The Chinaberry Tree

by Jessie Redmon Fauset

  • • • • •

  Malory and Gertrude had politely refused to play, withdrawing in favor of Mrs. Brown. But there were snap-shots of scenes at Wellesley to be examined and James Weldon Johnson’s “God’s Trombones” to be read. And then Gertrude played. Not jazzy songs such as Kitty invariably rendered but lovely, touching things like “Songs My Mother Taught Me,” and “The Old Refrain,” and a hauntingly beautiful, modern tune “Falling in Love Again.” The card-players in the back-room broke up, came in. Herbert Tucker in a fine baritone sang along with Gertrude. Dr. Brown leaned across the piano, humming, and was suddenly and joyously young once more.

  Everything contributed bewitchingly to the realization that life was going on as it should,—in a home. And with the realization came the thought to Malory of the home which some day he hoped to make. And with the thought came the vision of Melissa straining her eyes, fearfully looking for him under the Chinaberry Tree.

  It was half-past eleven; the evening, as Dr. Brown remarked mildly, was still young; Tucker said if he would wait a while longer, he would walk a piece with him. But, declining, he caught up his hat and hastened out. He had an errand to perform for his mother he told them worriedly. He hated to leave but he hated much more to think of Melissa, after having worked hard all day, in her disappointment. He almost ran across the town through the quiet, fragrant streets that were so alluring. . . . But when he got to Melissa’s house, surprisingly she wasn’t there. . . .

  • • • • •

  No one but Gertrude had observed his confusion. She said to herself: “Why should he be so upset, and whom could he possibly be going to see for his mother at this time of night? . . . I know he wasn’t going on any errand but where was he going?” . . . He was at her house again the next evening, enjoying himself obviously, but at eleven he arose and with quiet determination announced his intention of leaving. And suddenly as clearly as though he had told her she knew he was going to see Melissa. . . . But why, why, thus “clandestinely”? she said to her self. She had a great habit of using words correctly even when communing with herself; slang with her was an acquisition, a deliberate one; she really was an intellectual; if her blood had run a little less hot in her veins, she might easily have gone her ways to a nunnery. . . .

  It was this habit of thinking matters out precisely and in detail that aided her now. She bore Melissa no ill-will, she really felt, in spite of her mounting passion for young Forten, that there would be no gain in her attempting to intervene, “just so,” between Malory and this girl. “But there is something queer about their meeting in secret,” she said to herself and in that queerness might lie the one fact which could react to her advantage.

  She thought she could understand why the Stranges, “poor things,” might not want Melissa to have company. Not that they might have been afraid of her heritage,—Gertrude, reading Melissa like a wide-open book knew that nothing with her would ever outweigh the value of ultimate respectability,—but because they knew that she, a poor dependent, would have to earn her living and they did not want her to marry until she was equipped to meet life. Lots of parents and guardians were like that.

  But she could not understand Malory. Malory, she knew was at heart a gentleman, no girl, if it were left to him, need feel that her fair name must be imperilled because of his heedlessness. . . . He had a mother and two “terribly respectable” sisters. What could have been easier than for him to lay the case before them and to have them invite the girl over to their house? Most people would prefer to do that rather than to have their only son and brother “running around.” . . . But of course they probably were unaware that he was “running around.” . . . It seemed a needless sort of mystery.

  The very next day Malory deepened its needlessness. He had seen Melissa; the child was tired from her school work, the unseasonable weather and her steady confinement to Laurentine’s sewing-room. Added to this she had, all through this holiday been revisited by her dream,—it had a vampire-ish quality of sapping away her vitality—of course of this last she had told Malory nothing. She had bade him wearily to amuse himself as best he could without her . . . almost, under the influence of the hateful haunting nightmare she had said: “That’s what you’ll finally have to do anyway. I don’t believe we’re ever going to be able to get together.”

  He had never seen her washed out and lifeless like this. Something of her depression communicated itself to him. He felt let-down, apprehensive. . . . In addition to this Reba had remonstrated with him for staying so much away from the house.

