The Small Room

by May Sarton

  It opened, and Carryl Cope said shortly, “Ah, it’s you. Thank goodness!” In the gray light of the library, she looked stern, a little forbidding. “I suppose I should thank you,” she said drily, waving Lucy to an armchair. Then she launched at once into the subject at hand, as if she had been waiting so impatiently that she could not stop for the amenities. “It would have been a serious matter if we had not caught the issue of Appleton Essays in time.”

  “In time?” Lucy asked, bewildered.

  “I spent the morning calling back every single number that had been sent out Fortunately, only about forty in all. It was not officially for sale, you know. The students, at least, had not had a chance to get hold of it.”

  Lucy had come prepared for personal distress, possibly anger, but not to meet this administrator, concerned chiefly with the appearances of things, who stood, triumphant, her arms folded, leaning against the big desk.

  “I feel very badly about the whole thing,” Lucy said mechanically.

  “No reason why you should. You’re not responsible.”

  “I don’t like being the messenger of evil tidings.”

  “Nobody does.” But Lucy sensed that the gods were angry. Afraid of too long a pause, she floundered, “I suppose it will have to go to the student council.”

  “Those prigs! Not if I can help it!”

  It was an astonishing answer. Did Carryl Cope imagine that she could circumvent the natural order of things?

  “But can you help it?” she asked. “I thought …”

  “You thought there were laws, but laws were made for man. My dear Lucy, we cannot afford to have a person of this quality blackballed for life, for that is what it would amount to. We have some human responsibility.”

  “I couldn’t agree with you more,” Lucy said fervently.

  “Oh?” The eyes that had been so hard and fixed, softened. “Really? I thought you were out for blood.”

  “Why did you think that?”

  “Because you’re young. The young are frightfully self-righteous as a rule (you witnessed the vote about that irritating mathematical genius and saw how the instructors behaved); because you’re new here and might feel undue respect for the powers that be … and because I gather you are not especially fond of Jane.”

  Lucy prickled. “I certainly recognize that she is not ordinary.”

  “Now don’t be cross. I couldn’t bear it.” The raw nerve showed for the first time. “Let’s sit down and talk about this calmly.” But instead of sitting down, she walked to the windows and looked out. “Thank heavens, it’s snowing,” she murmured. “That wind nearly drove me crazy, making a shutter bang.” She turned back, took a cigarette out of an alabaster box on the table, and looked down at Lucy. “You have had a talk with Jane, Hallie tells me …” Then she lit the cigarette and inhaled deeply.

  “Yes.” Lucy had known this was coming, known that she would have to meet it, but now she was thoroughly scared. How much could she afford to tell without betraying Jane? To whom was she responsible?

  “What did she have to say for herself?”

  The room appeared to Lucy to have grown immense in the last few seconds; the books in their tall bookcases towered over her; the weight of the moment seemed projected from the walls themselves while outside the incessant, silent falling whiteness made her feel she was inside a spell, as if she had been walking in a limbo for hours and longed only to be allowed to sleep. She put a hand up to her forehead.

  “You’re tired. I’m going to make you a cup of tea. I must admit that the last twenty-four hours have been rather a strain for everybody.” The voice called back from down the hall, “Come and talk to me!”

  Obediently Lucy rose and followed, and stood with her back against the door frame while Carryl Cope puttered about absentmindedly with cups and saucers on a tray. It was clear that Lucy was being given a temporary reprieve. “I seem to remember your thinking that a college was a safe little world.” For the first time the mischievous look had come back into the hooded eyes.

  “Did I say that? It must have been a long time ago—”

  “It’s simply a microcosm where every normal instinct and emotion gets raised to the nth power.”

  “That doesn’t seem quite sane.”

  “It’s not. You need the guts of a camel to endure it.”

  Lucy laughed.

  “Well, don’t you?”

  “I got into a rage with my freshmen this morning …”

  Lucy felt the appraising probing eye upon her. “And you felt guilty, I suppose? Actually there’s nothing as efficacious as a little piqûre of anger now and then. Gets their sluggish adrenal glands into action, don’t you know?”

