THE JUDAS TREE

As I was walking home from the art school one day, a rather plump, middle-aged man in shaggy tweeds passed me and then looked over his shoulder. He had a smooth round face with red veins on his cheeks, pepper-coloured hair and a carelessly trimmed moustache. He carried a little bunch of spring flowers—hyacinth, narcissus, daffodils—and in his other hand was a knotted walking-stick.

The first time he looked round, his face wore no expression, and it reminded me of a beefy moon or a dartboard; but when, a few yards further on, he turned again, the skin round his eyes was crinkled into a kind and sleepy smile. He slowed down, then held out the bunch to me and said, ‘Like to smell?’

I was surprised, but I bent down at once and put my nose to the cold flowers. Their rich breath filled my head. A little tingle of excitement ran through me. I waited to see what would happen next.

When I raised my head I saw that the man was looking down on me with a sort of hungry benignity impossible to resist. It was as if he were saying, ‘Oh, you are young and silly and unprotected, and I am old and wise and unused. If only we two could combine!’

I felt that I had to treat him with great consideration, and this feeling threw up a slight barrier of pretence. I was a little uncomfortable.

‘They are lovely,’ I said, referring to the flowers. I nearly asked if he’d grown them himself, but the more I hesitated, the more inquisitive and pert the question sounded. I was tongue-tied and silent.

We were walking together over Blackheath now, near the church, and the pit where they light bonfires on Guy Fawkes’ Night. I expected the man to say goodbye soon and branch off in some other direction, but he stayed at my side and every now and then looked down at me. He was tall.

‘Where do you go to school?’ he said at last, smiling again in his disarming way.

I was nettled, but also obscurely complimented. I think I felt, ‘Well, I must look simple! Nobody knows what’s going on in this head.’

‘I am an art student,’ I said trying not to sound stiff.

‘Oh, that’s interesting!’ and his face lit up, as though an idea had come to him.

‘Do you know what a Judas tree is?’ He stared straight into my eyes, then added, very surprisingly, ‘I’ve been a schoolmaster for thirty years, and I can always tell when a boy is lying.’

‘I was going to say that I didn’t know.’ I felt repulsed at once by this flashing glimpse of another side of his character. I recognised the schoolmaster’s unnecessary parade, the over-emphasis.

‘Well,’ he said sweetly, returning to his earlier manner, ‘it is a wonderful tree that bears great rose-coloured flowers; and the amazing thing is that the flowers appear before the leaves! Judas, you know, after he had betrayed our Lord, repented and took back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests. But when he had told them that he had betrayed innocent blood, they gave a terrible answer; they said, “What is that to us? See thou to that.” So he threw down the silver in the temple and went to hang himself. He found a bare tree, climbed up into the branches, tied the rope; then jumped. The next morning the whole tree was lighted and hung with marvellous Judas-coloured flowers: And the Judas tree, from that day to this, always bears its flowers before its leaves.’

When he had finished this story, the man’s face was rapt. He seemed transported. To take him away from the dangerous subject of the Bible, I said, rather stolidly, ‘Why do you call the flowers Judas-coloured?’

‘Don’t you know that Judas had red hair?’ he rapped out. ‘I’ve collected every picture I can lay hands on, and nearly all the painters from the early Italians downwards have given Judas red hair. Sometimes it’s curly, sometimes it’s straight, but it’s almost always red.’ Then he gave me the names of one or two famous painters who had not given Judas red hair. He blamed them for inaccuracy, saying that their Judases failed and had not nearly enough evil in them, because of the mistake.

‘Don’t you think I’ve proved now that Judas had red hair? Could so many painters be wrong? There must be something in it.’ He looked at me sharply and anxiously, as though he wanted to make me agree.

I nodded and said, ‘I expect you’re right,’ then thought this weak, so added what I really felt.

‘It is all such a long time ago that nobody can really tell. Perhaps all the painters followed a tradition which was started by a man who hated red hair and so gave it to the villain in his picture.’

