The Chinaberry Tree

by Jessie Redmon Fauset

  “No, oh no!”

  “All right, be on time. Good-night, Melissa.”

  “Good-night, Malory.”

  • • • • •

  She went upstairs to her little room which opened from the large room shared by Kitty and Gertrude. She praised Kitty’s party and adored Gertrude’s dress, then yawning and tapping her hand against her mouth she vowed she must go to bed.

  “And if I leave in the morning before you get up you won’t mind will you?”

  Gertrude said they wouldn’t mind anything just so long as the house didn’t burn down and they’d have to go somewhere to finish their much needed sleep. “Hope you didn’t mind my monopolizing your young man, M’lissa.”

  “He isn’t my young man,” she lied languidly. “He comes to see Kitty and I’m around here too and it falls to his lot to take me home.” It was a good sketch she thought and decided to round it off. “He never comes to see me.”

  Even Kitty looked startled at this. “He doesn’t? Why Melissa!”

  “Well he doesn’t.” She remembered Christmas Eve. “He’s been in my house just one time and that was to bring me a package.”

  “Well, I do think!” exclaimed Kitty wider and wider awake. “Melissa you don’t mean to say you’re going to pass Malory up for Asshur Lane?”

  “Who’s Asshur Lane?” her sister interposed sharply.

  “Boy, Melissa used to go with all the time. He’s down in ’Bam now studying agriculture. His uncle’s got a big place out Birneysville way and Asshur expects to run it some day,” said Kitty, yawning and turning sleepy again. “Well, Melissa you certainly surprise me, but there’s no accounting for tastes as the old lady said when she kissed the cow.”

  “No,” said Gertrude slowly, “there certainly isn’t.” And went to bed very thoughtfully.

  • • • • •

  Melissa, blowing the sisters a kiss, passed into her room, closed the door and washed her face carelessly—she was sure of her complexion. But not being as sure of her hair she combed and brushed and twisted that with great solicitude, then donning a pair of gay pajamas she slid into bed. And thought.

  She said to herself. “Asshur—now—Asshur knows about Laurentine and all about Aunt Sal’s funny doings when she was a girl but he would never have spoken to me as Malory did about how to behave if I were going to be his wife and all.” She thought, “I wonder how Malory will take it when he finds out about Laurentine and Aunt Sal and how funny most of the people treat her. It was true,” she considered, staring hard through the heroically opened window at the moon which showed fainter in the grayness of the coming dawn, “it was true that the attitude of the Ismays and above all of Doctor Denleigh ranked higher than the attitude of all the remaining colored people in Red Brook except of course the Browns.”

  And after all none of it was Laurentine’s fault. “And certainly none of it was my fault,” she told herself hotly. She would, she reflected, have to tell Malory. For quite some time she had felt that was inevitable, but she had not meant to acquaint him with the facts until after they were married.

  Now she realized with startling clarity that if she didn’t inform Malory of her Aunt’s irregularities, Malory would hold against her two grievances:

  a.The irregularities themselves.

  b.Her silence on the matter.

  • • • • •

  “Asshur wouldn’t be like that,” her heart advised her stubbornly. “Asshur wouldn’t care if I was illegitimate myself . . . as long as I was a good girl.”—She thought of his letters. “Well of course any man wants his girl to be good.”

  Well she’d have to tell Malory, somehow, sometime—she couldn’t say when. How she hated it! And the thought came to her insistently, that she wouldn’t have been afraid to tell Asshur; Asshur would never let her down. Asshur cared for her, and for her only. No amount of scandal, no degree of misbehavior connected with her relatives, no libel circulated about herself would change Asshur. He would see her with his clear, strong, young eyes and somehow nothing else would enter his field of vision. Vaguely the thought of him comforted her, strengthened her.

  “Well I’ll tell Malory,” she promised herself again. “And if he doesn’t like it, he can—” But she couldn’t finish the flippant phrase. She really was in love with him, and she cared immensely for the kind of life for which she had waited so wearily, and which without effort he represented. No she couldn’t endure it if he did “lump it.”

