The Chinaberry Tree
He began to notice then that he never met them together on the street, never saw them together in church which he as a good citizen of the community attended regularly, never saw them at a movie. This flattened him out considerably. And then one week just before Christmas he ran into Doctor Brown’s house for a moment, paused at the door of the living-room whence merry voices were issuing, to come upon a medley of noise, music, a confusion of high pitched young voices. Kitty Brown was dancing slowly, sinuously with the boy whom he had seen in the woods with Melissa, and Melissa herself was dancing with another lad, Herbert Tucker, whom Denleigh remembered talking to at a basketball game. And the very next day he had met Tucker and Melissa on North Street coming from school. Tucker’s arms were full of books and Melissa’s were quite empty. “Hello, Doc,” she had grinned up at him.
So that was that. The little minx! Probably since she was just a young girl, and a mighty sharp looking girl too, she wasn’t allowed to have company but of course both she and the boys made the most of spare moments on the outside. Doubtless next week he’d come across her walking out with some one else.
• • • • •
Malory and Melissa, unconscious of course of Denleigh’s half-shamed espionage, went on blissfully “eating their cake and having it too,” as the boy said with no especial significance.
Melissa put a damper on Malory’s suggestion about Christmas dinner. “No, she wouldn’t let me invite you. Oh I don’t know, maybe she would. But I’d never ask her. I’ll never ask anything of Laurentine again, anyway, not long’s I live. But I’ve thought of something grand, Malory. Johnasteen and I rode way out to Pompton Lakes last week, had to deliver two dresses. And after we got there Johnasteen was awfully thirsty—we’d had fish for dinner. So we found a little shack back from the road, where they had soft drinks. It was very nice, a fire and everything. The man had a counter in one room and some little tables in the other, and he said, ‘Don’t you girls wants to eat a sandwitch or something with your sassparella? You c’n take it right in and eat it at them tables there.’ I suppose he wanted us to know that we could eat there even though we were colored. So we told him no. So he said ‘Well anytime you’re out this way and want to stop in, you can. We’re gonna have good things around Christmas time, turkey, fixin’s and everyth’g!’” Breathless she paused in her mimicry.
“So let’s go out there the day after Christmas and have our own Christmas dinner. I’ll bring some celery—I know he won’t have any of that—and some nuts and some cranberry sauce if I can manage it. Won’t that be fine, Malory?”
He thought it would. “Just the same this kind of thing is awfully silly, Honey. Of course it would be impossible for things to go on like this if I were going to be here after this year. I’d just have to come to your house to see you. This isn’t fair to you anyway. I can’t imagine what your cousin’s thinking about.”
“Well, of course she doesn’t know we see each other. I guess she doesn’t even know you exist,” Melissa interposed sensibly. “Though anyway I don’t see what she’s got to do with me. My mother sent me here in care of Aunt Sal and not to be governed by Miss Laurentine Strange!”
“Strange, Strange, is that her name? Look here, I wonder if she’s the little girl used to come to see my sisters sometimes when I was a little bit of a fellow. I used to call her Stranger, I remember . . . she only came for a little while I think, now as I look back—maybe a summer or so. And then I never saw her again . . . everything in my life seemed to change about that time. Strange, Strange! You don’t think that’s the same girl?”
But Melissa, suddenly remote, thought not. She’d never heard her cousin mention any Fortens. “She—she was educated in Newark you know.”
“Oh, perhaps she came from there. Well it doesn’t make any difference anyway. No cousin can separate us, can she, Melissa?”
“No Malory.” Her voice was faint . . . he’d been away so long, he had left when he was such a baby. Probably he knew nothing of the story of the Halloways and the Stranges. People would take it for granted that he knew and so wouldn’t mention it to him, and yet probably he didn’t know,—unless those awful sisters of his told him. Malory cared a lot about class, about family, she knew. Cared for it differently from the manner in which she did because he had always had it. She always listened with admiration and envy when he spoke of his great Aunt Viny and her grandfather who had been a caterer in colonial Philadelphia.
