The Chinaberry Tree

  Humming, she set about clearing off the table. But her mind under her calm exterior was busy thinking. As though Laurentine could separate her from Malory! See him! She almost laughed aloud. There were so many possibilities, school, movies, occasionally at Kitty’s, though she thought it best for purely feminine reasons to be careful about this . . . other girls, when it came to personable young men, being frequently unknown quantities. There were walks, the lonely Romany Road for choice, there were the long trips she sometimes took to deliver dresses for her cousin. Her resources were endless. She’d see Malory as often as she pleased—and of course they could write to each other. She burst into a trill of song at the thought of those letters. She’d write one to-night.

  • • • • •

  Afterwards she sat down dutifully enough with her cousin and aunt in the living-room and began to prepare her lessons. Malory, she knew, would telephone, she had told him she would let him know whether or not he could come to the house, never doubtful for a moment of the issue.

  The telephone rang. Laurentine, who was nearest, answered it. A male voice announced himself as Tucker and asked for Melissa. Silently her cousin passed over the receiver, sat down and listened mechanically to the meaningless, somewhat slangy conversation. Melissa ending on an “oh yeah,” returned to her Latin composition.

  The three sat more or less in silence in the pleasant room; Aunt Sal pored over one of the modern tabloids. Reading was not the easiest of tasks for her. She liked these little newspapers that told their story so easily and comprehensively in a few dramatic pictures with just the necessary number of words beneath. Laurentine was writing to Mrs. Ismay who had gone to Boston for a while. The telephone jangled anew and again Laurentine arose automatically, placed the receiver to her ear.

  “Hello,” said a nice, boyish voice. “This is Malory. Is that you, Melissa?”

  “Just a moment,” said Laurentine. “Melissa!” The girl’s side of the conversation was sufficiently innocuous. Laurentine composed herself to her writing and then paused for a moment, struck by something her relative was saying. “No, I’m awfully sorry. No, I can’t see you. You see my cousin doesn’t approve of my having callers. Oh yes, of course, she has them. Well, I will too when I’m as old as she is. Uh-huh! Well, good-bye. Yes. Good-bye-e-e.”

  She went back to her seat, passing on the other side of the table at which Laurentine sat writing. The older girl raised her dark, serious eyes to meet the quizzical, searching glance of her cousin’s green ones.

  Something like the flash of rapiers passed between them.

  It was war.

  CHAPTER XXII

  IT was not unnatural, not even unusual that Laurentine’s hostility strengthened Melissa’s determination to see more of Malory. What was significant, however, was the fact that the unexpected opposition steadied her, cleared her head. She had always known what she wanted, her desire had been an unwavering, light-streaming star before her, but she had not always estimated ways and means of obtaining it. Now she reviewed both. She meant to marry Malory. He represented everything that she wanted, conventionality, security, a certain narrow beauty, definite position. “And besides, I love him, love him,” she said to herself and paused in her Saturday morning task of ordering the kitchen, struck by the awful significance of those words. “And he loves me, I know it. So it couldn’t be wrong, could it, God, for me to try to get him?”

  She was not much given to praying, so she returned to a scrutiny of her affairs. She was as sensible as a girl of her years and experience could well be. Therefore it was not in her intention to marry at once or in secret. Plenty of time for that. With her clear vision it would never do, she realized, to be a millstone around her lover’s neck. That would defeat her own purpose. No, there were four, perhaps even five years before them besides this year in High School. She would employ those years in making herself as essential to Malory as a woman could be to a man. Perhaps it would be as well to be engaged—why of course they’d have to be engaged, she thought to herself, realizing with a sudden pang of fear that for four of those five years she and Malory would have to be apart. He would be going to the Massachusetts School of Technology and she would be—where?

  Unless of course she too could go to Boston—maybe she would go. But money was uncertain, she had no idea of Aunt Sal’s resources, and here was this new problem of Laurentine’s unfriendliness. She’d just have to make the most of this year, that was all. Not see Malory! She would see him, she would encourage him, she would enfold him with sympathy and attention and kindliness. And at the end of the school year how wonderful it would be to come to Laurentine with Malory’s class ring on her third finger and say: “Cousin Laurentine, Malory Forten and I are engaged to be married.”

