The Precipice

by Hugh Maclennan

  “No, I don't think she's that famous.” Mrs. Craig's eyes passed quickly from Jane to Lucy, and Lucy knew that the next remark was intended for her. She also knew that the older woman was being kind. Mrs. Craig liked to talk and Jane thought her a fool, but she was one of the most tolerant people in Grenville. “He stayed with us the first two weeks he was here, you know.” She smiled and nodded to another friend. “He used to get the Sunday papers from New York and he gave them to me when he was finished. I was quite excited when I saw a picture on the society page with the name underneath – Mrs. Stephen Lassiter. I asked him if she was a relation. I thought of course he knew it was there. Then he looked at the paper and said, ‘So she's in the paper again, is she?’ Then he grinned – you know that funny kind of grin so many Americans seem to have, as if they were making fun of you and themselves at the same time. ‘Meet my wife, Mrs. Craig,’ he said to me. Then he handed the paper back and asked me what I thought of her. I was so taken aback I hadn't the slightest idea what to say, it seemed such a funny question to be asked.”

  Nina turned to go, but Jane remained where she was, speaking quite calmly. Lucy was motionless. Her face had become pale, and she knew it.

  “Of course,” Jane said, “we're so quiet I'm sure we bored Mr. Lassiter almost to death, but on the other hand, I must say he didn't have much to talk about that interested me.” She nodded to another acquaintance and turned toward the sidewalk. “Are you going our way? I'd meant to ask someone what Mr. Orme finally chose for his anthem in your church this morning. He told me Friday he wanted “God Is a Spirit,” but he thought his sopranos were too loud for it. I know mine are.”

  “YOU'VE made me lie,” Jane said when they had reached their own living room.

  Lucy looked at her dumbly and shook her head. Nina went out into the hall and they heard a sudden burst of sobbing. Without raising her voice, Jane turned her head to the open door.

  “Nina, stop being hysterical.” Then, turning back to Lucy with her high cheekbones flushed, she said, “I never thought we'd have to be ashamed.”

  Lucy lifted her chin and her voice was steady though her hands trembled. “No one has to be ashamed. There was nothing done to be ashamed of. All he said was that he loves me, and I still believe him.”

  “You pitiful fool!”

  Nina burst into the room and flung herself at Jane. “Don't you say things to Lucy like that! Can't you see – can't you ever see anything, Jane? She's in love with him and it's beautiful and you're killing her, talking like that.”

  Jane's hands traced the beginning of a caressing motion over Nina's tousled hair, but she suppressed the gesture and forced her young sister away. Nina stood back, looking at her with an expression of bewildered and angry fear under her tousled yellow hair.

  “Can't you ever think of how people feel? What will happen to me when I fall in love if you're going to think I'm terrible too?”

  Jane's steady gaze reduced Nina to silence. Then she said quietly, “I'm old enough to be your mother, Nina. In a few years you'll understand what that means. Now please go out and lay the table for dinner. I want to talk to Lucy and I want to talk to her alone.”

  Nina stared back, but only for a moment. Then she dropped her eyes and did what she was told.

  Jane turned calmly to Lucy. “I never thought I'd have to tell a lie to anybody, much less to a person like Mrs. Craig. The Craigs have never had anything but money and they haven't had that for long. They'd be very pleased to be able to look down on people like us.” She created a long, deliberate pause. “I suppose you're aware that she knew I was telling a lie?”

  Lucy looked into her sister's eyes. They were large, black as buttons, and they gleamed with intensity.

  “I don't care,” she said. “You had no reason to tell her anything, except for the sake of your pride. If you wanted to tell her something, why didn't you tell her the truth? Or what you thought was the truth?”

  Jane looked at her steadily. “Father loved you more than he did any of us, and yet he never quite trusted you. He was always afraid you'd be too soft.”

  Lucy turned her back on her sister and looked up to the mantelpiece. Her father's picture stared back at her.

