It was about six o'clock when Mrs. Balfame, steadily losing, contrary to
all precedent, her mind concentrated, her features, like those of the
rest of the players, as hard as the stone faces dug out of Egypt, her
breath escaping in hissing jets, became vaguely conscious of a
disturbance in the outer room. The young people were dancing, as was
usual in the hour before supper, but the piano and fiddles appeared to
be playing against the ribald interruptions of a man's voice. It was
some time before the narrow flow of thought in Mrs. Balfame's brain was
deflected by the powerful outer current, but suddenly she became aware
that her partners were holding their cards suspended, and that their
ears were cocked toward the door. Then she recognised her husband's
voice.
For a moment she lost her breath and her blood ran chill. She had been
apprehensive for some time of a scene in public, but she had assumed
that it would occur in a friend's house of an evening; he attended her
nowhere else. The Club he had deserted long since; it was much too slow
for a man of his increasing proclivities, especially in a county
liberally provided with saloons and road houses.
During the last month she had become sensible of a new hostility in his
attitude toward her; it was as if he had suddenly penetrated her hidden
aversion and all his masculine vanity had risen in revolt. Being a
woman of an almost excessive tact, she had sprayed this vanity for
twenty-two years with the delicately scented waters of flattery, but the
springs had gone suddenly dry on that morning when she had uttered her
simple and natural desire to bring the conjugal sleeping accommodations
up to date.
And now he had come out here to disgrace her, she immediately concluded,
to make her a figure of fun, to destroy her social leadership. This
might also involve him in a loss, but when a man is both drunk and angry
his foresight grows dim and revenge is sweet.
Only last night there had been an intensely disagreeable scene in
private; that is to say, she had been dignified and slightly
contemptuous, while he had shouted that her knitting got on his nerves,
and the sight of all those books on the war made him sick. When the
whole business of the country was held up by this accursed war, a man
would like to forget it when at home. And every man had the same story,
by God; his wife was knitting when she ought to be darning stockings;
trying to be intellectual by concerning herself with a subject that
concerned men alone. Mr. Balfame had always resented the Woman's Club,
and all talk of votes for a sex that would put him and his kind out of
business. Their intelligent interest in the war was a grievous personal
indignity.
Being a woman of clear thought and firm purpose, and of a really high
order of moral courage, Mrs. Balfame was daunted for a moment only. She
laid down her cards, opened the door and entered the main room of the
club-house. There she saw, at the head of the room, a group of men
surrounding her husband; with one exception, almost as excited as he.
The exception was Dwight Rush who had a hand on one of Balfame's
shoulders and appeared to be addressing him in a low tone. Little Maude
Battle ran forward and grasped her arm.
"Oh, dear Mrs. Balfame," she gasped, "do take him home. He is
so--so--queer. He snatched three girls away from their partners, and the
boys are so mad. And his language--oh, it was something awful."
The women and girls were huddled in groups, all but Alys Crumley, who,
Mrs. Balfame vaguely realised, was sketching. Their eyes were fixed on
the group at the head of the room, where Rush was now trying to edge the
burly swaying figure toward the door.
Mrs. Balfame walked directly up to her flushed and infuriated spouse.
"You are not well, David," she said peremptorily. "In all the years of
our married life never have you acted like this. I am sure that you are
getting typhoid fever--"
"To hell with typhoid fever!" shouted Mr. Balfame. "I'm drunk, that's
what. And I'll be drunker when they let me into the bar. You get out of
this."
Mrs. Balfame turned to Dr. Anna, who had marched up the room beside her.
"I am sure it is fever," she said with decision, and the loyal Anna
nodded sagely. "You know that liquor never affects him. We must get him
home."
"Huh!" jeered Balfame, "you two get me home! I'm not so drunk I can't
see the joke of that. The matter with you is you think I'm disgracin'
you, and you want to go on bein' the high cock-alorum of this bunch.
Well, I'm sick of it, and I'm sick of bein' told to eat out when you're
at matinees or that damned Woman's Club. Home's the place for women.
Knittin's all right." He laughed uproariously. "But stay at home by the
fire and knit your husband's socks. Smoke a pipe too, if you like it.
