An Autumn Sowing

by E. F. Benson

He had steered the conversation away from the tidings that gleamed from Alice’s earnest eyes, he had taken it past that dangerous corner of religion, from which she might bolt back again to earnestness, and had brought it to its congenial base of legitimate clerical flirtation, which allowed him to talk baby-talk with adoring parishioners, and squeeze hands and dab on the presumption that all this meant no more to anybody else than to him. This was pure assumption: it meant much more to poor Alice....

For one brief moment a certain clear-sightedness penetrated her infatuation, a certain business-like unidealising vision, inherited probably from her father, came to her aid, giving her a warning both peremptory and final. For that one moment she saw this adored priest as he was, more or less, to whom this baby-talk and this squeezing of hands and this lighting of matches were not symbols of anything that lay behind them, but only expressive of an amorous anæmia. Had he been in earnest with a hundredth part of her intention, he would have caught at it, made plain his want, and even if marriage was not within the scope of his desire, reached a hand to the love she brought him, and claimed the comradeship of it, even if he could do no more. But, in this moment of clear vision, she saw and she knew that he did not even do that. He but sat on the hearth-rug and wagged his tail and barked for biscuits.... Then the clouds of her own foolishness, derived perhaps from her mother’s side, and strangely swollen by her individual temperament obscured that brief ray of common sense, and she yielded herself up to the entrancement of having Mr Silverdale sitting on the floor at her feet and lighting his cigarette from her match.

A sudden idiotic courage possessed her; she proposed to put things to the touch. The flickering firelight and her sense of convalescence inspired her. He had called her ‘Helper,’ he had said a thousand things behind which meaning might lurk. It was her business, like that of every sensible girl who wants to be married, to show him that his shy priest-like advances met a slightly less shy welcome. A wave of calculating fatuousness combed over her.

‘Poor parson doesn’t indulge himself as much as he ought,’ she said. ‘He won’t think a wee bitty about his own happiness, and so he makes others think of it for him.’

Alice looked not at him as she said these remarkable words but at the pink clock on the chimney-piece. She had the recklessness of physical weakness in her, she did not care what happened, if only one thing happened. If he would not take that lure, she was quite prepared to try him with another.

He half took it: he rose at it, but, so to speak, rose short. He continued to use baby-language, in order to indicate the distance that separated him from the earnest eyes that so pointedly looked at the pink clock.

‘Poor parson knows kind friends are thinking for him,’ he said. ‘He knows it too well perhaps: he is so selfish that he leaves his happiness in the hands of others, and doesn’t bother about it himself.’

Suddenly it struck this unfortunate clergyman that his words might conceivedly bear a disastrous interpretation to his adorer. Anything was better than to let such an interpretation become coherent: he felt that Alice had been encouraged to be on the point of proposing to him. Without a moment’s delay (since every moment was precious so long as Alice did not take possession of it) he switched off violently on to religious topics. Just now they had seemed dangerous to him, at this awful moment they presented the appearance of an Ark of Refuge.

‘Parson has got too much to think about,’ he hastily continued, ‘to allow him to think of his own happiness. Isn’t it true, dear Miss Alice, that we only get our own happiness when we are thinking not about ourselves? I thought about myself for half an hour this morning, and I did get so dreadfully bored. I thought how pleased I should be if—and how delighted I should be if—and then, thank God, I found myself yawning. It was all so stupid!’

‘I don’t believe you could be stupid,’ said Alice with her infernal calmness, that again terrified him.