“Forty-five,” she corrected him.
“That means she was born when the South was still in the shadow of slavery. In what state?”
“In Mississippi, in the littlest hole, mother said. Afterwards they moved to Alabama, then a cousin or somebody was taken here to Jersey by a relative of some visiting Halloway and then she sent for Aunt. Sal.”
“In Mississippi, a state where to this day all possible stress is laid on a white skin. Lots of colored people made a fetish of it, and of course all white people did. The whole system of slavery hung on it.”
“Well what of that? You just said Aunt Sal was born after slavery.”
“But that wouldn’t keep her from being affected by its consequences, the hang-over and everything. Think of her a little ignorant housemaid and then this young prince coming into her life and preferring her. Sticking to her too through thick and thin. Acknowledging her to all intents and purposes before everybody. He might have sent her away, he could have had the child put in a home.
“And on the other hand she must have found something tremendously satisfying in their life together. She’s been a handsome woman. She could have gone away and married. But look, did you ever think,” he paused, struck himself with this new aspect of the matter, “she’s remained here to be his living monument? How often do you think people would think of Colonel Halloway, how long would they remember him?”
Melissa said stupidly, “But Asshur they weren’t married.”
He almost shouted at her: “Well, what of it? And let me tell you my dear girl there’re worse things in this world than not being married. And any man who lets the facts of Laurentine’s parentage stand in his way, any colored man especially, doesn’t deserve the name of man. How many of us can trace his ancestry back more than three generations? Perhaps a few thousands of all the millions of colored people in this country. A darned small percentage I’m telling you.”
But Melissa was not interested in sociology. “Well, all I’ve got to say is I’m glad my mother was married and that I don’t have to go through what Laurentine does and Aunt Sal before her. How’d we get off on all this anyway, Asshur?”
He couldn’t answer her for a few moments, just stood surveying her, feeling oddly thwarted in his first love-making. Something tender, wholly masculine, but tender and solely protective, rose in him dissipating for the time all other feeling. She was so young this girl of his—he felt himself suddenly a man of the world—so ignorant, so, so cocksure. For almost the first time he saw her as she was, a slender wisp of femininity with nothing in the world to protect her but her belief, her pride in herself for having what? The ordinary heritage of the most ordinary child born in wedlock.
He stretched out two long arms, caught her slightly unwilling hands and drew her to him. “Melissa promise me two things.”
“I’ll try Asshur. Now don’t ask too much. What are they?”
“First that you’ll always be good.” He interrupted her anticipating her indignant rejoinder. “I don’t mean just ordinary good, but almost stupid good. Circumspect.”
But in spite of all her high feelings, her apparently reckless determination to have a good time, she loved the conventional. So she answered readily.
“I promise, Asshur.”
“And secondly if you are ever in trouble of any kind, Melissa, you’ll send for me.”
Her voice and face were very steady: “I’ll never be in trouble Asshur. And anyway, where would you be?”
“Promise me, Melissa.”
“I promise, Asshur. . . . Oo-oh look it’s time for you to go. I’ll walk to the gate with you.”
They started out the side door but he sent her back for her coat.
Shivering in the chilly night which was in such poignantly delicious contrast with the warm room within, she stood for a moment in the bright moonlight beneath the Chinaberry Tree while her cousin Laurentine looked down at her from her darkened window above.
“I’m awfully sorry Asshur.”
But he intent on other matters was hardly thinking about love.
“Just remember your promise Melissa. Gee, isn’t it cold? And isn’t it great out here under the China-berry Tree? Run in girl. Good-night.”
“Good-night Asshur.”
She ran in and in almost one simultaneous motion turned the key, extinguished the fire and snapped off the light. Then she ran up stairs and stood as Laurentine too in the room next to hers was standing looking out at the beautiful Tree. Only her thoughts were happy ones. She said to herself, “Eighteen and I’ve had a proposal!”
