The Small Room

by May Sarton

  “Pippa Brentwood.”

  They stood there. Pippa hesitated on the brink of whatever it was she wished to say. She blushed. Tears, to Lucy’s horror, sprang to her eyes. “About your father … You see, my father died this summer.”

  After all, Lucy had chosen to speak to them first on a personal level. But this intimacy upset her. She wanted to continue to speak to the class as an entity; her instinct was to shy away. She fumbled with her purse and wondered how on earth to handle this plea for sympathy, for pity, for understanding from a perfect stranger.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she murmured. “That is hard. Are you a Senior?”

  “Yes.”

  They were stranded there in the empty classroom, while the roar of life went on around them.

  “Thank you for telling me,” Lucy said because she could not summon any other remark that would not bring forth, she sensed, a flood of tears. “Well, I’ll see you next week,” and, abruptly, she fled.

  Self-doubt, Harriet Summerson had said; Lucy blushed inwardly the whole way across the campus to meet her for lunch at the faculty club. The superficiality of what she herself had managed to utter in the last hour appalled her. Exactitude, commitment, humility, self-respect indeed! She had even forgotten to sum up in those four words what she had meant to get over to the class.

  But, in the midst of this bitter self-examination, it was a relief to sit down opposite Hallie Summerson. Today in a blue tweed suit with a liberty silk print of small blue flowers beneath it, she was aesthetically satisfying, because so completely what she was; no vestige of make-up concealed the fine lines round her clear blue eyes. They sat where they could look out on the lawn, already dotted with scarlet and yellow maple leaves.

  When they had ordered creamed chicken, ice cream and coffee—nursery food, Lucy thought, perfectly suited to her shaken state of mind—and when they had talked about autumn and how lovely it could be in New England, Hallie paused and shot Lucy an observant glance. “Well, how did it go? I’ve already heard one report, so you see I am not afraid to ask the question.”

  “It was an experiment” (but what exactly had Miss Summerson heard?) “and at the moment I can only think that it failed.”

  “Good sign,” Miss Summerson nodded. “One always gets a negative reaction after a good class. It’s one of the hazards of the profession.”

  “Is it?”

  “You’ve given a piece of yourself away, even if it is only a certain amount of nervous energy, don’t you know? And you are a bit deflated as a result—diminished, one might say.”

  “Oh.” Lucy considered this and rejected it. “What depressed me, I think, was that I tried to say something about learning and teaching, and the only result was that a girl wanted to tell me about her father’s death.”

  “Pippa Brentwood, I expect. She does tend to dramatize,” Hallie answered Lucy’s nod, “and I’m afraid her father’s death, sudden and tragic as it was, has given her rather a chance to indulge herself.”

  “I felt cornered. I don’t believe in personal relationships between teachers and students, do you?”

  Miss Summerson raised her eyebrows with an air of faint amusement. “Theoretically, no.”

  “But it happens that the theory doesn’t work?”

  “Maybe you are one of the rare professors in a college of this sort who can keep her distance. That would be wisdom.”

  “Rare in one so young?” Lucy responded to the ironic tone.

  “Rare.”

  “No comment,” Lucy laughed. It was a relief to be talking to an adult for a change. “It’s amazing how after just one class, I realize things I hadn’t even imagined.”

  “For instance?”

  “For instance, the rather suspect intoxication of the captive audience. These girls are almost uncannily responsive.”

  “They can be almost uncannily unresponsive too,” and Hallie seemed lit up from inside with amusement. When she spoke again, it was on a different level from the chaffing tone she had used until now. She was suddenly serious. “I’m going back to what you said about personal relationships. One of the problems is simply that after a month of watching you and listening to you in class, your students know you far better and more intimately than you will ever know them. They feel related to you, you see.”

  “Oh dear, yes, I do see,” Lucy said, the quaking she had experienced just after the class returning in full force.

  “Part of the art of teaching, I have come to believe, lies in how this pseudo-intimacy is handled. It can be fruitful. Carryl Cope, for instance, is a case in point. Every student of hers is a conquest.”

  “One senses that. She expects disciples.”

