Superwomen Part 9

Then, in the fullness of his age, Menelaus died, and all at once the situation changed. Helen was no longer safe ash.o.r.e, listening to the breakers; she was in their power. Her husband's protecting influence gone, she was at the mercy of his subjects; at the mercy of the merciless.

The women of Sparta banded together and, in dangerous silence, advanced upon the palace. These were the mothers, the wives, the daughters, the sweethearts, of men who had left their white bones on the Trojan seacoast, that the golden Helen might again rest snug in the shelter of Menelaus' love. There was not a doubt as to the militants' purpose. And as they drew near the palace, Helen fled. One or two slaves, still faithful to her, smuggled the fugitive out through a rear gateway and through the forests toward the seash.o.r.e.

There, a handful of silver bought a fisher's boat and the service of his crew.

And once more across the "wine-hued aegean" fared the golden Helen, not this time in girlish light-heartedness to her husband's home, or, in guilty happiness, fleeing from that house by night with the man who had bewitched her, but a fugitive scourged forth from the only home she knew.

Storm-driven, her boat at last was blown ash.o.r.e on the island of Rhodes. There she found she had been running toward ill fortune just as rapidly as she had thought she was running away from it. The Queen of Rhodes had lost a husband in the Trojan war. And, like every other woman on earth, she had sworn the vengeance oath against Helen. So, the story goes, when the fugitive was brought before the Rhodian queen, the latter gave a single curt order. In obedience to that fierce command, Helen was led forth and hanged; her executioners being blindfolded, that they might not balk at destroying the world's loveliest creation.

So perished the golden Helen. For her sin, she is known to fame as "Helen of Troy," not "Helen of Sparta," or even "Helen of Argos."

Posterity has branded her, thus, with the name of the land she destroyed, instead of the land of her birth.

Poets and dreamers of dreams, even in her own century, have said that Helen did not die; that loveliness such as hers could not be destroyed, any more than can the smile of the springtide or the laughter of the sea. They say she escaped the Rhodians and set sail once more upon her wanderings. From sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e she voyaged,--ageless, divine, immortal, as eternal as Love itself. Ever, where she went, men adored her and besought her to remain among them to bless or curse their lives. But, ever, women banded together to drive her forth again upon her endless wanderings.

One legend tells of her sojourn in Egypt, and of her meeting, there, Ulysses, "sacker of cities." Penelope was dead, and Ulysses had recommenced his voyaging. He and Helen met, and the old, old love of nearly a half century earlier flared into new flame. And, as ever, Helen's love brought death in its wake. For the Sacker of Cities fell in battle within a few weeks after their reunion.

Another and more popular legend is that Helen, in return for everlasting youth, formed a highly discreditable business partnership with Satan, whereby she was to serve as his lure for the d.a.m.ning of men's souls. Do you recall, in Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus," it was by promise of Helen's love that the devil won Faustus over to his bargain? There is a world of stark adoration in Faustus' greeting cry, as, for the first time, he beholds the enchantress:

"Is this the face that launched a thousand ships And burned the topless towers of Ilium?

Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss!"

She granted him the kiss, but no immortality; instead, his meed was d.a.m.nation, like that of her million other swains.

Goethe, in the second part of his "Faust," makes her Marguerite's successor in Faust's love. And one poet after another has amplified the theory that she lives on through the ages, drawing men's souls from them.

And the poets are often right, where sane folk are wrong. The golden Helen--typifying the blind, all-engulfing love that laughs alike at reason and at destruction--lives and shall live while men are men. She lived as Cleopatra, for whom Antony deemed the world well lost. She lives as the hideously coiffured shopgirl with the debutante slouch and the blue-white powdered nose, for whom a ten-dollar-a-week clerk robs the till and goes to jail. And, as in the earliest days of her mortal wanderings, men ever stretch forth their arms to her as she pa.s.ses, and beseech her to stay her flight long enough to let them d.a.m.n themselves for her. And, as in those early days, women ever band together in righteous wrath to drive her forth into the darkness.

