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?