The Small Room (6 page)

“I find Péguy useful,” Jack said. “He's full of unacceptable simple truths. You can't fail to understand what he is talking about, nor fail to find it disturbing.”

“Of course what we teach them,” Blake Tillotson went on, “and not only in the social sciences, is that all values are relative. They feel that they have no underpinning; they are scared to death.”

“And so they run home to God?” Lucy heard herself say, “Or rather to a God who died in the late nineteenth century, the one with a long white beard?” She was dismayed to recognize it as an echo of John's voice, of John's attitude, and she was struck by how much she had changed in five years. What did she believe in now?

“And when there ain't no home to run to, they have nervous breakdowns and we call in a professional psychiatrist to hold their psyches together.” Blake Tillotson shrugged his shoulders. It was a defeatist gesture, a strange gesture for this heavy-set man to make, and one which seemed out of character.

“Let me read you what I went into the study to find,” Jack said, still standing in the doorway. “It's a passage from Simone Weil. I'll make a rough translation as I go along: ‘Two prisoners in contingent cells, who communicate by blows struck on the wall. The wall is what separates them, but also what permits them to communicate. So it is with us and God. Every separation is a bond.'”

Lucy felt that each of them, including herself, went off with this powerful image like a dog with a bone to bury it in his own private garden for future use; at any rate the audible discussion came to an end. And it was a relief when Maria suggested that they listen to some Bach. While the familiar Prelude and Fugue in C Minor climbed all around them, as if a cathedral were being built in the air, Lucy thought, she found herself considering the last sentence, “Every separation is a bond.” What did it mean? Or was it one of those gnomic phrases which penetrate to a layer of consciousness below reason, that one recognizes without being able to define? The wall that had separated John and herself was, she saw, in the clarity made possible by Bach's relentless musical precision, the scientific approach versus the intuitive one, the old old war which might in the last analysis be the war between men and women. By what language then might she and John have knocked their message of love through it? Sex had not been the answer, after all. Where there is no true mutuality, sex ends by being only another expression of hostility. We failed, Lucy thought, miserably. We failed each other.

“A penny for your thoughts, Lucy.” Maria startled Lucy out of her revery. What could she answer?

“I was thinking that all this puts an immense weight on human love,” she said.

CHAPTER 5

A few days later the faculty was called to a special meeting, and Lucy made her way into the Victorian amphitheatre, curious to witness this gathering of the clan and to have her initiation into Appleton at its most formal and formidable. The semicircular room did have a certain charm with its carved oak decorations and stiff-backed wooden benches. The President and two Deans were seated on Gothic thrones between life-size plaster casts of Pallas Athene and Apollo. Lucy had met the academic Dean only once, a handsome middle-aged woman with a rather hard surface, enhanced by jet-black hair, Miss Valentine by name. The Dean of the College, an elderly pencil-thin lady (very definitely “a lady”) was rumored to have a sense of humor; at the moment she looked merely patient. Turning from the stage to the auditorium—where the faculty was still sauntering in like an audience at a play—Lucy was surprised to see how many men there were, after all, on the roster of this college which remained indomitably feminine and feminist. Blake Tillotson now made his way to the lectern and stood, waiting affably, for the menagerie to settle down.

“When Miss Cope is ready to give me the floor—” he chaffed. Carryl Cope was standing in the aisle surrounded by an animated group.

“I
beg
your pardon, Blake,” she said airily, and sat down, while the ripple of laughter subsided.

“For the benefit of those of you who are new among us, let me remind you that no student is expelled from Appleton without a majority vote by the faculty, and that the faculty is not called into special session on such a matter without a recommendation from student government. I realize how busy you all are, so we shall hope to make this brief. Miss Valentine, will you present the case?”

