“Are you ill, Joan?”
To his horror she fell upon her knees and placed her face upon his arm. He did not move. He felt her shake her head. “Lonely, lonely,” he heard her whisper. He must, he felt, do something. Diffidently he put up his other hand and touched her hair once. It sprang warm and curled about his fingers and he took his hand away quickly. He must think of something to say.
“Would you — do you think you’d like to help me at the mission? It would give you something to do.”
But who could ever understand women? She lifted her head sharply and gave him a long look, and then she began to laugh, so long, so loud, until tears were in her eyes. He waited, pained. He had wanted to help her. At last she stopped laughing and wiped her eyes.
“I’ll help you,” she said. “Yes, perhaps it will give me something to do. … Good night, poor dear.”
She bent and kissed him, a touch upon his pale high forehead, and went away. She was better, he felt happily. The laughter had done her good, though he could not understand it. But it had done her good — he believed he had once heard a doctor say that laughter was medicinal. But why “poor dear”?
What was it Martin had promised and never given, what had he touched in her and not taken from her, what stirred in her and was not completed? Something now bloomed in her, lonely as a vivid flower in a field, solitary of its kind. She came to a sort of maturity, and this man who beset her doggedly had no more to do with it than a bee, stumbling upon a vivid flower, forcing its petals into a troubled readiness, because the hour was come. For he made no secret of why he came. He came each Sunday, doggedly, now without asking. Each Sunday, she perceived, he came with his plan of one more step he would take toward her. Having touched her hands at first, he took her hand the next time and held it. This, his way said, he had a right to do. Having held her hand, the next time he put his hand upon her waist. She drew away, sick, yet stirred by each fresh movement.
If she grew angry at him, and she was always angry at him for each fresh outrage of her, he waited or he made his answer through stiff, unmoving lips. “Don’t touch me like that, Bart Pounder!” she cried at him, her voice low. Of course her father would not hear in the study, who never heard anything.
“No?” Bart answered, and did not move. Then she would seize his great hand and throw his arm from her as though it were a snake. He let her throw it, but before he went away it would be about her again. And then, feeling the heavy dogged clasp, she might be silent, she might sit shuddering and stirred within the clasp. So one night he would touch her breast. So one night he would kiss her lips. She knew the way, but not the end. When he had kissed her, then what was the end?
In the night when he was gone she awoke, cold and hot, to ask herself the end. She was afraid in the night, in the empty house, with only the old man lying lightly asleep, to be near. Rose and Francis and her mother — they were all as though they had never been. She was alone and there was no one near — no one to whom heart could cling. She wanted her own. Oh, where were her own? Around her life was deep, tremendous, remote, silent. She moved alone in all the silence, she who loved warmth and nearness and the safety of human closeness. She would grow older and older, like Miss Kinney, waiting … waiting. Old people lived forever while the young waited. She was wicked. She was not waiting for her father to die. She loved this house, the village, the people she had always known. Oh, but they had never known her. They had seen her growing up, a tall child. “How you grow, Joan! My, you’re going to be a big girl!” Yes, she had grown and grown beyond them all. They knew her no more. They lived on in their little houses contentedly but she wanted everything. What could be the end?
Then came November. She could not stay within the confines of the house. The house was full of herself. In whatever room she sat, it became full and bursting with herself, and she could not stay for her restlessness. The dreaming of the autumn was over. The dying heat of Indian summer was finished in the still evenings.
And she could not stay in the confines of the garden. The garden she had cultivated was dead and finished and in the November sunshine the shadow of the church steeple, fell sharp across the frost-gray grass. But abroad in the woods along the road, there was wild beauty. There was madness in the woods, there was fullness in the red apples and in the dark wild grapes upon the stone walls, and in falling nuts and late yellow pears. In the energy of every color edged in the sharp clear cold she was whipped into intense restlessness.
She went to her father. “Give me the work you wanted me to have. I’m ready. I want something to do.” She seized the excuse to get away into the fields, to walk miles along the dusty gorgeous roadsides to South End. “I need help with the young people,” her father said. He spoke with gentle excitement. …
He would not of course tell Joan, but this was an answer to prayer. He would not tell her because once when his son Francis was little more than a child, and he had said when he did something — he had forgotten now what it was—“It is an answer to prayer,” the child had answered violently, “Then I won’t do it.” The young were so difficult to understand. And they had been such a problem to him at the mission — those large dark young men and the dark painted girls. He was helpless before their singing. They could take a hymn straight away from him, as they did “Oh, Beulah Land” the other day, and so with the singing of it that it ceased to be a hymn. They became stamping feet and clapping hands. There was one girl especially who snapped her fingers like a horsewhip at every intensified beat. Once she had leaped to her feet and had begun to sing alone a song he had not announced or had not even heard of. “Singin’ with a sword in mah hand, Oh, Lawd.” She sang it with her hands on her hips, swaying as though she were dancing. He had pronounced the benediction hastily and come away. “The Lord is not pleased.” But perhaps if Joan came, God would use her. He looked toward her with sudden dependence. She was so large, so strong. The young were so strong. He felt he would like to put out his hand and touch her arm. But he had never done that sort of thing and so he did not. He merely smiled delicately, without quite meeting her eyes.
“You will see what is needed,” he murmured. “When you get there you will see what is to be done — I feel sure you will be guided.” He gazed wistfully into space.
Upon a glowing afternoon she walked to South End. She wanted to walk, to walk along the rough road, searching passionately for every beauty. There was an immense dead oak once struck by lightning wrapped like a blazing tower in crimson woodbine. Here upon a rock a tiny flat vine crawled like a small scarlet serpent. The sunshine poured down from a golden heaven. The far hills were blue. In the streets of South End the sunshine glittered on every tin can and bit of broken glass and red ray of dress. They loved red here. The babies wore red slips and the young girls wore red blouses and red ribbons in their tightly braided hair. Red geraniums bloomed in rusty cans, and late zinnias shone cerise and scarlet from careless seeds.
Into the chapel they crowded, dark skins, red ribbons, rolling restless black eyes. They gathered, black skin, brown skin, skin of amber. They called zestfully to one another. They did not quiet until her father began to speak. Then they listened in a stillness that was not quiet. It was silent as a storm is silent before wind breaks. When her father announced the hymn, a small brassy organ began to throb and instantly the singing burst forth, loud, syncopated, full of wild music. “Like a river glorious is God’s perfect peace,” they sang, swaying, moving, surging.