Mrs. Balfame Part 3

Why do Mary Frew and Lottie Gifning go over to New York so often? Dave says it isn't only that women from these dull little towns go over to New York to meet their lovers, but that some of them are the up-town wives of millionaires, or the day-time wives of all sorts of men with money enough to run two establishments. It is a hideous world and I never ask for particulars, but the fact remains that Lottie and Mary and a few others have as many partners among the young men at the dances as the girls do; and I can recall hints they have thrown out that they could go farther if they chose."

"This is a busy country," remarked Dr. Anna drily. "Men don't waste time chasing the prettiest of women when convinced there is nothing in it--to borrow the cla.s.sic form. Young chaps, urged on by natural law to find their mate, will pursue the indifferent girl, but men looking for a little play after business hours will not. Why, you--you look as cold and chaste as Caesar's wife. They couldn't waste five minutes on you."

"That's what he said--that I was like Caesar's wife--"

"Enid!" Dr. Anna stopped the little machine and turned upon her friend, her weary face compact and stern. "Enid Balfame! Have you been letting a man make love to you?"

"Well, I guess not." Mrs. Balfame tossed her head and bridled. "But the other night, when I left your house, Mr. Rush was pa.s.sing and saw me home. He nearly took my breath away by asking me to get a divorce and marry him, but he respected me too much to make love to me."

"I should hope so. The young fool!" But Dr. Anna was unspeakably relieved. She had turned faint at the thought that her idol might be as many other women whose secrets she alone knew. "What did you say to him?" she asked curiously, driving very slowly.

"Why, that I would not be a divorced woman for anything in the world."

"You're not the least bit in love with him?" asked Dr. Anna jealously.

Mrs. Balfame gave her silvery shallow care-free laugh. It might have come from any of the machines pa.s.sing, laden with young girls. "Well, I guess not! That sort of foolishness never did interest me. I guess my vanity was tickled, but vanity isn't love--by a long sight."

Dr. Anna looked at the pure cold profile, the wide cool grey eyes, and laughed. "He did have courage, poor devil! It must have been--no, there was no moonlight. Must have been the suggestion of that old Lovers'

Lane, Elsinore Avenue. But if you wanted men to make love to you, my dear, you could have them by the dozen. Nothing easier--for pretty women of any age who want to be made love to. As for Rush--" She hesitated, then added generously, "he has a future, I think, and could take you somewhere else."

"I should be like a fish out of water anywhere but in Elsinore. I have no delusions. Forty-two is not young--that is to say, it is long past the adaptable age, unless a woman has spent her life on the move and filling it with variety. I love Elsinore as a cat loves its hearth-rug.

And I can get to New York in an hour. I think this would be the ideal life with about two thousand dollars more a year, and--and--"

"Dave Balfame somewhere else! Pity Sam c.u.mmack didn't turn him into a travelling salesman instead of planting him here."

"He's never been interested in anything in his life but politics. But I don't really bother about him," she added lightly. "I have him well trained. After all, he never comes home to lunch, he interferes with me very little, he goes to the Elks every night soon after dinner, and he falls asleep the minute he gets into bed. Why, he doesn't even snore.

And he carries his liquor pretty well. I guess you can't expect much more than that after twenty-two years of matrimony. I notice that if it isn't one thing it's another."

"Good Lord! Well, I wish he'd break his neck."

"Oh, Anna!"

"Well, of course I didn't mean it. But I see so many good people die--so many lovely children--I'm sort of callous, I guess. I make no bones of wis.h.i.+ng that he'd died of typhoid fever last week, instead of poor Joe Morton, who had a wife and two children to support, and was the salt of the earth--"

"You might give Dave a few germs in a capsule!" Mrs. Balfame interrupted in her lightest tones, although she turned her face away. "Or that untraceable poison you once showed me. A bottle of that would finish him!"

"A drop and none the wiser." Dr. Anna's contralto tones were gloomy and morose. "Unfortunately, I am not scientific enough for cold-blooded murder. I'm a silly old Utopian who wishes that a plague would come and sweep all the undesirables from the earth and let us start fair with our modern wisdom. Then I suppose we'd bore one another to death until original sin cropped out again. Better speed up, I guess. I've a full evening ahead of me."

CHAPTER IV

The "smart set" of Elsinore was composed of the twelve women that could afford to lose most at bridge. Mrs. Balfame, who could ill afford to lose anything, but who was both a scientific and a lucky player, insisted upon moderate stakes. The other members of this inner exclusive circle were the wives of two bankers, three contractors, two prosperous merchants, one judge, one doctor, and two commuters who made their incomes in New York and slept in Elsinore. These ladies made it a point of honor to dine at seven, dress smartly and appropriately for all occasions, attend everything worth while to which they could obtain entrance in New York, pay an occasional visit to Europe, read the new novels and attend the symphony concerts. It is superfluous to add that the very foundation of the superior social status of each was a large house of the affluent type peculiar to the prosperous annexes of old communities, half brick and half wood, shallow, characterless, impersonal; and a fine car with a limousine top. The house stood in the midst of a lawn sloping to the street, unconfined by even the box hedge and undivided from the neighbouring grounds. The garage, little less pretentious than the mansion, also faced the street, for all to see.

