“Would you like to hear what that night produced?” he said shyly.
“I'd love to.”
He quoted a poem he had written. It was conventional, beginning with a general mood like that of Wordsworth's from Westminster Bridge. The middle part contained a passage about sin like a long-eared animal slipping softly around corners under arc lamps while unseen fingers scratched furtively on dark window panes and a steamer's horn throbbed like doom up the narrow trench of deBouillon Street. Then the sun had risen, the river was peaceful, and everything became clean again.
Lucy said with sincerity that she liked it. She wondered if the summer had given him any experience with women, but her instinct told her that the poem itself was proof that it had not.
His mood changed. “Well, it looks as if I'll be going to Europe after all.”
“What do you mean? Bruce! You haven't got a scholarship, have you?”
“Don't you read the newspapers?”
Her face fell. Two years ago he had been a candidate for a Rhodes Scholarship and his failure to win it had been a bitter blow to his father.
“I met a Frenchman in Montreal,” Bruce said. “He was somebody quite important in the French Government over here on some sort of a mission. He addressed the Summer School one evening, and afterwards we had him upstairs in one of the rooms in the residence. After he'd had something to drink he took his hair down and said war was inevitable because the decent powers had no will left. We're all decadent, he said.” Bruce became tense once more. “I think he's crazy. I don't feel decadent. The whole situation seems perfectly clear to me. It's just a matter of organization. For the first time people have reached the point where nobody need be in want any more. Everyone could have good jobs and get married. The battle against nature has been won, but of course the capitalists are all old men and…”
Lucy listened to a familiar thesis, the litany of the young men of the 1930s, whose political prayer-books were diluted Marx, whose sermons appeared every week in The New Republic and The Nation, in so many little magazines under so many various suns. Surely, she thought, Bruce knew better than to believe that the battle against nature had been won.
“Well,” he ended, “I suppose going over at the government's expense would at least be one way of seeing Oxford and Paris.”
She knew then, with a feeling of deep indignation that it had to be so, that his instincts, unlike the top-surface of his mind, were half-welcoming the coming war and were half-grateful for the appalling stupidity of the people who ran the world. It was easier to curse Hitler and Mussolini, whom he hated and had never seen, than to curse his father, whom he knew and loved. She knew the ideology did not lie deep in him. Were it not for the Depression he might not be frustrated at all, for he had always been able to get joy out of being alive whenever the pressure of his father's opinion wasn't forcing him to be a success at he knew not what. And of course Bruce was hungry for women. She knew that his favourite novel was A Farewell to Arms. She wondered how often he had pictured himself as Hemingway's hero, lying in bed in an Italian hospital watching the swallows hunting over the roofs, the bottle beside him, waiting for the girl to come, the whole situation four thousand miles away from his father and Grenville. “…but that was in another country. And besides, the wench is dead.” The man who used that quotation knew puritans.
A door slammed at the back of the house.
“Lucy – what are you doing out there?”
Nina's voice came through the screen door from the kitchen. It was now full night, but Nina was able to recognize the white patch of shirt and ducks reclining in the deck chair facing her sister. The door opened and her lithe figure, outlined against the kitchen light, nearly tumbled down the steps.
“Why, it's Bruce! When did you get back? How are you?”
He rose and took her outstretched hand with a pleasure neither Lucy nor Nina failed to observe. Nina came close to him: soft, slim, and innocent, holding his hand a moment longer than was necessary, guiding it with a movement apparently absent-minded to her side between them. But there was an edge to her voice as she spoke to her sister.
“You might have told me he was here!”
Bruce picked up the empty chair and turned it around so that Nina could sit beside him.
“Have you forgotten all about me while you were away?” she asked him.
Lucy knew she was not wanted in the garden any more. She had neared his loneliness, knowing it was there, perhaps knowing what caused it, but she had been helpless to touch it. Now she would have to leave him with Nina. After a while he would probably kiss her and Nina's vanity would be flattered. She would make him feel she had granted a great favour and afterwards Bruce would go home and be more restless than ever.
Nina's voice was running on. “We've had all sorts of people here while you were gone. A cousin of Mary Eldridge's and Helen Macdonell's roommate stayed for a week. You don't know what you missed. And of course, Steve Lassiter at the Ceramic. You've heard about him!”
Why did Nina insist on calling Mr. Lassiter by an abbreviation of his Christian name when she had not even met him and would be punctiliously correct if she did? It was one of her mannerisms which grated on Lucy. Away from Jane, Nina worked diligently at imitating the heedless, gossipy girls who had drunk milk shakes in the Manhattan Pharmacy in their high-school days, and now at college probably drank cokes at another soda fountain just like the old one. And yet, perhaps Nina was not imitating the other girls at all. Perhaps that was just what she was like. Why not, if she wanted to be?
Lucy rose quietly and stood for a moment beside her chair, looking up at a sky which had never seemed vaster, more luminous, more mysterious with distance. The moon was about to set. Its lower horn was behind the trees, and in another twenty minutes it would be gone. She began to move slowly toward the kitchen door. Seeing her go, Nina pulled her chair closer to Bruce. But almost at once she twisted her neck around with a movement that made her hair tumble, and while one hand pushed it back into place, she called to her sister.
