The Clue of the Judas Tree

by Zenith Brown

  “Emily, this is Miss Gather,” said Mr. Trent.

  “Oh,” said Mrs. Trent. “Pleased to meet you, I’m sure.”

  I had actually touched the fat scarlet-tipped bejeweled fingers she extended before she turned and was greeting Dr. Sartoris.

  “How sweet of you, doctor!” she said. “I was so pleased and so surprised when Cheryl said she’d run into you at the station. Were you really coming here, to see us?”

  In view of the telegram I’d illicitly read, that seemed strange. But apparently not to Dr. Sartoris.

  He bowed over her hand.

  “It is the radio-chemistry of ideas, Mrs. Trent,” he said. She nodded and said simply, “A matter of spiritual tuning-in.”

  I looked at her quickly in spite of myself, but she. wasn’t being funny at all.

  “What do you make of it, Boswell?” said Mr. Trent. There was an ironic little grin on his face. “You up on that stuff?”

  “I’m afraid not, Mr. Trent,” I admitted.

  Mrs. Trent raised her platinum lorgnette and her plucked brows and looked vaguely around the room. I turned my back on Dr. Sartoris. I couldn’t bear to face him after that. It didn’t seem decent.

  At that point Magothy announced dinner, and we put down our glasses. Mrs. Trent brushed off a couple of bits of caviare and toast that had got becalmed on her plentiful bosom, and handed Dr. Sartoris her glass with a coquettish little flip of the eyebrows. She moved towards the door.

  Then there occurred the first sharp rift in what turned out to be an evening full of them.

  “Where’s Miss Hutton, Emily?” Mr. Trent said curtly.

  Mrs. Trent stopped, and turned around, and her rouged lips were set firmly.

  “She’s got ears, she can hear bells,” she said angrily. “If Miss Hutton can’t be down in time for dinner, she can go without it.”

  “We’ll wait,” said Mr. Trent quietly. “Magothy, go upstairs and tell Miss Hutton dinner is ready.”

  But Magothy did not have to go. Sharp light steps were coming quickly down the stairs, and a woman with dark sleek hair, parted in the middle and drawn like a silky sheath over a finely modeled head, appeared in the door. Her face was white, with a very red mouth and narrow finely arched brows that made Mrs. Trent’s scanty crop look cheap and ridiculous. Agnes Hutton had long drooping lashes. She was exquisite, I thought, in a smooth-fitting gown of coral satin, high at the neck in front and nothing anywhere in back.

  “I’m sorry I’m late, Mrs. Trent,” she said in a soft purring voice. She gave Mr. Trent a slow half-open smile, and turned to the other men, still more or less lined up against the amazing Renaissance Florentine fireplace that dominated the enormous green and gold living room. One thing seemed clear. Agnes Hutton certainly had not expected to see Dr. Sartoris. Her whole body moved perceptibly under the shock, and her eyes widened just an instant before she caught herself and sunk back behind her slit white mask.

  “Good evening, doctor,” she said quietly, and when Mr. Trent said, “This is Miss Cather whom I told you about, Agnes,” she extended her hand quite cordially and said, “Of course, Mr. Trent. How do you do, Miss Gather. We’re ever so anxious for you to begin. You’ve got a fascinating job. I can’t imagine anybody’s life that’s more interesting or worth while to do.”

  I remember thinking at the time that it seemed a little thick, but that she probably knew the correct thing to say. Mr. Trent looked perceptibly pleased, Mrs. Trent angry and a little futile, as if she should have thought of something of the sort herself. Major Ellicott raised one eyebrow and smiled ever so slightly. Cheryl’s and Dr. Sartoris’s eyes met inscrutably, Mr. Archer cleared his throat and frowned a little, Perry Bassett looked a little ashamed. I was a little surprised. It was such bald open-faced flattery, too obvious for a man to swallow, even from his secretary. In public, anyway. Mr. Trent, however, didn’t seem to find it difficult. Nor did the fact that that simple remark instantly congealed the last pretense at general cordiality in the room seem to bother him—or not at first.

  “I have had some interesting experiences,” he was saying, as the rest of us followed Mrs. Trent into the dining room in more or less of a constrained silence.

