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MRS. BALFAME
A Novel
by
GERTRUDE ATHERTON
[Illustration: Logo]
New York
Frederick A. Stokes Company
Publishers
Copyright, 1916, by
Gertrude Atherton
All rights reserved, including that of translation into
foreign languages
Fourth Printing
_And woman, yea, woman, shall be terrible in story;
The tales too, meseemeth, shall be other than of yore.
For a fear there is that cometh out of woman and a glory,
And the hard hating voices shall encompass her no more._
--_The Medea._
MRS. BALFAME
CHAPTER I
Mrs. Balfame had made up her mind to commit murder.
As she stared down at the rapt faces of the fifty-odd members of the
Friday Club, upturned to the distinguished speaker from New York, whom
she, as President, had introduced in those few words she so well knew
how to choose, it occurred to her with a faint shock that this momentous
resolution had been growing in her essentially refined and amiable mind
for months, possibly for years; for she was not an impetuous woman.
While smiling and applauding, patting her large strong hands, freshly
gloved in virgin white, at precisely the right moment, as the sound and
escharotic speaker laid down the Woman's Law, she permitted herself to
wonder if the idea had not burrowed in her subconscious mind--that
mental antiquity shop of which she had lately read so much, that she
might expound it to the progressive ladies of the Friday Club--for at
least half the twenty-two years of her married life.
It was only last night that awakening suddenly she had realised with no
further skirmishes and retreats of conscience or principle how she
hated the heavy mass of flesh sleeping heavily beside her.
For at least eight years, ever since their fortunes had improved and she
had found leisure for the novels and plays of authors well-read in life,
she had longed for a room, a separate personal existence, of her own.
She was no dreamer, but this exclusive and ladylike apartment often had
floated before her mental vision, chastely papered and furnished in a
cold pale blue (she had an uneasy instinct that pink and lavender were
immoral); and by day it should look like a boudoir. She was too wise to
make a verbal assault upon this or any foreign word, for she found the
stage, her only guide, strangely casual or contradictory in these minor
details; but although her little world found no trouble in discovering
what Mrs. Balfame increasingly knew, what she did not know they
suspected so little that they never even discussed her limitations.
Handicapped by circumstances early and late she might be, but she had
managed to insinuate the belief that she was the superior in all things
of the women around her, their born and natural leader.
Mrs. Balfame had never given expression to this desire for a delitescent
bedroom, being a woman who thought silently, spoke guardedly, and, both
patient and philosophical, rarely permitted what she called her
imagination to wander, or bitterness to enter her soul.
The Balfames were by no means well enough off, even now, to refurnish
the old bedrooms long since denuded by a too economical parent after his
children had married and moved away, but a few mornings since she had
remarked casually that as the springs of the conjugal bed were sagging
she thought she should send it to the auction room and buy two single
beds. Last night, lying there in the dark, she had clenched her hands
and held her breath as she recalled David Balfame's purple flush, the
deliberate manner in which he had set down his thick coffee cup and
scrubbed his bristling moustache, then rolled up the stained napkin and
pushed it into the ring before replying.
His first vocative expressed all, but he was a politician and used to
elaborating his mental processes for the benefit of befuddled
intellects. "You'll have them springs mended," he informed his wife, who
was smiling brilliantly and sweetly across the debris of ham and eggs,
salt mackerel, coffee and hot breads--"that is, if they need it, which I
haven't noticed, and I'm some heavier than you. But you'll introduce no
more of your damned new-fangled notions into this house. It was good
enough for my parents, and it's good enough for us. We lived for fifteen
years without art lampshades that hurt my eyes, and rugs that trip me
up; and these last eight or nine years, since you've been runnin' a club
when you ain't runnin' to New York, I've had too many cold suppers to
suit me; I've paid bills for 'teas' to that Club and I've put out money
for fine clothes for you that I could spend a long sight better at
election time. But I've stood all that, for I guess I'm as good a
husband as any in God's own country; I like to see you well dressed, for
you're still a looker--and it's good business, anyhow; and I've never
grudged you a hired girl. But there's a limit to every man's patience. I
draw the line at two beds. That's all there is to it."
He had made a part of his speech standing, that being his accustomed
position when laying down the law, and he now left the room with the
heavy country slouch his wife had never been able to reform. He had no
authority in walk or bearing, being a man more obstinate than strong,
more cunning than firm.
She was thankful that he did not bestow upon her the usual marital kiss;
the smell of coffee on his moustache had sickened her faintly ever since
she had ceased to love him.