“Lucy…I'm sure there's some ginger ale and grape juice in the icebox. Bring some out, will you? Like a dear?”
It was only then that Bruce realized Lucy had left. He turned around.
“Lucy – please don't go!”
Pausing on the top step, she saw the boy and girl like two blurs in the gathered darkness of the garden.
“Bruce's taste runs to beer, not grape juice,” she said, and shut the screen door behind her as she went inside.
She walked through the house to the front hall. Through the open door of the living room she could see Jane reading in an armchair, under a shaded light. Jane looked up enquiringly.
“It's such a lovely night,” Lucy said, “I think I'll go down to the beach for a while.”
Jane's eyes returned to her book. “You won't be late, of course.”
LUCY closed the door behind her, went down the path to the sidewalk, and walked down to the common. From the belvedere came a faint murmur of voices and a girl's low laugh. She crossed the common, but it was only after she reached the shore that the tremors of anger and humiliation faded away. Far down the beach the keel of a rowboat scraped the sand, and a few minutes later children's voices sounded as they moved up the beach and across the common under the trees. Their high voices were healing in the darkness. She imagined them walking home, growing sleepier with every step, then going upstairs with their hair tousled while they protested to their mothers that their hands and faces were not dirty at all, that they had only been at the lake and how could they get dirty there, and their mothers standing firmly by to make sure they washed before turning in. Finally she imagined the children small in their beds, thumbing their eyes to keep awake long enough to tell about the wonderful day they had passed. Then the eyes closing. The lights going out in the rooms. Their mothers standing quietly in the darkness listening for the deep breathing to begin. Then darkness and the long rest before the sun burst into their rooms in
the morning, and their eyes opened in wonder to see it.
The voices faded, leaving Lucy alone. After the moon set there was a great depth of stars. She sat on a log with her hands clasped about her knees. Warm with summer, the trees shrouding the common were still, but the whole night was alive. The deep darkness of an inland night throbbed with thousands of crickets and katydids, the velvet pulse of their noise broken occasionally by a dog's bark, by the muted blasts of motor horns on the main highway, by men's voices abruptly loud as they talked unseen crossing the common. Sitting alone on the beach Lucy was on the edge of a vast continuum of darkness, the darkness of the continental land behind her as she looked out at the residual light gleaming faintly on the surface of the lake. She told herself she was never less solitary than when she was alone.
But she had no wish to be alone, any more than she had a wish to make a frantic, unnatural effort to surround herself with company. It was the life prescribed within the family which had isolated Jane, Nina, and herself. Bruce Fraser knew that. McCunn knew it. Probably a good many people in the town knew it also. But none of them knew it as well as she did herself. None of those who had thought of her father as a cold, harsh man had understood that he had never been cold and that his harshness had mainly been a form of punishment directed against himself.
Lucy remembered his heavy-boned Scottish face as it appeared in his tender moments. These had been more frequent than the neighbours ever guessed. She remembered him sitting in his long chair reading Walter Scott or British history, sometimes demanding silence while he read a passage aloud to the family. She remembered him passing the plate on Sundays in the church, always stiffening slightly as he reached the family pew; and afterwards, at the Sunday-noon dinner of roast beef and browned potatoes, while the family was silent, pointing out to his wife just how bad the sermon had been. She remembered how, when she was very ill, he had come at unexpected times into her room to ask gruffly how she felt, fiddling about to adjust the window in an effort to show his affection while seeming to be doing something practical. The most vivid recollection of all was of the time when she had run a high fever and Dr. Fraser had been coming and going all day. Her father had knelt at her bedside and prayed aloud for half an hour, asking God to forgive him, apparently thinking Lucy was unconscious and unable to hear him.
John Knox Cameron had been no simple religious fanatic, nor in the ordinary sense of the word had he been a harsh or cruel man. He had been an inspector of schools for the county, and in his work he had shown ability and great energy. His knowledge had been considerable, enough to have passed for culture anywhere, but he had never permitted it to give him pleasure. In Grenville he had seemed something of a character because he had always worn old-fashioned stiff white collars that came so high on his neck he could hardly lower his chin. With townspeople he had been formal, distant, and in their eyes forbidding.
Yet whenever he made his rounds of the country schools he had seemed a very different sort of man. He had dressed like a farmer on Sunday, wearing pepper-and-salt suits of rough cloth bought in country stores and the kind of high leather boots lumbermen use. He could talk to farmers about their problems as one man to another, and in the country classrooms he had been famous for a heavy-handed Scottish humor both teachers and children had understood. At least a hundred men and women, plainly dressed, had come in from villages all over the county to attend his funeral.
Lucy remembered her mother saying to her the week after his death, “You know, your father never really loved me. He once wanted to marry another girl, but her parents told your father he ought to have been ashamed of himself wanting to marry a girl like that when he had no money to support her in the style to which she was accustomed. That was a cruel thing to say to him, but the Arkwrights were always hard people and much too big for themselves before they lost their money. Your father was a loyal man, Lucy. We must always remember that. He was staunch.”
