The Small Room

by May Sarton

  “Where will she go?” Maria pressed her point.

  “She’ll do original work.”

  “Is she hungry and thirsty?” Maria asked. “She strikes me as rather smug.” There was, Lucy sensed, tension between these two women, as different as night and day.

  “And why not, pray? She’s head and shoulders above anyone else in the senior class, intellectually speaking, and she’s worked like a demon.”

  “No shop talk,” Harriet Summerson interrupted. “After all, the Atwoods and Miss Winter don’t even know who Jane Seaman is.”

  “Oh, do go on! I find it fascinating,” Lucy said.

  “As a matter of fact, Jane has registered for your American Renaissance course, so you’ll meet her soon enough.”

  “Oh dear.” Lucy’s dismay turned to embarrassment when everyone laughed.

  “Actually,” Jack Beveridge said, “Jane is rather fun.” Jack provided some essence that was welcome among the intensities, the elaborate self-defence of the women professors. He provided the salt; also, Lucy felt he was kind.

  “You can’t imagine the relief it is to be here.” Henry Atwood burst into speech as a bird might burst into song, so great was his pleasure in the occasion and in himself for being present. “At Appleton, I mean.” He turned to his wife, who was helping to collect cups and saucers. “Isn’t it, Debby? You see, where we were—”

  “Where were you?” Carryl Cope asked.

  “A little college in northern Michigan, Defoe. I’m sure you’ve never heard of it. Anyway, all they talked about there was religion and sports.”

  “And whether anyone had been caught smoking,” Debby chimed in.

  “Smoking, of course, was a sin.” His round face beamed. “Probably brilliance in a woman would also have been thought a sin, but there was no opportunity to discover.”

  “It does sound peculiarly grim,” Carryl Cope said distantly. She was visibly not interested in what went on in northern Michigan.

  “Didn’t it make you feel like awful snobs?” Maria asked. Deborah shot her a quick startled glance. “Did you stop smoking, or did you smoke ostentatiously to prove your integrity?”

  Henry blinked and swallowed. It was clear that he thought he had caught the tone of the occasion and now feared he had missed a cue. “We were very uncomfortable,” he said humbly. Lucy had not expected such transparent ingenuousness in a colleague; he is a dear, she thought. “I hated it, as a matter of fact. I hated feeling superior. I felt I was everything they dislike about the East. I’m sure we failed somehow.”

  “No,” Debby was vehement. “You had two good students and one of them will go on to Chicago. That’s not failure.”

  “You make us feel overprotected,” Harriet Summerson said.

  “Against ignorance and sloth, why not?” The tiger showed its claws for the first time. You had to be a little inhuman, Lucy suspected, to be as secure as Carryl Cope.

  “It’s time I got home to Mother.” The remark seemed incongruous coming from Jennifer Finch, who rose from her chair to make it. Lucy had imagined her as living alone with a cat. Now in the general movement of departure the front door stood open into the late afternoon sunlight, and there was the casual feel of a summer evening, of time opening out. Children went by on bicycles ringing their bells. Lucy, the last to say goodbye, asked if she could help wash up.

  “Well, that’s very kind of you, Dr. Winter.”

  “Do call me Lucy, please.”

  “Very well, Lucy, come along to the kitchen. It will only take a moment, and we can go on talking. I always hate it when everyone leaves at once, don’t you? One is left high and dry.”

  There was an old-fashioned wood-burning stove in one corner, covered with newspapers and used as a general dump. The window sills had rows of plants in odd jars along them, geraniums mostly. The linoleum was worn; in the center of the room stood a deal table, its clean wood scrubbed. They washed the dishes at a soapstone sink. “I do like your kitchen,” Lucy said, standing with a towel in her hand, ready to wipe.

  “It’s awfully old-fashioned. But I know where everything is and can put my hands on it without opening and shutting a lot of little doors.” Harriet Summerson worked quickly but absent-mindedly. At this moment she dumped the full sugar bowl into the dishpan. “Good Lord, what have I done now?” She burst into laughter, Lucy laughed too, and felt suddenly at home.

