THE TURN OF THE SCREW
by Henry James
[The text is take from the first American appearance of this book.]
CONTENTS
THE TURN OF THE SCREW
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
THE TURN OF THE SCREW
The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except
the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old
house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered
till somebody happened to say that it was the only case he had met in
which such a visitation had fallen on a child. The case, I may mention,
was that of an apparition in just such an old house as had gathered us for
the occasion—an appearance, of a dreadful kind, to a little boy
sleeping in the room with his mother and waking her up in the terror of
it; waking her not to dissipate his dread and soothe him to sleep again,
but to encounter also, herself, before she had succeeded in doing so, the
same sight that had shaken him. It was this observation that drew from
Douglas—not immediately, but later in the evening—a reply that
had the interesting consequence to which I call attention. Someone else
told a story not particularly effective, which I saw he was not following.
This I took for a sign that he had himself something to produce and that
we should only have to wait. We waited in fact till two nights later; but
that same evening, before we scattered, he brought out what was in his
mind.
"I quite agree—in regard to Griffin's ghost, or whatever it was—that
its appearing first to the little boy, at so tender an age, adds a
particular touch. But it's not the first occurrence of its charming kind
that I know to have involved a child. If the child gives the effect
another turn of the screw, what do you say to TWO children—?"
"We say, of course," somebody exclaimed, "that they give two turns! Also
that we want to hear about them."
I can see Douglas there before the fire, to which he had got up to present
his back, looking down at his interlocutor with his hands in his pockets.
"Nobody but me, till now, has ever heard. It's quite too horrible." This,
naturally, was declared by several voices to give the thing the utmost
price, and our friend, with quiet art, prepared his triumph by turning his
eyes over the rest of us and going on: "It's beyond everything. Nothing at
all that I know touches it."
"For sheer terror?" I remember asking.
He seemed to say it was not so simple as that; to be really at a loss how
to qualify it. He passed his hand over his eyes, made a little wincing
grimace. "For dreadful—dreadfulness!"
"Oh, how delicious!" cried one of the women.
He took no notice of her; he looked at me, but as if, instead of me, he
saw what he spoke of. "For general uncanny ugliness and horror and pain."
"Well then," I said, "just sit right down and begin."
He turned round to the fire, gave a kick to a log, watched it an instant.
Then as he faced us again: "I can't begin. I shall have to send to town."
There was a unanimous groan at this, and much reproach; after which, in
his preoccupied way, he explained. "The story's written. It's in a locked
drawer—it has not been out for years. I could write to my man and
enclose the key; he could send down the packet as he finds it." It was to
me in particular that he appeared to propound this—appeared almost
to appeal for aid not to hesitate. He had broken a thickness of ice, the
formation of many a winter; had had his reasons for a long silence. The
others resented postponement, but it was just his scruples that charmed
me. I adjured him to write by the first post and to agree with us for an
early hearing; then I asked him if the experience in question had been his
own. To this his answer was prompt. "Oh, thank God, no!"
"And is the record yours? You took the thing down?"
"Nothing but the impression. I took that HERE"—he tapped his heart.
"I've never lost it."
"Then your manuscript—?"
"Is in old, faded ink, and in the most beautiful hand." He hung fire
again. "A woman's. She has been dead these twenty years. She sent me the
pages in question before she died." They were all listening now, and of
course there was somebody to be arch, or at any rate to draw the
inference. But if he put the inference by without a smile it was also
without irritation. "She was a most charming person, but she was ten years
older than I. She was my sister's governess," he quietly said. "She was
the most agreeable woman I've ever known in her position; she would have
been worthy of any whatever. It was long ago, and this episode was long
before. I was at Trinity, and I found her at home on my coming down the
second summer. I was much there that year—it was a beautiful one;
and we had, in her off-hours, some strolls and talks in the garden—talks
in which she struck me as awfully clever and nice. Oh yes; don't grin: I
liked her extremely and am glad to this day to think she liked me, too. If
she hadn't she wouldn't have told me. She had never told anyone. It wasn't
simply that she said so, but that I knew she hadn't. I was sure; I could
see. You'll easily judge why when you hear."
"Because the thing had been such a scare?"
He continued to fix me. "You'll easily judge," he repeated: "YOU will."
I fixed him, too. "I see. She was in love."
He laughed for the first time. "You ARE acute. Yes, she was in love. That
is, she had been. That came out—she couldn't tell her story without
its coming out. I saw it, and she saw I saw it; but neither of us spoke of
it. I remember the time and the place—the corner of the lawn, the
shade of the great beeches and the long, hot summer afternoon. It wasn't a
scene for a shudder; but oh—!" He quitted the fire and dropped back
into his chair.
"You'll receive the packet Thursday morning?" I inquired.
"Probably not till the second post."
"Well then; after dinner—"
"You'll all meet me here?" He looked us round again. "Isn't anybody
going?" It was almost the tone of hope.
"Everybody will stay!"
"I will"—and "I will!" cried the ladies whose
departure had been fixed. Mrs. Griffin, however, expressed the need for a
little more light. "Who was it she was in love with?"
"The story will tell," I took upon myself to reply.
"Oh, I can't wait for the story!"
"The story WON'T tell," said Douglas; "not in any literal, vulgar way."
"More's the pity, then. That's the only way I ever understand."
"Won't YOU tell, Douglas?" somebody else inquired.
He sprang to his feet again. "Yes—tomorrow. Now I must go to bed.
Good night." And quickly catching up a candlestick, he left us slightly
bewildered. From our end of the great brown hall we heard his step on the
stair; whereupon Mrs. Griffin spoke. "Well, if I don't know who she was in
love with, I know who HE was."
"She was ten years older," said her husband.
"Raison de plus—at that age! But it's rather nice, his long
reticence."
"Forty years!" Griffin put in.
"With this outbreak at last."
"The outbreak," I returned, "will make a tremendous occasion of Thursday
night;" and everyone so agreed with me that, in the light of it, we lost
all attention for everything else. The last story, however incomplete and
like the mere opening of a serial, had been told; we handshook and
"candlestuck," as somebody said, and went to bed.
I knew the next day that a letter containing the key had, by the first
post, gone off to his London apartments; but in spite of—or perhaps
just on account of—the eventual diffusion of this knowledge we quite
let him alone till after dinner, till such an hour of the evening, in
fact, as might best accord with the kind of emotion on which our hopes
were fixed. Then he became as communicative as we could desire and indeed
gave us his best reason for being so. We had it from him again before the
fire in the hall, as we had had our mild wonders of the previous night. It
appeared that the narrative he had promised to read us really required for
a proper intelligence a few words of prologue. Let me say here distinctly,
to have done with it, that this narrative, from an exact transcript of my
own made much later, is what I shall presently give. Poor Douglas, before
his death—when it was in sight—committed to me the manuscript
that reached him on the third of these days and that, on the same spot,
with immense effect, he began to read to our hushed little circle on the
night of the fourth. The departing ladies who had said they would stay
didn't, of course, thank heaven, stay: they departed, in consequence of
arrangements made, in a rage of curiosity, as they professed, produced by
the touches with which he had already worked us up. But that only made his
little final auditory more compact and select, kept it, round the hearth,
subject to a common thrill.
The first of these touches conveyed that the written statement took up the
tale at a point after it had, in a manner, begun. The fact to be in
possession of was therefore that his old friend, the youngest of several
daughters of a poor country parson, had, at the age of twenty, on taking
service for the first time in the schoolroom, come up to London, in
trepidation, to answer in person an advertisement that had already placed
her in brief correspondence with the advertiser. This person proved, on
her presenting herself, for judgment, at a house in Harley Street, that
impressed her as vast and imposing—this prospective patron proved a
gentleman, a bachelor in the prime of life, such a figure as had never
risen, save in a dream or an old novel, before a fluttered, anxious girl
out of a Hampshire vicarage. One could easily fix his type; it never,
happily, dies out. He was handsome and bold and pleasant, offhand and gay
and kind. He struck her, inevitably, as gallant and splendid, but what
took her most of all and gave her the courage she afterward showed was
that he put the whole thing to her as a kind of favor, an obligation he
should gratefully incur. She conceived him as rich, but as fearfully
extravagant—saw him all in a glow of high fashion, of good looks, of
expensive habits, of charming ways with women. He had for his own town
residence a big house filled with the spoils of travel and the trophies of
the chase; but it was to his country home, an old family place in Essex,
that he wished her immediately to proceed.
He had been left, by the death of their parents in India, guardian to a
small nephew and a small niece, children of a younger, a military brother,
whom he had lost two years before. These children were, by the strangest
of chances for a man in his position—a lone man without the right
sort of experience or a grain of patience—very heavily on his hands.
It had all been a great worry and, on his own part doubtless, a series of
blunders, but he immensely pitied the poor chicks and had done all he
could; had in particular sent them down to his other house, the proper
place for them being of course the country, and kept them there, from the
first, with the best people he could find to look after them, parting even
with his own servants to wait on them and going down himself, whenever he
might, to see how they were doing. The awkward thing was that they had
practically no other relations and that his own affairs took up all his
time. He had put them in possession of Bly, which was healthy and secure,
and had placed at the head of their little establishment—but below
stairs only—an excellent woman, Mrs. Grose, whom he was sure his
visitor would like and who had formerly been maid to his mother. She was
now housekeeper and was also acting for the time as superintendent to the
little girl, of whom, without children of her own, she was, by good luck,
extremely fond. There were plenty of people to help, but of course the
young lady who should go down as governess would be in supreme authority.
She would also have, in holidays, to look after the small boy, who had
been for a term at school—young as he was to be sent, but what else
could be done?—and who, as the holidays were about to begin, would
be back from one day to the other. There had been for the two children at
first a young lady whom they had had the misfortune to lose. She had done
for them quite beautifully—she was a most respectable person—till
her death, the great awkwardness of which had, precisely, left no
alternative but the school for little Miles. Mrs. Grose, since then, in
the way of manners and things, had done as she could for Flora; and there
were, further, a cook, a housemaid, a dairywoman, an old pony, an old
groom, and an old gardener, all likewise thoroughly respectable.
So far had Douglas presented his picture when someone put a question. "And
what did the former governess die of?—of so much respectability?"
Our friend's answer was prompt. "That will come out. I don't anticipate."
"Excuse me—I thought that was just what you ARE doing."
"In her successor's place," I suggested, "I should have wished to learn if
the office brought with it—"
"Necessary danger to life?" Douglas completed my thought. "She did wish to
learn, and she did learn. You shall hear tomorrow what she learned.
Meanwhile, of course, the prospect struck her as slightly grim. She was
young, untried, nervous: it was a vision of serious duties and little
company, of really great loneliness. She hesitated—took a couple of
days to consult and consider. But the salary offered much exceeded her
modest measure, and on a second interview she faced the music, she
engaged." And Douglas, with this, made a pause that, for the benefit of
the company, moved me to throw in—
"The moral of which was of course the seduction exercised by the splendid
young man. She succumbed to it."
He got up and, as he had done the night before, went to the fire, gave a
stir to a log with his foot, then stood a moment with his back to us. "She
saw him only twice."
"Yes, but that's just the beauty of her passion."
A little to my surprise, on this, Douglas turned round to me. "It WAS the
beauty of it. There were others," he went on, "who hadn't succumbed. He
told her frankly all his difficulty—that for several applicants the
conditions had been prohibitive. They were, somehow, simply afraid. It
sounded dull—it sounded strange; and all the more so because of his
main condition."
"Which was—?"
"That she should never trouble him—but never, never: neither appeal
nor complain nor write about anything; only meet all questions herself,
receive all moneys from his solicitor, take the whole thing over and let
him alone. She promised to do this, and she mentioned to me that when, for
a moment, disburdened, delighted, he held her hand, thanking her for the
sacrifice, she already felt rewarded."
"But was that all her reward?" one of the ladies asked.
"She never saw him again."
"Oh!" said the lady; which, as our friend immediately left us again, was
the only other word of importance contributed to the subject till, the
next night, by the corner of the hearth, in the best chair, he opened the
faded red cover of a thin old-fashioned gilt-edged album. The whole thing
took indeed more nights than one, but on the first occasion the same lady
put another question. "What is your title?"
"I haven't one."
"Oh, I have!" I said. But Douglas, without heeding me, had begun to
read with a fine clearness that was like a rendering to the ear of the
beauty of his author's hand.
