The Precipice

by Hugh Maclennan

  “How did you happen?” she said simply. “What made you think you'd like someone like me?”

  “I don't know. At least, not to put it into words.”

  “Was it only because you've been alone here?”

  “At first, yes. At first I thought you'd be different. You'd be something new.” He stopped. “But that didn't last very long.”

  She made no move and for many minutes they were silent.

  Lucy's mind became cool as it informed her she was at a crisis of her life. It informed her that she had no experience, she had nothing to go by but intuition. But she knew that she understood at least one part of him; she understood his loneliness. Almost, she understood that his boyish sensuality was perhaps the best part of him because it was his own blind way of trying to discover himself. The world his conscious mind admired seemed both senseless and harsh to her. He valued none of the things she loved best. He had none of Bruce Fraser's desire to make the world a better place. Almost, his conscious attitude seemed to state without words, “I didn't make the rules. And I know, as in your heart you know, that there's nothing to be done about them.”

  When he spoke his voice was quietly intense, as if he were talking to himself. “Wanting a woman isn't the same as loving her. The way I've lived, it's been simpler to want things. You see what you want and you try to get it. Generally you have to pay for it.” His voice grew heavy with emotion. “But loving isn't wanting, Lucy. I wish it were. Then maybe I could understand it. Last night, alone in that goddam hotel room, I got scared.”

  She heard his words with wonder. She knew then that he was more lonely than she herself had ever been. She could sense that his eyes were straining through the darkness toward her.

  “For hours last night I lay awake listening to that town clock beating itself up and all I could see was your face. Not your body, but your face. I remembered the way you'd looked at trees and flowers as if nobody had ever seen them before. Nobody has looked at me the way you do since I was a kid.”

  A series of small waves broke with a slow rhythm on the sand, and they took a few steps backward to avoid the upward wash. Her mind leaping for an instant out of the intensity of the second, she wondered where the waves had come from.

  “There must be a freighter out there in the fog,” she murmured.

  He paid no attention to her remark. He probably did not even hear it.

  “Last night I was thinking about myself. I've taken a wrong steer some place. I don't know what it is. I thought I was getting ahead with Sani-Quip. Now Carl's made me see I haven't a chance with them. I don't know what's the matter. That crowd in Cleveland…”

  He stopped, and for a long time the only sound was the whisper of water drops falling from leaves as they congealed into globules, and the globules slid off the slope of the leaves in the dark.

  “Then I came up here. I'd never lived in a place like this before. It seemed like – well, like the United States might have been forty or fifty years ago. Maybe like parts of the South are now where things haven't really begun to move. Then I began to wonder what the hell had happened to all of us – my family, I mean. My mother had everything she wanted, but before she died she didn't even have a real home. Her relatives were just so many names in an address book. My sister is as clever as hell, she knows all the answers, but Jesus – she's made a mess out of her life. She's not thirty yet and she's gone through two husbands already. And yet we had everything. We ought to have been the happiest people in the world.” A silence. “Then I met you. You've never been anywhere, but you make me feel ignorant. You seem to understand things I don't know anything about.” He stopped, and then he went on with a surge of emotion. “I never wanted to fall in love with anyone like you, Lucy, but I have.”

  Her face lifted and her sigh lost itself in the mist. He kissed her very gently. His hands caressed her breasts, and her head dropped back. As she felt his strength urgent against her body, her mind lurched and swayed, and a quiver of ecstasy flashed along her nerves. Out of the darkness the ecstasy grew and became visible, a jet of unbelievable flame flaring out of primeval darkness.

  “Lucy!” He was holding her up, and she realized she had gone limp in his arms. “Are you all right?”

  She tried to see his face in the darkness. She slipped into his arms and for a long time her lips were hungry under his. Then abruptly she broke free as implanted fears surged up and made her ashamed. Even as her mind told her there was nothing to be ashamed of, she felt drained and helpless. In clinging to him as she had done, in yielding to his hands on her breasts, she had revealed the heat of her own desire, and so had surrendered to him forever the gift of her invulnerability.

