The Chinaberry Tree

  “Don’t see him there at all,” said Mr. Stede still not turning his head but frowning intensely at the stove. “Thet gal Melissa ain’t thinkin’ ’bout this Forten boy, onliest one she’s got on her mind is that Asshur Lane.”

  “Well whoever’s she’s got,” his niece replied spitefully, “all I got to say is I hate her. I know she ain’t comin’ to no good end. And all I got to say is if I ever get a chance to give her a push that way I’ll do it. Settin’ herself above decent girls like me just because we has to earn our honest livin’.” She sniffed darkly. “They’s worse ways for a girl to earn her livin’ than doin’ housework.”

  “I sh’d say so,” her uncle aquiesced. “Here comes Johnasteen. Wouldn’t advise you to let her hear you carry on like this, Pelasgie.”

  She became silent then, stumping off noisily upstairs and to bed, with no mind to run counter to her cousin’s stout defenses for the Stranges.

  Johnasteen, heavy footed like her father went clumping about, closing shutters, locking doors. “Think I’ll go to bed, father. You comin’ up? You’d better, it’s kinda late.”

  But he thought he would wait awhile. And so he sat there far into the quiet night turning over and over the bits of gossip which Pelasgie had let fall. “Things is picked up so now fer Mis’ Strange, I can’t bear to think of startin’ up her worries agin,” he mumbled into his beard. After all, what was there to dread? In six months this boy would be gone—probably never to come back. Nothing much could happen in six months. “And then Asshur’ll come back, he’ll give Melissa plenty to think about.”

  If he could only keep Pelasgie “off’n her!” There was something chilling, marrow-freezing in an ill-will so intense, so active. “After all,” he solaced himself, “she don’t know nothin’, ’n ef she’ll jes’ keep her mouf shet.” Sighing a little over the unlikelihood of this he went creaking off noisily to bed.

  CHAPTER XXX

  THAT was a lovely winter. Laurentine and Melissa looking back in later safer years on this year in which fate showed itself at its sorriest, often recalled this season, dwelt on it, relived it; Laurentine with a certain sweet poignance; Melissa with a familiar pang of terror, a prayerful sense of gratitude.

  There were snow and ice in abundance, but the winter, though a severe one, was singularly pleasing and beautiful. The snow renewed itself constantly, so that everywhere were constant stretches of glistening, dazzling white. Redd’s Brook proper froze deeper than it had ever been known, responding not a whit to the brilliant persistent sun which made up in glory what it lacked in warmth.

  Denleigh, southern-born, had seen very little of winter sports as a boy, and had been too busy to take them on as a young man. Now suddenly he succumbed to their charm. Every moment which he could spare from his work he spent outdoors, skating, sleighing, ski-ing. Laurentine accompanied him in the first two of these activities, coming home wind-blown and rosy at night to have a final steaming cup of the delicious cocoa which Aunt Sal had left for them on the back of the stove in the kitchen. There would be a few moments of gay talk on nothing—the skates—the condition of the ice—the angle at which Denleigh wore his skating cap. And then the overpowering rush of languor spreading over her tired muscles. . . . “Oh Stephen, I’m so tired! I could go to sleep just standing up!”

  Denleigh would laugh down at her, his own face shining with health and happiness. “Run up to bed, sleepy-head! See you to-morrow.”

  It seemed to her she had never known such joy in living, such well-being. She had, in fact, never realized that such things existed. Few dances were given in Red Brook, none had been open to her in her extreme youth, and now it was doubtful that she would have gone, if she could. The skating supplied her with the poetry of motion which her beautiful sinuousness required; she loved her awareness of the perfect mechanism of her body; even at the beginning she adored the feel of the ache in her muscles. It was a treat to know she had them.

  And all this exercise and outdoor life was having its effect on her disposition. She lost once for all that diffidence which she had felt but so rarely had shown. It had always been there but now it was completely vanquished. Mingling with the crowd, passing through them with Denleigh at her side she was like a slender burnished arrow weaving in and out. Once she met Hackett, felt his burning, passionate eyes deep on hers. Her instinct, at one time would have been to turn away with a carefully simulated indifference. Now she met and recognized his gaze, responded to it with a grave bow—because she was truly indifferent.