  The Trents’ dining room was high and darkly paneled—lifted bodily from some Elizabethan manor house in Cornwall, Mrs. Trent told me later. The table, gleaming with silver and lace and slender red tulips, was a candle-lit island in a dark sea, so dark that Magothy and his assistant would have been invisible except for their shirt fronts and their white cotton gloves.

  We sat down. I could feel a tense ominous something close in behind me as solidly, almost, and as definitely, as the high back of my chair. I didn’t know then that that solid and definite something was Death, or that Death was there behind us, waiting in the deep shadows, his icy finger lifted, ready to point at one, two, three of us. But I did have so real a sense of something there that I turned with a start and looked back over my shoulder. It was only Magothy with my soup. But I wasn’t the only one who was uneasy. Mr. Trent’s voice had a sharp cutting edge as he pushed back his chair and stood up, tiny beads of perspiration on his high bald forehead.

  “For God’s sake, Emily, can’t we have some light in here?” he demanded angrily. “Magothy, turn on the lights.”

  Magothy hobbled over to the wall, and the room was flooded with soft overhead light. It wasn’t quite as romantic as the dim flickering light from the two seven-branch candelabra, but we all seemed to breathe a little easier.

  But before we had got to the broiled young chicken and asparagus, I realized that all the light in the world would not help the situation at that table. There was something distinctly wrong, and they were all trying to cover it up or evade it. All except Mrs. Trent, oddly enough, and Agnes Hutton. Dr. Sartoris and Mr. Archer did their best to hold the conversation away from something—whatever it was—but without success. Perry Bassett suddenly dropped his fork, and Mrs. Trent turned on him with a convulsive start, like a fury.

  “Will you stop that fidgeting, Perry? You’ll drive me crazy!”

  And then she put down her own fork, and leaned forward with a look of determination. The corners of her mouth were drawn down a little.

  “Duncan,” she demanded in a high and charged voice, “when is Michael Spur coming here? “

  There was a moment of dead silence.

  Then Mr. Trent looked impatiently at his secretary.

  “He didn’t say, Mr. Trent,” Agnes Hutton said. “His wire read ‘Coming back,’ and was signed ‘Michael Spur,’ as I’ve already told Mrs. Trent a great many times today. It was sent from New York at two-five last night, and it got here at nine-fifteen this morning.”

  Mr. Trent looked at his wife.

  “You know all I know,” he said shortly.

  Mrs. Trent was making a definite effort to control her voice.

  “I think you ought to find out something about him before you let him come here,” she said. “It’s your duty. He has no right here.”

  Mr. Trent’s face flushed.

  “He has every right here, Emily,” he said angrily. “His father was my partner and my friend. What money I have, I made because Stephen Spur backed me to the last ditch. Tom Archer and I are co-trustees of Stephen’s estate, and we are Michael Spur’s guardians.”

  Mrs. Trent moistened her lips, pale and dry under the thick coating of lipstick.

  “But, Duncan!” she cried. “I mean the boy’s health! It isn’t safe for any of us—there’s no telling what may happen! He might murder all of us in our beds!”

  “Rubbish!” Mr. Trent said with an angry snort. “Poppycock!”

  Heavy purple veins stood out at his temples, and a strawberry birthmark in the center of his forehead, which I hadn’t noticed before, burned somberly. And yet, I had the strong impression that he would very much like to be convinced that it was rubbish and poppycock.

  Up to now I had only seen Mrs. Trent archly condescending, or irritable and ill at ea
se. I saw now that under all her manner she had an obstinate vitality. Angry spots mottled her heavily powdered face and spread down her flabby white neck; her eyes blazed and her lips were set in a thin line curving downward at the ends, angry, frightened and determined.

  “You say that because you’re pig-headed and ignorant!” she cried. “Ask Dr. Sartoris. He’ll tell you it isn’t poppycock! That’s what happens in cases like this!”

  Everybody, even Mr. Trent, looked at Dr. Sartoris. He leaned back in his chair with great deliberateness, a wise and thoughtful expression on his handsome face. The shadows cast from overhead, and from the fourteen candles on the table, gave it a strong and rugged quality. It was the face of a man to listen to.

  “My dear Mrs. Trent,” he said, after a thoughtful pause, “I didn’t say quite that. I’m almost sorry now that I said anything at all.”

  Mrs. Trent was suddenly on the verge of tears, and her anger melted like the snow.

  “You don’t care what happens!” she said, like a plaintive child.

