The Chinaberry Tree Read online

  Lucy stared at her, her eyes large and strangely gray in her dark face. “I wanted to Laurentine,” she answered, “but my mumma say I dasn’t. She say you got bad blood in your veins.” Abruptly she left her former friend, ran to the table and came back with a tiny useless knife in her hand. “Don’t you want me to cut yo’ arm and let it out?” Laurentine had run home then quickly to her mother determined to have this matter explained. Sal was sitting on the back porch a letter in her hand. “It’s from your Aunt Judy,” she told Laurentine. “When she left here, she went to Philadelphia and married. Now she has a little baby, Melissa. Aren’t you glad to know you have a little cousin, Laurentine?”

  But she didn’t herself seem glad. Perhaps Aunt Judy had written her for help. That would be like her the child thought, silent all these months and then calling on her sister in her time of need. Her mother looked tired, beaten and discouraged. Laurentine put her own grievances and bewilderment resolutely behind her. She was young, anything could happen, but she would never ask any one for friendship again. She went down the porch steps, and crossed the grass and sat down under the Chinaberry Tree. Some day, somehow she would get away from Red Brook. There must be other people, other places. The Chinaberry Tree and the future were inextricably blended.

  CHAPTER III

  NOW suddenly and terrifyingly Laurentine was twenty-four and nothing had happened. Nothing that is, that was permanent.

  When she graduated from High School her mother explained to her Colonel Halloway’s legacy. The house was hers by deed of gift, he had made a present of it outright during his lifetime to one Sarah Strange and no one could take it from her. “I shall leave it to you,” Sal said, “you may sell it and do anything you choose with the proceeds, but I don’t want to sell it now,” she finished and looked at her daughter wistfully.

  “I know you can’t understand my view, daughter,” she said, “but I was happy here and happiness no matter what its source is not to despised.” Laurentine privately was of the same opinion but she said nothing. The habit of reticence had grown on her.

  Her mother went on to explain that while the house was secure, Colonel Halloway’s legacy was not. He had had the foresight to see that methods and modes of living would probably change bringing with them greater need for outlay and expense. He could not think of his dear girl, who had brought him so much joy, in want or need, so he had left her a percentage of the net income accruing from his factories. He should have added a proviso that this amount should never fall below a certain fixed sum.

  Instead he had placed in his wife’s relentless hands a weapon which she was quick to employ. Even Sal with a mind totally unfitted for business was able to realize that Mrs. Halloway at the risk of losing her own fortune was undoubtedly allowing her estate to be mishandled so as to minimize the share of this woman who had so grossly usurped her place.

  Mr. Gathers who did trucking for the Halloway concern told weird tales of sabotage of machinery and implements, of wholesale thefts and breakage, of accidents which were never investigated but for which replacement was always forthcoming.

  Mr. Gathers and Mr. Stede were both deacons in the Baptist Church. Mr. Stede took care of Aunt Sal’s grounds and kept the place in the meticulous order which Colonel Halloway had long ago inaugurated. With a delicacy and lack of personalities which one would never have suspected he retailed to Aunt Sal what Mr. Gathers had already retailed to him.

  Aunt Sal thought Laurentine had better learn dressmaking.

  A surprising thing happened. Laurentine could still recall that autumn day. There was a touch of the year’s dying on everything; the air, the sky, the trees, the grass were full of the austere grandeur of October. Laurentine was stitching, her mother was getting supper when the bell rang. The girl went to the door to admit two young women of beautiful mien and dress. Laurentine, herself the essence of self-control, gaped, surprised. It was as though she were suddenly seeing herself in a mirror, a self curiously bleached and lightened.

  For her black hair the two ladies had substituted ash blond, for her apricot skin, white and rose, but feature for feature the colored girl and the two white ones were exact replicas.

  The oldest girl spoke. “I think you know we are Phebe and Diane Halloway and you are Laurentine—” she tried to say it but something that she had whipped into a semblance of resignation suddenly failed her.

  “Laurentine Strange,” said Aunt Sal proudly. “Sit down ladies.”