I
I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a
little seesaw of the right throbs and the wrong. After rising, in town, to
meet his appeal, I had at all events a couple of very bad days—found
myself doubtful again, felt indeed sure I had made a mistake. In this
state of mind I spent the long hours of bumping, swinging coach that
carried me to the stopping place at which I was to be met by a vehicle
from the house. This convenience, I was told, had been ordered, and I
found, toward the close of the June afternoon, a commodious fly in waiting
for me. Driving at that hour, on a lovely day, through a country to which
the summer sweetness seemed to offer me a friendly welcome, my fortitude
mounted afresh and, as we turned into the avenue, encountered a reprieve
that was probably but a proof of the point to which it had sunk. I suppose
I had expected, or had dreaded, something so melancholy that what greeted
me was a good surprise. I remember as a most pleasant impression the
broad, clear front, its open windows and fresh curtains and the pair of
maids looking out; I remember the lawn and the bright flowers and the
crunch of my wheels on the gravel and the clustered treetops over which
the rooks circled and cawed in the golden sky. The scene had a greatness
that made it a different affair from my own scant home, and there
immediately appeared at the door, with a little girl in her hand, a civil
person who dropped me as decent a curtsy as if I had been the mistress or
a distinguished visitor. I had received in Harley Street a narrower notion
of the place, and that, as I recalled it, made me think the proprietor
still more of a gentleman, suggested that what I was to enjoy might be
something beyond his promise.
I had no drop again till the next day, for I was carried triumphantly
through the following hours by my introduction to the younger of my
pupils. The little girl who accompanied Mrs. Grose appeared to me on the
spot a creature so charming as to make it a great fortune to have to do
with her. She was the most beautiful child I had ever seen, and I
afterward wondered that my employer had not told me more of her. I slept
little that night—I was too much excited; and this astonished me,
too, I recollect, remained with me, adding to my sense of the liberality
with which I was treated. The large, impressive room, one of the best in
the house, the great state bed, as I almost felt it, the full, figured
draperies, the long glasses in which, for the first time, I could see
myself from head to foot, all struck me—like the extraordinary charm
of my small charge—as so many things thrown in. It was thrown in as
well, from the first moment, that I should get on with Mrs. Grose in a
relation over which, on my way, in the coach, I fear I had rather brooded.
The only thing indeed that in this early outlook might have made me shrink
again was the clear circumstance of her being so glad to see me. I
perceived within half an hour that she was so glad—stout, simple,
plain, clean, wholesome woman—as to be positively on her guard
against showing it too much. I wondered even then a little why she should
wish not to show it, and that, with reflection, with suspicion, might of
course have made me uneasy.
But it was a comfort that there could be no uneasiness in a connection
with anything so beatific as the radiant image of my little girl, the
vision of whose angelic beauty had probably more than anything else to do
with the restlessness that, before morning, made me several times rise and
wander about my room to take in the whole picture and prospect; to watch,
from my open window, the faint summer dawn, to look at such portions of
the rest of the house as I could catch, and to listen, while, in the
fading dusk, the first birds began to twitter, for the possible recurrence
of a sound or two, less natural and not without, but within, that I had
fancied I heard. There had been a moment when I believed I recognized,
faint and far, the cry of a child; there had been another when I found
myself just consciously starting as at the passage, before my door, of a
light footstep. But these fancies were not marked enough not to be thrown
off, and it is only in the light, or the gloom, I should rather say, of
other and subsequent matters that they now come back to me. To watch,
teach, "form" little Flora would too evidently be the making of a happy
and useful life. It had been agreed between us downstairs that after this
first occasion I should have her as a matter of course at night, her small
white bed being already arranged, to that end, in my room. What I had
undertaken was the whole care of her, and she had remained, just this last
time, with Mrs. Grose only as an effect of our consideration for my
inevitable strangeness and her natural timidity. In spite of this timidity—which
the child herself, in the oddest way in the world, had been perfectly
frank and brave about, allowing it, without a sign of uncomfortable
consciousness, with the deep, sweet serenity indeed of one of Raphael's
holy infants, to be discussed, to be imputed to her, and to determine us—I
feel quite sure she would presently like me. It was part of what I already
liked Mrs. Grose herself for, the pleasure I could see her feel in my
admiration and wonder as I sat at supper with four tall candles and with
my pupil, in a high chair and a bib, brightly facing me, between them,
over bread and milk. There were naturally things that in Flora's presence
could pass between us only as prodigious and gratified looks, obscure and
roundabout allusions.
"And the little boy—does he look like her? Is he too so very
remarkable?"
One wouldn't flatter a child. "Oh, miss, MOST remarkable. If you think
well of this one!"—and she stood there with a plate in her hand,
beaming at our companion, who looked from one of us to the other with
placid heavenly eyes that contained nothing to check us.
"Yes; if I do—?"
"You WILL be carried away by the little gentleman!"
"Well, that, I think, is what I came for—to be carried away. I'm
afraid, however," I remember feeling the impulse to add, "I'm rather
easily carried away. I was carried away in London!"
I can still see Mrs. Grose's broad face as she took this in. "In Harley
Street?"
"In Harley Street."
"Well, miss, you're not the first—and you won't be the last."
"Oh, I've no pretension," I could laugh, "to being the only one. My other
pupil, at any rate, as I understand, comes back tomorrow?"
"Not tomorrow—Friday, miss. He arrives, as you did, by the coach,
under care of the guard, and is to be met by the same carriage."
I forthwith expressed that the proper as well as the pleasant and friendly
thing would be therefore that on the arrival of the public conveyance I
should be in waiting for him with his little sister; an idea in which Mrs.
Grose concurred so heartily that I somehow took her manner as a kind of
comforting pledge—never falsified, thank heaven!—that we
should on every question be quite at one. Oh, she was glad I was there!
What I felt the next day was, I suppose, nothing that could be fairly
called a reaction from the cheer of my arrival; it was probably at the
most only a slight oppression produced by a fuller measure of the scale,
as I walked round them, gazed up at them, took them in, of my new
circumstances. They had, as it were, an extent and mass for which I had
not been prepared and in the presence of which I found myself, freshly, a
little scared as well as a little proud. Lessons, in this agitation,
certainly suffered some delay; I reflected that my first duty was, by the
gentlest arts I could contrive, to win the child into the sense of knowing
me. I spent the day with her out-of-doors; I arranged with her, to her
great satisfaction, that it should be she, she only, who might show me the
place. She showed it step by step and room by room and secret by secret,
with droll, delightful, childish talk about it and with the result, in
half an hour, of our becoming immense friends. Young as she was, I was
struck, throughout our little tour, with her confidence and courage with
the way, in empty chambers and dull corridors, on crooked staircases that
made me pause and even on the summit of an old machicolated square tower
that made me dizzy, her morning music, her disposition to tell me so many
more things than she asked, rang out and led me on. I have not seen Bly
since the day I left it, and I daresay that to my older and more informed
eyes it would now appear sufficiently contracted. But as my little
conductress, with her hair of gold and her frock of blue, danced before me
round corners and pattered down passages, I had the view of a castle of
romance inhabited by a rosy sprite, such a place as would somehow, for
diversion of the young idea, take all color out of storybooks and
fairytales. Wasn't it just a storybook over which I had fallen adoze and
adream? No; it was a big, ugly, antique, but convenient house, embodying a
few features of a building still older, half-replaced and half-utilized,
in which I had the fancy of our being almost as lost as a handful of
passengers in a great drifting ship. Well, I was, strangely, at the helm!
II
This came home to me when, two days later, I drove over with Flora to
meet, as Mrs. Grose said, the little gentleman; and all the more for an
incident that, presenting itself the second evening, had deeply
disconcerted me. The first day had been, on the whole, as I have
expressed, reassuring; but I was to see it wind up in keen apprehension.
The postbag, that evening—it came late—contained a letter for
me, which, however, in the hand of my employer, I found to be composed but
of a few words enclosing another, addressed to himself, with a seal still
unbroken. "This, I recognize, is from the headmaster, and the headmaster's
an awful bore. Read him, please; deal with him; but mind you don't report.
Not a word. I'm off!" I broke the seal with a great effort—so great
a one that I was a long time coming to it; took the unopened missive at
last up to my room and only attacked it just before going to bed. I had
better have let it wait till morning, for it gave me a second sleepless
night. With no counsel to take, the next day, I was full of distress; and
it finally got so the better of me that I determined to open myself at
least to Mrs. Grose.
"What does it mean? The child's dismissed his school."
She gave me a look that I remarked at the moment; then, visibly, with a
quick blankness, seemed to try to take it back. "But aren't they all—?"
"Sent home—yes. But only for the holidays. Miles may never go back
at all."
Consciously, under my attention, she reddened. "They won't take him?"
"They absolutely decline."
At this she raised her eyes, which she had turned from me; I saw them fill
with good tears. "What has he done?"
I hesitated; then I judged best simply to hand her my letter—which,
however, had the effect of making her, without taking it, simply put her
hands behind her. She shook her head sadly. "Such things are not for me,
miss."
My counselor couldn't read! I winced at my mistake, which I attenuated as
I could, and opened my letter again to repeat it to her; then, faltering
in the act and folding it up once more, I put it back in my pocket. "Is he
really BAD?"
The tears were still in her eyes. "Do the gentlemen say so?"
"They go into no particulars. They simply express their regret that it
should be impossible to keep him. That can have only one meaning." Mrs.
Grose listened with dumb emotion; she forbore to ask me what this meaning
might be; so that, presently, to put the thing with some coherence and
with the mere aid of her presence to my own mind, I went on: "That he's an
injury to the others."
At this, with one of the quick turns of simple folk, she suddenly flamed
up. "Master Miles! HIM an injury?"
There was such a flood of good faith in it that, though I had not yet seen
the child, my very fears made me jump to the absurdity of the idea. I
found myself, to meet my friend the better, offering it, on the spot,
sarcastically. "To his poor little innocent mates!"
"It's too dreadful," cried Mrs. Grose, "to say such cruel things! Why,
he's scarce ten years old."
"Yes, yes; it would be incredible."
She was evidently grateful for such a profession. "See him, miss, first.
THEN believe it!" I felt forthwith a new impatience to see him; it was the
beginning of a curiosity that, for all the next hours, was to deepen
almost to pain. Mrs. Grose was aware, I could judge, of what she had
produced in me, and she followed it up with assurance. "You might as well
believe it of the little lady. Bless her," she added the next moment—"LOOK
at her!"
I turned and saw that Flora, whom, ten minutes before, I had established
in the schoolroom with a sheet of white paper, a pencil, and a copy of
nice "round o's," now presented herself to view at the open door. She
expressed in her little way an extraordinary detachment from disagreeable
duties, looking to me, however, with a great childish light that seemed to
offer it as a mere result of the affection she had conceived for my
person, which had rendered necessary that she should follow me. I needed
nothing more than this to feel the full force of Mrs. Grose's comparison,
and, catching my pupil in my arms, covered her with kisses in which there
was a sob of atonement.
Nonetheless, the rest of the day I watched for further occasion to
approach my colleague, especially as, toward evening, I began to fancy she
rather sought to avoid me. I overtook her, I remember, on the staircase;
we went down together, and at the bottom I detained her, holding her there
with a hand on her arm. "I take what you said to me at noon as a
declaration that YOU'VE never known him to be bad."
She threw back her head; she had clearly, by this time, and very honestly,
adopted an attitude. "Oh, never known him—I don't pretend THAT!"
I was upset again. "Then you HAVE known him—?"
"Yes indeed, miss, thank God!"
On reflection I accepted this. "You mean that a boy who never is—?"
"Is no boy for ME!"
I held her tighter. "You like them with the spirit to be naughty?" Then,
keeping pace with her answer, "So do I!" I eagerly brought out. "But not
to the degree to contaminate—"
"To contaminate?"—my big word left her at a loss. I explained it.
"To corrupt."
She stared, taking my meaning in; but it produced in her an odd laugh.
"Are you afraid he'll corrupt YOU?" She put the question with such a fine
bold humor that, with a laugh, a little silly doubtless, to match her own,
I gave way for the time to the apprehension of ridicule.
But the next day, as the hour for my drive approached, I cropped up in
another place. "What was the lady who was here before?"
"The last governess? She was also young and pretty—almost as young
and almost as pretty, miss, even as you."
"Ah, then, I hope her youth and her beauty helped her!" I recollect
throwing off. "He seems to like us young and pretty!"
"Oh, he DID," Mrs. Grose assented: "it was the way he liked everyone!" She
had no sooner spoken indeed than she caught herself up. "I mean that's HIS
way—the master's."
I was struck. "But of whom did you speak first?"
She looked blank, but she colored. "Why, of HIM."
"Of the master?"
"Of who else?"
There was so obviously no one else that the next moment I had lost my
impression of her having accidentally said more than she meant; and I
merely asked what I wanted to know. "Did SHE see anything in the boy—?"
"That wasn't right? She never told me."
I had a scruple, but I overcame it. "Was she careful—particular?"
Mrs. Grose appeared to try to be conscientious. "About some things—yes."
"But not about all?"
Again she considered. "Well, miss—she's gone. I won't tell tales."
"I quite understand your feeling," I hastened to reply; but I thought it,
after an instant, not opposed to this concession to pursue: "Did she die
here?"
"No—she went off."
I don't know what there was in this brevity of Mrs. Grose's that struck me
as ambiguous. "Went off to die?" Mrs. Grose looked straight out of the
window, but I felt that, hypothetically, I had a right to know what young
persons engaged for Bly were expected to do. "She was taken ill, you mean,
and went home?"
