The Magnificent Spinster

by May Sarton

  “Can we have it if we find it?” Sonny asked then, “and can it be divided in two?”

  “Oh dear,” Jane smiled, “I haven’t thought about that. We had better make up our minds, hadn’t we? I can tell you one thing, though: it can’t be divided in two, only into three.”

  Christopher and Sonny exchanged a look, pondering this. “I thought it might be a ring,” Christopher said.

  “But a ring couldn’t be divided in three, you dummy,” Sonny said.

  “Well then, what can it be, you dummy yourself!” Chris gave Sonny a light punch on the arm.

  “I’d rather not guess,” said Sonny, frowning. “I’d rather have it a secret until we find it.”

  “But who’ll get it if we find it?” Christopher pressed. “What if I find it first; will it be mine?”

  “Well,” Jane said, refusing to be pushed, “I guess I haven’t made up my mind about that. Maybe,” she smiled across at Sarah, “we could share it and each have a piece, we three.”

  “We might decide to put it back for someone else to find, some boy not even born yet,” Sarah ventured. This was so like the wise Sarah that Jane laughed her pleasure in it.

  “There speaks wisdom,” she said.

  “What’s the use of finding it if we can’t have it?” Christopher asked.

  But Jane was enchanted by Sarah’s idea, the thought that the treasure might go on being discovered and then hidden again, every twenty years forever.

  “And how would anyone know there was a treasure?” Sonny said, anxiously. “I mean, if you died, who would know?”

  Strange what a shadow that thought cast, but Jane pushed the shadow off. “You and Christopher know,” she said. “Imagine what fun if you came back some day with your children!”

  “It’s no fun at all to think about our children,” Christopher said, suddenly cross.

  “No fun at all,” Sonny echoed.

  “What if we can’t find it?” Christopher asked then.

  “Ah, that’s the adventure,” Jane said, “we don’t know if we can.” She had turned to look out ahead and for a second wondered if she was imagining things, but, sure enough, the small brown head with enormous eyes appeared again, “Look, boys! A seal!”

  “Where?” They got up and bounded to the side, leaning over Jane as she pointed. “There! There!”

  “Those human eyes,” Esther whispered; “no wonder sailors thought they were glimpsing a mermaid.”

  The seal was curious, disappeared underwater and reappeared in the boat’s wake, and for the rest of the short ride across to the dock at Northeast Harbor they were entirely absorbed in seal watching.

  “I guess we’ll have to divide the treasure after all,” Jane murmured to Esther. “The boys will feel cheated otherwise.”

  “I wonder.” Sarah, who had caught this, ventured, “I would wait and see … it has to be a legend, doesn’t it? If they get inside the legend they might change their minds.”

  “And the whole point of a legend is that it goes on from generation to generation, like the island,” Esther said.

  “Well,” Jane said, thinking about this, “it can be told, after all. Roland blew his horn only once, but it has gone on and on for centuries in people’s minds because it became a legend and was told.”

  But now it was time to stop wondering what was going to happen or not happen and to begin making something happen, right away. Captain Fuller tossed the rope to a helpful young man and West Wind glided in to the dock.

  “When shall I come back, Miss Jane?” Captain Fuller asked.

  “I should think three o’clock would be safe.”

  “I’ll be here. Good luck, Miss Jane!”

  “Thanks. We may be on a wild goose chase, after all.” And she gave a wave which Captain Fuller did not see because he was lighting a cigar. “Now kids, let’s go. And my advice is,” she said as they ran down the dock, “take it easy. We have a steep climb ahead.”

  It was a half-hour walk to the beginning of the trail, and there Jane, Esther, and Sarah caught up with the boys.

  “You’ll be way ahead of us,” Jane announced, “so I had better tell you now what we are looking for.” And she explained that the treasure was hidden in a small cliff about six feet high, where they would be looking for a round stone with a white line across it. It was not a smooth cliff or ledge, but one with irregularities in it where there were patches of moss and tiny firs found places to root.

