The Precipice

by Hugh Maclennan

  “Well” – he tried to grin, but without success – “suppose I had? Joyce hadn't made up her mind what she was going to do then. How would you have felt?”

  “At least I'd have known.”

  She realized that in his eyes the fact that his wife was getting a divorce cleared up everything. Within a few weeks he would be free, like an apartment vacated on the first of the month, ready for the new tenant to move in. He was not trying to excuse himself. He felt there was nothing to excuse.

  She turned and forced herself to concentrate on his expression, like a student looking at a page in the text book during the last minute before an examination begins and all books are closed. For a moment she felt cool and untouchable, and this gave her an access of strength. She saw him now as a person who had been so spoiled by someone in his childhood that it was practically impossible for him to imagine that he could ever commit a serious wrong, or ever do anything that others would not be glad to forgive providing the forgiving put him in good humour again. And yet, he was not that simple. Somebody else had always resented him. Of course, she thought; that someone had been his father. She remembered his saying that his father had been a rugged, self-made man, while his mother had been gently reared. How much of what he now was could be traced back to his boyhood? He had no deep need for male friendship, just as he must always have been sure of himself with women. He was sure even now, and his confidence wounded her pride. He had invaded her solitude and taught her finally that she was passionate, probably more passionate than the average woman, until she was ashamed of how vulnerable he had made her.

  He took a step toward her, and she was afraid that if he touched her she would be helpless. She put up a hand as if to ward him off.

  “Lucy, my dear, don't you realize that where I come from divorce is a pretty common occurrence? Everybody makes mistakes. Don't you think you might try to see my side of it?”

  She clung to the top wire of the fence.

  “Do you think,” he said, “that it's been any fun finding out that the woman you married doesn't like you any more? You were quite right about Joyce. She is beautiful. But I didn't enjoy her beauty half as much as she did herself, and no man ever will.” He paused as if waiting for her to respond to the tone of his voice. “You're intelligent, Lucy. Particularly about people. Well, you saw Joyce's picture. Do you think she's generous? Do you think she's warm?”

  Lucy looked down over the field to the lake. Near the shore some boys were swimming and trying to duck each other. Otherwise the lake was empty.

  “Lucy, will you marry me? Because I love you so much.”

  “Don't!” she said. “Please don't say any more.”

  “I've said it to very few in my life, you know. I'm not a complicated man, and maybe I'm not very bright. I make mistakes. Only you're not one of them. You're different from anyone I've ever known. You're simple and decent and lovely. Joyce will get a divorce in a few weeks more and after that I'll be quite free to get married again. But it's got to be you.”

  Her mind asked itself why she could not simply say yes and drown her whole background in her longing for him. Her brain had years ago rejected most of the values by which Jane lived. But apparently the brain was not a very important part of the human organism. She could not say yes to him now. The attitude of many years was too heavy, making her feel deep in her core that marriage between someone like herself and a divorced man like Stephen Lassiter was so unthinkable it was taboo. Where could the marriage occur? Here in Grenville, where everyone would say that Lucy Cameron had broken up a marriage and had hardly waited a day after a Reno decree before taking the other woman's place? And then, seeing how confident he was in spite of the pleading note in his voice, her pride was wounded again.

  “No,” she said quietly, “I can't.” She turned to leave him. But, curious to know one more thing, she paused and asked, “Have you any children, Stephen?”

  An angry flush touched his cheekbones. “What do you think? I'm no angel, but I'm not a heel, either. If I had children, they would matter to me and I'd have told you long ago.”

  Their eyes met and for a second a flood of sympathy passed between them. In alarm she turned and began to walk away from him. He came forward, lithe and instinctive as an animal, and took her in his arms. A truck swished by and he paid no attention, but swung her around and kissed her fiercely on the lips. She struggled, helpless against his strength, loving the sense of his physical power. He kissed her again, then released her and looked at her with the flash of a boyish smile.

  “Don't touch me!” she whispered. “Don't ever touch me again!”