  It was a strange interview.

  Neither side mentioned the Colonel’s name, neither side spoke of that strange past which had brought at once such rapture and such pain.

  “We have thought of you often,” Diane told Laurentine smiling. “We knew your mother was probably taken care of but we couldn’t tell about you. Phebe has always been interested in the factories—she means to run them some day. But we have nothing to do with them now. But we each have a little money to be paid to us on coming of age. Phebe was twenty-one two years ago and my birthday was last week. What do you want us to do Laurentine?”

  They were three well-bred women facing a problem for which not one of them was responsible. Laurentine met generosity with generosity. She would not take money outright. But she would and could take training. She liked dressmaking and designing and if the girls would like to help her in her training she would be grateful.

  Her sisters looked at her. They had lived abroad at intervals for ten years, they had some wealth, education and a name known and respected within the radius of Red Brook and its environment. But the shadow of their father’s responsibilities had clouded their lives. Half dreading they knew not what they decided to proffer what help they could as soon as it was within their power. It was heartening to find Laurentine as she was.

  Laurentine in turn gazed back at these two. She could not say to them, “Give me life, give me contacts, give me the good times which are every young girl’s due. Don’t leave me here to perish, to dry, to wither.” But even as the thoughts went through her head, she sensed in those two fine faces a melancholy of the same stuff and substance and, perhaps, quality as her own.

  “I don’t believe they are happy either,” she told herself that night lying face downward on her pillows. “And I believe in their way unhappiness comes from the same source as mine. Perhaps there is something in this ‘sins of the fathers.’”

  It was arranged that she should go to Newark for instruction, her sisters would be responsible for all costs.

  Her mother came to her: “Laurentine, did you think? You might have gone anywhere, away from here—to New York, to Paris, perhaps you might have met people. You should meet them. I know you’re lonely.”

  Laurentine said simply: “I couldn’t go away and leave you here mother. And I knew you wouldn’t leave.”

  Her mother’s face quivered, its habitual calm broke, vanished. For the only time Laurentine saw her cry. “Oh, my daughter don’t leave me—if you could stay with me a little while longer. He was God to me you know and you are his child, you are still Frank—I used to call him Frank you know—his wife called him Francis.” Some dam in her broke. She babbled of Halloway, his youth, his wife’s coldness, her own love. She talked about Judy and their childhood days in Alabama.

  Laurentine went out in the chilly night and sat for hours under the Chinaberry Tree. When would that future, which she so clearly envisaged, come? It must be something very clean and sweet and bracing to rescue her soul from this welter, this tangle of human relations and passions and life and duty.

  CHAPTER IV

  MELISSA came strolling up the neat brick walk. She had had no trouble finding the house. Her mother Judy had described both it and its approach so accurately. Just as her mother had suggested she had left her little trunk and the small suitcase in the station. “Best do that,” said Judy, “until you’re sure whether or not they’ll take you in. Sal will be all right but I don’t know nothin’ about your cousin Laurentine. She used to be kinda sulky—beautiful
thing. Let’s see now, I guess she’s about twenty-four,—twenty-six. Wonder what she’s like livin’ in that little town all her life. Now ’Lissa don’t you go puttin’ on none of your airs with her.”

  “What would she do, if I did?” asked Melissa curiously. She was overbearing, inclined to be triumphant—no one knew why. She was poor, her father was dead, her mother a seamstress, not even a dressmaker. Yet somehow Melissa had always the sensation of living on top of the world. Perhaps she had inherited her conquering attitude toward life from her mother whom nothing seemed to down.

  Melissa admired her mother—save for one thing. She did not like the constant succession of suitors who were ever at her door. Their presence made the household alive and merry and yet, somehow unseemly, thought Melissa. She herself was a gay and lively creature but with an unexpectedly strong feeling for the conventional. Also she meant to marry as soon as possible after eighteen, a man as unlike as he could be to these men who clustered about her mother’s tiny house in one of those awful little side-streets in Philadelphia. She would marry a professional man, a lawyer or a doctor. These fellows were laboring men for the most part, truck drivers, road-menders from the South, big, hard, sweaty, black fellows, masons and bricklayers.

