Authors: Pearl S. Buck
Rose smiled and set it back, ready to please her sister. But she was silent, for she seldom spoke if she were not questioned.
Then the door opened with a burst and Francis came in. He looked at his mother first and she looked at him and the pride she took in her children blazed in her look.
“Come here, son,” she said. “Let me tie your tie again.”
“Can’t ever get a bow right,” he said, smiling wryly. He folded his long legs and dropped before her, kneeling, and leaned his arms upon her lap and gazed into her face confidently. She pulled the ends of his red tie loose and set it again with neat compact movements. She had bought the tie and chosen it red because her son was as brown as she was and she loved red secretly, although she felt it now a color unbecoming to her age and she would not wear it except as an edge to a collar or as a seldom seen lining. When she was young she had always a red dress among her others. But now instead she loved her son’s round dark chin above a red tie, and she liked to put a red rose in his buttonhole. The blackness of his hair and eyes were richer for red. Now as she finished he clasped his arms about her waist and pressed his face into her bosom.
“You smell nice, Mom,” he murmured.
She patted him on the cheek and straightened a lock of his hair. There was no embarrassment in her when her son made his love to her. She was not shy of him as she was of her daughters.
“Go and eat your breakfast before it is cold,” she said, and to the maid Hannah she said, “Bring in fresh rolls for Francis.” The boy rose and moving with the lazy grace of his too swiftly growing youth, he dropped into his chair and began to eat. But now his father saw him and spoke to him. “Are you not going to give thanks to God?” he asked.
The boy looked at him coldly, unwillingly. Then meeting that clear solemn priestly look he wavered and bent his head an instant and moved his lips, and so placated the man of God who was his father. But he did not summon God.
So the early morning life went on with energy in this room. Hannah brought in fresh bread and fresh coffee, and they all ate robustly except the father, who took his food sparingly. But to this they were all accustomed. Until he had delivered himself to his people of what he had learned newly about God he would not eat heartily.
For his hungry body was his temptation. He loved food. When he was a child he grew fast and he was always hungry, always eating so much that his brothers laughed at him. Then, after he was converted by the missionary in his thirteenth year, he began to know that he must fight to subdue his big body. For how could a man save his soul if his body were master? He had sat at his mother’s dinner table on that cold November Sunday, among all his vigorous brothers and sisters, and had let his piled plate stand before him. “I will take one-third of everything—no more,” he promised God. The rich smell of the chicken gravy moved in his nostrils. The fragrance of baked potatoes, of golden mashed turnips, of hot biscuits, made him faint. There was the sharp sweetness of honey, the spice of the pickled peaches and the heavy intoxicating perfume of hot mince pies. Across the table the missionary ate delicately, refusing much.
“You don’t eat, Mr. Barnes!” his mother cried, despair on her round face. What could be done with anybody who did not eat? In this great farmhouse everybody ate.
The missionary had smiled thinly and a little sadly at her. “I have eaten poorly for so long that now my stomach will not feast. It has the habit of poverty and prefers it.”
Then he also would so teach his own body. His mother saw his plate taken away and was frightened. “Paul, you’re sick! I never knew you not to eat!” He smiled sickly, the palms of his hands wet with the strength of his hunger. But he had not eaten. In a fire of blushing and shyness he had withstood his brothers’ teasing. “Well, if Paul’s not eating, he’s sick enough to die.” Even his father had smiled dryly. “I always say it keeps Paul poor just carrying all his food.” But they had not known how hungry he was all the time.
Even now, after all these years, he never sat down at the table and smelled the food without that voracious faintness in his belly. But no one knew this. He would have been ashamed even for Mary, his wife, to know. So he had early made it his rule to deny himself before he went before God for his people. At night he would eat hungrily and sleep soon, spent, his soul emptied. But now he sat silent and brooding, his eyes shining and strange and his mind not in his body, his ears deaf unless his name were called.
The children were used to this also. They accepted him among them, let him be as it seemed he must be, and turned toward their mother. She was their sun and they turned toward her and told her everything, or nearly everything except the secret core of themselves which without knowing it they kept from her and from everybody.
And she gave to them joyously in turn. Each had what he needed of her. As she had given them her milk when they were born, now she gave them the food of her brain and her thoughts and everything she knew. Sometimes it was not enough, but she did not know it and they did not tell her, if indeed they knew it. She gave them so much that it seemed enough.
Sitting among them on this Sabbath morning she was at her best and richest. She knew her house was warm and comfortable about her children. She was feeding them the best she had, feeding their bodies with milk and bread and meat and fruit, feeding richness into their blood and their flesh, making the mother’s eternal mystic transubstantiation. Soon their souls too would be fed. She did not wholly understand how, but in the house of God they sat and received for their souls bread and wine, and their father’s hands gave it to them. They were safe. Body and soul they were safe. She smiled peacefully and gave them bits of her love.
“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.