  “What are you trying to do, Jane? Drive me out of the house?”

  She turned and saw Jane make a small motion with her hand.

  “Don't be silly and don't make a scene,” Jane said. “Neither you nor Nina can earn your own living. You seem to forget we're poor and that none of us is clever. If we lose our self-respect and common sense, we're completely ruined. We've never been able to afford luxuries, and these – these emotional upsets are the worst luxuries of all.”

  Lucy felt as if her whole body were surging away from Jane. Actually she moved quietly, with her usual slow constrained motion, across the room to the window. Clear and radiantly blue, the lake reflected the sky.

  “I'm sick of hypocrisy,” she said. “I'm sick of living with fear. Fear of what?” Her voice almost broke. “Fear of nothing but what people like Father put into our minds when we were helpless children. I'm not ashamed. I'm not ashamed I fell in love even if Stephen is married. I don't mind Mrs. Craig knowing the truth.”

  “Knowing the truth!” Jane's lips became a thin line, and her voice quivered with the passion of her bitter knowledge. “Have you become soft-headed as well as soft-hearted? What does knowing the truth matter? Anyone who stops to think – even for a few minutes – knows the truth about most people. What matters is talking about it. When people talk about it, it becomes different. It becomes horrible.”

  Lucy turned quickly. “Jane – that's mad!”

  “Is it?” Jane said grimly. “Is it? Let me tell you something. Elizabeth Craig may have thought I was lying to her this morning. But she only thinks I was because I kept up appearances. As long as she's not absolutely sure, she's not going to talk about you. That's the kind of a woman she happens to be, and you can count yourself lucky.”

  The expression on Jane's face was one Lucy had never seen before. It was completely unmasked. It was the expression of a woman infinitely shrewd.

  “I don't care,” Lucy said desperately. “It's degrading to live in hiding like this. People here aren't cruel. People in Grenville are kind if you give them a chance.”

  “People here,” said Jane softly, “are like people anywhere else. They don't really like women like us. They don't like men like Father. There's nothing to be done about it and it doesn't matter. For they always respect us.”

  “Respect us? For what we do? Or for what we don't do?”

  “For what we are! And you can be very sure they'll be merciless if we ever give them a chance to say we aren't what we seem to be. It's too late, Lucy. It's too late for you to be another kind of woman even if you want to be.”

  Lucy put both hands over her face. In a whisper she repeated, “I'm not ashamed. I won't let you make me ashamed.”

  For several seconds Jane regarded her. “You will always have to live here,” she said. “I see nothing else for it because these days a woman has to be very highly trained to become anything but a shopgirl or a kind of servant.” She paused, calmly waiting. Then, her voice still quiet, she continued. “If everyone in town went about telling everyone else that you'd been keeping company with a married man – you, a girl they've had the impertinence to pity because you've been quiet and cultured and decent – if they said you'd been committing adultery with this sordid American – and you may be quite sure that's exactly what they would say if the talk started – if you knew, every time you passed people on the street, what they'd say the moment you were out of earshot, and if each time you remembered you'd have to go on living with such talk for years until you were an old woman – do you think you'd be able to tell me then you weren't ashamed?”

  There was a long silence. Lucy's knees grew weak and she shook her head slowly. “No,” she said in a whisper. “No.”

  Jane drew in her breath. “Now run along, and let's ha
ve our dinner in peace.”

  THAT night Lucy slept only a few hours. She woke in the morning to a cool fresh day, made breakfast, and went out to the garden. It was no comfort to her, for the whole enclosure ached with the recollection of her own happiness. She saw the deck chair in which Stephen had sat and talked. Its canvas seat was limp and shabby and ruffled in the light breeze.