  A branch tapping against the upper window sash and showing her the breaking day reminded her that she’d better go to sleep.

  “But it hasn’t been such a hot Christmas after all,” she decided settling down more comfortably in her warm pillows.

  • • • • •

  Malory could hardly wait for her to mount the bus before he began his ardent apologies, “I think I was horrid, Melissa. I know I had no right to speak to you as I did last night. You didn’t mean anything and I don’t blame Adamson for keeping you as long as he could. You’re a darn good dancer. . . .

  “There’s just a streak in me that makes me want my girl to be super—that’s all there is to it. It’s not jealousy exactly. I don’t seem to want her to be looked at, or talked about—I guess in my mind I sort of want her to be quiet, almost mousy. . . .”

  Startled she turned her gay young face toward him. “Why how can you say that Malory? It’s precisely because I wasn’t quiet or mousy that you became interested in me. Why think of that first day you met me at Kitty’s. I was the noisiest thing, and I was all over the place ”

  “Yes and that’s the way I want you to keep on being,” he assured her with a vehemence that struck her, all child as she was, as being too pronounced for the occasion. Of course she couldn’t see into his mind and discern the pictures of the deadly, discouraging morning he had spent in the brief hours separating them since the night before.

  He had come downstairs, he had thanked his sisters for their gifts, and had stood rather confidently, expecting some comment on what he in his innocence had selected for them. He had gone to some pains and self-denial to buy each of them a chiffon velvet dress—a black one for Harriett, rather severe and elegant, and a beautiful, brightly dark blue one for Reba. There was a lovely crescent-shaped buckle of brilliant green stones on Harriett’s and a graceful fall of creamy lace on the one he had chosen for Reba. He had surreptitiously borne two of their gowns to the store to be sure of the fit and the salesgirls had shown real, if amused, and slightly pitying interest.

  Reba remarked now on this morning after Christmas that the gowns were much too fine, that there was no place they could use them—”since we never go anywhere,” said she without regret. To-morrow she would take them back and the money would probably keep them in underwear and stockings, “and things,” she ended vaguely, “for a year.”

  Stunned and hurt and bewildered he stood while his mother, down early this morning, raised expressionless eyes and thanked him for the package he had sent her. “I haven’t opened it yet, son, but I’ll get around to it sooner or later. I know it’s something very nice.”

  The utter lifelessness of the scene made him deathly sick. He could, he thought, swoon—or even vomit,—with the disgust it brought him. He remembered, when, as a very little boy, he had gone with his Aunt Viny, all joyous expectancy, to spend a day on a pleasure boat up the river. And as soon as the boat began to move he had become violently ill . . . even when they placed him in a berth he could not get rid of the horrid feeling which enveloped him. It had frightened him so, to think that not even lying down could relieve his indisposition. . . .

  This morning he had gone back to his room without tasting his breakfast, he had sat in his arm chair with the gay chintz cover which he had pathetically picked out—”the wildest thing you have in the store,” he had told the clerk—and had let a sort of frightening stupor creep over him. Frightening because it made him afraid that the awful secret curse which enshrouded his mother and sisters migh
t some day—soon—enshroud him. And then he had thought of Melissa, so bright, so blithe, so alive . . . and he had caught up his hat and coat and dashed out into the gay December sunshine, only to remember with a catch in his throat that almost brought him to tears, that last night he had actually chidden her. He, Malory had dared to rebuke Melissa! Very much as though the gray, cold earth had dared to rebuff the sun!

  He was really very contrite.

  Melissa, happy and confident once more, smiled at him. She was infinitely relieved. Even so she would have to tell him, she decided. But even after she did it would be all right. “He needs me,” she said to herself over and over again, not guessing the cause of that need. “He needs me and so everything will really be all right. Any coothead could see that.”

  They were both of them divinely, devastatingly hungry. Malory because in his disgust he had walked off without anything to eat, Melissa partly because she had been too delicate to invade the Brown’s kitchen if no one was there, partly because she was afraid to tackle Pelasgie Stede if she were in charge.