  “I’m going to like it here,” she said, watching Miss Summerson pour the whole dishpan of water and sugar out, and rescue the cups and saucers. “I liked all those people.”

  “It’s a kind of zoo, really. I sometimes think we collect every species, but they are wonderful people. It may be a safe little world, but it’s an immensely alive one. You will not be bored.”

  “Does Maria Beveridge teach?”

  “She used to. Jack met her at Middlebury. But now they have three little boys, you see.”

  “How lovely to have three little boys!”

  “Don’t underestimate Jack, by the way. He’s first class. He’s developed an attitude of irony, cynicism, whatever it is, but that’s only a defence—hard to be a man in this female seminary.” She had become brusque with shyness. “I like Maria. She has the effect of a quiet storm, or perhaps I should say a quieting storm: she clears the air.”

  “Yes,” Lucy said. “I can see that. She’s quite formidable.”

  “High voltage all right, but on a different current from most of us. She’s not really an intellectual. She’s a nature. That’s why she disturbs Carryl.”

  Lucy smiled. “I shouldn’t have thought anything could disturb Carryl Cope.”

  “Lots of things do.” Harriet Summerson put the last cup into the drainer with an air of finality. She did not explain herself and Lucy didn’t dare ask. It was clearly time to leave.

  Miss Summerson turned and, leaning her back against the sink, pushed back her hair. Her eyes were as blue as a summer sea. “The hell of teaching is that one is never prepared. I often think that before every class I feel the same sort of terror I used to experience before an examination … and always I imagine that next year it will be different.” Lucy sensed that here, standing in the kitchen, she was close to the pulse of the life she was about to enter. She was in the presence of a mystery. It was not the words, ordinary enough, nor even what they expressed, but something intangible about Harriet Summerson herself, who now stood up and said, “I would like to ask you to stay for supper … that’s what all this has been about … but I must work.”

  “So must I,” Lucy said fervently.

  At the door they shook hands. Then Harriet Summerson looked off into the long bands of sunlight lying across the road. “Is there a life more riddled with self-doubt than that of a woman professor, I wonder?” she asked the evening air.

  Lucy walked back across the campus with Harriet Summerson’s question reverberating in her mind, and looked at the ugly red buildings with new eyes. She realized that the parting from John and its resonance had insulated her until now from thinking very much about the sort of life she was poised to enter, what joys and perils, what anxieties and power to endure lay ahead. Of course the absence of students had something to do with it; the most important element in this world was still lacking. Tomorrow and for all the days following it for a long autumn, winter, and spring, her attention would be focussed on a bevy of girls whom she could not even imagine. Would she be able to swing it? What could she tell them? What did she really know?

  CHAPTER 2

  The girls arrived, and settled like flocks of garrulous starlings, perpetual chatter and perpetual motion. Lucy, looking down from her office on the fourth floor of one of the oldest buildings, compared the campus to a stage where a complicated ballet was being rehearsed. Small groups flowed together and parted; a girl in a blue blazer ran from one building to another; five or six others arranged themselves under an elm, in unconsciously romantic attitudes, a chorus of nymphs. The effect was enhanced by the freshmen’s required red Eton
caps, and by the unrequired but almost universal uniform of short pleated skirts and blazers. Looking down on all this casual, yet intimate life from above, Lucy felt lonely and a little scared.

  If she had feared that Appleton’s emphasis on scholarship might have brought forth a group of cranks or creeps, girls in spectacles, girls who walk with their heads down, monsters of morose self-absorption and shyness, the reverse appeared to be true. They were frighteningly healthy and natural, but undifferentiated. And Lucy longed to separate the dancing corps into individual faces and names, to make contact with an actual class. She sighed and turned back to her desk, threw out the notes she had been laboriously making, and decided suddenly to do something quite different. To prepare for this first class, she found herself exploring and recovering areas in herself that had been blotted out by the last years. She had been living in someone else, now she must draw on herself. She had never realized until now what extraordinary teachers she had had, nor what complex threads had been woven together to bring her to the moment, this perilous, exhilarating moment when she would be asked to summon all that she held in her hands and to communicate it.

