“Joan, is your egg as you like it? You used to like it coddled that way, but if you want it different—people do change! … Rose, I’ve put a fresh cover on your bed. I didn’t like that one. I decided you might as well have the pink one. It suits your room so well. … Frank, darling, here is more bacon—crisp, just as you like it.”
In all this she did not forget the man. But she spoke to him most often through the children.
“Pass his cup, dear,” she said to her son. “He’s let it get cold. I’ll change it—”
She lifted her voice slightly higher and said clearly, “Here’s some hot coffee, Paul. Now drink it before it chills again.”
He looked at her vaguely and took the cup and drank a little of it and then rose.
“I’m going to the vestry,” he said quietly, and seemed, with his gentle and silent step, to drift from the room.
They knew that in the hour before they were all gathered in the pews he would be praying. He would pray so long and intensely that he would come out to them transfigured, the skin of his face shining and his body holy. They did not understand it. Francis begrudged his father the exaltation. Thinking of it now he said aloud, “I can’t see what he prays about so long. Gee, I’d run out of anything to say long before church time!”
But this even his mother could not endure.
“He is not saying anything,” she said quietly. “He is waiting before the Lord.”
He knew by her voice that now she would not let him have his way, not even him, not in this one thing, this thing between man and God. He dropped his head, pouting his red lips, and piled the golden marmalade recklessly upon his bread and swallowed it in great mouthfuls. Rose was playing with a small heap of dry crumbs, dreaming, absorbed into herself.
But Joan caught the words from her mother and sat gazing across the table into the garden, smiling. Waiting before the Lord! Waiting—waiting—before the Lord! The words marched through the air, shining, sonorous and caught to themselves other words. She was waiting, waiting and radiant—Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in. Who is this King of Glory? … Lift up—lift up your head—and wait!
She followed her mother into the church proudly, her head high on her straight neck. Years ago her mother had said to her, “You’re tall, so be as tall as you can.” After that, however she hated sometimes to have her head above all others, she remembered, and made herself as tall as she could.
Behind them came Rose alone, small and composed. Francis would come when he chose, or if he were rebellious enough he would not come, if the day were too fair and enticing by the river. But his mother’s wish was still compelling upon him. All her wishes were heavy upon him because of her love for him, and he did not feel her love too heavy since as yet he had no other.
But he resisted her a little now. When she said to him today, her eyes guarded, her voice determined to be pleasant, “Are you ready for church, son?” he looked up at her from the hammock on the porch where he had thrown himself. “I’ll be along,” he said, staring into the rose vines. “Don’t wait,” he said when she waited.
She looked at him, locking her tongue behind her set teeth, keeping her smile on her lips. A year before she would have said to him sharply and naturally, sure that because she loved him she knew best for him, “Go at once and get your hat and coat and come with me.” But now the instinct in her, always alive and fluttering toward her children and especially to this son, warned her that he was very near the moment when he would refuse her utterly. Some morning he would say, “I hate church. I won’t come with you again.” She was afraid of the moment and week by week she pushed it off, and he knew it, and was arrogant with her, lordly because of his youth.
So she had left him alone to come when he would, and she led her two daughters into the church. Joan sat beside her mother and Rose beside Joan. To them this was an air as familiar as home. This place, too, was a sort of home. Years full of Sabbaths Joan had sat in this same front pew beside her mother and Francis’s place was on the other side. Between these two strong lively children the mother sat, dividing them, quieting them, compelling them to their father, that he might compel them to God. Rose was obedient and she did naturally, or seemed to do, those things which she should do.
Yet today they were not complete as they had been for so long. Joan could feel her mother’s unease until Francis came into his place. Her mother prayed quickly, her hand over her eyes, and then sat back waiting for Francis, wanting him to come. Before the congregation she wanted her children assembled, still around her, still faithful. Many parents came alone. The church was full of old people alone, whose children were gone from the small village, or if they were not gone, they were grown and sat willfully at home or went out for amusement. But she was here with her children about her. Joan knew and could smile at her mother’s pride and humor her in it when after the service she would lead her children down the aisle through the people.
She turned her head slightly and looked about. It was early and the people were gathering. All her life she had come early with her family, to be, as her mother said, an example. The sun was streaming through the church in long bright metallic bars and the light, faintly colored by the stained-glass windows, shone upon the silvery heads of a few aged men and women who were early also. She caught old Mr. Parker’s eye and threw him her smile and felt her heart warm toward him. He had taught her music and from him she had learned how to write down the tunes that sang so easily into her head. He kept the little music store in the village by which he could not have lived unless he had tuned pianos and taught classes in singing in the district school. He taught faithfully, regularly, so that at the end he might sometime have a small pension. He could not sing much anymore, although once he had had a mild sweet baritone voice. But these days he could do little more than clear his throat and hum a note for the younger voices to catch from him.
