The Small Room (11 page)

When Hallie finally recognized a girl who had waved her hand insistently all this while, it was clear that she had held this particular vision of the material in reserve, and that she launched it now, with a conscious sense of timing.

“We've talked and talked,” the intense dark girl was wringing her hands with the relief of at last being allowed to speak, “but we haven't even approached what Keats was, nor what Fanny did to him!”

Half a dozen hands flew up in protest, and were quelled by a glance from Hallie, as the girl proceeded to read her evidence aloud, quoting first from that strong letter of 1819: “My mind is heap'd to the full; stuffed like a cricket ball—if I strive to fill it more it would burst. I know the generality of women would hate me for this; that I should have so unsoften'd, so hard a Mind as to forget them; forget the brightest realities for the dull imaginations of my own brain. But I conjure you to give it a fair thinking; and ask yourself whether 'tis not better to explain my feelings to you than to write an artificial Passion.” This was followed by several examples from the searing letters a year later where illness and passion combined, as the girl said with a vehemence close to tears, to unman him. “You could not step or move an eyelid but it would shoot to my heart”; “I am sickened at the brute world which you are smiling with”; and she ended by stating that the proof of her thesis lay in the poems, where one could clearly see that all the great work preceded that last year, and heartless Fanny must be blamed, she who had fallen like a shadow even over the early letters: “Even as I leave off it seems to me that a few more moments thought of you would uncrystallize and dissolve me. I must not give way to it but turn to my writing again. If I fail I shall die hard.”

As soon as she sat down, the argument began, a general clamor in which there was no thought of waiting for formal recognition. Lucy glanced at the clock. They had fifteen minutes to go against the brutal locking of the hour. Would Hallie herself never take over? For the eagerness, the excitement of discovery, the involvement that a first meeting with Keats must always elicit was there, but Lucy longed now for the voice of experience, for wisdom to shed its light at last. More than ever before she understood the marriage between a text and its reader. Keats himself was being diminished because these girls could only approach him with a thin layer of experience; the analysis of a text like this, she thought, is comparable to psychoanalysis. Everyone can get hold of a few simple formulas, but what knowledge, patience, and wisdom it must need to penetrate and fully understand the central complex of a personality!

“Let me bring this hour to a close by reading you three letters I have chosen,” Hallie spoke at last. Her tone had changed. She laid aside the gentle questioner who had opened the door for each student into his own capacities for appreciation. The long-withheld summation was at hand. And the class, so sensitive an instrument in the hands of this teacher, felt it. Doodlers stopped doodling. There had been excitement; now the attention was of a different, more intense kind. Yet Hallie Summerson had not raised her voice, sat as she had sat all along, books open before her, glasses taken on and off nervously, a plain middle-aged woman in a shabby classroom. But now the reason for formal education became apparent. For what took place before Lucy's eyes was created by Hallie, but had been born in her because of the class before her, and sprang from all that had preceded it. Lucy had observed the whole process, the initial enthusiasm, the disciplining of this rather loose excitement, then the gentle artful playing of a fugue where they ceased to be master and pupil and became partners in the dialogue, and finally the launching of a brilliant student who might be counted on to take them to the heart. Out of all these together, the summation flowered.

Never, Lucy felt sure, would Hallie Summerson be able to speak to one person as she now did to sixty. Something streamed out of her that was absolutely open, passionate, of an intensity that made shivers go up and down Lucy's spine. It was the freeing of a
daimon
, as surely as the writing of a poem springs from the freeing of the poet's
daimon
. It surrounded Hallie Summerson with the aura of a person set apart, lonely and—Lucy half-smiled at the word, but uttered it to herself nevertheless—sacred.

Yet what she was actually doing seemed simple enough—the reading of three carefully chosen letters, followed by a brief analysis of the romantic point of view, its risks, its weakness, its tendency to surpass the reality of occasions and people and to create a dangerously intense world of its own: Keats and Fanny Brawne. But also its capacity to inspire works of art; a whole world of sensation, thought, passion at its most naked and suffering, built around the small figure of a woman, utterly unable to bear the burden laid upon her. “Alas, poor Fanny,” Hallie said wryly, “Who can blame her? Life is not a Wagnerian opera and Fanny was asked to play a giant role.”

The bell rang, shattering the moment like a shot breaking a glass. It was the measure of that moment that neither the class nor their professor paid the slightest heed. She read the Bright Star sonnet, closed the book, gathered up her papers, said, “Think it over—” and was gone before anyone stirred.

Lucy sat on alone, on the hard chair, after everyone else had gone, thinking it over. She felt sure that only from immense inner reserve, only from the secret life, the dedicated life, could such moments be created. They came from innocence, deep as a well, the innocence of those who have chosen to set themselves apart for a great purpose: “the teacher,” a voice from a cloud. This power, Lucy suspected, had to be as carefully guarded as the creative power of the artist. What nourished it? Would she herself ever do more than stand at the threshold of the mystery, stand there with awe, but outside? Would she ever herself be a keeper of the sacred fire?

CHAPTER 9

When Lucy got back to her room just after lunch, she found a pencilled note on the hall table, marked urgent: Professor Cope asked her to drop in later on in the day. But urgencies faded before the first steady fall of snow. Lucy opened the window and knelt beside it, tasting the cool freshness, the stately, suspended, hypnotic fall, drank in the silence, and finally fell onto her bed as if she had been drugged, to sleep a dreamless sleep.

When she woke she could not remember where she was, started up in a panic, then feverishly pulled on overshoes, a woolen scarf, a raincoat, as excited and lifted up by the scene outside as she had always been as a child. If only her destination could have been Nowhere, some empty field where she could lean against a tree and watch the magic world being shaped around her. But as she stepped out and felt the gentle touch like a kitten's paw on her eyelids and mouth, she had to accept the fact that her destination was Carryl Cope. She stuffed her hands into her pockets and walked fast, head bent, thinking what a strange day this had been so far, a day of revelations, and dreading what new mysteries she would have to meet in a few moments. She had been summoned for what purpose? As whipping boy? Confidante? Or merely as a necessary source of information? It is idiotic, Lucy admonished herself, to be nervous. After all, Carryl Cope is not an ogre and I have done nothing wrong. Nevertheless, it was an effort to leave the gentle, gentling world of the snow outside, ring the bell, and climb that long black tunnel of stairs to the great blank door.

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.”