  At precisely five minutes past the hour a few days later she walked into Holmes D, to meet the American Renaissance section. The dinginess of the room struck her between the eyes, and also the unfocussed look of the twelve or so girls scattered about it. Her knees trembled idiotically as she stepped onto the small platform and sat down behind the desk. She looked up, met a pair of rather vague blue eyes, and dropped hers. The moment was of a gravity for her, had a weight that it could not possibly have for them, after all. They had not approached this hour with their hearts skipping a beat, with a prickle of gooseflesh on their skins. In the second’s pause, panic flowed in. She held it at bay by asking them in a rather firm voice to tell her their names. While they did so, she looked at the faces, a mistake, for, when they had all spoken, she realized that she had attached only one name to a person, that of Jane Seaman. The prize student sat hunched over, fair hair falling over one eye, a small-featured, secretive face that yielded nothing of itself. Lucy was conscious of being rather sardonically observed, and responded by stating at once that this was not going to be an easy course, that it would require extensive reading, and two major papers.

  “I am not going to lecture after today,” she said, “I shall expect you to do the talking, and in fact we shall consider ourselves a seminar.” She felt rising in her a faint intoxication, stemming from the concentrated attention that faced her. With it came a wave of happiness. What will she think of Thoreau, she asked herself, her eyes resting on a girl with a curiously old-fashioned look. Her face formed a perfect oval; she had reddish curly hair; her eyes seemed very wide-open or on the verge of tears (odd)—was her name Pippa? Lucy tried vainly to remember, as she opened her notebook and took a deep breath. This was it.

  “It occurred to me that a lively class—and I hope you will prove to be that—is rather like a tennis match. If so, you have a right to know something about your opponent on the court. So I am taking the period today to tell you where I stand. It will give you a clue to prejudices and predilections, as well as a clue to beliefs and standards.”

  Lucy sensed the increased stir of attention; those who had brought books closed them with an air of expectation.

  “As I thought about meeting you today, I looked back over my own education and was astonished at how rich and complex, how various the attitudes had been, and how various the demands made upon me by the great teachers in my life, how massive their influence.”

  There was a pause. Lucy felt compelled to get up, walk down from the raised platform to the windows, and look out, as she talked to them first about her father. “His hobby,” she said, “was cabinet-making. In the large old-fashioned apartment where we lived one room was devoted to his tools and workbench.” How dull it sounded! She longed to make this room vivid, to evoke in the dank classroom its sweet clean smells of wax, of resin and turpentine. She longed to bring before them her father in an old pair of dungarees, the look of happy concentration on his face as he whistled Gilbert and Sullivan tunes, the way his delicate surgeon’s hand stroked a piece of wood. What she could not tell them, but it swept over her in a wave of poignant regret, was how as a child she had longed for the same care and tenderness toward herself. Had she been silent for long? She was suddenly acutely aware of the loud tick of the clock on the wall, jerking the minutes away, admonishing her to keep to the subject. She spoke brusquely now, in an accelerated tempo, of what she had learned from her father about the importance of slow careful work, of close attention to detail, and of how much she had, as a child, resented his compulsive neatness. “You will discover,” she added with a smile, “that you appreciate teachers rather a long time after you have suffered from them.”

  Her smile was answered with a ripple of response. She was discovering that she could talk to these girls with perfect directness, in a way she had never been able to talk to anyone before in her life, as if the group of twelve were itself an entity, a delightfully giving personality, and as if she—freed by the strangely intimate yet impersonal circumstance—could give it something of herself that she would never be able to give to an individual human being.

