The Precipice

by Hugh Maclennan

  48 MacLennan, “Are We a Godless People?” Maclean's, 15 Mar. 1949. Re-published as “‘Help Thou Mine Unbelief,’” in Cross-Country.

  49 See MacLennan, Cross-Country, 132.

  50 Ibid., 135.

  51 MacLennan does not find a technique to express this, although he comes close with George Stewart's declaration that “Life is a gift.” The sense of mystery and privilege MacLennan (and George) feels is often apprehended through the contemplation of simple natural things, though it is not pantheistic.

  52 See Cameron, Hugh MacLennan, 212–18.

  53 MacLennan to Charles Duell, 5 March 1947. MacLennan Papers, McGill University Library.

  54 MacLennan to John Gray, 27 May 1950. MacLennan Papers, McGill University Library.

  55 HM to John Gray 27 December 1961. MacLennan Papers, McGill University Library.

  56 MacLennan was paid $3,000, a pittance that astonished his publishers. See Cameron, Hugh MacLennan, 246–7.

  57 Gray had admired Two Solitudes, which he read in Holland when he was stationed at Intelligence Headquarters with the Canadian army, and was delighted to become MacLennan's editor. Soon, they were fast friends.

  58 MacLennan refers to Jesus's parable, “New wine must be put in new bottles” (Matthew 9:14–17) in The Watch. It is one of many references to biblical texts in his work.

  59 Bratian is an unfortunate choice of name, as it was a common upper-class name in Romania. See Cameron, Hugh MacLennan, 393n16.

  60 Frederic Wakeman, The Hucksters (New York: Rinehart, 1946).

  61 See website: http://en.wikipedipedia.org/wiki/Bertram_Brooker

  62 Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (New York, Vanguard Press, 1951). This book launched McLuhan's career. It intrigued Americans because it demonstrated a detachment from and amusement about ads, rather than the seduction ad agencies expected. He and MacLennan differed in their positions: MacLennan being forcefully opposed to ad agencies and McLuhan exposing their methods in a humorous way.

  63 MacLennan's publishers insisted on a preamble explaining Cape Breton and Calvinism, which annoyed MacLennan. See Cameron, Hugh MacLennan, 230–1.

  THE PRECIPICE

  Sometimes we wake in the night and know why we have become what we are. Waking alone in the night, listening to the cars rumbling under the pavement of Park Avenue, or the grain boat's foghorn throbbing against the shore of Lake Ontario, or the wail of the through-freight on the Nebraska plain, we see in a flash against the eyeballs a fragment of what has happened to us all, and lacking the brave illusion of daylight, it is easy to wish we had been born in another century, or had inherited some other time than now.

  Were there nights in Egypt when the builders could not sleep? Surely there were nights when they lay on their backs and thought of the long road over the desert of which this was the end, counted the steps of the pyramids rising against the stars and wondered how many more layers would have to be added before the converging lines met at a final point and the whole could rise no higher? Did they wonder, looking at the colossal stone coffins they were building, why the pyramids were the only works that mattered in their day?

  But time is more than now, more than twelve o'clock, or any particular century. It is also ourselves. It is millions of people and many nations. It is the coolie whose water buffalo pulls a wooden plow through his master's rice paddy. It is the airman handing to a girl in Cairo one of the two silk stockings he remembers buying thirty-six hours earlier on Ste. Catherine Street. It is the scientist trying to harness God.

  Gaze up at the Empire State and the R.C.A. Building, watch the Skymaster circle into LaGuardia with its bellyful of executives, see the shop girls staring at rubies and pearls reposing like a mogul's concubines in the window of Van Cleef and Arpels, the roar of the fight crowd in the Garden, look at the festoons of toilet paper descending upon the hero who makes his Roman progress up the avenue, see the greatest flash of them all shoot through cloud-rings into the stratosphere. How near are you then to the end of the journey which the Puritans began more than three hundred years ago when they lost hope in themselves and decided to bet their lives on the things they could do rather than on the men they were?