Miss Valentine, replacing the President at the lectern, was visibly tense. She had a rather flat voice and this, or possibly the attitude it revealed, which was one of controlled irritation, Lucy found chilling. The case concerned Agnes Skeffington, a Senior who had been, it appeared, a model student, able in all her work, brilliant in the field of mathematics. But lately she had become absorbed in a mathematical problem, to the exclusion of every other responsibility. She had cut most of her classes, even in Carryl Cope's advanced mediaeval history (this, Lucy suspected, might be
lése-majesté)
; she had handed in no papers; had failed to appear at any of the meetings of a House Committee of which she was presiding officer; “in fact,” Miss Valentine ended, “she has, to all intents and purposes, withdrawn from the college. I have had several talks with her, and her attitude remains adamant; she will make up required work
when
she has completed the problem which, she insists, demands her undivided attention at present.”

Miss Valentine sat down and stared grimly out at the faculty, while Blake Tillotson opened the meeting to comment and discussion. He recognized first an elderly professor, dressed in rough blue tweed, with a shock of white hair that stood up like a cock's comb, Professor March of the Department of Mathematics. His charm, that of the darling male professor at a woman's college, was evident at once. He commended Miss Valentine at some length “on the very clear picture she has given us of this interesting case.” He went on, elaborately, by reminding them of the old story of the Christian thrown to the lions, whom the lions refused to devour as he whispered a message into their ears. The something was, as he was sure they remembered, “After the meal, you will have to make an after-dinner speech, you know.” Mild laughter suggested that they did indeed remember. When it had subsided, Professor March went on, “I feel that I am facing a rather formidable row of lions here. Agnes, as you all know, is my student. May I just whisper in your ears this little message: If we let her go, I have no doubt that Radcliffe will welcome her to the fold.”

When the delighted laughter had subsided, and Professor March had sat down again, Miss Valentine asked, “What makes you think, Professor March, that Radcliffe would welcome a student who is failing all her courses except one?”

“My dear Miss Valentine,” the Professor stood and beamed, “I am aware that this is a very unorthodox student, one who must be trying to the administration, to say the least, as also to her other professors” (here a faint bow in Carryl Cope's direction was discernible), “but let me say simply that mathematical genius is also unorthodox.”

“Would you say that Agnes had mathematical
genius
? Would you go as far as that, Professor?” The President, Lucy sensed, was on the student's side.

“She has only been able to concentrate for the last few weeks, since her demission from the college, as you are all aware …” He waited for the murmur of laughter. “I would go so far as to say that this girl is capable of original work.”

“And that is unusual?” Tillotson pressed.

Professor March shrugged. “Among female students so rare I can say it has never happened before in my twenty years here. In ten years at Columbia, I had two male students of whom I could say as much.”

He sat down.

Lucy looked anxiously in Carryl Cope's direction. Surely she would not remain silent? But Blake Tillotson recognized first a young woman in the Department of Physics. She felt strongly that in a liberal arts college, students should be required to complete work in several fields. If the girl was that brilliant, she could go on to graduate school and concentrate there; open rebellion was not to be tolerated. She was followed by a young man with a foreign accent who pleaded the danger of favoritism. If they began to make exceptions, where would it end? He himself had a student who was engaged in writing a novel, but he had not seen his way to excusing her from a term paper on that account. By this time Lucy had wavered back and forth and did not know what she thought. She felt that the sense of the meeting had shifted and that the majority at present would stand, though reluctantly, against Agnes Skeffington. So it was at a moment of considerable tension that Carryl Cope at last took the floor.

“As you all know,” she began, every word meticulously articulated in her deep voice, “Agnes Skeffington is—or was, until she disappeared into a cloud of figures—a student of mine. Let me make it crystal clear that I do not give a hoot whether she comes to my class or not, if she is doing distinguished work in another field.” The two young professors seated just in front of Lucy exchanged an eager wink and nod. This is what they had learned to expect of Carryl Cope, evidently, and Lucy felt ashamed of her own circumspection. “The point is, my friends,” and now she turned toward her colleagues rather than toward the stage, “that we talk a great deal about excellence, and pride ourselves on demanding it, but when we get what we have asked for, become as confused and jejeune as a freshman in a course on ethics. We are unwilling, evidently, to pay the price of excellence. What is the price?” and here she turned to the stage and addressed her final remarks to Miss Valentine (so Lucy sensed). “The price is eccentricity, maladjustment if you will, isolation of one sort or another, strangeness, narrowness. Excellence costs a great deal. It is high time some of us faced the fact.”