  “What do you do with yourself, Malory? It isn’t as though you hadn’t a comfortable home.”

  And he had rushed out of the place banging the rusty and rotting screen-door which irritated him so. “You don’t call this a home, I hope!” he had flung back at her dim, futilely worried figure. The very wrinkles, the very crowsfeet which sullied what otherwise might have been a very fair countenance angered him past endurance. “What in God’s name has she got to be worried about? What’s eating them?” he asked himself in the insensate fury to which they so often reduced him.

  And because he hadn’t Melissa to talk to and because after all, even at twenty-one, he was a badly-frightened, unhappy, nervous, little boy, before he knew it he had blurted his woes out to Gertrude. Not of course about Melissa, but about his miserable home-life and the secret persistent misery which spread, penetrating like some malignant mist about and through everything. . . .

  They were out walking in the lovely weather. Gertrude turned her clear, cool face toward him, spoke to him in her clear, cool voice. She asked him no questions, she pointed out to him how blest he was to be of a different stripe from his relatives. “You yourself, Malory, suggest such a different environment; you’re going to be such a truly remarkable man with your keen mind and your appreciation of everything that is lovely.” In no time she had sustained and uplifted his fainting spirit.

  She took him home; Dr. Brown of course was out, and so was Mrs. Brown. It was Pelasgie’s day off, but Kitty was there. . . . Her sister however refused to be a party to this campaign; she withdrew disdainfully to her room. But Gertrude didn’t care . . . she was a wise woman . . . she was able to do for him what Melissa, she surmised shrewdly, had never been able to do—fix him a meal. The table, spread intimately for two, wore an aspect of spring itself with its combination of yellow jonquils and green glassware, and its daintily arranged but nourishing salad and knic-knacs.

  Gertrude moved about, serene and restful, like a pastel nymph in her delicate pinks and rosy tans. “Easy on the eye,” Malory thought even in the midst of his fast-vanishing unhappiness. In spite of his fondness for words and literature he liked slang, believing that it had about it an exactness, an appositeness that nothing, no other form of expression, equalled.

  He stayed until just before dinner-time when he left, immensely appeased and comforted. “Of course I’d like to stay,” he acknowledged sturdily in response to her delicate urging, “but I can’t have your folks thinking that I’ve changed my lodgings.” He actually went off whistling down the walk.

  • • • • •

  But she was not so happy. On the contrary she was infinitely depressed, immeasurably disturbed. For a long time after his departure she sat in their pleasant living-room biting her lower lip, holding an unlighted cigarette in her carefully manicured fingers. Assailed by a grave, by a serious doubt, she arose and walked the length of the room, her hand resting on her hip. “Only one thing,” she told herself slowly, “only one thing in this world could make people act as crazy as that and that would be for them to be crazy. I wonder if that’s it. I wonder if those Fortens are half insane and know it and don’t want Malory to know it. . . .

  “But I’ve got to know it,” she told herself firmly, “I’ve got to find out about this. . . . Now how am I going to do it?” She was a selfish girl, but this rather unsophisticated, unsuspecting lad awoke in her the finest, gentlest sympathies which she was ever t
o know. “Poor Malory,” she thought to herself, “even if the rest of them are tainted, perhaps I can save you . . . I’ll do anything I can to help you, Malory, Malory!” . . . But what could she do?

  • • • • •

  The impossibility of her task never deterred her. Characteristically enough, her mind leaped to no impulse of action. Rather she sat down and took stock of where she was, what she knew, what she might learn and the time she had in which to collect her knowledge. Clearly she, who had never associated with any of the rank and file of the Red Brookians, except quite literally, Melissa, Ben Davis, Herbert Tucker and Malory himself, must find, and must find in less than a week, some one who knew all about the Fortens, some one who didn’t talk and yet must be made to talk; some one who would know how to keep quiet when once that talking was over.

  “In Red Brook,” said Gertrude to herself quite seriously, “there ain’t no such animal.”