  Although time is millions of people and many nations, we say for the sake of convenience that this story begins in the innocent summer of 1938, when August heat brooded over the Middle West, and Germans crouched in Silesian fields with their steel helmets wreathed in sheaves of wheat, and old men everywhere fluttered their hands and looked at each other with frightened eyes.

  ONE

  IN LATER YEARS BRUCE FRASER OFTEN asked himself how it had happened that a woman he had taken for granted most of his life, had casually watched at work in her garden next door, should ultimately seem to him the embodiment of all that was essentially female – easier to sense than to understand, durable, and possessed of a kind of private beauty he felt he alone could recognize. The time came when the thought of Lucy Cameron never failed to stir him.

  But no such thoughts were near the surface of his mind that August morning in 1938 as he stood on the porch of his father's house in Grenville, Ontario, and watched her trimming the edges of her patch of lawn. Bruce was young enough then to think that ideas were more important than people. And besides, those were still the days of innocence in a little town like Grenville, where Canada breathed out the last minutes of her long Victorian sleep. They were the days when the well-meaning generation everywhere – in college common rooms, in the pages of the rough-paper magazines, in smoky apartments where beer drinking was a ritual and a symbol of the times – were still so excited by the novelty of knowing the score that they could spend delicious hours proving to themselves that life was a dirty trick, measuring with logic and dialectic each year against its predecessor to prove how inevitable it was that the tide should keep flooding in. Now Italy, now Germany, now Spain, and soon the rest of us.

  Bruce thought about the book he had been reading the night before, a book so full of social significance it had drugged him into a state of perverse contentment. If all the famous men in the world except a handful of Russians were knaves, fools, or conspirators, who could rightly blame him for being unsuccessful at twenty-four?

  After days of rain the sun was out again and the sharp ozone from Lake Ontario was in his nostrils. Light shimmered on the water and redoubled itself, light vibrant and sensual as calling trumpets. On a morning like this, after two months in Montreal, even the old street where he had grown up seemed new.

  Lack of experience made Bruce look even younger than he was, in spite of a rugged jaw which was oblong and very Scotch, bristly brown hair, and strong blue eyes. His youth showed in his tall, slim intensity and in his frequent expressions of startled surprise.

  A dog barked next door and Bruce turned his head. It was a remarkably gracious house, he decided, as he did each time he came home. Massed ranks of phlox bloomed on either side of a low doorstep behind a curving border of petunias and sweet alyssum. The door itself had been painted a hue of turquoise blue and a polished brass knocker hung in the centre of it below a wide-spreading fanlight. The walls were white clapboard with outside shutters of blue; dormers on the third storey broke the slope of the roof. But more than any other one thing about it, he liked the way the house clung to the ground, facing a street as quiet as Sunday.

  It was an outward expression of the personality of Lucy Cameron. Seven years ago, when her father died, there had been no gardens and no colour, the splendid British colonial style of the house browned off by blistered tan paint, its lines unsoftened, its fences wood instead of the hedges that had taken their place. In those days it had seemed exactly the kind of house old John Knox Cameron would choose to live in, and to leave to the three daughters who were his only children. He would have been horrified, Bruce reflected, could he have guessed what Lucy would do with it on the strength of four years’ salary from the only paying job she had ever held.

  And yet she had d
one nothing new to the house at all. She had merely stripped off an imposed ugliness and restored it to its proper position in time, for it was one of the oldest properties in Grenville, built by a Massachusetts judge who had been driven out of New England at the time of the American Revolution, owned by his descendants ever since. It was a Scotsman who had married into the family three generations before who had added the brown paint and the harshness, for the Scotch and Scotch-Irish who had flooded into Ontario in the wake of the original Loyalist settlers had roughened everything they touched. It would be another hundred years before any part of English-speaking Canada could hope to be rid of what they had done to it.