  “I'm in love with you, Lucy.”

  The words hit her mind like the clang of a bell.

  “There's never been anything like this for me before. Say something, Lucy, for God's sake!”

  She could not answer him. She heard his voice begging, begging for what she did not know, in her dazed confusion his voice became like a choir: “I love you, Lucy. I can do anything now. I can trample down everything that's kept me back. It's been inside me, that's where the trouble was. I love you, Lucy.” She turned from him and moved inland. In this haunted, luminous mist the trees were strange. They were cool and ghostly like fungoid outgrowths of the darkness itself, like the colourless, scentless, noiseless landscape of a dark dream through which once she had wandered lost and alien, and then had awakened in the familiar room, her body floating weightless on the bed while her reason recorded the fact that she had returned from a journey through herself and had found a mysterious peace in that foreign place. But now she was alone in the empty room of the night, alone with her ignorance and guilt and pity that things must always be as they are.

  He was still beside her, holding her wrists. “I love you, Lucy. This is real, you know.”

  Her lips opened but nothing came from them. Her mind said, What is love, What is love? And then crazily, she heard Jane's voice. God is love, Lucy. Lonely God.

  Her eyes groped through the dark for his massive presence beside her. That was all he was in this mist, a present mass. She had forgotten even what he looked like. He seized her almost roughly, as though his muscular strength could break down all obstacles in her, his hands caressed her body with fierce boldness, his lips passed over her eyes and cheeks until she was physically exhausted.

  Then abruptly he broke away. “I've been alone too long. I'm sorry.”

  A startled night-bird screamed in the darkness over the lake. She stood there silent and invisible beside him under the trees.

  “There's something I want to tell you,” he said. “But I'd rather let it go until some other time. It's not important. It hasn't anything to do with you and me.” She was silent, so he said, “We'd better go back. Tomorrow – if you will – we'll sit quietly and talk.”

  Her eyes blurred with tears and she laid the back of his hand against her cheek. It was so large her face felt frail against it.

  Then she turned toward home and he walked quietly beside her as they passed up the common through the trees to the road. He kissed her lightly as she opened the door of the house, then turned without a word and went back to his car.

  THE next morning Lucy was wakened by the sound of Jane giving a piano lesson. She heard a spatter of rain against the window and closed her eyes. Fifteen minutes later she opened them with a start and saw by the clock on her dresser that it was five minutes past ten. She remembered she had forgotten to set the alarm the night before, and wondered if Jane had been cross about having to get the breakfast herself. Slipping out of bed, she put on a dressing gown, stretched, and went to the window. Her eyes were heavy with sleep as she looked out at the rain. She remembered having heard the first drops just before falling asleep at four in the morning.

  Her lips were tender, and she started impulsively to the mirror to see if his kisses had bruised them, thinking from the way they felt that they must be tell-tale to everyone. Al
l she saw in the mirror was a sleepy face. It was only then that she noticed the bowl of flowers on her desk. Five roses, with a few raindrops still clinging to their petals.

  When she entered the hall she heard Nina moving in her own bedroom and Lucy went to her door impulsively.

  “Oh, Nina, thank you for cutting the roses.”

  “It seemed a shame to leave them out in the rain. And don't worry about breakfast. I got it for Jane.”

  “Thank you,” Lucy said. There was more than gratitude in her voice.

  At half-past eleven Lassiter telephoned. “Look,” he said without preliminaries, “this is the devil. I've to go back to Cleveland right away.”

  She was ashamed to be trembling all over at the thought of his leaving her alone again.

  “For good?” she managed to say.

  “God, no! Only for a week. Maybe I'll even be back before that. Working for Sani-Quip is like being in the army. You're never sure what's cooking.” His voice sounded almost gaily casual as he added, “Going to miss me?”