  “Don’t be censorious too quickly,” Harriet Summerson said a shade impatiently. “You see, girls will respond to feeling always; what is hard is to get them to think. Carryl may have disciples, but they do not become so without learning a great deal about mediaeval history, a great deal more than they will ever know about Carryl.”

  “Jane Seaman is one of those, I take it.”

  “Jane is Carryl’s exhibit Number One at the moment. And Jane was a pretty rough diamond when she arrived—rich, spoiled, arrogant. She has learned to think and to work hard.”

  “But perhaps not to be humble?” Lucy could not resist.

  Had she gone too far? At this second, Harriet Summerson visibly withdrew. Loyalty to a friend and colleague? At any rate, she changed the subject.

  “It might interest you, before you get smothered in freshman papers, to look in on one of Jennifer Finch’s classes.” The gently chaffing tone had returned. “She carries out your theories.”

  “Yes,” Lucy responded at once. “At your tea she dominated, yet she seemed at first the most unassuming person there. I was fascinated.”

  “Visit a class …” Miss Summerson held out the prospect rather like a carrot to a donkey, Lucy felt.

  “Miss Finch said something about having to go home to her mother. It was a little startling.”

  “Oh yes, she’s the classic old-maid professor, bound hand and foot to an autocrat. We have all prayed for Mrs. Finch’s demise, without avail. She has an iron constitution, of course.”

  “And Miss Finch has not been limited by—” Lucy hunted for a word and did not find one.

  She caught the twinkle in Miss Summerson’s candid eye. “We are all limited by something or other. Thank God for transcendance, sublimation, and all those other dirty words, say I, all those suspect ways of handling impossible circumstances or one’s own impossible self!” When she spoke out like this, Miss Summerson’s whole face went pink.

  “Yes,” Lucy sighed, remembering her violent arguments with John on this subject. “We’ve become dreadfully self-conscious. That, too, is a limitation, perhaps.”

  “And just there is Carryl’s strength. She simply will not be bothered. You heard her furious reaction to the idea of a committee on mental health? She and her old friend Olive Hunt, who is unfortunately a trustee, have managed to keep the college back in that respect. We are old-fashioned.”

  “But can one refuse knowledge when it is available?”

  “You and I could not. Carryl can. She is, don’t forget, one generation ahead of mine, and two ahead of yours, and one cannot wholly transcend one’s generation, I fear. Has it ever occurred to you that there is a lag? A generation of young professors emerges who have been formed by the generation preceding them? One of my best professors at Smith was still a Meredith fan because Meredith was avant-garde when she was young. When I began to teach, Joyce, Proust and Virginia Woolf were the great figures: in college we passed around the banned edition of Ulysses! How old-fashioned can you get?” Miss Summerson drank a last swallow of coffee and looked at her watch. “Goodness, I almost forgot to tell you what the student I met after your class had to say. It was succinct: ‘Miss Winter’s neat!’”

  Lucy laughed with relief.

  “I might add, so you get the full flavor of the word, that th
is girl was in Europe last summer and told me she had found Chartres ‘neat.’”

  By the time they said goodbye on the terrace Miss Summerson had suggested that she be called “Hallie,” and Lucy felt decidedly restored. It was a good solid feeling to have Hallie Summerson at your back.

  CHAPTER 3

  The momentum of the fall semester gathered itself after that first day and Lucy did not see Hallie Summerson or anyone else among her colleagues for more than a week. She had imagined that she knew the material on Thoreau and Emerson almost by heart, that preparation for these first lectures would be easy, but she soon discovered that knowing something and teaching it are as different as dreaming and waking. Things she had never noticed before sprang up at her out of the text; questions pounced upon her from the class, and the familiar words and ideas startled her as if she had not spent hours already examining them. She met a surprising resistance to Thoreau and it unnerved her; the students were not delighted by his pungent style (style did not touch them yet) and were irritated by what they called his lack of responsibility and childishness; Jane Seaman defined him as a nineteenth-century beatnik. Lucy found herself getting hot with irritation and bafflement. She felt like a lawyer arguing a case before a hard-hearted jury, and was limp at the end of the hour; three of the girls walked back to the club with her, carrying on the discussion where it had left off when the bell rang. In those ten minutes Lucy had a vivid sense of what the dialogue between pupil and teacher can be at its best. And in the course of it, she understood what it was that made a professor like Carryl Cope respect a student like Jane Seaman. For Jane led the group of anti-Thoreauvians and in doing so kept Lucy on her mettle. This was exhausting but exhilarating, quite different from one of the freshman sections which seemed like a huge passive elephant she had to try to lift each morning. At times Lucy felt desperation, as if she would never catch up, never be really prepared for the next day, or that her head would burst with the sustained hours of concentration she must ask of herself. She marvelled at how much vitality was required: how could people like Hallie Summerson, Carryl Cope, Jack Beveridge keep this up for years and years, lift one elephant after another on sheer gusto and nerve?

