by May Sarton
“Is it December?” I asked. Outside it is a grim, cold day with a high wind rattling the dead leaves.
“No, dear, it’s November 28th. Thanksgiving was last week.”
But how am I to believe the slightest thing? Even to the date? They are driving me slowly to the wall, driving me into senility, and for them that means complete passivity. When I am a vegetable they will be glad.
“Miss Spencer is more cheerful these days,” Harriet said to Rose in that way she has as if I were not in the room. “She doesn’t cry anymore, do you, dear?”
“I expect not.”
“Do you remember how you used to cry?”
“No,” I lied, and saw them exchange a look—mad as a hatter!
Later when I lay down and began to write, I realized for the flash of a second what this atmosphere does. They never tell me the truth and I pretend to believe their lies. Then I lie to them and little by little every shred of truth, of reality, is destroyed. I have stopped crying because I am dead inside.
Anyway, I won about the candles. Harriet came and took the wreath away, to hang in the front window, she told me.
“Didn’t Miss Thornhill bring candles?”
“Maybe she forgot” I prevaricated.
“Hmmm,” Harriet sniffed and went away.
I have hidden the candles under my underwear in a drawer but I’ve got to think of a better place. Under the mattress they might break. Maybe in my empty suitcase? No one would think of looking there. I am not about to go on a journey.
The best news is that Ned brings the trash cans in every night because a raccoon has been knocking them over and makes a fearful mess outside. Harriet is trying to cajole him into building a shed that could be padlocked. But so far he has shown no interest at all in performing this task.
“Why bother?” I heard him say. “It’s no trouble to bring the cans in.”
If I can set the trash cans on fire all will be well. Ned and Harriet sleep in a bedroom off the kitchen so they would hear any loud noise, but my guess is they sleep soundly, and the door is locked. Tonight I’ll practice going out there, so I know just what I might run into. If they wake, I can pretend that I feel dizzy and sick and was looking for some Alka Seltzer.
I have to be sure that Pansy is not indoors. Thank goodness the old dog was put to sleep some time ago. He would have barked. I could put some lighter fluid on the curtains—a quick blaze.
I must also find out whether there is a fire extinguisher and see if I can manage to put it out of commission. I really feel awake and able to cope for the first time in weeks. The adrenal gland seems to be working again. And that cup of real coffee excited me.
I wonder what it’s like to die in a fire? I guess you suffocate. It can’t take very long.
But now I must be very careful. It has to be done in a blizzard when the fire engines either can’t get up here or are slowed down. And how can I keep myself alert that long? December, January … the big snows don’t come till January. And what if I lose my nerve? Right now I do not feel ready. Something is still to happen—I don’t know what—before I can feel ready.
The only person I mind about is Jack … is there some way to get him out? Warn him? No, that would be too risky. The old men are better off dead. I have no compunction whatever about giving them a quick blazing end. It’s more than they deserve, poor creatures.
My Aunt Isabel would fully approve of this criminal act. I can hear her saying, “Only cows go meekly to the slaughter. You’re a brave woman, Caro. And you’re not crazy enough to let them have it their way, to carry you out addled and totally gone to seed … no, Caro, you’ll go out in a blaze!”
At present all this is still a fantasy, something to keep me going from day to day. And I repeat with ironic satisfaction Eliot’s lines,
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.
There is only one fire in me now, a fire of disgust and hatred, and there is plenty of fuel to keep it going till January in this place.
It is strange that now I have made my decision I can prepare for death in a wholly new way. I feel free, beyond attachment, beyond the human world at last. I rejoice as if I were newborn, seeing with wide-open eyes, as only the old can (for the newborn infant cannot see) the marvels of the world. These late November skies are extraordinary … great open washed-in color, a transparent greenish-blue, a wonderful elevating pink. The trees are so beautiful without their leaves. I lie on my bed and sometimes just look for hours in a daze of quiet pleasure.
I listen to music again. Last night the Mozart Adagio and Fugue for Strings in C Minor. It is years since I listened to it with Alex at a concert in London. Now I listened to it quite differently … the memory of passion added nothing. The music alone was with me. I felt exalted and purified.
I have believed since I came here that I was here to prepare for death, but I did not yet know how to do it. At first I felt I must cling to myself, keep my mind alive somehow—That was the task set before me, a losing battle, for the best I could hope for was to stand still in the same place. Progress in an intellectual sense was clearly out of the question. It ended in greater and greater frustration and anger.
