The Precipice

by Hugh Maclennan

  This is too barren, too impersonal a place to see him for the first time in four months, she thought. How hateful to be like millions of other couples, working out our destiny in a hotel bedroom!

  The door opened and he stood back while she went in, and then she was glad they were where they were. Perhaps it was the best kind of place in all the world to be meeting him, without the weight of a personalized background familiar to one or the other, a strange hotel in a strange city, bare of reminders of the past, either good or bad. Besides, it was a charming room for a hotel bedroom. The eastward-facing windows were bright with sun and a view over Lake Michigan. There was an air of the past in the furnishings, of dignity and spacious comfort. The furniture might be no better than imitations in the best manner of Grand Rapids, but they were at least imitations of an era of graciousness. Before she arrived in Chicago the Blackstone had been no more than a name to her; unconsciously she had dreaded the thought of having to talk to Stephen in a room filled with streamlined furniture and aseptic walls, a room lighted indirectly with an overcast of blue, a place that would remind them of Bratian's apartment or their own original furnishings, of Madison Avenue agencies, of the places where Marcia had once liked to eat, of the kind of rooms Gail Beaumont probably kept in New York. What, she thought, would the hypothetical survivors of this century make of the character of people who chose to live with chrome and steel and blue glass when they encountered replicas of such rooms in museums? Exactly what we make of ourselves – cocktail parties, hangovers, childlessness, psychoanalysis, and divorce.

  She stood still and looked at the soft colours of wall paper and draperies and rug while Stephen pulled a chair of Georgian design toward the window.

  “I like it here,” she said, and he seemed grateful for the naturalness of her first remark.

  “It's not a bad room,” he said. “I've been here over two weeks. Mother used to stay in the Blackstone. I suppose that's why I did too.”

  As she dropped her purse and gloves on the bed and sat down she saw the pain in his face as it caught the light, but his eyes met hers when she faced him. His self-control made him seem so much older than she remembered him. She knew that he might be as glad to see her as she was to be with him, but a moment like this would be hell for him. Yet he gave no signs of wisecracking or shrugging it off. In no other way did he show her so clearly that much had been happening to him.

  “How did you know I was here?” he said quietly, sitting on the edge of the bed.

  “Marcia told me.”

  For the first time she saw the trace of a smile touch his face. “I needn't have asked. I came out to see Carson about that Shasta job. He's been here for more than a month.” His voice was heavily controlled. She had the feeling that he was not so much warding her off as keeping his distance, being scrupulously careful to presume nothing from the fact of her presence.

  “It's good to see you again,” he said. “Very good.” He looked out the window. “But Lucy – why did you come?”

  There was no defensiveness in his voice and no pretense. It was the voice of a man who had lost something he knew he could never replace. His youth was gone, but whether he had gained anything to fill the vacuum she didn't know.

  “Because I wanted to see you,” she said.

  He searched her features with the expression of a man who has discovered, late and painfully, that only a few words of the thousands he hears in the space of each day can be believed. He looked down and saw that his own hands were trembling. He got up and moved the draperies farther from the window to let in more air, then sat down heavily again. Finally he looked up at her, held her eyes, then with a slow movement he put his head in his hands.

  “I'm so ashamed.”

  “No, Stephen,” she murmured. “No!”

  She sat down on the bed beside him and he made a movement to ward her off. She touched her fingers to his cheek, felt the warm, familiar, tough, male skin. Then she got up and went back to her chair. As if from a long time and a long distance his voice came to her again.

  “Why did you come?”

  This time she had no answer.

  “I suppose Marcia told you why I left New York?”

  “Yes.”

  “I'd hoped I wouldn't be a trouble to you again.”

  “Stephen –” She was on her feet, wanting desperately to have him take her in his arms, to stop talking, to see that words were useless. “Come on back to Grenville with me. We can forget all about the past two years. As though –” Her hands made a motion of brushing unseen objects aside. “As though they never were. As though –”

  He looked up. Slowly, with deliberate emphasis he said, “But they were, Lucy. They happened exactly the way you remember them. The way I remember them, too.”

  Her mind lurched wildly as she wondered how Bruce would have behaved in a situation like this, and she knew in the next instant that he would never let himself get in a situation like this, and that if he did, his imagination would distort it. But Stephen was still an engineer, trained never to argue with facts.

  “I'm not drinking now. I cut it out before I left New York, except for the first night here and that was nothing to speak of. I don't think I ever drank enough to do anything more than lower my efficiency, so I can't blame – what I did on that.”

  The whir of tires on Michigan Avenue seemed to grow louder in the noon heat. Thank God, she thought, I didn't come here with any set phrases or plans in my head.

  “A big guy like me!” he said. “How did you stand it so long? Lassiter thought he could have everything both ways. He tried –”

  “Stephen, dear – don't!” She saw that her hands were clenched and she put them behind her back. “Don't punish yourself like that!”

  “Facts are still facts, Lucy. You've faced most of the ones that came your way. It's my turn now.”

  Suddenly she smiled. “You don't have to be quite so headstrong, darling.”

  The last word surprised him; Lucy had never thrown endearments around the way Marcia did; its implied familiarity broke the grimness of his mood and she took advantage of the break.

  “You must listen to me. Just this once, Stephen. Please listen! I've been making discoveries of my own these past months, too. I've learned where I stand on all sorts of things. Stephen, dear – please listen! There's not a single thing that makes my life worth living that you haven't given me. You're the only real strength I have in the world.”

  He stared at her. “Strength? You're not talking about me?”

  She closed her eyes, opened them, and her face was as bare and beautiful as he had ever seen it in passion.

