Invincible Minnie/Book 2/Chapter 10
Frances did not mention this shortcoming of Miss Eppendorfer’s at home, and it was never openly referred to between the authoress and herself. But Miss Eppendorfer ceased to be so careful, she was even relieved that Frances knew her vice and that she didn’t have to live in fear of her discovering it. The whiskey came openly with the grocery orders, then vanished into her own room. She was never to be seen drinking it, but there were many mornings when she couldn’t be awakened till noon, and when she did get up, she would be in a state that wrung Frankie’s kindly heart. The poor shaky, weeping thing, moaning about her aching head, swallowing her dreadful “headache cures,” and waiting in agony till relief came.... Frances had to sit by her, holding her hand and trying to quiet and cheer her. She struggled against disgust, but in vain; she would reach the point where the whole affair seemed intolerable, and she was determined to go home, and then Miss Eppendorfer would suddenly change, get up in the morning, dress elaborately and take her “little pal” out for a day of amusement. She was at such times so ingratiatingly kind that Frances put aside all thought of leaving her. No doubt these intervals of hectic excitement were her periods of reform; in fact, she almost admitted it.
“I have to keep on going,” she said, “to take my mind off things.”
Curious that Frances should find herself so placed, Frances who had been brought up to regard drunkenness in a man as a bestial crime, and in a woman, a thing almost impossibly awful. She sometimes wondered at herself, how was it that she didn’t blame Miss Eppendorfer, but looked upon her failing as if it were a disease? She felt herself very old, very experienced. In spite of her pity and real unhappiness over the thing, there was in it a deep, secret satisfaction; it was, she felt, Knowledge, Life; she was learning, developing. She had so far, far outgrown Minnie and her grandmother and their standards! She was tolerant, worldly-wise; there wasn’t, she believed, much more for her to learn....
The future rather worried her. This couldn’t last forever, and after this, what? She was not gaining experience that would be of any practical value to her in any other position. She was not able to save money; at the end of six months she found herself no better off than when her career had begun. And she was so ambitious, so passionately anxious to succeed, to be important and famous. She gave her problem much serious thought. One thing was certain; she couldn’t and wouldn’t leave Miss Eppendorfer under the present circumstances; the only thing was for her to prepare herself, to be ready for something better when there was a change of some sort. She presented her scheme to Miss Eppendorfer as tactfully as possible.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said, “if I knew how to type better and faster, and something of shorthand, I’d be ever so much more useful ... to you, and—and in general ... I wrote to a business school near here, and I think, if you don’t mind, I’ll take a course there in shorthand and typing. Three evenings a week, from seven to nine.”
But Miss Eppendorfer protested, begged her to put it off and not to leave her so much alone. She was afraid of this plan, afraid that she would, by it, lose this girl she so much needed.
“Just wait a month, dear, won’t you? Till the days are longer?”
It seemed an idiotic reason to Frances, and she looked obstinate.
“Perhaps I could take the course with you,” Miss Eppendorfer suggested, “I think I’d enjoy it.”
That idea didn’t please Frankie at all; the thought of going to school with anyone of Miss Eppendorfer’s age, appearance and temperament was appalling. She imagined what people would say—how they would be ridiculed. She was obliged to postpone the plan for a time, until she could think of a different way of presenting it....
Chance gave her an opportunity very soon. One morning the telephone rang, in itself a rare happening, and she hurried to answer it, as the authoress was asleep.
“Is this Miss Eppendorfer?” enquired a high, loud voice with an exaggerated London accent. “Oh, her secretary! Very well! You will please to tell Miss Eppendorfer that her cousin Kurt Hassler from Hamburg is here, and would like to call.”
“She’s not awake yet,” Frances explained, “but if you’ll leave your number”
“The Ritz,” he replied haughtily. “Find it in the telephone directory. I am here until one.”
She had scarcely replaced the receiver when Miss Eppendorfer opened the door of her room and stood smiling absent-mindedly at her.
“I thought I heard the telephone,” she said.
“You did. It was your cousin from Hamburg. He wants to see you.”
Miss Eppendorfer became immensely excited, and insisted upon Frankie’s calling him up at once.
“I’m too nervous,” she said. “Tell him to come to-night for dinner at seven.”
He accepted the invitation, and the authoress was delighted.
