The Precipice

by Hugh Maclennan

  “But your father lost his money?”

  “Yes, but he'd proved he could make it. He'd lived a full life. He'd shown what he could do.” He saw her smiling. “What are you thinking about?”

  “After what you've just said it would sound rather foolish.”

  “What is it?”

  “Well, to me just being – just existing – would be a full life, if –”

  “If what?”

  “If I felt I were making the most of all that lay around me. If I felt I were doing things I really liked. If I felt free to be myself as natural as one of those flowers. Stephen – doesn't it seem pointless to use up all the best years of your life just making money like your father did, so that when you're an old man you can build a memorial with it?” She smiled again. “My uncle, Matt McCunn, says the only time money is important is when you haven't got any.”

  He looked at her curiously. “He worked at the Ceramic, didn't he?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was sorry I had to let him go.”

  “He doesn't mind. He's really a very happy man.”

  Crickets and katydids enhanced the long silence which followed. He watched her as she lay back in the chair, and realized that her attraction for him was unique. Usually he was drawn to boldness in a woman, or the piquant suggestions her figure evoked in his mind. The feelings aroused in him by Lucy were subtler and almost mysterious, they warmed him inside. As he wondered what expression her face would hold if he ever made love to her, he realized that he had no idea what it would be. She was not conventionally beautiful; probably she was not beautiful at all. He tried without success to find a phrase to describe her. She was virginal, yet often she seemed more mature and knowledgeable than most of the women he knew. She seemed very sure of her ideas, without trying to force them on anyone else, the way his sister Marcia did. Probably she had what one of his uncles would call a philosophy.

  Lassiter got up and crossed to her, and standing behind her, laid his fingers on her dark hair. He liked the texture of it, but wished she would fix it less plainly. A hairdresser in New York would be able to transform a girl like this in a single session.

  “How did you learn so much, living here?”

  She looked back and up at him, her forehead wrinkling, her lips breaking into a smile. “Me? I haven't learned anything much. Only a little about myself. In Grenville there's at least plenty of time to think.”

  “I heard someone say once that if you knew yourself you knew everything. Or was it Socrates who said it? I don't know. Anyway, Socrates didn't know calculus.” He grinned down at her. “I'm one up on him there. I used to be good at it.”

  He looked up at the sky. The moon was clearly visible, pale as a white flower in the faded blue of the sky. He moved around to the front of the chair and held out his hand.

  “Let's get out of here before your sisters come back. Let's drive to Toronto and see what kind of a dinner Ontario's big town can give us?”

  She thought of Jane as he pulled her to her feet, and supposed there would be still another scene in the morning if she went with him. Then she felt his arm about her waist, his body as strong and solid as a wall, and again she felt the excitement of knowing a man really wanted her company.

  “I'll have to change.”

  She left him in the garden and went into the house. When she returned she was wearing a natural linen suit and brown accessories.

  “It suits you,” he said. “You're so cool and lovely it makes me feel good just to look at you.”

  OVER the weekend the weather broke and a heavy gale rode inland off the lake. The Cameron house was so dark that lights had to be turned on during the day and a wind that had started far down the Mississippi Valley and then had been pushed eastward by a cold front moving from Hudson Bay tore over the rolling Ontario land. On Saturday afternoon Lassiter called Lucy to say that the power system at the plant had failed and that he would be working late that night and would have to work all day Sunday to complete his report to Ashweiler and he wished he could see her but he couldn't.

  Tired from three late nights in succession, and from the strain of resisting the sense of guilt which Jane's close-lipped and forbidding silence spread through the house, Lucy rested and tried to interest herself in a novel. That night she went to bed early and fell asleep with the house trembling in the wind and the thunder of rapid waves hitting the beach in her ears.

  On Sunday morning the whole country looked wet and flat. A few lonely cars swished over the King's Highway and the pavement was black in the rain. The wind had ceased, but the rain still fell, and just before eleven o'clock the sidewalks of King Street were filled with people walking under umbrellas to the churches.

  There was tension in St. David's that morning, and Lucy noticed that a good many of the middle-aged men were wearing service buttons from the war. Most of the veterans had discarded the habit of wearing them years ago, but now they had taken them out of drawers, polished them, and quietly fitted them into their lapels. She found herself counting their young sons who sat in the pews beside them, the ones in their middle teens who were still at school. Remembering Lassiter's tanned face, she noticed how the English and Scottish ruddiness predominated in the complexions of all these Grenville men. She found herself comparing the younger ones with their fathers. The fathers’ faces looked heavier in expression than their sons’ ever would. Not sad, but ponderously confident, more rugged and less sensitive, and the difference was not entirely caused by the difference in age. These youngsters were a new breed for Canada. Their features showed less stubbornness and perhaps less durability, but more refinement and more imagination. Across the aisle and several pews ahead she saw Bruce Fraser. He was one of the few men present who was in his early twenties, but there was no doubt that he was far closer to the sons than to the fathers. A world in which he would feel at home would be a very different place from the world John Knox Cameron and Jane had made for her.