  She left the garden and returned to the house and tried to get through with her usual work. Bobby Harmon was bungling his first piano lesson as usual. He jangled, stopped while Jane lectured him, then blundered on again. She left the house and walked into town, hoping to meet the postman on the way. She knew there would be no letter from Stephen, for he was not the kind who would write letters even if he had something to say; if he wanted to talk to her he would telephone. She did not see the postman, but by the time she had reached the highway she had almost persuaded herself there would be a letter from him in the morning mail; there would surely be something to explain what he had done. A man like Stephen, she told herself, was far too frank and direct to tell her he loved her, practically to ask her to marry him, if all the time he was already married himself.

  She met the postman on her return and he handed her only one envelope, which was not from Stephen. It was addressed to the Misses Cameron in Mrs. Craig's neat, correct and commonplace handwriting, and it contained a brief note and a clipping from a newspaper. Lucy crumpled the note and dropped it into her pocket, took a quick glance at the picture and slipped it into her shopping bag. Then, as she looked up, she saw Matt McCunn waiting for her at the corner. He was as neat as ever, this morning wearing a blue polka-dot tie, his trousers threadbare at the cuffs but freshly pressed, his face genial and almost dapper.

  When she reached him she made no attempt to return his smile. “I thought you'd gone up north for the winter?” she said.

  McCunn grinned. “Well, everything was against it from the beginning. I got no further north than Sudbury, where I met some old hards I used to know and won a hundred and fifty dollars in a three-day poker game. Then I started listening to the radio and what was the use? You can't stand it alone in the bush when things are getting ready to snap. Don't you know there's going to be a war?”

  “Is there?” she said.

  She started to walk back the way she had come. He had been the first man in Grenville to enlist in 1914 and he was probably intending to be the first to try to enlist when the new war began. She walked quickly back to Matilda Lane. Only when she was completely alone, walking down to the lake under the trees, did she take the clipping from her basket and examine it.

  The picture showed the world's idea of a beautiful woman. Her blonde hair was tailored, her face narrow with arched cheekbones and eyebrows. Her nose was as delicately haughty as an Egyptian's. She was the kind of woman who wore clothes such as Lucy had never seen except in the pages of a magazine. She was the kind who was at home in any drawing room in any city of the world. Her manners were cool, considered, and flawless. If she and Lucy were ever to meet face to face, she was the kind of woman to whom a girl like Lucy would exist merely as something which for the moment interrupted her line of vision, or imposed on her code of manners an obligation to be distantly polite. She was a woman who knew her price and had always known it, who quietly took it for granted there would never be a lack of men like Stephen Lassiter willing to pay it. The caption under the picture told nothing further about her. It stated merely that she was chairman of a committee of a Junior League charity ball.

  Lucy looked at the picture until she had memorized it. Then she continued her walk home and entered the house, and when Nina spoke to her, trying to be kind but unable to keep out of her voice some traces of her old habit of depreciation, she had nothing to say. She felt completely stunned. An hour ago, in spite of the evidence Mrs. Craig had given her, in spite of the lingering horror of her scene with Jane, she had been sustained by the inner conviction that Stephen Lassiter was in love with her. Now, having seen the picture of his wife, she was sure he was not. No man married to such a woman could feel anything but a passing affection for someone like herself; or, being lonely and bored, could do more than want her casually as men apparently always wanted women, as casually as they wanted food, contriving to press each incident for what it was worth in order to squeeze the last drop of pleasure from it. She closed her eyes. The worst thing of all was the fact that when he had made love to her he had been sincere. Her senses told her that. Therefore sincerity was something which could be casual too. She knew that if he appeared and touched her again she would be helpless against him. In bewilderment she realized that once again Jane was right. If you let your defences down, everything flowed over you.

  Then her brain clogged and froze. It refused to work any more. The image of Stephen Lassiter's wife floated across her eyes once more and her lips set for a moment, then grew soft. The image faded out and she went upstairs to lie down and try to rest. But she was unable to sleep that morning nor again that night. She was stunned, her nerves remained on edge even while her mind refused to function, and the next day she was so silent and abstracted that Jane began to worry about her.

