The police, nettled by the sensational coup of the press, made a real
effort to discover the identity of the man or woman who had fired the
second pistol. For a time they devoted their efforts to implicating
Frieda and young Kraus, but the pair emerged triumphantly from a
grilling almost as severe as the third degree; furthermore, there was an
absolute lack of motive. Conrad had never evinced the least interest in
politics; and that Old Dutch should have commissioned the son of whom he
was so proud to commit murder when gun-men could be hired for
twenty-five dollars apiece was unthinkable to any one familiar with the
thoroughly decent home life of the family of Kraus.
Old Dutch's establishment was more of a beer garden than a common
saloon, and responsible for a very small proportion of the inebriety of
the County Seat. He and his sons drank their beer at the family board,
but nothing whatever behind the bar. As for Conrad, Jr., industrious,
ambitious, persistent, but without a spark of initiative, obstinate and
quick-tempered but amiable and rather dull, his tastes and domestic
ideals as cautious as his expenditures, it was as easy to trump up a
charge of murder against him because he happened to have seen Mrs.
Balfame leave her house by the kitchen door a few moments before he
heard the shot that killed her husband, as it was to fasten the crime
upon the unlovely Frieda because she ran home untimely with a toothache.
Frieda confessed imperturbably to her attempt to blackmail Mrs. Balfame,
adding (in free translation) that while she had no desire to see her
arrested and punished, she saw no reason why she should not turn the
situation to her own advantage. When Papa Kraus was asked if he had
counselled the girl to demand five hundred dollars as the price of her
silence, he repudiated the charge with indignation, but admitted that he
did remark in the course of conversation that no doubt a woman who had
killed her husband would be pleased to rid herself of a witness on such
easy terms, and that it was Frieda's pious intention--and his own--that
the blood-money should justify itself in the coffers of the German Red
Cross.
All this was very reprehensible, of course; but an imperfect sense of
the minor social and legal immoralities was no argument that such
blundering tactics were the natural corollary of a specific murder. To
be sure, there were those that asserted with firm lips and pragmatical
eyes that "anybody who will blackmail will do anything," but the police
were accustomed to this line of ratiocination from the layman and knew
better.
Their efforts in every direction were equally futile. Behind the Balfame
Place was a lane; Elsinore Avenue was practically the eastern boundary
of the town, which had grown to the south and west. There were two or
three lowly dwellers in this lane, and in due course the memory of one
old man was refreshed, and he guessed he remembered hearing somebody
crank up a machine that night, but at what time he couldn't say. It was
after seven-thirty, anyhow, for he turned in about then, and he had
heard the noise just before dropping off. That might have been any time
up to eight or nine, he couldn't say, as he slept with his windows shut
and couldn't hear the town clock. His cottage was directly across from a
point where the second assailant, running out of the grove and grounds,
would have climbed the fence to the lane if he had kept in a reasonably
straight line. But there had been heavy rains between the night of the
shooting and the awakening of the old man's memory, and not a track nor
a footstep was visible.
The police also searched the Balfame house from top to bottom for the
pistol the prisoner indubitably had carried from the house to the grove;
nor did they neglect the garden, yard and orchard, or any of the old
wells in the neighbourhood. They even dragged a pond. Their zeal was but
a further waste of time. It was then they concluded that Mrs. Balfame
had gone out deliberately to meet a confederate and that he had carried
off both pistols. But who was the confederate and how did he know at
what hour Balfame would reach his front gate? It was as easily
ascertained that Mrs. Balfame had telephoned no message--from her own
house--that night as that she had received one from her husband which
would give her just the opportunity she wanted. But how had she advised
the other guilty one? The poor police felt as if they were lashed to a
hoop driven up and down hill by a mischievous little girl. All the men
who had been at Cummack's when Balfame called up his wife had left the
house before he did, and proved their alibis. Even Cummack, who had
"sweat blood" during the elimination process, had finally discovered
that the janitor of his office-building had seen him go in and come out
on that fatal night. Did Mrs. Balfame go forth some time after Dr. Anna
brought her home from the Country Club, find her partner in crime and
secrete him in the grove? If so, why did she not remain in the grove
with him instead of returning to the house to leave it again by the
devious route that delivered her almost into the arms of young Kraus?