Poor Helen! Or--is it happy Helen? I think the former adjective is to be chosen. For the game she plays can end only in ultimate loss to herself. And that game's true winners, in the long run, are the very women who, fearing her spell over their loved ones, harry her forth to new wanderings. This thought should comfort them in the inevitable hour when golden Helen's shadow shall fall momentarily athwart their placid lives.

The prim path must inevitably triumph over the primrose path.

CHAPTER FIVE

MADAME JUMEL

NEW YORK'S FIRST OFFICIAL HEART BREAKER

Far to the north, on New York City's westerly side--on One Hundred and Sixtieth Street, near St. Nicholas Avenue--stands almost the sole American memorial to a super-woman. It takes the shape of a colonial dwelling, two and a half stories high, white, crowned by a railed gazebo, and with rear extensions and columns and the rest of the architectural fantasies wherein our new-world ancestors rejoiced.

It is called the Jumel mansion, after Madame Jumel, although it originally belonged to Mary Morris, an earlier and more beautiful man-slayer, at whose dainty feet George Washington, with solemn, but futile, protestations, deposited his heart; and although the woman whose name it bears ended her days there, not as Madame Jumel, but as Mrs. Burr.

The house once stood far in the silent country. But the thin, throbbing island's life crawled northward inch by inch, until to-day the mansion crouches, miscast and bewildered, amid a forest of new and top-heavy flat houses--happy hunting ground for none-too-rich homeseekers--and is shaken by the jar of "L" and New York Central trains.

Poor old house! Bewigged and small-clothed Great-gran'ther Peregrine, from Pompton, caught in the screaming eddy of a subway rush-hour crowd at the Grand Central!

So much for rhapsody. The Jumel place is worth it. For there ghosts walk--the stately, lavender-scented old villains and villainettes who made up New York's smart set a century and a quarter ago, when flats were called "rookeries" and polite folk would scarce mention such things.

In those days, when any theme was too darkly disreputable or indelicate for discussion--and a few things still were, in that ante-white-slave era--people were p.r.o.ne to refer to such doubtful topics as "shrouded in mystery," and to let it go at that. There was more than one event in the cradle-to-grave career of Madame Jumel that called for and received the kindly mystery shroud. As far as coherence will allow, let us leave the shroud snugly tucked around those events.

I mention it, at the outset, only because more than one chronicler has used it to account for hiati--(or is it hiatuses? The former sounds more cultured, somehow--) in the lady's career. Whereas, nearly all, if not quite all, these gaps can be bridged quite easily by well-authenticated facts. Some of them too well authenticated for complete comfort.

And so to the story.

Aboard a ship bound north from the West Indies, one day in 1769, a woman died, a few hours after the birth of her baby daughter. It was not necessary to remove any wedding ring from the dead mother's finger before burying her at sea. One story says that her orphaned daughter's father had been a French sailor named Capet. Another and wholly diverse tale says that the baby was not born at sea at all, but in the Providence, Rhode Island, poorhouse, and of unknown parentage. You see the shroud of mystery was pressed into service very early in the biography.

In any event, soon after the ship touched at Providence, a Rhode Island tradesman's wife was so attracted by the prettiness of the solitary girl baby as to adopt her. At the subsequent christening, the rather uninspiring name of Eliza Bowen was bestowed on the child. No one seems to know why. More mystery, and not a particularly thrilling one at that.

In strait-laced ways and to all demure modesty, Eliza was reared. And at fifteen she was not only the prettiest girl in Rhode Island, but one of the cleverest and--so declared the pious--one of the very worst. In those days and in New England, it was delightfully easy to acquire a reputation for wickedness by merely failing to conform to all the ideas of the blue-law devotees. Shan't we give Betty Bowen--her commonly used name--the benefit of the doubt?

We know she was not only blessed with unwonted beauty, but with an exceptional mind. She had, in full measure, even in girlhood, the nameless and irresistible charm of the super-woman. She was reckless, high of spirit, impatient of restraint; inclined to listen over-kindly, perhaps, to the pleadings of her countless rural admirers.

Then, when she was only seventeen, Colonel Peter Croix came into her life. Croix was a former officer in the British army and lived in New York. He had plenty of money, and was more or less what, a century later, would have been called a "rounder."