  “No, no, my dear friend—that’s unkind of you. All I mean is that I’ve alarmed you, and I may be wrong. I only spoke of what may happen, just to protect you. That’s all. Let’s forget I mentioned it.”

  He dismissed the matter with a deprecatory smile. Mr. Trent made an inarticulate sound, and Mr. Archer spoke up curtly.

  “Do I understand, Doctor, that because of this other business years ago, you think there’s danger of this boy’s going off again? “

  We turned again to look at Dr. Sartoris, and I stole a glance at the other faces caught round the pool of gleaming silver, lace and candlelight there in the center of the great room. Mr. Trent’s gray eyes were narrowed, his face was still heavily flushed, the veins still standing out at his temples; but he was listening. Agnes Hutton, her skillfully rouged lips slightly parted, had not once taken her eyes off the great man next to Mrs. Trent. Perry Bassen was making bread pills and piling them up, like a collection of little gray can-no nballs, at the base of a silver dish; but he was watching his sister and Dr. Sartoris. Major Ellicott was looking at Cheryl, with his faintly superior smile. And all of them, of course, had completely forgotten that I existed.

  “I can answer that question for you,” Dr. Sartoris said at last. “Here we have a case of sheli shock. This boy was sent home from France when he was only twenty years old. Outwardly, physically, in good shape; psychically, emotionally that is, all wrong. You have enough tragic evidence of that. Mrs. Trent has told me how he used to get up at night and try to find his gun.”

  Mrs. Trent closed her eyes dramatically.

  “Oh, don’t you remember, Duncan?” she cried. “That night when we found him looking out of his window? He was leaning out, you could tell he was seeing something down in the gardens; and his face was horrible—his voice was ghastly! He was saving ‘There he is! Get him! Stick him! Ah . . . he’s dead!’”

  She was leaning forward urgently, her voice sunk to a whisper, horror on her face. She was an actress—she was seeing what Michael Spur had seen: a man hiding and being found; a naked bayonet; a clean thrust; death.

  Mrs. Trent sank back in her chair. The table was silent as the grave. Then she leaned forward quickly.

  “Then he’d hunt for his gun,” she cried. “Don’t you remember, Duncan? And then that terrible night he found it—God knows where! And he went out, and you and his father and Dick went after him. Oh my God, and I was watching from my window! And I saw the spurt of fire in the dark; and Stephen Spur was lying there at your feet, dead, murdered by his own son!”

  The tears forced themselves under the mascara’d lashes of her closed eyes, and fell unchecked on her velvet bosom.

  Everybody at the table seemed moved, even Major Ellicott, who I thought was probably not often moved by anything.

  “I didn’t know you remembered it so well, Emily,” he said. “You ought to forget it. It’s dangerous.”

  She made a little futile gesture. Mr. Trent his head sunk forward, was staring at some point far away past the candles in front of him. He looked up with a start when Dr. Sartoris began to speak again, which he did with a little of the air, I thought, of not liking to have Mrs. Trent steal his show.

  “You had him put under observation then, I understand,” he said, his voice very grave and impressive. “After a few months he was discharged. But if he had been completely restored, I feel that he would have come back here and carried on his father’s work. Instead, he wanders off for . . . how long has it been?”

  “Fourteen years,” said Mr. Archer.

  Dr. Sartoris shrugged his large shoulders.

  “And now, he’s coming back. I should feel that his sending a telegram after midnight is evidence that he’s still laboring under emotional strain. And what happens is this: the old associations are still here—the house, the gardens, the rooms, the people. And they may set up the old psychosis. There lies the danger.”

  He looked quietly round the table, and shook his head a little.

  “I could tell you a hundred cases; none as terrible as this, but of the same type. But I don’t want to alarm you. All I suggest is that you take all possible care to save this young man from a recurrence of that psychosis—for his sake as well as your own.”

  There was a long and tense silence before Mr. Trent spoke.

  “You think he meant to kill his father?”

  Dr. Sartoris hesitated.

  “If I say yes,” he replied, “I want you to understand very clearly what I mean. In the sense that we all have the Œdipus Complex—in varying degrees, depending on our libidinal structure or soul plasm, and our environmental structure, which is the molding of soul plasm—we can say that every father is his son’s natural enemy, every mother her daughter’s.”

  I stole a glance at Cheryl. She was staring straight in front of her, her attitude startlingly like Mr. Trent’s.

