The Small Room

by May Sarton

  “You won’t be cold?” For Lucy had noticed the lack of a coat, instead a little old-fashioned fox fur was draped over Olive’s shoulders.

  “I’m never cold. Heater in the car.” She got in and turned some mysterious button. It was a huge black Buick convertible. And, as Lucy had feared, Olive Hunt was an erratic driver. They swooped out of the drive, making the gravel fly, then came to a sudden halt at an intersection. “Sorry,” Olive said, but this was clearly only a manner of speech. She was evidently one of those dangerous beings who regard a car not as a means of transport but as a means of expression. Neither of them spoke until they were well outside the town limits on an empty country road that climbed up and down the hills, past farmhouses wearing their evening look of warmth and intimacy so that here in the huge car, propelled she did not know where, in the power of this alarming stranger, Lucy felt nostalgia for the small safe rooms they passed so swiftly, for the quiet of a kitchen stove and someone knitting in a rocker. She sensed that words were building up in the woman at her side, and that soon she would be listening again. Am I always to be an ear, Lucy thought, exhausted in advance. Why do all these people fasten onto me? “Outside the hierarchies,” Carryl had said. But Lucy suspected that it was also because she was innocuous, innocent, a kind of receptacle. She represented the safety of the amateur to whom the professional can talk. Mesmerized by the road and her thoughts, she did not have any idea how long this silence had lasted, so purposeful on Olive’s part, so passive on her own. To what inner destination were they being hurtled through the dark?

  “Thank you,” Olive said suddenly.

  “For what?”

  “For not jabbering.”

  Lucy laughed. “One can be silent in a car. It’s a relief.”

  “Yes.”

  Lucy glanced sideways at the profile at her side, the erect stance (no hunching over for Olive Hunt), hands light on the wheel, eyes slightly narrowed, and the line of cheekbone and sharp nose standing out in the light from the dashboard.

  “Carryl has outgrown me,” she announced. “You know, she’s a great woman. Have you ever seen one before?” But she did not wait for an answer. “She’s patient with me for old time’s sake. After all, we’ve known each other for twenty years. It grows into a habit.” She gave a short laugh. “I taught her a lot of unimportant things—that room, for instance—took her to Europe, gave her an assurance about money and things that she lacked. Never could get anywhere near that shining mind of hers, though. Tried. There, she taught me, and I had to work hard to keep up, I can tell you. Now that’s all over.”

  “I don’t see why …” From what Lucy had heard and seen for herself, she guessed that Olive had become something of a burden. But is one not also supported by such burdens? Take the burden away and there is the void.

  “No. Too young. You couldn’t see. Not yet. How it all ends in despair. No one can hold what they have. It slips through one’s fingers. All except money. Money, if you guard it, increases with age. It’s the only thing that does.”

  “What for?”

  “God knows!” The answer shot back. “Carryl would say power. She’s right, I expect. Would anybody listen to me if I weren’t so rich?” Again Lucy heard the mirthless laugh, like dry leaves rattling. “Now I’ve had my comeuppance. They won’t listen to me. They’re going to hire a psychiatrist and Olive Hunt’s millions be damned. ‘We can’t sell our souls,’ Blake said to me. The effrontery of it! What has psychiatry to do with souls, anyway, nothing but sex, the sex of infants at that, from what I hear!”

  Lucy decided to let this pass.

  “The irony of it is that if I had lost all my money in ’29, if I hadn’t had such very conservative advisers, it might have made all the difference. I might have learned,” she said savagely. “Too late now. I’m committed. I’ve taken a stand.”

  “Yes,” Lucy smiled to herself in the dark, “it would take courage to go back on it now.”

  “Be quiet. I didn’t ask you to come on this drive to lecture me!”

  “You didn’t ask me to come,” Lucy said, irritated in spite of herself.

  “Didn’t I?” The car swerved abruptly, throwing Lucy off her balance, and was brought to a halt. They were stopped along the border of a field, a ragged field. The headlights picked out rotten cornstalks blowing in the wind. The silence, after the roar of the engine, was rather too loud. The dark, when the headlights were snapped off. was rather too dark. “I’m tired to death of being mystery she old woman said.