Or begun to hate him? She had wondered, as she lay there inhaling deeply
to draw the blood from her head, if she ever had loved him. When a man
and a maid are young! He had been a tall slim youth, with red cheeks and
bright eyes, the "catch" of the village; his habits were commendable and
he would inherit his father's store, his only brother having died a year
earlier and his sisters married and moved West. She was pretty,
empty-headed, as ill-educated as all girls of her class, but she kept
her father's house neatly, she was noted even at sixteen for her pies,
and at twenty for the dexterity and taste with which she made her own
clothes out of practically nothing. She was by no means the ordinary
fool of her age class and nation. But although she was incapable of
passion, she had a thin sentimental streak, a youthful desire for a
romance, and a cold dislike for an impending stepmother.
David Balfame wooed her over the front gate and won her in the orchard;
and the year was in its springtime. It was all as natural and inevitable
as the measles and whooping-cough through which she nursed him during
the first year of their marriage.
She had been happy with the happiness of youth ignorance and busy hands;
although there had been the common trials and quarrels, they had been
quickly forgotten, for she was a woman of a serene and philosophical
temperament; moreover, no children came, for which she felt a sort of
cold negative gratitude. She liked children, and even attracted them,
but she preferred that other women should bear and rear them.
But all that comparative happiness was before the dawning of ambition
and the heavier trials that preceded it.
A railroad expanded the sleepy village into a lively town of some three
thousand inhabitants, and although that meant wider interests for Mrs.
Balfame, and an occasional trip to New York, the more intimate
connection with a great city nearly wrecked her husband's business. His
father was dead and he had inherited the store which had supplied the
village with general merchandise for a generation. But by the time the
railroad came he had grown lazy and liked to sit on the sidewalk on fine
days, or before the stove in winter, his chair tilted back, talking
politics with other gentlemen of comparative leisure. He was popular,
for he had a bluff and hospitable manner; he was an authority on
politics, and possessed an eloquent if ungrammatical tongue. For a time,
as his business dwindled, he merely blasphemed, but just as he was
beginning to feel really uneasy, a brother-in-law who had been the chum
of his youth arrived from Montana and saved him from extinction and "the
old Balfame place" from mortgage.
Mr. Cummack, the brother-in-law, turned out the loafers, put Dave into
politics, and himself called personally upon every housewife in the
community, agreeing to keep the best of all she needed, but none of
those articles which served as an excuse for a visit to New York or
tempted her to delightful hours with the mail-order catalogue.
Mrs. Balfame detested this bustling common efficient brother-in-law,
although at the end of two years, the twelfth of her married life, she
was keeping a maid-of-all-work and manicuring her nails. She treated him
with an unswerving sweetness, a natural quality which later developed
into the full flower of graciousness, and even gave him a temperate
measure of gratitude. She was a just woman; and it was not long after
his advent that she began to realise the ambition latent in her strong
character and to enter upon a well defined plan for social leadership.
She found it all astonishingly easy. Of course she never had met,
probably never would meet, the really wealthy families that owned large
estates in the county and haughtily entertained one another when not
entertaining equally exclusive New Yorkers. But Mrs. Balfame did not
waste time in envy of these people; there were old families in her own
and neighbouring villages, proud of their three or four generations on
the same farm, well-to-do but easy-going, democratic and, when not so
old as to be "moss-backs," hospitable to new notions. Many, indeed, had
built new homes in the expanding village, which bade fair to embrace
choice bits of the farms.
Mrs. Balfame always had dominated these life-long neighbours and
associates, and the gradual newcomers were quick to recognise her power
and her superior mind; to realise that not to know Mrs. Balfame was to
be a commuter and no more. Everything helped her. Even the substantial
house, inherited from her father-in-law, and still surrounded by four
acres of land, stood at the head of the original street of the village,
a long wide street so thickly planted with maples as old as the farms
that from spring until Christmas the soft leafy boughs interlaced
overhead. She had a subtle but iron will, and a quite commonplace
personality disguised by the cold, sweet, stately and gracious manner so
much admired by women; and she was quite unhampered by the least of that
originality or waywardness which antagonises the orthodox. Moreover, she
dressed her tall slender figure with unerring taste. Of course she was
obliged to wear her smart tailored suits for two years, but they always
looked new and were worn with an air that quite doubled their not
insignificant price. By women she was thought very beautiful, but men,
for the most part, passed her by.
For eight years now, Mrs. Balfame had been the acknowledged leader of
Elsinore. It was she who had founded the Friday Club, at first for
general cultivation of mind, of late to study the obsessing subject of
Woman. She cared not a straw for the privilege of voting; in fact, she
thought it would be an extremely unladylike thing to do; but a leader
must always be at the head of the procession, while discriminating
betwixt fad and fashion.
It was she who had established a connection with a respectable club in
New York; it was she who had inveigled the substantial well-dressed and
radical personage on the rostrum beside her to come over and homilise
upon the subject of "The European War _vs._ Woman."