  Bruce left the steps of his porch and began to stroll up the narrow street. A century and a half ago someone had given it the name of Matilda Lane to honour a relative of George the Third, and the name had stuck. It seemed to Bruce more absurd than quaint, but he liked the street itself better than any other in town, for the elms that lined it, planted by the original settlers, had reached a noble height. Only here, in this lane running down from the King's Highway to the common at the edge of the lake, did Grenville seem in any sense mature. The branches of the elms soared up and out, dark gray under the mass of their leaves, and joined tips high overhead to make the lane like a cathedral nave open at both ends. It was constantly rich in changing lights. This morning the sunshine struck down, tangled in the branches, and dropped such a net of shadows onto the red paving bricks of the street that he seemed to be wading through them as he walked.

  He turned at the King's Highway and strolled back the way he had come. When he reached the Cameron house Lucy was working among her flowers. A shopping basket lay on the grass behind her, and without noticing Bruce she moved slowly along the border as she looked at the petunias. Suddenly she bent down, carefully snipped off a dried seed pod, dropped it into a small envelope she took from a pocket, and shook the seeds loose. She was in profile to Bruce but he could see an expression of quiet, shy pleasure touch her face. He thought with some pity and even with a faint feeling of male superiority that any pleasures Lucy Cameron would ever have would be shy ones.

  The Frasers had always been sorry for the Cameron women who lived next door. Bruce's mother was a happy, nerveless woman whose only grief was an operation which had made it impossible for her to have more than one child. His father was the best general practitioner in the county. Dr. Fraser's life had been clouded by the knowledge that he could have risen to the top of his profession in any of the cities of the country, had he not been compelled to support his parents after leaving medical school by establishing a practice in the first town where a vacancy had occurred. As a result he had concentrated most of his thwarted ambition on his son and was considered by Grenville a stern and highly respectable man.

  But compared to old John Knox Cameron, Dr. Fraser's life had been almost licentious. John Knox had been hard even for an Ontario small town to take, where the Scotch-Irish are chocolate-brown with Calvinism. He had been dead for seven years now, but his ghost still haunted the house where he lived. His wife had died the year after her husband, in thankful relief, Mrs. Fraser was known to have said, and now his three daughters lived there alone. Jane, the eldest, was a church organist and a music teacher, known to be well on her way toward forty. Lucy, ten years younger than Jane, kept the house. Nina was only nineteen and she knew she was considered the prettiest girl in town.

  Bruce waited for Lucy to turn around, but she was intent on her flowers so he called out, “Hello, Lucy! How are you?”

  She turned around, quick pleasure flashed into her face as she saw him and then was immediately checked, as though she thought she might create the presumption that he was equally pleased to see her.

  “When did you get back?” she said.

  “Last night.”

  “How was Montreal? And McGill?”

  “All I can remember was the heat. If there were marshes instead of factories along the St. Lawrence the place would be famous for its malaria.” He walked across the lawn to look at her flowers. “Your garden grows lovelier all the time.”

  She flushed with pleasure but her voice was matter of fact as she answered, “August is a dull month for gardens. I wish you could have seen it in June.”

  A cicada screamed from the tall grass on the common which lay between the foot of the street and the lake. Sunlight reflected from the white clapboards, and Bruce looked curiously toward an open window as he heard the tinkling of Jane's piano. He had once played the same piece himself, in the same room, and he grinned at Lucy as she read his thoughts. It was nine years since he had stopped taking lessons and Jane couldn't have been thirty at the time, but she had seemed to belong to his mother's generation then and she still did.

  “You must get tired hearing those same things year after year.”

  “I do. Or I would if I hadn't stopped hearing them long ago. Nina complains about having to be quiet so much of the time in the house, but I never seem to notice.” She bent down to pick up her shopping basket and dropped the shears and the envelope containing the seed pod into it. “If you're looking for Nina you might find her on the shore. She went down there with her dog.”

  “I wasn't looking for anyone. I'm lazy today.”

  Lucy stood with her basket on her arm. “I'm afraid I have to go along to King Street now. You're not going that way?”

