The Small Room (12 page)

“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; religion 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.

“It's serious,” Pippa said a little defiantly. “It's about Jane.”

“Oh?” Lucy froze. “What about Jane? Jane seems to be managing very well.”

“That's just it. I mean, no one can understand. Of course we all know about the
Iliad
essay. You can't expect such things to get completely hushed up on this campus!”

“No, I expect not.”

“Miss Winter, I am not a member of student government, but my roommate is.” There was a pause. Apparently Pippa now lacked the courage to take the jump.

“She feels that student government should have been brought in, no doubt.”

“Yes, she does. They criticize you, and Professor Cope. I couldn't stand it any longer. Oh, Miss Winter, why has it been hushed up? It seems so
unfair
. No one understands.”

“You know,” Lucy paused to light a cigarette, “this is not a very simple question, Pippa.”

“But Jane
did
plagiarize!”

“Yes, she did.” It was an impasse, and Lucy found it impossible to say more.

“They say it's a pure case of favoritism; if anyone else had done what Jane did, they would have been expelled.”

“I can believe that's what they say. But, you know Pippa, sometimes one has to ignore what ‘they say.'”

“It's not good when the students distrust the faculty,” Pippa said with vehemence. “It's horrible. I hate it all!” She began to cry.

Lucy felt stiff and sore; Pippa's tears, this time, could not be pushed aside as self-indulgent, but she could find no word of consolation to speak.

“I don't understand,” Pippa sobbed. “I don't understand any of it. Why should Jane get away with this? Why?”

“The punishment is so severe that it would mean the end of her education. Is the image of justice worth that? Don't you think what she has to bear from having been exposed and from her own conscience is punishment? Should we snarl, rush at her, and tear her limb from limb because this is the rule of the tribe? Honestly, Pippa!”

“She doesn't seem to be suffering at all. She's triumphant!” Pippa had stopped crying. She was simply very angry. “It's not fair to have a student council if, when something like this happens, they are not allowed to exercise their power. It's undemocratic!” It came out with the false emphasis of someone who is repeating phrases she has heard.