  A few of them were recruited from the upper ranks of menials, a house-man, a waiter, an occasional chauffeur. It was with one of these last that Judy was now going to Chicago—to Melissa’s dismay—but she made no protest. She had long since learned that eventually she and her giddy mother must part company. She even offered to stand up with her.

  “You ought to have a bridesmaid, mother.”

  But Judy had protested, hurriedly averting a suddenly flushed face. “Nonsense baby. Stanton wouldn’t like that foolishment. We’ll stand up before a Justice of the Peace down in City Hall just before train time. You go on to your Aunt Sal. She’ll take care of you. And anyways she’ll let you stay with her for a few days until I can write you from Chicago. Just don’t you go to stirrin’ up Laurentine, that’s all. She was awful high and mighty when she was a girl—she’s got that bad white blood in her, you never kin tell.”

  • • • • •

  Even before she rang the bell Melissa stopped to admire the garden. Her mother she decided, had not done the place justice. She had not dreamed of this exquisiteness, this beauty and cleanliness, this peace. A country town to her had meant up to this point bad, rutty roads, straggling farm lands, cows, scattered poultry. Only rich people, she had supposed, lived in this beauty and serenity. There were, she knew, rich colored people, there were some well-to-do ones in the church which she attended on Lombard Street in Philadelphia but she had never been in their homes. Their affluence to her had meant only lack of necessity for hard labor, plenty of clothes, plenty of food. She had never thought of their possible cultivation of taste, the development of loveliness.

  She was about to mount the steps of the front porch and ring the bell when around the house in the side yard just beyond the side porch she spied the thick foliage and the circular shadow cast by the Chinaberry Tree. She was a stranger, she had never seen her aunt or her cousin, she did not know whether or not they would take her in, but for all that she ran down the side path, crossed the lawn and sat down on the circular hexagonal seat. Here she would stay, here in this house, in the shade of this Tree she must and would live. Here under this Tree she would talk with nice, quiet, country girls and flirt with adoring, awkward, ambitious, country boys, far away from her mother’s friends, and the hateful little house, and their disorderly, ragged precarious life.

  • • • • •

  Laurentine, from her sewing-room had seen the slight figure crossing. She came to the screen-door and looked out as her cousin mounted the steps and crossed the side-porch. Melissa caught sight of a beautiful deep gold face, suspended apparently without body in the upper half of the screen-door, so completely did the dark green dress which Lauren-tine was wearing blend and melt into the soft gloom within.

  “Proud Laurentine,” said Melissa to herself and henceforth always gave her that dramatic title in her meditations. In another moment another face, dark and tragic and likewise momentarily bodiless appeared over Laurentine’s shoulder.

  Melissa addressed herself to it, “Aunt Sal,” she said, speaking with her mother’s directness and with a personal sincerity and trust which Sal suddenly found very charming. “I am Melissa Paul, Judy’s girl you know. Mumma sent me to you, she’s going to be married again, she said you would take me. Aunt Sal, Laurentine, you won’t turn me away will you? You’re going to let me in?”

  Her voice, her assured gaze wavered. She could not, she felt suddenly, leave this again, this beauty, this calm, the promise of the Chinaberry Tree.

  Aunt Sal pushed the door backwards. “Come in my dear,” she said slowly. “Come in. You c’n have the room across from Laurentine’s.”

  • • • • •

  “Where are your things?” Laurentine asked her. “I’ll telephone Mr. Gathers to go get them. You’ll find us very, very quiet, Melissa, but I’m sure you’ll be comfortable.” She went out and closed the door, leaving Melissa to gaze dumbfounded about the pleasant room. The walls were tinted a delicate orchid, there was a fresh lavender and white cotton coverlet on the old-fashioned broad bed, two oval rag rugs in tones of purple and lavender lay at the side of the bed, before a plain vanity-table, with its long, revealing mirror. A couple of fantastic creations by Maxfield Parrish adorned one wall. On another hung a chastely mounted print of the head and slender shoulders of a young girl, her eyes full of dreams and beneath, the line

  “She dwelt among th’ untrodden ways.”

