The Small Room

by May Sarton

  Miss Valentine sat down and stared grimly out at the faculty, while Blake Tillotson opened the meeting to comment and discussion. He recognized first an elderly professor, dressed in rough blue tweed, with a shock of white hair that stood up like a cock’s comb, Professor March of the Department of Mathematics. His charm, that of the darling male professor at a woman’s college, was evident at once. He commended Miss Valentine at some length “on the very clear picture she has given us of this interesting case.” He went on, elaborately, by reminding them of the old story of the Christian thrown to the lions, whom the lions refused to devour as he whispered a message into their ears. The something was, as he was sure they remembered, “After the meal, you will have to make an after-dinner speech, you know.” Mild laughter suggested that they did indeed remember. When it had subsided, Professor March went on, “I feel that I am facing a rather formidable row of lions here. Agnes, as you all know, is my student. May I just whisper in your ears this little message: If we let her go, I have no doubt that Radcliffe will welcome her to the fold.”

  When the delighted laughter had subsided, and Professor March had sat down again, Miss Valentine asked, “What makes you think, Professor March, that Radcliffe would welcome a student who is failing all her courses except one?”

  “My dear Miss Valentine,” the Professor stood and beamed, “I am aware that this is a very unorthodox student, one who must be trying to the administration, to say the least, as also to her other professors” (here a faint bow in Carryl Cope’s direction was discernible), “but let me say simply that mathematical genius is also unorthodox.”

  “Would you say that Agnes had mathematical genius? Would you go as far as that, Professor?” The President, Lucy sensed, was on the student’s side.

  “She has only been able to concentrate for the last few weeks, since her demission from the college, as you are all aware …” He waited for the murmur of laughter. “I would go so far as to say that this girl is capable of original work.”

  “And that is unusual?” Tillotson pressed.

  Professor March shrugged. “Among female students so rare I can say it has never happened before in my twenty years here. In ten years at Columbia, I had two male students of whom I could say as much.”

  He sat down.

  Lucy looked anxiously in Carryl Cope’s direction. Surely she would not remain silent? But Blake Tillotson recognized first a young woman in the Department of Physics. She felt strongly that in a liberal arts college, students should be required to complete work in several fields. If the girl was that brilliant, she could go on to graduate school and concentrate there; open rebellion was not to be tolerated. She was followed by a young man with a foreign accent who pleaded the danger of favoritism. If they began to make exceptions, where would it end? He himself had a student who was engaged in writing a novel, but he had not seen his way to excusing her from a term paper on that account. By this time Lucy had wavered back and forth and did not know what she thought. She felt that the sense of the meeting had shifted and that the majority at present would stand, though reluctantly, against Agnes Skeffington. So it was at a moment of considerable tension that Carryl Cope at last took the floor.

  “As you all know,” she began, every word meticulously articulated in her deep voice, “Agnes Skeffington is—or was, until she disappeared into a cloud of figures—a student of mine. Let me make it crystal clear that I do not give a hoot whether she comes to my class or not, if she is doing distinguished work in another field.” The two young professors seated just in front of Lucy exchanged an eager wink and nod. This is what they had learned to expect of Carryl Cope, evidently, and Lucy felt ashamed of her own circumspection. “The point is, my friends,” and now she turned toward her colleagues rather than toward the stage, “that we talk a great deal about excellence, and pride ourselves on demanding it, but when we get what we have asked for, become as confused and jejeune as a freshman in a course on ethics. We are unwilling, evidently, to pay the price of excellence. What is the price?” and here she turned to the stage and addressed her final remarks to Miss Valentine (so Lucy sensed). “The price is eccentricity, maladjustment if you will, isolation of one sort or another, strangeness, narrowness. Excellence costs a great deal. It is high time some of us faced the fact.”

  Lucy would have liked to shout “Bravo!” No one went so far, but there was an impish stir, a chuckled wave of response, even a few scattered clappings of hands, as Carryl Cope sat down. The President had not been able to conceal a smile, nor Miss Valentine a frown.

  “Would anyone like to add a word to the discussion, or is your pleasure that we put the matter to a vote? Would someone like to make a motion?”

  Lucy was not surprised to see Miss Finch slowly rise to her feet from far back in the room. As usual she took her time.

  “If we should make an exception to our perfectly good rules and standards in this special case, may I suggest that we write into the body of our law a new rule that would cover such cases in the future? My thought is …” Miss Finch paused here while she formulated her thought, “that we might incorporate an amendment: In the case of work above and beyond the usual college standard, a student shall be allowed a specific period of freedom from her usual obligations, provided,” and here Miss Finch’s voice became decisive, “she has fulfilled those obligations by the time she graduates. I agree with Mr. Simonides that graduation from Appleton must imply a general education, a general culture. It would present a real hazard if we were to add one to the growing number of pure scientists who have no humanistic foundation.”