The bed was so warm, so comfortable ; she wanted to lie awake and think but the sudden warmth after the cold had made her drowsy.
Two thoughts struggled through her drowsy almost furry consciousness.
“I almost wish he was going to be a doctor.”
And later in amusement tempered by an oncoming rush of sleep. “As though I’d ever get in trouble!”
CHAPTER XIII
BUT almost immediately she was in trouble, although of a different sort she was sure from what Asshur meant. The fight at the brook brought into existence certain most unexpected results. It seemed to have revived with truly remarkable vehemence all that old story of Aunt Sal and her white paramour. (Melissa used this term to describe Colonel Halloway in a diary which she began to keep about this time.)
Melissa to her complete astonishment began to find herself suffering from the ostracism which she supposed had been Laurentine’s portion in her younger days. From having been easily the most popular girl in her little group, she was transformed with a devastating rapidity and ruthlessness into an outsider. Little clubs of which she had been a member broke up and re-formed under a new name with the same personnel but with the exception of Melissa. The older people, it is true, treated her with the same hardly-veiled, slightly mordant malicious interest which they had always shown. They plied her with questions, smiling with sly glee at her innocent complacent answers.
“Well now if here ain’t Melissa,” Mrs. Epps would say when the young girl came down to her house for the fresh eggs which Aunt Sal had ordered. “Any more boys fightin’ over you my dear?”
“No,” Melissa answered frowning faintly. She couldn’t understand the wretched woman’s interest. “My goodness me,” she’d tell herself, “lots of girls must have had fellows quarreling over ’em.”
“My goodness me, Mrs. Epps,” she said aloud, “didn’t you ever have any boys fussing over you when you were a girl?”
“No,” said Mrs. Epps solemnly, “I never did. But then too nobody ain’t never said nothin’ about my folks. That’s why Asshur lit into him, wasn’t it because Harry Robbins said suthin’ about your folks?”
“Er—well—sort of,” Melissa conceded. For all her coolness and assurance she could not cope with things like this. She could not conceive of such cruelty being deliberate.
“My,” she thought, “poor Laurentine! How they must dislike her! And yet what on earth does she do to them?”
• • • • •
The boys too formed a vexing problem. Up to this time it had seemed almost impossible to escape their attention. She had been to use her own phrase “pestered to death” with them. Now without warning they let her alone. The telephone once so insistent was mute after Laurentine closed up her sewing-room. This defection meant not so much to her as the defection of the girls. Asshur was the pick of the boys and there was no question but that Asshur was hers signed, sealed, and ready at least for delivery. But still all this meant a lessening of her sense of well-being, a diminution of that intense feeling of complacence which had been hers ever since she had first arrived in Red Brook.
Not that the boys were ever rude. She almost wished they were with some of the old homely roughness which once they had tendered her. On the contrary their greetings were almost too exaggeratedly polite. In the presence of Asshur Lane this deference was more emphasized than ever. She saw Asshur turn red under his chestnut co
lored skin and realized that he was as helpless as she. Only Ben Davis and Herbert Tucker, old friends of Asshur’s, and Ben at least a former aspirant for her own special friendship, acted as always the rôle of nice, hearty, healthy boys.
Vexed and ashamed, she spoke somewhat haltingly to Asshur about it.
He was embarrassed and sore. She could see that without guessing the reason why. But he could not help her. “I don’t know what’s got into them,” he growled. “Half the time I think Harry Robbins gets ’em goin’ somehow. Expect I’ve got that nigger’s head to bust yet. But mind you behave Melissa. Be a good girl, a really good girl, all the time. Now remember.”
• • • • •
Still she told her troubled self walking home in the soft spring afternoons through beautiful, lonely Romany Road, still things could have been far worse. For much as she hated the results following on the fight at Redd’s Brook, she hated the fight itself still worse.
“Sooner or later my dear,” she said to herself, “you know you meant to get away from them anyhow. Well they broke off with you first and saved you the trouble of breaking off with them and feeling guilty about it all your life.”