  “My dear,” Lucy answered, “so am I!”

  “You? With your whole life before you?”

  “Some of it is already past. I was engaged to be married. It has been broken off.”

  “Oh, you’ll marry,” Olive said, without pity. “You’re young. Everyone makes mistakes, don’t you know. I never could persuade Carryl to come and live with me outright. Now it’s all over and done with. But I still resent it bitterly. Sometimes I think our love has been nothing but war from beginning to end, war and the binding up of wounds.”

  “Sometimes I think that’s what it was for John and me,” Lucy murmured.

  “You don’t say?” Olive Hunt half-turned in her seat and peered at Lucy through the dark. “How extraordinary … I mean, that we should sit here in limbo, you so young, I so old, and meet on such an odd thing as the nature of love.” Lucy felt the narrowed eyes piercing her. “Give me a cigarette, child, if you have one.”

  Lucy fumbled for the cigarettes, handed one to Olive Hunt, and, as she lit it for her, met the fierce blue eyes, and in that second saw the real person tremble somewhere far inside. “But you never felt you were screaming in a high wind trying to be heard—with Professor Cope, I mean—did you?”

  “Oh, we heard each other all right. Didn’t John hear you? I sometimes think men don’t ‘hear’ very well, if I take your meaning to be ‘understand what is going on in a person.’ That’s what makes them so restful. Women wear each other out with their everlasting touching of the nerve. What am I saying?” She sounded really shocked. “I must have gone mad. Never thought such a thing, let alone said it in my born years. You have a very pernicious effect on people, Lucy.” And she gave a slight fierce smile.

  “But I would not have thought that Carryl Cope, with all her brilliance, was especially sensitive in this way, or …” Lucy paused.

  “Or she wouldn’t have made such a mess over Jane?” The old voice came back smartly. “Carryl is like a man, of course. She has been wonderfully stimulating to her students: she has adopted them like orphans, pushed them, wrangled with them, forced them to grow—and they never forget her.”

  “I’m sure they don’t.”

  “But she has not penetrated to their personal lives or problems. You are right there … and a very good thing, too!” There was defiance in the tone. Then she sighed. “But Jane has been different. Carryl loved Jane. You haven’t seen her as I have pacing up and down, caged in, worrying about Jane, talking about Jane, planning what could be done after this crisis blows over. It’s been a queer lonely time.” Olive gave a loud sigh, then puffed fiercely at her cigarette. “I can’t forgive that girl. She’s responsible for too much suffering.”

  Yes, Lucy thought, the young always imagine that suffering is their prerogative.

  “I think Carryl saw in that girl,” Olive went on, “the image of herself when she was young; Jane does have a sort of primary intensity, hunger for work, whatever it is, that one doesn’t find every day. And Carryl said to me more than once, ‘When that girl is safely launched, I’ll retire, Olive.’ We were going to take a year and live in Greece.” She bowed her head. “Old dreams. Old illusions.”

  “It’s going to be all right,” Lucy murmured without real conviction.

  “What makes you think so?”

  “Well, surely the student council’s decision is all to the good?”

  “Too late,” the old woman said moodily. “My goose is cooked.”

  “You mean because
of this business of the psychiatrist?” She was dying to add, “But you don’t have to be so stubborn, do you?” and then found that she had uttered the thought aloud. “Forgive me. I didn’t mean to say that. It just popped out.”

  “Pop goes the weasel!” Olive Hunt laughed loudly. “I do have to be stubborn. Don’t ask me to change. I can’t. I won’t.”

  Lucy restrained an impulse to giggle. It all seemed so absurd, yet was so cruel.

  “Dear me,” Olive Hunt looked at her watch. “We must be getting back. Carryl might call and wonder where I am.” The tone had gentled, but she caught herself at it and quickly added, “She won’t, of course. If you think I’m stubborn!”

  “People are so queer,” Lucy said. “I’ll never, never understand them.”

  The car shook as Olive Hunt touched the starter and made the motor roar. “You can say that again!”