  She turned and walked quickly back along the road, and he remained behind, motionless with astonishment. He watched her figure receding, thinking how small and graceful she was and how strange, and asked himself in angry bewilderment why in hell everything that mattered in his life always went wrong.

  When Lucy got home she met Jane in the hall, and for a moment the sisters’ eyes met. It was evident that Jane had guessed who had made the telephone call an hour ago.

  “He's not really married,” Lucy said in a flat voice she could hardly recognize as her own. “His wife is in Reno, getting a divorce.” Jane's eyes opened wide with alarm. “I had nothing to do with it. It was going to happen anyway.” She began walking up the stairs, adding as she went, “He's leaving Grenville tomorrow. I won't be seeing him again.”

  But when she reached her room the finality of her last words hit against her mind and tears began to stream down her cheeks. In tormented confusion she asked herself why she had sent him away, why at the crisis she had been unable to discard the superstitious sense of taboo under which she had been reared? Was it pride or fear or merely lack of imagination, the inability to conceive of anything real outside a town where people never divorced, where passion was either orderly and blessed by clergy, or else concealed and crushed out of existence?

  She went to the bathroom and bathed her eyes, and a few minutes later she heard the front door open and close. Jane had left for her afternoon walk. She went downstairs and stretched out in the long chair before the fireplace, her mind stunned, her senses in turmoil. The phone rang four times and she made no move to answer it. Fifteen minutes later the doorbell rang and she remained where she was, sitting in the long chair in the living room. Then there was silence for several minutes in which she heard footsteps on the gravel as somebody walked through the narrow lane on the left side of the house to the garden. Deliberately she turned her face away from the window and looked up at the twin photographs of her father and mother on the mantel.

  AUGUST slipped into September. Shortly after Labour Day, Bruce Fraser went back to his school in Toronto. The nights grew colder and the first signs of red appeared on the maples. Grenville seemed empty after the handful of summer people returned to Toronto and the hotels received fewer tourists. The Ceramic Company was now working more or less on the schedules Lassiter had laid out for it, but the talk spread around the town that after his departure another expert, a man higher up in the Sani-Quip Company, had come to check his work. There was a wide-spread belief that Lassiter's recommendations had been more favourable to old Grenville employees than the parent company desired.

  During that September in Canada, as everywhere else in the western world, people shared the same agony of fear and shame when Hitler revealed that he was at last in a position to disgrace the entire human race. When Chamberlain went to Munich something happened in Canada which few people understood at the time. Outside of Quebec, they had been taught from childhood to believe that their principal glory as a people rested on the fact that they were part of the British Empire. But along with this sense of continuance from the Old Country, which Americans had largely lost through the revolution, they had for years accepted British foreign policy like a handed-down suit of clothes. Now a psychological break occurred. Inarticulate people began to realize that Canada, in fact, was standing more and more alone, and they had a feeling
a little like the mingled sadness and tenderness which comes over a growing man the first time he fully understands that his father is no wiser or more infallible than he is himself. But overshadowing all sentiment, as everywhere else, was the fear of the war. Unlike the Americans, they knew they would be in it from the beginning, and it gave them a feeling of being trapped.

  For Lucy, that month of September was a time when news broadcasts formed a rising crescendo to her own unhappiness. Jane turned on the radio at least five times a day to listen, and produced argument after argument to convince herself that instead of being scared to death, Chamberlain was following a policy so profound nobody could understand it. In her preoccupation with the world crisis, Jane almost succeeded in forgetting Stephen Lassiter. One evening the telephone rang when Lucy was out of the house and Jane told the long distance operator to inform the party in Cleveland that Lucy Cameron was no longer in Grenville. But Jane never told Lucy about this call.