  Lucy glanced down the hall. Nina was upstairs and Jane was giving a lesson to an exceptionally bad pupil who was making one mistake after another in a complicated series of scales.

  “Yes. How soon are you leaving?”

  No sound came from the other end of the wire. Then she realized he had put his hand over the mouthpiece to speak to somebody in the office. His voice came again.

  “Wait a minute.” She could hear him talking impatiently to someone at the other end, then he returned to her. “These bastards say I've got to leave right now. They're driving me to Toronto to catch a plane and they're in a hurry. I hate to go like this!”

  “It's all right, Stephen.”

  “I'll be back soon. Only a week at the most, darling. Think about me while I'm gone or I won't be able to stand it.”

  She murmured something and the wire went dead, leaving her staring up at The Death of Nelson. Rain drummed on the clapboards and the entire house brooded in dark shadows and grey light as she went down the hall to resume the mechanical routine of her housework.

  At noon a pupil left and Jane turned on the radio for news. Nina came downstairs and all three listened to the exquisite voice of the BBC announcer who had been carrying the world crisis for over a month into every little town along the Canadian railroad tracks. Today the announcer told the world that this year's conference of the Nazi Party at Nuremberg was going to be the most dramatic ever held, that the Diplomatische Korrespondenz had produced another threatening editorial, and that Mr. Chamberlain had no comment to make.

  “I can't understand,” Jane interrupted, “why England goes on pampering those people.”

  ON THURSDAY evening of that week Lassiter telephoned from Cleveland. When Lucy came downstairs in answer to Nina's summons, she was aware of a muted sense of excitement in the house. It was her first long-distance call. He began by telling her he would be back the following Tuesday. For several minutes he kept up a half-kidding conversation, and she answered in such a low voice he thought the connection was bad. It never occurred to him that her sisters, one in the living room and the other just out of sight at the top of the stairs, were listening to every word she said.

  Finally he burst out, “God damn this phone! It's bad enough being more than five hundred miles away from you without – can't you hear me yet?”

  “Yes,” she said. “You could easily be right here.”

  “Well, I can hardly hear a word you say. Lucy – I'm as lonely as hell. But I've found out something important. You and I are made for each other. We've got to get –”

  Jane came out of the living room and Lucy shifted to one side in hasty embarrassment as she passed down the narrow hall. The receiver twisted against her ear and his next words were blurred. Jane passed on up the stairs.

  “…and remember it till I get back.”

  “I'm afraid I didn't hear,” she said. “Not all of it.”

  “God damn this phone, it's got me licked! I'll be back on Tuesday. In the meantime, remember I love you. Did you hear that?”

  “Yes.”

  Then he hung up and she went into the living room. Her embarrassment gave way to wonder as she realized the full import of what he had said.

  She switched on the light over the piano, sat down, and tried to compose her nerves by playing the music which was open on the rest. It was the “Waldstein Sonata” and the allegro movement was much too difficult for her fingers. Then Nina burst into the room.

  “Oh, for heaven's sake, Lucy – stop that! It sounds terrible.”

  “I'm sorry.” She turned from the piano.

  Nina's impish face appeared in the light. “How does it feel? Long-distance calls and everything! He didn't call just to hear the sound of your voice, did he?”

  “Long-distance calls don't mean anything to Americans.”

  “From the expression on your face they mean something to you. You look like the cat –” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “You should have seen Jane.”

  “I did.”

  Lucy got up and turned her back, her old habit of defence against Nina reasserting itself. She picked up a book and went upstairs to her room.