The visitor had proved to her own satisfaction and that of the major
part of her audience that the bomb which had precipitated the war had
been made in Germany. She was proceeding complacently, despite the
hisses of several members with German forbears, and the President had
just exchanged a glance of amusement with a moderate neutral, who
believed that Russia's desire to thaw out her icy feet in warm water was
at the bottom of the mischief, when--spurred perhaps by a biting
allusion to the atrocities engaging the press at the moment--the idea of
murder took definite form in that clear unvisionary brain so justly
admired by the ladies of Elsinore.
Mrs. Balfame's pure profile, the purer for the still smooth contours and
white skin of the face itself, the stately setting of the head, was
turned toward the audience below the platform, and one admiring young
member, who attended an art class in New York, was sketching it as a
study in St. Cecelia's, when those six letters of fire rose smoking from
the battle fields of Europe and took Mrs. Balfame's consciousness by
assault: six dark and murky letters, but with no vagueness of outline.
The first faint shock of surprise over, as well as the few moments of
retrospect, she asked herself calmly: "Why not?" Over there men were
being torn and shot to pieces by wholesale, joking across the trenches
in their intervals of rest, to kill again when the signal was given with
as little compunction as she herself had often aimed at a target, or
wrung the neck of a chicken that had fed from her hand. And these were
men, the makers of law, the self-elected rulers of the world.
Mrs. Balfame had respected men mightily in her youth. Even now, although
she both despised and hated her husband, she responded femininely to a
fine specimen of manhood with good manners and something to talk about
save politics and business. But these were few and infrequent in Brabant
County. The only man she had met for years who interested her in the
least was Dwight Rush, also a scion of one of the old farm families.
Rush had been educated in the law at a northwestern university, but
after a few years of practice in Wisconsin had accepted an offer to
enter the most respectable law firm in his native township. He had been
employed several times by David Balfame, who had brought him home
informally to supper perhaps once a fortnight during the last six
months. But, although Mrs. Balfame frankly enjoyed his society and his
evident admiration for a beauty she knew had little attraction for his
sex, she had all a conventional woman's dislike for irregularities,
however innocent; and she had snubbed Mr. Rush's desire to "drop in of
an afternoon."
He barely flitted through her mind when she asked herself what did man's
civilisation amount to, anyway, and why should women respect it? And,
compared with the stupendous slaughter in Europe, a slaughter that would
seem to be one of the periodicities of the world, since it is the
composite expression of the individual male's desire to fight somebody
just so often--what, in comparison with such a monstrous crime, would be
the offence of making way with one obnoxious husband?
Something over two years ago--when liquor began to put a fiery edge upon
Mr. Balfame's temper--Mrs. Balfame had considered the question of
divorce; but after several weeks of cool calculation and the exercise
of her foresight upon the inevitable social consequences, she had put
the idea definitely aside. It was incompatible with her plan of life.
Only rich women, or women that were insignificant in great cities, or
who possessed conquering gifts, or who were so advanced as to be
indifferent, could afford the luxury of divorce. Her world was the
eastern division of Brabant County, and while it prided itself upon its
progressiveness, and even--among the younger women--had a gay set, and
although suppressed scandals slid about like slimy monsters in a marsh,
its foundations were inherited from the old Puritan stock, and it fairly
reeked with ancient prejudices.
It was a typical middle-class community with traditions, some of its
blood too old, and made up of common human ingredients in varying
proportions. Mrs. Balfame, enlightened by much reading and many
matinees, applied the word _bourgeois_ to Elsinore with secret scorn,
but with a sigh: conscious that all its prejudices were hers and that
not for an instant could she continue to be its leader were she a
divorced woman.
Mrs. Balfame indulged in no dreams of sudden wealth. Elsinore was her
world, and on the whole she was content, realising that life had not
equipped her to lead the society of New York City. She liked to shop in
Fifth Avenue--long since had she politely forgotten the mobs of
Sixth,--to occupy an orchestra chair with a friend at a matinee, and
take tea or chocolate at the fashionable retreats for such dissipations
before returning to provincial Elsinore. There was a tacit agreement
between herself and her husband that he should dine with his political
friends in a certain restaurant behind a bar in Dobton, the county seat,
on the Wednesday or Thursday evenings when she found it impossible to
return to Elsinore before seven o'clock; an arrangement which he
secretly approved of but invariably entered a protest against by coming
home at two in the morning extremely drunk.
He never attended the theatre with her, his preference being for
vaudeville or a screaming musical comedy, for both of which
abnormalities she had a profound contempt. She saw only the "best plays"
herself, her choice being guided not so much by newspaper approval as by
length of run. It must be confessed that in the eight or nine years of
her comparative emancipation from the grinding duties of the home she
had learned a good deal of life from the plays she saw. On the whole,
however, she preferred sound American drama, particularly when it dealt
with Society; for the advanced (or decadent?) pictures of life as
presented in the imported drama, she had only a mild contempt; her first
curiosity satisfied, she thanked God that she was a plain American.