  The boys took their sweaters off at Esther’s suggestion and tied them around their waists. The sea breeze had not materialized and it had suddenly become a hot July day.

  “You take it slowly, Jane, won’t you?” Sarah exhorted. Jane did not like to be reminded of her age.

  “I’ve climbed this trail a thousand times,” she answered. “Don’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs!”

  “Annie charged me to keep a firm hand.” Sarah smiled. “I’m only following her orders.” She strode on ahead then, and Jane and Esther followed at a slower pace.

  “You’re in a lot better shape than I am,” Esther said, stopping to catch her breath after the first steep ascent.

  “I have longer legs,” Jane said. “Look back … we begin to see the island.”

  Esther stopped to look out across the bay. “Yes, there it is, like a long dark furry animal asleep. How many people have stood here and wondered who lived there; the big house is hardly visible at all behind the firs!”

  “Muff used to fight against any tree being cut, so it has become less and less visible. And without the hurricane in thirty-eight it might have disappeared altogether!” And she turned to Esther. “You are too young to remember that.”

  “I was four, and I remember it very well … the way the trees in Cambridge fell without a sound, like feathers.”

  “The island was decimated. We came up a week later to see what was what and we wept.” Jane quickly recovered from remembering that agonizing scene. “The men set to work and in a year or two wildflowers we had never seen before began to show in the cleared-out places among the ragged stumps.”

  They walked on. The silence took over. Below them the shining blue, and ahead the path rising into a section of small trees and bushes.

  “We must be close to the place now,” Jane said quietly, aware suddenly of why they were here on this day. “Where are the boys?” She stopped to cup her hands and give a long “Halloooo!”

  “We’re up here!” Sarah called back.

  Could it be that she had found the place? Jane and Esther hurried to join her, wherever she was. Jane stumbled on a root but luckily did not fall. And there they were, the boys sitting on a jutting rock, swinging their legs, and Sarah, her knapsack flung down beside her, standing beside the cliff.

  “You’ve found it! Great stuff!”

  Instantly the boys were at her side. “Is this it?” Christopher cried out. “Really?”

  “But we can’t find the stone,” Sonny said, “so we thought this couldn’t be it.”

  “Maybe we’re not tall enough,” Sonny said, looking up at Jane.

  “Matthew could just reach it,” Jane said, “and he was about your size.”

  “I thought you should be here for the final search,” Sarah said, “so I suggested that we all wait.”

  This was it all right, the crucial moment, and Jane wondered if there was the slightest chance that she could lay her hands on that small stone. But then it was the boys’ adventure, she realized, and they must have a try first.

  “I tell you what,” she said, laying a hand on each of their shoulders. “Let’s go at this with the utmost care. Each of you start at one end of the cliff and very slowly feel your way across till you meet in the middle. One of you has a chance to find it and it should be at about your height, Sonny, so Christopher had better look about a foot lower.”

  “Remember,” Esther said, surveying the scene, “it’s not a race, boys,” for Christopher had lunged at the wall as though he would pull it to pieces. Sonny
, always cautious, was feeling his way slowly. Pebbles trickled down. When a jay screamed he jumped.

  “How could it be here?” Christopher said. “Someone else must have found it by now.”

  Sonny had reached a small fir pushing up through a crevice and was feeling around it when he noticed just above it, almost hidden by a tree—could it be?—a small aperture with a round stone pressed into it, a stone with a white line through it.

  “Eureka!” he shouted. “It’s here … the round stone! What shall I do now?”

  “Let Jane be the one to unearth it,” Esther suggested. “Don’t you all think she should be the one?” And Sarah agreed.

  “Shucks,” said Sonny, turning around to face them. “I thought it was finders keepers. Didn’t you, Christopher?”

  “Yes,” said Christopher.

  “Go ahead, Sonny, you pull it out.” Jane conceded. She was not about to take over the crucial moment. But before he could, she had to say, “But remember, it’s magic, and none of us can possess magic or keep it forever.”

  Sonny had to pull quite hard to dislodge the stone, but at last it came and he could slide his fingers into the hole and feel a small leather pouch there. “I’ve got it! Here it is!” he said, dancing up and down and waving the pouch.