But she wrote in her diary in the round unformed writing which showed what a child she really was: “Sometimes it’s just as well to watch people even if they seem to be your friends, and get ahead of them before they get a chance to get ahead of you. That might make you feel mean but it could make you feel kind of good too.”
• • • • •
But these troubles faded into insignificance before a very real problem which was slowly rising before her. Spreading, to change the figure, as circles spread and spread wrinkling the calm surface of a pond, stretching on and on. . . .
Laurentine had failed her, Laurentine who had always been so kind, so like an elder to a kid sister; the kind of sister that you read about, Laurentine, from whom she had, with the faintest touch of superciliousness, accepted favors—was decidedly cold to her, Laurentine, unbelievably, decidedly, incontrovertibly, disliked her.
It had taken her a long time, busied as she was with her lessons, her little vanities, her new problems with the boys and girls of Red Brook, to perceive this. She had come to her cousin with her usual confidence :
“Laurentine couldn’t you find just the littlest bit of time to make me a dress for the picnic? I’ve just seen the peachiest picture in the evening paper. You could copy it.”
Laurentine frowning at a length of crêpe Ginette, could not it seemed. And expressed no regrets.
But Melissa having seen her absorbed before in problems of designing, tactfully withdrew. She had a wholesome respect for Laurentine’s positive genius in this field. Melissa could sew exquisitely, beautifully. Her “finishing off” in this day of makeshifts was marvelous to behold. But she could not design and drape and create. She would never be able to do that. Still Matilda Gathers had been known to step into such a breach before, and could probably be depended upon to do so again. The dress did not worry her.
• • • • •
“Laurentine, what about letting me have that cream silk? I could just get my dress out of that?”
“What cream silk?”
“The one hanging with your things in the spare room.”
“Well what about letting you have it?”
Melissa stared wide-eyed? What had got into her tranquil cousin?
“Why, can I have it?”
“No you can’t have it.”
“Why Laurentine! You said, why last year you said I could have it. You said : ‘Maybe I’ll give you that dress next year.’”
“Did I? And this year I say I won’t give it to you.”
Melissa persisted : “But what are you going to do with it Laurentine?”
“Nothing so far as I know.”
“Are you going to wear it yourself?”
“I’m not expecting to.”
“And you won’t let me have it?”
“I won’t let you have it.”
Laurentine’s almond-shaped black eyes looked full into Melissa’s round unblinking green eyes of a kitten.
It was the young girl’s eyes which fell first. “Why,” she thought shrinking within herself under the balefulness of that stare, “Why Laurentine doesn’t like me a bit. Why she hates me!”
• • • • •
Aunt Sal sitting immobile as of late she did so often, observing Laurentine, watched the girl leave the room. Her wavering step brought a rush of pity to her heart. She had been proud of Melissa’s assurance in that house of uncertainties.
“Weren’t you hard on her Laurentine?”
“Wasn’t she hard on me? . . . Oh mother, mother let me alone, let me alone I say! And stop watching me!”
CHAPTER XIV
MELISSA thought: “She’s mad, she’s mad clear through. And it’s because Phil Hackett don’t come to see her any more. And he’s the only beau she had. And she’ll never get another. . . . Asshur’s the only beau I have too, but I’ll have others, lots more. Wait and see—oh wait and see! For one thing I won’t stick around here all my life like Laurentine. I won’t, I won’t!”
In the hot early evening of June she sat under the Chinaberry Tree with Asshur, her weary mind suddenly calm, her hurt heart finding balm. The young man, his long legs stretched comfortably before him, slouched beside her enveloped with Melissa in a sudden penetrating peace.
“Isn’t it lovely here Asshur?” She looked at the emerald grass, the indirect handiwork of a remote God through a far more direct handiwork of Mr. Stede. Some half-open roses cast their fragrance on the air adding to the lavishness of the summer beauty. And over and above all the rich foliage of the Chinaberry Tree cast its deeper shade on the pale glow of the departing sun. The boy and girl sat enveloped and surrounded in the pensive almost sadly sweet aura of the summer night.