Above all, who was the man?
It was at this point that the police gave up, although they still
maintained a pretence of activity. Not so the press. Almost daily there
were interviews with public men, authors, dramatists, detectives,
headed: "Did Mrs. Balfame Do It?" "What Did She Do With the Pistol?"
"Was She Perchance Ambidexterous? Could She Have Fired Both Pistols at
Once?" "Will She Be Acquitted?" "Was It a German Plot?" "If Guilty,
Would She Be Wise to Confess And Plead Brain Storm?" The interviews and
symposiums that illuminated the Sunday issues were conducted by men, but
the evening papers had at least one interview or symposium a week on the
subject between a sister reporter and some woman of local or national
fame. Nothing could have been more intellectual than the questions asked
save, possibly, the answers given.
Upon the subject of the defendant's guilt public opinion fluctuated, and
was not infrequently influenced by news from the seat of war: when it
looked as if the Germans were primed for a smashing victory, the
doubting centred firmly upon the family of Kraus and Miss Frieda Appel;
but when once more convinced that the Germans were fighting the long and
losing game, the hyphenated were banished in favour of that far more
interesting suspect, Mrs. Balfame. Certainly there was nothing more
amusing than trying and condemning a prisoner long before she had time
to reach judge and jury, and tearing her to shreds psychologically. In
Spain the people high and low still have the bull-fight; other countries
have the prize-ring, these being the sole objective outlets in times of
peace for that lust of blood and prey which held the spectators in a
Roman arena spellbound when youths and maidens were flung to the lions.
But in the vast majority of Earth's peoples this ancestral craving is
forced by Civilisation to gratify itself imaginatively, and it is this
cormorant in the human mind that the press feeds conscientiously and
often.
In Elsinore the subject raged day and night, and the opinion of the man
in the street may be summed up in the words of one of them to Mr. James
Broderick of the _New York News_:
"Brain storm, nothin'. She ain't that sort. She done it and done it as
deliberately as hell. I ain't sayin' that she didn't have some excuse,
for I despised Dave Balfame, and I guess most of us would let her off if
we served on the jury, if only because we don't want this county
disgraced, especially Elsinore. But that ain't got nothin' to do with
it. And there's an awful lot of men who think more of their consciences
than they do even of Brabant, let alone of Elsinore, where like as not
all of 'em won't have been born--the jurors, I mean. I'm just
wonderin'!"
Mr. Broderick met Mrs. Phipps one afternoon at Alys Crumley's. She was
not a member of the inner twelve, but a staunch admirer of Mrs. Balfame,
although by no means sure of her innocence.
"Maybe she did," she admitted, "since you are not interviewing me for
print. But it's yet to be proved, and if she does get off, I don't fancy
she'll lose many of her friends--she wouldn't anyhow, but then if she
went up, they'd have so much further to call! As for wars," she
continued with apparent irrelevance, "there's this much to be said: a
lot of good men may get killed, but when you think of the thousands of
detestable, tyrannical, stingy, boresome husbands--well, it is to be
imagined that a few widows will manage to bear up. If women all over the
world refuse to come forward in one grand concerted peace movement,
perhaps we can guess the reason why."
None of these seditious arguments reached Mrs. Balfame's ears, but as
her friends' protestations waxed, she inferred that their doubts kept
pace with those of the public. But she was more deeply touched at this
unshaken loyalty than she once would have believed possible. She had
assumed they would drop off, as soon as the novelty of the affair had
worn thin; but not a day passed without a visit from one of them, or
offerings of flowers, fruit, books and bonbons. She knew that whatever
their private beliefs, the best return she could make for their
passionate loyalty was to maintain the calm and lofty attitude of a Mary
Stuart or Marie Antoinette awaiting decapitation. She shed not a tear in
their presence. Nor did she utter a protest. If she looked tired and
worn, what more natural in an active woman suddenly deprived of physical
exercise (save in the jail yard at night), of sunlight, of freedom--to
say nothing of mortification: she, Mrs. Balfame of Elsinore, shut up in
a common jail on the vulgar charge of murder?
