The Precipice

by Hugh Maclennan

  As John started downstairs he stopped abruptly on the top step. “What about Daddy?”

  “Oh, he'll be all right. Perhaps he'll come to see us in Grenville.”

  “Will he know how to get there?”

  “Yes. He was there once before – before you were born.”

  “He might forget,” John said. “That was a long time ago.”

  For the next hour she worked with her usual concentrated speed at packing, remembering which clothes the children would need, answering their questions, listening for the telephone. It occurred to her to wonder why an otherwise temperate individual must leave the only two homes she had ever had with such precipitation. She remembered the expression on Bruce's face that Saturday afternoon seven years ago when he had asked her if she had any conception of the kind of life she was diving into. The recollection brought her no pain. She had refused nothing. She had lived. Seven years ago, apart from the immature boy Bruce then was, she had been completely alone. Now John and Sally were with her. Now at least she was a whole woman.

  The children were standing at the foot of the stairs waiting for her when she came into the house after putting the last piece of luggage into the back of the car. She went to her writing table and wrote a brief note for Stephen, put it into an envelope, sealed it, wrote his name on the envelope, and laid it on the table in the hall. She called Shirley's mother to say that she wouldn't need Shirley for some time, but would send a cheque for the remainder of the month. She made a last round to check the doors and windows and sent the children out to the car. Then she stood in the hall fighting off a rising panic as she tried to imagine Stephen's emotions when he returned to an empty house. She took one step toward the telephone and stopped; then she picked up the note she had written and slipped it into her purse. She walked out into a late afternoon sun, closed the door behind her, heard the lock click, and joined the children in the car. They were sitting gravely on the front seat, solemn as mice in their best clothes. She opened the glove box and took out a road map and spread it on her knees.

  “Look, dears, where we're going.” She pointed to a red line. “We'll spend the night in Stroudsburg and tomorrow we'll go up into the Mohawk Valley. We'll go through Utica and Watertown and then we'll cross the Saint Lawrence at the Thousand Islands. We'll see the greatest river on the continent from the International Bridge and then we'll be in Canada. After that we'll have a lovely drive along Lake Ontario and pretty soon we'll be in Grenville. That's my old home. Isn't it going to be fun?”

  She backed the car and turned it, and just as she was changing gears she heard a faint sound from the house. The telephone was ringing.

  Lucy sat motionless behind the wheel while John and Sally turned their heads to look at her. They had not heard the telephone; perhaps it was only her imagination. Suddenly she cut the engine and hurried up the flagstone walk to the front door. The phone was still ringing as she fumbled in her bag for the door key. It rang once more as she entered the hall and she dropped her bag and ran to it. But then she picked up the instrument all she heard was the dial tone. She replaced it and stood in the dim hall feeling the weight of her disappointment. At that moment she felt as though she were standing alone in an unfurnished house, a house with no personality, no suggestion of an owner, no past and no future.

  She picked up the instrument once again and dialled long distance. When a girl answered, “Bratian Advertising Company,” she asked for Mr. Lassiter.

  “He's not here,” the frustrated voice answered sharply. “Nobody's here. The office is closed for the day. He's not in his hotel either. I just tried to get him there.”

  Lucy drew a deep breath, then picked up her bag, heard the lock click behind her once more, and returned to the car.

  “Was it Daddy?” John asked as she started the motor.

  “No, dear. I just thought I heard the phone. There was nobody on the line.”

  FIVE

  THE ELM TREES OVERHANGING Matilda Lane were silent and dense with leaves on this warm July evening. As Bruce Fraser left his father's house, walked down to the common and across it to the shore, he thought how this short stretch of barely a hundred yards had changed in length since he could first remember having run away from home to cross it at the age of three.

  In length, but not in aspect. All of us in childhood discover a special walk which leads us directly to the edge of the world. We reach a point where we can physically go no farther, but our thoughts leap and then for a few moments we are on our way toward becoming Everyman. Such a place can never be completely real to us again because all that is valuable in it has become part of ourselves, and it changes with ourselves, becoming empty or full, wise or meaningless as we grow old.

