The Precipice

by Hugh Maclennan

  Jane interrupted. “Never mind, Nina – we've been through all that before. Your education was taken into account long ago, so please tell me what your point is.”

  The cumulus cloud was absorbing Lucy's attention. It still looked like a furry white cat asleep in the sky. It hadn't changed at all. Neither had her sisters, and neither had she herself.

  “I asked Lucy to let me have it,” Nina went on. With sudden impatience she wriggled out of her chair and dropped onto the ground. She picked up a twig and broke off the crooked end of it until she had a sharp probe. Then she began to root into the grass. “After all,” she said, “I know it's Lucy's dress, but she hardly ever wears it and we've got to be practical since we have no money. What do you think, Jane?”

  Nina had to ask twice, for Jane's mind was always slow to move from one channel to another. When she finally understood the import of Nina's question she turned to Lucy and asked what she thought about it.

  “Nothing,” Lucy said.

  “But you must think something. After all, it's your dress.”

  “That's so,” Lucy said. “It's my dress.”

  There was a pause; a pause suddenly tense. Nina was now on the grass concentrating on forcing the twig straight down into the earth without breaking it.

  Jane said, “I don't see why you can't let Nina have it, Lucy. After all, it's the practical thing to do. You won't be using it.”

  Lucy was quite still in her deck chair. The cloud was still also, and so was the air; so was everything outside herself.

  “I wear it at your recitals,” she said at last.

  She glanced at Jane and turned away, feeling the flush that was beginning to suffuse her cheeks.

  Jane said, “But that's utter nonsense! I know it's a pretty dress, but after all – there won't be a recital till next winter. In the meantime, I don't see why Nina can't get some use out of it.”

  “But I –” Lucy was unable to say anything more.

  Jane looked down at her nails. “I don't see how we can afford a new dress for Nina right now,” she said finally.

  “And of course, we must be practical,” Lucy said.

  Jane lifted her chin sharply, tried to calculate Lucy's expression, and failed.

  “Really, Lucy – I do wish you wouldn't be so difficult. Sometimes I don't understand you at all.”

  Lucy leaned forward and rose slowly from the deck chair. Without answering, she began to gather up the plates, knives, and glasses, and stack them on the tray.

  “Lucy,” Jane said, with quiet determination, “please don't be foolish. Hurt feelings are a luxury none of us can afford.”

  Still Lucy did not answer. She lifted the tray and carried it into the kitchen. A strained silence lingered behind her in the garden. Nina was affecting to concentrate on a colony of ants she had disturbed with her twig. Jane's face glowed slightly in the heat as she sat forward on the edge of her chair, knees pressed together and angled slightly to one side.

  “I wish you'd be more considerate of your sister,” she said to Nina. Her voice was firm to keep out of it the sadness of her own nature. “I know you've been a great help about the house this summer, but I was thinking perhaps you could help Lucy a little more. After all, housework gets awfully monotonous.”

  “Next summer if I have any luck I'll get a job and be out of here.” Nina forgot all about the ants and scrambled to her feet. She went back to her chair again, her young face bright with annoyance. Her voice was petulant, but it was the innocent, unconscious petulance of a very young girl who only half guesses the import of what she says.

  “But I don't see why she has to be so selfish. Dresses don't mean a thing to Lucy.”

  Pan got up and stretched with a yawn, looked around, made a sudden dart at a fly, then trotted slowly over to where Nina was sitting.

  Jane suddenly made up her mind. “Go down to Overstreet's this afternoon. They're having a sale. I think we should be able to afford one dress. After all – if a thing is needed, it can hardly be called an extravagance, can it?”

  The petulance vanished from Nina's face. She jumped up, her yellow hair flopping and shining in the sun, and to Jane at that moment her happy prettiness was worth the price of any dress in town. She balanced precariously on the arm of Jane's chair.

  “You're so nice to me, Jane.”

  “Don't be silly,” Jane said.

  “But everyone knows you're wonderful. Everyone in town.”

