The Chinaberry Tree

by Jessie Redmon Fauset

  Mrs. Ismay was enraptured. “Oh, Laurentine, it’ll be wonderful! Nobody thinks of such delightful color combinations as you, or gets such lovely lines. When I think how humbly I went to your house that time asking you to make me just the plainest sort of a dress—a mere fig-leaf as it were!”

  “And I suppose I was so haughty!”

  “Oh, absolutely! Frozen, unapproachable! I raved about you even then. I came home and said to Doctor: ‘Positively, Doctor, that Strange girl.’ . . .”

  “Millie, if you start all that nonsense about me again!”

  “All right then, I won’t. You know I thought I really wouldn’t speak to you again.”

  “And then you came up to me after all, that Sunday. I can imagine how lonely and forlorn I looked!”

  “You didn’t, you looked like a lovely statue. I wanted Doc to see you and judge you for himself. You know you really did bowl him over that Sunday afternoon.”

  “I don’t know about that. But I know that that was the beginning of the nicest days I’ve ever spent in my life.”

  Mrs. Ismay smiled, “That wasn’t because of your meeting Doctor and me, that was because you met Denleigh for the first time. Is he coming here tonight?”

  Laurentine affecting a casualness which she was far from feeling, her lovely face faintly flushing, would say she was sure she didn’t know.

  • • • • •

  But of course he always came, as he came on one special night which Laurentine treasured in her memory. The coolness of the November weather had subsided, had stepped aside, so to speak, to allow one final gesture of departed Summer. Mrs. Ismay, in her blue pajamas, Laurentine in a deep peach dress, with still deeper tinted lace arranged in the smart, sparse fashion of the day at neck and wrists, Mrs. Brown, Kitty’s mother, encased trimly in a cleverly modern black and white gown, were playing bridge with Dr. Ismay. He was impatient to be on with the game and yet half pleased too to recline, a spare, resigned figure in his chair and wait for their chatter to die down a bit and give the game a chance. It gave him a gratefully accepted opportunity to study Laurentine, whose beauty and grace always afforded him the satisfaction obtained by looking at a beautiful piece of art.

  Denleigh’s arrival was the signal for the game to break up. Dr. Ismay always rebelled at this. “Confound it, Stephen, why is it these women never can play after you come in? Seems to me I never have a satisfactory game of bridge any more. Here Laurentine, child, let’s see that scorer!”

  Laurentine obediently passed it over. She loved this moment, she loved the manner in which Denleigh after greeting his hosts and any chance guests, found his way to her side, and paused there, remained there, utterly content.

  “Well,” said Mrs. Ismay, “we might just as well break up. You know in five minutes, you’d be clamoring to play Black Jack with Stephen anyway. Here, I’ll put this little table over here so as not to disturb him and you can bring your chair up. No, don’t move Laurentine. I’ve got the best mousse in the world for us. I thought since to-day was so warm that we might try that kind of refreshment just once more. It seems so nice and summery.”

  She served her dainty repast. The men deep in their game, stopped and wolfed theirs down. Laurentine and Mrs. Brown and Mrs. Ismay ate slowly, dwelling on unimportant nothings. Mrs. Brown, remembering Kitty’s overwhelming desire for one of Laurentine’s creations, approached the matter obliquely.

  “Mrs. Ismay’s pajamas are lovely, Miss Strange. She says you designed them.”

  “And made them,” struck in Mrs. Ismay before Laurentine could answer. “She says I’m the first colored woman in Red Brook, she believes, to be wearing lounging pajamas.”

  “Except myself, of course,” Laurentine interposed, laughing. “I’ve had some beautiful green ones for two or three months now. I usually try these exotic styles out on myself before I allow my clients to take them seriously. I think Millie’s are very smart, myself. You ought to have some too, Mrs. Brown. A black and white combination like that dress you’re wearing would be splendid for you.”

  “I imagine it would be hard to get them to set right, isn’t it?”