  During the years of his teens this was the walk that Bruce had invariably taken whenever he was in trouble, or very happy, or merely longing to be alone. Whenever he returned to Grenville from a journey he had always found an excuse to walk out of the house and turn toward the common within the first few hours, to keep going until he found himself standing once again on the sand. It took him less than two minutes to cover the distance now, though once it had seemed to take two hours. Yet he tended to measure all space in his mind's eye by this stretch of a hundred yards and he always would.

  The sun was down and in the gathering twilight the lake was almost as great a source of light as the sky. Saffron and shrimp-coloured clouds shredding out of the west were floating eastward down the water. Two ships were in sight several miles from the shore; the smoke of a third trailed along the southern horizon and lost itself in the mauve gloaming which rose like a presence out of the invisible United States. The lake was as still tonight as water in a bowl, not a leaf stirred, and the small sounds of Grenville pulsed at his back. Somewhere a door was closing, a woman calling her child in for the night, steps crossing the gravel path near the bandstand, a multitude of crickets chirping, a muted blast rising from a motor horn on the King's Highway.

  Bruce was tired. He knew why and he knew he would soon be fresh again and eager to work, but tonight he was simply tired. He breathed deeply and smelled the flat odour of fresh water that has been lying still under the sun.

  Had he come back to Canada and settled into a civilian job after the operation on his eye, he might by now be feeling as fresh and hopeful as the majority of the boys who were pouring back into the country on every trooper from England. Like himself, they had discovered Canada only after they left it three years ago and now they were eager to find out first-hand how good it was. But instead of leaving the war when his own battles were over he had returned to it as a spectator, had trained himself to analyze and to analyze ruthlessly, to consider escapism the lowest degradation to which a man could sink. And now this tough attitude of which he had been so proud was showing wide gaps. A wry, not even bitter sense of humour was causing him to mock himself and to tell himself that if he continued to develop the way he had started he would soon be like the reformer who got picked up in a brothel, or the psychiatrist who committed suicide. The insanity of the times was so pervading it could even appear to turn intellectual integrity into a vice. In lush seasons there was a certain bullying self-flattery about a harsh determination to be realistic, but what was the good of it now? The best men of his time had believed that the way to reform evil was to expose it, and to that end they had thought about evil constantly. The most famous books of the century swam in evil, all of them, right down to puny imitators like himself, swallowing the whole materialistic fallacy which maintained that to dissect evil is the same as to practise good.

  Now that he was back in Grenville the humiliating thought had occurred to Bruce that no matter how you slice it, the food a man eats turns into the man himself. The early Christians had apparently believed this, for when they revolted against the materialism of Rome they had not considered Nero worth more than a few lines of scripture. Bruce grinned at his own thoughts. What a godsend Nero would be to the rough-paper magazines today!

&nbs
p; As he started back across the common he realized that an elderly man coming toward him was deliberately walking into his path. Bruce passed a hand over his imitation eye, thinking he must be more tired than he had thought. The man stopped and waited for Bruce to reach him, and he saw it was Matt McCunn.

  “Well for God's sake!” Bruce said. “When did you get home?”

  “Hullo, laddie! I could ask you the same.”

  “Last night. I came in on the late train.”

  The two men drifted toward a green bench.

  “Going to stay a while?” McCunn asked, looking across the common carefully before he allowed the seat of his pants to touch the wood.

  “A month. Maybe more. I've got plenty of time to think things over. I've been offered a job in Toronto and another in Vancouver. Haven't decided yet which I'll take.”

  “Don't take either,” McCunn said. He reached in his pocket and drew out a blackened old pipe which he took some time to fill. As Bruce watched him he realized that the man had aged at last. McCunn's hair had always been white, but white like a premature frost. Now his posture suggested the kind of repose that comes only with age and a willing acceptance of it.