  Jane pushed her firmly away. “And whatever you get, be sure it's suitable.”

  Nina sat on the edge of the table. It began to tip and she scrambled closer to its centre of gravity. Leaning there, her body lithely twisted, she concentrated with sudden eager interest on the grain of the wood.

  “Jane,” she said in a low voice, “why is Lucy like that?”

  From where Nina was sprawling she could not see the look of acute embarrassment which appeared on her sister's face.

  “That's a remarkably silly thing to say.”

  “But why –” Nina began.

  “It hasn't been easy for Lucy, if that's what you mean. It's not easy for any girl to be ill in bed for three years in her mid-teens.”

  “But that was years and years ago. Lucy isn't sick any more. I'm talking about now.”

  There was a deep silence to which Jane was sensitive and Nina was not. Nina broke it abruptly.

  “Do you think Lucy will ever get married?”

  “Well…” Jane hesitated and swallowed. Then her voice became briskly matter-of-fact. “Lucy's far more competent than a lot of people imagine. She's a splendid housekeeper. And she has all sorts of ideas, some of them very practical.”

  Nina, still looking at the grain in the white pine, her falling hair hiding her profile, smiled quietly. “You know she won't, of course. Nobody would ever want to marry Lucy.”

  Jane rose from her chair and regarded her young sister for a moment, her small mouth very straight. Then she walked into the house.

  Insects droned, the cat slept, the heat brooded like something in leash. Pan leaped onto the table and pressed his wet muzzle against Nina's bare forearm. For a moment she fondled him, then pushed him off to the ground.

  “Come on, Pan! Let's go swimming!”

  Her hair waved up and down as she ran into the house.

  THAT evening after supper Lucy went alone into the garden to inspect her flowers before it got too dark to see them. In full sunshine the garden was unchangingly brilliant, but in the morning and evening the flowers were like an assembly of living things, resting in the evening, in the morning like children eager to show how fresh they were after the night and how much they had grown. Now the hyperion lilies had almost closed, but in the gathering darkness the nicotianas had opened and were filling the air with fragrance. A sickle moon was in the sky, half hidden by the upper branches of a maple tree. One pale star was visible beside it.

  She bent to smell the white blossoms, saw in the half-light a small patch of crab grass beside them, and stooped to pull it out. When the back door of the Frasers’ house opened and closed she stood up, and looking over the hedge she saw Bruce Fraser strolling over the grass with his hands in the pockets of his white duck trousers.

  “I came out earlier,” he said. “Where were you?”

  “Hello, Bruce.” Her voice was warm. “Washing dishes, probably.”

  He passed down the line of the hedge until it yielded to a wooden fence. Then he vaulted over, landing on his toes. Tall, thin, and smiling, he approached Lucy, squeezed her hand, and impulsively put his arm about her shoulders to give her a quick sideways hug. She read no more into the gesture than was intended. He dropped into one of the deck chairs under the apple tree, clasped his hands behind his head, and looked up at the sky. After pulling a few more weeds, she came and sat in the chair nearest him. He sighed luxuriantly, an eager, animal sound that came from his healthy joy in being alive on a fine evening.

  “It's good to be back.” He was still looking up
at the sky. “You know, this town could be made into one of the loveliest places in the world. Pull down the brick buildings on King Street. Rip that damned-fool top off the post office. Build little quays along the lake front and plant them with trees. Recruit a permanent town orchestra. All we'd need would be the money and a new population. Ever thought about it yourself?”

  “Often,” she said smiling.

  “What have you been reading lately?”

  “Oh, nothing much. A few novels. I found a wonderful new book on botany, but all it did was show me how little I know.”

  “I don't believe it. Whenever I think of Grenville and how ignorant it is, I remember you. You know everything.”

  She laughed. “That's a terrible thing to say about a girl, even if it were true.”

  “Dear old Grenville! It breeds us modest. No beer, no vice, no nuthin’. You haven't any beer, have you?”