“I haven’t seen him since he was a child,” she told Frankie, “but I’ve heard lots about him. He went to Heidelberg, and then he went into his father’s business and he’s done wonderfully well, they say. He speaks English, French and Spanish perfectly.”
“Are you a German then?” Frankie asked.
“No; my father was, but I’m not. I’m American through and through. I can’t even speak German. If Kurt didn’t speak English, I don’t know what I’d do.”
While she drank her coffee, Miss Eppendorfer ingenuously confided to Frances her great desire to impress Mr. Hassler.
“You see, his family—my father’s cousins, over in Germany, always looked down on us. They were as rude as they could be. You know how proud those old commercial families are. Why, my dear, Kurt Hassler would never have dreamed of putting his foot inside my door if I hadn’t got a name for myself with this writing. So I’m going to show him that I’m somebody, after all. That I know how to do things right!”
Jennie was fetched to wait on the table, and supper was ordered from a restaurant nearby, with an extravagant variety of wines. Miss Eppendorfer dressed herself in her very best, and implored Frances to do the same, but Frances, although expecting a bearded and majestic man in evening dress, refused to put on any of the authoress’s finery.
“He’s not coming to see me,” she cried, “and, anyway, I’d rather look like what I am.”
Proud humility! And wasn’t she aware all the time that in her fresh blouse and blue serge skirt she utterly eclipsed Miss Eppendorfer, she with her clear brown skin and her beautifully honest eyes, with her youth and strength and dignity?
She had resented Mr. Hassler’s manner over the telephone and she had only to take one look at him in person to hate and detest him forever. He was unexpectedly young, not so old as herself, she imagined, but with a self-assurance seldom attained by other races this side of forty. He was handsome enough, but detestably arrogant, a smooth-shaven, blonde-crested boy with upturned nose and wide, impudent mouth. He was stupid and pompous, couldn’t talk about anything but himself and his “world-export business” as he called it, yet Frances saw that he had wit enough to take the measure of his cousin. His gallantry was so obviously mocking that she burned with shame for the poor haggard, painted woman who gulped it down. It was really torment for her to look on.
Alas, poor Frankie! She had yet to learn of Miss Eppendorfer’s second great weakness!
After that evening everything was changed, Miss Eppendorfer herself a quite different person. She was as good-tempered, as kindly as ever, but so silly that Frankie’s own amiability began to wear thin. She wrote no more, all her talk was of clothes, of hair dressers, of manicures. She would spend all morning sitting at her dressing table, polishing her nails and “jabbering,” as her secretary mentally called her talking. She was full of the affectations of a happy young girl, was impulsive, whimsical, even pouted. And for whom but that obnoxious little Hamburger, young enough to be her son!
He called every evening, and made it plain to Frankie that he wanted to be alone with his cousin. So she withdrew to her bedroom and tried to read, to ignore that light, hysterically gay voice answering his impudent compliments.
“Can’t she see?” Frankie used to ask herself, almost in tears. “Doesn’t she know he’s laughing at her? Oh, what an idiot she’s making of herself, poor old thing!”
He and Frances hated each other. She stared at him with cold contempt, he looked her up and down insolently; they never spoke unless it couldn’t be avoided. Unfortunately Frances had to listen to a great deal about him from Miss Eppendorfer, how successful and brilliant he was in business, how supremely well-educated, how fastidious and aristocratic, how irresistible to the fair sex. He told her about his “affairs” and she insisted upon telling Frankie, although the latter said bluntly enough that she wasn’t interested. It was necessary that she should be shown what a remarkable conquest Miss Eppendorfer had made. She was forced to hear about the Russian princess, the awfully exclusive Parisienne, and above all about the eminent and very chic Damen in Wien. The colossal success he had had! Frances had either to consider him a liar, or the ladies on the continent of Europe as pitifully lacking in taste.
He very soon began coming to dinner every night, and Miss Eppendorfer went to great trouble to secure a cook who was not only a German, but a German from the only correct part of Germany for cooks to inhabit. She extorted big wages and made life wretched with her shrewishness, but her delicacies were supposed to atone for all this. Expenses mounted steadily; Frances had not imagined that Miss Eppendorfer had so much money. She bought new clothes continually, and flowers, and very expensive wines. Mr. Hassler was not absent for a single night for two months after the coming of the German cook, but not once did he invite his cousin to go anywhere with him, or did he bring her flowers or sweets.