  Suddenly one day the maples on the campus and on the surrounding hillsides turned; it was a brilliant gold air splashed with vermilion and scarlet, but mostly radiant gold, such a glory of light under the flat blue sky that Lucy realized for the first time the fact that autumn in New England is something more than a season, some great adventure. But she could not take time out to explore, as she longed to do, because this was the period of freshman conferences. Lucy saw four or five students, each for a half hour or more, every day. She had the impression that the faces which turned toward her eagerly in the classroom closed fatally the minute she confronted them in the dingy cubbyhole that was her office. The room was unyielding. It had a dead smell; dankness descended on her when she sat down in the hard armchair before the scratched ugly desk, and waited for a girl to show up. It was irritating, though not unnatural perhaps, that they were so often late. Susy or Jane or Hannah arrived breathless; dumped an armload of books on the floor; feigned surprise when lateness was remarked upon and Lucy brought out a paper from the folder before her, covered with notes and marks, the signs of her own hard labor, and suggested that they get down to work.

  But how, she asked herself on these occasions, without ever being able to give an assured answer, did one do that? She might read a passage aloud, a passage where dangling clauses, half sentences, mixed metaphors, clichés all added up to fuzzy thinking. But the girl sitting there, patient and bored, waiting to be “told,” had no inkling of this, was astonished to discover how many mistakes one could fall into, looked innocently dismayed. Lucy was sometimes severe. “When you say you worked hard, what exactly did you do? Sit at a desk and doodle for half an hour?” She was distressed to hear her voice, at these moments, take on the tone of an exasperated governess. Sometimes she laughed, remembering the rhyme she had loved as a child, “You naughty kittens, you’ve lost your mittens!”

  Sometimes the response was sullen: “No one understands me, it is hopeless” was written on the closed face. Patiently then Lucy took the paragraph up again word by word and analysed it, but then the danger was that even to herself the problems involved began to sound so complicated that she was dismayed. Halfway through, she could feel the student’s attention wandering to the brilliant leaves outside. It did sound dull!

  “Do you think you might try to rewrite this paragraph now while you have it all clearly in mind?”

  (Look of terror.)

  “Well then, if not now, bring it to class tomorrow.”

  Was this giving in? Should she have forced the issue? She could hear the footsteps running down the hall like an animal released from a cage, free of having to concentrate, free of having to pin the wandering mind down, having learned next to nothing while Lucy herself had been working furiously hard, and felt drained by the effort she had been making. Beside the hard work in the small room, lecturing seemed easy, but Lucy was aware even after the first afternoon that this was where the real teaching would be done. From these endless half hours of attentive prodding and pushing and nurturing, Hallie Summerson and the others had lifted the girls Lucy enjoyed now as Juniors and Seniors, and she felt something like awe at the achievement.

  “May I see you for a moment?” Lucy lifted her head at the end of one afternoon that week and saw Pippa Brentwood, of all people she did not want to see, standing in the doorway. While Pippa sat down and explained haltingly that she had in mind for her paper an essay on the uneasy friendship between Thoreau and Emerson, how the two men had defined it, and why they had failed each other—while she talked eloquently of this, Lucy was aware of this girl’s curious distinction; a round white collar over a black sweater set off the oval face, the high round forehead framed in soft red curls, the clear eyes that literally brimmed with feeling.