  “How I wish we did!”

  “In Montreal I floated in it. It was all you could do on hot nights – walk the street, climb the mountain, or drink beer. The taverns reek. You pass their open doors and a wet malty gush of air comes out at you like a cow's breath. I loved them.” He twisted his long body sideways and looked at her. “While we're on the subject – have you heard the latest on Wes Muchmore? Remember when he was running for mayor he promised he'd do something for the young men? Well, he's done it. He's had the government liquor commission moved into the back part of town on Dufferin Street, around the corner from the railroad station. Now the boys can get their booze without being seen by their betters as they come and go. But the best part is this. Jonathan Eldridge owns the building where the commission used to be, and he collected a sweet rent on it month by month. Wes told him solemnly he was sure he'd feel better in his mind now that no liquor was being sold on his property. Jonathan never allowing a drop in his own house, he had no answer for that one. You've got to admit Wes has his points.”

  Bruce lifted his knees, hooked his heels over the crossbar of the chair, and began to talk about Montreal. History was his special subject, but he had always had an insatiable curiosity to know as much as he could about everything. So he had been attending the Summer School at McGill. Lucy often wondered if Bruce had any clear idea of what he wanted to do with his life. He wasn't making enough money to be really independent and his father was exceedingly ambitious for him. Since graduating from Queen's University four years ago he had been teaching in a private school in Toronto. But he was not a man who fitted easily into the modern scheme of things, which Lucy, with a shrewdness more intuitive than conscious, assumed was better adapted for misfits than for whole men. Apparently Bruce wanted to be a whole man, but during the last four years he had at least discovered something of what he was up against in becoming one. The only jobs available existed for specialists.

  He finished talking, and for a time silence settled in the garden. Lucy's hand, dropping over the side of the low chair, touched grass. It was already damp. The August night had come in quickly. The sickle moon had ridden out from behind the trees and now the garden was dark. She knew that Bruce had formed the habit of thinking of her as Nina's older sister, as she always thought of him as the boy next door. Yet he was often present in her mind; rather like an extra dimension, the only person she knew who could occasionally feel about things as she did herself. When she planned new groupings in her garden she wondered if he would notice them. When she read new books, she felt a desire to talk to him about them.

  Bruce's voice breaking into the silence, was lower. “I used to think about this garden on hot nights when I was in Montreal. It's funny – when I'm away from Grenville, the chief thing I remember is you working on your flowers here.”

  Lucy waited quietly.

  “These Ontario towns – everyone says they're narrow-minded and dull. I've been known to say the same myself. But when I think of you and what you've done to your place, the description doesn't fit any more.”

  She had an image of someone cast away on a raft on a quiet sea under the stars; of a ship coming over the horizon and drawing near.

  His voice went on. “Il faut cultiver votre jardin – people have been praising Voltaire for two centuries for writing that, though neither he nor they ever dreamed of taking his advice. But you've actually done it. You're the only person I know who has. With the world falling to pieces all around you.”

  His last words made her smile faintly in the darkness; made her like him, too, as some women like a man who is completely removed from a woman's world and can't begin to understand a woman's motives. It was natural for Bruce to link her garden with a political and philosophical idea. Lucy did not expect him to know that the real reason why she spent so many hours over her plants was because she had no children.

  Still smiling, she asked, “What makes you think I'm contented, Bruce?”

  “Because it's so obvious that you are. Everybody else around here thinks Neville Chamberlain's a great man. They believe it automatically because he's Prime Minister of Great Britain. But you know what's going on as well as I do, and you're still contented. It's wonderful.”

  “My Uncle Matt wouldn't agree with you. He told me this morning I ought to get out of Grenville.”

  “What does he know about you?”

  The vessel which had neared her solitude was already sailing past. “If you wanted to grow a new flower, Bruce, or a new vegetable – I mean something entirely different, a mutation – where would you choose to live?”

  “I don't know! Does it make any difference?”

