The Precipice

by Hugh Maclennan

  “Wait!” he said, his face with its long scar looking frozen. “Let's hear that.”

  They listened while the announcer, using the measured, cool tones of all Canadian news reporters during the war, described the destruction of Hiroshima.

  The voice went on, repeating itself as though repetition could make the appalling real. No one in the room spoke and no one moved until Bruce snapped off the radio again. Then they were aware that Jane had been standing in the door of the living room all the time the announcer had been speaking, a vase full of bright flowers in her hand. Her voice was as measured as the announcer's when she broke the silence.

  “The Americans were bound to do something like that one day,” she said.

  THAT night Lucy was unable to sleep. She lay in bed with all her nerves tense while her ears heard every sound in the night. She heard each truck and car pass the head of Matilda Lane and each riffle of breeze in the leaves of the elms outside her window. After midnight the breeze became steady and the air was filled with the constant wash of waves.

  She remembered Bruce's face as he had talked about what tonight's news was going to mean. His quick, poetic imagination had raced off into the future, drawing one deduction after another, and now he was almost certainly awake in his own bed next door, trying to find some hope in a world his reason told him had reached the position in a crime story of the criminals’ confederate who knew too much to live. She knew what he was thinking because his mind was too much like her own. The kind of world he wanted to live in was too much like the kind she wanted. Even the judgments he uttered were statements of ideas she herself tried to suppress. It was bad enough having to live with her own thoughts these days, without having their weight doubled by Bruce's problems.

  Tonight, more acutely than on any night since she had left Princeton, Lucy found herself longing for Stephen. First for his arms around her, for his sheer physical strength and the peace his body gave her. But far more than that she missed the way his factual engineer's mind, totally different from her own, had stood between her and this world the engineers had made. She remembered his words, spoken years ago in Grenville before they were married, “Some day they'll do it – they'll go faster than sound, they'll rocket clear off this planet.”

  Whatever else Stephen might feel, he would feel no shock or angry bewilderment at the appalling information they had received tonight. The frame of mind which had produced this bomb was the frame of mind in which he had been born and raised. The skills which had made it were the only skills he really valued. And the tensions produced by those skills, the tensions arising in hundreds of thousands of men driving constantly forward, committing themselves and everyone else again and again to the risk of living with the results of their skill, were the tensions he had been trying so desperately to escape.

  She knew tonight, clearly for the first time, in what she had failed him. She had not sufficiently understood the tensions, she had given him no adequate release for them. When she could lie alone with this realization no longer, she got out of bed, put on her dressing gown and slippers, and tip toed downstairs.

  It was two-forty by the clock in the hall. She looked at the phone and tried to think of the consequences of carrying out her impulse to call Stephen at his hotel in New York. She tried to picture the scene at the other end of the line. What likelihood that he would even be in his room? He knew where she was; he had known it for months. If he still needed her, he would have called long ago; he would – as Bruce had said – have left New York and come up to get her.

  She opened the front door and stood on the threshold while the cool breeze off the lake fanned her cheeks. Where was he now? What was he doing? With whom was he sharing his plans – if he still had any?

  “What's the matter, Lucy? Aren't you well?”

  She turned and saw Jane on the landing of the stairs.

  “I'm all right.” She stepped back into the hall and closed the door behind her. “I couldn't sleep. Sometimes it helps to move about.”

  Jane came down, an old dressing gown held close about her, and turned on the light in the hall. The Death of Nelson, grey and precise, assumed its place above the table to the right of the hatrack.

  “I'll fix you something hot to drink,” Jane said.

  They went out to the kitchen together, and after pouring milk into a pan, Jane looked up and remarked, “I wonder when Bruce will get over his habit of upsetting people? You can't blame it on the war, for he was always like that. What do you think will become of him?”

  Lucy picked up an unopened tin of Ovaltine, took the top off, and set it on the table.

  “Whatever else you do,” Jane went on, “you mustn't brood. It's not as if you have anything to blame yourself for. If I were in your position, I wouldn't care what somebody else had done to me, so long as I knew I hadn't done anything wrong myself.”

  She was standing over the electric burner, looking down at the milk in the pan. The overhead light showed the grey streaks in her dark hair, which even now, after several hours in bed, managed to look fairly neat.

  She turned off the switch and carried the pan to the table. While pouring the milk into two glasses, she went on, “I forgot to tell you I was talking to Mr. Armitage this morning. He's looking forward to having John start school in September. He said he was sure he'd make a good pupil because you were so good when you were his age. It's a very fortunate thing for John to be here, for it means he won't be spoiled. Mr. Armitage was telling me the American schools are filled with this new progressive nonsense. It's even spreading into Toronto and Montreal, he says. So long as he's principal, we're not going to have any of it here.” She finished stirring the Ovaltine into the milk and handed Lucy her glass. “Next week I'll look into getting his books and scribblers. Falconer's has them in stock already, for I've seen them in the window. What's the matter?”