I see, now that death is not a vague prospect but something I hold in my hand, that the very opposite is required from what I thought at first. I am asked to listen to music, look at the bare trees divested of all but their fine structure, drink in the sunset like wine, read poetry again. I have laid novels aside. (The human world in the sense of relationship is not mine to worry about or to partake of any longer. It is not my concern.) I am gathering together all that matters most, tasting it for the last time. As I do this, everything mundane falls away. Why, it seems quite stupid that I have minded drinking coffee from a plastic cup! How foolish can one be?
Harriet and Rose come and go through the room like ghosts. They have no power to irritate or confuse. So for the first time I am able to be kind to them. That is because they have lost their power to hurt.
And how has this immense change taken place? It came from seeing Anna again and letting that whole burden of love and shame fall away, all tension of that sort gone from me … and it then came from making the decision to end this whole business in a cleansing burst of flame. I am knotted up to a single purpose now. What a relief! I am stripped down to nothing, needing no protection anymore. All needs have been fulfilled. Is this madness, God?
I believe it is close to it. But perhaps at the furthest reach and in the presence of death there is no distinction to be made. Absolute nakedness may be madness. It doesn’t matter. It is what is required.
And when we have achieved it, then perhaps we are able to give the ultimate things. At some earlier stage it might have been love. Now it must be an end to misery and corruption for the body, a clean quick end. We give when we have nothing. Then there is no wall between us and the living or the dead. We are all one.
I look at the old men with a new tenderness, the curious way they revolve around Jack, the only youngish person in the house. There he sits rocking all day, always cheerful except very rarely when he gets angry … as who doesn’t? The other night a fox must have been in the vicinity for the geese were restless, squawked in fear and huddled against the door. At about ten there was a real commotion and Jack called out in his strange strangled voice. I got out of bed to see what the matter was, opened the door, and whatever it was got frightened off. By then Harriet had arrived in her wrapper, bare feet, furious at being awakened.
“Jack was worried about the geese,” I explained. “He thinks there may be a fox out there.”
“And what if there is?” she screamed. “Can’t I get a night’s sleep for once? Who cares about the geese? Good riddance, I’d say.”
At this rough speech, Jack suddenly howled and sobbed like a child. “P—p—poor geese,” he stammered, “Jack doesn’t w—w—ant them to die!”
“Now, Jack,” she said more gently, “they’ll be all right.
I’ll send Ned out with his rifle. Go to bed, Miss Spencer, you’ll catch cold. All we need is an epidemic of colds around here.”
I fled, fearing worse. But none of us slept the rest of the night. Mr. Thompson had a nightmare and gave a muffled scream. Fred Smith, who so rarely speaks, went off on a jag of some kind, some childhood memory about a goose. “He was a holy terror,” he kept saying, “goosed the schoolteacher one day.” Then he giggled and nearly choked to death. “Chased old Mr. Brown half a mile down the road,” and he gave a whoop. Jack repeated the phrase and laughed and laughed. That room of old men had become a nursery in the middle of the night. I was dying to get up and make them cups of cocoa, but I didn’t dare.
And now I have just heard that Harriet plans to have the geese killed and put in the freezer. It will be a relief as I have been anxious about them. They should not have been left with no shelter these cold nights. I myself feel the draft from the window, a thin stream of icy air. It gives me neuralgia. Tried to stuff Kleenex along the sills, but Harriet tore it all out.
“I’m cold in the night,” I explained.
“Nonsense, you have two blankets. Pull one up over your head.”
And still I wait for whatever it is that has to happen. Some outrage or cataclysm, some galvanizing event that will give me the courage to act.
It’s December, they tell me. I have stopped reading the newspaper. Marooned. The trouble is that now I have come right up to the inexorable FACT: I have to admit that I do not want to die. Soon it will snow. Soon I will have to be ready. But I am not. I feel terribly restless and have taken to pacing about, a thing that irritates Harriet and Rose—I always seem to be in their way when they pass with a bedpan or broom. But how does one fill time waiting … waiting.
I have to admit that in some ways I am treated with kindness these days. Harriet washed my hair yesterday, maybe to try to tire me out! Tomorrow Richard Thornhill is to pay a visit. I really have no wish to see him … I have to conceal so much. Can’t tell him my plans, of course. Might pretend madness … and should I give him the early copybooks? I cannot bear to part with them. Yet how to save them when the time comes? I am all at sixes and sevens, pacing around in limbo.
“We have to get you out of here,” was what Richard came to say. Why was my reaction so violent? Even a month ago such words would have been a reprieve, but I burst into tears and begged him not to do anything, not to take me away. “I have to die here,” I said. “It’s too late … too late!”
He took my hand and held it then and calmed me down.
“No one is going to force you, dear Miss Spencer.”
“Having one of her spells, is she?” Harriet came in with warm milk. I held the cup in my two hands like a baby.