  Chrysanthemums and Michaelmas daisies gave a final show of colour in the garden. Apples were picked from their one tree, they preserved peaches and pears and made crab-apple jelly, and put up the last of the beans and tomatoes. This was the only kind of housework that Jane enjoyed. She liked seeing the rows of jelly jars gleaming as she thought how much they would all enjoy them in the winter months. The whole town began to tidy up against the winter, and on the day Chamberlain flew to Munich, the Grenville streets were blue with the smoke of burning leaves. Lucy began to prepare her cold frames for the winter; she spent hours in the garden with a chart of the plants, making notes for transplantings in the spring.

  Chamberlain flew back to Croydon bringing peace in his time, and the newscasters reporting his return brought to Grenville a cessation from anxiety. At least there would be no fighting in 1938. Nina left for her third year at Queen's and Lucy and Jane were alone in the house.

  EARLY in October Grenville felt its first frost. Waking shortly after dawn, Lucy got up and walked about her room. She saw the first rays of the sun striking red through the trees and colouring the wisps of hoarfrost on the grass of the common. It was the beginning of the season all Canadians love best, and for a short while, in the clarity of the air at sunrise, Lucy felt some of the weight of her depression lift. She went back to bed and fell asleep. When she got up for breakfast at eight o'clock the last of the hoarfrost had melted and she knew it would be a fairly warm day.

  About mid-morning she walked northward out of the town. She left the houses behind her and then left the inland road and walked up through a footpath in a cropped field until she came in sight of the cottage where Matt McCunn lived. Here the land rose to a height of about two hundred feet, the fields bosoming upward in softly contoured slopes. It was not a range of hills, but an isolated eminence on a gently rolling plain, and it seemed higher than it really was because of the flatness of the surrounding country.

  McCunn came out on the veranda as she approached and waved to her, then disappeared inside the cottage. By the time Lucy reached the steps he was out again with a glass in either hand. One contained whiskey and the other water. He handed her the water, saying he didn't like to drink alone.

  “Well,” he said offering her the lone rocker on the porch, “so the war didn't start after all! Never mind. It will in the spring. And that bloody fool Chamberlain has added two years onto the duration.”

  She sat down on the top step and felt the warmth of the sun on her shoulders. Her fingers touched the battleship gray paint of the steps and it felt suave.

  McCunn was in his shirt sleeves but he looked tidy and well groomed. Lucy wondered whether or not Jane would revise her opinion of him if she ever came out here to see how he lived. McCunn's cottage was not very comfortable, but he kept it scrupulously clean and neat.

  Her dark hair gleamed in the light as her eyes searched the fields rolling down to the lakeshore plain. From here Grenville looked like a cluster of trees with four steeples and the cupola of the post office resting among their tops and shining in the sun. Beyond the town, the lake shimmered deep blue under a cloudless sky.

  “Well, Lucy,” said McCunn.

  She looked up at him, her forehead wrinkled slightly, but she managed to smile. “Well, Uncle Matt.”

  McCunn sipped his whiskey and looked at her gently. “Why don't you get in bed with the big bastard?” he said quietly.

  She flushed. “You certainly manage to reduce everything to bare essentials.”

  “Why not? Isn't it what you wanted me to say – only maybe in politer words? Your expression showed it the minute I saw you.”

  “You manage to read faces easily.”

  McCunn grinned and crossed his legs. “Any woman's, Lucy. It's my talent. That's why they unfrocked me. I made them too uncomfortable.”

  The familiar pattern was repeating itself. McCunn's genius for irrelevancy, for building up a fantasy world resting on a limited amount of acute observation, was beginning to develop.

  “Did they really unfrock you?” she said drily. “I never quite believed that story, you know. I think you just retired.”

  He grinned. Knees spread, head on one side, he set his glass on the floor. His face, incongruous under the noble dignity of his white hair, looked innocent and rather childlike.

  “You're not happy here, are you, Lucy?”

  “For the first time I'm willing to admit I'm not.”

  A tender expression followed the grin on his face. “You know something? In spite of it all, I love Grenville. I always did and I always will.”

  “You seldom talk as if you did.”

  “Whom the Lord loveth, he chasteneth.”

  She laughed quietly.