  “I love you now more than I've ever loved you before.”

  He got to his feet, blundered to her almost blindly, and she felt his arms come about her. Then his muscles tightened and he forced her away. She leaned heavily against the dresser and watched him move to the window and stare out.

  “Stop trying to believe the best,” he said. “Listen! Listen and I'll tell you.”

  There was a long silence during which he continued to stare at the lake while she resumed her place in the chair and studied the carpet.

  “How are John and Sally?” he said.

  “They're fine. They've had a lovely summer. John's grown a full inch since spring.”

  The whir of tires on the avenue was as steady as her breathing.

  He turned around and looked at her for a long time. “It would be easy to say I've been crazy these past two years. It would be easy to say I was only one of hundreds of thousands of other men in New York. You knew I wasn't unacquainted with women before I married you, or before I married Joyce. But the facts are still there.” He returned to the edge of the bed. “I never stopped loving you or the children. If you can believe that you can believe the rest of what I've got to say. In spite of loving you I practically moved in with another woman. I stayed with her while you knew about it. I stayed with her after you'd taken the children to Canada. I stayed with h
er until Harper stopped the account and Carl fired me. I stayed with her until even she got wise and kicked me out. And all that time –” His eyes forced her to look at him. “I never stopped loving you.”

  Lucy's eyes held his. “Then I came to Chicago to see Carson about another job,” he went on, “because I heard he was going to be here for a few weeks. But my reputation got here first. He just looked at me over his desk and said, ‘What's happened to your integrity?’”

  Stephen got up again and began to prowl about the room. “It took me quite a while, but I found the answer. I didn't have any.”

  He was standing over her. “That's the kind of man I am now.”

  Her chin lifted. It was an old gesture of hers; it highlighted the bone structure of her face and let the unbreakable quality in her nature dominate it. Six months ago it had seemed accusing and intolerable to him. Now he accepted it gratefully.

  “No man is the kind of man you think you are if he can bring himself to say what you've just said.”

  For the first time that morning she saw a light of hope appear in his tired face; it appeared for a second and then it was gone, and she knew that the nature of her problem had changed with its going. Stephen had reached the end of the same road Marcia had taken, had followed to the source most of the marsh-lights which had appeared to his generation like rising suns. And at some time during the past fortnight he had found himself staring in horror at his own face in the glass.

  It took all the discipline at her command to prevent pity from driving her into his arms and destroying the ultimate dignity of his despair. The fact that she and John and Sally still loved him was no final answer to his need. She learned then that there are moments when human love is no more help to a man than the sight of friends beckoning across a bottomless chasm.

  “I think I know what to do, Lucy. But I've got to be alone.”

  Six months ago she had believed him powerless to check his own deterioration. Now he had reached the yawning edge of the precipice and he knew it was there, he knew the map he had followed was no longer of any use.

  “I'm forty years old, you know.”

  She heard him, but she made no answer. Into her mind floated a scene from her childhood in Grenville, her father reading the morning prayers: “And by grace are ye saved through faith, not of yourselves; it is a gift of God.”

  The walls of the room in this strange hotel in a foreign city seemed to slide soundlessly apart to leave her looking outward into infinite distance. The walls which had encompassed her all her life, the walls of a puritan tradition, were there no longer. But Stephen, even when drunk and in bed with another woman, was more of a puritan than she herself had ever been. In defeat, his judgment of himself was identically the same as Jane's. Behind them both was the same bleakness, the same terror of appearing weak, the incapacity to recognize the difference between a fault and a sin, or a sin and a crime, the same refusal to believe that Christ had meant what he said when he stated that the kingdom of heaven belonged to the poor in spirit. In Stephen's self-condemnation she could hear the authentic ring of her sister's voice, and she knew that both of them, Jane deliberately, Stephen by a sort of inheritance in his own subconscious, had spent their lives trying to keep the door shut between their own inner solitude and the mystery of life itself.

  “I'm going away,” she heard Stephen say.

  But instead of listening to him she heard Jane's voice, the voice which for more than a century had been driving the bold and generous ones out of a thousand Grenvilles all over North America, driving them away to cities which had lost all touch with the towns, driving some into a transplanted Asiatic luxury they could never understand, launching others into a rootless technology in which they could never do enough to appease the unknown monster on the other side of the door, leaving them unforgiven and longing helplessly for the purity and safety of a childhood to which none of them could ever return.

  She listened to his words. He was telling her that only this morning he had taken a job in northern Minnesota. He was going to drive a truck for a contractor who was building a new road. He wanted to work with his hands. Perhaps later – he didn't know – he would try for an engineering job again.

  Lucy could feel the aching, empty pain in him as she watched his face. She moved away from the dresser and put both her hands on his cheeks, raising his chin until his eyes met hers.

  “Stephen dear – how long are you going to let dead men make you ashamed of yourself?”

  He stood there quietly under the touch of her hands and Lucy wondered if the trembling she felt was in herself or in him.

  Had he heard her? Did he know what she meant?

  Driven from his father to Bratian, all his life he had been taking upon himself a devious, useless punishment for a useless, ancient guilt.

  She saw him in the construction gang in Minnesota – sweating, unhappy, working with men he did not like, trying to persuade himself that by being miserable he would somehow render himself immune from blame. Was punishment the only thing in which he could still believe?

  His eyes were searching hers. He made an indecisive movement as if to turn away. Then, as though compelled by a new and unrecognized force, he took her quietly into his arms.

  “What have you done to me, Lucy? What did you say?”

  “Nothing, darling. You've been listening to yourself.”

  It's the beginning, she thought. Once again, it's a beginning.