The man was infuriated. ‘Of course Judas had red hair!’ he thundered. I was able to picture him in front of a class at school, abusing the boys violently.

We walked on in silence. Still the man didn’t leave me. I was about to turn to the right, pretending that I lived in that direction, when the man, with all his fierceness gone, said, ‘I’m wondering if you could do something for me, since you are obviously a clever lad.’ I moved about uncomfortably in my clothes, wondering what was coming.

‘Could you paint me a picture of Judas hanging dead from the Judas tree, with the beautiful rose-red flowers all round him? You could do the flowers very large, and I want Judas really dead. His tongue must be hanging out, black and swollen. It would make a wonderful picture, and I’ve been trying to get it painted for years.’

He looked at me with intense, excited eyes. He had begun his speech cajolingly, with the remark about the clever lad, but he ended on the same vibrant note as before. It was clear that he lived for Judas and the Judas tree.

‘Won’t you have a shot at it?’ he pleaded when I did not answer at once. ‘I could give you a great deal of help over the details. I’ve got some enlarged photographs of the flowers, and I know exactly how a hanged man looks. His head lolls on one shoulder just like this—’ Here he stopped abruptly and, drooping his head to one side, showed the whites of his eyes and the whole length of his tongue in a hideous imitation of death.

‘I could sit like this for you, if you liked,’ he said, still holding the pose. I wished he would stop distorting his face, so I told him how convincing he looked and moved on. He hurried after me.

‘I thought at one time of having real red hair, cut from a human being, or, if that’s not possible, from a red-setter, for my Judas, but my sister, who lives with me, tells me that an oil painting in which real materials are also used is in very bad taste. Do you agree?’

He seemed wistful, wanting me not to condemn his idea as fantastic.

‘I think to have the whole picture in paint would be safer,’ I said carefully; ‘but I’m afraid I could never do it for you. It would be much too difficult. I wouldn’t know how to begin on such a subject.’

We had almost crossed the heath. I should have gone along Chesterfield Walk to reach my rooms on Croom’s Hill, but the man said, ‘You must come home with me and see my reproductions of Judas; and if my sister’s in she will give us tea.’

Again there was the tingle of excitement in me, the feeling that some sort of adventure might be unfolding. I had been growing a little restive, but this invitation reawakened my interest. I wanted to see his surroundings.

‘Oh—thank you,’ I said, ‘I’d like just to look at your pictures, but I mustn’t be late back.’ I hoped in this way to make any sudden retreat seem necessary, not rude.

Somewhere behind the Green Man we turned down a long street of mid-Victorian yellow-brick houses with dog-tooth mouldings over the doors and windows.

‘We live a bit further down, on the left,’ the man said, then, realising that he did not know my name, he demanded it in his schoolmaster’s manner.

I told him and he seemed to weigh it in his mind, as if trying to assess its worth.

‘Mine’s Clinton,’ he returned solemnly.

‘Oh, we have a girl at the art school called Clinton,’ I said. ‘She comes to the fabric-printing class, and she’s going to teach art.’

He frowned and looked uncertain for a moment, then he said stiffly, ‘She is no relation—no relation at all. I can trace my family back to the thirteenth century.’

The last sentence, so naked, so irrelevant and disagreeable, chilled me. I said nothing.

‘If they’ve got any books on heraldry at your art school, you’ll be able to look up quite a lot about my family,’ he said smoulderingly, willing me to be awed.

I still said nothing and he began to boast about his family so outrageously that I wanted to laugh. Could he be serious? I had known nothing like it since early school-days, when children vied with one another over motor-cars, the size of houses and the number of servants kept.

I was relieved when he put his key into the front door and dropped the subject of his family as abruptly as he had introduced it. We were in a dark hall now. He led me to the door of the back room, then threw it open. I saw a grand piano, a large old portfolio stand, and books in low cases, lining the walls rather meagrely. Opposite the one French window was a dilapidated brown sofa.

