The Precipice

by Hugh Maclennan

  He shook hands with Bruce and apologized to them all for being late. He sat down between Lucy and her husband and began to talk across her.

  “He came after you left,” Bratian said.

  “Well?”

  “He's still making up his mind.”

  Lassiter frowned and said something Bruce couldn't hear. Again he saw Lucy's eyes intent on her husband's face.

  “Quit worrying, Steve,” Bratian said in a harsh, precise voice. “Everything's going to be okay. Relax. So what if he hasn't made up his mind yet? He will. You made a good impression on him last week.” He turned to the others. “Let's get out of here. This place is like an annex to my office.” His eyes ran quickly over the flank and shoulders of a girl seated at the bar and then he turned to Lucy. “I've booked a table at the Marguery. Specially for you.”

  The cool night air made Bruce giddy and then it cleared his head. He found himself in the back seat of a cab next to Lucy, Lassiter on his other side, and Marcia and Bratian perched on the drop-seats. His hand closed over Lucy's and she answered the pressure gently, as if to let him know she was there and was thinking of him. In the half darkness he saw her profile as she leaned forward to speak to Marcia, but for most of the ride to the Marguery she was just a presence beside him. His head was clear when he stepped out on the pavement of Park Avenue while the commissionaire held open the taxi door, he saw the traffic disappearing into the wall of Grand Central Station, and looking up, he saw the tower above the station bursting with lights. When he entered the Marguery the silence was so dignified he could almost hear it reproving him. An elderly gentleman with a face like a British Prime Minister of good vintage was speaking to the headwaiter by the door of the restaurant. Bratian went to look for a telephone and Bruce was conscious of Lucy by his side, while Marcia and Lassiter were several paces away.

  “Have you really enjoyed your day?”

  Their eyes met, each of them a little shy of the other.

  “Wonderfully.”

  Marcia seemed to be arguing with her brother.

  “Poor Marcia!” Lucy said. “She's separated from her husband again and she and Stephen always seem to get into an argument. They both worry about each other when they're apart, but the minute they get together they begin to argue. I'd hoped you'd like her, because I like her so very much.”

  “I do,” Bruce heard himself saying. “I do.”

  But he was not looking at Marcia as he said this. He was looking into Lucy's eyes, and suddenly his heart felt so full that tears started and he had to blink them back. For months he had been hardening himself against feeling anything. It had seemed the only way he could face what lay ahead; to make himself mindless, factual, to think of women as pin-up girls, to turn his flair for poetry into composing bawdy limericks, to do anything for a laugh. Now in this quick exchange of glances between Lucy and himself the attitude melted away.

  It was not a look of understanding which passed between them. It was not even a look of recognition, the kind exchanged by husband and wife who have experienced every shade of each other's moods. Rather it was a look of startled awareness, a sudden involuntary touching by each of the mystery at the core of the other. It was as if their hidden spirits, issuing for an instant into the light, had brushed in passing. His imagination leaped wildly. He lacked the experience to know that such a meeting is more poignant and more dangerously disturbing, perhaps even keener and more profound, than mature love can ever be, for mature love is a matter of endurance, a matter of wisdom and care. He felt new, naked, reckless, and powerful. His hands quivered as he clasped them behind his back.

  The next thing he knew, Lassiter was speaking to him. “What must you be thinking of us? You come down here on leave from the war and we go on talking business, talking as if what we were doing mattered a damn –” His big hand closed affectionately on Bruce's arm, just over the elbow. “I'd give everything I've got to be with you, boy! It won't be long, don't worry, before this whole country is lined up where it belongs.”

  Bratian reappeared and began to talk to the headwaiter. Marcia joined Lucy and Bruce, and the next thing Bruce knew they were walking over a soundless carpet to their table.

  For the next half-hour, while they sat at a large table and a pair of grave men served them, Bruce was incapable of hearing anything anyone said. Cocktails were ordered and he drank another manhattan. Sole was served after the soup, a slim, finely drawn sole with the tang of the ocean still perceptible in its meat. A pale German wine appeared with the fish and he drank two glasses of it. When he realized he could not taste the superb wild duck Lassiter had ordered, he had enough sense to let the burgundy rest in his glass, lifting it occasionally to the light and pretending to sip it, looking into its glowing heart and remembering the rubies he had seen that same afternoon on Fifth Avenue. All the time his eyes kept straying toward Lucy on the opposite side of the table, longing for a trace of recognition in her glance. At the same time, as Lassiter talked to him eager for him to feel at home and enjoy himself, Bruce found himself drawn to him too, told himself he had misjudged Lassiter, and cursed himself for being such a fool as practically to have fallen in love with his host's wife.

  Marcia was speaking to him. “How long are you down for?”

  “Three days.”

  “Would you like to see me tomorrow?”

  “I'd like to very much.”

  Her head inclined toward his. “You lived next door to Lucy for years, didn't you?” she said in a low voice.

  “Practically all my life.”

  She knows, Bruce thought. I don't care if she does know.