But in spite of the amiable devotion of her friends and their
assurances that no jury alive would convict her, and in spite of her
complete faith in Dwight Rush, the prospect of several months in jail
was almost insupportable to Mrs. Balfame, and haunted by horrid fears.
She made up her mind again and again not to read the newspapers, and she
read them morning and night. She knew what this terrible interest in her
meant. Not a talesman in the length and breadth of Brabant County who
could swear truthfully that he had formed no opinion on the case. Other
murder cases had been tossed aside after a few days' tepid sensation,
unnoticed thereafter save perfunctorily. It was her unhappy fate to
prove an irresistible magnet to that monster the Public and its keeper
the Press. Her hatred of both took form at times in a manner that
surprised herself. She sprang out of bed at night muttering curses and
pulling at her long braids of hair to relieve the congestion in her
brain. She tore up the newspapers and stamped on them. She beat the bars
before her windows and shook them, the while aware that if the doors of
the jail were left open and the guards slept, she would do nothing so
foolish as to attempt an escape.
Sometimes she wondered, dull with reaction or quick with fear, if she
were losing her reason; or if she was, after all, a mere female whose
starved nerves were springing up in every part of her like poisonous
weeds after a long drought. Well, if that were the case, her admiring
friends should never be the wiser.
But there were other moods. As time wore on, she grew to be humbly
grateful to these friends, a phenomenon more puzzling than her attacks
of furious rebellion. Even Sam Cummack, possibly the only person who
had sincerely loved the dead man and still stricken and indignant, but
carefully manipulated by his wife, maintained a loud faith in her, and
announced his intention to spend his last penny in bringing the real
culprit to justice. Left to himself, he would in time no doubt have
shared the opinion of the community, but his wife was a member of the
grand army of diplomatists of the home. She was by no means sure of her
sister-in-law's innocence, but she was determined that the family
scandal should go no further than a trial, if Mr. Cummack's considerable
influence on his fellow citizens could prevent it; and long practice
upon the non-complex instrument in Mr. Cummack's head enabled her to
strike whatever notes her will dictated. Mr. Cummack believed; and he
not only convinced many of his wavering friends, but talked "both ways"
to notable politicians in the late Mr. Balfame's party. Most of these
gentlemen were convinced that "Mrs. B. done it," and were inclined to
throw the weight of their influence against her if only to divert
suspicion from themselves, several having experienced acute discomfort;
but they agreed to "fix the jury" if Mr. Cummack and several other
eminent citizens whom they inferred were "with him" would "come through
in good shape." There the matter rested for the present.
Above all was Mrs. Balfame deeply, almost--but not quite--humbly
grateful to Dwight Rush. Her interviews with him so far had been brief;
later he would have to coach her, but at present his time was taken up
with a thousand other aspects of the case, which promised to be a cause
celebre. He made love to her no more, but not for an instant did she
doubt his intense personal devotion. He had, after consultation with
two eminent criminal lawyers whom he could trust, decided that she
should deny in toto the Kraus-Appel testimony, and stick to her original
story. After all, it was her word, the word of a lady of established
position in her community and of stainless character, against that of a
surly German servant and her friends, all of them seething with hatred
for those that were openly opposed to the cause of the Fatherland. He
knew that he could make them ridiculous on the witness stand and was
determined to secure a wholly American jury.
It was some three weeks after Mrs. Balfame's arrest that another blow
fell. Dr. Anna's Cassie suddenly remembered that a fortnight or so
before the murder Mrs. Balfame had called at the cottage one morning and
asked permission to go into the living-room and write a note to the
doctor. A moment or two after she had shut herself in, Cassie had gone
out to the porch with her broom, and as she wore felt slippers and the
front door stood open, she had made no noise. It was quite by accident
that she had glanced through the window, and there she had seen Mrs.
