The Small Room

by May Sarton

  “Thank you for coming,” Maria said, quite formal, even shy, as she neared her own domain.

  Lucy watched her walk rapidly down the path, and watched the door open and a long oblong of light fall on the path, then black out. It was cold. And it seemed a long way back to the Faculty House.

  CHAPTER 17

  Lucy walked slowly across the campus to Hallie’s the next week in the cold, damp dark, for a pre-Christmas party. She felt dull and tired, as if in the last days some life energy had been drained out of her. But the sheer act of walking roused her and she found herself looking at the lighted buildings all around her with affection; they were no longer pieces of architecture to be judged as insufficient, but intimate presences. She was amazed to think that it was barely three months since she had crossed these same paths on her way to that first tea at Hallie’s when she had been so much an outsider; when she was still an ironic observer, and quite uncommitted. Was she committed now? The question had brought her to Hallie’s door, where she was greeted with a kiss.

  “Here’s Lucy!” Hallie announced as if she were bringing them all a present. Lucy shook Henry’s hand, then went over to Jennifer, sitting by the fire in the low chair she always chose, and found herself finally standing in the long window with Carryl Cope. Coming from the dark into all this warmth, she felt tears start to her eyes, and turned away from the penetrating glance.

  “She needs a drink,” Carryl said to the world at large. “Henry is bartender. I can recommend his martinis.”

  “So here we are again,” Hallie was saying. “The last time, Lucy and the Atwoods had just arrived. I remember we teased you. Did you mind?”

  “I was vastly interested,” Lucy smiled.

  “You have had quite an initiation, I must say,” Carryl said drily, “you and the Atwoods. You have, one must concede, had a strong dose of Appleton.”

  “Yes, in three months we have led them rather a dance,” Jennifer rested her eyes thoughtfully on Carryl, “haven’t we, Carryl?”

  “We are not going to talk shop!” Hallie broke in, just as she had before, in exactly the same tone of voice. But of course they did talk shop. Lucy sat cross-legged in front of the fire with her drink, listening to an animated discussion about whom they should invite to give the Tat-lock lecture the following year. She listened to the voices, rising and falling, to Carryl Cope’s incisive vote against a Harvard luminary, to Jennifer’s plumping for Oppenheimer or “someone,” as she said, “who has the idea that the most important thing in academic education now is to bridge the split between disciplines.” Henry Atwood came in with a suggestion that they consider an anthropologist and preferably a woman. “Anthropology would seem the logical subject to me,” he said quietly. Lucy felt that Henry Atwood had moved into new command of himself; he had acquired a kind of authority. “Don’t you agree, Lucy?”

  “Lucy is not with us,” Carryl spoke for her. “She did not hear the question.”

  “I was just thinking …” She had been thinking that she missed the Beveridges more even than she had expected to. Their absence was a presence.

  “Listen.” Carryl Cope demanded attention, and especially from Jennifer. “You have been keeping the wind from the shorn lamb. But I want to talk about it.”

  “It?” Jennifer raised her eyebrows.

  “I’ve come to certain conclusions about the Jane Seaman affair and I want to talk about it. Do you mind?” she asked, with a humility and tentativeness Lucy found touching.

  “Mind?” Jennifer asked at once. “Mind?” she asked again, swallowing a smile. “You underrate our curiosity.”

  But the doorbell broke into the prickly moment. Hallie, flustered, rose with a muttered, “Darn whoever it is!” and went to receive the evidently unexpected guests. At once they heard the joy and relief in her voice. “Maria! Jack!” she cried. “You dears. Come in, come in. Henry, get them a drink!” she called back. They all instinctively rose to their feet.

  Jack and Maria came in on a cloud of glory. Their faces were radiant. Even Jack, who smiled so rarely, was smiling as he walked into the room holding Maria’s hand. “Well, here we are,” he said. “Late but avid. What are you talking about?”

  “We were not talking about you …” Jennifer began to unwind a long spool of thought, but Jack was too excited to listen.

  “No? How extraordinary, Maria! They were not talking about us.”

