the twilight under the trees toned in delicate wistfulness. “I sometimes think—I’m afraid I talk—you see, it’s the only thing that ever really happened to me. I still hope to return, you know, some day, when dear Mother is safe in heaven. She’s eighty-two this year. Of course I couldn’t leave her. But I practice the Banpu words every day so that I don’t forget the language. I could pick up right where I left off.”

Rose had said nothing. She had stood, a younger quiet figure behind her sister. But now she spoke, her voice soft. “You made me see everything. I saw it all just as it is.”

Miss Kinney looked up at her, her face a pale emptiness in the shadows, and she gasped. She cried out, “Why—why—why—you dear child!” She began to weep a little and reached for Rose’s hand and squeezed it hard and hurried away into the shadows. They walked quietly across the lawn in silence until Rose said softly again. “How wonderful it must be to have served—like
that
!”

But Joan’s heart rose up. It rose against the sweetness in Rose’s voice. Suddenly she hated sweetness, Rose’s steady unvarying holy sweetness.

“I should hate it,” she said abruptly.

“But, Joan,” Rose protested with gentle reproach, “wouldn’t you go—if God called?”

Her mind glimmered with dark half-formed pictures shaped out of Miss Kinney’s words. She felt the heat, too fierce for health, forcing the strange dark jungles into fearful lush unnatural life. She saw the black people, their eyes gleaming whitely through the jungles.

“No,” she answered shortly, and ran into the house, into her home. She wanted always to stay where it was safe and warm and light. She wanted her own.

When she looked back upon that summer, months after it was over, she saw it was more holiday than she knew at the time. For her mother said no more of her illness. She rose as usual in the morning and when after days Joan put a question to her shyly, for she was still shy of flesh intimacy with her mother, the mother wore her accustomed cheerfulness and she answered, “I’m no worse, anyway. Don’t worry, child. Go on and have your fun this summer. I’m all right.”

And because it was what she wanted to believe Joan believed it and took her pleasure, falling easily back into the old happy dependence. They all leaned more than ever upon the mother. The house was full of their merriment. Tall half-grown boys stumbled up the wooden steps of the porch and shouted for Francis, and when he came roaring to meet them they clattered off to fish and to swim and to their own haunts by river and road. Older youths came shyly asking for Joan, and Rob Winters asked always for Rose. He was a tall fair grave boy, his parents’ only son, in school to be a minister, and careful and always anxious to be right. If Rose minded that only this one asked for her she did not show it. She met him with her invariable quiet smile and they went away alone together.

But Joan did not want to be alone with any of the ones who came to find her. She welcomed anyone. She was full of warmth, ready to live, hungry to laugh. All she did she did as though she starved for it. A small picnic of village boys and girls was a feast to her. She woke on the morning of a day set for pleasure and found her heart beating with pure joy and a song in her mouth ready. It did not matter who was to be there, whom she would meet or what she would do in this time of her life, this time when she waited, sure of what was to come. It was joyful to rise, to bathe, to dress, to eat, to run out of the house and cry out to other young who came to meet her, to run down the quiet street and plunge into woods and clamber up mountainsides and dive into deep cold pools. She lived in her body only, and all the rest of her lay sleeping, shut off alone and asleep. She scarcely read a book, or if she did it must be some easy story of summer love. For a while she was through with learning. Her body grew very beautiful. Her face rounded and the color of her skin grew dark and rich with sun and health. The hours of play made her eyes merry and her laughter quick and some nonsense was forever bubbling at her lips.

So during the short lovely summer she paid no heed to anyone while she lived for her own sake. Her father was a ghost to her. She kissed him gaily in passing and cried a greeting to him because it was a pleasure to be kind to everyone, and then he was gone from her mind. Rose she forgot except as they passed and then she laid a careless gay hand upon her sister’s cheek, and Francis was nothing to her except to give and receive teasing and laughter.

One would have said she was in love and yet she was not. She was not in love with anyone or anything except with the whole world. She was in love with the morning and the sun. She was in love with rain and moonlight. But she was not deceived by any hot young voice swearing his love by the moon. She smiled and listened gladly, because she liked to listen to love, to any love while she waited, and out of what she heard she made dreams. Ned Parsons, strumming his guitar under the wisteria and staring lovesick into her eyes, could make her smile. She could not love Ned, whom she had always known and whom as a little girl she had fought and conquered many times, poor Ned to whom his mother had given with her blood her foolish romantic imagination. He did not look like Emily, dusky, stocky Emily who was like her father. Emily was going to the city to get a job. “I’ve got to get away from here,” she told Joan tersely. “I want to make my own way.” But Joan said quickly, “I’ll never go away from home. I love it here in the village, with everybody always exactly the same.”

“I don’t,” said Emily shortly.