  She would make a plan and stick to it.

  • • • • •

  What she could not take into her calculations, poor child, was the awful pull which her newly wakened emotions would sooner or later impose up on her will. Modern youth, after all, does not differ so greatly from the youth of all ages. Melissa, in common with her contemporaries, was far better acquainted with fundamental biological facts than any girl of her age, thirty years ago. But in spite of her knowledge she was as unprepared as any of them to undergo the bewilderingly sweet agony of first love.

  Fortunately she was not at that stage yet. Meanwhile life was golden, glorious. School was hard, but not too hard. Malory did her Latin carefully for her every day in advance. He himself needed only chemistry and physics. He had brought enough credits from Philadelphia with him to cover his other demands. Housework was easy—she had long since found out that playing the part of Pentecost to old Mr. Stede brought ample and satisfactory rewards in blackened stoves, scrubbed oil cloth and scoured bathtub.

  Johnasteen and Matilda had both grown to like her and could find time to drape and fit the bright ends and remnants of silk and tweed which she brought them, purchased with the change bestowed on her weekly by Aunt Sal. If Laurentine had chanced to look in the girl’s diary now she would have seen no reference to her own pitiful condition or to poor Asshur with his tender bi-weekly admonishments, or even of Kitty Brown. Those pages spoke now of Malory and Malory only.

  • • • • •

  For it was he who had transformed her life. It was he who introduced to her the joys of real companionship, the pleasures of oneness in sympathy and understanding. With Asshur and his endless tennis, rowing and skating, she had tasted the supremeness of physical well-being; she had loved being vital, and strong and young. However, he had been merely a pal. But Malory was the essential lover. He read poetry to her, the rather obvious poetry of beauty and of romance, Tennyson, Rossetti and Swinburne, what he could interpret of the intensely masculine emotionalism of Browning, the divine nebulousness of the Ode on the Intimations of Immortality. He converted the Romany Road into Fairyland. He showed her the trees, the moon, the stars and the sunset as a background for the drama of their own love, and of other lovers. He made of her a queen. With him bread and butter, houses, birth, money, clothing were necessary evils in an existence whose real object was the pursuit of compatibility, warmth, gayety, companionship and a certain almost platonic concept of love.

  Neither of them knew as yet the tug of passion. The boy, as the girl, moved in a divin’e trance of beauty and ecstasy and thought of marriage only as a means to conserve this same beauty, this same ecstasy. In the intensity of this feeling even Melissa’s hard-headed singleness of purpose wavered and blurred. At times she forgot her determination to marry this boy and when the realization of her purpose returned to her sometimes at night lying straight and still and reminiscent in her little gay bed she wept tears of joy to think that no such fixity of intention was necessary. All this and more was waiting for her. In good time it would all be hers anyhow.

  • • • • •

  “Malory,” she told him, shivering deliberately with the delight of the nipping November weather, coming through the dark street
s from the little public library, “Malory, after all, it is sort of nice that Laurentine wouldn’t let me have callers, isn’t it? It’s just kind of wrapped us in a sweet secret, like a warm covering. If I live to be a hundred, I’ll never forget this summer and fall. It is lovely, don’t you think?”

  The boy nodded assent, holding her gloved hand more tightly in the crotch of his arm. “Still,” he added with the male desire for comfort, “it would have been a lot nicer if she had. Think what fun we’d have sitting in your kitchen this minute, snug and warm with perhaps a beaker of cocoa and a doughnut. Tell you what, Honey, it’s tough on a decent guy having to meet you around like this. Why on earth did she have to pick on me? She used to let that Lane fellow come in, didn’t she?” he finished jealously.

  Melissa giggled delightedly. “Don’t call Asshur that Lane fellow. He’s a grand lad, wait till you meet him, you’ll think so too. Laurentine wasn’t picking on you, silly, she doesn’t know you from Adam. She’s just awfully unhappy all the time, that’s what’s the matter with her and she’s started taking it out on me for the last year or so.”