  It was as if her newly balanced and co-ordinated body had lent a similar balance and co-ordination to her mind. Nothing outside of overwhelming fundamental disasters could be lastingly evil, eternally damning in this bright, blue, cheerful, laughing world of sport. You couldn’t cry, you couldn’t weep with your nerves all stimulated, your mind all steady, your heart all responsive—like this. Unconsciously she saw herself differently, as the least important and yet as the most important feature in her world.

  And all this time she was building up a comradeship with Denleigh, emerging from his ægis, to wear one of her own which enabled her to walk side by side with him. She was serene, triumphant, sure of her lover, for the first time in her life sure of herself.

  She used to say to him: “Oh Stephen isn’t it too perfect? If we could go on like this forever!”

  But he wanted his wife: “It will be much more fun being married,” he told her sagely, “wait and see. This way we could still be separated. Married we’ll be one. No this is all very fine, my dear, but I must be much more sure of you than this. You must be surer of me. . . .”

  “I wonder,” she would murmur, “if I can be.”

  • • • • •

  Melissa’s joys of course were not so mature, not experienced with such introspection. Since Lauren-tine had taken to going about she could not of course spend too much of her time outside with Malory. She had to be discreet. But it created a new understanding between them. Melissa would leave the house with Ben, of whom her relatives approved. She would see to it that Laurentine glimpsed her skating with her young escort. And then this over, she would leave Ben and skate with Malory, far, far off down the reaches of the Brook where the willows in spring hung so plaintively. And after that there would be Herbert Tucker, and a little rival skating with Kitty Brown, who shone in this, as she did in all sports.

  It was great fun, both Melissa and Malory thought, to play such indifference before others and yet to be so tinglingly aware, he of her, she of him. Under the ghostly willows when the turn of chance brought them an opportunity to visit them, they clung together for a sweet moment and kissed, then catching each other’s hands they swerved back like big, lovely birds swooping and swaying until they’d reached the center of the crowd again. There they parted carelessly, to mingle ostentatiously unaware, with other girls and boys, to reunite at the end of another half-hour or so, amused, triumphant, unspeakably full of their love, of their bliss.

  After it was all over, Ben would take her home, all unconscious of what had been going on under his very eyes. Once after she got in Malory telephoned her and she talked to him in laughing whispers, well aware that Laurentine and Denleigh not twenty feet away were too absorbed to know that she was even about. And once when she knew that Laurentine was not coming home but was going with her lover from the Brook over to Mrs. Ismay’s for cards and a late supper, she actually let Malory in the kitchen again. And the two sat giggling, close together like bad children in the warm spicy darkness. They ate a sandwich or two, whispering happily of gay nothings, of utter nonsense, until suddenly an overpowering awareness descended upon them, stimulating and yet paralyzing; until finally Malory stammered he thought he’d better be going. Melissa nervously fumbling with the door could not turn the key in the lock too quickly after him. Skurrying upstairs she undressed in the pitch blackness, her face on fire. . . .

  • • • • •

  The thaw, and the spring with it, seemed to come over night.
One day they were skating on the Brook, the next the ice was cracking, showing deep fissures. Little stray breezes blew from nowhere riding like feathers on stiffer, chillier, currents of air, touching the cheek with unbelievable delicacy, carrying with them some overpowering memory, some faint poignant hint of something that had happened a long time ago. And presently the heart remembered that miraculously it had been spring and miraculously it would be spring again. . . . The willows along the brook were bare and ghostly; then one day, though still bare, they were no longer ghostly, there was life in them, creeping, mysterious, pungent. . . .

  “The time of the singing of birds is come,” Malory quoted to Melissa. She did not know that he was quoting . . . she never read the Bible, would have been amazed to hear it spoken of as poetry.