  “Oh no,” said Laurentine, warming to her subject. “Patterns nowadays are very easy to follow. I cut mine out myself—I usually do draft patterns for myself. But my cousin, Melissa, doesn’t know how to draft, so when she made her pajamas—she usually has one of everything I have—she just bought a pattern and followed it carefully. She has a beautiful pair—brown and white they are.” With some faint idea of making amends to Melissa for any possible injustice, she added graciously, “She’s a clever young one.”

  “That’s right, she is your cousin,” said Mrs. Brown, rocking comfortably. “I know you live in the same house, but I never think of you as being related. Wonder why? Yes, she is clever and bright. My Kitty is very much taken with her. I just left her at my house as I came out, talking to Malory. I suppose you know him?” she asked idly.

  But Laurentine said placidly that she didn’t know any Malorys. Mrs. Brown, on the verge of remarking that Malory was only his first name, lost interest in the conversation as Mrs. Ismay came in with the mousse. Mrs. Brown loved good cheer and as the ice was as attractive in appearance as it proved later to be in flavor, her attention was completely diverted.

  Laurentine thought in amusement: “The little wretch! I might have known she’d manage to get ahead of me. I can’t have her meeting boys on the outside, though. Guess eventually I’ll have to let him come to call. I wonder who these Malorys are. I’ll ask Stephen.” But with the consciousness of his name in her mind she forgot all about Malory and Melissa too, remembering only that soon this pleasantly uneventful evening would be over and that she and Stephen would be going home.

  • • • • •

  They left at last. Denleigh gallantly crowded Mrs. Brown into the car with himself and Lauren-tine. She lived only two blocks away. At last she too had left them and the man and woman faced each other in the tingling excitement which was more precious to him even than to her, since he had long since thought never to know its like again.

  “I almost wish we didn’t have the car,” he complained. “It’s such a heavenly night. I can put it up and walk—shall we?”

  But she had a better plan; a plan whose significance not even he could divine. Since the night was indeed so heavenly, the sky so clear, the stars so twinkling, the air so mellow and balmy, yet invigorating, they would drive around to her house and sit for awhile under the Chinaberry Tree.

  She was trembling with inward eagerness. The trivial incident had for her the force of a ritual. She had ridden, walked and talked with Hackett, but she had never sat with him beneath the Tree. Perhaps silently she was pledging herself to Denleigh.

  Afterwards she remembered how he looked as he sat there. He had on a light-weight overcoat and a soft hat which he wore well over his eyes, but this, later, he pulled off and removing her little cap let his well-shaped head rest lightly against hers. By moving her rounded face ever so slightly, she could feel the thrilling roughness of his closely-shaven cheek against her own. She put up her hand and gently touched the little, carefully-shaped patch of hair before his ear. She felt a strange, permeating sense of well-being in being thus close to him, in being so intimate. It seemed to her she sensed for the first time the oneness which a successful marriage could bring, with no idea of its social benefits or security. Denleigh caught her hand and laid it against his lips, then moving closer to her, he sat, his arm about her, long legs stretched out well in front of him, a cigarette in his left hand, his dear face against her hair

  She thought of Melissa, Asshur, the Chinaberry Tree and almost swooned with satisfaction. But aloud she said, looking toward his shapely, sizable shoes, “You have good understandings, haven’t you, Stephen?”

  And his laughing answer, “The better to support you with, my dear.”

  • • • • •

  Ah, no moments with Hackett had ever been like these—she doubted i
f any moments, no matter how perfect their setting, could ever have been like these with her first lover. And suddenly, she who knew nothing about men, knew completely the difference between the love of a man like Denleigh and that of a man like Hackett. Never had she felt like this. It seemed to her she needed no further proof of his loyalty—the fact that he was able to afford her this complete, this absolute sense of peace, of well-being with the world, was sufficient proof that he was as much hers as she was her own possession. And one does not mention one’s loyalty to one’s self.