Lucy would have liked to shout “Bravo!” No one went so far, but there was an impish stir, a chuckled wave of response, even a few scattered clappings of hands, as Carryl Cope sat down. The President had not been able to conceal a smile, nor Miss Valentine a frown.

“Would anyone like to add a word to the discussion, or is your pleasure that we put the matter to a vote? Would someone like to make a motion?”

Lucy was not surprised to see Miss Finch slowly rise to her feet from far back in the room. As usual she took her time.

“If we should make an exception to our perfectly good rules and standards in this special case, may I suggest that we write into the body of our law a new rule that would cover such cases in the future? My thought is …” Miss Finch paused here while she formulated her thought, “that we might incorporate an amendment: In the case of work above and beyond the usual college standard, a student shall be allowed a specific period of freedom from her usual obligations,
provided,
” and here Miss Finch's voice became decisive, “she has fulfilled those obligations by the time she graduates. I agree with Mr. Simonides that graduation from Appleton must imply a general education, a general culture. It would present a real hazard if we were to add one to the growing number of pure scientists who have no humanistic foundation.”

How serious it all is, Lucy thought, and her feelings were compounded of something like awe before the power they must assume toward a human destiny, and a disgraceful impulse to laugh. As soon as one was not personally involved, how easy to be detached! But into the corner of her thought there crept also the image of Agnes Skeffington herself … stubborn, brilliant, knowing what she wanted, able to defy even Carryl Cope by sheer belief. What extremity of being must exist in a young woman with such faith in herself! Lucy's contemplation of it filled her with humility. She herself had never in her life been seized by anything as wholeheartedly as that. And shall I ever be, she wondered? Am I capable of such commitment?

The vote itself was close, even with Miss Finch's proviso incorporated into the motion. But in the final count, the ayes had a majority. Agnes Skeffington would be allowed to go her lonely way within the college.

Miss Valentine was visibly annoyed; she walked off the stage and disappeared. The President and the Dean of the college came down through the auditorium, on the other hand, stopping to talk. Lucy found herself squeezed into the crowd, directly in front of Carryl Cope, and was very much surprised to be tapped on the shoulder by that august hand, and invited to “come back with me and have a drink? It's a suitable hour, is it not?”

As they drove along in Miss Cope's Hillman she explained that the old house where she had an apartment had belonged originally to the owners of a textile factory, rivals of Eben Wellington whose daughter had founded the college. And indeed it was imposing, set back in a large garden that resembled a park, a late Victorian house with long narrow windows, a mansard roof, painted battleship gray. “The remaining Woodwards, two maiden ladies, live downstairs. We treat them like Venetian glass, as Blake hopes to get the house for the college, eventually …”

The private entrance, hidden at one side, and the narrow stairway up two flights, had not prepared Lucy for the spaciousness that opened out as they arrived. She stepped into a long high room that might have been an eighteenth-century gentleman's library. What a contrast to Hallie's unselfconscious accumulation of family furniture, plants and books! This room had evidently been designed as the reflection of a highly selfconscious personality. Red damask curtains swept to the floor at three windows, the walls between them lined from top to bottom with books, many of them in fine bindings, and in many languages. The room was dominated by a huge refectory table with heavy carved legs, littered with papers, paperback detective stories, a French novel, as well as some formidable leather-bound tomes. An elaborate marble mantel at the far end of the room drew Lucy's attention to the painting that hung above it, a study of clouds blowing across a blue sky, the clouds of a damp country, reforming themselves, all in motion—England, Lucy supposed. She made her way across the room to take a closer look, just as Carryl Cope came back with a tray containing a bowl of olives and two martinis.