"She was not taken ill, so far as appeared, in this house. She left it, at
the end of the year, to go home, as she said, for a short holiday, to
which the time she had put in had certainly given her a right. We had then
a young woman—a nursemaid who had stayed on and who was a good girl
and clever; and SHE took the children altogether for the interval. But our
young lady never came back, and at the very moment I was expecting her I
heard from the master that she was dead."
I turned this over. "But of what?"
"He never told me! But please, miss," said Mrs. Grose, "I must get to my
work."
III
Her thus turning her back on me was fortunately not, for my just
preoccupations, a snub that could check the growth of our mutual esteem.
We met, after I had brought home little Miles, more intimately than ever
on the ground of my stupefaction, my general emotion: so monstrous was I
then ready to pronounce it that such a child as had now been revealed to
me should be under an interdict. I was a little late on the scene, and I
felt, as he stood wistfully looking out for me before the door of the inn
at which the coach had put him down, that I had seen him, on the instant,
without and within, in the great glow of freshness, the same positive
fragrance of purity, in which I had, from the first moment, seen his
little sister. He was incredibly beautiful, and Mrs. Grose had put her
finger on it: everything but a sort of passion of tenderness for him was
swept away by his presence. What I then and there took him to my heart for
was something divine that I have never found to the same degree in any
child—his indescribable little air of knowing nothing in the world
but love. It would have been impossible to carry a bad name with a greater
sweetness of innocence, and by the time I had got back to Bly with him I
remained merely bewildered—so far, that is, as I was not outraged—by
the sense of the horrible letter locked up in my room, in a drawer. As
soon as I could compass a private word with Mrs. Grose I declared to her
that it was grotesque.
She promptly understood me. "You mean the cruel charge—?"
"It doesn't live an instant. My dear woman, LOOK at him!"
She smiled at my pretention to have discovered his charm. "I assure you,
miss, I do nothing else! What will you say, then?" she immediately added.
"In answer to the letter?" I had made up my mind. "Nothing."
"And to his uncle?"
I was incisive. "Nothing."
"And to the boy himself?"
I was wonderful. "Nothing."
She gave with her apron a great wipe to her mouth. "Then I'll stand by
you. We'll see it out."
"We'll see it out!" I ardently echoed, giving her my hand to make it a
vow.
She held me there a moment, then whisked up her apron again with her
detached hand. "Would you mind, miss, if I used the freedom—"
"To kiss me? No!" I took the good creature in my arms and, after we had
embraced like sisters, felt still more fortified and indignant.
This, at all events, was for the time: a time so full that, as I recall
the way it went, it reminds me of all the art I now need to make it a
little distinct. What I look back at with amazement is the situation I
accepted. I had undertaken, with my companion, to see it out, and I was
under a charm, apparently, that could smooth away the extent and the far
and difficult connections of such an effort. I was lifted aloft on a great
wave of infatuation and pity. I found it simple, in my ignorance, my
confusion, and perhaps my conceit, to assume that I could deal with a boy
whose education for the world was all on the point of beginning. I am
unable even to remember at this day what proposal I framed for the end of
his holidays and the resumption of his studies. Lessons with me, indeed,
that charming summer, we all had a theory that he was to have; but I now
feel that, for weeks, the lessons must have been rather my own. I learned
something—at first, certainly—that had not been one of the
teachings of my small, smothered life; learned to be amused, and even
amusing, and not to think for the morrow. It was the first time, in a
manner, that I had known space and air and freedom, all the music of
summer and all the mystery of nature. And then there was consideration—and
consideration was sweet. Oh, it was a trap—not designed, but deep—to
my imagination, to my delicacy, perhaps to my vanity; to whatever, in me,
was most excitable. The best way to picture it all is to say that I was
off my guard. They gave me so little trouble—they were of a
gentleness so extraordinary. I used to speculate—but even this with
a dim disconnectedness—as to how the rough future (for all futures
are rough!) would handle them and might bruise them. They had the bloom of
health and happiness; and yet, as if I had been in charge of a pair of
little grandees, of princes of the blood, for whom everything, to be
right, would have to be enclosed and protected, the only form that, in my
fancy, the afteryears could take for them was that of a romantic, a really
royal extension of the garden and the park. It may be, of course, above
all, that what suddenly broke into this gives the previous time a charm of
stillness—that hush in which something gathers or crouches. The
change was actually like the spring of a beast.
In the first weeks the days were long; they often, at their finest, gave
me what I used to call my own hour, the hour when, for my pupils, teatime
and bedtime having come and gone, I had, before my final retirement, a
small interval alone. Much as I liked my companions, this hour was the
thing in the day I liked most; and I liked it best of all when, as the
light faded—or rather, I should say, the day lingered and the last
calls of the last birds sounded, in a flushed sky, from the old trees—I
could take a turn into the grounds and enjoy, almost with a sense of
property that amused and flattered me, the beauty and dignity of the
place. It was a pleasure at these moments to feel myself tranquil and
justified; doubtless, perhaps, also to reflect that by my discretion, my
quiet good sense and general high propriety, I was giving pleasure—if
he ever thought of it!—to the person to whose pressure I had
responded. What I was doing was what he had earnestly hoped and directly
asked of me, and that I COULD, after all, do it proved even a greater joy
than I had expected. I daresay I fancied myself, in short, a remarkable
young woman and took comfort in the faith that this would more publicly
appear. Well, I needed to be remarkable to offer a front to the remarkable
things that presently gave their first sign.
It was plump, one afternoon, in the middle of my very hour: the children
were tucked away, and I had come out for my stroll. One of the thoughts
that, as I don't in the least shrink now from noting, used to be with me
in these wanderings was that it would be as charming as a charming story
suddenly to meet someone. Someone would appear there at the turn of a path
and would stand before me and smile and approve. I didn't ask more than
that—I only asked that he should KNOW; and the only way to be sure
he knew would be to see it, and the kind light of it, in his handsome
face. That was exactly present to me—by which I mean the face was—when,
on the first of these occasions, at the end of a long June day, I stopped
short on emerging from one of the plantations and coming into view of the
house. What arrested me on the spot—and with a shock much greater
than any vision had allowed for—was the sense that my imagination
had, in a flash, turned real. He did stand there!—but high up,
beyond the lawn and at the very top of the tower to which, on that first
morning, little Flora had conducted me. This tower was one of a pair—square,
incongruous, crenelated structures—that were distinguished, for some
reason, though I could see little difference, as the new and the old. They
flanked opposite ends of the house and were probably architectural
absurdities, redeemed in a measure indeed by not being wholly disengaged
nor of a height too pretentious, dating, in their gingerbread antiquity,
from a romantic revival that was already a respectable past. I admired
them, had fancies about them, for we could all profit in a degree,
especially when they loomed through the dusk, by the grandeur of their
actual battlements; yet it was not at such an elevation that the figure I
had so often invoked seemed most in place.
It produced in me, this figure, in the clear twilight, I remember, two
distinct gasps of emotion, which were, sharply, the shock of my first and
that of my second surprise. My second was a violent perception of the
mistake of my first: the man who met my eyes was not the person I had
precipitately supposed. There came to me thus a bewilderment of vision of
which, after these years, there is no living view that I can hope to give.
An unknown man in a lonely place is a permitted object of fear to a young
woman privately bred; and the figure that faced me was—a few more
seconds assured me—as little anyone else I knew as it was the image
that had been in my mind. I had not seen it in Harley Street—I had
not seen it anywhere. The place, moreover, in the strangest way in the
world, had, on the instant, and by the very fact of its appearance, become
a solitude. To me at least, making my statement here with a deliberation
with which I have never made it, the whole feeling of the moment returns.
It was as if, while I took in—what I did take in—all the rest
of the scene had been stricken with death. I can hear again, as I write,
the intense hush in which the sounds of evening dropped. The rooks stopped
cawing in the golden sky, and the friendly hour lost, for the minute, all
its voice. But there was no other change in nature, unless indeed it were
a change that I saw with a stranger sharpness. The gold was still in the
sky, the clearness in the air, and the man who looked at me over the
battlements was as definite as a picture in a frame. That's how I thought,
with extraordinary quickness, of each person that he might have been and
that he was not. We were confronted across our distance quite long enough
for me to ask myself with intensity who then he was and to feel, as an
effect of my inability to say, a wonder that in a few instants more became
intense.
The great question, or one of these, is, afterward, I know, with regard to
certain matters, the question of how long they have lasted. Well, this
matter of mine, think what you will of it, lasted while I caught at a
dozen possibilities, none of which made a difference for the better, that
I could see, in there having been in the house—and for how long,
above all?—a person of whom I was in ignorance. It lasted while I
just bridled a little with the sense that my office demanded that there
should be no such ignorance and no such person. It lasted while this
visitant, at all events—and there was a touch of the strange
freedom, as I remember, in the sign of familiarity of his wearing no hat—seemed
to fix me, from his position, with just the question, just the scrutiny
through the fading light, that his own presence provoked. We were too far
apart to call to each other, but there was a moment at which, at shorter
range, some challenge between us, breaking the hush, would have been the
right result of our straight mutual stare. He was in one of the angles,
the one away from the house, very erect, as it struck me, and with both
hands on the ledge. So I saw him as I see the letters I form on this page;
then, exactly, after a minute, as if to add to the spectacle, he slowly
changed his place—passed, looking at me hard all the while, to the
opposite corner of the platform. Yes, I had the sharpest sense that during
this transit he never took his eyes from me, and I can see at this moment
the way his hand, as he went, passed from one of the crenelations to the
next. He stopped at the other corner, but less long, and even as he turned
away still markedly fixed me. He turned away; that was all I knew.
IV
It was not that I didn't wait, on this occasion, for more, for I was
rooted as deeply as I was shaken. Was there a "secret" at Bly—a
mystery of Udolpho or an insane, an unmentionable relative kept in
unsuspected confinement? I can't say how long I turned it over, or how
long, in a confusion of curiosity and dread, I remained where I had had my
collision; I only recall that when I re-entered the house darkness had
quite closed in. Agitation, in the interval, certainly had held me and
driven me, for I must, in circling about the place, have walked three
miles; but I was to be, later on, so much more overwhelmed that this mere
dawn of alarm was a comparatively human chill. The most singular part of
it, in fact—singular as the rest had been—was the part I
became, in the hall, aware of in meeting Mrs. Grose. This picture comes
back to me in the general train—the impression, as I received it on
my return, of the wide white panelled space, bright in the lamplight and
with its portraits and red carpet, and of the good surprised look of my
friend, which immediately told me she had missed me. It came to me
straightway, under her contact, that, with plain heartiness, mere relieved
anxiety at my appearance, she knew nothing whatever that could bear upon
the incident I had there ready for her. I had not suspected in advance
that her comfortable face would pull me up, and I somehow measured the
importance of what I had seen by my thus finding myself hesitate to
mention it. Scarce anything in the whole history seems to me so odd as
this fact that my real beginning of fear was one, as I may say, with the
instinct of sparing my companion. On the spot, accordingly, in the
pleasant hall and with her eyes on me, I, for a reason that I couldn't
then have phrased, achieved an inward resolution—offered a vague
pretext for my lateness and, with the plea of the beauty of the night and
of the heavy dew and wet feet, went as soon as possible to my room.
Here it was another affair; here, for many days after, it was a queer
affair enough. There were hours, from day to day—or at least there
were moments, snatched even from clear duties—when I had to shut
myself up to think. It was not so much yet that I was more nervous than I
could bear to be as that I was remarkably afraid of becoming so; for the
truth I had now to turn over was, simply and clearly, the truth that I
could arrive at no account whatever of the visitor with whom I had been so
inexplicably and yet, as it seemed to me, so intimately concerned. It took
little time to see that I could sound without forms of inquiry and without
exciting remark any domestic complications. The shock I had suffered must
have sharpened all my senses; I felt sure, at the end of three days and as
the result of mere closer attention, that I had not been practiced upon by
the servants nor made the object of any "game." Of whatever it was that I
knew, nothing was known around me. There was but one sane inference:
someone had taken a liberty rather gross. That was what, repeatedly, I
dipped into my room and locked the door to say to myself. We had been,
collectively, subject to an intrusion; some unscrupulous traveler, curious
in old houses, had made his way in unobserved, enjoyed the prospect from
the best point of view, and then stolen out as he came. If he had given me
such a bold hard stare, that was but a part of his indiscretion. The good
thing, after all, was that we should surely see no more of him.
