Read Online Time Is Noon by Pearl S. Buck - Free Book Online Page A

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