  “I've been home no more than three weeks myself,” McCunn said between puffs of his pipe. “The last time I hit Liverpool after I got out of Trieste I shipped out for Halifax and came straight back here. And, by God, here is where I stay from now on!”

  Bruce laughed and once again put his hand over the scar which crossed one cheek from temple to chin. It was a habit of which he was unaware. “What in hell were you doing in Yugoslavia?” he said.

  “Getting myself a liberal education, for one thing. It turned me into a Presbyterian again, for if original sin don't account for what goes on there, nothing else does.” McCunn pulled on his pipe. “But they were mighty nice to me. I got pneumonia and some of them would come back from a massacre – at least that's what they claimed they'd been doing – and be as good to me as if I was their own father. They'd laugh like kids and show their teeth, and they've got teeth so good a dentist would starve to death if he had to live among them, and tell me what they'd been doing and what a fine country they were going to have when they'd killed everyone they didn't like.” He turned to look at Bruce. “I heard you had a bad time yourself.”

  “No, I don't think so. I was one of the lucky ones.”

  “Maybe you're right. For the troops, this wasn't as bad as the last one. But it was damn queer. I thought it was a pretty good war at first, but it piled up slowly and before it was over it really got me.”

  Bruce leaned back against the green slats of the bench and watched the fading light on the lake while McCunn went on talking. He wondered why the sort of inner humour of a man like McCunn – humour that wasn't funny but which seemed to mitigate everything unpleasant in life for those who had it – had apparently skipped his own generation. For instance, what kind of reports would a man like McCunn have written from the San Francisco Conference? Bruce had an odd feeling that in their way they would have been more accurate than his own. Because he had been called back from Europe to cover the conference and had been commissioned to write a magazine article for Maclean's to explain its significance for Canada, he had taken it very seriously indeed. The article was still only half-finished, but in it he had established the premise that Canada, in more or less settling her old disharmony between the French and English within the country, had at last responded to the challenge peculiar to her nature and therefore had finished the war fresher than she had entered it. She was hopeful, eager, ready to start. The problem he must go on to state concerned how much chance the big powers were going to give her, for they had established at San Francisco the principle that the wisdom of a nation is in exact proportion to its size. Given the article to finish, what would McCunn do with it?

  At a break in the old man's monologue Bruce said, “What did you think of the San Francisco Conference? I've got to write an article on it for Maclean's.”

  “Balls,” McCunn said. “All balls!” And went on to urge him to get out of newspaper work and put his mind on something pleasant.

  “You know,” he went on, “I've always considered myself a pretty smart man, if you take my definition of smartness. When I was sick in that cave in the worst goddam mountains I ever saw, like heaps of iron with flour dusted over them, I decided exactly what I wanted to do when I got back to Grenville. It was better than wondering if I ever would get back, which seemed pretty unlikely.”

  “What was it?”

  “What I'm doing. Right now. I'm in charge of this common. I rake up leaves and mow the grass and keep the benches in order and I'm going to put in some flower beds this fall. I felt pretty good about persuading them to let me do that. The Chamber of Commerce's got a new booklet printed that says there's more ozone in the air in Grenville than any other place in the world but one. They don't say where the other place is. So I said, what's the use of ozone if you can't smell anything better than an occasional whiff from the Ceramic Company? You should have heard me talking to Wes Muchmore! You're too young to remember but I was a damned good preacher once. I had the gift.”

  Bruce laughed and felt his scar again. And after a moment McCunn added, “I've been hunting rotted manure all over the countryside for three days. Plenty of horse for some reason, but I can't find enough cow.”

  Bruce crossed and uncrossed his legs and tried to keep his mind on what McCunn was saying. The nearest of the ships out on the lake had broken out her riding lights and behind them darkness was filling the common, growing like a substance between the boles of the trees. Somewhere out of it came the sound of a girl's laughter. Bruce and Matt McCunn talked for a while longer in sparse sentences broken by long periods of silence. Then McCunn broke his peace.

  “Have you seen Lucy yet?”