And Lucy's mother – what was she? A quiet woman, fiercely protective, yet dominated totally by her husband. Perhaps that was why Jane felt secure in the old house? Perhaps that was also why she found it so necessary to believe she had taken her father's place in it, and to assume, as he had done, that the rest of the world was hostile?
Lucy did not know for sure about Jane. But she did know that this old house, which her father had bought from his wife's uncle, had meant something very special to him. The purchase of the house had been one of the great successes of his life. As a boy he had never known a home of his own. On his death he had been haunted by the fear that he had not been able to leave enough money to keep it up. The house had been a symbol to him, and the symbol had been a fortress.
There were some dusty old pictures in the attic which had told Lucy their own story. There had been a grandfather who drank and had knocked over a lamp which had set fire to his house one freezing night when Lucy's father had been a small boy; that night John Knox Cameron had lost both his parents, and he himself had been rescued by a neighbour. There were pictures of two maiden aunts, raw-boned Scotch women who had brought Lucy's father up and had made his life a Calvinistic horror, forbidding him toys as a child, making him ashamed of his own lustiness when he grew older. There was one picture of John Knox himself, preserved from his college days. It showed a young man with reddish hair and a daring, almost a desperate, cast of features. Lucy knew when she saw that picture that her father's iron self-control had been acquired. It could never have been natural to a man with a face like that.
Lucy rose from the log and looked out at the lake. All the earlier violence of the family had sunk now, like stones beneath the surface. Did it still lie there, heavy like stones? Did the violence of all the men who had broken this hard country lie submerged, too? Ontario had not always lain rigid under this glaze of respectability.
In the semi-darkness of the lake she watched a sailboat drift in to anchorage. It was a large yacht with a diesel auxiliary, probably cruising down from Toronto to the Thousand Islands. She heard the rings clatter as the mainsail fell to the deck. There was a heavy plunge as the anchor was thrown. A few minutes later a series of ripples broke on the sand before her. Then the lake was flat again, and under its stillness, the cold, heavy, invisible stones.
Lucy began to walk slowly along the shore, her hands in the pockets of her dress. She did not pity herself. Understanding had been a purifier. She had learned the beginnings of understanding in her teens, during the years of her illness. Even then she had sensed that for the rest of their lives she and Jane would bear the weight of the merciless religion which her father's aunts had inflicted upon him. It was then that she learned how true it was that the evil men do lives after them.
For the pattern set by her father had remained. The three sisters were held together by the heritage of their father's fierce sense of protection, but they were divided by the cleavages in their parents’ minds.
During Lucy's illness, with the life of the whole household revolving around her bed, the growing Nina had felt herself neglected. She had become dependent on Jane whom she half feared, and envious of Lucy with a resentment no less deep because it was unconscious. Worse than anything else was the way both Jane and Nina had accepted the strange picture their father had made of Lucy. Like most sincere Calvinists, he had believed that unless he anticipated the worst in his imagination, the worst was sure to happen in fact. So, just in proportion as he was eager for Lucy to be well, to be a daughter of whom he could be proud, he had convinced himself, as well as her sisters, that she was different from other girls and that no one could expect her to live a completely normal life. He spoke of her constantly as “poor Lucy.” By the time she was eighteen, they had all come to take it for granted that she would never marry.
When she had reached the wire fence surrounding the property of the Ceramic Company, Lucy saw the lights on the cement dock that ran out into the water. A small lake-boat was tied up at the dock and a light on its deck blinked on and off as an unseen sailor m
oved back and forth in front of it in the darkness.
She turned and walked back again. The images of her father's aunts returned, and with them, a rush of indignation and a rise of self-assertive confidence. It was absurd that these two women she had never seen, so ignorant they believed even the misprints in the Bible were sacred, should bind their power into the third generation. Knowledge had power too. She knew what they had done to her father and what her father had done to her. Knowledge was the only power in the world which could undo the chain of evil men left behind them.
Coming back to the log she sat down again. The flat expanse of the lake now glowed with stars. There were muffled sounds from the yacht as the crew talked in the cabin. The riding lights of two vessels neared each other about half a mile from the shore. Turning inland she saw lighted windows glowing here and there through breaks in the trees. Yes, there was knowledge. It exorcised the past from the present. Now this whole night was throbbing with present life, the only thing of meaning and merit; insects sang, unseen crews on the vessels went about their business, in all the nearby houses plain people were living out their time. Knowledge could make them all free. There was also love. A fire of hungry love smouldered hotly in the whole Cameron family and always had. The three sisters were bound warmly to one another; in spite of the confusions and jealousies, their lives were entwined like the shoots of a convolvulus.
The two ships had passed each other and now their lights were drawing apart. A soft undulation in the surface of the lake swelled slowly inward, collapsed with a rushing sound that travelled rapidly away for a hundred yards down the sand, bursting as it went with a continuous rush of soft laughter.
A quick thrill of delight passed through Lucy's body and gave her a prickly feeling at her finger tips and the roots of her hair. She knew what she was, if no one else did. Her lips moved.
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