  EARLY on Tuesday afternoon Lassiter telephoned to say he was back in Grenville and would be calling to see her within the half-hour. The sound of his voice made her tremble and he had to repeat himself before she replied.

  “I can't see you.”

  “Why not? Anything the matter?”

  “No. But I can't see you, Stephen.”

  His voice sounded disappointed, but it remained fairly casual. “What about tonight then, after supper? My job here is finished. I didn't come back to the factory, I came back to see you. You tell me when…”

  “Not at all, I'm afraid.”

  “What?” His tone quickly changed. “Look, Lucy, has anything –”

  She hung up before he could finish and looked down the empty hall. Then, realizing that he would probably come over directly, she left the house and walked down to the common, across and up the next street to the highway. She had no errands, but she could go to the library for a while. There are always errands to invent in a small town.

  When she was two hundred yards eastward on the main road she saw the LaSalle approaching and knew that he had recognized her. She saw him pulling over to the wrong side of the road, and as she reached the corner of Minto Street she turned quickly to the right to avoid having to meet him in the view of a pair of elderly women she had seen approaching. Minto Street was empty. The car entered it and stopped beside her, and she saw his puzzled face leaning toward her.

  “What's this all about?”

  It seemed foolish to continue walking, so she waited for him to get out of the car and join her. As she saw his large, lithe body sloping around the end of the car and coming near, every nerve tightened as she tried to keep the returning fondness from infecting her. She began to walk back toward the main road, for Minto Street ended at the beach on the town side of the common, and at this hour there were many people at the water's edge. He fell into step beside her, looked at her curiously, and said nothing. They walked past the head of Matilda Lane, past the filling station and the giant oak tree, and soon were on the country road on the edge of town with a farm on one side and a fallow field on the other rolling down to the lake.

  “What's the matter, Lucy? Why can't you see me any more?”

  She felt the colour mount to her face. It hurt to ask the question she had to ask now. It sounded vulgar and theatrical.

  “You're married, Stephen. Aren't you?”

  He stopped and looked at her. “So that's what it's all about!” he said quietly.

  She began to walk again. Walking, looking straight ahead, she could break the spell of his fascination.

  “Mrs. Craig told me on Sunday.” Suddenly the statement of bare facts was comforting. Facts had a sort of life of their own, unaffected by emotion. Her voice was level as she continued. “She showed me a picture of your wife that was in the Tim
es. She's very beautiful.”

  Lassiter hunched his shoulders and kicked a pebble out of his way. It shot in a low arc twenty feet up the road, then bounded off at an angle into the grass. They stood aside as a truck passed, and again stood aside as a pair of cars followed it.

  “Let's get off this road,” he said. He turned toward the lower field. “God damn it – ever since we've met we've been running away from some place or other to be alone. It's no good.”

  A wire fence blocked entrance to the field and there was no gate. He leaned against a fence post and took out a package of cigarettes, offered them to her automatically, took one himself when he remembered she did not smoke, lit it, and flicked the match across the shallow ditch onto the pavement.

  “I should have told you,” he said. “I was going to tell you today.”

  She looked away across the fields.

  “Joyce is getting a divorce now,” he said. “She left New York for Reno last week. I talked to her from Cleveland before she left. I think she wants to marry somebody else, but I'm not sure. Maybe she only wants to get rid of me. She never told me anything I wanted to know.” He stared into her face, but she frustrated him by continuing to avert her eyes. “Joyce and I have been washed up nearly two years.”

  She was quivering like an animal in the cold when she put her hand on the top wire strand of the fence. It seemed a terrible place to have to talk to him, to settle this affair standing by the highway on the edge of a field.

  “It has nothing to do with you and me,” he said.

  His blindness to her state of mind shook her. She covered her face with her hands, then was ashamed for revealing such weakness and emotion to a man she was trying to think of as a stranger.

  “Why couldn't you have told me? Why didn't you tell me long ago?”