  But that night when she lay in bed unable to sleep, her mind was filled with a sort of wild radiance. She whispered to herself in the empty room, “How could a thing like this happen to me! How could a man like Stephen fall in love with someone like me!” Then she remembered the feeling of his lips on hers. She remembered the enormous strength of his body as he had held her. She recalled how people in Grenville had looked up to him as a man with authority who knew his job. She knew nothing of his work, but it was good to know he was respected for it. She felt strangely proud of him. And then she recalled the wistfulness in his voice as he had spoken to her that night on the beach in the darkness. He was not miraculous. He was not someone out of a fairy tale coming to rescue her from frustration. He had known many other women and yet he had singled her out from them all. She closed her eyes and listened to the stirring of a faint wind in the trees. She tried to imagine herself with children, living with freedom in her own house. She felt an overpowering gratitude to this man who had been the first to recognize her as a woman. Again she recalled the feeling of his lips on her own, and her body moved in bed as she turned on her side, her fingers against her cheeks. He needed her and she loved him. Whatever he wanted she would do.

  For the remainder of that week she felt utterly alone, but not solitary. She was unable to imagine what the next months would bring. She merely waited out the days until his return with a confidence she had never known. Several women she met in the town commented on how well she was looking, and Jane, sensing in her sister an invulnerability and a dignity she had never remarked before, was puzzled and disturbed.

  This mood of wonder, doubt, and excitement lasted until Sunday.

  They were in church again, and the sunshine of a fine day poured in through the gothic windows. Even more of the older men were wearing their service buttons; but today, in this lovely end-of-the-summer warmth, there was no tension in the church. They sang “The Lord Is My Shepherd” to “Wiltshire” and followed it up with “Fight the Good Fight” and “The Church's One Foundation.” The anthem was “Lift Up Your Heads,” and when Jane's choir broke into it the faces of the singers shone with their pleasure in the music. Watching them, seeing the sunshine pouring into the church on bald heads and white hair, on young children with their parents, Lucy thought what a laundered, soap-and-water appearance the people all had this morning, and the other side of the Presbyterian faith, the great and noble side enunciated in the response to the first proposition of the Catechism, struck Lucy with a force she had never felt in a church before – Man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever! Her father, she thought smiling, might have wanted to believe that, but he had never felt it safe to take a chance on it.

  When the service was over Lucy and Nina waited on the lawn for Jane to join them from the
choir entrance. Family friends stopped to speak, and the usual fragments of conversation drifted about: “I thought the choir was simply marvellous this morning. Miss Cameron's really wonderful with them, don't you think…If only Dr. Grant wasn't so depressed about Hitler…But he's so right about committees…look at Mrs. Edgerton's work to get a committee together to get rid of that pool room! She's losing her mind and the place is still open for business…The Baptists must have had a long sermon today…Poor things, Dr. Puddington is such a trial to them…”

  The doors of the neighbouring church opened and let a flood of Baptists into the street. Jane appeared from the side entrance, came out along the path, and joined Lucy and Nina. Out of the press of Baptists heading west, Mrs. Craig, the wife of the manager of the Ceramic Company, detached herself and approached them. They all agreed it was a fine day.

  Looking at the sisters with a smile both kindly and meaningful, Mrs. Craig said, “I've been wanting to tell you. I thought it was so nice for Mr. Lassiter to be able to meet you all when he was here. Jim and I liked him so much, and we used to wonder what he'd do for company in Grenville. A man like that is used to so much excitement and activity. I'm sure you were a godsend to him.”

  Before Jane could speak, Nina cut in. “He was probably good for us, too,” she said.

  Mrs. Craig nodded to a passing acquaintance. “I hope he'll be able to bring his wife back with him,” she said. “I'd like to meet her. From a picture I saw of her in the society page of The New York Times she must be an exceptionally striking-looking woman.”

  A lifetime habit of control kept Lucy's face expressionless. Out of the corner of her eye she saw that Nina had given a quick start and had flushed. The silence which followed Mrs. Craig's remark lasted no more than two seconds, but to Lucy it seemed eternal.

  Jane broke it. She smiled easily, and her voice was quietly matter-of-fact. “We only just met him, you know, and he barely mentioned his wife. One day he was in the library when I was on duty and he asked me a lot of questions about the books we had. Later on he came to tea in the garden.” She paused to speak to a friend, then continued, “His wife must be famous to be in the Times. Is she an actress?”