She must get him away from the subject of Laurentine. “How are your sisters, Malory?”
“Oh awful,” he groaned, stopping in front of the clearing. “Let’s go in here, it’s so bright and warm. Oh, I’ve got something to show you!” He ran over to a clump of bushes, felt among their roots, and pulled out two stained old horse blankets. “I found them up in the attic and sneaked them up here last night. Here, sit down.” Gently he placed her on one, and bundled her up in the other. “There, you can always be warm as long as there’s no snow on the ground.”
He stretched out himself on the other half of the rug. “You know Melissa, this really is too wonderful. . . . This clearing is our home isn’t it, Honey, and the sky is our roof. . . . We’ll have a home of our own some day too Melissa.” His face clouded, “As unlike my home as possible. God!” he exploded. “You can’t imagine what my home is like. Mother isn’t what you’d call an old woman. I’d swear she wasn’t a day over fifty. But she just sits and stares off into space. The girls read cook books and talk over recipes—they’re private caterers you know—as though they were telling ghost stories. Harriett practically never opens her mouth to me. Reba just says, ‘Good-morning, good-night, I wish you’d pick up your clothes off the bathroom floor, Malory. Did you get the socks I put in your room? Don’t stay out too late, Malory!’”
“Oh Malory, she must say more than that !”
“I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles she doesn’t.”
• • • • •
He might have added that of late she had taken to following him to the front door evenings, as he flung impatiently out of that deadening atmosphere. She would press her face against the wires in the screen door, her faded green or gray dress disappearing into the faded coloring of the door so that her head, as always, seemed suspended bodiless in air. “You’re—you’re not going out to see any girls, Malory?”
And his impatient response: “What would I be going to see any girls for? See enough of them at school—they’re all over the place. Goodness, can’t a fellow go out for some air, the way you keep this house shut up!”
He hated to tell a lie !
• • • • •
“We haven’t any radio in the house, any piano, . . . unless a fellow, or Kitty Brown calls me up now and then, the telephone rings only on business. . . . You know Melissa, I’m twenty-one next June. I’ll be my own man then. My Aunt Viny left me a little money, to go to school with. But I’m well and strong now, there’s nothing to hinder me from working in the summer—other fellows do. We’ll get married. You can come up to Boston with me—We’ll get a couple of rooms and have a home. . . .” He put his arms about her enveloped as she was in the clumsy covering. “We might get married before then—in secret.”
“We could. And you could go away and I’d stay here and sew for Laurentine and send you money and help you.” No she wanted to get away from Laurentine, away where Malory would never hear of that story. “Or no, I’ll go to New York and find work there.”
“New York indeed! You’ll go to Boston with me and live with me and make a home for me.”
“I might keep a boarding-house,” she said doubtfully, “I’m a good cook.” She warmed up to the subject. “We’d just take students and give them good home-cooking. Then I wouldn’t be any expense.”
He laughed down at her indulgently. “You funny little tucked-in squirrel—you look like one to-day Melissa, your eyes are so bright and sharp. A boarding-house indeed! No wife of Malory Forten will ever keep a boarding-house, or sew, or do an
ything else. I expect to take care of my wife myself, all by myself, thank you.”
“Malory, that’s so silly! I could help just at the start.”
“Neither at the start nor at the finish.”
“Then we won’t be able to marry for quite some time.”
“We’ll marry in June,” he told her firmly. “So make the most of these last six months, little Ladybird!”
Coming out of the woods where the road debouched suddenly into the end of Owen Street, they came face to face with Harry Robbins.
Malory who knew him slightly, said “Hullo Rob-bins,” and would have passed on.
But Robbins looking as though he had seen an unexpected vision gave him the barest nod, turning to the girl with a slowly dawning, unmistakably malicious satisfaction spreading over his countenance. Taking off his hat, he bowed profoundly almost sweeping the ground.