  How serious it all is, Lucy thought, and her feelings were compounded of something like awe before the power they must assume toward a human destiny, and a disgraceful impulse to laugh. As soon as one was not personally involved, how easy to be detached! But into the corner of her thought there crept also the image of Agnes Skeffington herself … stubborn, brilliant, knowing what she wanted, able to defy even Carryl Cope by sheer belief. What extremity of being must exist in a young woman with such faith in herself! Lucy’s contemplation of it filled her with humility. She herself had never in her life been seized by anything as wholeheartedly as that. And shall I ever be, she wondered? Am I capable of such commitment?

  The vote itself was close, even with Miss Finch’s proviso incorporated into the motion. But in the final count, the ayes had a majority. Agnes Skeffington would be allowed to go her lonely way within the college.

  Miss Valentine was visibly annoyed; she walked off the stage and disappeared. The President and the Dean of the college came down through the auditorium, on the other hand, stopping to talk. Lucy found herself squeezed into the crowd, directly in front of Carryl Cope, and was very much surprised to be tapped on the shoulder by that august hand, and invited to “come back with me and have a drink? It’s a suitable hour, is it not?”

  As they drove along in Miss Cope’s Hillman she explained that the old house where she had an apartment had belonged originally to the owners of a textile factory, rivals of Eben Wellington whose daughter had founded the college. And indeed it was imposing, set back in a large garden that resembled a park, a late Victorian house with long narrow windows, a mansard roof, painted battleship gray. “The remaining Woodwards, two maiden ladies, live downstairs. We treat them like Venetian glass, as Blake hopes to get the house for the college, eventually …”

  The private entrance, hidden at one side, and the narrow stairway up two flights, had not prepared Lucy for the spaciousness that opened out as they arrived. She stepped into a long high room that might have been an eighteenth-century gentleman’s library. What a contrast to Hallie’s unselfconscious accumulation of family furniture, plants and books! This room had evidently been designed as the reflection of a highly selfconscious personality. Red damask curtains swept to the floor at three windows, the walls between them lined from top to bottom with books, many of them in fine bindings, and in many languages. The room was dominated by a huge refectory table
with heavy carved legs, littered with papers, paperback detective stories, a French novel, as well as some formidable leather-bound tomes. An elaborate marble mantel at the far end of the room drew Lucy’s attention to the painting that hung above it, a study of clouds blowing across a blue sky, the clouds of a damp country, reforming themselves, all in motion—England, Lucy supposed. She made her way across the room to take a closer look, just as Carryl Cope came back with a tray containing a bowl of olives and two martinis.

  “Ah, you are looking at the Constable. Charming, isn’t it? It belongs to Olive Hunt, actually; she saw I had fallen in love with it, and kindly lent it to me. By the way, Olive may drop in later on. She often does. Says she likes my martinis: Have one.”

  The atmosphere was cordial, so much so that Lucy wondered whether there were not some special reason for such attention to a temporary instructor in a different department. She felt absurdly nervous, and was dismayed to find her hand shaking as she took the martini glass.

  “The spectacle you have just witnessed must have been entertaining for you?” But just as Lucy was registering how pompous Carryl Cope did sound, the tone changed. “Good gracious, child, don’t sit in that uncomfortable chair! Come here where I can see you!”

  She sat down obediently in a red leather armchair directly opposite the small imperious figure on the sofa. “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Were you entertained?”

  “In a way,” Lucy said warily. “I’m so new at all this. I suppose I’m torn between awe and laughter.” She caught the slight wince. “I thought you were splendid.”

  “Damn fool! I should have kept my trap shut. Jennifer saved the day with that exquisite judicial mind of hers.” Then, having given the devil his due, she added, “I can’t say I like Agnes Skeffington, though. Genius is always intolerable when you come right down to it. Don’t you agree?”

  “I haven’t had much experience with genius.”

  “Not that young doctor?” But, catching Lucy’s look of dismay, Carryl Cope quickly added, “Very rude of me, to mention your private affairs. But you might as well get used to living in a goldfish bowl.”

  “I was only startled,” Lucy said at once. “I try not to think about John.” Then she suddenly laughed. “But he’s not a genius, anyway, though he is maddening, of course.”

  “In what way, if I may be permitted to press on?”

  Lucy felt a great longing to talk about John, and a fear of doing it, a fear of exposing herself to this woman’s curiosity and, worse, to her perspicacity which Lucy suspected might be something like John’s—irrefutably there, but also at times besides the point. And his entrance into the room, the return of his presence at just this moment, was painful. One does not bury the past, she thought; one lives with it. “I’m sorry,” she said, feeling the pause becoming embarrassingly long. “I find it hard to formulate. Maybe one of our points of contention was that he is interested in the general, the abstract, and I in the specific and the personal. His language itself used to madden me,” and she smiled.

  Carryl Cope laughed. “I never can understand why women expect men to be like themselves.”

  “Anyway, it’s all over. We do not even write.” Liquor is quicker, she thought, dismayed by the acute pain she felt in the middle of her chest. “I think we really loved each other, but somehow we could never communicate, so it ended by becoming like an illness.”

  “And you are convalescing here?” The challenge in the faintly mocking air was beginning to be familiar. “You are not really committed to us, are you?”