  “But,” Jennifer proceeded, “we felt your absence. The circle was incomplete.”

  Maria, as usual, brought her own atmosphere with her. She had been standing in the middle of the room, Jack’s hand in hers, and now she left him to go over to Carryl.

  “Carryl,” she said, “I am glad to see you. You know, you have been in my mind a kind of monster.”

  “Really, Maria? How odd. For I often seem like a kind of monster to myself.”

  They shook hands. Nobody laughed, though Lucy felt an almost irresistible desire to giggle, as she did on all self-consciously formal occasions, as she had years ago when two members of her class had destroyed a plasticene map and hurled bits of it at each other, only to stand eventually before the assembled school and solemnly shake hands. These two had been hurling bits of the map of love at each other for some years. It had its humorous side.

  “Here you are.” Henry, as usual oblivious to the stress and triumph of the moment, brought filled glasses to Maria and Jack.

  “Well, we can sit down,” Hallie said. “We really do not have to stand any longer.”

  “We do not have to if there is another chair,” Jack said.

  “Oh Henry, do bring one in from the dining room, like an angel!”

  They were all waiting for the moment to coalesce, waiting for what Carryl had been going to say. Could she say it now the Beveridges had come?

  “What was it you were all discussing when we so rudely interrupted?” Jack asked. It was hard to define how he looked, somehow glistening, a swimmer through magic airs. And he bowed over Carryl’s hand like a magician as he lit her cigarette.

  “Thank you, Jack. Our lights have been somewhat obscured lately, haven’t they?” She gave him one of those half-mocking, half-tender looks that Lucy had come to recognize as the prelude to a pounce.

  “Possibly,” Jack said with a fleeting smile at Maria.

  Then with a sudden imperious gesture Carryl took one of his hands in hers and reached over to Maria with the other. “It’s all right? The tiger is tamed?”

  Lucy though, Oh dear, she can’t resist!

  “Yes, if Jack is the tiger!” Maria said instantly and laughed with a perfectly happy laugh. It rang out in the room like a largesse, like a fling of golden sunlight poured over them.

  “Yes, if Maria is the tiger!” Jack answered.

  “You wretch!” Maria whispered as he went past her, back to his chair, but she was smiling.

  “‘Teach me to heare Mermaides singing, or to keep off envie’s stinging, and finde what winde serves to advance an honest minde,’” Jennifer recited in her softest voice, the one that always gathered silence to it. When had she said it before in just that tone?

  “Yes, Jennifer.” Carryl leaned forward, was suddenly serious. “I have been thinking about that winde …”

  “We all have.” Hallie spoke into the fire. “The secret society we chaffed these newcomers about bust right open.” When Hallie was moved, she was apt to use rather old-fashioned slang, Lucy had observed. “Well, and now where are we, Carryl?”

  “Right in the middle of something,” Carryl answered, and she added with distaste, “It’s all been so immensely personal, for one thing … so disastrously personal. Somehow or other we are stripped down.”

  The words sank into a silence. For once, Lucy thought, we are silent.

  “Yes …” Maria gave a sigh, and it too rested there, like a question and an answer.

  They had finished their drinks, but no one moved.

  “It’s really preposterous that one girl’s dishonest mind coul
d cause such an earthquake!” Jack said, then turned expectantly toward Carryl, who was evidently preparing to speak.

  “During all these weeks, feeling your censure …” She made a gesture to quell any attempt to refute the last word. “No, don’t deny it! All these weeks, I have been trying to come to terms with this thing.” The earnest tone changed to a mocking one, and she shrugged. “Oh, I don’t suppose any of us change very much, nor shall I. Sooner or later one comes to terms with oneself.”

  “You are quite splendid,” Maria said firmly. Lucy would have liked to hug her. One thing about wholehearted people like Maria was that their positive was as definite as their negative. “It is a kind of splendor for which I have felt great jealousy.”

  “Not really?” Carryl turned to her in honest bewilderment.

  “Of course.”

  “Why?”

  “Your brilliance stands on rock, the rock of real achievement. If anyone is Appleton, you are it. Why do you think I have been jealous?” Maria threw back her head, and her eyes sparkled. She seemed wrapped in her own splendor of physical being.