  Lucy was thinking how from the outside of any relationship it seemed easy to analyse and face reality, but from inside it all got distorted. Only suffering and self-destruction. She had envied the generation that knew so little about themselves that they seemed able to act freely, from impulse. Now she felt it was, after all, an advantage to be at least slightly aware of the irrational forces at work. It kept one from freezing into a “character,” from the immobilized nature caught in its own prison like Olive Hunt, driving too fast, speeding back into the coil, the inextricable coil.

  “Do you have to commit suicide?” Lucy asked aggressively, because she felt compassion for and also impatience with the old child beside her.

  “I like driving fast. It’s a relief.”

  “I didn’t mean the driving.”

  “What did you mean?”

  “What drives you to cut yourself off from Appleton and from Carryl. Why must you do it?” Lucy trembled before the storm sure to come. But there was no answer. Only the hands gripped the wheel like claws; the jaw was thrust forward.

  “My father would never have countenanced such a thing.”

  “As a resident psychiatrist?”

  “Yes. Inherited money presents certain problems, responsibilities if you will. Perhaps that had never occurred to you, Miss Know-It-All?”

  “I don’t know anything,” Lucy stammered, touched to the quick. “But life does go forward. If people only did what their fathers would have done, the world would stand still!”

  “And a good deal more sensible than whirling toward its own destruction, you must admit!”

  It’s hopeless, Lucy thought, gripping the door-handle as they swung dangerously round a curve at seventy miles an hour. I’m a fool to have tried. After all, perhaps Carryl Cope really wanted this break, and it was Carryl she cared about.

  “You’re too wise for your own good,” Olive Hunt gentled unexpectedly. “You take it all in, listen, make the perfect ear. But what do you do with it? You did fight with that John of yours, after all.”

  “Touché,” Lucy admitted, swallowing hard. “It’s easy to be wise about other people. And anyway, I’m not.”

  “Oh yes, you are. You used the word ‘suicide.’ Right on the beam. If I go through with that change in my will, I lose Appleton and Carryl, the two loves of my life. Clear as crystal. Why do I have to do it, you ask? Pride, Lucy, pride. Without it, I’d be committing suicide too. I’m not a person to make idle threats.”

  They shot through a red light, bypassed an oncoming truck by half an inch, and then heard the sharp, commanding whistle of a policeman as he roared up beside them on a motorcycle.

  “Now I’ve done it!” Olive said, drawing up to the curb with a flourish.

  “Listen, dame …” (The cap, the goggles, the firm chin; were they turned out on a conveyor belt, Lucy wondered.) “You are a public hazard. Seventy miles an hour through a red light. You go to court, and no argument.”

  Olive was fidgeting about in her purse, and finally extracted her license, while he waited, unsmiling, pen poised. “My name,” Olive said icily, “is Olive Hunt.”

  “I don’t care what your name is. Either you’ve been drinking or you’re crazy. Tell it to the judge.”

  “Now?” Olive Hunt asked and Lucy detected a slight quaver.

  “Tomorrow at ten A.M. at the District Court. This is a Summons. Now, lady, you drive home at twenty miles an hour and pay attention to the stop lights.”

  Olive started the car and stalled it; Lucy noticed that her hands were shaking. She said a five-letter French word and began again. This time the car crept forward in perfect control.

  “That was bad luck,” Lucy said. She was rather tense now herself, as if the car had become the symbol for murderous drives within Olive and might run them into a tree.

  “My fault,” the old lady muttered. “Damn fool! Time I was dead,” she added, full of self-hatred and something like despair, Lucy felt. Everything’s so ragged and unfinished. Does life really go on tearing at people’s vitals forever like some cruel bird of prey? Is there never to be rest or peace, no final and abiding wisdom or fulfillment? Did those who stayed as alive as Olive and Carryl do so because of some flaw, some open wound that never would close? Need? Hunger? Do we die still like hungry babies at the end?

  But the car was now drawing to a stop in front of the club.

  “Well?” Olive Hunt was impatient to be off. “Here we are. Journey’s end …”

  “Yes,” Lucy said absentmindedly, “we have arrived. I must go.”