  “Lucy's in love with Steve. But really in love. The way people used to be. It's incredible, isn't it?”

  He had no idea what to say and wondered if he was drunk. All sense of time had disappeared and the people around him seemed to be floating. He took a package of cigarettes from his pocket and offered one to Marcia. She picked up the package with curiosity and the yellow cardboard gleamed in the light.

  “Black Cat – what a name for cigarettes! I think it's rather sweet. What are they – Canadian?”

  Before Bruce could answer, Bratian extended a long silver case which he snapped open. “Try one of these. They're Greek. There's only one place in New York where you can get them.”

  “Carl knows the one place in New York where you can get anything,” Marcia said.

  Bruce took the flat, slender cigarette and lit it. His palate was now so dulled from drink and excitement he could have been smoking shag without knowing the difference.

  “Tell me something, Fraser,” Bratian was eyeing the end of his cigarette, “up in Canada have you been surprised at the way the British have held out?”

  “Not since the first of July.”

  Bratian smiled. “Why are they so good now when five months ago they didn't know what they were doing? That's the most important question raised by the whole war.”

  “That means Carl thinks he knows the answer,” Marcia said.

  Again Bratian smiled. “It happens that I do know the answer. Churchill. People in the mass are like animals. I don't care who they are, that's what they're like.” His oval eyes held Bruce. “Why does every animal in a herd suddenly lift its head and start running in the same direction? Because a single animal – at a precise moment – has translated what the others feel into a specific action. The real leader of any people has got to be a medium. Are you interested in history?”

  “Before the war I thought it was my subject.”

  Bratian tapped the white ash of his cigarette. “Some day I'd like to write a book on the philosophy of history. I have an idea an advertising man might have something important to say on that subject. After all – what is our job? We're mediums. What we feel today, the masses will want tomorrow.”

  Bruce wondered what the man was driving at. Was he testing him out? Lucy, on the far side of the table, sat calmly without a word, and for the first time in months the war seemed far away to Bruc
e, a trivial episode, a saga he had read about years ago in his study at Queen's.

  TUGBOAT whistles blowing in the East River woke Bruce at seven-thirty the next morning. He opened his eyes and a soreness at the back of the neck and a dryness in his throat informed him he had a mild hangover. The whistles continued to blow intermittently. In the near distance a riveting machine was racketing like a Vickers firing bursts on a beaten zone. The drum beat of New York going to work pulsed in a steady undertone through the open window and after a few minutes he realized he would not regain his sleep that morning even if he stayed in bed until noon. He threw off the covers, got up, and stretched, and his eyes squinted against the sunlight pouring into the room. Then he got rid of his hangover by standing for nearly a quarter of an hour under the shower. He shaved and came back to the room with a towel around his waist and stood in bare feet looking out the window. His room was on the east side of a hotel in Tudor City – he had been given the address by an American friend in the squadron before coming down – and he could look across the river to Long Island City. A new destroyer was moving up the channel toward the Queensborough Bridge with her guns wrapped in canvas jackets.

  It was while Bruce was dressing that the sensation of warm and excited fullness, still lingering from his meeting with Lucy the previous night, changed to one of aching surprise at himself and astonishment that such an emotion could have struck him so quickly and left him with the feeling that he had been ham-strung. He glared at himself in the mirror as he fixed his tie and pulled his face into a stern frown. A few minutes ago he had been planning to telephone Lucy the moment he finished breakfast. His imagination had been completely uncontrolled. He was in love with her. He had discovered the only woman he could ever love. Her eyes had revealed that she had discovered him also. He brushed his hair slowly. Her eyes – how did he know what lay behind them?

  Then the thought occurred to him that he had done something wrong. If Lucy had been deeply stirred by him, he was culpable. Somehow he had always felt that if men and women got snarled up in each other's lives, it was the fault of the man.

  After breakfast he left the hotel and began to walk. It was another hazy, golden day, and the people on East Forty-second Street moved without hurry. Bruce began to look into their faces as though they could somehow tell him more than he already knew about himself. His eye fell on an itinerant shoe-shiner. The man was squatting on the pavement beside his footrest and a box of polishes and old rags, his shoulders hunched over, his back against the front of a cigar store, his eyes closed against the sun, head dropping so far sideways his left ear almost touched his shoulder. The sun gleamed on a flat forehead, and a ring of worn black hair circled a bald skull the colour of ivory.

  Looking at the man led Bruce to look at his own shoes. They were scuffed and dusty, so he stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. It seemed a strange, public way to improve his appearance, but apparently it was a custom in New York, so he moved over to the footrest and put his right foot on it. The man came to life, looked up and smiled, and then crouched on both knees like a slave before his master.

  While he worked, Bruce stood there near the corner of Forty-second Street and Third Avenue, one hand on his hip, the other at his side clasping his leather gloves. He listened to the enlargement of noise as elevated trains roared by overhead and receded again, to the clanging of streetcars and the honk of horns, and he felt completely alone. His thoughts began to march with a cautious inner honesty.