“Well, Melissa,” he smiled, his rather prominent eyes goggling straight out of his head. “Well Melissa!”
Malory drew her aside. “Nasty, unpleasant sort of chap,” he said carelessly. “Always makes me think of something crawling.”
“Yes, doesn’t he?” said Melissa. It was all she could do to keep her teeth from chattering. “I think we’d better separate here Malory.” She barely returned the pressure of his hand, so eager she was to get away.
• • • • •
“I wish I could get away from Red Brook and everything and everybody in it!” Well in six months time she would. That wasn’t her original idea, but perhaps it was just as well to follow it. She would marry Malory the day after their commencement and go away with him. Somehow, someway she would manage not to be a drag on him. Harry Rob-bins and his hateful tongue! Still nothing very much could happen in six months.
To her astonishment when she came out of school the next Monday she met Harry Robbins at the corner of the block. She stared at him completely nonplussed. She had not been able to see Malory the preceding Sunday, they rarely saw each other in school, never left the building together, so she had been looking forward to their meeting this afternoon with great eagerness. Now she would not see him at all she knew, for Harry was quite capable of walking all the way home with her. She’d have to enter the house to get rid of him and once in she’d have no excuse for leaving it again.
Bowing cordially—politeness she knew in his case was the best policy,—she tried to walk past him. But he blocked her, not ungently, one hand at her elbow, the other reaching for her books.
“I hadn’t seen you for such a long time, Melissa,” he said civilly, “that I thought I’d come by to-day and walk home with you.” Silently she surrendered her books. It would be the first time she’d ever disappointed Malory. What would he think!
“I’d been wondering what had become of you since Asshur left,” the smooth evil voice went on, “I kind of figured that he’d made you promise to keep to yourself ’til he came back. But I see it’s not Asshur, it’s that Forten fellow.” She looked at him wordlessly.
Suddenly he brought his prominent brown eyes to bear directly on her. “I been thinking about you steadily since Saturday—I been figuring—I kind’a got it worked out that your Aunt and your cousin don’t know that you’re running around with him.”
How could he know that, she wondered fearfully trying to keep her consternation out of her eyes. But he had seen them flicker momentarily and he went on, a hard note of triumph in his mocking voice.
“Oh you don’t fool me, Melissa. I know too much about you and yours.” He changed his tone, the triumph vanished into a mean attempt at ingratiation. “Now I don’t think you treated me any too well, when you and I were going together, you even kind of sicked Asshur Lane on to me. I don’t mind admitting I’ve got a grudge against him.
“But I’ve none against you Melissa, and the proof of it is I’ve come to tell you that nothing in the world would give me more pleasure than to see you marry Malory Forten. If you have any trouble finding a place to meet, you can come to my house. Nobody lives there but me and dad.”
Still she was silent. He looked at her smiling his false smile. “Well, no one could speak fairer than that could they, Melissa?”
They had reached their gate now; he had ruined her day for her. She told him: “Good-bye, Harry, I have to go in right away.”
“All right, I’m going. So you won’t say anything? Well that’s all right too. Well remember you have my best wishes.”
She walked slowly up the path, stopped for a moment under the Chinaberry Tree which somehow made her think of Asshur. Almost she wished he were here now, he was always so strong, so capable, so full of resources. “He’d smash his face in,” she thought with sudden savage satisfaction. . . . But of course if Asshur were there, there’d be no Malory. Why in a way she was longing for Asshur to help straighten out these strange new difficulties which were besetting her and her relationship with young Forten.
“And of course Asshur wouldn’t help me there,” she told herself clear-headedly. “But he would help me,” something, stronger than her head, asseverated over and over again. . . . Strange how she could never picture him as failing her, even though she so signally was about to fail him.
She opened the side door, walked through the little vestibule into the brilliantly-lighted sewing-room. Ordinarily she removed herself quickly from Laurentine’s domain, but to-day she flopped wearily into an easy chair.