  “You could hardly wish to stay incarcerated in this dangerous machine with a daft old woman!” and Olive laughed her mirthless laugh.

  “Don’t,” Lucy said quietly and got out. Then she stood at the curb and watched the car shoot off, throwing hard pieces of snow in her face.

  She waved, as one waves to a plane, with no hope that she could be seen but as a form of salute: one could get very fond of impossible people, she thought.

  CHAPTER 16

  Now everyone flung himself into work with relief; they had all been tossed about enough on the storms of the last weeks. The people who had been most involved even felt an aversion to seeing each other; twice Lucy passed Jack Beveridge crossing the campus—as if by mutual accord they waved, but made no attempt to converse. Jane sent a little note from the sanitarium where she was to stay at least until the beginning of the spring term in February, and for once that articulate nature seemed to be at a loss for words. The careful schooled print marched effortfully across the page, and, after thanking Lucy for “all you have done,” ended, “They say I shall get well, and I am trying.” Lucy answered this with an affectionate note, and then tried to put Jane out of her mind, though she found that the ironic smile, the lock of fair hair falling over one eye, often swam up between her and the page of a student paper she was correcting, a persistent ghost. It was a relief to be confronted with the fact that the price of excellence could, at least sometimes, prove to be tough-minded balance and hard work: Pippa’s paper on Emerson and Thoreau turned out to be more than creditable and Lucy was delighted to be able to tell her so.

  “I got so absorbed in it, I forgot about everything else,” Pippa said, blushing to the roots of her hair with pleasure. “Though for a while it was like being in a thicket. I had so much material I didn’t know how to get out, how to make a plan; I used to sit at my desk and think my head would burst.”

  “What did you do then?” The way people thought things out had always interested Lucy, how a mind works, process.

  “I did what you said. I kept making outlines, discarding wonderful stuff because it wasn’t necessary. You said, ‘Keep the center clear.’ And you said, ‘If you get into a panic, spell things out 1, 2, 3.’” The solemnity with which Pippa repeated these simple pieces of advice made Lucy smile. “You smile, but all that helped. Sometimes people take those obvious things for granted, professors, I mean.”

  “I suppose there’s some value in not being brilliant. I can’t take anything for granted.” Lucy was thinking aloud, at ease with Pippa now. What a long way they had come toge
ther in a few months!

  “You’ve taught me a lot.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Of course the other thing …” Pippa sat on the edge of the chair in the musty-smelling office, as fresh as a daffodil. “The other thing is that somehow doing it for you, I could do it better. It gave an extra edge. I wanted it so much to be good, for you …”

  “Oh Pippa,” Lucy groaned. “Do it for the thing itself, not for me.”

  “For you as well,” Pippa answered with surprising firmness. “Teaching is more than just a subject, you know. It’s a person, too. You can’t get away from that, even if you want to.”

  “I do want to—outside the classroom,” Lucy said sharply. She had spoken out of her own edginess, out of all that had happened lately, and she had spoken too sharply, for Pippa’s eyes filled with tears.

  “Come on, Pippa, don’t be a goose. I want you to read this paper in class tomorrow. Take it with you. And try to speak up!”

  Pippa had risen in response to the tone of dismissal and stood there with the paper in her hands. If she is preparing to burst into tears, Lucy thought grimly, she can jolly well go and do it somewhere else.

  “See you tomorrow in class,” she added more cordially to Pippa’s back as it disappeared down the hall.

  You can’t win, Lucy thought, taking out a cigarette and puffing furiously at it. There was no avoiding the issue: the most detached teacher in the world infused her detachment, and if one student or another received this as a personal message, well, maybe one had to accept that that was one way of learning. No wonder teaching was called an art, the most difficult kind of art in which the final expression depends upon a delicate and dangerous balance between two people and a subject. Eliminate the subject and the whole center collapses …

  At this point in her thoughts, Lucy suddenly remembered that she had promised to go to tea in one of the dormitories with a group of freshmen. It was the sort of occasion she most dreaded; but she had accepted at the height of the crisis when she felt that it was important to keep up what contact one could between the faculty and the rebellious student body. Oh well …