  “I don’t know,” Lucy said, balking at being pinned down. “I don’t think I’m a very good teacher, at present. But perhaps I should not have been a very good wife.” She said this lightly, but it boomeranged and hurt as it reverberated in her heart.

  “You are a rather curious phenomenon. It’s unusual to go through the labor of getting a Doctor’s degree unless one is serious. Were you? Or did you want to marry that John of yours? Was that the main thing?”

  “That was the main thing,” Lucy said, forced to honesty though she knew she was being disappointing. “Isn’t that serious enough for you?”

  Carryl Cope got up and took the tray of glasses out to the kitchen. She had not responded to this little prick, and Lucy wondered if she were offended, but she herself was on her mettle now.

  “You have never regretted not marrying?” she asked, standing in the door of the kitchen. It was odd that they both took it for granted that marriage and the sort of prestige Carryl Cope represented were generally found to be incompatible.

  “No.” The answer was definite. “When I was young no one wanted to marry me; and when I was old, I wanted to marry no one. Here you are, Dr. Winter.” Lucy was handed a second martini and this time the “Dr.” was heavily ironic.

  “I must seem to you slightly ridiculous.”

  “My dear child,” the tone was irritable, “it is I who am ridiculous. In my heart of hearts I have to agree that the intellectual woman, as Dr. Johnson said of the woman preacher, can only be compared to a dog standing on its hind legs.”

  “Yet you have given your life to persuading generations of students of just the opposite …”

  “No, I teach for the singular, for the exceptional; I teach for the one in a hundred, one in a thousand maybe. And you forget,” the tiger glared, “that teaching is only half my life; my work is still, don’t you know, quite extraordinarily absorbing. I sometimes think I am just beginning to discover what it is all about …” This last was said so modestly that Lucy was touched. “Good God! Without my own work I would go mad. It gives me some nourishment at the roots.” Then she smiled and recovered herself; the eyes that had flashed out became hooded and withdrawn. “I get awfully angry with my work, want to throw it out the window and read a detective story. What people will not understand about our profession as teachers,” she said, walking up and down the length of the room, “is that it takes the marrow out of your bones, and something or other has to put it back. For me, work does that. Where is Olive?” she asked suddenly, and Lucy suspected that it was not a non sequitur, but that Carryl Cope also required nourishment of a more personal kind. “I suppose you have an idea that all is peace and quiet, that this is a safe little grove without a faun or a fury in it, just a collection of (we hope!) brilliant old maids, a sort of secular retreat where perpetually active minds perpetually sow seeds in virgin ground.”

  Lucy smiled. “Well,” she said cautiously, “I wouldn’t say quite that, though the ground is virgin all right—and it does seem rather safe.”

  “Safe?”

  Carryl Cope walked over to the window. She looked very small, standing against the long crimson curtains, small and tired. “Safe?” she asked again and turned back, thrusting her hands into her pockets. “My dear child, if you could, for one moment, look into the lives around you …”

  “How I would like to!”

  “Did it ever cross your innocent mind that people with no personal lives, no passions, no conflicts could not possibly do the sort of teaching an institution of this kind demands? What do you think we are?”

  A momentary vision crossed Lucy’s mind of flocks of professors dashing off to Italy or Greece on sabbatical leave, to have love affairs with D. H. Lawrence gamekeepers or fishermen, and she could not swallow the delighted smile the vision evoked.

  “Oh well, smile.” Carryl Cope shrugged it off, as if Lucy were beyond the pale.

  At this moment of possible revelation, or confidence, she was sorry to hear the muted ring of the doorbell; Carryl murmured, “Excuse me. That will be Olive. Where have you been?” Lucy registered the cross, intimate inflection as she rose to her feet to confront Olive Hunt (whom every college has, she remembered, but surely not always just like this!) She shook hands with a rangy, gray-haired woman with piercing blue eyes, an emaciated face that must once have been beautiful, in a tweed suit with a diamond sunburst at her throat, long elegant feet a
nd hands.

  “Olive, this is our new instructor, Dr. Winter, of the English department.”

  “Harriet has told me about you,” she said brusquely; she was evidently full of some preoccupation of her own, and hardly looked at Lucy. “I’ve been having another wrangle with Blake,” she announced to the room at large, for Carryl had disappeared down the hall. “It is a mystery to me why perfectly good people who have no reason to let themselves be bamboozled, end by listening to fools and charlatans.”

  “Blake listens to you, dear.” Carryl stood in the door, shining with mockery and pleasure. “Drink this and calm down.”

  “I won’t calm down!” But she laughed, then sat down abruptly, stretched out her long slim legs, crossed at the ankles, and fixed her piercing blue gaze on Lucy. “Forgive me. I am, as you can see, exercised.”

  “All colleges have them,” Carryl murmured, “after all.” Lucy presumed that the personal pronoun must refer, not to elderly ladies on the Board of Trustees, but to resident psychiatrists. The subject kept coming up, she noticed.

  “Appleton has never conformed, Carryl, as you very well know. We had three communists on the faculty during that McCarthy business,” she explained to Lucy, with a toss of her head, “and a damn nuisance they were, I must say.”