  Melissa, the inherited mantle of her mother’s hardness slipping away from her own slender shoulders, stood before the little print entranced, the tears pricking her eyelids. That girl in the slightly yellowed print was Melissa. She had been inhabiting this room for these sixteen years until its rightful owner should appear. Her mother, her mother’s friends, Alder Street in Philadelphia faded, disappeared into a fleeting, dissolving mist. She, Melissa had come—no, she had returned—home.

  • • • • •

  Laurentine had gone down stairs to her sewing-room. She had a dress to finish by morning but she dropped her work and in a sudden and unusual fit of irresolution she sat for a few moments under the Chinaberry Tree.

  She did not want her cousin to live with them. How like her Aunt Judy and her selfishness to send the girl there at a moment’s notice! Of course they could take care of her. Laurentine’s earnings alone could do that and with no stint or effort. Besides, Melissa would be useful, she could help Sal with the housework and undoubtedly she had inherited something of her mother’s natural aptitude for the needle. Of course, too, in the autumn she would have to go to school. It wasn’t as though she would be useless or a source of expense, an incubus constantly clogging one’s freedom.

  But she didn’t want her about, recalling Judy’s sudden and mysterious disappearance and all the upheaval of Red Brook colored society connected vaguely and loosely with that phenomenon. To this day people spoke of the gloom which had settled on the Forten family soon after those far-off happenings.

  “Seems like Mrs. Forten lost both her husband and her best friend at the same time, and they ain’t none of them never got over it,” people said. Reba and Harriett and their mother lived like wraiths remote and insubstantial. Only Malory, the boy who had been sent to Philadelphia to school almost immediately after his father’s death, had remained, it was supposed, normal and unchanged. But most people had forgotten all about him ; Laurentine had never consciously heard of him.

  “I’m right keen to see that boy Malory again,” Mr. Gathers used to remark to Mr. Stede.

  Laurentine wanted nothing of any sort to be recalled which re-emphasized the apartness of her family. She had in her pride and sensitiveness withdrawn to herself and missed the fun and excitement and love-making due young people in their teens. But lately, it seemed
to her that a special niche was being created for her in the little quiet, closely-knit Jersey town. Her work, her constantly increasing clientèle, her dignity, her remarkable beauty, her distinguished clothes were bringing her a half begrudged, half-admiring recognition. She was stil a creature apart, but no longer a pariah, rather some one choice, unique, different.

  In the last two years she had been asked more than once to community bridge parties—she had been the most beautiful figure imaginable at the open air pageant held by the Baptist Church on the open Fair Grounds.

  It was then that Phil Hackett, son of the wealthiest colored man in the town, George Hackett, ash-contractor, had recalled to her the fact that he had been in High School with her. He had taken her driving many times since then and they had gone a few times to the movies.

  She knew her beauty stirred him; he liked and yet dreaded the effect of her distinguished appearance. Incomprehensibly, he liked that into which her strange life had transformed her and yet it seemed as though he could never reconcile himself to its sources.

  Conscious that she did not yet love him and yet still more conscious that marriage with him meant turning the key forever in the door of the wall surrounding her past, she felt she must not lose him.

  And now here was Melissa.

  • • • • •

  The glaring July sun slid down the sky, the heat began to drain out of the atmosphere, very much as color might be drained from a cloth, leaving the air cool and faded. Laurentine still sat pondering in the soft glow of the late midsummer afternoon.

  After all, Melissa was young, she was alone. With Judy’s blood in her veins, Laurentine and her mother could not turn her out to fend for herself. “Perhaps if I am very good, Lord,” she compromised . . . praying, “perhaps if I am very generous, I’ll meet with generosity,—Lord, Thou knowest. Give me peace and security, a home life like other women, a name, protection. And Lord, don’t make me wait too long. I feel,” said Laurentine, at twenty-four, “I feel, Lord, so old.”