  Dr. Grant rose in the pulpit. He had been a chaplain in France and he was still close to the returned men. His powerful hands gripped the lectern, his short grey hair bristled, and his large nose seemed to grow larger still.

  “Pour out thy fury upon the heathen that know thee not, and upon the families that call not on thy name: for they have eaten up Jacob, and devoured him, and consumed him, and have made his habitation desolate.”

  He preached for half an hour to these innocent people about the evil that was inherent in mankind. He was sick with anxiety about Hitler, and it was clear to him that Hitler would never have been allowed to reach power if the world had shared his own Presbyterian conception of wickedness. “They thought they could abolish evil by appointing committees of experts to deal with it.”

  After the service the three sisters went home to the usual Sunday dinner of roast beef and browned potatoes and a trifle for dessert. All the time they had been listening to Dr. Grant the roast had been cooking in a slow oven. During dinner the rain stopped and a changed wind sprang off the lake. About three o'clock Bruce came over and they all sat down to listen to a summer concert on the radio, but just when the last noisy surge of a Wagnerian overture was finished and Mozart's flutes began to sing into the room, they had to turn off the radio to receive callers.

  Bruce went home and Jane poured tea for two elderly women and one white-haired man who stayed till half-past five. By that time the sky had lightened, the clouds broke open, and the sun drove to the west in a blaze of ruddy gold. Robins appeared on the soaked grass of the lawn. They made quick running steps and froze with heads cocked to listen for worms, their beaks darted and then they shot forward over the grass again. The garden beds were spangled with white, lavender, and pink petals beaten from the phlox by the rain and the wind.

  No one in the Cameron house mentioned Lassiter's name throughout the day, though all three sisters, each in her own fashion, was acutely conscious of his presence among them.

  WHEN Lassiter called for Lucy late Monday afterno
on she knew that the easy atmosphere of their last meeting was not going to be repeated. There was a tight look about his mouth and he seemed irritable.

  “I've had another letter from Cleveland,” he said when they were out on the road. “You pour yourself into a job like I've been doing and it just looks like routine for them. I don't know. You never can be sure what Sani-Quip will do because it hasn't got any feelings. When they want to be, they can be very tactful. Last year when they took over the Ceramic, the big shots that came up here were so tactful that Jim Craig still thinks they're swell. It's part of the system. If they fire Jim they'll give him a pension because Canadian good will is worth the price.” He shrugged his shoulders. “My good will doesn't matter a damn and they know it. I'm just another engineer.”

  After that he drove for miles in silence and some of his tension spread to Lucy. She felt helpless to say anything to make him feel better, for she knew nothing about his work. Just after sunset they slowed down as they entered a town grim and angular with brick houses. The town hall was red and there was a red factory with windows dark and some of them broken. Men and women with grey faces were crowded around the door of a movie house when they parked the car and got out. A middle-aged man with two front teeth missing asked Lassiter for ten cents for a cup of coffee and Lassiter gave him half a dollar. Then they looked through the flyblown windows of a place called the Maple Leaf Cafe and Lassiter swore.

  “What's the matter with this country? Doesn't anyone but Greeks and Chinamen run restaurants in Ontario? Do you want to go on to the next town?”

  “I doubt if it will be any better. We might as well have supper here. Let's try the one across the street.”

  They edged into a booth in a place called the Radio Cafe and ate leathery steaks in a smell of stale cooking grease, tobacco smoke, and the sourness of spilled milk which had accumulated spill by spill over the months and had never been adequately cleaned from the flooring. On and off, a juke box blared so loud they found it hard to talk.

  “I hate textile towns,” he said.

  She laid down her knife and fork with the steak only half-eaten.

  “All the same,” he said, “this town here counts for more than Grenville. It's got four times as much industry. Do you know what that means?”

  “I'm not sure that I do.”

  “It means for one thing that nice places aren't important any more.”

  She wondered what lay behind the odd defiance in his manner tonight, but did not try to say anything.

  “Outside of New York, what places are important on this continent? Pittsburgh, Chicago, Detroit, Youngstown, even a place like Ponca City in Oklahoma. That's the kind of town that counts. Newark is a dump but it counts. And I'm not talking about the best sections in those places, either. I'm talking about the worst.” He looked up at her. “Your world is dead, Lucy. Do you know it?”

  His strangeness startled her. “What is my world?”

  “I was thinking of you in the garden. It shows in your face, what you feel about that garden. You're beautiful in a way hardly any women are any more. The women you see in New York crossing the Plaza at five o'clock are supposed to be the most wonderful in the world, but they don't look like you. They never remind anybody of a garden. You see them there, they're polished and their clothes cost a fortune, but – but what do they mean? Of course, they're the product of a system, and Carl Bratian says the final product of any system is never any good for anything. Yet every woman in the United States who has to work for a living, every ordinary housewife in the sticks – no matter how plain she is, she's aware of those women in New York.”

  Lucy wondered whether he was talking against her or against a preconceived idea in his own mind. Her intuition told her he was not talking against her, and presently his eyes softened as he turned away.