  “She dislikes me,” she told Malory. “I don’t know why.”

  “And I know you don’t care,” Malory answered. “Who cares about the Brown’s maid?”

  The day was fine and bright and sharp, the bus was only a third full and ran briskly and with a most engaging crunch over the fine dry snow. On the banks of the road beneath the brown trees it lay compact and undisturbed, like a smoothly laid blanket. The sky was very blue, some schoolchildren in bright red caps and mittens scurried into the woods, their skates in their hands toward some not too remote frozen little stream. Two of the little boys had new sleds.

  “If only we had skates or a sled!” Melissa sighed to Malory.

  Presently it was their stop and right about the bend was the little white road house and the hospitable Greek. He was pock-marked and wore a villainous red stuff muffler about his throat, but he was a good chef, heaven alone only being able to solve how he had come by his knowledge of American cookery.

  They went into the little back-room and the Greek built a fire in the blackened chimney and piled on it logs damp enough to sizzle. And they ate turkey soup with onions in it, and roast turkey and stuffing with chestnuts, cranberry sauce, stewed canned corn, tomato and lettuce salad. Melissa had forgotten to bring her little package of celery which the Brown girls discovered several days later in her little room and wondered how it had got there. But the Greek with composure and nonchalance produced some very white and hard, and Melissa pronounced it better than what they had had at home.

  Malory declared they had eaten for hours. And afterwards they walked six of the fifteen miles home along a path in the woods which ran almost parallel with the road. Both of them were on wings, and happier, they felt than they could ever possibly be again in their lives.

  Melissa voicing some indefinable doubt said: “It must be all right Malory for us to love each other and to get married—we feel so good about it.”

  He stared at her. “All right? Why I should say! Oh gosh, Melissa to think that you should be in the world and I should be in it too, the same years, the same place—we might so easily have missed each other. And here you are just the girl for me.”

  She asked wonderingly: “How can you possibly know that?”

  “Because you are me—I’m you. I recognized you the moment I met you. You’re the other part of me—like—like a shell and what it contains. I had in me all these dark, vacant spaces, and you had the gifts with which to fill them—light, richness, life itself,—why Melissa, if I were to lose you now, I guess I’d die. And we see things alike, we’re both proud and we’re both ambitious, we both want the best. We both realize that the world is full of beauty and loveliness and we both mean to get our share of them.”

  Standing there in the little woods all sharply etched in white and brown they kissed under the last brilliance of the dying winter sun.

  Afterwards they found the bus and rode home almost in silence. Fortified with magazines and the memory of his dear girl and the beautiful day, Malory felt he could endure the dank, gloomy house. And anyway his room would be bright and gay.

  Melissa stole in through the side door and scampered up to her room. Presently she came down to the kitchen to find Aunt Sal looking in the ice-box. “Hello! That you Melissa? Did you have a good time? Laurentine’s gone over to Mrs. Ismay’s, so I let the girls off. How’d you like to have just a mite of turkey—it’s always so good the second day, or here’s some ham and the greens we had left from the day before Christmas!”

  Melissa opined that she’d had enough turkey for one while. “Think I’d like the ham and greens. Let’s have it out here in the kitchen, Aunt Sal. I’ll make some teeny, weeny baking-powder biscuits, just enough for you and me,” she said smiling happily. She liked to be alone with Aunt Sal. She wished she dared confide some of her precious secrets to her—to Aunt Sal, who she knew must be able to keep secrets safe and well.

  CHAPTER XXIX

  IT had been a lovely day, a perfect day, a most satisfactory day and yet that night again she dreamed her horrible dream.

  Again she saw the road; she saw herself running, running to overtake that queer, shuffling figure. Again she had the feeling that she knew who the figure was and again dreaded worse than she dreaded death to have it turn around. Long before daybreak she awoke; there were beads of sweat on her brow, indeed there was a fine perspiration over her whole body. For a while she lay there, spent and exhausted . . . thinking not so much of the dream as of what would become of her, if this sort of thing continued . . . shivering at the thought of how terrible it would be if this dream should be realized.