  “Not now. But maybe I could climb the back fence this evening?”

  A trace of a smile touched her face and he thought it made her look charming and a little sad. “You won't be able to see the flowers in the dark,” she said.

  As she walked toward the King's Highway he watched her and wondered why he had never troubled himself to think about Lucy Cameron before. One took so many people for granted in Grenville; one accepted the stock judgments made of one's neighbours by the community and let it go at that. If Lucy would only give herself a chance, he thought, she could be an attractive woman. She moved with the quiet grace of a shy animal, yet in all her movements there was an air of conscious control, as though she hoped that whatever she did would escape notice. This same characteristic was even more marked in her face. It was an intelligent face, he thought, essentially a proud face. Her chin and the upper part of her head could have modelled a cameo, clean-cut and distant. But in the eyes and mouth unknown qualities brooded. Her large eyes were brown and widely spaced, with curving brows. Her lips were soft, warm, and sensuous. These features, together with her air of dignified solitude, combined to give her the prevailing expression of a woman who has never been recognized by others for what she knows herself to be.

  Bruce turned and strolled down to the common. The grass was resilient as he walked under the trees and he felt a wall of coolness rise to meet him as he neared the lake. It was good to be back. Grenville was such a safe place, so stubbornly sure of itself and so full of humour when one knew it well. Certainly not a single one of the madmen who were making current history could support himself within its limits.

  But even as the loveliness of the scene and the warmth of his returning affections invaded his mind, the restless, critical side of Bruce rose to meet them. Grenville was also a town of eight thousand people who had been stiff-necked from the day the first United Empire Loyalist had marked out his lot a century and a half ago, constantly right in its judgments but usually for the wrong reasons. Here was lodged the hard core of Canadian matter-of-factness on which men of imagination had been breaking themselves for years. Grenville was sound, it was dull, it was loyal, it was competent – and oh, God, it was so Canadian! The ferments and the revolutions of the past twenty years might never have existed so far as this town was concerned. Until the Grenvilles of Canada were debunked from top to bottom, Bruce decided, there would be no fun and no future for anyone in the country.

  He reached the sand, picked up a flat stone warm from the sun, drew back his shoulder, and launched his whole body into the throw. The stone skipped over the flat blue water, splashing up
a series of miniature rainbows, then tumbled, and sank. He stood on the edge of the shore for several minutes before he turned to stroll back under the trees of the common. He skirted a bandstand where once a fortnight in the summer a grocer, a hardware merchant, a shoemaker, a hotel-keeper, a freight-handler, and three clerks met to play marches and popular medleys while the children of Grenville came down to the common with their parents to listen. In one corner of the common near the foot of Matilda Lane he came to a neat, white belvedere, built two generations ago in honour of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee by the man who at that time had been the town's leading citizen.

  Bruce climbed the steps into the belvedere and sat down for a smoke. Engrossed in his own thoughts, he forgot all about Grenville and the middle Cameron sister. Lines of poetry entered his head, were driven out by a sentence he thought he might use in an article he hoped to write for The Canadian Forum. He thought about Hitler and Chamberlain and the stupidity of the British tories and his own unique ability to understand so much. Then he remembered that Nina Cameron was supposed to be somewhere on the beach, so he left the belvedere and walked down to the shore again.

  There was no sign of Nina or her dog. The beach was empty as far as he could see in both directions. The water stretched over the horizon into the United States. Ontario might be the smallest of the five continental lakes, but to the people of Grenville its frontier seemed at least as absolute as an ocean.

  MEANWHILE Lucy Cameron was walking into town along the King's Highway where the tranquil quietness that seeped up from the lakeshore was shattered. Cars and trucks poured past steadily, for Grenville lay on the main road between Toronto and Montreal, and all of them were faced with a full-sized black and white billboard which announced, GRENVILLE LOVES ITS CHILDREN…DRIVE SAFELY OR LIVE WITH A BAD CONSCIENCE.