“On such a night,” sighed Asshur, looking athwart the haze of his cigarette smoke at the pale golden light filtering through the chinks of the dark green over-lapping leaves,
“Stood Dider with a wilier in ’er ’and,”—Melissa burlesqued meanly.
“Asshur.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Phil Hackett’s stopped coming to see Lauren-tine.”
“He has?” Asshur straightened his spine, and tapped the toe of his sneaker with his tennis racket.
“Yes.”
“Think she cares?”
“Yes, awfully.”
“P’raps she doesn’t. P’raps she’s sent him about his business. I don’t see how a girl like Laurentine could be crazy about Hackett. Always seemed to be a good deal of a stuffed shirt, if you ask me.”
“Well, stuffed shirt or not, he doesn’t come any more.”
Asshur stirred uneasily, “Well they didn’t quarrel did they? Somehow I don’t see proud Laurentine quarreling with anybody. Bet she gave him the bum’s rush.”
“Not a chance,” said the practical Melissa. “Not a chance. Mighty few colored women in this town would give Phil Hackett the cold shoulder. And certainly not Laurentine.”
• • • • •
But she was not quite so sure on Sunday. Laurentine went to church quite regularly now. Melissa could not guess why. Certainly she paid no attention to the minister, and even less to the members of the congregation. Serene, beautiful, cold as a statue she stood for a moment on the steps after service, glancing over the dispersing congregation. She gave no effect of lingering to be spoken to, she was just there and the place was suddenly transformed into a background whose only business was to enhance her dignified beauty and the absolute perfection of her soft green dress.
Melissa knew that her cousin was not waiting for her. She would probably speak to the minister’s wife, Mrs. Simmons, and to a few girls, members of a sewing guild which she had once directed. Then she would stroll in leisurely fashion homeward and resign herself to the quiet monotony of a small town Sunday afternoon. There would be literally nothing for her to do. The
moving picture theatres would be closed, there would be no company unless Mr. Gathers or Mr. Stede dropped by to inquire about chores for the following week.
Melissa wondered how she stood it. She herself once upon a time would have gone strolling with girls, or entertaining in her side yard. Now this was a thing of the past. But there was always Asshur with his selfless devotion and the unobstrusive, unfailing courtesy of Ben Davis and Herbert Tucker. It was conceivable that she might have spent the afternoon by herself in one of her sudden attacks of studiousness. But to spend the day in enforced solitude would be beyond her endurance.
It was while she was thinking of this that she saw Phil Hackett appear suddenly from nowhere, for he had certainly not been in church, and stop in confusion before Laurentine. Evidently up to that moment he had not seen her. Mechanically his hand flew to his hat, he inclined his head, parted his lips to speak. But Laurentine stepping just far enough to the side to avoid touching him walked off down the steps, apparently unconscious that such a person as Hackett ever existed.
Melissa, round-eyed, saw the dark flush mounting painfully to his brow, saw him glance about swiftly to note if anyone else had observed his embarrassment. Evidently no one had unless it was Mrs. Ismay sitting in her car outside the church yard waiting for her husband who for reasons of his own attended service every Sunday morning.
She straightened up from the cushions against which she had been lolling, and crossing the pavement met Laurentine as she passed, still nonchalant and self-possessed, through the gates. The doctor’s wife touched the girl’s hand fleetingly, her arm slid around her waist.
“Miss Strange,—Laurentine—do come home with me and spend the afternoon. You can telephone your mother. Dr. Ismay is going to Trenton after dinner. I shall be all alone.”
Her voice rang absolutely sincere. Laurentine hesitated, yielded. She was literally at the end of her endurance. “Thank you Mrs. Ismay,” she murmured. “I’ll be glad to go with you. You are very kind to ask me.”