The Small Room

by May Sarton

  “Have you talked with her yourself, Jane?”

  “Yes, of course,” Jane sneered, “she had me in for a little session. She was very kind, blind as a bat, inhuman and cruel without even knowing it.”

  “That is not my impression of Carryl Cope,” Lucy said gently.

  “She wants to take me to Europe with her this summer,” Jane said, obviously aware that this statement would be startling.

  “That is generous.”

  “No, just guilt.”

  God, what a mess this is, Lucy thought. How would it ever get straightened out? “I’m going to let that pass, Jane. As things are now you could transfer to another college. Would your father understand?”

  “He’d pay the bills all right, if that’s what you mean.” Lucy felt acutely the desolation of the prospect, the loneliness, the isolation of the girl before her. She took a deep breath and made her decision.

  “Jane, would you like to come home with me for the weekend? I can’t promise you very much,” she went on quickly to give Jane a moment to think the answer over. “But you would be away from here, in New York, and you’d be free to go and come as you please. My mother is often rather dreary now, since my father’s death, but she would find it quite appropriate that I bring a student home, and would ask no questions.”

  Lucy had expected anything except a flood of tears. But the girl was bent over, sobbing great tearing sobs.

  “I don’t know if that means yes or no,” Lucy said gently.

  “It m—m—means y—y-yes,” Jane wailed. “It’s so awfully k-k-kind of you. You’re the only kindness.”

  “Nonsense, I just happen to be here.” Lucy waited for the force of the crise to spend itself, then she came to the point. “I’m glad you’ll come, Jane. Now may I ask just one thing of you?”

  Jane nodded.

  “If I make an appointment for you with a psychiatrist will you see him? Maybe one way out of the trap is to talk to someone right outside this whole mess, someone who might help you understand what all this is about Carryl Cope.”

  “I don’t need help about Carryl Cope,” Jane said as bitterly as ever. “If that’s a condition, then, no, I’d rather stay here.”

  “Of course it’s not a condition! But you could do with some help, it seems to me.”

  “I’m all right.”

  “You’d be pretty inhuman if you were after these last days. And I don’t think you are either inhuman or all right. Hating Carryl isn’t going to get you out of the trap, Jane. It’s what locked you in there.”

  Whenever Lucy heard herself laying down the law with such an appearance of authority, she had an immediate reaction of revulsion. It was too easy to stand outside and tell someone off (after all, she herself had just failed in a crucial human relationship); always she had the sense that you kill life by analysing it too rationally. It was a little like taking his shadow away from a person, depriving him of the rich indefinable marsh of feeling from which being springs. The effect on Jane was instantaneous.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, with a return of her earlier insolent tone. “You’re just like everyone else who has read a little Freud and thinks he can paste a label on things and solve them with a label.”

  “No nonsense about you, my girl, is there?” Lucy smiled. “You’re absolutely right. So why not go to someone who has done more than read a little Freud? Why not go to the horse’s mouth?”

  Jane got up and walked about restlessly, took a book out of the bookcase, opened it, and put it back. “Reason is all I’ve got,” she said with her back to Lucy. “I’m scared to give it up. They’ll want to dig down underneath. I’ve got this far on reason and I’m damned if I’m going to be dragged back to infancy and go through all that again.…” She was crying. “Besides,” the words were torn out of her, Lucy felt, “Carryl Cope would call it c-c-cowardice …”

  “You have to remember that Carryl Cope comes from a different generation. When she says things like that, she is simply reflecting her own background and environment.”

  “She hasn’t failed! What do you suppose would have happened to her if someone had gone around digging in her subconscious?”

  It occurred to Lucy that if someone had, Jane might not now be caught like a rat in a maze. But it was not the moment to say so. “Maybe she was just lucky, or maybe she has genius that transcends her limitations. Don’t you see, Jane, if you run away now from this matrix of pain and conflict, and never come to terms with it, you will just be settling for fossilizing at this stage? Do you really like yourself as you are that much?”