  They were walking by the Brook which people deserted after the skating season, “When spring really does come,” Malory said, “the boys will be down here swimming. But we’ll find some other place to go by then . . . and the next spring, why you’ll be going in swimming where I go swimming. Think of that ‘Lissa!”

  Melissa did think of it, thought of it too often so that when they were together she was unable to conceal her sense of completeness, of possessiveness. And Malory responded in kind. Literally neither one of them spoke of the other to anyone else and yet almost anybody seeing them together at Kitty’s, at a movie, standing briefly on the church portico, must know: “Here are two young people who are mightily attracted.”

  It was the end of February, the snow was gone, the Brook loosened; the middle of the day was deliciously balmy. Top-coats were beginning to be a nuisance, but older folks were shaking their heads and saying: “You know this is regular pneumonia weather. March is just around the corner. You know how treacherous that is!”

  In the air were thoughts of kites, tops, roller-skates, spring hats . . . love.

  Colored Red Brook society, a little comatose from the severity of the winter came to life, unwrapped itself, yawned, stretched, opened an eye and saw that the world was livable again, opened yet another eye and saw Malory and Melissa.

  Not everybody noticed. Since Denleigh’s quiet championship of Laurentine and Mrs. Ismay’s un-emphatic but persistent sponsoring, Red Brook had been inclined slowly, regretfully to let the Stranges alone. But their affairs had been such a delicious morsel.

  Then too, Dr. Denleigh was a gentleman—yes—granted. He was a good doctor too. But not a Red Brookian; and no more was Mrs. Ismay or that there Brown girl to whose house Melissa was always running. Asshur too was from far away—he had returned there—who knew why? And Harry Robbins, a genuine native it is true, but really of little account. But this new and elegant young stranger—young Forten now, related to those queer Forten girls! It did seem too bad for him to come in and have to get mixed up with that “passel of Stranges.” True there were few girls in the town to whom he could direct his attention. Pelasgie Stede now with her funny, spotty face and her “bench” legs—that part of Red Brook that discussed such matters at length put a collective showing of hands on collective hips and laughed as only colored people can laugh, without malice, with gargantuan laughter, at something cosmically funny.

  Many of them did not stop to trace the relationship of Malory to his mother and sisters. But a few of the older folks did. Mrs. Epps seeing Melissa and her young man sipping an orange drink, passed and repassed their slim unconscious backs until she had had a full view of Malory’s face. Then a little aghast she entered into session over the telephone with Mrs. Tracey, two blocks away. Mrs. Tracey dropped everything and came around.

  “You don’t mean Malory Forten, Hannah Epps, him that was the baby when Forten died?”

  “Sure do.”

  “Well ain’t that the beatinest!”

  “Sure is.” Mrs. Epps was not usually duo-syllabic, but in this case as she herself would have said, she was too tuckered out to talk.

  “Look here, Gracey Tracey,” she said finally using Mrs. Tracey’s unbelievable combination of given and Christian name, “this really ain’t none of our business. Guess we’d better keep out’n it. But oh my lan’ won’t there be an explosion some day! . . . But keep your mouth shet. I aim to.”

  Still even from a closed mouth it is possible to let fall a hint of mystery, of unheard-of surprises, of something with the possibility of both comedy and tragedy in it. . . . But after all one couldn’t be sure.

  Melissa thought she detected some slight change in her rarely met public—a colder, more intensely curious eye; a queer aloofness that had in it something different from either meanness or malice, something faintly terrifying. It made her think of her dream, from which thank heaven she had lately been completely free.

  • • • • •

  Of this, however, she did not speak to Malory, indeed it was a long time before she herself was convinced in her reasonable mind of what some watchful seventh sense pointed out to her as being true. The change on the face of Rev. Simmons when she approached him from priestly benevolence to momentarily stark anxiety; the completeness with which Mrs. Epps ignored Malory the day he went with her for eggs. The old woman actually stood between them, her back to the boy, questioning and drilling Melissa with a sort of severe dutifulness so different from her one time malicious curiosity that the girl was all at sea. Even Malory, with his total inability to perceive people whom he considered not socially but cosmically inelegible, was struck by her odd combination of rudeness and of interest. Not liking it, he took Melissa by the arm and hustled her out.