Now the organ began to sound, deeply and quietly, the notes caught and held strongly. Joan turned her face toward the music and listened carefully. She could see a man’s back, straight and slenderly shaped. She knew him, at least she knew him like this in the church, sitting with his back to her, reaching and plucking the music out of the organ. She knew his back better than his face, his music better than his voice. At other times no one knew him very well, though he lived in the village and had been a child here. He had a law business of his own in the city to which he came and went almost daily. At night he slept in his mother’s house in the village where he had always slept except for the two years he had been away at the war. He was an only son, whose father had died when the son was a child. To the villagers he seemed to have no other life than this one in the village, to care for his mother, to walk sedately with her in their garden, to remark upon the flowers. She said to him, “I believe the lilac will be in bloom by tomorrow.” He replied, “I think it will, Mother.” She said to her neighbors, “Martin is all I have to live for.” So she clung to him that she might have something for which to live, and for him she kept the square red brick house rigidly dustless and ordered. He entered every night into the clean shadowy hall and moved in silence about the clean shadowy rooms.
Yet every morning he went away to Philadelphia and did his work and so well that he gathered a little fame about himself as a lawyer, a fame of which the villagers heard remotely and always with doubt and wonder, because they had known him since he was born. They had always said, “His father was no great shakes—he had big ideas about that shirt factory in South End, but he couldn’t keep it going—a good man, but not very bright.” So it was hard to believe in the son. “If Martin had come into the factory and helped me, things would have been different.” But Martin had gone early to his own life, and as soon as his father died he had sold the factory to Peter Weeks.
Of himself Martin Bradley never spoke. Silently, smiling a little to everyone, he came every Sunday morning to play the organ as he had begun to
do when he was eighteen years old. On his first Sunday home from the war he was at the organ again. No one asked him what had happened between and he said nothing and soon it was forgotten that he had ever been away.
Now while Joan listened and looked at his straight back and narrow dark head, upon which the hair was beginning to turn gray, he played a Bach fugue meticulously and perfectly, making each note round and complete and valued. The choir door opened and four people came in irregularly as they chose and a little apologetically, as though they felt that everyone knew them in other guise than this. There were two women and two men, Mr. Winters and Mrs. Parsons and Mr. Weeks and Miss Kinney. They took their seats and stared earnestly and self-consciously in front of them, except Miss Kinney, who had once been a missionary in Africa. She smiled continually and her eyes darted here and there, as restless as pale blue butterflies.
Then the vestry door opened and the music softened. Joan’s father came in, a priest newly come from the presence of God to his people. Through thirty years this had never become stale in him or usual. He would not come unless from God. Once in her little childhood Joan remembered a delay. The people waited for him, at first patiently and then in surprise, their eyes fixed on the vestry door. Moments passed and the organ rolled on and on and wandered into bypaths of variation, but ready at any instant to come through to the final major note. She was only six years old, but she caught her mother’s wonder and then her anxiety. She heard her mother whisper, “I shall have to go and see what is wrong.” She felt her mother gather herself to rise.
Then the door opened as though on the wings of a wind, strongly and swiftly, and her father strode in with triumph and his voice rang out to his people, “Let us praise the Lord by singing—”
Later when her mother cried, “Paul, where were you? We were all waiting!” he said simply, “I could not get God’s blessing and I could not go to my pulpit until I did.”
But now, in the beginning of his age, his temper stilled, it seemed he had always God’s blessing. He moved tranquil and serene, tall, a little bowed, but his eyes were clear and blue and guileless as a child’s eyes are. He stood before his people and paused. The organ fell silent and the people looked at him, waiting. But before he could speak there was a sound at the door, a step in the aisle and a movement. It was Francis, come to sit beside his mother once again. His father waited for him.
They were complete now. The father was set above them in the pulpit and the mother and the three children were in their accustomed places. Their faces were turned to him, waiting for what they were about to receive.
So they received their food from God. The people rose in the bars of many colored sunshine, and were for the moment caught and held in the brightness. They sang together, and Joan sang, above them all, her big young voice soaring above their feeble old voices, carrying them along, gathering them in its full stream. Then they sat back comfortably and gave thanks and heard the reading of Scripture. They gave too at the due moment small bits of silver that tinkled into the old pewter plates.
In the choir loft Mrs. Parsons rose tall and gaunt, yet with sweetness in her disappointed eyes, and sang, “But the Lord is mindful of His own.” She sang it a little too slowly, clinging to the favorite words, and her voice faded upon the high notes, but she still sang with a touching hopefulness. What she longed for might yet be. So she sang, believing wistfully in what she had not received. She loved these moments of singing, when she could lose herself in vague hoping about the story she was writing.
Emily was so much like her father, so impatient of her mother’s “scribbling” as they called it. Edward had always been hard on her about it. When he came home and found things not quite ready for dinner because she had been writing, he was so hard. And now Emily, although she was only fifteen, was hard too. “You write such silly stuff, Mother!” Her voice was cold and she rattled the dishes in the sink. But Ned—dear boy—he was older than Emily but still he listened to her stories, and his eyes would grow wet. “Neddie, it’s only a story,” she said to him time and again. He helped her to keep on hoping. Some day someone would want her stories. One of the letters would not be a rejection, and Edward would say, “Well, well, Florrie—you were right and I was wrong.” Edward would say what he never had said about anything. “Forgive me, Florrie.” She would just be patient and keep on writing as nicely as she could.