  “I’m brilliant. You have said so yourself,” Jane said passionately. “I could get my degree at Columbia and go on to the doctorate and become a professor like Cope.”

  Lucy bit back the answer that leaped to her tongue: Is teaching a profession for the humanly crippled to take refuge in? She said quietly, “Yes, you could.”

  “But?”

  “Jane, may I say a word to you about your long paper?”

  “It was good, wasn’t it?” In the last few minutes Lucy had watched the artificial bolstered arrogance slip over the suffering human being like a mask. It was not a pleasant thing to see.

  “It was a straight A paper. You succeeded admirably in what you had set out to do. But,” Lucy paused and fumbled for words, “I found it disturbing. I am sure it gave you pleasure to tell off so many clever people and prove yourself, to yourself, a match for them. But from some absolute view, God’s for instance …”

  “Does God have to be brought in?”

  “No, He does not have to be. But perhaps it is the moment to suggest to you that Carryl Cope, who does not believe in Freud, does have faith. This makes her humble on one level, where you are not on any that I can see.” The retort was sharp.

  “It’s faith or Freud then?”

  Lucy saw why Carryl Cope had been delighted by this mind. Even drunk, even desperate, the shining intelligence was there.

  “There is something a little troubling about brilliance that finds its satisfaction in nay-saying only. You are indulging, Jane, in a corrupting form of power, the power of the critic of critics. I gave your paper an A, as you know, but I liked Pippa’s very much better though her grade was a B. Grades are a recognition of accomplishment on one level. Don’t be so unintelligent as to overestimate them.”

  “Don’t take away the only thing I have,” came the answer, an angry bitter answer.

  And Lucy responded with something like anger. “If that’s all you have, it’s not enough. Not enough for you, not enough for me as your teacher. Your intelligence is, if you will, an angel. You are putting it to poor work for an angel. Really, that paper was full of hatred and self-hatred, hatred of the intellect, hatred of all those critics who can prove themselves superior to the artist they analyse because they can analyse him.” Had she gone too far? Jane looked up, met Lucy’s eyes and did not waver.

  “Yes, I guess that’s true,” she said, quietly. “You win.” Then she sat down, hugging herself and rocking as she had when she first came in.

  “Winning isn’t important.”

  “What is?”

  “Helping you through this difficult passage is—to me.”

  “It’s humiliating.”

  “People believe in you. That shouldn’t be humiliating.”

  “I’ve let them down.”

  “Yes, you have. You’ve let them down badly.”

  “Very well.” Jane got up and pulled on her trench coat. “I’ll see that god-damned analyst of yours.”

  They parted on a firm handshake, and on a straight look.

  It was a victory, but now Lucy was alone, and she saw that it was after eleven and too late to call her mother, she felt close to exhaustion, and wondered if she had taken on more than she could handle. She had certainly taken a huge risk in making herself responsible for getting Jane to see a psychiatrist. Carryl Cope would resent it. At this moment she envied Carryl deeply—env
ied her certainties, her eminence, her genius, her faith, even her blindness. I am nothing, Lucy thought with woe, and I have taken on all this as if I were God.

  But before she went to sleep, she wondered whether just this were not what you did take on if you chose to be a teacher … this, the care of souls.

  CHAPTER 13

  On the way back to Appleton after the weekend Jane slept most of the way, and Lucy again found herself looking out the window at the pastures, stone walls and white farms she had watched flow past her in September, just a little over two months ago. She would never have imagined that she would be bringing back a sleeping child, a child in her care, that she would have found herself already so deeply engaged and committed. For Jane and she were coming back together and Lucy had determined to make a real stand, now she was backed up by professional advice. Things could not be allowed to slide along, or Dr. Gunderson warned that a serious breakdown could take place.

  Fortunately Lucy felt sure that Blake Tillotson would be responsive, as indeed he was. He readily agreed that Jane go straight to the infirmary where she could be protected, and promised to follow through on her father and if possible get a decision at once that she be given therapy as Dr. Gunderson had recommended. Lucy had a sense, for the first time in weeks, that there was hope. But Tillotson then warned her that “College Notes will have a rather vituperative editorial tomorrow. Things have got a little out of hand,” and she agreed to come to a meeting in his office at four the next day. So, she thought with a sinking heart, it was too late for the easy solution she had imagined possible in the euphoria of the return.