  “I felt it was a failure.”

  “Nonsense. It’s a costly method, costly to oneself, I mean. But it usually works. The strength one needs!” she said, lifting the tray and preceding Lucy back to the library. When she had set it down, she drew the curtains and turned on the lights. As Lucy took long swallows of tea, things seemed to have got back to their natural proportions.

  “Now, shoot!” It was a command, though it was given with a smile. “What did Jane have to say?”

  Because the atmosphere had changed, Lucy no longer felt any hesitation. She must tell Carryl Cope the truth, but as she began to talk she realized how baffled she still was by the exhausting scene with Jane, how little she really understood, and how very difficult if not impossible it was to try to sort out mere defensiveness from reality. But she could not turn back, and she did not spare Carryl Cope the impact of Jane’s breakdown and her violent accusations about having been forced beyond her strength.

  Carryl Cope listened in absolute silence, making no comment. Occasionally she sighed, a deep sigh, as unconscious as her gesture of pouring herself another cup of tea without offering one to Lucy.

  “It does seem to me,” Lucy ended, “that severe punishment at this point would solve nothing.”

  “She has been punished enough.” There followed a long silence. Lucy had the feeling that Carryl Cope had forgotten she was there. She seemed very remote, lost literally, in thought. When she spoke, her face had no expression except one of immense fatigue and distaste. “Of course the dreadful fact is that one loses trust. How many of Jane’s other performances were borrowed? Must we track it all down, check and recheck every single thing we have ever published of hers? It makes me feel sick.”

  “You must talk to her yourself.”

  “Of course.” Carryl Cope got up and began to pace up and down the room, slowly. “Good Christ!” The swearword was like a cry of anguish. “I suppose what this girl needs is a psychiatrist. That’s what you think, isn’t it?” She turned back to Lucy fiercely.

  “Maybe.”

  “I’ve given her everything I had to give, hours of time—she came here when she chose. What more could I have given?” she asked sitting down again.

  “I don’t know,” Lucy said miserably. “Only perhaps you gave a great deal to the mind, but something got left out that would have made it right. Somehow she got twisted up. Somehow she felt deprived. The heart …”

  “Mind? Heart?” Carryl Cope refused to accept or perhaps did not hear what Lucy had, trembling, implied. She got up, pacing again back and forth down the big room, thinking aloud. “Good work is done when these two move in harness. Jane was not just a brilliant mind.” (Lucy winced at the use of the past tense.) “She had that extra dimension of passionate interest. I didn’t feel I was pushing her; she asked for it, bombarded my door for books.” (But what was she really after, Lucy wondered, not books, possibly not books at all.) “You know, Lucy,” Carryl Cope bore down again, demanding her full attention, “students don’t do that every day. It is, I suppose, intoxicating. It’s like watching bamboo grow a yard a night, or whatever it does. I have never found teaching a drudgery, but I must admit that one does a good deal of lifting the stodgy or the paralysed over the years—here was someone who could run!”

  Lucy
nodded in silence. Her mind was racing, but there was nothing that she dared to say. Suffering, bafflement filled the room.

  “Also,” Carryl Cope stood still for a moment, “she was lonely, as the brilliant always are. I had the illusion that she found something just by being here, an atmosphere where she could breathe, her natural element. There were times last year when she came and spent half a day in this room, just reading while I worked.” She glanced round the walls with a cold eye, then sat down suddenly, and asked in an ironic voice that could not conceal pain, “Where did I go wrong? What happened? Am I crazy to think that for Jane Seaman to behave as a thief is a personal attack; that, consciously or not, it is an attack on me?”

  Lucy froze. What did one answer?

  “Well!”

  “I don’t know,” Lucy said. “I think perhaps it was. But I don’t know,” she repeated, too aware of the gap between them, the years, the rank, the fact that however much compassion she might feel for Carryl Cope, it was not her place to dispense it.