  “You're lovely,” he murmured. “No, I'd never want to change you.”

  She looked directly at him. “I don't think anyone could.”

  “Then my being around here hasn't made any trouble for you?”

  “Not much.”

  “Wasn't it simpler before?”

  “Only on the surface.”

  He pushed aside a plate containing soggy apple pie and lit a cigarette.

  “It's a funny thing,” he said. “Back home a lot of people think I'm soft. I don't mean physically – they never thought I was soft when I played football. I mean people like Ashweiler and Carl Bratian. They think I let it matter too much if I like somebody. But up here I've had the feeling that Jim Craig and a lot of others think I'm hard.” Seeing her smile, he added almost indignantly. “Are you laughing at me?”

  “No.”

  “Then what are you doing?”

  “Using my imagination, I suppose.”

  “Yes,” he said softly, giving her a sudden intent look. “Yes, you're always using it.” He continued to look at her steadily. “Does it matter to you that I've known rather a lot of women?”

  “Should it matter?”

  “What would your sisters feel about it? Would they think I was immoral if they knew?”

  She broke into a laugh which disconcerted him. “They both know anyway.”

  On the drive back, the moon rode with them. It was almost full now and it whitened the fields. The Ontario lake shore, so gentle, so immature, as if the people who lived here were afraid of losing the austere and bitter innocence of youth, and so kept themselves more plain than was necessary by building their homes with harsh and angular lines, red brick or wood painted in drab colours, was now so transfigured by the moonlight that one's imagination could discover in it almost any shape of beauty found existing within one's self. The car whispered along quietly and once Lucy had the sensation of being at rest while the landscape shifted and flowed past. She pictured the waterway stretching from here back eastward along the trail of the voyageurs to the point where Lake Ontario ends and the St. Lawrence begins, through the flat land of Dundas County where lighted ships in the canals seem like long, low houses moving across the darkness of the fields, through the blaze of light at Montreal and thence down the avenue of the river past the intimate lights of parish after parish, past Quebec and the Ile d'Orléans till the river widens into the solitudes of salt water and no lights remain, and the air is cold and surges smash and drag in the darkness along the empty cliffs of the Gaspé and Labrador.

  His voice broke the reverie. “If you left here, would you miss it?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Would you mind leaving?”

  “I don't know. It would depend.”

  His right hand closed over hers. A mist had risen and it lay on the water like a range of broken hills facing the undulating land, gleaming in the moonlight.

  “Are you getting cold?”

  “A little.”

  “It seems to get cold about a month earlier here than at home. You notice it at night.”

  He stopped the car and snapped the top into place, then drove on more slowly. By the time they reached Grenville swathes of mist had drifted inland, up Matilda Lane as far as the King's Highway, and the trees loomed through it without shadows while the pale light rode above them. The LaSalle glided to a stop.

  “Every light in your house is out.” His lips were almost at her ear. “Maybe your elder sister has got used to me at last.”

  “Have you known all along how Jane feels?”

  “I guessed some of it from your face when you mentioned her. Then Jim Craig helped. He says she's pretty strict.”

  Lucy shivered slightly.

  “Cold?”

  “Not very.”

  The muted sigh of a truck passing on the main highway puffed down the street and it was followed by the forlorn wail of a whistle as a freight train approached a level crossing. The town clock, very faint, struck the half-hour.

  “Lucy?”

  His voice was low. His hand gripped hers and she felt it quiver. Her free hand opened the door, she released herself and slipped out. T
hen he joined her under the trees.

  They walked slowly down the end of the street toward the commons. A light burned in the Frasers’ house and she knew it was in Bruce's room and that he was probably reading in bed. With the grass of the common soft under her feet she felt the mist enfolding them, felt it cold and wet against her face, and then they stood on the shore staring into nothing. Under the mist a wave turned over and broke with a gasp.

  His hand found the soft warmth under her arm, and slowly turning, she lifted her face. As the whole length of her body felt his strength against her, his thighs and chest flexing hard as he strained her close, he kissed her so hard her lips felt bruised. Then he bent and picked her up as if she were a child.

  He stood there on the sand in the darkness holding her, his cheek rough against hers, and it was several minutes before he became aware of her lack of response. He set her down and she stood beside him looking out into the dark mist, hearing the occasional wash of a wave, feeling his hand about her waist so tight she had to strain to breathe against it. For several minutes Lucy felt cold and empty and more alone than she could ever remember feeling in her life. A man she liked better than anyone she had ever known had touched and caressed her, and the strangeness of it had daunted her.

  His hand moved to her shoulder and she felt his fingers stroking her hair and cheek.

  “If I'd never touched another woman – would you like me better? ”

  Her heart stirred at the wistfulness in his voice. He seemed so strangely and surprisingly immature. With a sense almost of physical pain, she felt the hard core of resistance created by her whole life begin to melt. In this sightless mist there were no shapes or straight lines or even movement or sound. She took the fingers of his hand from her hair and pressed them to her cheek. He made no attempt to kiss her again. He simply stood there with her head against his shoulder and his fingers in hers against her cheek.