How this middle-aged Lothario chanced to meet the Rhode Island belle, no one knows. But meet her he did. He was the first man of the world who had come into Betty's rustic life. By contrast with the local swains, he was irresistible. Or so she found him. At all events, she did not resist. She eloped with him, and Rhode Island knew her no more. Her real career as a heart breaker had set in.

To New York, Colonel Croix brought his inamorata. There he installed her in a stately country house at Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue, on the spot where, afterward, A. T. Stewart's white marble domicile used to excite the out-of-towners' awe, and where now a trust company's building stands.

Betty wore amazingly costly clothes, paying for a single dress far more than for her year's wardrobe in Rhode Island. Croix festooned jewelry, Christmas-tree-like, over her neck, hair, and hands. She blossomed like the rose. Croix, inordinately proud of his conquest, also brought shoals of his friends to call, which was a mistake; for Betty had no leanings toward monopolies.

Like the hackneyed, but ever-useful, meteor, Betty flashed upon stark young eighteenth-century New York. The city--so far as its male population was concerned--threw up both hands in blissful surrender.

Croix's friends--some of them rounders like himself, some of them fat, solid, but beauty-loving financiers--formed a court of beauty around the fair newcomer. Betty's consummate charm drew to this court other and loftier men, too.

For example, one of her foremost adorers was a brilliant, magnetic young statesman whose birth was perhaps as unblest as her own, but whose self-made name was already beginning to ring through America. He was Alexander Hamilton. He had a high-born and attractive wife of his own, and an adoring nestful of children. But Hamilton believed in monopolies no more than did Betty, and he became her adorer.

Another of the higher type of men who came a-courting Betty was a statesman of almost equal fame--a little fellow, scarce five feet four inches tall and slight of build, whose strikingly handsome face was lighted by enormous black eyes almost snake-like in their mesmeric power--particularly over women. He was Aaron Burr.

Burr was a lady-killer of the first order. He was not a man of bad morals. He was simply a man of no morals at all. But he was also a man of no fear, and a genius withal. He knelt, not in submission, but in ironic admiration before Betty. And she, like fifty other women, was swayed by his hypnotic eyes and his wondrous love eloquence.

At the house of which Croix had made Betty the chatelaine, Burr and Hamilton often met, but never at the wish of either. For they hated every bone in each other's bodies.

They had been at loggerheads as mere lads, when together they had served on General Washington's staff during the Revolutionary War.

Afterward, in social and political life, they had clashed, and clashed fiercely. Now, as rivals for the interest of the volatile Betty, their smoldering hate flamed forth lurid and deathless.

And thenceforth, fanned by new political and other causes, that death hate grew. It came to a head seven years later, when, in the gray of a chilly morning, the lifelong rivals faced each other, pistol in hand, in the fields beyond Weehawken Heights; and when, at the first volley, Hamilton sprang high in air, then crashed to the earth, mortally wounded.

Yes, in her time Betty had--directly or indirectly--much to answer for.

George Washington Bowen, in after years, swore that he was the son of Betty and of the Father of his Country. This the Jumels have fiercely denied.

Among the business-men guests Croix brought to see Betty was an enormously rich old French wine merchant, Stephen Jumel by name. This was in 1804--the year of Hamilton's death. Jumel was fifty; Betty was thirty-five. Jumel was pa.s.sing rich; Betty had shrewdness enough to realize that her own fortunes, under her present circ.u.mstances, depended solely on her looks and her charm. As beauty is not eternal and as charm sometimes fails to outlive it, the super-woman deemed it wise to accept the infatuated wine merchant's offer of marriage.

Indeed, she is said to have angled with Napoleonic strategy for that same offer, and to have won it only after a sharp struggle of wits.

Jumel was no fit opponent for her, then or ever after. From the first, they appear to have had but a single will between them--and that was hers.

On April 17, 1804, Betty and Jumel were married in St. Peter's Church in Barclay Street. The wedding's record still stands in the parish archives. So does the statement made on that occasion by Betty--a statement charmingly at variance with all other records of her origin.