‘Sit down, sit down,’ the man said expansively. I was his guest now, no longer a chance acquaintance. He wheeled the portfolio up to me, then brought out picture after picture in which Judas appeared. Some of them were charming old prints torn from books, others were shiny ‘Last Suppers’ and richly glowing ‘Betrayal’ scenes made for Catholic children. There were dreary photographs of great masterpieces and ‘details’ showing every crack in the plaster or the panel. I looked again and again at evil, twisted, avaricious features, at hyacinth-curling hair, at goatee beards and at ones flowing like the little waterfalls in Japanese gardens. There was simulated love—the lips kissing while the eyes were glittering, almost radiant, with treachery. Then the torture of remorse, the last agony of realisation.

But there was no picture of Judas hanged, paid out, fulfilled. For a moment I felt the lack, almost understood Mr Clinton’s preoccupation with the subject.

He was sitting very close to me now, breathing on my neck as he leant over me to point with his stubby finger. I could smell juicy pipe tobacco, the animal smell of tweeds, and something between alcohol and the smell in chemist’s shops. Was it the last traces of whisky, of eau de Cologne, patent antiseptic or medicated snuff? I tried to analyse it in this elaborate way to cover my growing uneasiness. Would Mr Clinton never move away to some other part of the room? Had he enticed me here for some criminal purpose? Was he perhaps going to try to string me up, so that he should at last have a living, kicking picture of Guilt and Retribution?

My thoughts grew so wild that in my nervousness I began to gather the reproductions together officiously and thrust them back into the portfolio. I felt that his eyes were burning into the back of my head. He said nothing. I wanted to get up and run.

‘Did you like your school?’ The flatness of the question came as a shock. Because I had expected strangeness, or even violence, I was bewildered. How did this man’s mind work? Why at the climax did he always jump to some other subject, as if the first one no longer meant anything to him?

‘Perhaps I liked it in bits,’ I answered vaguely, ‘but I couldn’t have enjoyed it much, because I ran away.’

‘You needn’t imagine that I think any the better of you for that,’ he said.

Blood rushed up into my face. Could he think that I was proud of running away from school? The pointless snub seemed unforgivable, until I remembered that he was a schoolmaster.

He began to tell me all about himself. He had been a housemaster at a school whose name I had not heard before. Nobody had ever run away from his house. He understood boys, and boys understood him. It was, I was made to realise, a great loss to the school when the ridiculous rules had compelled him to retire. He was not idle, though. There was all this research on Judas to be done, and he was musical. Had I not noticed the Broadwood grand piano? Did I play?’

‘Only a very little,’ I answered cautiously.

‘And can you sing?’

‘I was in the choir at school until my voice broke, but now I don’t sing properly,’ I said.

He looked at me expertly. ‘Perhaps you had a good treble; but what have you got now, I should like to know? Maybe something—maybe nothing. Just come over to the piano and we’ll see.’

I followed him in a hot state of embarrassment. Was I really to be made to sing ‘ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, AH, AH, AH’ in that shaming way? I began to sweat a little. But a part of me was pleased. I wanted to be able to sing well, and once my voice had broken no one had bothered with it. Was my adventure to end in free singing lessons? I hoped so. Clinton looked so competent on the piano stool. I believed in him.

I began quaveringly, afraid of too much sound and of the surprising, unnatural tone of my voice.

‘Louder!’ he shouted.

I grew a little bolder, ascended and descended the scale, and sang particular notes which he thumped insistently, until they sounded like tom-toms in the jungle.

His hands dropped from the keyboard and there was an impressive silence for a moment; then he looked not at me, but out of the window, and said, ‘I can make something of your voice. Of course, you’ll have to work. You’d better come here at least twice a week.’

‘Thank you so much,’ I said, really grateful, ‘but can you spare the time? Wouldn’t it be a nuisance?’

‘Nuisance! Why nuisance? It’s part of my job. I’ve trained hundreds of lads’ voices. I hate letting them go to waste.’

At this point a woman’s tired, rather petulant voice called from upstairs.

