The Precipice

by Hugh Maclennan

  “Aren't you too old to keep on disappearing into the bush like that?”

  “What do you mean, bush? Yellowknife's turning into quite a town. And do you think fifty-one is old? I'm in good condition.” They stopped on a corner while a truck filled with rattling cases of beer passed by. “Labatt's,” he informed her, and went on, “You tell Jane something from me. Tell her to quit worrying.”

  They crossed the street and began walking under old trees, past houses which had clung to the business section for years without being absorbed by it. Next door to an undertaking parlour the high wire backstop of the tennis courts came into view.

  “You know,” McCunn said as another truck went past, “the whole bloody country pounds through this town every day, and people like Jane don't even see it. That's another reason why the men have to get out.” He gripped her arm suddenly. “Look – there's the bastard that fired me.”

  A game of singles was in progress on the tennis courts, a rare sight in Grenville these days, particularly in the middle of a business morning.

  “The big one,” McCunn said. “That's Stephen Lassiter. Efficiency expert.” He laughed. “Let's go over and make him feel uncomfortable. He's supposed to set an example up here and it'll make him feel as guilty as hell if he sees me watching him play tennis when he ought to be on the job.”

  Lucy felt she had taken about as much of McCunn as she could stand for the day. “I forgot to get the groceries,” she said. “I'll have to go back.” She stopped and faced him. “We're really concerned about you, Uncle Matt. Please don't leave town without telling us, the way you did last time.”

  He smiled at her with affection and with a look in his eyes she had sometimes noticed in the eyes of other men, but did not understand. As she walked back to the square a feeling of disenchantment filled her. She liked Grenville; she loved its trees and changing weather; she liked most of its people. But sometimes the town seemed to be closing in around her, freezing her into the mould of a perpetual childhood. She had no function here. Neither had Bruce Fraser nor Matt McCunn, but being men they could escape. McCunn had escaped without finding a function anywhere, but the odd thing about him was that he really believed he had lived a full life, even though his wife had left him years ago and the only gold he had ever discovered had been cheated out of him by mining promoters. When he had enough to drink McCunn liked to say that the secret of a good life was courage, but he meant something else by the word than Lucy did. What did he know of a woman's courage, the courage of waiting, of facing a blank wall for the rest of your life with a quiet and decent dignity? As this thought struck her, the brightness of the morning became a pain. Could she really have been describing herself?

  TEN minutes later, when Lucy came out of the grocery store with a full basket, McCunn was nowhere to be seen. By the time she reached the backstop of the courts again three children were watching the game. She stopped beside them for a moment and then turned into the club grounds and entered the deep shade cast by three great pine trees which rose over the old, white-painted pavilion.

  The appearance of the club had changed little since she was a small girl. As she laid her basket on the pavilion steps and sat beside it, she remembered the times she had been here as a child. When her father had been alive and active, her mother had sometimes brought her out here on Saturday afternoons as a treat, to watch him pitch quoits. In the winters there had been a Quebec heater in the pavilion and the snowshoe club had used the place every weekend. Men wearing red-and-white woollen suits with long woollen stockings and parkas and red scarves would meet on Saturday afternoons at the club, trudge until dark over the fields, and then return to the pavilion for a supper of pork and beans, hot breads, and coffee prepared by their wives. Then they would sing together and tell each other how tired they were and repeat that the blizzards had been much heavier when they were children. Always, on such evenings, someone was sure to remember the great storm that had struck Grenville on Twelfth Night, 1909, when the Anglicans were holding a social in the basement of their church. That had been a storm. The lake wind had piled the drifts so high around the church that when the first people tried to leave they had floundered in the snow and finally had lost their feet, and old Sid Townshend, who had been out West, had made a lariat out of a clothesline he found in the basement and had thrown the lasso at them, and the whole congregation had mocked the Methodists by singing a Methodist hymn, Throw Out the Lifeline, while they hauled them in. After that they had taken all the cushions and hassocks out of the pews and spent the night in the basement, and the next week the Presbyterians said there was one thing they were sure of, it was the first time any of the Anglicans had ever willingly spent more than half an hour inside a church in their lives.