But then Emily never laughed. And Emily was ugly, with her long hard upper lip and coarse black hair and her decided way of saying even small things such as wanting the sugar passed to her. Joan liked Ned better, though she knew even in the moonlight that his pale gray eyes were a little popped and she heard in the midst of his loving how his big bony fingers faltered upon the strings and she winced at every discord. She was not deceived by him, but in his reedy voice she heard another voice. In his gangling body bent toward her she dreamed another devotion, and so she cried softly, “I love music under the moon!” And she cried it with such ardor that he felt it next to love for him. Meanwhile, she gazed across the lawn while he sang and saw with ecstasy the tall deep shadow the church threw among the lighter shadowing trees. Someday, somewhere, in a lovelier place upon this earth, she would hear a song, a great new song. Because of this she was tender to Ned, warm even to Jackie Weeks who was still in high school, warm to every voice she heard. So she enjoyed everything, a campfire beside a lake, a canoe darting down a stream, a bird’s call in the night.

And there was always about her the good steady warmth of her home. She accepted her mother’s ready smile and pushed away a foreboding that her mother grew thinner or that she seemed tired. Once in the night, near the end of the summer, she woke to hear the old subdued quarrel behind the bedroom door. Or was it a quarrel? She did not know; she did not want to know. She wrapped her braid about her ears and pushed her head into the softness of her pillow and slept again deeply. When the morning came she thought she had dreamed it. Surely she had dreamed it.

Suddenly the summer ended. Her mother said one day, “It is Rose’s turn now. I must see Rose through four years of college. When Rose is through and Francis, when you are all ready to begin your own lives, then I will rest—not just rest a little of an afternoon, but a long rest. I’m going to be selfish then for a long while.” She smiled over a heap of flowered summery lawn she had in her lap and threaded her needle again with pink silk.

“As if you could be selfish!” Joan cried. She was still not dressed for the day, though it was nearly noon. The morning had turned gray and soft with rain and she had danced late at a party the night before and then slept far into the morning and waking very hungry had gone to find food. Now she sat in her yellow silk pajamas upon her mother’s bed, a slice of bread and apple butter in her hand—she was always hungry—and her mind full of sweet leisure. But her mother was unexpectedly grave. “I could do with a rest,” she said, sighing. Then she made haste to amend it. “Oh, I don’t mean I don’t want to work. I’ve always enjoyed every kind of work. When I was a girl I used to think I didn’t like sweeping. But I’ve learned to like it, too, now, through having to do it so much. One might as well enjoy what one has to do. I like now to feel a room grow clean under a strong broom. … There comes Mrs. Billings. I daresay she wants me to tell her what to talk about at Ladies’ Aid tomorrow. She is a good soul—but stupid. Darling, would you mind calling Rose and having her slip this dress on? You have such a good eye for style, and I want her dresses to look right when she goes away. I’ll try to get rid of Mrs. Billings, quickly.” Her mother was up swiftly and with energy, calling as she went, “Rose—Rose, come and try on your dress—”

Joan, shaking out the flowery folds, waited while Rose took off her dress. Then she dropped down the fluffy stuff over Rose’s head and over the smooth round shoulders and met Rose’s eyes in the mirror. “Oh, Rose, you’re pretty,” she cried in honest praise. “I’m glad it’s your turn for the new things.”

The small multicolored flowers upon the pink background suited the round pale face, the dark eyes. But Rose was composed. She smiled a little and said nothing. Joan cried at her again. “Don’t you care, Rose? Don’t you want to be pretty? When I was your age I was so frightened I’d never be pretty. You’re so much prettier than I was then. I’m too big—bony big—and my mouth is awful. I try to think it isn’t, but I know it is.”

Rose hesitated. “I don’t want to think of such things,” she replied.

“But you are really pretty,” Joan said laughing. “Silly little saint!” She shook the pretty shoulders lightly. Funny Rose, always afraid of sin! She began to sing carelessly, her mouth full of pins, fitting the dress here and there, letting it into a little more fullness at the breast—Rose’s breasts were rounder than her own—tightening it at the waist. She felt her sister’s body soft and warm under the lawn, a girlish shape. Here and there her fingers touched the fine skin. She saw the little yellow-brown curls soft upon the bent white neck. Tenderness flowed up in her for her sister. She did not often feel near to Rose like this. The touch of Rose’s flesh brought her near, the service she did her brought her near. She felt warm toward the young girl, warm as a mother might, full of generous love for her.

“Little, little saint,” she murmured and smiled intimately and kindly into Rose’s eyes in the mirror. She was so much bigger than Rose. She would always take care of Rose.

Then abruptly one day the house was empty without Rose. Until now when each summer ended it had been she, Joan, who had gone away to fresh faces and new life; she who when she came back again made complete the family. Now she stood with her father and her mother and watched Rose’s face at the train window with secret dismay. Her own safe years, years when she knew clearly what to do, were now so quickly gone. Slow in passing, now that they were gone, they were so swiftly gone.

When they walked home together in the early sunlight of a September morning she felt very grave. Her holiday was over. Even though she walked to her home and between these two who had always given her shelter, she was no longer sheltered. She must push out from between them, go out from her home. She must begin something for herself if she were to live at the pitch of delight. But she wanted and feared this independence. She wanted to live for herself, and yet she wanted this warm home about her at night.

Her mother looked at her and smiled. “I felt lost when you went away as Rose is doing today. I never get used to any of you going away. The first time you went away I went home and cried.”