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

broke in impatiently, half ashamed for him before the son. “Paul, don’t you remember we went to the closing exercises a week ago?”
    “Yes, my dear, I do,” he replied mildly, looking at her with his clear blue distant gaze. “But I thought there was something said about Latin to be done this summer.” He brightened suddenly and seemed to come nearer. “I might be of help there,” he said with diffident eagerness.
    “Or I could,” said Joan, smiling mischievously.
    The boy broke out into rich laughter, “Gee, I’ll have to work yet with a bunch of teachers right in the family! Now don’t you speak, Rose!”
    “I?” said Rose, looking up out of mists. “Oh, I couldn’t—Besides, I’ve promised Father to take a special catechism class for little girls this summer.”
    “I’ve promised him a month’s vacation, Paul,” the mother said. Then she beamed unexpectedly upon him. “But it’s dear of you to help him—I know he’ll be glad—”
    “Oh, sure,” said the boy gaily, satisfied, and pushing away from the table.
    So the meal came to an end and they were knit together again by it. Their lives parted now and each went his way, but three times a day they were knit together again bodily. The body was their tie, the sameness of their blood and flesh. They met together and ate and drank and they renewed their flesh and their blood. They rose refreshed and ready to live apart for a while. In the search for what they wanted beyond the body they lived alone. But they would come together again and again, so they were never lost in loneliness.
    What her own life alone was to be, Joan did not yet know. She rose, light and idle in her heart, and walked into the garden. The sun poured down into it like wine into a cup. The smell of the earth rose up through the grass, hot and close. It came up even between the flowers. She went to the lemon lily and bent over it and drew its fragrance into herself. She drew deep breaths until her body was filled, a vessel full of fragrance. But under its delicacy was the strong musky odor of the hot earth.
    She straightened herself and walked about, unhurried and at her ease, looking at every leaf and flower. There was nothing she had to do and the garden was lovely. Between the opening buds of a white rosebush a spider had spun a web, catching delicately here the point of a leaf, there the edge of a calyx, drawing a cluster of white roses together surely and lightly into a silver net. In the center of the whiteness and the silver the spider sat small and black and still.
    Beyond the garden stretched the street, leading away from the house and the garden, away from the village, into country and beyond. She gazed east and west. To the east the church was closed and silent. It had nothing to do with today. Yesterday people had gone into it and lent it life, but today they passed it by, putting their lives elsewhere. A woman passed now. It was Martin Bradley’s mother, and she did not even turn her head to see where she had been yesterday. But she stopped when she saw Joan alone, for here was someone to whom she could talk and she could not resist that. She smiled at Joan cozily and sleekly. She was small and plump and satisfied with herself and her son, and her neat gray cotton dress fitted her as closely as feathers are fitted to a plump bird.
    “Isn’t it a nice day?” she said. “I’m on my way to the butcher’s to get the sweetbreads early. Martin loves a good crumbled sweetbread for his dinner, done with a bit of bacon. I do myself. We’re both fond of sweetbreads.”
    She nodded and smiled and went on importantly, stepping solidly on her small fat outward pointing feet. She was on her daily mission. Each morning she went early to the butcher to get the tidbit she planned that day for her son. If she got it she was triumphant for the day. If she failed, if someone was before her, the day was embittered. She carried small intense hatreds against her neighbors if they