‘Stupid? I am always stupid,’ he said. ‘I want to do something for everybody committed to my charge. I want to give myself to the drunkards and the drabs and the unbelievers. But I am like a foolish cook: I do not know how to serve myself up so as to become palatable.’
He could not help drawing a long breath of cigarette smoke mixed with relief. He thought that the corner had been quite safely steered round. There they were back again in parish work, and what could be nicer? He disregarded Alice’s gasp of appreciation at his modesty, and proceeded with an increased sense of comfort.
‘Give, give!’ he said. ‘Give and ask nothing. What you get doesn’t matter. Does it?’
He was feeling so comfortable now that he scarcely wished for Mrs Keeling’s entry. Alice’s earnest eyes, so he told himself (thereby revealing his ignorance of psychology) were dim with the perception of this fine interrogation. He was being wonderful, as he had so often been before, and the perception of that would surely fill her soul with the altruistic glee that possessed himself. He began, in the sense of personal security which this gave him, to get a little incautious. He did not wait for her acceptance of the prodigious doctrine that nothing you get matters to the problematical getter, but construed his own sense of security into her acquiescence.
‘So let us give,’ he said, just as if he was perorating in the pulpit, ‘let us give till we have spent all our energies. That will take a long time, won’t it: for the act of giving seems but to increase your capability of it. Dear Miss Alice, I have a thousand plans that are yet unrealised, a thousand schemes for this little parish of ours. We must have more schools for religious education, more classes, more lives unselfishly lived. I want all the help I can get. I want to transfuse St Thomas’s with the certainty that the doubting disciple lacked. But I can’t do it alone. Those who see must lend me their eyes—I am a mere stupid man. I——’
And then the fatuous voice suddenly ceased. To his extreme terror Alice with her earnest eyes leaned forwards towards him. She was husky through influenza, but the purport of what she said was horribly clear.
‘Oh, Mr Silverdale,’ she said, ‘do you really mean that? That you can’t work alone as a mere man? Do you——’
Alice drew a long breath that wheezed in her poor throat and covered her eyes with her hands, for she was dazzled with the vision that was surely turning real. To her, to his Helper, he had said that he was no use as a mere man. Surely the purport of that was clear.
‘Do you mean me?’ she said.
Mr Silverdale got up off the hearthrug where he had been sitting nursing his knees with miraculous celerity. She behind her hidden eyes heard him and knew, she felt she knew, that in another moment would come the touch of his hands on hers as he took them, and bade her look at him. Perhaps he would say, ‘Look at me, my darling’; perhaps his delicious joking ways would even at this sublimest of moments still assert themselves and he would say ‘Peep-o!’ But whatever he did would be delicious, would be perfect. But no touch came on her hands, and there was a long, an awful moment of dead silence, while behind poor Alice’s hands the dazzle died out of her vision. Before it was broken, she perceived that beyond a shadow of doubt he did not ‘mean her,’ and both were tongue-tied, he in the shame of having provoked a passion he had no use for, she in the shame of having revealed the passion he had not invited. She had come to the wrong house: she was an unbidden guest who must be directed outside the front-door again.