  He informed himself that he had been a fool not to have seen Lucy with different eyes all the years she had lived in Grenville. It was almost shameful to have come to New York and here see her with her husband and child before discovering that she was a beautiful woman. Two years ago, as he now knew only too well, he had been nothing but an inhibited Ontario boy. In the last twelve months, with his life committed, with the lonely tensions crawling through the night when he had forcibly to grip himself and explore his mind as if to prove in advance that he could control his fear when the time came, he felt he had grown many years older. He told himself coldly that if the feeling which had emerged between himself and Lucy last night were allowed to grow and spread, it would take over his whole life. It would unman him if Lucy did not respond to it, and it would ruin Lucy if she did.

  He tried to straighten his shoulders and found it difficult to do so with one foot raised on the cleaning-rest. He pressed his lips together and his face twitched as once more the profile of Lucy, transfigured by his imagination into a vision sad, fragile, and mysterious, floated across his mind. But was she really beautiful? He had never thought so before yesterday. A woman like Marcia Stapleton would be called beautiful by almost anyone. Nina was certainly prettier than Lucy. Among all the individual girls to be seen in the crowds of New York, a stranger passing Lucy on Fifth Avenue would hardly notice her at all. Yet the question as to whether she was beautiful or not made no difference today whatever. For him she had a quality far greater than any objective beauty of figure or features. She had the power of making him think of beautiful things, of lifting his imagination. Through her he longed to discover everything yet to be learned, and his intuition told him that a search of Lucy would be endless. The thought brought a feeling of joyous power throbbing through him.

  The man at his feet tapped his shoe and Bruce changed one foot for the other on the rest. Could any man, he wondered, feel as he was feeling about any woman? Perhaps falling in love was never more than what one did to one's own imagination, letting it play upon a woman's image like a pianist before a piano.

  Bruce stood there with one foot raised, testing this new idea for a moment, and then with a ruthlessness toward himself which was typical, which in fact was a product of his whole life-training, his willpower took control and crushed the colour and the wildly trembling excitement into the hinterland of his mind. Lucy was married. Therefore it was impossible to fall in love with her. Therefore he did not love her. Therefore he must think of something else.

  A girl in a light wool dress walked past and his eyes followed her. She was everything Lucy was not. She had the face and shoulders of a Slavonic peasant, large breasts which quivered to every step; her hips, heavy and suggestive, rose and fell under her tight skirt. But his eyes continued to follow her until she turned the corner.

  That's why men go to whores, he thought. Whores are safe. They never touch the imagination. They make a man feel worse, rather than better. They always disappoint him and so they don't necessarily cause him to disappoint himself.

  He laughed, and the Italian's forehead wrinkled as he looked up. In Grenville, Bruce thought, you believed you were in love with a woman if you had a means of supporting her and wished to marry her. Otherwise you were merely infatuated and the feeling was not serious. It was not a thought which the Italian would have considered cause for laughter.

  He had finished with his brushes and now set about giving a final polish to the second shoe with a blackened cloth. Once or twice he looked up at the man above him, the yellowish whites of his eyes showing, but he had no way of guessing what lay in Bruce's mind. Perhaps he wondered if this tense young foreigner would some day drop bombs on the helpless little town in southern Italy which he had left years ago to follow a dream of making a great success in America. Perhaps he thought only of the difference which stood between them, the one blue-eyed, keen and erect, quick and dangerous, the kind of man invariably chosen to drop bombs; the other on his knees, loose and shapeless, yet slow and softly durable, with inarticulate, useless but ultimate knowledge in his eyes.

  As the toe of Bruce's service shoe took on its final polish, Bruce began deliberately to cauterize his mind of the soft persuasion of beauty and mystery with which he had wakened that morning. He was making himself bare, bleak, and self-reliant again. In line with his entire life-training, he encouraged himself to expect little and to be thankful for what he had, yet to feel guilty for not being able to do more. He also encouraged himself to beware of happiness unless it
were the kind he could pick up and lay down at will. He would not, he told himself, make any attempt to see Lucy again.

  The Italian had finished his shoes and now was sitting back on his haunches with the dirty rag in his hand. Bruce reached into his pocket, took out a quarter and gave it to the man, who smiled, touched his forehead, and put the coin in his own dirty pocket. Then Bruce turned on his heel and began to walk rapidly toward Fifth Avenue because it was the direction in which he had started. On the corner of Fifth he was stopped by traffic lights. The open door of a bus was in front of him so he got in and climbed to the upper deck, where he sat staring at the neck of the man in the seat in front. At Eighty-second Street a number of people got off the bus in front of the Metropolitan Museum, so Bruce followed them. And there he spent nearly two hours roaming through the galleries, identifying originals whose copies he had seen in many books. The American Wing held little interest for him, so he walked down the stone stairway and for nearly half an hour he looked at the statue of the Etruscan spearman. In his present mood he seemed to feel things which even two days ago he believed he would have missed: the merciless truth in that merciless figure, its functional, necessary, and dutiful ferocity. He left it reluctantly and went in search of a telephone booth.