  There was no use approaching Kitty, granted that she had known anything. Kitty was whole-heartedly for Melissa. Gertrude, feeling her way, had ventured some slight remark about Malory which her sister ignored. Strangely but logically enough she harked back to a former conversation which the two of them had held on the first evening of Gertrude’s homecoming.

  “There’s no use,” she said to her sister, “reminding me of what I did to Claudia Temple about Jerry Adamson. You know there’s no comparison between the two cases. Taking Malory away from Melissa Paul with the odds she has against her and all, is just like taking candy from a baby and you know it. . . .” A peaceable, easy-going girl by nature, she was for once violently angry. “You make me sick, Gertrude Brown, if you ask me.” . . . She mumbled to herself: “What in the devil did Pelasgie do with my green slip? She only puts away the things you want to wear and then she hides them.”

  Gertrude said evenly: “You know how mother hates to hear a girl swear.” Kitty went out and slammed the door.

  Her distaste had made Gertrude wince. Preferring, it is true, her own somewhat devious methods to Kitty’s straightforwardness, she possessed none the less considerable admiration for her sister; she disliked forfeiting the latter’s careless good-will. . . . Well she’d have to do without it for a season. . . . The question now was how could she, with discretion, find out what she wanted to know about Malory’s family? It was not easy to probe too openly into the affairs of a man whom you were planning to marry. . . . And suddenly her subconscious mind working on after her conscious attention had strayed away from the subject in hand answered: “Pelasgie” . . .

  Of course, Pelasgie! Not that Pelasgie was safe, not that Pelasgie was discreet, only that Pelasgie properly stimulated would talk and never know that she had been incited to talk. Pelasgie, Gertrude rightly guessed, would talk gladly about anyone, provided only that she might let her venom have full sway. Pelasgie, embattled as she was against the whole of colored Red Bank, could hardly open her mouth about any one without immediately telling you the worst.

  • • • • •

  Gertrude asked her to wash her hair in the morning. The only understanding dresser of colored hair was as far away as Morristown; Gertrude thought Pelasgie might just as well earn that money and save herself the trip. Pelasgie thought so too. But Gertrude was doomed to disappointment. Mentioning Mr. Malory Forten’s name as a bait elicited from the current hair-dresser only the remark that she was glad to see Malory “comin’ eround to see you a spell, Miss Gertrude. Take some of the shine outa that high and mighty Melissa Paul, think-so-much-of-hers’ef ever-sence-you-all-tuk-’er up. But ev’ybody ’round yere know that bad Strange blood, yessir-ee.”

  That seemed to be that. And after all there were limits. You couldn’t discuss your sister’s pal with a girl like Pelasgie. Furthermore clearly she knew nothing about Malory and anyway, as later she let fall, she had lived in Red Brook only three years. . . . Disappointed, Gertrude talked bravely on the weather, on Pelasgie’s hat à la Princesse Eugénie [and how that poor lady would have been glad to be in a position to discuss that libel!], on the flowers which her mother placed daily on the table these days.

  “Come outa you-all’s back yard,” said Pelasgie blithely. “Didn’t you know it? My uncle Jonathan plants ’em and spades ’em ev’y year. What he don’t know about flowers ain’t nuthin’. He tend to all these flowers around yere.”

  “Can he make a living at it?” asked Gertrude politely surprised.

  “Don’t hafta,” Pelasgie answered with a pride which would certainly have amazed old Mr. Stede. “Seems like there ain’t nuthin’ he can’t do when it comes to beautifyin’ a place. . . . There ain’t nuthin’ he can’t do, ’n nuthin’ he don’t know about things;—’n come to think of it about people, too.”

  “How do you mean about people?”

  “I just mean about people; he knows about ’em, knows about their affairs, their secrets, their pains and troubles . . . on’y you can’t get him to say nuthin’ about ’em. But remember! You ain’t never see nuthin’ like it. Used to live down next to the For tens years ago; he could tell you to this day ev’ything about them; when them two crazy sisters was born, how old they is,—’thout doin’ no substraction; whut they used to eat for dinner Sundays. You oughta hear Matilda Gathers’ father tell how ole Uncle Jonathan knowed he wus goin’ to marry before he knowed, hise’f.”