This was not so good a thing, I admit, as not to leave me to judge that
what, essentially, made nothing else much signify was simply my charming
work. My charming work was just my life with Miles and Flora, and through
nothing could I so like it as through feeling that I could throw myself
into it in trouble. The attraction of my small charges was a constant joy,
leading me to wonder afresh at the vanity of my original fears, the
distaste I had begun by entertaining for the probable gray prose of my
office. There was to be no gray prose, it appeared, and no long grind; so
how could work not be charming that presented itself as daily beauty? It
was all the romance of the nursery and the poetry of the schoolroom. I
don't mean by this, of course, that we studied only fiction and verse; I
mean I can express no otherwise the sort of interest my companions
inspired. How can I describe that except by saying that instead of growing
used to them—and it's a marvel for a governess: I call the
sisterhood to witness!—I made constant fresh discoveries. There was
one direction, assuredly, in which these discoveries stopped: deep
obscurity continued to cover the region of the boy's conduct at school. It
had been promptly given me, I have noted, to face that mystery without a
pang. Perhaps even it would be nearer the truth to say that—without
a word—he himself had cleared it up. He had made the whole charge
absurd. My conclusion bloomed there with the real rose flush of his
innocence: he was only too fine and fair for the little horrid, unclean
school world, and he had paid a price for it. I reflected acutely that the
sense of such differences, such superiorities of quality, always, on the
part of the majority—which could include even stupid, sordid
headmasters—turn infallibly to the vindictive.
Both the children had a gentleness (it was their only fault, and it never
made Miles a muff) that kept them—how shall I express it?—almost
impersonal and certainly quite unpunishable. They were like the cherubs of
the anecdote, who had—morally, at any rate—nothing to whack! I
remember feeling with Miles in especial as if he had had, as it were, no
history. We expect of a small child a scant one, but there was in this
beautiful little boy something extraordinarily sensitive, yet
extraordinarily happy, that, more than in any creature of his age I have
seen, struck me as beginning anew each day. He had never for a second
suffered. I took this as a direct disproof of his having really been
chastised. If he had been wicked he would have "caught" it, and I should
have caught it by the rebound—I should have found the trace. I found
nothing at all, and he was therefore an angel. He never spoke of his
school, never mentioned a comrade or a master; and I, for my part, was
quite too much disgusted to allude to them. Of course I was under the
spell, and the wonderful part is that, even at the time, I perfectly knew
I was. But I gave myself up to it; it was an antidote to any pain, and I
had more pains than one. I was in receipt in these days of disturbing
letters from home, where things were not going well. But with my children,
what things in the world mattered? That was the question I used to put to
my scrappy retirements. I was dazzled by their loveliness.
There was a Sunday—to get on—when it rained with such force
and for so many hours that there could be no procession to church; in
consequence of which, as the day declined, I had arranged with Mrs. Grose
that, should the evening show improvement, we would attend together the
late service. The rain happily stopped, and I prepared for our walk,
which, through the park and by the good road to the village, would be a
matter of twenty minutes. Coming downstairs to meet my colleague in the
hall, I remembered a pair of gloves that had required three stitches and
that had received them—with a publicity perhaps not edifying—while
I sat with the children at their tea, served on Sundays, by exception, in
that cold, clean temple of mahogany and brass, the "grown-up" dining room.
The gloves had been dropped there, and I turned in to recover them. The
day was gray enough, but the afternoon light still lingered, and it
enabled me, on crossing the threshold, not only to recognize, on a chair
near the wide window, then closed, the articles I wanted, but to become
aware of a person on the other side of the window and looking straight in.
One step into the room had sufficed; my vision was instantaneous; it was
all there. The person looking straight in was the person who had already
appeared to me. He appeared thus again with I won't say greater
distinctness, for that was impossible, but with a nearness that
represented a forward stride in our intercourse and made me, as I met him,
catch my breath and turn cold. He was the same—he was the same, and
seen, this time, as he had been seen before, from the waist up, the
window, though the dining room was on the ground floor, not going down to
the terrace on which he stood. His face was close to the glass, yet the
effect of this better view was, strangely, only to show me how intense the
former had been. He remained but a few seconds—long enough to
convince me he also saw and recognized; but it was as if I had been
looking at him for years and had known him always. Something, however,
happened this time that had not happened before; his stare into my face,
through the glass and across the room, was as deep and hard as then, but
it quitted me for a moment during which I could still watch it, see it fix
successively several other things. On the spot there came to me the added
shock of a certitude that it was not for me he had come there. He had come
for someone else.
The flash of this knowledge—for it was knowledge in the midst of
dread—produced in me the most extraordinary effect, started as I
stood there, a sudden vibration of duty and courage. I say courage because
I was beyond all doubt already far gone. I bounded straight out of the
door again, reached that of the house, got, in an instant, upon the drive,
and, passing along the terrace as fast as I could rush, turned a corner
and came full in sight. But it was in sight of nothing now—my
visitor had vanished. I stopped, I almost dropped, with the real relief of
this; but I took in the whole scene—I gave him time to reappear. I
call it time, but how long was it? I can't speak to the purpose today of
the duration of these things. That kind of measure must have left me: they
couldn't have lasted as they actually appeared to me to last. The terrace
and the whole place, the lawn and the garden beyond it, all I could see of
the park, were empty with a great emptiness. There were shrubberies and
big trees, but I remember the clear assurance I felt that none of them
concealed him. He was there or was not there: not there if I didn't see
him. I got hold of this; then, instinctively, instead of returning as I
had come, went to the window. It was confusedly present to me that I ought
to place myself where he had stood. I did so; I applied my face to the
pane and looked, as he had looked, into the room. As if, at this moment,
to show me exactly what his range had been, Mrs. Grose, as I had done for
himself just before, came in from the hall. With this I had the full image
of a repetition of what had already occurred. She saw me as I had seen my
own visitant; she pulled up short as I had done; I gave her something of
the shock that I had received. She turned white, and this made me ask
myself if I had blanched as much. She stared, in short, and retreated on
just MY lines, and I knew she had then passed out and come round to me and
that I should presently meet her. I remained where I was, and while I
waited I thought of more things than one. But there's only one I take
space to mention. I wondered why SHE should be scared.
V
Oh, she let me know as soon as, round the corner of the house, she loomed
again into view. "What in the name of goodness is the matter—?" She
was now flushed and out of breath.
I said nothing till she came quite near. "With me?" I must have made a
wonderful face. "Do I show it?"
"You're as white as a sheet. You look awful."
I considered; I could meet on this, without scruple, any innocence. My
need to respect the bloom of Mrs. Grose's had dropped, without a rustle,
from my shoulders, and if I wavered for the instant it was not with what I
kept back. I put out my hand to her and she took it; I held her hard a
little, liking to feel her close to me. There was a kind of support in the
shy heave of her surprise. "You came for me for church, of course, but I
can't go."
"Has anything happened?"
"Yes. You must know now. Did I look very queer?"
"Through this window? Dreadful!"
"Well," I said, "I've been frightened." Mrs. Grose's eyes expressed
plainly that SHE had no wish to be, yet also that she knew too well her
place not to be ready to share with me any marked inconvenience. Oh, it
was quite settled that she MUST share! "Just what you saw from the dining
room a minute ago was the effect of that. What I saw—just
before—was much worse."
Her hand tightened. "What was it?"
"An extraordinary man. Looking in."
"What extraordinary man?"
"I haven't the least idea."
Mrs. Grose gazed round us in vain. "Then where is he gone?"
"I know still less."
"Have you seen him before?"
"Yes—once. On the old tower."
She could only look at me harder. "Do you mean he's a stranger?"
"Oh, very much!"
"Yet you didn't tell me?"
"No—for reasons. But now that you've guessed—"
Mrs. Grose's round eyes encountered this charge. "Ah, I haven't guessed!"
she said very simply. "How can I if YOU don't imagine?"
"I don't in the very least."
"You've seen him nowhere but on the tower?"
"And on this spot just now."
Mrs. Grose looked round again. "What was he doing on the tower?"
"Only standing there and looking down at me."
She thought a minute. "Was he a gentleman?"
I found I had no need to think. "No." She gazed in deeper wonder. "No."
"Then nobody about the place? Nobody from the village?"
"Nobody—nobody. I didn't tell you, but I made sure."
She breathed a vague relief: this was, oddly, so much to the good. It only
went indeed a little way. "But if he isn't a gentleman—"
"What IS he? He's a horror."
"A horror?"
"He's—God help me if I know WHAT he is!"
Mrs. Grose looked round once more; she fixed her eyes on the duskier
distance, then, pulling herself together, turned to me with abrupt
inconsequence. "It's time we should be at church."
"Oh, I'm not fit for church!"
"Won't it do you good?"
"It won't do THEM—! I nodded at the house.
"The children?"
"I can't leave them now."
"You're afraid—?"
I spoke boldly. "I'm afraid of HIM."
Mrs. Grose's large face showed me, at this, for the first time, the
faraway faint glimmer of a consciousness more acute: I somehow made out in
it the delayed dawn of an idea I myself had not given her and that was as
yet quite obscure to me. It comes back to me that I thought instantly of
this as something I could get from her; and I felt it to be connected with
the desire she presently showed to know more. "When was it—on the
tower?"
"About the middle of the month. At this same hour."
"Almost at dark," said Mrs. Grose.
"Oh, no, not nearly. I saw him as I see you."
"Then how did he get in?"
"And how did he get out?" I laughed. "I had no opportunity to ask him!
This evening, you see," I pursued, "he has not been able to get in."
"He only peeps?"
"I hope it will be confined to that!" She had now let go my hand; she
turned away a little. I waited an instant; then I brought out: "Go to
church. Goodbye. I must watch."
Slowly she faced me again. "Do you fear for them?"
We met in another long look. "Don't YOU?" Instead of answering she came
nearer to the window and, for a minute, applied her face to the glass.
"You see how he could see," I meanwhile went on.
She didn't move. "How long was he here?"
"Till I came out. I came to meet him."
Mrs. Grose at last turned round, and there was still more in her face. "I
couldn't have come out."
"Neither could I!" I laughed again. "But I did come. I have my duty."
"So have I mine," she replied; after which she added: "What is he like?"
"I've been dying to tell you. But he's like nobody."
"Nobody?" she echoed.
"He has no hat." Then seeing in her face that she already, in this, with a
deeper dismay, found a touch of picture, I quickly added stroke to stroke.
"He has red hair, very red, close-curling, and a pale face, long in shape,
with straight, good features and little, rather queer whiskers that are as
red as his hair. His eyebrows are, somehow, darker; they look particularly
arched and as if they might move a good deal. His eyes are sharp, strange—awfully;
but I only know clearly that they're rather small and very fixed. His
mouth's wide, and his lips are thin, and except for his little whiskers
he's quite clean-shaven. He gives me a sort of sense of looking like an
actor."
"An actor!" It was impossible to resemble one less, at least, than Mrs.
Grose at that moment.
"I've never seen one, but so I suppose them. He's tall, active, erect," I
continued, "but never—no, never!—a gentleman."
My companion's face had blanched as I went on; her round eyes started and
her mild mouth gaped. "A gentleman?" she gasped, confounded, stupefied: "a
gentleman HE?"
"You know him then?"
She visibly tried to hold herself. "But he IS handsome?"
I saw the way to help her. "Remarkably!"
"And dressed—?"
"In somebody's clothes." "They're smart, but they're not his own."
She broke into a breathless affirmative groan: "They're the master's!"
I caught it up. "You DO know him?"
She faltered but a second. "Quint!" she cried.
"Quint?"
"Peter Quint—his own man, his valet, when he was here!"
"When the master was?"
Gaping still, but meeting me, she pieced it all together. "He never wore
his hat, but he did wear—well, there were waistcoats missed. They
were both here—last year. Then the master went, and Quint was
alone."
I followed, but halting a little. "Alone?"
"Alone with US." Then, as from a deeper depth, "In charge," she added.
"And what became of him?"
She hung fire so long that I was still more mystified. "He went, too," she
brought out at last.
"Went where?"
Her expression, at this, became extraordinary. "God knows where! He died."
"Died?" I almost shrieked.
She seemed fairly to square herself, plant herself more firmly to utter
the wonder of it. "Yes. Mr. Quint is dead."
VI
It took of course more than that particular passage to place us together
in presence of what we had now to live with as we could—my dreadful
liability to impressions of the order so vividly exemplified, and my
companion's knowledge, henceforth—a knowledge half consternation and
half compassion—of that liability. There had been, this evening,
after the revelation left me, for an hour, so prostrate—there had
been, for either of us, no attendance on any service but a little service
of tears and vows, of prayers and promises, a climax to the series of
mutual challenges and pledges that had straightway ensued on our
retreating together to the schoolroom and shutting ourselves up there to
have everything out. The result of our having everything out was simply to
reduce our situation to the last rigor of its elements. She herself had
seen nothing, not the shadow of a shadow, and nobody in the house but the
governess was in the governess's plight; yet she accepted without directly
impugning my sanity the truth as I gave it to her, and ended by showing
me, on this ground, an awestricken tenderness, an expression of the sense
of my more than questionable privilege, of which the very breath has
remained with me as that of the sweetest of human charities.
What was settled between us, accordingly, that night, was that we thought
we might bear things together; and I was not even sure that, in spite of
her exemption, it was she who had the best of the burden. I knew at this
hour, I think, as well as I knew later, what I was capable of meeting to
shelter my pupils; but it took me some time to be wholly sure of what my
honest ally was prepared for to keep terms with so compromising a
contract. I was queer company enough—quite as queer as the company I
received; but as I trace over what we went through I see how much common
ground we must have found in the one idea that, by good fortune, COULD
steady us. It was the idea, the second movement, that led me straight out,
as I may say, of the inner chamber of my dread. I could take the air in
the court, at least, and there Mrs. Grose could join me. Perfectly can I
recall now the particular way strength came to me before we separated for
the night. We had gone over and over every feature of what I had seen.