‘Excuse me,’ the man said, leaving the piano stool at once; ‘that is my sister. I shall go up and ask her about tea.’

It was long after tea-time and I wondered what the sister would say. I heard them talking at the top of the stairs in low voices: The only clear words were the sister’s irritable ‘Who is it?’

I was immediately ruffled, upset, put in a false position, and decided to leave as soon as the man returned.

I heard him running down the stairs. He burst into the room in a young way and said, between puffs, ‘My sister’s got one of her troublesome heads, and so I’ve persuaded her to stay in her room, but we can go into the kitchen and forage for ourselves.’ He seemed delighted about his sister’s headache. He came up to me at the piano, put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Can you boil eggs, you scoundrel, eh? I bet you coddle ’em or make them like old leather boots, but come and try, while I make toast.’ He gave me several playful punches.

I was not expecting so much heartiness and good-fellowship. His changes in personality were too much for me. I had been hurt by his sister’s words. And what was the cause of this sudden gaiety? Had he a sinister reason for wishing his sister out of the way in her room? All my misgivings reawoke and I longed to get away from him. It was easy to persuade myself that he was evil.

‘But I really must get back,’ I said, ‘or they’ll wonder what has happened to me.’ Even if I had stayed out all night no one would have worried; but I allowed Clinton to think that careful parents were waiting for me at home.

‘Can’t you just stay to tea?’ he asked, quite crestfallen.

‘I’m afraid not; it’s getting so late.’ I moved firmly towards the door and he followed me, shambling.

‘You will try to do my picture of Judas, won’t you?’ he said. He was different again—sad, deflated, almost clinging. ‘And you must come here for your singing lessons.’

‘Oh, thank you, I will,’ I said.

We were through the dark hall and I was walking down the steps and saying goodbye over my shoulder in my haste. I smiled at him and tried to look pleased, but it was easy to see that I was escaping.

He stood under the porch disconsolately, then gave a little jerk with his hand and went in and slammed the door.

I sucked in deep breaths of air and ran up to the heath, free at last.

I saw nothing of Mr Clinton for about a month after this first meeting. I did nothing about his Judas picture and avoided going anywhere near his house. I regretted the singing lessons, but would not have braved his strangeness, his unaccountable changes of mood, and the something alarming in him, even for them.

When I saw him for the second time I was with three other students. I suddenly recognised his back. He was a few feet in front of us on the pavement. He carried no posy, but he had his walking-stick.

By turning my head away and talking earnestly I hoped to brush by unnoticed; but as I passed him I heard him call out, ‘Oh; so it’s you, is it?’

‘Hullo!’ I said, stopping and trying to put surprise and pleasure into my voice.

‘What are you doing, going home?’ he asked suspiciously.

‘No; we’re having tea together somewhere first,’ I said, my eyes following the other students, who were now some yards in front. ‘Have you done anything about that picture?’ There was accusation in his voice.

‘I haven’t had a moment,’ I said guiltily. ‘I couldn’t do that sort of thing at the school, you know. I’d have to do it at home.’

He turned sharply and saw me looking at the backs of the other students.

‘Well—hadn’t you better go after your friends?’ he said, somehow threateningly. ‘Hadn’t you better leave me and catch them up?’

And in this last sentence Mr Clinton seemed to put all the waste and emptiness of his life. It was so sad that I was melted and horrified. He who had once had fifty boys to bully and befriend now had no one at all. People all smiled nervously and backed away, as I had done. How old and mad and undesirable he must feeling!

‘Why don’t you cut along?’ he sneered. ‘Why don’t you join them for a jolly tea-party? You’re no use here.’ He darted a venomous look at me and went on jeering at my dumb, nonplussed state. I would have stayed with him, but he was driving me away with every word.

‘Yes, I must go,’ I said miserably, turning my shocked, startled face to him.

But as I turned he looked away and appeared to be interested in a black boy’s head and a pipe in a tobacconist’s window.

‘Goodbye,’ I said uncertainly. He never turned.

Inexplicably wounded and humbled, I ran on to join my friends.