  “It makes quite a lot. Burbank went to California. I don't think I ever realized what a hard country this is until I seriously tried to grow flowers in it.”

  “You mean, you've really wanted to get away, too?”

  “I suppose if I'd wanted to go badly enough I'd have left years ago. One gets used to things. A woman's life in a town like this consists in getting used to many things she knows aren't right.”

  “I'd hate to see you leave. After all – think how we'd miss the garden.”

  Her chin lifted as she glanced away from the white blur of his shirt and face and leaned back to look at the moon. Now the passing ship had sailed on to the horizon. Bruce was too young, he was too engrossed in his own problems – in trying to understand the surfaces of so many different things – to be able to feel what lay within her, or even to know it was there. Like most of the men she had met, he looked for nothing in a woman's mind but some reflection of his own. And besides, he was a Grenville boy who wanted to be a success in the world outside. His family background had not been as strict as her own, but he was conscious of the pressure of his father's will driving him ahead, condemning him for being impractical. This, more than anything else, had driven him into revolt against the whole Grenville attitude. Yet he had revolted far less than he imagined. The moment her voice had conveyed the hint of a deep personal emotion he had recoiled from her involuntarily. Generations of Calvinism had made them all afraid of themselves. The great emotions, love and fear and hate and desire, could break like thunderclaps in his mind as in hers, and because of their training they would both try to conceal them with matter-of-fact words or a quick change of subject.

  And now she spoke lightly to change the mood. “I was reading a book about an American who'd been in Russia. Apparently the Russians eat a heavy protein diet with hardly any greens. One day on a train to Kiev the American woke up with the insides of his cheeks swollen, craving fruit. He found two honeydew melons in the dining car, sitting in a bowl like decorations. He bought them and ate them, and the swellings subsided within fifteen minutes. He'd never eaten a honeydew before. The Russians told him it was an American fruit and of course they added that one day one of their own scientists would produce something better. It was only then that he realized that Luther Burbank was one of the greatest Americans who ever lived.”

  There was another silence. Then Bruce said, “I never guessed you took your work that seriously.”

&n
bsp; “I don't, really. I hardly know anything important about it. But I know I could learn if I had the chance, and sometimes I think it would be wonderful to work for a few years in one of those experimental nurseries in California.”

  “Then what? Come back and start one here?”

  “I don't know. It's just a crazy notion. It's so hard to do the same things here. People wouldn't give you any support if you did.”

  He took the thought away from her and changed it. “You've got to be fifty years old in Canada before they give you a chance to do anything.”

  “Is it the same in Montreal?”

  “Probably. I don't know. It's all Canada.” He was remote from her now, remote even from the garden and the beauty of the night. It was obvious that Montreal had made an impression on him, for apart from Toronto it was the only great city he had ever seen. “Montreal is tolerant and I found it exciting. Under the surface I have an idea it's beautifully immoral. Anyway, you don't feel as if the whole damned neighbourhood was peeping over your shoulder all the time. You realize Canada is a hell of a lot more than the Province of Ontario. And I liked the French-Canadians. I liked them fine. They may be priest-ridden, but hell, there's only one priest to a village and here we've got about five thousand neighbours to check up on us.” He pulled out a packet of cigarettes and lit one. “One night I couldn't sleep. Do nights like that ever get you – when the moon is behind a floor of clouds and everything is pale and hot? I looked out the window and saw some women walking along Sherbrooke Street. So I got up and dressed and began walking myself.” His voice rose eagerly. “It's terrific, what you can see in the back streets of that city after dark on a hot night down in the east end. It's not Canada at all down there. I saw the sun rise over the Jacques Cartier Bridge, and there was the city, and the grain elevators catching the first light, and a Cunard liner with a red funnel and white decks and a black hull, and a few seagulls screaming. I was absolutely alone.”

  Lucy had heard these outbursts of description from Bruce before. Sometimes she wondered if he used them on others, but she rather doubted it. Most people in Grenville would be suspicious of a turn of mind like his.