"He was looking for someone else, you say—someone who was not you?"
"He was looking for little Miles." A portentous clearness now possessed
me. "THAT'S whom he was looking for."
"But how do you know?"
"I know, I know, I know!" My exaltation grew. "And YOU know, my dear!"
She didn't deny this, but I required, I felt, not even so much telling as
that. She resumed in a moment, at any rate: "What if HE should see him?"
"Little Miles? That's what he wants!"
She looked immensely scared again. "The child?"
"Heaven forbid! The man. He wants to appear to THEM." That he might was an
awful conception, and yet, somehow, I could keep it at bay; which,
moreover, as we lingered there, was what I succeeded in practically
proving. I had an absolute certainty that I should see again what I had
already seen, but something within me said that by offering myself bravely
as the sole subject of such experience, by accepting, by inviting, by
surmounting it all, I should serve as an expiatory victim and guard the
tranquility of my companions. The children, in especial, I should thus
fence about and absolutely save. I recall one of the last things I said
that night to Mrs. Grose.
"It does strike me that my pupils have never mentioned—"
She looked at me hard as I musingly pulled up. "His having been here and
the time they were with him?"
"The time they were with him, and his name, his presence, his history, in
any way."
"Oh, the little lady doesn't remember. She never heard or knew."
"The circumstances of his death?" I thought with some intensity. "Perhaps
not. But Miles would remember—Miles would know."
"Ah, don't try him!" broke from Mrs. Grose.
I returned her the look she had given me. "Don't be afraid." I continued
to think. "It IS rather odd."
"That he has never spoken of him?"
"Never by the least allusion. And you tell me they were 'great friends'?"
"Oh, it wasn't HIM!" Mrs. Grose with emphasis declared. "It was Quint's
own fancy. To play with him, I mean—to spoil him." She paused a
moment; then she added: "Quint was much too free."
This gave me, straight from my vision of his face—SUCH a face!—a
sudden sickness of disgust. "Too free with MY boy?"
"Too free with everyone!"
I forbore, for the moment, to analyze this description further than by the
reflection that a part of it applied to several of the members of the
household, of the half-dozen maids and men who were still of our small
colony. But there was everything, for our apprehension, in the lucky fact
that no discomfortable legend, no perturbation of scullions, had ever,
within anyone's memory attached to the kind old place. It had neither bad
name nor ill fame, and Mrs. Grose, most apparently, only desired to cling
to me and to quake in silence. I even put her, the very last thing of all,
to the test. It was when, at midnight, she had her hand on the schoolroom
door to take leave. "I have it from you then—for it's of great
importance—that he was definitely and admittedly bad?"
"Oh, not admittedly. I knew it—but the master didn't."
"And you never told him?"
"Well, he didn't like tale-bearing—he hated complaints. He was
terribly short with anything of that kind, and if people were all right to
HIM—"
"He wouldn't be bothered with more?" This squared well enough with my
impressions of him: he was not a trouble-loving gentleman, nor so very
particular perhaps about some of the company HE kept. All the same, I
pressed my interlocutress. "I promise you I would have told!"
She felt my discrimination. "I daresay I was wrong. But, really, I was
afraid."
"Afraid of what?"
"Of things that man could do. Quint was so clever—he was so deep."
I took this in still more than, probably, I showed. "You weren't afraid of
anything else? Not of his effect—?"
"His effect?" she repeated with a face of anguish and waiting while I
faltered.
"On innocent little precious lives. They were in your charge."
"No, they were not in mine!" she roundly and distressfully returned. "The
master believed in him and placed him here because he was supposed not to
be well and the country air so good for him. So he had everything to say.
Yes"—she let me have it—"even about THEM."
"Them—that creature?" I had to smother a kind of howl. "And you
could bear it!"
"No. I couldn't—and I can't now!" And the poor woman burst into
tears.
A rigid control, from the next day, was, as I have said, to follow them;
yet how often and how passionately, for a week, we came back together to
the subject! Much as we had discussed it that Sunday night, I was, in the
immediate later hours in especial—for it may be imagined whether I
slept—still haunted with the shadow of something she had not told
me. I myself had kept back nothing, but there was a word Mrs. Grose had
kept back. I was sure, moreover, by morning, that this was not from a
failure of frankness, but because on every side there were fears. It seems
to me indeed, in retrospect, that by the time the morrow's sun was high I
had restlessly read into the fact before us almost all the meaning they
were to receive from subsequent and more cruel occurrences. What they gave
me above all was just the sinister figure of the living man—the dead
one would keep awhile!—and of the months he had continuously passed
at Bly, which, added up, made a formidable stretch. The limit of this evil
time had arrived only when, on the dawn of a winter's morning, Peter Quint
was found, by a laborer going to early work, stone dead on the road from
the village: a catastrophe explained—superficially at least—by
a visible wound to his head; such a wound as might have been produced—and
as, on the final evidence, HAD been—by a fatal slip, in the dark and
after leaving the public house, on the steepish icy slope, a wrong path
altogether, at the bottom of which he lay. The icy slope, the turn
mistaken at night and in liquor, accounted for much—practically, in
the end and after the inquest and boundless chatter, for everything; but
there had been matters in his life—strange passages and perils,
secret disorders, vices more than suspected—that would have
accounted for a good deal more.
I scarce know how to put my story into words that shall be a credible
picture of my state of mind; but I was in these days literally able to
find a joy in the extraordinary flight of heroism the occasion demanded of
me. I now saw that I had been asked for a service admirable and difficult;
and there would be a greatness in letting it be seen—oh, in the
right quarter!—that I could succeed where many another girl might
have failed. It was an immense help to me—I confess I rather applaud
myself as I look back!—that I saw my service so strongly and so
simply. I was there to protect and defend the little creatures in the
world the most bereaved and the most lovable, the appeal of whose
helplessness had suddenly become only too explicit, a deep, constant ache
of one's own committed heart. We were cut off, really, together; we were
united in our danger. They had nothing but me, and I—well, I had
THEM. It was in short a magnificent chance. This chance presented itself
to me in an image richly material. I was a screen—I was to stand
before them. The more I saw, the less they would. I began to watch them in
a stifled suspense, a disguised excitement that might well, had it
continued too long, have turned to something like madness. What saved me,
as I now see, was that it turned to something else altogether. It didn't
last as suspense—it was superseded by horrible proofs. Proofs, I
say, yes—from the moment I really took hold.
This moment dated from an afternoon hour that I happened to spend in the
grounds with the younger of my pupils alone. We had left Miles indoors, on
the red cushion of a deep window seat; he had wished to finish a book, and
I had been glad to encourage a purpose so laudable in a young man whose
only defect was an occasional excess of the restless. His sister, on the
contrary, had been alert to come out, and I strolled with her half an
hour, seeking the shade, for the sun was still high and the day
exceptionally warm. I was aware afresh, with her, as we went, of how, like
her brother, she contrived—it was the charming thing in both
children—to let me alone without appearing to drop me and to
accompany me without appearing to surround. They were never importunate
and yet never listless. My attention to them all really went to seeing
them amuse themselves immensely without me: this was a spectacle they
seemed actively to prepare and that engaged me as an active admirer. I
walked in a world of their invention—they had no occasion whatever
to draw upon mine; so that my time was taken only with being, for them,
some remarkable person or thing that the game of the moment required and
that was merely, thanks to my superior, my exalted stamp, a happy and
highly distinguished sinecure. I forget what I was on the present
occasion; I only remember that I was something very important and very
quiet and that Flora was playing very hard. We were on the edge of the
lake, and, as we had lately begun geography, the lake was the Sea of Azof.
Suddenly, in these circumstances, I became aware that, on the other side
of the Sea of Azof, we had an interested spectator. The way this knowledge
gathered in me was the strangest thing in the world—the strangest,
that is, except the very much stranger in which it quickly merged itself.
I had sat down with a piece of work—for I was something or other
that could sit—on the old stone bench which overlooked the pond; and
in this position I began to take in with certitude, and yet without direct
vision, the presence, at a distance, of a third person. The old trees, the
thick shrubbery, made a great and pleasant shade, but it was all suffused
with the brightness of the hot, still hour. There was no ambiguity in
anything; none whatever, at least, in the conviction I from one moment to
another found myself forming as to what I should see straight before me
and across the lake as a consequence of raising my eyes. They were
attached at this juncture to the stitching in which I was engaged, and I
can feel once more the spasm of my effort not to move them till I should
so have steadied myself as to be able to make up my mind what to do. There
was an alien object in view—a figure whose right of presence I
instantly, passionately questioned. I recollect counting over perfectly
the possibilities, reminding myself that nothing was more natural, for
instance, then the appearance of one of the men about the place, or even
of a messenger, a postman, or a tradesman's boy, from the village. That
reminder had as little effect on my practical certitude as I was conscious—still
even without looking—of its having upon the character and attitude
of our visitor. Nothing was more natural than that these things should be
the other things that they absolutely were not.
Of the positive identity of the apparition I would assure myself as soon
as the small clock of my courage should have ticked out the right second;
meanwhile, with an effort that was already sharp enough, I transferred my
eyes straight to little Flora, who, at the moment, was about ten yards
away. My heart had stood still for an instant with the wonder and terror
of the question whether she too would see; and I held my breath while I
waited for what a cry from her, what some sudden innocent sign either of
interest or of alarm, would tell me. I waited, but nothing came; then, in
the first place—and there is something more dire in this, I feel,
than in anything I have to relate—I was determined by a sense that,
within a minute, all sounds from her had previously dropped; and, in the
second, by the circumstance that, also within the minute, she had, in her
play, turned her back to the water. This was her attitude when I at last
looked at her—looked with the confirmed conviction that we were
still, together, under direct personal notice. She had picked up a small
flat piece of wood, which happened to have in it a little hole that had
evidently suggested to her the idea of sticking in another fragment that
might figure as a mast and make the thing a boat. This second morsel, as I
watched her, she was very markedly and intently attempting to tighten in
its place. My apprehension of what she was doing sustained me so that
after some seconds I felt I was ready for more. Then I again shifted my
eyes—I faced what I had to face.
VII
I got hold of Mrs. Grose as soon after this as I could; and I can give no
intelligible account of how I fought out the interval. Yet I still hear
myself cry as I fairly threw myself into her arms: "They KNOW—it's
too monstrous: they know, they know!"
"And what on earth—?" I felt her incredulity as she held me.
"Why, all that WE know—and heaven knows what else besides!" Then, as
she released me, I made it out to her, made it out perhaps only now with
full coherency even to myself. "Two hours ago, in the garden"—I
could scarce articulate—"Flora SAW!"
Mrs. Grose took it as she might have taken a blow in the stomach. "She has
told you?" she panted.
"Not a word—that's the horror. She kept it to herself! The child of
eight, THAT child!" Unutterable still, for me, was the stupefaction of it.
Mrs. Grose, of course, could only gape the wider. "Then how do you know?"
"I was there—I saw with my eyes: saw that she was perfectly aware."
"Do you mean aware of HIM?"
"No—of HER." I was conscious as I spoke that I looked prodigious
things, for I got the slow reflection of them in my companion's face.
"Another person—this time; but a figure of quite as unmistakable
horror and evil: a woman in black, pale and dreadful—with such an
air also, and such a face!—on the other side of the lake. I was
there with the child—quiet for the hour; and in the midst of it she
came."
"Came how—from where?"
"From where they come from! She just appeared and stood there—but
not so near."
"And without coming nearer?"
"Oh, for the effect and the feeling, she might have been as close as you!"
My friend, with an odd impulse, fell back a step. "Was she someone you've
never seen?"
"Yes. But someone the child has. Someone YOU have." Then, to show how I
had thought it all out: "My predecessor—the one who died."
"Miss Jessel?"
"Miss Jessel. You don't believe me?" I pressed.
She turned right and left in her distress. "How can you be sure?"
This drew from me, in the state of my nerves, a flash of impatience. "Then
ask Flora—SHE'S sure!" But I had no sooner spoken than I caught
myself up. "No, for God's sake, DON'T! She'll say she isn't—she'll
lie!"
Mrs. Grose was not too bewildered instinctively to protest. "Ah, how CAN
you?"
"Because I'm clear. Flora doesn't want me to know."
"It's only then to spare you."
"No, no—there are depths, depths! The more I go over it, the more I
see in it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear. I don't know what I
DON'T see—what I DON'T fear!"
Mrs. Grose tried to keep up with me. "You mean you're afraid of seeing her
again?"
"Oh, no; that's nothing—now!" Then I explained. "It's of NOT seeing
her."
But my companion only looked wan. "I don't understand you."