  Lucy turned to hide a convulsive movement of the muscles of her throat.

  “This is your home now,” Jane said. “And the children have become quite accustomed to it. You must stop thinking about him.”

  The eyes of the two sisters met, but this time it was Jane who looked away.

  NAGASAKI was destroyed and the Japanese war was over. There was dancing on the main cross street off the King's Highway in Grenville, and a huge raft was built and heaped with oiled logs, towed into the lake from the dock of the Ceramic Company, and lighted after sunset. It burned for hours. When Lucy went to bed that night the last glow of red-hot ashes was still visible on the water.

  For days afterwards she did her best to hide her restlessness. She felt that the purposes of everyone she knew were pulling in opposite directions. Jane came back from shopping in King Street with a set of school books for John, a box of yellow pencils, and a carton of crayons. Bruce went to Toronto and after two days he was home again with the news that he had accepted a job on a large newspaper and would begin work immediately after Labour Day. Nina wrote to her old employer in Toronto and was told by return mail that she could have her job back whenever she wished it, the sooner the better. Jane began her new schedule of music lessons and the sound of scales being played on the piano filled more hours of every day.

  THE roar of unheard, unfelt, unsmelled explosions thundered through Stephen Lassiter's brain as he lay clamped by the inland heat of an August night to the soft mattress of his hotel bed. A thousand Privateers formed themselves into a relief map of the town they were destroying, they covered it like a coffin lid in the most exact operation ever conceived, the bombs dropped like a carpet, each one precisely placed, the blast of each bomb so calculated in advance by specialists that a single salvo would obliterate all life below in the split of a second. The planes swept through Stephen's brain over the town, the church steeples disappeared in the boiling dust, then the planes droned away into the lean face of Stephen Holt Carson, into the faces of his own New England ancestors hanging on the walls of his mother's house in black walnut frames.

  His heavy mu
scles stirred. Suddenly a great tongue of darkness writhed down from a red sky as hot as the turmoil in his tired, middle-aged stomach and licked him in the face, licked him so that his skin revolted from its texture, horrid and wet and senseless as the tongue of a cow.

  He groaned and heaved his body upright. Where was he?

  Eyes sore in the darkness, mouth like sour dry wool from too many cigarettes, he groped for the light, turned it on, and saw a telephone book and a bottle of whiskey and a glass. The bottle stood on a Gideon Bible and it was nearly full. He remembered now. It was a strange hotel in a city he had never lived in before and he was not drunk. Even before going to sleep he had known that whiskey was no longer any help. Again the tongue of darkness licked down into his brain. God, how many other men in the world were lying in the darkness dreaming of bursting bombs and town-smashing inventions?

  He lay on his back in the darkness stripped to the waist, his chest heaving. The window was a visible shape in the room, steel coloured at the upper part, dark grey where it was open. He felt the sweat cold on his forehead and chest, warm on his stomach.

  Why should he be in a fix like this? What had he done that hundreds of thousands of others hadn't done? Christ, it wasn't as if he hadn't worked hard all his life!

  He surged up, rolled sideways out of bed, lurched to the window, and thrust out his head, sucking in gulps of the hot night air. It was a terrible city in summer when the wind came in from the prairies. At half-past four in the morning his eyes ached with the dry heat.

  He sat down in a high-backed chair before the window, his big body motionless. Hog butcher for the world. Even cities had their slogans now. He saw the lights of widely spaced cars travelling along the Outer Drive, and beyond it the lake broadening out into a plain that seemed to grow more visible as he watched it.

  Where were the people in those cars going at this hour of the morning? And they might ask the same of him. What was he doing sitting in this particular window in this particular hotel room at the bad end of a hot night. At the moment the only reason he could think of for being here was his memory of a winter in school when his mother had written to him on the stationery of this same hotel and he had told himself that some day he would stay there, too. But there were other reasons. He was here because Myron Harper had gone all the way to the top from being a minister's son in a little Ohio town, a bigger man than any four-star general in the army, and just at the minute when he was ready to show the world there were no limits to what he could do, the government had taken away his contracts.

  Harper's face confused itself with Bratian's in Stephen's mind. Carl had said, “Why worry, Steve? You'll fall on your feet. You ought to buy a book. Life begins at forty, you know.”

  Bastard!

  His head and shoulders were a solid mass, ominous and powerful in the pale frame of the window. What was happening? What in God's name was the matter with him? Had the whole world suddenly become populated by faceless people? You thought you knew them, you thought they loved you, and then –

  Gail Beaumont's voice, cool, competent, deliberately sealing in the eager vitality he had thought so unique, freezing him away from any touching of that vibrant body: “It's no use, Steve. You're too immature. If there's one thing I can't live with it's a man with a guilt-complex. If you won't go to a psychiatrist and get rid of it –”

  Bitch! Did she really believe there was a patent remedy for everything?

  He drew back his right fist and smashed it against the stone that jutted beyond the window. He drew it back and smashed it again and again, then let it lie on his thigh, the skin broken and bleeding, the flesh swelling.