  “My!” said Gertrude, choosing her language carefully and wondering if she gave visible evidence of the excitement simmering within her, “he sounds like a fortune teller. I’d like to see a man as remarkable as that.”

  “Lan’ sakes Miss Gertrude, ain’t you never see Uncle Johnathan? Why he out in your back yard now. He’s liable to be there off’n on all this week.”

  • • • • •

  Of course she hunted him up. But the old man was more than a match for her. She found out about his weakness and plied him with trays heaped full of the coarse substantial food which his system so persistently craved. She praised his flower-beds, she made herself acquainted with the names of people in Red Brook of whose existence she had never dreamed. Many of them indeed she was destined never to see. The names of these people, introduced at random into her casual conversation, brought from him no response except the mention of Pelasgie whom he declared consistently in a voice absolutely unmodulated by the knowledge of her proximity in the kitchen, to be more ungrateful than a sea-serpent’s tooth.

  The introduction of the Eppses, the Simmonses, the Traceys, the Gatherses into their talk brought from him only the briefest of glances from his old light eyes. If she mentioned the Stranges or Melissa, if she as much as touched on the catering business in connection with the Fortens, he grew either entirely silent or talked with simply no relevancy whatever about the weather, Pentecost, a “green Christmas,” and spring onions.

  She was a smart girl but he had seen many smart girls and he knew that none of them bothered with an old, dirty faded man like himself unless some purpose lurked in their minds. He had known from the very first day that she wanted him to talk to her about the Fortens and he had also known that he had no intention of so doing.

  Saturday came and she was leaving Sunday. In the afternoon she sought him out. He was, with his clumsy movements which so often, so amazingly produced such delicate results, gathering his tools together . . . wishing she would let him alone . . . he was an old man and weary . . . it took strength to set one’s will against such a person as she. But she was a younger woman, intent on the business of life. “Mr. Stede,” she told him, her eyes, as impenetrable as his own, holding his gaze, “I’ve got daddy’s Ford down at the gate and I’m going to drive you home.”

  Well after all she’d be gone in a day or two; he’d soon be rid of her. “These young gals, can’t nobody manage ’em at all these days,” he fretted within himself. He sat, drooped down despairingly, in the car, his thin beard sweeping his chest. Almost before she had left her father’s gate, she began with no pretenses left between them. “Mr. Stede, I want to ask you a
question,—Mr. Stede is there any reason why a girl shouldn’t marry Malory Forten?”

  The suddenness of the onslaught found him unprepared, took him off his feet.

  He answered, confused but cautious: “That would depend on who the gal wus, Gertrude.”

  It was the first breach in his wall and she was quick to see her advantage which, however, she did not immediately press.

  “Would it be all right for me to marry him?”

  The old quiet voice answered quickly, too quickly: “Why yes, Gertrude, why not?” She could have sworn to the note of relief in his tone. “Does he want you ter marry him, Gertrude?”

  After all she had got her answer, she might have stopped there. But she must get to the bottom of all this. And suddenly without planning it she played all her best cards. Her sophistication dropped from her . . . she was like any other young girl desiring greatly an honorable young man who was already pledged to “the other woman.”

  “Oh,” she wailed, “if he only did! No he wants to marry Melissa!” She was so sure that they met clandestinely that she voiced it as a fact. “You know they meet in secret, Mr. Stede, at night,—at her home—under that Chinaberry Tree.” She had walked past there during the week and her mind had immediately created the situation.

  He sat up straight, his faded eyes at last scared and miserable. “God!” he whispered and she discovered that he was talking to his Maker. “God, You know, they hadn’t oughta do that.”

  She was as frightened as he. And yet what could it all be about? “Mr. Stede,” she begged him, “tell me. You know I love Malory. I think maybe he could love me. But he saw Melissa first, she was the only girl in this town he could look at, and now she loves him too. . . I’m sure nothing could ever make him give her up.”