"Why, it's that the child may keep it up—and that the child
assuredly WILL—without my knowing it."
At the image of this possibility Mrs. Grose for a moment collapsed, yet
presently to pull herself together again, as if from the positive force of
the sense of what, should we yield an inch, there would really be to give
way to. "Dear, dear—we must keep our heads! And after all, if she
doesn't mind it—!" She even tried a grim joke. "Perhaps she likes
it!"
"Likes SUCH things—a scrap of an infant!"
"Isn't it just a proof of her blessed innocence?" my friend bravely
inquired.
She brought me, for the instant, almost round. "Oh, we must clutch at THAT—we
must cling to it! If it isn't a proof of what you say, it's a proof of—God
knows what! For the woman's a horror of horrors."
Mrs. Grose, at this, fixed her eyes a minute on the ground; then at last
raising them, "Tell me how you know," she said.
"Then you admit it's what she was?" I cried.
"Tell me how you know," my friend simply repeated.
"Know? By seeing her! By the way she looked."
"At you, do you mean—so wickedly?"
"Dear me, no—I could have borne that. She gave me never a glance.
She only fixed the child."
Mrs. Grose tried to see it. "Fixed her?"
"Ah, with such awful eyes!"
She stared at mine as if they might really have resembled them. "Do you
mean of dislike?"
"God help us, no. Of something much worse."
"Worse than dislike?—this left her indeed at a loss.
"With a determination—indescribable. With a kind of fury of
intention."
I made her turn pale. "Intention?"
"To get hold of her." Mrs. Grose—her eyes just lingering on mine—gave
a shudder and walked to the window; and while she stood there looking out
I completed my statement. "THAT'S what Flora knows."
After a little she turned round. "The person was in black, you say?"
"In mourning—rather poor, almost shabby. But—yes—with
extraordinary beauty." I now recognized to what I had at last, stroke by
stroke, brought the victim of my confidence, for she quite visibly weighed
this. "Oh, handsome—very, very," I insisted; "wonderfully handsome.
But infamous."
She slowly came back to me. "Miss Jessel—WAS infamous." She once
more took my hand in both her own, holding it as tight as if to fortify me
against the increase of alarm I might draw from this disclosure. "They
were both infamous," she finally said.
So, for a little, we faced it once more together; and I found absolutely a
degree of help in seeing it now so straight. "I appreciate," I said, "the
great decency of your not having hitherto spoken; but the time has
certainly come to give me the whole thing." She appeared to assent to
this, but still only in silence; seeing which I went on: "I must have it
now. Of what did she die? Come, there was something between them."
"There was everything."
"In spite of the difference—?"
"Oh, of their rank, their condition"—she brought it woefully out.
"SHE was a lady."
I turned it over; I again saw. "Yes—she was a lady."
"And he so dreadfully below," said Mrs. Grose.
I felt that I doubtless needn't press too hard, in such company, on the
place of a servant in the scale; but there was nothing to prevent an
acceptance of my companion's own measure of my predecessor's abasement.
There was a way to deal with that, and I dealt; the more readily for my
full vision—on the evidence—of our employer's late clever,
good-looking "own" man; impudent, assured, spoiled, depraved. "The fellow
was a hound."
Mrs. Grose considered as if it were perhaps a little a case for a sense of
shades. "I've never seen one like him. He did what he wished."
"With HER?"
"With them all."
It was as if now in my friend's own eyes Miss Jessel had again appeared. I
seemed at any rate, for an instant, to see their evocation of her as
distinctly as I had seen her by the pond; and I brought out with decision:
"It must have been also what SHE wished!"
Mrs. Grose's face signified that it had been indeed, but she said at the
same time: "Poor woman—she paid for it!"
"Then you do know what she died of?" I asked.
"No—I know nothing. I wanted not to know; I was glad enough I
didn't; and I thanked heaven she was well out of this!"
"Yet you had, then, your idea—"
"Of her real reason for leaving? Oh, yes—as to that. She couldn't
have stayed. Fancy it here—for a governess! And afterward I imagined—and
I still imagine. And what I imagine is dreadful."
"Not so dreadful as what I do," I replied; on which I must have
shown her—as I was indeed but too conscious—a front of
miserable defeat. It brought out again all her compassion for me, and at
the renewed touch of her kindness my power to resist broke down. I burst,
as I had, the other time, made her burst, into tears; she took me to her
motherly breast, and my lamentation overflowed. "I don't do it!" I sobbed
in despair; "I don't save or shield them! It's far worse than I dreamed—they're
lost!"
VIII
What I had said to Mrs. Grose was true enough: there were in the matter I
had put before her depths and possibilities that I lacked resolution to
sound; so that when we met once more in the wonder of it we were of a
common mind about the duty of resistance to extravagant fancies. We were
to keep our heads if we should keep nothing else—difficult indeed as
that might be in the face of what, in our prodigious experience, was least
to be questioned. Late that night, while the house slept, we had another
talk in my room, when she went all the way with me as to its being beyond
doubt that I had seen exactly what I had seen. To hold her perfectly in
the pinch of that, I found I had only to ask her how, if I had "made it
up," I came to be able to give, of each of the persons appearing to me, a
picture disclosing, to the last detail, their special marks—a
portrait on the exhibition of which she had instantly recognized and named
them. She wished of course—small blame to her!—to sink the
whole subject; and I was quick to assure her that my own interest in it
had now violently taken the form of a search for the way to escape from
it. I encountered her on the ground of a probability that with recurrence—for
recurrence we took for granted—I should get used to my danger,
distinctly professing that my personal exposure had suddenly become the
least of my discomforts. It was my new suspicion that was intolerable; and
yet even to this complication the later hours of the day had brought a
little ease.
On leaving her, after my first outbreak, I had of course returned to my
pupils, associating the right remedy for my dismay with that sense of
their charm which I had already found to be a thing I could positively
cultivate and which had never failed me yet. I had simply, in other words,
plunged afresh into Flora's special society and there become aware—it
was almost a luxury!—that she could put her little conscious hand
straight upon the spot that ached. She had looked at me in sweet
speculation and then had accused me to my face of having "cried." I had
supposed I had brushed away the ugly signs: but I could literally—for
the time, at all events—rejoice, under this fathomless charity, that
they had not entirely disappeared. To gaze into the depths of blue of the
child's eyes and pronounce their loveliness a trick of premature cunning
was to be guilty of a cynicism in preference to which I naturally
preferred to abjure my judgment and, so far as might be, my agitation. I
couldn't abjure for merely wanting to, but I could repeat to Mrs. Grose—as
I did there, over and over, in the small hours—that with their
voices in the air, their pressure on one's heart, and their fragrant faces
against one's cheek, everything fell to the ground but their incapacity
and their beauty. It was a pity that, somehow, to settle this once for
all, I had equally to re-enumerate the signs of subtlety that, in the
afternoon, by the lake had made a miracle of my show of self-possession.
It was a pity to be obliged to reinvestigate the certitude of the moment
itself and repeat how it had come to me as a revelation that the
inconceivable communion I then surprised was a matter, for either party,
of habit. It was a pity that I should have had to quaver out again the
reasons for my not having, in my delusion, so much as questioned that the
little girl saw our visitant even as I actually saw Mrs. Grose herself,
and that she wanted, by just so much as she did thus see, to make me
suppose she didn't, and at the same time, without showing anything, arrive
at a guess as to whether I myself did! It was a pity that I needed once
more to describe the portentous little activity by which she sought to
divert my attention—the perceptible increase of movement, the
greater intensity of play, the singing, the gabbling of nonsense, and the
invitation to romp.
Yet if I had not indulged, to prove there was nothing in it, in this
review, I should have missed the two or three dim elements of comfort that
still remained to me. I should not for instance have been able to
asseverate to my friend that I was certain—which was so much to the
good—that I at least had not betrayed myself. I should not
have been prompted, by stress of need, by desperation of mind—I
scarce know what to call it—to invoke such further aid to
intelligence as might spring from pushing my colleague fairly to the wall.
She had told me, bit by bit, under pressure, a great deal; but a small
shifty spot on the wrong side of it all still sometimes brushed my brow
like the wing of a bat; and I remember how on this occasion—for the
sleeping house and the concentration alike of our danger and our watch
seemed to help—I felt the importance of giving the last jerk to the
curtain. "I don't believe anything so horrible," I recollect saying; "no,
let us put it definitely, my dear, that I don't. But if I did, you know,
there's a thing I should require now, just without sparing you the least
bit more—oh, not a scrap, come!—to get out of you. What was it
you had in mind when, in our distress, before Miles came back, over the
letter from his school, you said, under my insistence, that you didn't
pretend for him that he had not literally EVER been 'bad'? He has NOT
literally 'ever,' in these weeks that I myself have lived with him and so
closely watched him; he has been an imperturbable little prodigy of
delightful, lovable goodness. Therefore you might perfectly have made the
claim for him if you had not, as it happened, seen an exception to take.
What was your exception, and to what passage in your personal observation
of him did you refer?"
It was a dreadfully austere inquiry, but levity was not our note, and, at
any rate, before the gray dawn admonished us to separate I had got my
answer. What my friend had had in mind proved to be immensely to the
purpose. It was neither more nor less than the circumstance that for a
period of several months Quint and the boy had been perpetually together.
It was in fact the very appropriate truth that she had ventured to
criticize the propriety, to hint at the incongruity, of so close an
alliance, and even to go so far on the subject as a frank overture to Miss
Jessel. Miss Jessel had, with a most strange manner, requested her to mind
her business, and the good woman had, on this, directly approached little
Miles. What she had said to him, since I pressed, was that SHE liked to
see young gentlemen not forget their station.
I pressed again, of course, at this. "You reminded him that Quint was only
a base menial?"
"As you might say! And it was his answer, for one thing, that was bad."
"And for another thing?" I waited. "He repeated your words to Quint?"
"No, not that. It's just what he WOULDN'T!" she could still impress upon
me. "I was sure, at any rate," she added, "that he didn't. But he denied
certain occasions."
"What occasions?"
"When they had been about together quite as if Quint were his tutor—and
a very grand one—and Miss Jessel only for the little lady. When he
had gone off with the fellow, I mean, and spent hours with him."
"He then prevaricated about it—he said he hadn't?" Her assent was
clear enough to cause me to add in a moment: "I see. He lied."
"Oh!" Mrs. Grose mumbled. This was a suggestion that it didn't matter;
which indeed she backed up by a further remark. "You see, after all, Miss
Jessel didn't mind. She didn't forbid him."
I considered. "Did he put that to you as a justification?"
At this she dropped again. "No, he never spoke of it."
"Never mentioned her in connection with Quint?"
She saw, visibly flushing, where I was coming out. "Well, he didn't show
anything. He denied," she repeated; "he denied."
Lord, how I pressed her now! "So that you could see he knew what was
between the two wretches?"
"I don't know—I don't know!" the poor woman groaned.
"You do know, you dear thing," I replied; "only you haven't my dreadful
boldness of mind, and you keep back, out of timidity and modesty and
delicacy, even the impression that, in the past, when you had, without my
aid, to flounder about in silence, most of all made you miserable. But I
shall get it out of you yet! There was something in the boy that suggested
to you," I continued, "that he covered and concealed their relation."
"Oh, he couldn't prevent—"
"Your learning the truth? I daresay! But, heavens," I fell, with
vehemence, athinking, "what it shows that they must, to that extent, have
succeeded in making of him!"
"Ah, nothing that's not nice NOW!" Mrs. Grose lugubriously pleaded.
"I don't wonder you looked queer," I persisted, "when I mentioned to you
the letter from his school!"
"I doubt if I looked as queer as you!" she retorted with homely force.
"And if he was so bad then as that comes to, how is he such an angel now?"
"Yes, indeed—and if he was a fiend at school! How, how, how? Well,"
I said in my torment, "you must put it to me again, but I shall not be
able to tell you for some days. Only, put it to me again!" I cried in a
way that made my friend stare. "There are directions in which I must not
for the present let myself go." Meanwhile I returned to her first example—the
one to which she had just previously referred—of the boy's happy
capacity for an occasional slip. "If Quint—on your remonstrance at
the time you speak of—was a base menial, one of the things Miles
said to you, I find myself guessing, was that you were another." Again her
admission was so adequate that I continued: "And you forgave him that?"
"Wouldn't YOU?"
"Oh, yes!" And we exchanged there, in the stillness, a sound of the oddest
amusement. Then I went on: "At all events, while he was with the man—"
"Miss Flora was with the woman. It suited them all!"
It suited me, too, I felt, only too well; by which I mean that it suited
exactly the particularly deadly view I was in the very act of forbidding
myself to entertain. But I so far succeeded in checking the expression of
this view that I will throw, just here, no further light on it than may be
offered by the mention of my final observation to Mrs. Grose. "His having
lied and been impudent are, I confess, less engaging specimens than I had
hoped to have from you of the outbreak in him of the little natural man.
Still," I mused, "They must do, for they make me feel more than ever that
I must watch."