There was hardly a horse left in Elsinore; taxi cabs awaited the traveller at the station, and people that could not afford handsome cars purchased and enjoyed the inexpensive runabout.

Mrs. Balfame had segregated her smart set for strategic reasons, but that did not mean that both she and they were not kindness itself to the less favoured. Obviously, an imposing party cannot be given by twelve families alone, especially when almost half their number are childless.

On all state occasions the list of invited numbered several hundred, in that town of some five thousand inhabitants.

It said much for the innate n.o.bility of these wealthier dames of Elsinore, who read the New York society papers quite as attentively as they did the war news, that they submitted without a struggle to the dominance of a woman who never had possessed a car and whose husband's income was so often diverted from its natural course; but Mrs. Balfame not only outcla.s.sed them in inflexibility of purpose, but her family was as old as Brabant County; the Dawbarns had never been in what might be called the cavalry regiment, consisting of those few chosen ones living in old colonial houses set in large estates and with both roots and branches in the city of New York; but no one disputed their right to be called Captains of the infantry. And Mrs. Balfame, sole survivor in the direct line, had two wealthy cousins in Brooklyn.

Once in a while Dr. Anna, a privileged character, and born at least in Brabant County, took a hand at bridge, but she was a poor player, and, upon the rare occasions when she found time to spend a Sat.u.r.day afternoon at the Country Club, preferred to rest in a deep chair and watch the young folks flirt and dance until the informal supper was ready. Never had she tripped a step, but she loved youth, and it gave her an acute old maid's delight to observe the children grow up; snub-nosed, freckled-faced awkward school girls develop at a flying leap into slim American prettiness, enhanced with every late exaggeration of style. She also approved heartily, on hygienic grounds, of the friends of her own generation dancing, even in public, if their partners were not too young and their forms too c.u.mbersome.

Mrs. Balfame and Dr. Anna arrived at the Club shortly after four o'clock. Young people swarmed everywhere, within and without; perhaps twenty older matrons were sitting on the veranda knitting those indeterminate toilette accessories for the Belgians which always seemed to be about to halt at precisely the same stage of progress.

Mrs. Balfame, who had set the fas.h.i.+on, had not brought her needles to-day. She went directly to the card room; but her partner for the tournament not having arrived, she entertained her impatient friends with a recent domestic episode.

"I have a German servant, you know," she said, removing her wraps and taking her seat at the table. "A good creature and a hard worker, but leaden-footed and dull beyond belief. Still, I suppose even the dullest peasant has spite in her make-up. I have been reading tomes of books on the war, as you learned from painful experience yesterday; most of them, as it happened--a good joke on Anna that, as she gave me the list--quite antagonistic to Germany. One day when Frieda should have been dusting I caught her scowling over the chapter heads of one of them. Of course she reads English--she has been here several years. Day before yesterday, when I was knitting, she asked me whom I was knitting for, and I told her--for the Belgians, of course. She asked me in a sort of growl why I didn't knit for the homeless in East Prussia--it seems that is where she comes from and she has been having letters full of horrors. I seldom bandy words with a servant, for you can't permit the slightest familiarity in this country if you want to get any work out of them. But as she scowled as if she would like to explode a shrapnel under me, and as she is the third I have had in the last five months, I said soothingly that the newspaper correspondents had neglected the eastern theatre of war, but had harrowed our feelings so about the Belgians that we felt compelled to do what we could for them. Then I asked her--I was really curious--if she had no sympathy for those thousands of afflicted women and children, merely because they were the victims of the Germans.

She has a big soft face with thick lips, little eyes, and a rudimentary nose; generally as expressionless as such a face is bound to be. But when I asked her this question it suddenly seemed to turn to wood--not actively cruel; it merely expressed the negation of all human sympathy.

She turned without a word and slumped--pardon the expression--out of the room. But the breakfast was burned this morning--I had to cook another for poor David--and I know she did it on purpose. I am afraid I shall have to let her go."

"I would," said Mrs. Battle, wisely. "She is probably a spy and quite clever."

"Yes, but such a worker!" Mrs. Balfame sighed reminiscently. "And when you have but one servant--"

The tardy partner bustled in and the game began.

CHAPTER V

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 c.o.c.ked 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 a.s.sumed 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 att.i.tude 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 leaders.h.i.+p. 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 G.o.d; 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 s.e.x 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 h.e.l.l 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."