  The snowshoe club had died fifteen years ago and the Quebec heater had been removed from the pavilion. As more and more people acquired cars, they had lost the habit of making their own pleasures. The quoit beds were still there, covered with sticky brown canvas tarpaulins, but few men used them any more. There were not enough native young men even to support the tennis courts, and the clay would have gone to grass and weeds had it not been for the handful of summer people from Toronto who contributed enough to keep them going. But the old familiar smells of the place were still present as reminders that once the club had possessed life and reason of its own: pine needles hot with sun, pine cones lying on the ground, the dry odour of old tennis balls seeping out the pavilion door from the changing rooms. After skirting the building Lucy looked out at the tennis courts.

  There are moments in life when quite ordinary scenes, scenes which are really none of our business, startle us without our knowing why they should. For Lucy this was such a moment. As she watched Stephen Lassiter playing tennis, the thought occurred to her, so clearly she could almost see it in print: if this man is important, then everyone else I know is not.

  But as soon as she examined the thought it disappeared. She told herself that Lassiter was merely a man who had been an athlete when younger and had managed to find someone who could give him a good game of tennis. Yet, as she watched him, her original feeling returned. The game brought his aggressive facade of self-confidence into sharp focus, and as she looked at his face and movements, Grenville seemed a smaller place than it had seemed half an hour ago.

  She found herself enjoying the game, realizing that she had never really seen tennis properly played before. Lassiter was probably over thirty and less than thirty-five, and his opponent looked the same age. Both wore sweat shirts with large Ps on the front and both handled themselves on the court with trained concentration. Even with nothing at stake they were playing to win. Beyond that all resemblance between them ended.

  Lassiter's opponent was a wiry little man with smooth dark hair, a large nose, and an oval face which to Lucy looked foreign. He played a carefully calculated game, using a lot of slice, and waited for Lassiter to make mistakes. Lassiter was well over six feet in height, but his chest and shoulders were so powerful he seemed large rather than tall. In spite of his muscular development he was not stiff; he moved on the court with the feline precision of a natural tennis player. Neither man was in good condition, but Lassiter seemed the more fit of the two. The little man covered court like a rabbit, but Lassiter had too much power for him. Lucy watched the heavy muscles of his calves knotting as he bent his knees to hit, relaxing as the weight left them, knotting as the next ball came. They had a sort of proud, easy power, like the muscles of a horse, and his rusty-blond hair was loose on his head and flopped as he ran.

  A set was finished on an odd game and they changed sides. Lassiter stripped off his sweat shirt and stood with one large hand on the heaving muscles of his diaphragm while the other clamped his racket against the net cord. His linen shirt clung to his body like a wet bathing suit. The buttons were open at the top, showing a chest dusted with brown hair.

  “These shadows are bastards!” he said as he panted.

  The little man wiped his ha
nds on a towel and said nothing. Lucy had no idea who he was, but supposed from the P on his sweatshirt that he must be an old college friend who had come to visit Lassiter.

  “That last shot in the corner,” Lassiter said. As he panted his voice came in jerks. “I couldn't see it at all. Why the hell don't they cut down the trees?”

  They walked away from each other toward the baselines. Lassiter's diaphragm muscles showed taut through his wet shirt as he stretched for his service. He threw the ball very high and reached while his heavy body pivoted on the splayed toes of his left foot; the racket hit the ball with a smack like a rug-beater on a wet sheet and the ball caught the court wide and two feet above the servicecourt angle. His opponent didn't get his racket within two yards of it.

  “How was that, Carl?”

  The little man shook his head. “I didn't see it. Take it again.”

  “How was that, did you see?”

  With a start, Lucy realized that Lassiter was addressing her, looking straight at her from the middle of the court, and she flushed with embarrassment. She knew nothing of tennis, and couldn't have answered even if she had seen the ball strike.