Then Richard closed the door.
I lay on my bed as heavy as a corpse. A very strange sensation. I had my eyes closed. I didn’t care whether he stayed or not. But he did stay, silent there beside me for a while. Then he talked about other things—how much Lisa is looking forward to seeing me when she comes home in two weeks for a weekend. Her young man has decided to go back to college and become a doctor after all. While Richard talked I managed very slowly to come back to the surface. At last I could open my eyes.
He reached over again and took my hand. His felt so warm and comforting, I looked deeply into his eyes for a second.
“I am stripped down to nothing,” I said. “So somehow I can see you very clearly, and everything else. I want you to know that whatever happens you did all that you could. You have been a good friend.”
“We are all wound round in mystery,” was his answer.
It was as though we were the last people left alive on earth. I do not really know what happened, why it was like that. I felt I was speaking to someone very far away, yet someone who would hear a whisper, and perhaps I did whisper,
“Can you forgive me now?”
The strange thing, the marvel was that he did not say what at any other time he might have said, something about my not needing to be forgiven. He understood that I was in extremity and he did not question it.
“I believe we are forgiven at the instant of asking forgiveness, for asking forgiveness is an act of faith. It places the soul in eternity.”
“But I am thinking of terrible things, Richard. Do you believe in damnation?”
“I don’t know. Do you?”
“Yes. But I think I am going to risk it … when the snow falls.”
Then there was a long silence.
The man was clearly suffering with me and for me. His silence was so intense I felt almost as though he was a laser beam, probing, probing, trying to reach to the very marrow of my thought. I saw the sweat on his forehead. It was all very strange.
Then something snapped. Like people who have been dreaming, we woke.
Richard coughed. We were back in the normal world. I noticed a spider web in the corner of the room, and the way a band of sunlight lay across the floor. I looked around me.
“You are a great person, Miss Spencer.”
“I wish you could bring yourself to call me Caro.”
“I think of you as Miss Spencer. It is a sign of respect. I don’t come across so very many great human beings.”
I had to smile at that. It seemed so nonsensical.
“No, I mean it. Don’t smile. I have seen in you what courage can be when there is no hope. I have seen the power of a human being to withstand the very worst and not be corrupted, and not change.”
“I have changed.”
“Not in any way that affects the essence. You are beautiful.”
He must have gone then, or someone knocked on the door. I can’t quite remember now. I remember that I felt terribly tired and perhaps I slept.
“Well, thank goodness, you’ve come to!” I head Harriet’s voice, “you’ve been lying there like a corpse. Your pulse was so low I could hardly catch it. What have you been doing?”
I was given a drink, a thimbleful of brandy.
I felt shivery and queer and decided to have a hot bath before supper and get into bed. When I was in the bathroom running the water, I realized that in my confused state I had forgotten my soap and face cloth. I was barefooted and must have made no sound at all, for when I came to my room Harriet was sitting on the bed reading the last copybook. I had left it open there with the pen inside it. She looked extremely startled to see me, and for just a second we stared at each other. Then I felt such a flood of fierce strength rise in me that I must have lunged at her like a wild animal, torn the copybook out of her hands and in doing so knocked her off balance so she fell to the floor.
“Rose! Help!” She screamed, but she was not hurt, only panting with anger and the effort of lifting her two hundred pounds up. I met Rose in the corridor as I ran to the bathroom, still clutching the copybook, and locked myself in.
Harriet stood outside shouting at me, “I know your evil thoughts, cursing us! Attacking me! That’s assault and it’s a federal offense in case you’re interested!”
“Come on, Harriet,” I heard Ned say. “She’s crazy, poor thing … leave her be!”
“She’ll go without supper, that’s for sure.”
I could have laughed at the impotence of this punishment. What do I care about supper?
I have been here now for a long time. Maybe hours. Everything is as I dreamed it would be. It is snowing hard. I can peer out of the bathroom window at whiteness, a fur of whiteness against the panes. All I have to do now is wait for them to go to bed. I wish I had my watch on, but I took it off when I undressed. But I can tell by the sounds, and eventually by the silence. And meanwhile I am going to lie down on the bathmat with my back against the door and have a little nap. I feel at peace. Death by fire will come as an angel, or it will come as a devil, depending on our deserts.
Only one thing, THE important thing I must manage to do is place all the copybooks in the frigidaire. To you who may one day read this, I give them as a testament. Please try to understand
.
AFTERWORD
This manuscript was found after the fire that destroyed the Twin Elms Nursing Home. In a letter found inside the cover, Miss Caroline Spencer requested the Reverend Thornhill to have it published if possible. This has been done with the permission of her brother, John Spencer.
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.