Frances would have found it difficult to explain what her secretarial
duties were during that year. Principally to go with Miss Eppendorfer
everywhere that she went--to the shops, the bank, the dentist. She was
too nervous to go out alone; she wouldn’t stir without her “little pal”;
and, as far as Frances could see, she had no other friends. There were a
few people who telephoned, and who very rarely dropped in to see her,
but she never got invitations of any sort. It puzzled Frances; she could
see no reason why Miss Eppendorfer shouldn’t be popular; in the first
place, she was a quite successful writer, which should have brought some
sort of fame, and in the second place, she had an excellent disposition.
They lived together, all day and every day, month after month, those two
women, without a sharp or a violent word, with the exception of the two
famous Scenes, to be described later. And these didn’t exactly count,
for the authoress was not altogether responsible, altogether herself
then.... Of course, there were times when relations were a bit strained,
but not often. And the remarkable, the admirable thing was, that they
were _not_ congenial, not in any way suited to each other; it was simply
their common kindliness and good temper that so preserved harmony.
Lack of friends was not the only point to puzzle Frankie; there were
other mysteries. It was a long time before she could understand Miss
Eppendorfer, or appraise her with any justice. At first she saw much to
disgust her. The slatternliness, above all, the shameless lack of pride.
She used to look across the supper table at the pallid, faded blonde
creature, with uncombed hair, still dressed in a wrapper over her
nightdress, and wonder how, _how_ ...! Even this, though, she learned to
condone when she saw that it sprang not so much from neglect as from
awful weariness. The poor soul was either hectic with excitement,
flying from shop to shop, restaurant to restaurant, taking every meal
away from home for perhaps a week, or else she couldn’t make up her mind
even to walk round the corner for a breath of air, would stay shut up in
the flat for days. She dressed well enough when she went out; she spent
money lavishly on her clothes and wore them with a conspicuous and
rather vulgar sort of style, but she didn’t really care; had no sort of
decent pride in her body. Didn’t trouble much about cleanliness, for
instance.
Her book, too, was a shock to Frances. It was the story of a woman
living on the prairies--the Lonely Woman--alone with a stolid husband;
then a young clergyman stopped there on his way somewhere, and chapter
after chapter recounted the wiles, the lures of the lonely woman to
rouse his passion, to destroy his honour. In the end she got him,
triumphed for a few lurid days, and then tried to run away with him. But
they were overtaken by a blizzard and died, frozen to death. The
pursuing husband saw them, sitting clasped in each other’s arms, and
shot them, not knowing that they were already dead, and then gave
himself up to the police and was hanged. It was what her publishers
called “palpitating”--very. Nothing was left to the imagination.
Frances thought it awful; she hadn’t been trained to see the poetry in
lust. All she could say in praise was that the prairie scenes seemed
very true to life, and Miss Eppendorfer assured her that they were.
“I’ve lived out there,” she said. She often told scraps of her past
life, but they wouldn’t piece together; sometimes one story directly
contradicted another. She had been married, sometimes she said once,
sometimes twice, and her husband--or first husband--had been
“unspeakable.” She had divorced him, or he her. Sometimes she described
her childhood as ideally happy, her parents as wealthy and indulgent;
then, once, she told Frances she was the daughter of a wretched woman
who had lived with a worker in the Chicago stockyards. Yet all this
didn’t impress Frances as lying; it was too vague, too aimless; she
couldn’t help a stupid feeling that Miss Eppendorfer didn’t _know_
exactly what had happened to her. Which was of course absurd.... And she
was sure that the stories which told of want, pain, and struggle were
the true ones, that the poor woman had suffered.
Talent she undoubtedly possessed. Although Frances detested the
persistent fleshliness of her stories, she had a generous admiration for
the gift itself. She would watch her writing, almost with awe, wondering
where the ideas came from, from what unfathomable reservoir she drew so
easily. She had no style, little art, couldn’t even use the language
properly; simply she put on paper the visions of her curious mind. She
sometimes used to cry as she wrote. And, although her books were
oversensual, her talk wasn’t. She avoided those topics which distressed
the austere Frances.