  At the next opportunity she would make him any promise he wanted. And they could marry—any time they wanted, she suddenly discovered. Almost she was ready to shout at the knowledge of her small independence. She had some few savings—why, she had a dowry, a French girl’s dot. Suddenly she saw the value of a system which she in common with most Americans had despised. Denleigh had been heavily taxed by his former marriage, his divorce, and his wife’s fatal illness. If necessary he could use her money and they would start all over again. Alone, poor. Eminently practical person though she was, she liked that. They’d have a little house—away from pitying Melissa—thank God—she smiled in the darkness—and away from her mother. But her mother would like that. She knew her mother!

  If he wanted her to, she would keep on sewing, or she’d give it up, and just keep house for him. She’d cook and sew—cook food and sew on clothing which he had bought for her. She’d have to go to him for money . . . and perhaps there’d be children, his first wife had never given him a child.

  “Oh Stephen, Stephen,” she thought like all loving women the world over. “We’re going to be so happy! Stephen, you’ll be so surprised when you speak to me. . . .”

  • • • • •

  But although Stephen spoke, he did not speak of love. Instead he began to talk to her, as men do to the women they love and trust, about himself, about his youth, about that strange, far-off, lonely little boy which he had been, years and years ago.

  “Lonely, even though I had ten brothers and sisters, Laurentine. I was the youngest. I was my mother’s pet. The older children resented, half laughingly the love she bore me; my father, I see it now, was half jealous of the hold which I had on her attention. . . . She was a wonderful woman, not beautiful like you, but brave and courageous, undaunted—she’d have moved heaven and earth to get the things she wanted for her children and husband. . . . She’d have gone through hell for me.”

  They had been poor people in Charleston, South Carolina. But, at first, happy. His father had kept a store—he was genial, he meant well, the neighbors liked him. In a way prosperity shone on him and yet a persistent bad luck. He tried to educate his children. “But eleven children are too many for even a rich man to look after,” Denleigh said musing. “The ones he educated died before he did, the others rebelled and started out in easy openings that got them nowhere. And then they died. Strong fellows too, they were.”

  Presently the father died—of grief and disappointment and of the ceaseless, unequal struggle forced on him by life. He knew he was dying. He called Stephen to him, the lad was but eleven. He said, “My boy, as long as you live, I know your mother will be looked after.”

  Laurentine fought to keep the tears back. So much responsibility for such a very little boy!

  “I did look after her,” he told her. “Of course I was childish, but there were things I could do. I ran errands, I cleaned house. The two boys next oldest to me worked in the brickyard. Mother wouldn’t let me work there—she said I wasn’t strong enough. Really I was as tough as a brickbat. But I love to think she saved me from it—I hated that kind of work and the rough men. I did work there for a brief spell but I got out of it. I played on her sympathy. I can see myself now, a miserable, snuffling brat. . . . At night I’d come home, bury my head in her shoulder and whine: ‘I have the hardest time of any little chillen. . . .’ My brothers teased me about it for years! . . .

  “Days when she went out, she used to give me the money to buy the dinner. I had to get nourishing food and enough of it for those hungry boys, the three girls, my mother and myself. Believe me, I was some shopper!

  “Know what I used to do? I used to get on the trail of hucksters and vegetable men. When they’d got to the fag end of their produce and of their own strength, I’d sidle up to them and ask them how much they wanted for what was left. I drove some mighty shrewd bargains, I tell you.

  “Only sometimes you know, inasmuch as I bought whatever was left, I’d have to repeat the menu if a huckster this day was over-stocked with the same vegetables as the huckster whom I had cleaned out the day before. I can hear my brothers now revolting after the third dinner running of mustard greens.

  “‘You Stevie, you! Bet if you bring in any more of this grass to-morrow, we just about gonna bust yo’ head!’”

  He laughed. “I don’t know myself how I got away from it all. Mother of course was back of it. From some place, she produced enough money to send me to Washington. My father had left her a house. She took in roomers, she ran the store. At first she used to keep me. But I picked up jobs. I was wiry and willing, fairly apt at my books. I got through High School, went to Howard, there were still six long years before me. But by that time I had got in with the fellows. We used to go away in the summer time and work on the boats. God! How my feet ached me! In the early fall I’d bum auto rides from New York all the way down to Charleston. Many a time I’ve done the last fifty miles on foot. My mother would wash and iron and mend for me. And I’d get back by standing in with some colored porter on the train. He’d hide me away in a baggage car. . . . But it was a great life. Seeing the obstacles loom up, disappear. Watching the years dwindle till finally there was only one . . . then interneship and the state board and the fun!”

