The Small Room (19 page)

“And so to be released from the pressure I represent?” Carryl asked, coldly. Lucy was all too aware that the very language she spoke, the words themselves, could only be an irritant, if not positively offensive.

“I guess so,” she murmured.

In the long pause that followed, Lucy looked anxiously from Olive, who had put a hand up to her face and had apparently not heard, to Carryl, who was sitting forward listening intently, it would seem, to her own thoughts.

Olive gave a hoarse loud laugh. “So, you're a father, Carryl! Very appropriate, I must say.”

“Be quiet, Olive.” The tone was low but exceedingly firm.

“I must say the whole thing makes me feel quite ill,” she answered, her eyes flashing. “But at least if all this folderol has a grain of truth in it, you cannot blame yourself, Carryl. If someone chooses to think you are her father, that is not your fault.”

Carryl paid no attention to this, but went on thinking aloud in the compelling way she had when she was really interested. “If your doctor is right, then I should have some understanding about this, for I have certainly tried to be my own father. He died when I was still in college.” She addressed herself to Lucy. “He was a scholar of sorts … yes, I think one might call him that, though his profession was farming and he had had no education to speak of. Wanted a boy, of course, brought me up to read Latin and Greek. I wish I could help that girl!” She got up and began pacing the room.

Olive Hunt gave a loud deep sigh, as if she were letting something go, something fall away. Lucy was astonished to see that her eyes had filled with tears. “I hate to be left out of everything,” she said. “I hate old age, impotence, self-importance, pride, and all the little subterfuges one indulges in to keep going. Damn it, I suppose I've got to bury my nose in Dr. Freud!”

Was it capitulation, Lucy asked herself, with a wild hope? But just then the telephone gave a muffled ring. They all lifted their heads like animals caught by a bright light in the dark. They waited and heard it ring again, loudly this time.

“At last!” Carryl breathed as she lifted the receiver.

“Yes, this is Professor Cope. Thank you.” She was waiting for someone to be put through. “Yes, Blake. Yes … Impossible!” She was standing at the desk with her back to Lucy and Olive, who exchanged an anxious glance. What new disaster? They could see her shoulders shaking, and it was clear when she put down the receiver with a triumphant “Thank
you
, Blake,” that something wholly unexpected had happened.

“What is it, Carryl?” Olive asked impatiently.

“My dears, I honestly can't quite believe it yet, but Blake called to say that the student council, God bless them, has voted that Jane be allowed to go in peace, that the college receive her back as a regularly enrolled student, as soon as she is well enough. The reason for this mercy? That she has already had her punishment through the long delay and suspension of justice. Who would have believed it of those prigs?” She had been laughing with the triumph, now suddenly she burst into tears. “Pay no attention,” she said, “it's just my confounded nerves.” She walked round her desk and stood behind it, shifting some papers about on which the tears fell, turning them to put a book back in the bookcase. Neither Olive nor Lucy moved. “What makes one cry,” Carryl said in a muffled voice, “is when the young do a little better than one could do oneself, when people come through after all.” But the effort at self-control failed. “I think you'd better go, both of you. I've just got to be alone. To
think,
” she added with characteristic violence.

“Come along, Lucy,” Olive got up, “you and I had better get out.”

“Jane, Jane …” Carryl murmured to herself, as if they had already gone.

“Think about yourself for a change, darling.” Olive used a rough, tender tone Lucy had never heard in her voice before. “Have something to eat. It's
all right,
” she said, giving Carryl's shoulders a gentle squeeze of affectionate regard before she turned to go.

Lucy stood at the door, waiting, and thinking ruefully that it was Carryl not Jane who had been punished; thinking, too, that this victory had—as perhaps do all victories where much human suffering has been involved—its aftertaste of desolation.

CHAPTER 15

“Let's drive!”

One did not say no to a command of Olive Hunt's, but Lucy felt tired, would have liked to be alone, to lie down on her bed and sleep. As they stood by the car Olive sniffed the air. “It's going to snow … December already! Time keeps moving faster and faster. Well, get in!” Suddenly, she was impatient.

“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.