  “If so, there is something very wrong with Appleton,” Carryl answered without smiling. She had withdrawn, hooded like a fierce old bird that will not leap into the air except for good cause. For a second she closed her eyes. When she opened them she spoke to Lucy. “I refused to recognize the whole person in Jane Seaman. Why?” She was obviously asking herself that question. “The little devil came and went in my house as if it were her own. And I justified this invasion on the grounds that she had a hungry mind, and if I could nourish it I would.”

  “Didn’t she?” Jack asked. “I would have thought that estimate accurate.”

  “Maybe, but she did not come for the books, or to nourish her mind …” Carryl said wearily. “She came for me. She came for help. And I was not there. Help was not forthcoming.” She sat there, glittering with self-castigation as if it were a jewel she wore.

  “But,” Jennifer answered gently, “who knows what would have happened if you had given her what she wanted …”

  “Ah! The risk,” Carryl nodded. “Yes, the risk … and we are back again at the price of excellence, which is, if I remember, where we came in.”

  “And it is?” Jennifer probed.

  “Why not the joy? Why the price?” Maria almost shouted. “Why do you all talk in terms of sacrifice, never of fulfillment?” It could not have been more startling if a gigantic flower in fireworks had burst there in the room and showered them with sparks.

  “Yes,” Lucy asked, in passionate recognition, “why always the price?”

  “Because,” Jennifer said quite harshly, and without equivocation, “we have—haven’t we, Carryl?—come to equate excellence with some sort of mutilation.”

  “This I cannot see,” Maria came back at once. “This I do not understand. This,” she said, looking down and not at Jack, “has nearly broken my marriage in two.”

  “Because,” Hallie stood up in the force of her conviction, “because what we give our students, whether we are personal with them or not, is the marrow, the essence of ourselves, what true lovers ask of love—and what does this mean? It means that for one reason or another, we are ourselves cripples. We are able to give so much just because we do not have.”

  “No!” Maria said, shaking her head vehemently. “No!”

  “No what?” Carryl Cope turned the full force of her person toward Maria like a searching beam of light. It was the moment of truth. They all felt it.

  “No, you give from richness, not from poverty, from wholeness or not at all.”

  “You are not a teacher,” Jack said, as if to protect the others.

  “I was. I know what I am talking about. Lucy knows too, she still knows because she has not yet been poisoned by this atmosphere of self-mutilation, and she has been able to lead at least one of her students into excellence—I am speaking of Pippa—because she did not withhold herself.”

  “Henry, make some more martinis,” Hallie whispered.

  “But you are willing to grant, surely, that there is such a thing as the life of the mind?” Jennifer asked. “It seems to me that we are talking round and round the same nub, and the nub is the ‘life of the mind’ and how it is nourished, or stimulated. I am not so sure,” she said, obviously launched on one of her long ruminations, “that the awareness we have—we who have chosen or been forced to remain old maids—of what might be called mutilation is not a perfectly healthy sign. Surely we do not wish to hold ourselves up as examples? Are we not the way rather than the end? It is not our function to lead the honest mind necessarily to venture upon our path, but to find its own—and these paths must be different. I do not myself see Appleton as primarily a school for scholars. If it were, we would have to reduce the enrollment by ninety per cent.”

  “As a school for what then?” Jack asked.

  “The total human being!” Lucy said fiercely, “and doesn’t that mean to learn to think about feeling as well as about everything else—and how are we to teach that if we don’t know ourselves?”

  “Great teachers are great people. You can’t get away from that.” It came from Debby Atwood, she who had been so silent.

  “And there are as many kinds of great people as there are hummingbirds in Brazil, four hundred to be exact.” Jack turned from the group toward Carryl, and for the first time this evening his slight stammer was in evidence. “C-Carryl, it’s very noble of you, and all that, to feel responsible for Jane, but I doubt, actually, if it would have been such a very great help if you had given whatever it was you think you withheld. After all, you have had a thousand successes against this one failure. Look at that mathematical girl, the genius we have around, she seems to be doing fine. And I very much doubt whether she is pouring out her soul into Professor March’s unwilling ears. Haven’t we all gone a little wild over Jane?” He turned to the others now. “The trouble with Appleton is that we take it all too seriously …”

  “Hear, hear!” Maria clapped her hands.