Such was Mrs. Balfame when she made up her mind to remove David Balfame,
superfluous husband. She was quite content to reign in Elsinore, to live
out her life there, but as a dignified and irreproachable and well-to-do
widow. Divorce being out of the question, there was but one way to get
rid of him: his years were but forty-four, and although he "blew up"
with increasing frequency, to use his own choice vernacular, he was as
healthy as an ox, and the town drunkard was rising eighty.
Mrs. Balfame's friend, Dr. Anna Steuer, was now replying to the lady
from New York. After reminding the Club that the President of the United
States had requested his docile subjects to curb their passions and
flaunt their neutrality, Dr. Steuer proceeded to demolish the
anti-German attitude of the guests by reciting the long list of
industrial, economic and scientific contributions to civilisation which
had distinguished the German Empire since the federation of its states.
Dr. Steuer was of Dutch descent, and her gifts were not forensic, but
the key-note of her character was an intense and passionate loyalty. She
had spent some of the most impressionable years of her life in the
German clinics, and she cherished a romantic affection for a country
whose natural and historic beauties no man will deny. She had
steadfastly refused to read the "other side," pinning her faith to all
that was best in the country of her youthful dreams. In consequence, her
discourse, while informing, was somewhat beside the point; and had it
not been for the deep love borne her by almost every one present, there
would have been a polite but firm demand to give place.
Mrs. Balfame was smiling encouragement when her musings took a sudden
and arbitrary twist. Being a person who never acted on impulse, her
decisions, after due processes of thought, were commonly irrevocable.
The moment she had made up her mind to pass her husband on, she had
committed herself to the act; and, even before Dr. Anna Steuer had
claimed her superficial attention, had already erected the question,
How?
Mrs. Balfame was a woman who rarely bungled anything, and murder, she
well knew, was the last of all acts to bungle, did the perpetrator
desire to enjoy the freedom of his act. Being refined to her marrow, she
shrank from all forms of brutality, and rarely, if ever, read the
details of crime in the newspapers. The sight of blood disgusted her,
although it did not turn her faint. She kept a pistol in her bedroom;
burglars, particularly of late, had entered a large number of houses in
Brabant County; but nothing would have horrified her more than to empty
its contents into the worst of criminals.
Mechanically she had run through the list of all the accepted forms of
removing human impedimenta and rejected them, when Dr. Anna's scientific
mind, playing along the surface of hers, shot in the arrow of suggestion
that she belonged naturally to the type of woman that poisoned if forced
to commit murder. It was bloodless, decent, and required no vulgar
expenditure of energy.
But healthy people, suddenly dead, were excavated and the quarry
submitted to chemical tests; it was then--smiling brilliantly at her
ardent pro-German friend--that Mrs. Balfame recalled a rainy evening
some two years since. She and Dr. Anna had sat over the fire in the old
Steuer cottage, and the doctor, who before the war never had been
interested in anything but her friends, her science, and suffrage, had
discoursed upon certain untraceable poisons, had even risen and taken
down a vial from a secret cupboard above the mantel. During the same
conversation, which naturally drifted to crime, Dr. Anna had discoursed
upon the idiocy of doctors who poisoned with morphia, strychnine, or
prussic acid, when not only were these organic poisons known to all
scientific members of the profession, but they could easily remove the
barrier to their complete happiness with cholera, smallpox, or typhus
germs, sealed within the noncommittal capsule.
Mrs. Balfame shuddered at the mere thought of any of these dreadful
diseases, having no desire to witness human sufferings, or to run the
risk of infection, but as she stared at Dr. Anna to-day, she made up her
mind to procure that vial of furtive poison.
So sudden was this resolution and so grim its portent that it was
accompanied by unusual physical phenomena: she brought her sound white
teeth together and thrust out her strong chin; her eyes became fixed in
a hard stare and the muscles of her face seemed to menace her soft white
skin.
Alys Crumley, the young woman who had been sketching Mrs. Balfame
instead of listening to the discussion, caught her breath and dropped
her pencil. For the moment the pretty, ultra-refined, elegant leader of
Elsinore society looked not like St. Cecelia but like Medea. Always
determined, resolute, smilingly dominant, never before had she betrayed
the secret possibilities of her nature.
Miss Crumley cast a glance of startled apprehension about her, but the
debate was just finished, every one was commenting upon the splendid
self-control of the high participants, and repeating the New Yorker's
last phrase: that not civilisation but man was a failure. A moment later
Mrs. Balfame advanced to the edge of the platform, and, with her
inimitable graciousness, invited the members of the Club to come forward
and meet the distinguished guest. Little Miss Alys Crumley, watching
her, listening to her pleasant shallow voice, her amused quiet laugh,
came to the conclusion that the fearsome expression she had seen on her
model's face had been a mere effect of light.