  “That crazy old woman! Was she losing her mind? What was she talking to you about Melissa? She took pains not to let me hear her. What was she mumbling?”

  “I hardly know myself,” the girl stammered. “She—she—knows my folks, so I guess she thinks she can give me advice. She—she was talking about Asshur.”

  “Talking about Asshur! Well, I’ll be—! Say what’s the matter with this damned town anyway? What are they trying to do, give us the run-around?”

  They were destined to ask themselves that question very often in the difficult months that followed.

  • • • • •

  Mrs. Epps who had chidden Melissa on a memorable occasion for permitting Asshur to show his preference for her so plainly, had been that day his undivided champion. She advanced upon her subject tacking, so to speak, like a sail-boat.

  “You young girls, Melissa, can’t afford to be too keerful how you treats these boys. Sometimes hit runes them.” The young girl stared wondering what insidious thing she might have done to Asshur and how Mrs. Epps knew of it.

  The old woman continued : “If I was young and had a nice feller waitin’ for me, eatin’ his heart out, ’pears like I’d send for him—yep’n marry him too.” She went on at a great rate never mentioning Asshur’s name and yet making it clear that she was not referring to Malory, whom indeed she did not appear to see.

  • • • • •

  Then there was old Mr. Stede. Malory and Melissa strolling home from an evening spent in the little public library, hunting up references ran into the old man clumping down the street in his stiff, heavy boots. His eyes could not have been sightless after all for he espied them afar off and waited for them under the arc light.

  “Kinda late fer you to be out, Melissa, ain’t it?” he queried. The question was addressed to the girl but his eyes never left Malory’s face. Instead without waiting for an answer he addressed the lad.

  “’N who may you be my boy’n how long you ben around yere?”

  “My name’s Malory Forten,” said Malory, instinctively recognizing a person of character, “and I’ve been about now for some six months. I was born here though.”

  “H’mph,” said the old man sniffing. “Well, I bids you, good-evenin’.”

  “And who’s he?” asked Malory but without much surprise and with no resentment.

  Melissa told him wearily that it was just an old man who had always worked for her aunt, “Been with her since befor
e Laurentine was born.”

  Mr. Stede met Melissa the next afternoon in the back yard whence he had inveigled her to show her how nice and fresh the swing looked. “Got it done early this year; these seasons is so onchangeable now. Does your Aunt Sal know young Forten?” He ran the whole conversation together as though the subject of Malory were the main theme for him.

  “No,” said Melissa rather low, “she doesn’t. . . . Laurentine won’t let me have him at the house, so we meet sometimes at the library and places and stroll home together.” He was the first person to whom she had spoken of Malory and it made her feel better. No need either to ask Mr. Stede to keep his own counsel, none knew better than he how to do this.

  “Laurentine won’t let him come to the house,” his strange eyes rested unseeingly on hers. “Why won’t Laurentine let him come to the house? What’s she got agin him?”

  “Nothing. I doubt if she’s ever seen him. It’s me she’s—agin. She’s got some kind of mad on me and she doesn’t want me to have any fun.”

  “What’s she got agin you?”

  “I don’t know, honest I don’t, Mr. Stede. Christmas, Aunt Sal invited Ben Davis to come in and he’s been around two—three times to take me skating. But Laurentine won’t hear to anyone else.”

  He ignored all this. “This young feller now, you know anything about him?”

  “Nothing except that he lives way down South End, way beyond the Eppses. Lives with his mother and his two sisters—they do catering.”

  “Yes, I know. Is he—now—is he calcoolatin’ to stay here long?”

  “No, he’s going away again in June right after he graduates and,” she finished with sudden determination, “he’s never coming back.” She would never, never permit him to return to this miserable, pestering, busy-bodying hole.