  His eyes closed and he felt the pain throb up from his hand into his brain. At least the pain was positive. It was better to feel pain than to feel nothing.

  And then, sharp as a New England barn etched against the snow in winter, he saw the face of his mother's old friend, S.H. Carson. When had that been? A week ago? How long? Carson's voice had matched his face, a face that carried in its lines the story of generations of self-denial. “And now you've deserted your wife – well, it amounts to the same thing – and you've come to me because you're no good to advertising any more.” So much power in the quiet shake of a head like that. “Where's your integrity? Come and see me again when you've pulled yourself together. You're very like your father, you know.”

  The long splendid curve of the lakefront emerged slowly out of the east. A light wind sprang off the water and for a moment drove back the heat. Stephen picked up a blanket from the floor at the foot of the bed, wrapped it around his shoulders, and resumed his place at the window. Again the stern faces of his ancestors swam around him, each in its walnut frame. Side by side they hung on the wall, adding up to so much more than the sum of their parts. Side by side they stared at him, all accusing, all self-confident, not a single glance of mercy in the eyes of one of them, nothing but hard, faultless arrogance.

  What sense did it make? What were they all trying to say to him? On one side were Carl and Gail and all the agency crowd in New York. They had turned him out because he was no good to them any more, because he didn't measure up to their standards in spite of how hard he had tried. On the other side were Carson and Lucy and his ancestors. They had turned him out, too, disapproved of him and found him wanting. What did it mean?

  He got to his feet and threw the blanket to the floor, crossed the room and went into the bathroom. He took off his pajamas and stood under the shower and turned it on full force; first hot, then tepid, then cold. He stood there under the cold jets of water, forcing himself to take it without a grimace. Then he turned the water off and towelled himself and stood naked in front of the long glass. His right hand was still bleeding. He wrapped a linen towel around it and then flexed his muscles. They bunched heavily as they had always done. What if he was forty? What if they all thought he was a failure? They cancelled each other out, didn't they, since their ideas about what was good were diametrically opposed.

  But where did that leave him? Where – except dangling between them?

  He put on the trousers of his pajamas again, picked up the blanket, and sat down in the chair by the window. He could take it. Whether they thought so or not, he knew he could. Only he'd have to figure out somehow where he stood – who he was going to try to please.

  The lake was bright in the dawn now, but the breeze had died and it was hot again.

  Take a boat, take a white boat with a yawl rig and sail up the lake all the way to the straits of Mackinac, starboard down the South Channel past Cheboygan into Huron, past Sarnia down the St. Clair, past Detroit and Windsor into Erie, up through the Welland into the first lake the Frenchmen entered when they paddled the river and portaged the rapids on their way to China. Let the sheets run out through the blocks while the south wind blows her to the northern shore. An hour from now Sally would be awake and crying to be fed. But no, it was a long time since Sally had wakened at dawn; now she clung to her sleep till John or her mother wakened her.

  When the children grew up, when John and Sally got into difficulties, would they know what had happened to them and where it had all begun? Would they find anyone to tell them that wanting to be liked, wanting to be admired for doing a good job was so much too little in this world?

  He breathed slowly, evenly, his great chest sucking in the clean air off the lake. He heard the rumble of a train, but he couldn't decide whether it was in Grant Park or an elevated on its way to the Loop somewhere behind the hotel. The clouds over the lake were flushed along the edges and already it was bright enough to see a gull in the sky. Lucy loved the dawn. Lucy always knew why she liked something and why she didn't. But could she really tell the difference between sunset and dawn?

  At one time during the war Myron Harper had worked for three weeks without once leaving the wing of the plant where his office was. He had worked in a room without windows, air conditioned, with indirect lighting and sound-proofed walls. Suppose the electricity had failed and
the clocks had stopped and he had emerged from that office at a certain moment of dawn or sunset – could he have known whether it was going to be night or day?

  Stephen's face was heavy as the light caught it, heavy lines were marked in the flesh and dark circles lay under his eyes.

  Dear Lucy, I didn't mean to hurt you. How could I tell it would matter that much to you?

  For a while his mind emptied and he stopped thinking about anything. Perhaps he slept for a while in the chair. Then he heard trucks and buses on the avenue below and he felt the pain in his hand.

  I must get this straight, he said to himself. I'm hanging halfway between them, and it's not a place any man can stay for long. He tried to put his mind on a backward look over his life and he could see nothing but a long, twisting empty road. He had worked hard, he had tried to do what the best of them did, and now he might just as well have done nothing at all.

  And then in a rushing sweep of comprehension the full shock of what he had done to Lucy smashed against his brain. What thoughts must have passed through her mind before she took the children and left the house in Princeton to go back to the place where he had found her? The only reason he had felt her silence to be a matter of sitting in judgment was because he knew it should have been. Yet Lucy had never judged anyone in her life except herself. Years and years before he met her she had come to terms with herself.