  “You are somewhere between me and Jane in age.” The voice seemed to have penetrated Lucy’s thoughts. “You are sufficiently detached. I am asking you to be honest with me. Take it as a compliment, if you wish.” Such an appeal had to be answered.

  “Jane said it was like taking jumps on a horse with the bars set higher and higher. My guess is that at some point she went into panic. Possibly she realized without really knowing it that something was being left out; perhaps she wanted something of you quite desperately that you could not afford to give. It’s not that she was right, only that she was stuffing herself with the wrong food and suffering from malnutrition, if you like.” Lucy had never felt more inept in her life, nor less capable of playing the curious role assigned to her by sheer chance, that of judging two people whom she hardly knew, and their relationship which she came to in abysmal ignorance.

  Carryl Cope gave a deep sigh. It was her only response. Then she suddenly lifted her head. “I simply won’t accept giving up now!” Strength, which had seemed to ebb from the bent figure a few moments before, flowed back with such force that Lucy was startled. It was as if a barren winter tree, battered, with half its trunk gone, had suddenly leafed over. “I’m not going to give Jane up. If, at least in my own heart, I accept it as my failure not hers (and you almost persuade me, you perspicacious child!), then she may still come out all right, graduate, go on. If”—and she paused while her eyes flashed out on Lucy like a hawk’s—“if the thing can be hushed up. I’m going to fight, Lucy!”

  “There is still Jane’s point of view,” Lucy said, too aware of the prickly path Carryl Cope was setting out on. “You will meet resistance.”

  “After all, I’m saving her skin!”

  “People are not necessarily grateful for that.”

  “Aren’t they? Why not?” The fire, the teasing stance had come back.

  Lucy took a deep breath. This was it. “Part of Jane wants to fail is my guess, wants to commit suicide, if you will. Part of her wants to be punished. Don’t you see, if she comes out of this without paying the price, she will have to face the burden of her brilliance again—and your expectations of it.”

  But once more Carryl Cope brushed a suggestion aside as irrelevant to the current she was on. There was something splendid in this will, splendid and tragic. Had Carryl Cope ever for one instant really put herself in Jane’s shoes?

  “I’m staking all I’ve got on Jane.”

  “That’s rather grand,” said Lucy.

  “Making a dreadful mess I’m doing my best to cover up? Nothing very grand about me, I’m afraid. An hour ago I thought I would resign.”

  “You take it that seriously?” Lucy was again taken by surprise by this astonishing woman.

  “Send Jane Seaman to a psychiatrist and resign!”

  “They would seem to you an equal admission of failure, I suppose?” and Lucy could not help smiling.

  “Naturally. Teachers who abandon their students to psychiatrists had better resign, by my books.”

  Once more the power of indomitable innocence struck Lucy hard. But she guessed—and with dread—that Carryl Cope would need every weapon she could muster to sustain it in the weeks to come.

  “If I can be of any help, as time goes on—” she said, getting up to leave.

  “I consider you a friend, Lucy. I count on you.”

  “I am honored.” The word was formal.

  “Pish tush! I’m a silly old fool and you know it.” But at the door, she frowned, looked at Lucy a shade anxiously as she said, “I’ll see Jane this evening. Meanwhile I need not insist that the utmost discretion is in order.”

  “Hallie knows. I think no one else does.”

  “Good gracious, child! I’d forgotten about the snow. Will you be all right?” Carryl Cope pulled the long string of the hall light, as if to make sure that Lucy was properly dressed.

  “I love the snow,” Lucy said.

  But she hardly noticed it, as a matter of fact, walking with her head bent and asking herself a series of questions with no possible answers at present. What is really being defended? Jane Seaman? Carryl Cope? A point of view about intellectual brilliance divorced from life that must be maintained or too much would crumble? And what is justice, Lucy asked herself, for she felt at the moment that justice was cruel, cruel to everyone in this case. Yet can justice be laid aside so lightly? What is justice? She asked the whirling snow. The answer was a gust of wind that made her shiver and turn up her coat collar.