  “What’s she got to be unhappy about?”

  She thought it best to be cautious. “Fell out with her beau I guess and I think it makes her kind of sore to see me having such a good time. For she certainly wasn’t that way at first,” she reflected, “and there used to be lots of boys and girls around here then.”

  “I suppose you still hear from Lane?”

  “There’s no way I can stop him writing, is there? Yes, I still hear from him and answer him too. I have to,” she added honestly. “He was so kind, so good to me before you came, Malory. This is such a queer place to live in—blows so hot and cold. One minute you have lots of friends and the next minute you have none. At first everybody was lovely and then they all sort of fell away, except Asshur and Herbert Tucker and Ben Davis.”

  “H’m, a lot of boys. What’re you trying to do, Melissa—razz me? What about Kitty Brown? Isn’t she a good friend?”

  “Yes, oh yes! The best friend. I’d have perished without her. But she isn’t—of the town, exactly—she’s just a law unto herself. But at first the girls were around here in droves—it was so lively. I don’t know what made them change so. It must be something in the air. For at first Laurentine was grand to me too, and then she got so different. If it hadn’t been for Aunt Sal and Kitty—and,—and Asshur, I’d have perished I’m telling you.”

  “Asshur always gets into it, doesn’t he? I suppose he asked you to marry him.”

  “Right-o!”

  “Are you going to, Melissa?”

  She went closer to him then, she laid her round, rosy face crowned with the aureole of her soft blown hair and her green beret, sweetly, confidingly against his rough coat. She looked up at him, in spite of herself, her whole heart in her eyes.

  “What do you think, Malory?”

  • • • • •

  He walked down the street from her gate, shaken with ecstasy. For the first time in his life he thought seriously of money. His Aunt Viny had left him money too, but it also was all tied up; it also was for his education. “If I could only have that to do as I pleased with,—if we could just get married right away. . . . Oh, Melissa!” he groaned. . . .

  The light burned dimly in the hall of his home as he entered . . . lights burned dimly all over this house, he’d discovered irritably. The second day after his arrival he had rushed out and bought a powerful bulb for his room and the bathroom, and the hall too. . . . No one had remarked on it but the dim bulb in the hall had been replaced. “I’d like to smash the damn thing,” he thought with the sullenness in which dwelling in this place so often enveloped him. He let the faded-brown screen door slam to behind him. This was another source of irritation; when the summer had passed he offered to take it down, but his sisters had remonstrated.

  “It’s always been up there,” Reba had said tonelessly.

  • • • • •

  As the door slammed she came now to the head of the stairs and called down. “Is that you, Malory?” Her listless voice was almost utterly without inflection.

  “Yep it is. Where are you all? Gone to bed?”

  “Mother has. Harriett’s in her room, and I’m in mine. Be sure to lock the door before you come up.”

  “Before I come up! Why, aren’t you coming down any more?”

  “No.”

  All this time he’d been talking from the bottom of the stairs to the trailing gray mistiness of her figure at the top. Now he put a tentative foot on the step. “Say, what’s the matter with all of you, going to bed before ten o’clock! Say, I’m going to bring a gang of folks in here one night. Fellow’s got to have a little life.”

  She came down a step or two. “What girls and fellows? I didn’t know you knew anybody.”

  “Don’t be silly! How could I help knowing scads of people in this little place? Why, there’re a couple of awfully decent fellows; Davis and Tucker,” he came up a step or two, “and Kitty Brown, father’s a doctor, and—” he cleared his throat, so near she seemed—“a girl named Melissa Paul, and ”

  “Whom did you say—Melissa Paul?”

  He tried to keep any truculence out of his tone. “Yes, why not? Do you know her?” He came nearer, peering to read her inscrutable face in the dim light.

  She hesitated the slightest possible fraction of time. “No, I don’t,” she said listlessly, “but I’ve heard of her. I’m not sure she’s so nice, Malory. I think a lot of boys go there. . . . Who else did you say?”