  “Damn!” Carryl said. “I no longer know what I think … or feel.” She turned to Henry, standing in the doorway—jug in his hand, “yes, give me another drink.” Then she added, half to herself, it seemed, “The fact is that I was more involved than I should have been in Jane’s success—and failure.”

  On these words a silence fell. Jennifer stretched out her hands to the fire. Maria got up and asked Jack for a light, then bent down to kiss him on the ear. Hallie disappeared into the kitchen. It was, Lucy felt, like an intermission at a play. And while it went on, she considered the whole conversation as if it had been a jigsaw puzzle With one after another of them fitting in a piece. But somehow the whole pattern was still not clear.

  “Thank you, Henry,” Carryl said as he bent over to fill her glass. “We know what you do very well, but we don’t know what you think,” she looked at him with her quizzical dominating look, “you who are intoxicated by Appleton!”

  Henry gave a desperate glance toward his wife. He stood there with the martini jug in his hand, taken by surprise.

  “I’m bursting,” he said, “but I don’t know quite with what!”

  Then the saving laughter seized them all.

  “Come on, Henry,” Jack teased when the laughter had subsided, “you have the floor. And we are not going to let you get away with such imprecision. Collect yourself, man. Think, Henry!” His voice mocked the professorial.

  “I can only speak for myself,” he said. “I’ve never met a problem like Jane, thank God. All I know is that I don’t get all this withholding business. It seems to me you just teach and then go away and hope some of what you said sank in, and then when you see the papers you know almost none of it did. As far as I can see, teaching is as much as anything the ability to handle failure most of the time, one’s own failure, I mean …” He stood there, waving the jug back and forth a little as if it were a ball in his hand. Then he set it down on a side table.

  One simply co
uld not be ironic about Henry, Lucy thought. He was too innocent and clear.

  “Once in a while you do have to, kind of, be a father to somebody, though. Do you remember Saul, Debby? This boy used to hang around all night until I was propping my eyes open.” He laughed. “Saul wasn’t even bright.”

  “And you were a good father?” Carryl asked gently.

  “He had the patience of a saint,” Debby answered from, as usual, the floor. “And Saul did pass!”

  “Now he writes me twelve-page letters and says no one understands him but me.” Henry rubbed the back of his head.

  “Henry, you are a darling,” Maria enunciated for them all.

  “It’s only because I listened to him that he thinks that,” he said, his eyes bright behind his glasses.

  “Yes …” Jennifer had been silent for a long time, and was still concentrated on the fire, feeding it tenderly with pine cones and little pieces of kindling. Now she lifted her head. “I have a hunch that we are at last, with Henry’s help,” and she turned to give him one of her rare smiles, “coming close to the point We are all verbalizers by trade”—Lucy recognized in the pause the beginning of one of Jennifer’s slow elucidations, the spider beginning to weave her web—“and so we tend to believe that everything is communicated through words. But do we actually reach our students by heart-to-heart talks?” She raised her eyebrows. “I myself have never done such a thing in forty years. No, we teach a subject to half-formed people who are, we must presume, going to grow into wholeness partly through the discipline of exploring a subject. But …” and here she accelerated her pace as she turned to Carryl, as if she had been afraid she would be interrupted and must get to the point, “there is an intangible communion between a teacher and a student which is not, I am prepared to grant, wholly intellectual.”

  “Obviously.” Carryl sounded impatient. “What are you after, Jennifer?”

  “‘Teach me to heare mermaides singing …’” she went on, imperturbably. “Perhaps quite simply you did not hear the mermaids singing, you and Jane.”

  “It is not usual to hear mermaids singing while studying the trade routes of the Middle Ages!” A ripple of smiles acknowledged Carryl’s answer, but it was clear that it had been an interruption and the web was by no means woven to the end.