  “Well—” Lucy was, in fact, impressed, “—that sounds rather a good idea. You’ll have to do a lot of reading in the journals and letters, but I quite envy you that pleasure.”

  “Yes,” Pippa murmured. “You see, I need to work hard this term. It’s better for me if I do.”

  How unfair it was, Lucy thought, to withdraw at once as if a nerve between them had been touched. “Well, then, go ahead.” And, quickly, before Pippa would have a chance to submerge them in the personal, the private world of her grief, Lucy added, “I am curious to see how this lively class writes. You are such an articulate group, but,” she smiled, “it doesn’t necessarily follow that you will write like angels, I fear.”

  “We are excited by the course.” Pippa blushed furiously. And before Lucy had time to make a response, she plunged in desperately, “Please help me!” Her eyes had filled with tears.

  “I know this is a hard year for you, Pippa, but I think the less you dramatize—” How harsh it sounded!

  “It’s real suffering,” Pippa wailed, and the tears poured down her cheeks like summer rain. “You can’t say it’s not real!”

  Face this, Lucy admonished herself. Be kind. After all, she’s only a child.

  “Of course it’s real. The loss of one’s father at any age …” But where to go from here? “Is your mother finding it very hard?” She heard the tone of her voice, cool, sympathetic, yet withholding. It was hateful to be in this position where it was kindness to appear a little less than human. The question only produced loud sobs. Lucy talked on at random, saying all the commonplaces about death, about time, waiting for the girl to regain command of herself.

  “You see,” Pippa said after blowing her nose, “I wasn’t there. I went away for the weekend, although he asked me to stay … it’s that.” Tears flowed again.

  So here it was again the old universal wound, Lucy thought, feeling pity for the first time. She found herself speaking quite gently now about the load of guilt children always do carry around about their parents, and how self-blame can,
after a point, become self-indulgence. “It’s the human condition, Pippa.”

  “Is it?” It was touching to see the immense relief in the face of innocence before her, relief like some clear dawn taking the place of disintegration and darkness. “I knew you’d understand. I knew you’d help.”

  “But I’ve done nothing but utter some old saws!”

  “It’s so wonderful to be able to talk to you at last.”

  At last, Lucy thought, indeed! The sherry-colored eyes were radiant. “Well,” she said briskly, “I’m glad I could help.”

  “You won’t refuse to see me?”

  So, here it was and no escaping the necessity to be cold.

  “On professional matters, Pippa, I’ll always be here. This has been an excursion outside them.”

  “I’m a terrible nuisance, I guess,” Pippa said hopefully.

  “No,” Lucy summoned dispassion to her side as if it were a guardian angel. “But you are, perhaps, confusing me with someone else, an imaginary someone, let us say, ‘a father confessor and friend.’ I don’t see myself in that role, I’m afraid.” Lucy got up and stood with her back to the window. It was meant to be a dismissal.

  “You sound so hard,” Pippa said in an accusing voice.

  “I’m not hard,” she shot back, fatally on the defensive. “I’m too vulnerable. I have never been a teacher before. And I don’t believe in college teachers being amateur psychoanalysts.” She recovered herself firmly. “There must be a subject between us, Pippa, an impersonal subject,” she said, facing the girl squarely.

  “Well,” Pippa, accepting defeat, gathered her books together as slowly as possible, “but if I could just see you when I get desperate? I’ll try not to, I really will,” she added eagerly.

  “I’m not a monster, after all,” Lucy said, and left it at that.

  Pippa would have been delighted by the chaos she left behind her. Lucy stood at the window a long time, looking down on an already leafless maple, and the wind blowing the dried gold leaves about on the grass. Two girls went by arm in arm. She glanced from them to the white pillars of the library. How cool and discreet the world outside looked compared to the confused, upset, muddled world of this small room where so much happened and did not happen. She had behaved herself, Lucy thought with dismay, like an insufferable prig. Oh, what a bore it was to have to endure those penetrating, innocent, suffering, demanding eyes of Pippa’s, those sherry-colored eyes that wept as easily as a summer shower! I want to be free to teach my students in peace, she thought. I want to be free to do that unselfconsciously, without all this personal stuff. I want to be allowed to give what I can give.