  And suddenly she knew it would be realized. She said to herself: “This is really going to happen. I wonder what will/become of me then.” And with that thought came the memory that Asshur, she was sure it was Asshur, was also in the dream . . . if the reality of it ever came to pass, undoubtedly he would be in that reality. Her shivering ceased, she lay quiet, revelling in the warmth of the cozy bed and in her knowledge of the comfort which her room contained. She snapped on the light and with relief, picked out its dear accessories, the comfortable arm chair, the purple and gold hangings flapping slightly in the chilly morning breeze entering the half-opened window, the familiar little dressing table with its secret store of cosmetics. . . . She must get some more powder, she would get two shades, ochre and white, that would make just the right combination for her; she had seen Gertrude Brown mix them and she and Gertrude were of about the same color.

  Thinking on such commonplace things she grew vital and normal again. . . . It was Christmas Week, she didn’t have to go to school the next day, didn’t even have to get up very early if she didn’t care to. It was fun lying here in the “stilly night”—she had been struck by the words which she had read in a poem prescribed for supplementary reading in her English—it was fun to be thinking, living, breathing softly, consciously, like this, just keeping oneself alive. . . . She wondered why Gertrude Brown never wore green, she ought to look very well in it; “even better than me,” she decided, dispassionately critical. . . . She wondered, drowsily, if Gertrude Brown really liked Malory. . . .

  Malory!

  Her heavy lids flew wide open. Malory! Why hadn’t she thought of him? Why hadn’t he appeared both in her mind and in her dream to rescue her from this terrifying crisis, this portentous happening that crouched, she was sure of it, just round the corner of her future, waiting like a dragon, to devour, not her life, but her happiness, her peace, her sense of well-being?

  And after a while it was borne in on her why Malory could not come to help her . . . shivering, she put her head under the covers and lay there as in an ague for a long while. But finally, she emerged calmer, and spoke aloud to herself once more in the eerie silence of the early day.

  “Asshur will be there.” She called his name softly to the corners of the dainty room. . . . Reassured, she arose, and throwing her violet robe over
corn-colored pajamas, went over to her dresser and drew out a packet of letters—Asshur’s. On her way back to the warm bed she stopped at the little dressing table, pulled out Asshur’s wrist watch and fastened it with slim shaking fingers about her amber-tinted wrist.

  So, she was safe.

  • • • • •

  Morning found her restored and refreshed. She opened eyes on a bright sun that showed dazzlingly on the snow that lay in the back yard. The branches of the Chinaberry Tree which she glimpsed right well from her window though the tree was more directly below Laurentine’s, bore feathery ruffs of the powdery substance—Melissa thought she’d like to stand under them and knock the stuff off and feel it fall cold and stinging against her warm cheek. . . .

  She glanced at the watchband which surprisingly clasped her wrist, and remembering her fantastic fears of the night before, took it off smiling. As though anything could happen! “Dear old Asshur,” she murmured and forgot him again.

  To-day she would not see Malory. After she had finished her household stints she was to go over to school and see a performance of certain acts of “Le Voyage de Monsieur Perrichon.” Probably none of her friends would be over there, excepting Ben Davis, Malory being long since beyond the enjoyment of such elementary stuff. He had had a pretty stiff course of the language in Philadelphia and was now reading Loti and even Proust. French did hot come easily to Melissa, her ear played her unexpected tricks but she was immensely tickled by Labiche’s little masterpiece, so she had read and reread several times the few scenes which were to be enacted, and anticipated a good laugh.

  On the whole she was glad not to be seeing Malory to-day. Not because he wearied her, she always wanted to see him, but because she hated so to be deceiving Aunt Sal. She did not mind it in the case of Laurentine; Laurentine had brought this situation on herself but her aunt was different. More than once the young girl thought of confiding in this woman who without ostentation had already mothered her far more than Judy. But something curiously delicate held her back. Aunt Sal she knew could have no objection to Malory, a fine, decent upstanding lad, her aunt would have said, but the two young people meant to marry in June and Laurentine’s mother might not like Melissa to marry before her daughter.