“But the Lord is mindful, is mindful of His own. He will not—” she crooned tenderly, slowly, her eyes misted, her voice thick and soft in her throat. She sat down, strengthened, and began to plan a new story—the best. It was so easy to plan stories in church, in the quiet while the sermon was going on. She drifted happily away.
So the sermon began. Because of this sermon the children had gone quietly every Saturday of their lives, though the day was a holiday. In the bare study they knew their father sat and searched the Scriptures for them all. They could not go in there for any cause. They tiptoed through the house with their small friends following them, their goal the cookie jar in the kitchen. With their hands full of cookies they burst out of the silent house, and ran down to the end of the street, released and joyful and screaming with glee. About them were trees and meadows and under their feet the grass green, thickly green, and the day was a holiday.
Their voices sang and shouted and they played with desperate pleasure and at times fell into quarreling. But even the quarreling was sweet and intense. They gave no thought to their father in his study, searching the Book to find food for their souls, even as they gave no thought to their mother cooking and baking for them in her kitchen and making and mending for them. All this was of course; it all made the foundation of their life safe, and for them it was forever.
Of God they knew nothing except what they were told. They believed, or thought they did, what their father told them. They trusted him about God. When he said God was a kind father who did not let even a sparrow in the garden suffer, they believed him. Besides it seemed true because all the sparrows they saw were plump and busy. When he told them the very hairs of their head were numbered they believed him, for they were used to love. They would not have thought it strange if their mother numbered their hairs, because she so loved them, and it was not strange in God. They were important and complacent and sure of God, believing He loved them and cared for them.
There was also Jesus Christ who died for their sins, and the Holy Ghost. But the Holy Ghost was a shadow and without substance or shape, and they left it at that. But Jesus was real, “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild.” He was touching and real, though more real before his resurrection than afterwards. Afterwards he became arrogant and proud. He said, “Touch me not.” But before, when he was a man, he said “Come unto me,” and “suffer the little children.” Then they understood him. They would have rushed to him, laughing and shouting if they had been near him, because he was real to them, though dead.
But when he hung on the cross for their sins they were uncomfortable and guilty about themselves although they did not know why. They only knew they were sinful and everybody was sinful. They were “conceived and born in sin.” Long ago Joan had used to wonder what “conceived in sin” was. She asked her mother one day, “Was I conceived in sin, too?” Her mother’s eyes opened in surprise and her dark cheeks flushed and she said quickly, “When you are older I will explain everything. Would you like to take Francis and go and play with Netta Weeks? You can take a couple of cookies so she can give one to little Jackie.”
Still she never did quite explain. But after a while Joan knew it could not be a thing for which she alone was to blame. If everybody was so conceived it was a common sin and so she forgot it because there was so much else to think of in the crowding seasons. There was so much to enjoy and she wanted never to think of unpleasant things. She chose to be happy and to laugh.
But Rose could not forget. Once Rose asked her miserably, her lips suddenly dry, “Joan, do you—do you understand about being conceived in sin?”
&nbs
p; Joan was shocked by the question. She knew by then how life began inside a woman’s body, out of a man’s body, but it was secret knowledge. She had learned it secretly at school, guiltily against her will. She had listened, surprised, and had shouted angrily, “I don’t believe it.” But she was compelled to believe it. “I know,” said Netta Weeks. “How do you know?” Joan demanded loudly. But Netta only smiled foolishly. Joan felt sickness rush over her. She went away but she could not forget. It was a long time before she could forget when she looked at her father and mother. But she made herself forget at last, so that she could escape from it.
But she could not bear to speak of it even to Rose. Indeed between them, spoken, it would be the more shameful. Her healthy flesh crawled at the thought, outraged. “I don’t know anything about it,” she said shortly. She ran out into the garden and picked a great handful of her mother’s red roses.
So Rose asked no more. She grew inwardly toward herself. She read her Bible every night even in winter, however cold her bedroom was. She never hurried at her prayers. If she felt tempted to hurry and to get into her warm bed she punished herself and prayed more slowly. Rose was ready always to go to church, to dream, to take the bread and wine, the tears filling her eyes easily as she thought of him who died for her sins. She felt herself full of sin. She saved every separate sin and remembered it when the bread was crumbling upon her tongue and when the wine burned her lips delicately, because it was so sweet to feel herself washed clean by Jesus’s blood. It was almost sweet to sin that she might be washed clean. But that again was sin, to want to sin, and so she prayed in ecstasy, to be forgiven again and again.
This intense and secret life Rose kept within herself and because she lived inwardly, outwardly she seemed always mild and gentle and obedient and her blue eyes were saintly in their mildness. The villagers said often, “She is an angelic child—so good.” And hearing it she felt pleasure, a strange pleasure, tingling in all her body. She planned fresh goodness, a set number of kind deeds every day. She took flowers to old Mrs. Mark who lay in her little stone house, at the edge of the village, bedridden with creeping paralysis. She took flowers until Mrs. Mark said plainly, “I haven’t any more vases, child. Anyways, roses bring on my hay fever. There—I know you mean well enough, but I’ll take the will for the deed.”
Time Is Noon Page 2