That's what my granny did. The whole lot of you women haven't got one
good man's brain between you, and yet you'd talk the head off the
President of the United States--"
He was about to launch upon his opinion of Elsinore society when a
staccato cough interrupted the flow. Mrs. Balfame turned away with a
gesture of superb disdain, although her face was livid.
"The sex jealousy we have so often discussed!" Her clear tones from the
first had carried all over the room. "He must be taken home." She looked
at Dwight Rush and said graciously: "I am sure he will go with you. And
he will apologise to the Club when he is himself again. I shall go back
to our game."
She held her head very high as she swept down the long room, but her jaw
was set, her nostrils distended, a narrow strip of eye was fixed and
glaring.
An unforeseen situation had blown to flame such fires of anger as
existed in her depths, and she was unable to extinguish them as quickly
as she would have wished. To the intense surprise of the bridge women
who had followed her out of the card-room and in again, she sank into a
chair and burst into tears. But she managed to cry quietly into her
handkerchief, and in a few moments had her voice under control.
"He has disgraced me!" she exclaimed bitterly. "I must resign from the
Club."
"Well, I guess not." The ladies had crowded about her sympathetically.
"We'll all stand up for you," cried Mrs. Battle. "The men will give him
a good talking-to, and he'll write an apology to the Club and that will
end it."
These friends, old and more recent, were embarrassed in their genuine
sympathy, for no one had ever seen Mrs. Balfame in tears before. Vaguely
they regretted that, extreme as was the provocation, she should have
descended to the level of mere womanhood. It was as if they were present
at the opening of a new chapter in the life of Mrs. Balfame of Elsinore;
as, in truth, they were.
Mrs. Balfame blew her nose. "Pardon me," she said. "I never believed I
should break down like this--but--but--" once more she set her teeth and
her eyes flashed. "I have a violent headache. I must go home. I cannot
finish the game."
"I'll take you home," Dr. Anna spoke. "Oh, that beast!"
The other women kissed Mrs. Balfame, straightened her hat, and escorted
her out to the runabout which Dr. Anna brought to the rear entrance of
the clubhouse. She smiled wearily at the group, touching her brow with a
finger. As soon as the little car had left the grounds and was beyond
the reach of peering eyes, she made no further attempt at self-control,
but poured forth her inmost soul to the one person she had ever fully
trusted. She told the doctor all the secret horror of her life, her
hatred and loathing of David Balfame; everything, in short, but her
determination to kill him, which in the novel excitement that had
invaded her nervous system, she forgot.
Dr. Anna, who had heard many such confessions, but who obstinately had
hoped that her friend's case was not as bad as it appeared
superficially, was glad that she was not driving a horse; humane as she
was, she should have forgotten herself and lashed him to relieve her own
feelings.
"You must get a divorce," she said through her teeth. "You really must.
I saw Rush looking at you. There is no mistaking that expression in a
man's eyes. You must--you must divorce that brute."
"I'll not!" Mrs. Balfame's composure returned abruptly. "And please
forget that I gave way like this and--and said things." She wondered
what she really had said. "I know I need not ask you never to mention
it. But divorce! Oh, no. If I continue to live with him they'll be sorry
for me and stand by me, but if I divorced him--well, I'd just be one
more divorced woman and nothing more. Elsinore isn't Newport. Moreover,
they'd feel I'd no further need of their sympathy. In time they'd let me
pretty well alone."
"I don't think much of your arguments," said Dr. Anna. "You could marry
Rush and go to New York."
"But you know I mean what I say. And don't worry, Anna dear." She bent
over the astonished doctor and gave her a warm kiss. "And as I'm not
demonstrative, you know I mean that too. You are not to worry about me.
I've got the excuse I needed, and I'm going to buy some things at second
hand and refurnish one of the old bedrooms and live in it. He can't say
a word after this, and he'll be humble enough, for the men will make him
apologise to the Club. I'll threaten him with divorce, and that alone
will make him behave himself, for it would cost him a good deal more to
pay me alimony than to keep the old house going--"
"That isn't an argument that will have much effect on a man, usually in
liquor. But women are queer cattle. Divorce is a great and beneficent
institution, and here you elect to go on living under the same roof with
a brute--Oh, well, it's your own funeral. Here we are. I've got to speed
up and practise medicine. Am expecting a call from out at Houston's any
minute. Baby. Good night."