Balfame standing on a chair before a little cupboard in the chimney
placing a bottle carefully between two other bottles. She had fully
intended to tell her mistress of this strange performance, but as the
doctor those days came home for but a few hours' sleep and too tired to
be spoken to, not even taking her meals there, Cassie had postponed her
little sensation and finally forgotten it.
When she did recall the incident under the pressure of the general
obsession, she told it to a friend, who told it to another, who again
imparted it, so that in due course it reached the ears of the alert Mr.
Broderick. It was then he informed the public of the lost glass of
lemonade and all the incidents pertaining thereto that had come to his
knowledge. Mrs. Balfame's slightly "absurd explanation" was emphasised.
Once more the police were "on the job." The restored bottle was analysed
and, ominously, found to contain plain water. Every bottle in the house
of Mrs. Balfame was carried to the chemist. Mrs. Balfame laughed grimly
at these sturdy efforts, but she knew that the story diminished her
chance of acquittal. The public now condemned her almost to a man. The
evidence would not be allowed in court,--Rush would see to that,--but
every juror would have read it and formed his own opinion. Somewhat to
her surprise Rush asked her for no explanation of this episode, and she
thought it best not to volunteer one. To her other friends she dismissed
the whole thing casually as a lie, no doubt inspired.
As the skies grew blacker, however, her courage mounted higher. Knitting
calmed her nerves, and she had many long and lonely hours for
meditation. Her friends kept her supplied with all the new novels, but
her mind was more inclined to the war books, which she read seriously
for the first time. On the whole, however, she preferred to knit for the
wretched victims, and to think.
No one can suffer such a sudden and extreme change in his daily habits
as a long sojourn in jail on the charge of murder without forming a new
and possibly an astonished acquaintance with his inner self, and without
undergoing what, superficially, appear to be strange changes, but are
merely developments along new-laid tracks in sections of the brain
hitherto regarded as waste lands.
Mrs. Balfame of Brabant County Jail was surprised to discover that she
looked back upon Mrs. Balfame of Elsinore as a person of small aims, and
rather too smugly bourgeoise. The world of Elsinore!
And all those artificial interests and occupations! How bored she really
must have been, playing with subjects that either should have interested
her profoundly or not at all. And for what purpose? Merely to keep a
step ahead of other women of greater wealth or possible ambitions. Her
astonishment at not finding herself all-sufficient, as well as her new
sense of gratitude, bred humility which in turn shed a warm rain upon a
frozen and discouraged sense of humour. While giving her friends all
credit for their noble loyalty, she was quite aware that they were
enjoying themselves solemnly and that no small proportion of their
loyalty was inspired by gratitude. She recalled their composite
expression in the hour of her arrest. They had fancied themselves deeply
agitated, but as a matter of fact they were dilated with pride.
Why had she cared so much to lead these women in all things, to be Mrs.
Balfame of Elsinore? To return to such an existence was unthinkable.
In spite of the fact that her own tragedy dwarfed somewhat her interest
in the great war, she saw life in something like its true proportions;
she knew that if acquitted she would be capable for the first time of a
broad impersonal outlook and of really developing her intellect. With
more than a remnant of the cold-blooded and inexorable will which had
condemned David Balfame to death by the medium of Dr. Anna's secret
poison, she seriously considered taking advantage of young Rush's
infatuation, changing her notorious name for his and receiving the
protection that her awakened femininity craved. At other times she was
equally convinced that she would marry no man again. She could live in
Europe on her small income, travel, improve her mind. Europe would be
vastly interesting after the war, if one avoided beggars and impromptu
graveyards.
But although she was deeply interested in herself, and gratified that
she possessed real courage, and that it had come through the fire
tempered and hardened, there were moments, particularly in the night,
and if the profound stillness were rent with the shrieks of drunken
maniacs, when she was terribly frightened; and in spite of the American
tradition which has set at liberty so many guilty women, she would stare
at the awful vision of the electric chair and herself strapped in it.