  “Oh I don’t know, girl named Adamson comes from Short Hills, or Little Rocks—I don’t know the names of these places around here. Believe it’s Morristown she comes from. Well, what do you say?”

  Her voice came steadily. “I don’t believe Mother would like it.” She started upstairs. “Don’t forget to lock the door, Malory.”

  He ran down the stairs noisily. “What the heck! Reba makes me sick, she makes me sick!” he told himself savagely. He foraged in the icebox, found some cold apple pie and cheese and took it up to his bright room which his own efforts and persistence had made comfortable.

  “Of all the incomprehensible ways to live! What could make people like that, I wonder?” Stonily objective, he surveyed his family in his mind. He had no criticism to make of his mother—old people were like that, he guessed—well no, Aunt Viny wasn’t like that, she was gay enough with her cronies, he could hear her cackling now. But his mother, a much younger woman, was for some inexplicable reason, done with life. She was, he knew it, an empty shell.

  As for his sisters—the idea of Reba’s daring to criticize Melissa because boys went to see her! Of course they went to see her—so alive and bright and warm she was! Didn’t moths fly about a flame? He remembered then Laurentine’s edict. Wouldn’t Reba be astonished if she knew that he, her cherished brother, wasn’t allowed to cross her threshold?

  Well, his own home would be different from this. There’d be lights all over the house, and music and Melissa and himself and friends—yes and children. His children! Melissa’s children! . . . He snapped off the light and lay face downward for hours in the warm, sweet darkness.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  NOW that the fall was setting in, Laurentine played bridge at Mrs. Ismay’s on Wednesdays instead of junketing down to Newark in the little car to the movies. About seven, she would go over to the Doctor’s house, walking gravely and happily through the quiet streets, the crackling leaves swirling about her or breaking brittlely under her feet. At such times her heart was singing a little song within her. She was like any other young woman, she thought, going off to spend a pleasant evening with a pleasant neighbor, with no longing or yearning in her heart, no goal to be striven for or reached, no sick memories to be crushed down, covered with the trivial occupation of the moment.

  At such times she said to herself, “God is in his heaven, all’s well with the world.” There was nothing during these days that she wanted changed
except perhaps her feeling about Melissa. She was ashamed of this feeling. Yet she could not shake it off. There were times when she was obsessed with the idea that some time all this beauty and peace and satisfaction in which she moved would cease and that in some obscure way its departure would be traceable to Melissa. She never spoke sharply or even reprovingly to her young cousin but in her heart lay, coiled like a tiny serpent, a little current of dislike ready to rear and strike at a moment’s notice.

  Sometimes Dr. Denleigh, who had opened his office in the district in which she lived, would rush over to her house in his new Ford, honk madly outside her gate, and drive her with equal madness and utter disregard of traffic signals, over to Dr. Ismay’s, drop her and return to his increasing practice.

  She would go in then and she and Millie Ismay would talk with the complete intimacy and interest which women absolutely en rapport with each other employ. Millie, who was comparatively indifferent to her appearance outside, was amazingly given over to a consideration of her indoor apparel, her house dresses and négligées. Often Laurentine brought with her one of her latest books of modes, and scraps of material used in fashioning apparel for Mrs. Judge Manners and her lovely and exclusive, newly-married daughter, Mrs. del Pilar. Laurentine would hold the cloth up against Mrs. Ismay’s skin and drape with her magic fingers the stuff into marvelous fold and line, employing an enthusiasm and liveliness of interest such as she rarely manifested to her customers.

  “This blue is heavenly for you, Millie. My dear, I thought of you to-day as soon as Mrs. del Pilar showed it to me. If you want me to I’ll order yours along with hers, so you can get the benefit of my discount. You’ll probably be the first colored woman in Red Brook to be wearing lounging pajamas!

  “See, I’m going to cut them quite low. You’ve such a lovely back and I’ll make you a little jacket to slip on when you have company. I’ll make it in this Spanish Tile color. This is just a scrap, but can you get the idea?”