  Bruce felt his throat tighten. “For a few minutes this afternoon. But not to talk to.”

  “Funny thing,” McCunn said. “I never thought I'd see them all together in that house again. Hear Nina's getting home soon too.”

  After a few more idle sentences Bruce got to his feet, said goodnight, and left McCunn on the edge of darkness between the trees and the water, with his pipe glowing occasionally as he drew on it.

  On his way home Bruce saw the lights in the Cameron house and wondered how he could stand living next to Lucy all summer unless he could get over feeling as he did now. During the years in England he had convinced himself that the emotion he had felt about her in New York had been nothing more than the product of his own burning imagination. Now he knew how wrong he had been; the emotion had lain dormant like a buried plant and its returning growth was riving him. He had seen her coming out the door of the Cameron house that afternoon and when she looked up toward his window and found him standing there, she had waved. But after returning the gesture he had left the window abruptly and spent the rest of the afternoon indoors thinking of something else, a feat which years of discipline had made possible.

  Then his mother had brought Lucy into his mind again at supper, this time in a startling new aspect. “I believe she's had trouble with her husband,” his mother said. “I wouldn't dream of asking questions, of course, but she's been here quite a while, you know. Since about the middle of May. And Jane never speaks of her husband when she talks about Lucy at I.O.D.E. meetings and other places I usually see her.”

  “Jane wouldn't be likely to speak about him under any circumstances,” Bruce's father said.

  “No, I suppose not. But she's so happy lately. Jane is, I mean.”

  “Never thought she'd come back to Jane after leaving the way she did!” Dr. Fraser said.

  Bruce had changed the subject.

  Now his mother was waiting for him when he returned from the common and she met him in the hall as he started up the stairs.

  “You've been gone such a long time,” she said.

  “Have I? I didn't think it was more than half an hour.”

  “No – I
mean, nearly five years. Wouldn't you like to come in and talk to your father and me this evening? There's such a lot you haven't told us yet.”

  “Yes, of course,” he said automatically and came down the two steps to stand beside her. “But I'm really awfully tired tonight. If you wouldn't mind waiting for another day, I'd be better company.” He looked at her with affection and knew that no matter what words might pass between himself and them, the conversation would be painful for them all because they still clung to their old idea of him and he had not yet discovered a way of making himself seem like the son they thought they knew.

  “All right,” she said, as complacent as she had always been with him. “Let's make it tomorrow night then. I'll explain to your father.”

  He kissed her forehead and then her cheek. “Do you mind if I take a bottle of beer and sit in the dark in the garden for a while? It's still pretty hot upstairs and I've got to think of some ideas to finish an article I'm doing on the U.N.O.”

  “Yes, of course. Only – Bruce dear, you shouldn't work all the time. You need a rest. Goodness only knows your father was never one to encourage you not to work, but even he's beginning to worry about you.” She smiled up at him. “It will be nice for you when Nina gets home. Jane says she's due sometime this week. She's such a nice girl and you and she used to be such good friends.”

  “Nina?” He tried to keep the irony out of his voice, but he was startled by the implications of the suggestion. So they were beginning to worry because he wasn't married! He smiled down at his mother and put his arm about her shoulder.

  “It's awfully dark out now,” she said. “Surely you can't do any work in the garden at this time of night!”

  One more attempt to coax him into the living room and then she would give up. What could she know of the nature of darkness? How could he hope to tell her a fraction of the thoughts that had cataracted through his mind in the darkness of these past years? It was in darkness that you sat and fought down your fear on the way to the target. It was out of darkness that you leaped naked and indecent for your frenzied minutes in the slashing lights over a flaming town. It was back to darkness that you returned after perpetrating your action, a darkness velvet-soft and lovelier at such a moment than any woman you had ever dreamed of. And the death in the darkness you had left behind was the reason why you felt spasms of hysterical omnipotence as you gabbled over the intercom and watched the glowing instrument panels as you flew home over the North Sea and listened to all the motors humming steadily.