Frances could not comprehend this thing; she thought she did, but she didn’t, in the least. It was the sort of affair not related in romantic novels; there was nothing romantic about it. It might be classified as a “love affair,” although it would have been confoundedly hard to find any love in it.... Frankie simply thought that Miss Eppendorfer was “silly” about the young man, and anxious to impress him, and that he was attracted by the good dinners.
Her first real suspicions awoke when she was checking up the stubs in the authoress’s cheque book, which she did every month when the vouchers came back from the bank. And she saw, no less than five times, cheques made out to “Kurt Hassler” for fifty dollars, sixty dollars, up to a hundred. It gave her a vague feeling of uneasiness, which she couldn’t shake off, although she assured herself that it was all “business.”
Then she and Miss Eppendorfer had the first of their quarrels. The cook wanted a day off, and Miss Eppendorfer gaily asked Frankie if she wouldn’t cook one of her dear little suppers for “Kurtie.” Frances flushed.
“Why don’t you go to a restaurant?” she suggested.
“Kurtie’s so sick of restaurants. I told him what heavenly things you used to fix up for me, and he said he’d like to see what you could do. He’s”
“I’m sorry,” said Frances, “but I’d rather not.”
“My dear! Please! I’ve practically promised.”
“I can’t help it. I couldn’t.”
“But why?”
Frances looked at her indignantly.
“I wouldn’t cook for that man!” she said, severely.
“What is your objection to him, may I ask?” enquired Miss Eppendorfer, with sudden frigidity.
“I’d rather not say.”
“I insist.”
“I’m not going to say. It has nothing to do with the case, anyway. I don’t mind—I never mind doing things for you. But ... I should think you’d know better than to ask me to cook for your guests. I’m supposed to be your secretary, Miss Eppendorfer, not your servant.”
She was startled by the expression on Miss Eppendorfer’s face.
“A hell of a secretary you are!” she screamed. “You don’t know a damned thing. You’re no more use to me than a parrot. You take my money and never do a stroke of work. You’re as lazy as a nigger.” And much, much more, of abuse that grew fouler and fouler, most of it unintelligible to the girl. She stood motionless, white as a sheet, dumb with horror, her own little anger swept away on this violent torrent. She never forgot the scene, or the words.
“Oh!” she whispered. “Oh!... How terrible!... Oh, God, how terrible!”
For she had a dreadful feeling of helplessness, of being in a world where her dignity was of no avail. She cried forlornly for Minnie and her grandmother, even for her mother, dead a score of years.
She had packed her trunk and was absolutely determined to go home that night when Miss Eppendorfer came to the door, imploring to be let in. She, too, was in tears, streaming with tears, and she went down on her knees to Frances.
“Forgive me!” she cried. “Forgive me! Frances, darling, you know how terribly nervous I am! Don’t be too hard on me. I can’t live without you!”
She was so dreadfully upset that Frances had to get her to bed and give her a dose of some powerful sedative she used for her “nerve attacks,” and telephoned to Hassler not to come. And in the end she agreed not to go home.
But she remained very grave and thoughtful. She went out to supper at a little French table d’hôte nearby, came back and went to bed, without seeing Miss Eppendorfer again.
She was waked up late that night, though, by her. The poor creature was crying again, standing by Frankie’s bed.
“Oh, Frances!” she moaned, “I’m so wretched! I wish I were dead!”
Frances asked what was the matter.
“Kurt was so nasty to me,” she sobbed. “I rang him up after you’d gone out, and he came. But he wouldn’t stay a minute. He just looked at the supper and went away. I tried! I had sardines and caviare and fruit, all fixed in a dainty way.... Oh, Frances!”
Her voice rose to a shriek that alarmed Frances.
“Don’t get excited!” she entreated. “Just tell me, quietly, all about it. First let me close the window.”
It was an incoherent tale; he had told her that she didn’t know how to dress, that he wouldn’t be seen in a public place with her, that at her age she shouldn’t try to wear pink. Told her she looked vulgar. That he couldn’t see a trace in her conversation of the brains he imagined were required in novel writing.
Frances was exasperated.
“Why in the world do you bother with him!” she cried. “He’s—I’m sure you’re deceived in him. Why don’t you let him go?”
Miss Eppendorfer began to weep anew.
“I love him!” she declared. And seeing Frankie’s shocked face, she added, with humane motive, “We’re going to be married!”
Frances believed it.