  “No,” said McCunn. “Don't laugh. The people here are bright and clean, they've got the whole future before them and they've got savour. They're warm, Lucy. That's the funny thing about them – under the surface they're warm. I don't mean the ones like Jonathan Eldridge. But our Highland people – I learned this in the ministry – they really want to do the will of God. But the information they got on that subject all came from John Calvin, and all he told them was what not to do. Now me, I always thought John Calvin was a son of a bitch, and that's the main reason why they unfrocked me.”

  She looked at him without comment.

  McCunn chuckled. “But they're a lusty lot here. In spite of everything they're lusty. You'd be surprised, if you knew them as well as I do. Don't judge them by Jane and your father. Those two just happen to be the incarnate images of the kind of morality the rest of them pretend to believe in but really don't. A lot goes on here, and a lot more people get tousled than you think. The fact is, the town has always thought Jane and your father a mighty peculiar pair.” He gave her a sideways look, took another pull at the whiskey, and laid the glass down again. “I used to watch the people from the pulpit in the old days,” he said with another grin. “The young girls with their plump arms and shining morning faces, the young men with necks and shoulders like prime young bulls looking up the earnest way they do as if they wanted me to know how eager they were to do the right thing. It was a touching sight to see. But then I'd look at their parents. And I'd see your father in his old pew on the middle aisle, waiting to hear me say something he could disapprove of. And then I'd get sore. So one day I told the congregation right out what was the trouble with the whole lot of them.”

  Again McCunn stopped to pick up his glass. He took a long pull and half emptied it, then wiped his lips with a handkerchief and laid it down again. His eyes began to twinkle as he looked over the slope of the fields to the church steeples rising above the trees of the town.

  “That morning I told them something no preacher ever dared say from a pulpit in the whole of Canada. I told them the Province of Ontario was so innocent the only sin they could understand was the sin of fornication. I said they put so much stress on it, the worst kind of crook could cheat them and exploit them, and they'd never be quite sure he was a crook so long as what they called his morals lo
oked okay. Why right here in this town, I said, there's one of the biggest skinflints and widow-cheaters that ever lived. But so long as he keeps out of the lawcourts he's going to get by, for he don't drink, he don't play cards, and he'd be scared to look at a woman sideways so long as anyone from his home town was within fifty miles to tell someone else he did it.” McCunn stopped and eyed her again, very pleased with himself. “Of course, I was talking about Jonathan Eldridge, and they all knew it. But I didn't stop there. From now on, I said, when I preach about sin – and I'm going to do it aplenty – I want it clearly understood I'm thinking about what the old ones do in their business hours, and not what the young ones do in the hammocks behind the ivy. Little children, I said, looking at a young couple in the second pew, love one another.”

  McCunn stopped, shook his head and rubbed his hand over his face as Lucy's level eyes watched him.

  “Do you expect me to believe you preached a sermon like that?” she said.

  “As sure as my name means a son of a bitch – and in Gaelic that's what it does mean, with a root right back to Sanskrit, that's what I preached. You asked me why they unfrocked me. I've told you. Of course, they brought up some more reasons besides. They also said I was divisive.” There was a long silence. “Now, did what I say make sense, or didn't it?”

  Again she laughed quietly. Uncle Matt really was preposterous enough to have preached a sermon like that in a Presbyterian church.

  “Lucy,” he said, “everybody thinks I'm a fool. Well, what is a fool? Generally it's a man who isn't shrewd. I admit I'm not shrewd. But there are times when being shrewd doesn't get you anywhere, and you're at one of those times now. The whole world is, for that matter. You want to do something perfectly natural. Why don't you do it? You don't because of how your father and Jane brought you up. Those two were shrewd. And what did it get them?” His voice suddenly became angry. “God help a people if they think sex is the only important sin there is, for the day will come when they find out they've been lied to and cheated, and then they'll cut loose and make a mockery of sex and go straight to hell the way the Romans did. Don't forget, Lucy – the old Romans were puritans too!”