  “And the nurses.”

  “And the nurses! Gosh, they were pretty. And the city girls! Phew! And the tempting welcome given to young fellows, homesick and lonely and on their uppers! The Sunday night suppers, the pleasant mother, the hospitable father, the ravishing girl. . . .”

  “Whom you married.”

  “Yes, I married her. . . . I tell you, Laurentine, I wouldn’t repeat that part of my life for anything, and I wouldn’t be without it. Marriage is heaven—and it can so easily be hell. She was spoilt—and to my amazement, in spite of my hard life, I realized I was spoilt. But I didn’t know it until too late. My mother, my family had all thought me wonderful, you know. I thought so myself. . . . I had been so used to consulting only my own wishes, it never entered my head seriously to consider another’s. She was beautiful, an only girl.

  “Her father, mother, brothers had indulged her from her birth. She didn’t know what self-denial, or self-control meant. I wasn’t much better. And when she found she couldn’t get her own way with me, she went to some one with whom she thought she could . . . and from him to another and then to another. I hated her for betraying me . . . she hated the man whose severity and lack of understanding forced her into that betrayal.”

  Perhaps it was the broken moonlight raining through the Chinaberry leaves that made his face look so old.

  “Yet when she was dying she sent for me. Poor girl. . . . You know, Laurentine, there really is something about marriage.”

  “I’m sure there is, Stephen.”

  “Everybody should suffer before he marries. Suffering makes for understanding and clarity more than anything I know.” He rose and looked down at her, “You’ll understand me, Laurentine? You’ll see me clear?”

  Her answer was a vow. “Oh, I will, Stephen, I will.”

  “And I will, too,” she told herself as she picked her way carefully through the darkened house.

  CHAPTER XXIV

  ON Saturday she drove into the country with him. The spell of their last talk was still on them, it seemed to surround them with an aura as sacred as a consecration. The balmy weather was continuing, though Aunt Sal had predicted a change. She came down to the gate after they had got in th
e car, bearing Laurentine’s dark green coat with its smart beaver collar.

  “Best take it with you, daughter.”

  Denleigh sprang out of the car, hat in hand, took the coat and held the gate open for her to re-enter.

  She beamed at him loving his petits soins.

  Denleigh waited until the straight, slender figure had gone up the path, waved good-bye and the two started off.

  “She’s been great stuff to you, I’ll bet, hasn’t she, Laurentine?”

  “You can’t imagine! And it hasn’t always been easy.”

  “In a way, no. In another way, yes. After all, she’s had what she wanted out of life, hasn’t she?”

  “Oh, Stephen, how can you ask that? Every woman wants security, unquestioned position, good standing. She’s had none of those.”

  “I’ll bet you never heard her bemoan the lack of them. I tell you, Laurentine, a woman like your mother is perfectly willing to pay the piper as far as she herself is concerned. Any suffering she’s done, aside from the loss of her husband, he was really that, you know, she’s done for your sake, I’m sure of it.”

  Laurentine looked at him in astonishment. “How can you say that? If she was suffering for my sake why didn’t she take me away from here, why didn’t she take me some place where I wouldn’t have been known? Then I wouldn’t have had to suffer and she needn’t have suffered for me.”

  “That’s easily seen into,” he answered, guiding the little car past whole fields of goldenrod, gay flower-beds and the cozy homes of northern Jersey. “Why haven’t you gone away from here long ago? Partly because you feel you owe it to your mother to remain, partly because you don’t want these people here to feel they can drive you out. And she doesn’t go or she didn’t go (I doubt if she thinks of it now) partly because she didn’t want these people to feel they could run her away, but far, far more for your father’s sake.”