It made me blush, the next minute, to see in my friend's face how much
more unreservedly she had forgiven him than her anecdote struck me as
presenting to my own tenderness an occasion for doing. This came out when,
at the schoolroom door, she quitted me. "Surely you don't accuse HIM—"
"Of carrying on an intercourse that he conceals from me? Ah, remember
that, until further evidence, I now accuse nobody." Then, before shutting
her out to go, by another passage, to her own place, "I must just wait," I
wound up.
IX
I waited and waited, and the days, as they elapsed, took something from my
consternation. A very few of them, in fact, passing, in constant sight of
my pupils, without a fresh incident, sufficed to give to grievous fancies
and even to odious memories a kind of brush of the sponge. I have spoken
of the surrender to their extraordinary childish grace as a thing I could
actively cultivate, and it may be imagined if I neglected now to address
myself to this source for whatever it would yield. Stranger than I can
express, certainly, was the effort to struggle against my new lights; it
would doubtless have been, however, a greater tension still had it not
been so frequently successful. I used to wonder how my little charges
could help guessing that I thought strange things about them; and the
circumstances that these things only made them more interesting was not by
itself a direct aid to keeping them in the dark. I trembled lest they
should see that they WERE so immensely more interesting. Putting things at
the worst, at all events, as in meditation I so often did, any clouding of
their innocence could only be—blameless and foredoomed as they were—a
reason the more for taking risks. There were moments when, by an
irresistible impulse, I found myself catching them up and pressing them to
my heart. As soon as I had done so I used to say to myself: "What will
they think of that? Doesn't it betray too much?" It would have been easy
to get into a sad, wild tangle about how much I might betray; but the real
account, I feel, of the hours of peace that I could still enjoy was that
the immediate charm of my companions was a beguilement still effective
even under the shadow of the possibility that it was studied. For if it
occurred to me that I might occasionally excite suspicion by the little
outbreaks of my sharper passion for them, so too I remember wondering if I
mightn't see a queerness in the traceable increase of their own
demonstrations.
They were at this period extravagantly and preternaturally fond of me;
which, after all, I could reflect, was no more than a graceful response in
children perpetually bowed over and hugged. The homage of which they were
so lavish succeeded, in truth, for my nerves, quite as well as if I never
appeared to myself, as I may say, literally to catch them at a purpose in
it. They had never, I think, wanted to do so many things for their poor
protectress; I mean—though they got their lessons better and better,
which was naturally what would please her most—in the way of
diverting, entertaining, surprising her; reading her passages, telling her
stories, acting her charades, pouncing out at her, in disguises, as
animals and historical characters, and above all astonishing her by the
"pieces" they had secretly got by heart and could interminably recite. I
should never get to the bottom—were I to let myself go even now—of
the prodigious private commentary, all under still more private
correction, with which, in these days, I overscored their full hours. They
had shown me from the first a facility for everything, a general faculty
which, taking a fresh start, achieved remarkable flights. They got their
little tasks as if they loved them, and indulged, from the mere exuberance
of the gift, in the most unimposed little miracles of memory. They not
only popped out at me as tigers and as Romans, but as Shakespeareans,
astronomers, and navigators. This was so singularly the case that it had
presumably much to do with the fact as to which, at the present day, I am
at a loss for a different explanation: I allude to my unnatural composure
on the subject of another school for Miles. What I remember is that I was
content not, for the time, to open the question, and that contentment must
have sprung from the sense of his perpetually striking show of cleverness.
He was too clever for a bad governess, for a parson's daughter, to spoil;
and the strangest if not the brightest thread in the pensive embroidery I
just spoke of was the impression I might have got, if I had dared to work
it out, that he was under some influence operating in his small
intellectual life as a tremendous incitement.
If it was easy to reflect, however, that such a boy could postpone school,
it was at least as marked that for such a boy to have been "kicked out" by
a schoolmaster was a mystification without end. Let me add that in their
company now—and I was careful almost never to be out of it—I
could follow no scent very far. We lived in a cloud of music and love and
success and private theatricals. The musical sense in each of the children
was of the quickest, but the elder in especial had a marvelous knack of
catching and repeating. The schoolroom piano broke into all gruesome
fancies; and when that failed there were confabulations in corners, with a
sequel of one of them going out in the highest spirits in order to "come
in" as something new. I had had brothers myself, and it was no revelation
to me that little girls could be slavish idolaters of little boys. What
surpassed everything was that there was a little boy in the world who
could have for the inferior age, sex, and intelligence so fine a
consideration. They were extraordinarily at one, and to say that they
never either quarreled or complained is to make the note of praise coarse
for their quality of sweetness. Sometimes, indeed, when I dropped into
coarseness, I perhaps came across traces of little understandings between
them by which one of them should keep me occupied while the other slipped
away. There is a naive side, I suppose, in all diplomacy; but if my pupils
practiced upon me, it was surely with the minimum of grossness. It was all
in the other quarter that, after a lull, the grossness broke out.
I find that I really hang back; but I must take my plunge. In going on
with the record of what was hideous at Bly, I not only challenge the most
liberal faith—for which I little care; but—and this is another
matter—I renew what I myself suffered, I again push my way through
it to the end. There came suddenly an hour after which, as I look back,
the affair seems to me to have been all pure suffering; but I have at
least reached the heart of it, and the straightest road out is doubtless
to advance. One evening—with nothing to lead up or to prepare it—I
felt the cold touch of the impression that had breathed on me the night of
my arrival and which, much lighter then, as I have mentioned, I should
probably have made little of in memory had my subsequent sojourn been less
agitated. I had not gone to bed; I sat reading by a couple of candles.
There was a roomful of old books at Bly—last-century fiction, some
of it, which, to the extent of a distinctly deprecated renown, but never
to so much as that of a stray specimen, had reached the sequestered home
and appealed to the unavowed curiosity of my youth. I remember that the
book I had in my hand was Fielding's Amelia; also that I was wholly awake.
I recall further both a general conviction that it was horribly late and a
particular objection to looking at my watch. I figure, finally, that the
white curtain draping, in the fashion of those days, the head of Flora's
little bed, shrouded, as I had assured myself long before, the perfection
of childish rest. I recollect in short that, though I was deeply
interested in my author, I found myself, at the turn of a page and with
his spell all scattered, looking straight up from him and hard at the door
of my room. There was a moment during which I listened, reminded of the
faint sense I had had, the first night, of there being something
undefinably astir in the house, and noted the soft breath of the open
casement just move the half-drawn blind. Then, with all the marks of a
deliberation that must have seemed magnificent had there been anyone to
admire it, I laid down my book, rose to my feet, and, taking a candle,
went straight out of the room and, from the passage, on which my light
made little impression, noiselessly closed and locked the door.
I can say now neither what determined nor what guided me, but I went
straight along the lobby, holding my candle high, till I came within sight
of the tall window that presided over the great turn of the staircase. At
this point I precipitately found myself aware of three things. They were
practically simultaneous, yet they had flashes of succession. My candle,
under a bold flourish, went out, and I perceived, by the uncovered window,
that the yielding dusk of earliest morning rendered it unnecessary.
Without it, the next instant, I saw that there was someone on the stair. I
speak of sequences, but I required no lapse of seconds to stiffen myself
for a third encounter with Quint. The apparition had reached the landing
halfway up and was therefore on the spot nearest the window, where at
sight of me, it stopped short and fixed me exactly as it had fixed me from
the tower and from the garden. He knew me as well as I knew him; and so,
in the cold, faint twilight, with a glimmer in the high glass and another
on the polish of the oak stair below, we faced each other in our common
intensity. He was absolutely, on this occasion, a living, detestable,
dangerous presence. But that was not the wonder of wonders; I reserve this
distinction for quite another circumstance: the circumstance that dread
had unmistakably quitted me and that there was nothing in me there that
didn't meet and measure him.
I had plenty of anguish after that extraordinary moment, but I had, thank
God, no terror. And he knew I had not—I found myself at the end of
an instant magnificently aware of this. I felt, in a fierce rigor of
confidence, that if I stood my ground a minute I should cease—for
the time, at least—to have him to reckon with; and during the
minute, accordingly, the thing was as human and hideous as a real
interview: hideous just because it WAS human, as human as to have met
alone, in the small hours, in a sleeping house, some enemy, some
adventurer, some criminal. It was the dead silence of our long gaze at
such close quarters that gave the whole horror, huge as it was, its only
note of the unnatural. If I had met a murderer in such a place and at such
an hour, we still at least would have spoken. Something would have passed,
in life, between us; if nothing had passed, one of us would have moved.
The moment was so prolonged that it would have taken but little more to
make me doubt if even I were in life. I can't express what followed
it save by saying that the silence itself—which was indeed in a
manner an attestation of my strength—became the element into which I
saw the figure disappear; in which I definitely saw it turn as I might
have seen the low wretch to which it had once belonged turn on receipt of
an order, and pass, with my eyes on the villainous back that no hunch
could have more disfigured, straight down the staircase and into the
darkness in which the next bend was lost.
X
I remained awhile at the top of the stair, but with the effect presently
of understanding that when my visitor had gone, he had gone: then I
returned to my room. The foremost thing I saw there by the light of the
candle I had left burning was that Flora's little bed was empty; and on
this I caught my breath with all the terror that, five minutes before, I
had been able to resist. I dashed at the place in which I had left her
lying and over which (for the small silk counterpane and the sheets were
disarranged) the white curtains had been deceivingly pulled forward; then
my step, to my unutterable relief, produced an answering sound: I
perceived an agitation of the window blind, and the child, ducking down,
emerged rosily from the other side of it. She stood there in so much of
her candor and so little of her nightgown, with her pink bare feet and the
golden glow of her curls. She looked intensely grave, and I had never had
such a sense of losing an advantage acquired (the thrill of which had just
been so prodigious) as on my consciousness that she addressed me with a
reproach. "You naughty: where HAVE you been?"—instead of challenging
her own irregularity I found myself arraigned and explaining. She herself
explained, for that matter, with the loveliest, eagerest simplicity. She
had known suddenly, as she lay there, that I was out of the room, and had
jumped up to see what had become of me. I had dropped, with the joy of her
reappearance, back into my chair—feeling then, and then only, a
little faint; and she had pattered straight over to me, thrown herself
upon my knee, given herself to be held with the flame of the candle full
in the wonderful little face that was still flushed with sleep. I remember
closing my eyes an instant, yieldingly, consciously, as before the excess
of something beautiful that shone out of the blue of her own. "You were
looking for me out of the window?" I said. "You thought I might be walking
in the grounds?"
"Well, you know, I thought someone was"—she never blanched as she
smiled out that at me.
Oh, how I looked at her now! "And did you see anyone?"
"Ah, NO!" she returned, almost with the full privilege of childish
inconsequence, resentfully, though with a long sweetness in her little
drawl of the negative.
At that moment, in the state of my nerves, I absolutely believed she lied;
and if I once more closed my eyes it was before the dazzle of the three or
four possible ways in which I might take this up. One of these, for a
moment, tempted me with such singular intensity that, to withstand it, I
must have gripped my little girl with a spasm that, wonderfully, she
submitted to without a cry or a sign of fright. Why not break out at her
on the spot and have it all over?—give it to her straight in her
lovely little lighted face? "You see, you see, you KNOW that you do and
that you already quite suspect I believe it; therefore, why not frankly
confess it to me, so that we may at least live with it together and learn
perhaps, in the strangeness of our fate, where we are and what it means?"
This solicitation dropped, alas, as it came: if I could immediately have
succumbed to it I might have spared myself—well, you'll see what.
Instead of succumbing I sprang again to my feet, looked at her bed, and
took a helpless middle way. "Why did you pull the curtain over the place
to make me think you were still there?"
Flora luminously considered; after which, with her little divine smile:
"Because I don't like to frighten you!"
"But if I had, by your idea, gone out—?"
She absolutely declined to be puzzled; she turned her eyes to the flame of
the candle as if the question were as irrelevant, or at any rate as
impersonal, as Mrs. Marcet or nine-times-nine. "Oh, but you know," she
quite adequately answered, "that you might come back, you dear, and that
you HAVE!" And after a little, when she had got into bed, I had, for a
long time, by almost sitting on her to hold her hand, to prove that I
recognized the pertinence of my return.
You may imagine the general complexion, from that moment, of my nights. I
repeatedly sat up till I didn't know when; I selected moments when my
roommate unmistakably slept, and, stealing out, took noiseless turns in
the passage and even pushed as far as to where I had last met Quint. But I
never met him there again; and I may as well say at once that I on no
other occasion saw him in the house. I just missed, on the staircase, on
the other hand, a different adventure. Looking down it from the top I once
recognized the presence of a woman seated on one of the lower steps with
her back presented to me, her body half-bowed and her head, in an attitude
of woe, in her hands. I had been there but an instant, however, when she
vanished without looking round at me. I knew, nonetheless, exactly what
dreadful face she had to show; and I wondered whether, if instead of being
above I had been below, I should have had, for going up, the same nerve I
had lately shown Quint. Well, there continued to be plenty of chance for
nerve. On the eleventh night after my latest encounter with that gentleman—they
were all numbered now—I had an alarm that perilously skirted it and
that indeed, from the particular quality of its unexpectedness, proved
quite my sharpest shock. It was precisely the first night during this
series that, weary with watching, I had felt that I might again without
laxity lay myself down at my old hour. I slept immediately and, as I
afterward knew, till about one o'clock; but when I woke it was to sit
straight up, as completely roused as if a hand had shook me. I had left a
light burning, but it was now out, and I felt an instant certainty that
Flora had extinguished it. This brought me to my feet and straight, in the
darkness, to her bed, which I found she had left. A glance at the window
enlightened me further, and the striking of a match completed the picture.