  CHAPTER 10

  This time there was to be no faculty meeting, and no meeting of the student council. Lucy thought a little wryly that this time the messenger with evil tidings had delivered his message not to a temporal king who would have received it in public, but to one of the jealous, personal, all-powerful gods. Jane came to class, as imperturbably in control of herself, apparently, as before. A simple statement made its appearance on the bulletin boards, apologizing for an unforeseen delay in the publication of the fall issue of Appleton Essays. On the surface everything seemed settled.

  Under the surface, however, rumor and gossip flourished. Twice Lucy had the feeling when she walked into a group of fellow instructors at the Club that her entrance brought on a quick change of subject. She was in a situation where frankness was impossible, and the necessity to be discreet meant in effect that she must keep away from the subject altogether; all this tried her nature. The only person she could talk to was Hallie, but even Hallie had seemed lately to have withdrawn. She had told Lucy that Carryl had not only had the promised talk with Jane, but also with the President, and things had been satisfactorily hushed up, if that was the word to use for this universal buzz that never came out into the open.

  “Carryl is taking a long chance,” she said at the end of a rather stiff tea.

  “She is defending what she believes in,” Lucy had answered, torn between loyalties, “and what she believes in is rather grand.”

  “Yes, of course.” But the slow blush—was it shame? anger?—that followed on this instantaneous response seemed to deny it.

  They had left it at that.

  The snow had melted fast, but something of the excitement of winter stayed on, the air clear and brilliant, the ring of a heel on frosty pavement, a peculiar evening light when the white houses seemed to be floating on the violet air and dark fell like a curtain before one knew it. And, in spite of the prickly situation around Jane, Lucy was often flooded with happiness so fresh and overwhelming that she began to believe that teaching might be her vocation after all. The freshman section had roused itself after her outburst of anger: three of the girls had written good papers on Job and the class discussion had been heated, one of those hours when Lucy felt she was not so much teaching as witnessing a group of intelligent girls teach themselves. She would never have thought this particular section capable of fervor. But she suspected that the subject matter had something to do with it; Job touched them at crucial points in their own experience; re
ligion was a subject they wrestled with outside the curriculum, no doubt. It occurred to her that it was perhaps only at points of conflict that some door in the lazy attention was finally forced open, and people became educable—at least if the conflict were not too intense or deeply buried, she reminded herself, thinking of Jane. She was absorbed in these thoughts and smoking a cigarette before putting her mind on reading and correcting a long paper, when a knock roused her, a tentative knock.

  “Come in,” she called. “Oh, come in, Pippa.”

  “I brought my paper,” Pippa said, “I couldn’t wait.”

  “Good,” Lucy smiled. “I’m looking forward to reading it.” Instinctively she went back to sit down at her desk. “Well, Pippa,” she said kindly, “how are things with you?”

  She was struck by the open beauty of the face before her, wrapped in a blue muffler which Pippa had twisted round her neck and over her head so that it framed the purity of line, the long oval. For just a second Lucy felt a pang at the passing of youth. Life had seemed to her rich a moment before, but it was passing, passing …

  “You’d better take off your coat and sit down. How is it out?”

  “Cold and starry.” Pippa sat down on the bed, beside her coat, one hand rubbing the dark-blue wool absentmindedly.

  “There’s something on your mind, child. What is it?” How revolting to say “child”! It had slipped out, setting Pippa outside, making her feel that her problem, whatever it was, must be a childish one. Here it all is again, Lucy groaned inwardly, conflict, self-criticism. Here we go again!

  “You said if I ever had a real problem I could come.” As usual those large eyes had filled with tears, and Lucy felt wildly impatient. She waited while Pippa apparently measured the leap she was about to take. The image came to Lucy’s mind of herself as a child crouching before the broad jump, measuring it with her eyes, waiting for the moment when she would have the courage to force her heavy weight through the air, feel the knees release from the tense spring in them—and she smiled.