  She spoke then of a woman teacher whose rages had taught the terrified students a respect for France and French civilization that had lasted through their lives. “It is hard for me even now,” Lucy heard herself saying, “to detach myself from the conviction I held at twelve years old that the French are superior in every way to everyone else.” (Dear Mademoiselle Monnet she thought, as she sat down to look at her notes, where are you now? With your elegance and fury, with your radiant joy as you recited La Fontaine?) “We learned to respect a subject—in a school where it seemed often that we ourselves were the main subject of passionate attention.”

  The irony in Lucy’s tone escaped her listeners, she felt, but if she had lost them briefly, they came back as she spoke of Mr. Nagle who had given up a highly-paid job on Life magazine because he wanted to teach English. What a sacred phenomenon he had appeared to his students, many of whose parents would have thought such a decision simply crazy! “But that was not why he was a great teacher,” she reminded them and herself. “I have come to see that he communicated to us a rather rare quality in my profession.” Lucy was so startled to hear herself use the phrase “my profession” that she stammered slightly as if she had just told a lie. “It w-w-was humility. He was devastatingly honest, with a kind of honesty that forced him to ask questions rather than to make statements, and to question himself as seriously as he did us.”

  Jane Seaman was looking out the window. Bored? It was possible, after all, that the whole idea of this lecture was a fiasco, and they were finding her merely absurd. The clock gave another loud tick, as the hand jerked away another minute. Yet, in the tension established in her own mind vis à vis Jane Seaman, Lucy found strength. I’ll make her pay attention, she said to herself, launching into a description of the professor of philosophy she had sat under in college. She explained that she had failed the midyear examination in Professor Greene’s course, but that he had taken the trouble to call her in and talk it over, although this was a class of two hundred and such attentions were hardly to be expected.

  “‘You’re trying to jump the gun, Miss …’ and I remember he had to look for my name on the blue book … He told me that my paper was clumsy, but that it contained one original concept. Was I aware of that? [I was not.] Well, I had better hold my horses and master the subject before I launched into private speculations. ‘However,’ he added with a severely uncompromising look in his eye, ‘I respect you, Miss Winter, and you must learn to respect yourself. The people who made A on this exam may never think an original thought. You can. You’ll do better next time, please.’ Well,” Lucy smiled, “you can imagine how hard I worked after that!”

  She noticed then, at what had seemed a moment of triumph, that the girls were gathering the
ir books together, and there was a faint stirring among them as of a flock of birds about to rise and fly away. She still had five minutes, and she swung out into the air like a trapeze artist, forcing their attention back by the recklessness of her drive.

  “I have just one more exemplar and the record will be complete. Professor Hardy, in my own field of American literature, was a tease—genial, outgoing, the kind of professor who actually seems to enjoy having students around. He said that the trouble with women students” (immediately Lucy felt the prickle of renewed attention) “is that their very intensity gets in the way of the valuable nonchalant roving eye. I’m sure you have realized at the end of this hour of self-revelation that I am one of the serious characters to whom these remarks were addressed. Professor Hardy opened out for all of us the conception of what the French used to call the ‘gai scavoir.’ You are not yet aware of the excruciating self-tortures Ph.D. students go through, nor how remarkable this professor was, who wore his learning so lightly that he forced you to wear yours with at least an attempt at a sense of proportion. I’m afraid that most of us were rather more like elephants dancing than like Ariel,” (was Jane Seaman smiling? Lucy thought she caught a fleeting smile on that ungiving face) “but we could imagine the lightness mastery makes possible. I shall try not to take you too seriously, and I hope that sentiment may be reciprocated.” Lucy glanced nervously at the clock and added, “Whew! I just managed to get in under the line!” The bell pealed out like some dreadful siren, and at once the whole building trembled as classes tumbled out and thundered down the stairs. “Until next week and Mr. Thoreau!”

  Lucy closed her notebook, got up, and was about to make her escape when she was stopped at the door by the Victorian-looking redhead she had noticed early in the hour. The others eddied round them.

  “That was very interesting, Miss Winter. Especially about your father.”

  “Thank you,” Lucy said. She did not want to speak to anyone at the moment. “What is your name? I must begin to try to remember names …”