  “What’s inside it?” Christopher, consumed by curiosity, asked. “Open it, you dummy!”

  Sonny shot a glance at Jane, holding the pouch in the palm of his hand. “One, two, three, magic, it’s me!” And out tumbled the three gold pieces, shining so brightly in the sunlight they might have been minted that morning.

  “It’s gold!” Christopher said. “Pure gold!”

  “One twenty-dollar piece and two ten-dollar ones,” Jane said, a twinkle in her eyes. “So you see, although in one way it can’t be divided to two, in another way it can. Sonny, because he found it, can choose whether he wants the twenty-dollar piece or the two tens.”

  “So I haven’t lost after all,” Christopher breathed.

  “I want the twenty-dollar one,” Sonny said. “I’ll keep it for a million years,” he added solemnly.

  “I want the two tens,” Christopher said, “so I can jingle them in my pocket.”

  Jane beamed. It did seem like a wonderful bit of luck that the treasure had been there for twenty years, and could be found after all those winters and snows and high winds. “Shall we make an oblation to the gods of this place, who maybe helped us find it?”

  “But what can we make an oblation with?” Sarah asked.

  “Milk,” Jane said at once. “I have an idea the gods are fond of milk, milk and honey, but today they will have to accept just milk.” Sarah handed her the big Thermos and she let fall a few drops of milk on a round of moss at their feet. “There,” she said.

  What with the climb, the excitement, the marvelous climax, everyone was ravenous and they decided to sit down right where they were and lean their backs against the cliff. After they had devoured two peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches and were eating grapes and drinking milk while Sarah poured out coffee for herself, Jane, and Esther, Sonny asked, rather warily, “Aunt Reedy, what did you mean about magic … you said to remember that no one can possess it? Can’t we keep the gold pieces?”

  Jane laughed. “I don’t know exactly what I meant. I guess I was thinking about this day in all its glory, and that we can have it now, but we can’t keep it forever.” She looked out to the bay below and a white sail floating past. “Anymore than Eleanor, Cam, and Matthew could keep that day when we hid the treasure … we had to let it go, you see.”

  “But we can keep it, can’t we? The gold pieces, I mean,” Christopher said.

  “Can we?” Esther broke in. “The gold pieces will last forever, maybe, but we won’t. Is that what you meant, Jane?”

  It was impossible, Jane felt, to articulate what exactly she did mean. But what came to her mind was a de la Mare poem Marian had often said, and she recited it now:

  “Look thy last on all things lovely

  Every hour. Let no light

  Seal thy sense in deathly slumber

  Till to delight

  Thou have paid thy utmost blessing;

  Since that all things thou wouldst praise

  Beauty took from those who loved them

  In other days.”

  Esther had tears in her eyes as she whispered, “Thanks, Jane.”

  “I don’t understand it,” said Christopher, “but I like the way it sounds.”

  Sonny pushed away the sadness he sensed in the air, the aftermath of so much excitement and triumph, and asked if he and Christopher could go on ahead to the top. And off they went.

  “What a triumph!” Esther said then.

  And Jane laughed. “I was so afraid it wouldn’t work!” And she added, “It might be the last chance, you know. I’m not the mountain climber my father was at my age. And then,” she reached out to touch Esther’s shoulder, “Sonny and Christopher are the right age for magic. It just seemed a chance I had to take!”

  “I wish they had wanted to put the treasure back,” Sarah said.

  “I know,” Esther assented at once.

  “Yes,” Jane said thoughtfully, “but I think that was too much to ask, don’t you? Children live in the present … we were asking them to imagine something very far away that they could not really imagine.” Then she smiled. “And since I too am one who lives in the present, I understand that very well. It is so hard for me, for instance, to imagine the island forty years from now. Will it still be in the family? Will it be possible, financially speaking, to keep it all going? All I know is that we have it now, the secret treasure.”

  “And all the memories of it,” Esther murmured.