“Tired?” asked Johnasteen sympathetically. “Home kinda early ain’t you ?”
Melissa said “yes” to both questions.
“Look kinda peaked,” Johnasteen went on brightly. “You want me to get you suthin’?”
She could feel Laurentine’s glance flicker toward her for just a second. “No,” she told Johnasteen finally, “no thanks, not a thing.”
Afterwards she was glad the sewing girls were there; otherwise she might have gone over to her cousin, might have gone on her knees and dropped her head in the older girl’s lap, might have said: “Oh Laurentine, you’re young, but I’m younger. You’ve had a hard time but you’re coming to the end of it now. Don’t be angry with me anymore . . . whatever I’ve done, I didn’t mean to do it. Don’t hate me Laurentine, love me. Be a sister again and tell me what’s happening to me? What can I feel coming from far, far away to hurt me and wound me and frighten me? What’s the matter with Malory and me ?”
But immediately her common sense reminded her that Laurentine didn’t even know Malory, had never seen him, never heard his name. She got up wearily, went up to her room, picked up Asshur’s letter which Aunt Sal always placed so carefully on her dresser and laid it down again. Then she rouged and powdered her face, washed her hands and went down stairs to dinner.
The meal over and the place ordered, she plodded with painful concentration through the fifty lines of Vergil which she’d been unable to get from Malory, remounted the stairs. Automatically she read Asshur’s letter; she knew in advance practically every word he would say. Drearily but precisely she went through the rites of her toilet, snapped off her light and went to bed.
• • • • •
That night for the first time she dreamed the dream.
CHAPTER XXVI
SHE did not dream it immediately; she did not fall to sleep immediately. Instead, lying at first tense and then relaxed in her narrow bed she sought to bring her mind to bear on Harry Robbins and his slimy generosity. What lay behind it she could not quite guess but she knew enough about Harry to realize that there lurked some evil intent. It was not like him to give her up; it was not like him to yield up anything even that he didn’t want, with grace and good-will. It was indeed his would-be air of eager kindness that most frightened. She could understand his willingness to thwart Asshur, but it seemed hardly likely that he would sacrifice his own desires to that extent. No he must have some ulterior motive whose working out would satisfy the grudge which she knew he bore her.
Stubbornly she tried to fathom it out. Could it be that knowing Malo
ry’s pride in his name, Harry was hoping to precipitate the marriage and then acquaint his young rival with the story of Aunt Sal and Lau-rentine and their connection with her? Perhaps Robbins thought such a tale pointing to deception on Melissa’s part would alienate Malory to such an extent that it would mean separation and that she would come to Harry after all for shelter and protection.
“But I never would,” she told herself stoutly.
Well then what was it all about? Her tired mind refusing to cope any longer with such an unsolvable problem switched involuntarily to a discussion which they had had in her English class on the ancient Greek drama. She had meant to read up on the subject but she had been too tired. However, Miss Scarlett, her teacher had been as always very clear and precise in presenting the details. She could remember, she thought, almost every word of it, in case an examination was sprung. What had intrigued her attention most had been the pictures which Miss Scarlett had shown of the masks of Tragedy and Comedy. After they had gone the round of the class Melissa had secured them again and pored over them in an agony of fascination, fear, and repulsion.
She hated the sightless eyes, the horrid, gaping mouths, the snaky hair. Even the plane of the cheeks and the moulding of the lips seemed to carry a suggestion, in both masks, of a mad, deliberate cruelty. In particular she was at once magnetized and repelled by the hint of laughter in the Comic Mask. If anyone were ever to look at her with that vacant, leering grin, that promise of heartless mirth. . . .
“I’d scream out loud,” she told herself cowering under her warm covers. She closed her eyes to shut out the image which her mind had conjured up for her, opened them again—the face was peering at her over the foot of the bed.
• • • • •
Of course it was not surprising that she dreamed, she thought, waking wanly and exhausted in the chilly little light of a December morning. Suddenly she reviewed it, hating the memory of each detail.