  “So that while to all appearances young Spur was devoted to his father, I think we can say that that tragic accident was in truth wish fulfillment, the triumph of the libido. You must understand that Michael Spur would be entirely, the most genuinely, unconscious of this desire to kill his father. In his state there’s no doubt that he would have shot anyone in his way that night. But you know we never do anything accidentally—not really. That Michael Spur chose his own father to shoot that night was undoubtedly, in my opinion, the Œdipus Complex. There is in all human conduct some motivating force—unconscious, perhaps, but powerful.”

  He gave us a deprecatory grave smile, and went back to his dessert.

  A little silence was broken again by Mr. Archer.

  “It doesn’t follow, however, that he’s a dangerous madman, and that we’re all in danger of our lives?”

  If Dr. Sartoris noticed the irony in the lawyer’s voice he gave no indication of it.

  “Oh, not at all,” he said calmly. “As I’ve assured Mrs. Trent over and again. No, I’m merely suggesting, as a physician and a friend, that Michael Spur’s return to the very spot where that terrible thing occurred—to the very spot, still, I understand, unchanged—may cause an emotional throwback. That in turn would result in a recurrence of the old illness. In which case, I must repeat, unless precautions are taken, there is a definite possibility of a similar tragedy.”

  Mr. Trent cleared his throat so brusquely that I started.

  “I don’t know anything about the Œdipus Complex,” he said angrily, “and I don’t want to. But when you or anybody else, your Dr. Freud included, tells me that Michael Spur wanted to kill his father, because he was jealous of his mother’s love, when his mother had been dead for five years—if that’s what you mean by your Œdipus Complex, well, it’s a damnable outrage!”

  His voice rose to a shout, and he brought his fist down on the table with a crash.

  The quiver of silver and glass died away in a faint musical blur. Duncan Trent glared savagely at Dr. Sartoris, who sat imperturbably at the other end of the table. For the first ti
me since we had sat down Perry Bassett spoke.

  “I suggest, Duncan,” he said gently, “that it wouldn’t do any harm to let the doctor talk to Michael, when he comes. It’s sometimes possible to cure cases of that kind, isn’t it?”

  Mr. Trent snorted violently. Mr. Archer and Major Ellicott exchanged the sort of masked glances that are usually called “significant.”

  “I must say I’m glad somebody takes an intelligent attitude about it,” Mrs. Trent said, her lips still compressed into a thin red line. “I think Perry is right, Duncan. You ought to persuade Dr. Sartoris to psychoanalyze Michael, and cure him of his Œdipus Complex, so he won’t shoot anybody else.”

  Dr. Sartoris lookeij a little pained, and I thought he would have preferred a different statement of his procedure. Mr. Trent started to speak; but Mr. Archer, whose habit of blandly ignoring Mrs. Trent must have been long-standing, it was so taken for granted by everybody, including Mrs. Trent, brushed the suggestion aside as if neither Perry Bassett nor his sister had spoken.

  “I want to get this straight,” he said grimly, in a dry crisp courtroom voice from which all the geniality had gone. “You believe first that on that night here, fourteen years ago, Michael Spur meant to shoot and kill his own father. And you believe secondly that when he comes back—tomorrow, tonight, whenever he gets here—there is a definite probability that he will kill someone else, it may be someone at this table, unless he is watched. That is your contention? “

  Dr. Sartoris bowed very gravely.

  “And I support it,” he said, “with many years of experience in treating cases of shell shock and the mental and emotional derangements caused by it.”

  Mr. Archer’s keen blue eyes moved slowly from Dr. Sartoris to Mr. Trent.

  “It will take more than that, Duncan,” he said, “to make me think there is any harm now in Michael Spur.”

  Mr. Trent stared moodily down at the table.

  Dr. Sartoris’ grave face relaxed into a friendly smile.

  “Then don’t say I didn’t give you fair warning,” he said. He shrugged lightly, as if perhaps after all the whole thing was not as serious as he’d been pretending. His calm gaze moved slowly down the long table, resting for a diagnosing instant on each of the seven faces. When it came to Mr. Archer’s the doctor who was Mrs. Trent’s adviser and the lawyer who was Mr. Trent’s looked steadily at each other for a long moment. I doubt if many people had ever met Mr. Archer’s blue cold stare so unwaveringly.