  Epilogue

  I find that I have come to the end of what I had to say about Jane Reid. She lived another six years. During that time she fell and broke her arm, and she was so sure-footed even in old age that I have come to believe it happened because of a small stroke. After that, she found it hard sometimes to find a word, although she never lost an instant response to any friend and especially any child who came to call at the barn in Cambridge, and, with Sarah’s help, she spent every summer on the island. Sarah, with infinite tact and discretion, was then always at her side, helping her to dress when that became necessary, setting the scene at teatime so that many friends were hardly aware of any change, as they stopped by, as they always had done, to be cherished and to bask in the atmosphere of pure love.

  During those years Lucy died, and I myself retired from college teaching and came back to Cambridge to live in an apartment not far away.

  The time came when Jane was in bed most of the day and Sarah told intimate friends that she would die probably very soon, as her heart was failing. We came one by one to find her, her hair in a long pigtail, lying in her great bed under the eaves, her eyes still very blue, her hand reaching out to clasp the hand of a beloved friend. How warm a clasp it was! I have held the hand of people Jane’s age whose hands felt like ice, but Jane’s was vitally warm and alive as one held it for a moment, like a blessing.

  Those last years had been a long, radiant sunset.

  And then she was gone.

  A Biography of May Sarton

  May Sarton (1912–1995) was born Eleanore Marie Sarton on May 3 in Wondelgem, Belgium, the only child of the science historian George Sarton and the English artist Mabel Eleanor Elwes. Barely two years later, Sarton’s European childhood was interrupted by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the onset of the First World War.

  Fleeing the advancing Germans, the family moved briefly to Ipswich, England, and then in 1915 to Boston, Massachusetts, where her father had accepted a position at Harvard University. Sarton’s love for poetry was first kindled at the progressive Shady Hill School, a period she wrote about extensively in I Knew a Phoenix, published in 1959.

  At the age of twelve, Sarton traveled to Belgium for a year to live with friends of the family and study at the Institut Belge
de Culture Française. There, she met the school’s founder, Marie Closset, who grew to be Sarton’s close friend and mentor, and who was the inspiration for her first novel, The Single Hound (1938).

  On returning to the States, Sarton graduated from Cambridge High and Latin School in 1929. Although she was awarded a scholarship to Vassar College, Sarton joined actress Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre in New York instead, much to the dismay of her father. However, while learning the basics of theater, Sarton continued to develop her poems, and in 1930, when she was just eighteen, a series of her sonnets was published in Poetry magazine.

  In 1931, Sarton returned to Europe and lived in Paris for a year while her parents were in Lebanon. In large part, Europe provided the backdrop for her encounters with the great thinkers of the age, including the novelist Elizabeth Bowen, the famed biologist Julian Huxley, and of course, Virginia Woolf. After Sarton’s own theater company failed during the Great Depression, she turned her full attention to writing and published her first poetry collection, entitled Encounter in April, in 1937.

  For the next decade, Sarton continued to write and publish novels and poetry. In 1945, she met Judy Matlack in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the two became partners for the next thirteen years, during which she would suffer the deaths of several loved ones: her mother in 1950, Marie Closset in 1952, and her father in 1956. Following this last loss, Sarton’s relationship fell apart, and she moved to New Hampshire to start over. She was, however, to remain attached to Matlack for the rest of her life, and Matlack’s death in 1983 affected her keenly. Honey in the Hive, published in 1988, is about their relationship.

  While the 1950s were a time of great personal upheaval for Sarton, they were a time of success in equal measure. In 1956, her novel Faithful Are the Wounds was nominated for a National Book Award, followed by nominations in 1958 for The Birth of a Grandfather and a volume of poetry, In Time Like Air; some consider the latter to be one of Sarton’s best books of poetry. In 1965, she published Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, which is frequently referred to as her coming-out novel. From then on, her work became a key point of reference in the fields of feminist and LGBT literature. Strongly opposed to being categorized as a lesbian writer, Sarton constantly strove to ensure that her portraits of humanity were relatable to a universal audience, regardless of readers’ sexual identities.