  By four-o’clock the next afternoon the campus was buzzing; without mentioning any names or the Seaman affair itself, the editorial accused the administration of dishonesty. It was headed “Justice or Anarchy.” Perhaps, after all, Lucy told herself, a head-on collision might turn out to be healthier than all the subterranean gossip. Such were her thoughts as she crossed the campus on the way to Tillotson’s office, and ran into Jack Beveridge.

  “Oh Jack, I’m so glad to see you! I’m scared about this meeting because I’ve stuck my neck out.”

  “So have I,” he said, his profile looking somewhat narrower, more tense than usual, and the nervous tic back again around his mouth. “Maria hardly speaks to me.”

  Lucy received this confession in silence.

  “It seems absurd that this ridiculous affair could rock our marriage, but it sure has.” His eyes narrowed. Under the nervousness Lucy felt suppressed rage. “I sometimes think we’ve all gone mad. Rats in a cage.”

  “Odd, that’s just the image Jane used.”

  “Is Carryl invited to this star chamber gathering, by the way? Do you know?”

  “Blake didn’t mention her name when I talked to him last night.” As they walked, Lucy decided she had better inform Jack of what had happened in the last days. “I took Jane home with me for the weekend, Jack. I got her to see a psychiatrist. She’s in a bad way.”

  “You have been a busy little bee!” The tone was teasing, but not kind.

  “Please, please, don’t be cross.”

  “I’m not cross,” he said testily. “I admire your courage. You have entered the lists as fresh as a daisy, and all the rest of us seem to be worn down by something like passive disgust—with ourselves, I suppose, with the whole messy business college teaching appears to be. I wish I could take Maria to Italy,” he said half to himself. “We’re rotting here.”

  Lucy hoped devoutly that Jack’s bitter mood would not prevail. Jennifer at least could be counted on, and Blake Tillotson, for some objectivity, some compassion too.

  Hallie and Jennifer were already sitting on two of the leather chairs that seem mandatory in presidential offices. Lucy glanced up at the inevitable bad portrait of Miss Wellington in Doctor’s robes that stared down at them with an expression of dislike in her pale blue eyes. Miss Wellington would not approve of psychiatrists, that was sure.

  Blake Tillotson came in from his inner sanctum and pulled the chair out from behind the big empty desk with a natural instinct not to be pompous that Lucy inwardly commended.

  “Exams are coming up, I know. I realize how precious time is. Let us therefore waste none. By the way,” he interrupted himself, “where is Miss Valentine?” And called back into the inner office, “Get Valentine, Pross, will you please?” He had not mentioned the Dean on the telephone and Lucy suspected that he would just as soon she not be found. But she did appear a few seconds later, as polished and composed as an icon.

  “Sit down, Dean,” Blake said with false cheer. “You know what we are up to, of course.”

  “The Seaman case, I presume,” she said with a fleeting smile.

  “Precisely. There are two sides to this question. Jane’s and the college’s. I am going to ask Miss Winter to brief us on what she knows of Jane’s present state of mind. Let us get all the facts on the table before we jump to any rash conclusions.”

  Lucy felt like a small child who has somehow got herself involved in a grown-up scandal and must present crucial evidence. Jack’s teasing remark had put her off, for she had been too busy with Jane’s immediate problem to worry about herself having to face a hostile world. Instinctively she turned toward Jennifer as she recounted as briefly as possible the gist of what Dr. Gunderson had told her after his interview with Jane. “I am aware,” she ended, “that I have rushed in where angels, notably Olive Hunt, fear to tread …”

  The laughter helped.