  “Was it good?” Lassiter said. “I couldn't see it. They ought to cut these trees down.”

  She heard her own voice say, “I think it was all right.”

  Lassiter looked at her and turned back to the baseline, and she felt a fool as he said over his shoulder, “We'd better take it over, Carl.”

  Lucy was self-conscious now, wondering what they would think of a lone girl who came to the club to watch them. She turned to leave, and as she walked beside the court toward the road she passed quite close to Lassiter. This was a face millions of people would recognize even if they didn't know the man himself. It was authentic American; a product of what the United States so often does to the original Anglo-Saxon mould. It was larger and bolder than the faces of most Canadian men she knew, but somehow its lines were less decisive, and it was a difficult face for her to understand. The eyes looked boyish. The mouth, when he concentrated, looked hard. When he grinned he was very attractive. It was the face of a man who expects most people to like him exactly as he is.

  THE lawn in front of the Cameron house was deep green under the noonday sun, and a girl was lolling in its centre playing with the wire-haired terrier she had just washed. She was a girl with blue eyes, golden curls, a snub nose, a wide laughing mouth, plump bare arms coloured like honey in the sun, and a short neat body that was never still. Her hair kept falling into her eyes and she laughed as the dog barked. The dog caught the end of the towel she held, braced his feet, and tugged. Both the girl and the dog seemed to understand each other, and between them they formed a full part of the summer morning.

  Nina's gambolling stopped abruptly as Lucy came up with her basket.

  “Where've you been?” she said. “Oh, of course, you were shopping. You've been an awfully long time. Jane was looking for you.”

  The dog made another convulsive movement which tore the towel out of Nina's hands. He ran with it to the edge of the steps, dropped it to bark at a cat, and stood panting with the towel on the ground in front of his forepaws, while the cat eyed him with a solemn and distasteful air. Lucy skirted the dog and sat on the top step. The dog barked again.

  “Pan!” Nina said. “Shut up, for heaven's sake!”

  The cat moved in against Lucy's thigh and her right hand began to stroke it. The throat throbbed with a slow, pulsing purr, the hair felt hot with sun, and Lucy's eyes ranged over Nina's head down the road across the common to the lake. The water looked cool, green, and vast, and the deckhouses of a grainboat were just nudging the horizon.

  “Jane's fit to be tied this morning,” Nina said.

  There was another skirmish between Nina and the dog. Through the screen door of the house came the faint echo of another music lesson: do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do repeated six times in different keys with a few mistakes. Nina caught the towel, but when the dog suddenly stopped pulling on his end of it, he took her off balance and she collapsed backwards. She remained sitting squarely on the lawn, her legs spread flat in front of her, her arms like a pair of flying buttresses propping upright the weight of her back. She tossed the hair out of her eyes.

  “What a wonderful day!” she said, as though she were the only person in the world who knew it. “You can almost taste it. I could bite a morning like this.” Then, without a pause, “You know that blue chiffon dress of yours?”

  Lucy looked at her younger sister.

  “May I have it?” Nina said. “I want to dye it. You practically never use a party dress except for Jane's recitals. I'll have it dyed and cut down to fit. It'll look lovely on me. Don't you think it will? It never suited you, anyway.”

  The corners of Lucy's mouth turned up in a faint smile, but Nina had already grabbed the towel and begun playing with Pan again.

  “What's the matter with Jane this morning?” Lucy said.

  “Oh, it's that letter she got yesterday. She probably stayed awake half the night thinking up answers to it, and of course she won't use any of them. You know Jane.”

  The scale-playing had ceased, and Jane's pupil was now beginning a piece called Sunday Morning at Glion. From the truculent incompetence in its execution it was evident the player was a boy. Lucy waited for the mistake that usually came at the twelfth bar. It came. The playing stuttered a bar further, stopped, returned, repeated the mistake, stopped once more, then went angrily back to the beginning again.

