Free Time Is Noon by Pearl S. Buck Page B

breathing, and on the man’s thick neck she saw the sweat stand out in coarse drops.
    It was over in a moment, a few words, a halting promise interchanged, an instant’s suspense about the ring. He fumbled at the girl’s finger and she snatched the ring from him. “Here, give me it,” she said loudly, forgetting where she was. He watched absorbed while she worked the thing over her knuckle, and then sighed gustily in relief.
    “Now come and have some cake and coffee,” her mother said with brisk kindness. It was her custom. They smiled sheepishly and followed her into the dining room with the stumbling docility of beasts. Behind them Joan saw their hands clasped, two rough knotty young hands, holding each other hard. They would go back to some house, some small wooden house in a field, and they would work and eat and sleep and make crude love and rear children together, mated. It was a life. She was suddenly very lonely. She turned abruptly and went back to her room.
    In a night autumn came rushing. The wind blew cold across her sleeping and when she opened her eyes in the morning it was to find upon her bed a shower of leaves from the maple tree outside her window, dry leaves veined with yellow. She sprang up to shut out the cold and saw early frost upon the green grass. The chill woke her sharply and she did not go back to bed. She must get to work this day. As soon as breakfast was over she would work on the prelude she had begun last spring and never finished. She would go over to the church and work alone at the organ. She dressed resolutely and swiftly and ate her breakfast quickly.
    Her mother worried, “Joan, you haven’t eaten enough.”
    She answered, “I want to get to work, Mother, I must work this very day. I have an idea for my prelude.”
    But her mother did not hear her. She sat listening, her head lifted, her hands hovering above the coffee cups. There was a clatter on the stairs and the door burst open and Francis fell into the chair beside her.
    “Say, Mom, gimme my food quick, will you? Jackie Weeks said he’d help me with my math this morning if I got there early, and I want to get it done so’s I can go nutting. I’ll bet the frost was hard enough last night to make ’em drop. He’s a shark at math. Lord, how I hate math!”
    “Perhaps Joan would help you, darling,” said his mother. “Here—let me butter your muffin. I wish you wouldn’t go so much with Jackie.”
    But she would not wait, Joan told herself. She had her own work to do. Besides, her mother had not even heard her. “I’m not good in math, I’m afraid,” she said, and then hated her selfishness. “Of course I will help, Frank,” she said.
    “Jackie’ll do it quicker,” he said carelessly, and she was released.
    With her music under her arm she walked across the still frosty lawn and into the quiet church. Outside the air was pungent and fresh, electric with cold, but here in the church it was warm and still and untouched by freshness. There was a faint aged odor, the odor of old people, a little sweet, a little dying. She tiptoed through the empty aisle, past the empty pulpit, and sat herself at the organ and opened it and immediately the waiting keys invited her. She was tired of idleness—work was pleasure. She spread her pages and played the first bars softly and critically. She played on and then broke off. There she had stopped writing it down last spring just before Commencement. A melody had come to her and she had written it down in haste and then left it incomplete because they had called for her, Mary Robey and Patty, her roommates.
    “Joan—Joanna! Practice—practice for the senior parade!”
    The senior parade was the most important thing in the world to her then. It was nothing now—less than a memory. Strange how she could hear their voices and yet she did not want to see them—not really. They were over, somehow. She wanted—she wanted—not them—someone. She set herself resolutely to the