  “Thank you, Miss Winter. Now, before I open this meeting to discussion, let me tell you where the administration stands and has stood, and just why.” It was clear to them all, as Blake Tillotson spoke, that he had yielded to Carryl Cope’s persuasion to give Jane another chance. The degree of resistance to this decision had not been foreseen, he explained, except by Miss Valentine (here he made a slight bow in her direction). At present it was clear that underground resistance was turning into open revolt. Not only had the officers of student government called on him to protest, but also, that very morning, a delegation of instructors and associate professors: “On the one hand we face Jane Seaman, whom a psychiatrist has diagnosed as seriously disturbed, on the other hand, a faculty and student body who, if not seriously disturbed, are certainly up in arms.”

  “If there were a third hand,” Jennifer said, “—but perhaps I must alter the phrase; in the third place, there is Carryl Cope in her embattled eminence.”

  “Quite.” Blake Tillotson did not smile. “Frankly, it’s a hell of a mess, and I need your help. What do we do now?”

  “We resign ourselves to due process,” Jennifer murmured.

  Gentle as her remark was, it was greeted with an appalled silence.

  Finally Jack spoke. “Do two wrongs make a right? Will backing down now make things any better? And what about Carryl?” His voice rose. “We’ll have a free-for-all faculty meeting, delegate someone to call on student government and throw the whole mess in their laps. For Carryl, a major humiliation and defeat. And this to be followed, presumably, by the expulsion from the college of Jane Seaman, who is, we are assured, mentally ill!”

  “Maybe,” Miss Valentine answered quietly. “But the trouble is, Professor, that we have a revolt on our hands.”

  “And somebody has to be thrown to the lions?” Jack asked icily.

  “What is your alternative?” Dean Valentine had, under the circumstances, considerable dignity, Lucy had to admit.

  Jack leaned back in his chair, puffing a cigarette.

  “Well, Beveridge?” Blake asked a little impatiently.

  “It may sound cruel, but if Jane could be shipped right out to a doctor for treatment, I don’t see why that wouldn’t provide the perfect solution.”

  “For everyone except Jane,” Lucy said. “Surely we can’t just wash our hands of her. We do have some responsibility there.”

  “That,” Jennifer said supportively, “is Carryl’s strong suit, is it not?”

  “In w
hat way are we responsible?” Dean Valentine asked.

  The question hung in the air, and when it was clear that it would not be answered, she went on. “The college, as far as I know, has never admitted extenuating circumstances in a case of outright plagiarism.”

  “Jane could be transferred to another institution,” Lucy said. “Surely that is one alternative …”

  “It would not quiet the storm raised in this morning’s College Notes, however,” Blake said gently. “My own feeling is that whatever is done, can only be done now after consultation both with faculty and students. The thing has gone too far to be hushed up, either by transferring Jane or by handing her over to a sanitarium or its equivalent—provided we could get parental consent, of course—”

  “The wolf pack is in full cry,” Jennifer answered equally gently, “so we throw it some meat?”

  “Very well. You do not approve. What is your own solution?” For the first time Blake Tillotson showed signs of irritation.

  “I have none, Blake. I’m in a bad way.”

  “Why wasn’t Carryl asked to this meeting?” Jack’s tone was belligerent. If Blake Tillotson had called this particular group together in the hope of getting a dispassionate analysis of the situation, he had been rather optimistic, Lucy thought.

  “She is too vulnerable to be dispassionate,” Blake answered without equivocation.

  “It would seem that we all are,” was Jennifer’s response to this. “My own view is … tentatively … (for I must admit that I feel inconclusive), that if education is our business then the only thing that really matters here, or at least the point where our emphasis must lie, is with Jane herself. I cannot help feeling that as far as she is concerned we have bungled hugely from beginning to end.” For Jennifer this statement was extraordinarily passionate.

  Until now Hallie Summerson had kept very quiet; now she leaned forward, her blue gaze fastened on Jennifer’s face, her eyes narrowed slightly.

  “I couldn’t agree with you more,” Blake said at once, “but if our business is education, then surely Carryl Cope also matters.”

  “Carryl took a chance,” Hallie blazed out. “Some of us thought it a risky chance, a dangerous one. I think she must now take the consequences.” Alone among them, Hallie seemed sure of where she stood.