  “What letter?” she said to Nina.

  “It's something to do with the library. She left it on the hall table and I read it. She probably wanted us to read it or she wouldn't have left it there. Something completely silly – but you know Jane.”

  Lucy continued to look at the lake. A faint scroll of smoke from the grainboat curled on the horizon with a long, sinuous gesture. A pack of cumulus cloud had risen like a vast white mountain out of a flat blue floor.

  “You don't mind if I take that old dress, do you?” Nina said.

  “What do you want it now for?” Lucy's voice was a quiet contralto with real movement in it. Nina's voice had rather a hard tone, though no harder than most people's in her part of the country.

  “Pan!” Nina said. “Go away, you're still wet!” She turned with another backward toss of her hair. “You know – the club dance.”

  Lucy sat quietly in the sun. “You don't need a dinner dress for that.”

  “But this time I do!” Nina got up and sat on the bottom step. “It won't be just an ordinary club hop, you know. Steve Lassiter's going to be there.”

  Lucy smiled. “Do you know him?”

  “No, but he's going to be there, and Mary Macdonnell knows him.” Nina peered inside Lucy's basket and began turning over the parcels. “You didn't get any icing sugar and I specially wanted a cake for tomorrow. He's from New York, you know.”

  The dog made another sally with the towel, but Nina had forgotten all about him. Inside the house, Sunday Morning at Glion staggered to a defiant end.

  “He's got a LaSalle convertible,” Nina went on. “And it's perfectly obvious he thinks none of the girls here has any style.”

  Lucy had often wondered if Jane guessed how much difference the movies had made in her younger sister's life. Jane practically never went to the movies, and Lucy herself went seldom. But Nina, being nine years younger, had grown up with moving pictures. She would have resented it if anyone had called her a movie fan. She never read movie magazines and in her high-school days she had never gossiped about the movie stars the way some of the other girls did, but she tended to see situations in terms of movie formulae. It occurred to Lucy now that she was probably seeing Lassiter in this way: the handsome man from the big city, presumably rich, forced to spend a few months on business in a small town which contained, to his delighted surprise, Nina herself. Another vague formula which Nina shared in common with many Canadians told her that she was somewhat superior to Americans, th
ough she never asked herself why, or expected Americans to recognize the superiority.

  “He oughtn't to be allowed to think this is just another hick town,” Nina said.

  “And isn't it?”

  A frown traced an inverted V above Nina's snub nose. It made her look about three years younger.

  “You know perfectly well it isn't,” she said. “We're not in the least like those American small towns. Grenville has a real history, after all. We're – well, we're different.” She spun around on the step, hoisted her knees to chin level, and hugged them to herself with both hands. The frown disappeared. “The only trouble with Grenville is that people here think it isn't nice to be different. And Americans are always trying to be different and – anyway, he looks like one of the better kind of Americans.”

  Lucy rose and picked up her basket. Nina remained on the step.

  “I think you're mean,” Nina said.

  Through the screen door came the sound of Jane's voice, followed by the dutiful answer of a small boy. Then the door opened and a carrot-headed youngster of twelve came out with a music roll under his arm. The expression of relief on his face at having finished his music lesson was not sufficient to counteract his disgust at having had to take one at all, or at being seen walking home with a music roll.

  “Hello, Bobby,” Lucy said.

  “Hello, Miss Cameron.”

  “It's a shame having to work on a day like this, isn't it?”

  The boy looked sheepish. “Well, I guess so.”

  He shifted from one foot to the other, and then his sheepishness yielded to an expression of superiority that made Lucy feel his junior. He strode down the steps and out to the sidewalk. He kicked a pebble as far as he could and it shot across the street and lodged in a depression by a tree root. Pan rushed after it and began nuzzling. The boy picked up a larger stone and threw it toward the lake. Pan left the tree and chased. The boy let out a whoop and ran after him, and the two faded across the common onto the beach. Lucy stood watching, her hand on the doorknob. Nina was still on the bottom step.