The child had again got up—this time blowing out the taper, and had
again, for some purpose of observation or response, squeezed in behind the
blind and was peering out into the night. That she now saw—as she
had not, I had satisfied myself, the previous time—was proved to me
by the fact that she was disturbed neither by my reillumination nor by the
haste I made to get into slippers and into a wrap. Hidden, protected,
absorbed, she evidently rested on the sill—the casement opened
forward—and gave herself up. There was a great still moon to help
her, and this fact had counted in my quick decision. She was face to face
with the apparition we had met at the lake, and could now communicate with
it as she had not then been able to do. What I, on my side, had to care
for was, without disturbing her, to reach, from the corridor, some other
window in the same quarter. I got to the door without her hearing me; I
got out of it, closed it, and listened, from the other side, for some
sound from her. While I stood in the passage I had my eyes on her
brother's door, which was but ten steps off and which, indescribably,
produced in me a renewal of the strange impulse that I lately spoke of as
my temptation. What if I should go straight in and march to HIS window?—what
if, by risking to his boyish bewilderment a revelation of my motive, I
should throw across the rest of the mystery the long halter of my
boldness?
This thought held me sufficiently to make me cross to his threshold and
pause again. I preternaturally listened; I figured to myself what might
portentously be; I wondered if his bed were also empty and he too were
secretly at watch. It was a deep, soundless minute, at the end of which my
impulse failed. He was quiet; he might be innocent; the risk was hideous;
I turned away. There was a figure in the grounds—a figure prowling
for a sight, the visitor with whom Flora was engaged; but it was not the
visitor most concerned with my boy. I hesitated afresh, but on other
grounds and only for a few seconds; then I had made my choice. There were
empty rooms at Bly, and it was only a question of choosing the right one.
The right one suddenly presented itself to me as the lower one—though
high above the gardens—in the solid corner of the house that I have
spoken of as the old tower. This was a large, square chamber, arranged
with some state as a bedroom, the extravagant size of which made it so
inconvenient that it had not for years, though kept by Mrs. Grose in
exemplary order, been occupied. I had often admired it and I knew my way
about in it; I had only, after just faltering at the first chill gloom of
its disuse, to pass across it and unbolt as quietly as I could one of the
shutters. Achieving this transit, I uncovered the glass without a sound
and, applying my face to the pane, was able, the darkness without being
much less than within, to see that I commanded the right direction. Then I
saw something more. The moon made the night extraordinarily penetrable and
showed me on the lawn a person, diminished by distance, who stood there
motionless and as if fascinated, looking up to where I had appeared—looking,
that is, not so much straight at me as at something that was apparently
above me. There was clearly another person above me—there was a
person on the tower; but the presence on the lawn was not in the least
what I had conceived and had confidently hurried to meet. The presence on
the lawn—I felt sick as I made it out—was poor little Miles
himself.
XI
It was not till late next day that I spoke to Mrs. Grose; the rigor with
which I kept my pupils in sight making it often difficult to meet her
privately, and the more as we each felt the importance of not provoking—on
the part of the servants quite as much as on that of the children—any
suspicion of a secret flurry or that of a discussion of mysteries. I drew
a great security in this particular from her mere smooth aspect. There was
nothing in her fresh face to pass on to others my horrible confidences.
She believed me, I was sure, absolutely: if she hadn't I don't know what
would have become of me, for I couldn't have borne the business alone. But
she was a magnificent monument to the blessing of a want of imagination,
and if she could see in our little charges nothing but their beauty and
amiability, their happiness and cleverness, she had no direct
communication with the sources of my trouble. If they had been at all
visibly blighted or battered, she would doubtless have grown, on tracing
it back, haggard enough to match them; as matters stood, however, I could
feel her, when she surveyed them, with her large white arms folded and the
habit of serenity in all her look, thank the Lord's mercy that if they
were ruined the pieces would still serve. Flights of fancy gave place, in
her mind, to a steady fireside glow, and I had already begun to perceive
how, with the development of the conviction that—as time went on
without a public accident—our young things could, after all, look
out for themselves, she addressed her greatest solicitude to the sad case
presented by their instructress. That, for myself, was a sound
simplification: I could engage that, to the world, my face should tell no
tales, but it would have been, in the conditions, an immense added strain
to find myself anxious about hers.
At the hour I now speak of she had joined me, under pressure, on the
terrace, where, with the lapse of the season, the afternoon sun was now
agreeable; and we sat there together while, before us, at a distance, but
within call if we wished, the children strolled to and fro in one of their
most manageable moods. They moved slowly, in unison, below us, over the
lawn, the boy, as they went, reading aloud from a storybook and passing
his arm round his sister to keep her quite in touch. Mrs. Grose watched
them with positive placidity; then I caught the suppressed intellectual
creak with which she conscientiously turned to take from me a view of the
back of the tapestry. I had made her a receptacle of lurid things, but
there was an odd recognition of my superiority—my accomplishments
and my function—in her patience under my pain. She offered her mind
to my disclosures as, had I wished to mix a witch's broth and proposed it
with assurance, she would have held out a large clean saucepan. This had
become thoroughly her attitude by the time that, in my recital of the
events of the night, I reached the point of what Miles had said to me
when, after seeing him, at such a monstrous hour, almost on the very spot
where he happened now to be, I had gone down to bring him in; choosing
then, at the window, with a concentrated need of not alarming the house,
rather that method than a signal more resonant. I had left her meanwhile
in little doubt of my small hope of representing with success even to her
actual sympathy my sense of the real splendor of the little inspiration
with which, after I had got him into the house, the boy met my final
articulate challenge. As soon as I appeared in the moonlight on the
terrace, he had come to me as straight as possible; on which I had taken
his hand without a word and led him, through the dark spaces, up the
staircase where Quint had so hungrily hovered for him, along the lobby
where I had listened and trembled, and so to his forsaken room.
Not a sound, on the way, had passed between us, and I had wondered—oh,
HOW I had wondered!—if he were groping about in his little mind for
something plausible and not too grotesque. It would tax his invention,
certainly, and I felt, this time, over his real embarrassment, a curious
thrill of triumph. It was a sharp trap for the inscrutable! He couldn't
play any longer at innocence; so how the deuce would he get out of it?
There beat in me indeed, with the passionate throb of this question an
equal dumb appeal as to how the deuce I should. I was confronted at
last, as never yet, with all the risk attached even now to sounding my own
horrid note. I remember in fact that as we pushed into his little chamber,
where the bed had not been slept in at all and the window, uncovered to
the moonlight, made the place so clear that there was no need of striking
a match—I remember how I suddenly dropped, sank upon the edge of the
bed from the force of the idea that he must know how he really, as they
say, "had" me. He could do what he liked, with all his cleverness to help
him, so long as I should continue to defer to the old tradition of the
criminality of those caretakers of the young who minister to superstitions
and fears. He "had" me indeed, and in a cleft stick; for who would ever
absolve me, who would consent that I should go unhung, if, by the faintest
tremor of an overture, I were the first to introduce into our perfect
intercourse an element so dire? No, no: it was useless to attempt to
convey to Mrs. Grose, just as it is scarcely less so to attempt to suggest
here, how, in our short, stiff brush in the dark, he fairly shook me with
admiration. I was of course thoroughly kind and merciful; never, never yet
had I placed on his little shoulders hands of such tenderness as those
with which, while I rested against the bed, I held him there well under
fire. I had no alternative but, in form at least, to put it to him.
"You must tell me now—and all the truth. What did you go out for?
What were you doing there?"
I can still see his wonderful smile, the whites of his beautiful eyes, and
the uncovering of his little teeth shine to me in the dusk. "If I tell you
why, will you understand?" My heart, at this, leaped into my mouth. WOULD
he tell me why? I found no sound on my lips to press it, and I was aware
of replying only with a vague, repeated, grimacing nod. He was gentleness
itself, and while I wagged my head at him he stood there more than ever a
little fairy prince. It was his brightness indeed that gave me a respite.
Would it be so great if he were really going to tell me? "Well," he said
at last, "just exactly in order that you should do this."
"Do what?"
"Think me—for a change—BAD!" I shall never forget the
sweetness and gaiety with which he brought out the word, nor how, on top
of it, he bent forward and kissed me. It was practically the end of
everything. I met his kiss and I had to make, while I folded him for a
minute in my arms, the most stupendous effort not to cry. He had given
exactly the account of himself that permitted least of my going behind it,
and it was only with the effect of confirming my acceptance of it that, as
I presently glanced about the room, I could say—
"Then you didn't undress at all?"
He fairly glittered in the gloom. "Not at all. I sat up and read."
"And when did you go down?"
"At midnight. When I'm bad I AM bad!"
"I see, I see—it's charming. But how could you be sure I would know
it?"
"Oh, I arranged that with Flora." His answers rang out with a readiness!
"She was to get up and look out."
"Which is what she did do." It was I who fell into the trap!
"So she disturbed you, and, to see what she was looking at, you also
looked—you saw."
"While you," I concurred, "caught your death in the night air!"
He literally bloomed so from this exploit that he could afford radiantly
to assent. "How otherwise should I have been bad enough?" he asked. Then,
after another embrace, the incident and our interview closed on my
recognition of all the reserves of goodness that, for his joke, he had
been able to draw upon.
XII
The particular impression I had received proved in the morning light, I
repeat, not quite successfully presentable to Mrs. Grose, though I
reinforced it with the mention of still another remark that he had made
before we separated. "It all lies in half a dozen words," I said to her,
"words that really settle the matter. 'Think, you know, what I MIGHT do!'
He threw that off to show me how good he is. He knows down to the ground
what he 'might' do. That's what he gave them a taste of at school."
"Lord, you do change!" cried my friend.
"I don't change—I simply make it out. The four, depend upon it,
perpetually meet. If on either of these last nights you had been with
either child, you would clearly have understood. The more I've watched and
waited the more I've felt that if there were nothing else to make it sure
it would be made so by the systematic silence of each. NEVER, by a slip of
the tongue, have they so much as alluded to either of their old friends,
any more than Miles has alluded to his expulsion. Oh, yes, we may sit here
and look at them, and they may show off to us there to their fill; but
even while they pretend to be lost in their fairytale they're steeped in
their vision of the dead restored. He's not reading to her," I declared;
"they're talking of THEM—they're talking horrors! I go on, I know,
as if I were crazy; and it's a wonder I'm not. What I've seen would have
made YOU so; but it has only made me more lucid, made me get hold of still
other things."
My lucidity must have seemed awful, but the charming creatures who were
victims of it, passing and repassing in their interlocked sweetness, gave
my colleague something to hold on by; and I felt how tight she held as,
without stirring in the breath of my passion, she covered them still with
her eyes. "Of what other things have you got hold?"
"Why, of the very things that have delighted, fascinated, and yet, at
bottom, as I now so strangely see, mystified and troubled me. Their more
than earthly beauty, their absolutely unnatural goodness. It's a game," I
went on; "it's a policy and a fraud!"
"On the part of little darlings—?"
"As yet mere lovely babies? Yes, mad as that seems!" The very act of
bringing it out really helped me to trace it—follow it all up and
piece it all together. "They haven't been good—they've only been
absent. It has been easy to live with them, because they're simply leading
a life of their own. They're not mine—they're not ours. They're his
and they're hers!"
"Quint's and that woman's?"
"Quint's and that woman's. They want to get to them."
Oh, how, at this, poor Mrs. Grose appeared to study them! "But for what?"
"For the love of all the evil that, in those dreadful days, the pair put
into them. And to ply them with that evil still, to keep up the work of
demons, is what brings the others back."
"Laws!" said my friend under her breath. The exclamation was homely, but
it revealed a real acceptance of my further proof of what, in the bad time—for
there had been a worse even than this!—must have occurred. There
could have been no such justification for me as the plain assent of her
experience to whatever depth of depravity I found credible in our brace of
scoundrels. It was in obvious submission of memory that she brought out
after a moment: "They WERE rascals! But what can they now do?" she
pursued.
"Do?" I echoed so loud that Miles and Flora, as they passed at their
distance, paused an instant in their walk and looked at us. "Don't they do
enough?" I demanded in a lower tone, while the children, having smiled and
nodded and kissed hands to us, resumed their exhibition. We were held by
it a minute; then I answered: "They can destroy them!" At this my
companion did turn, but the inquiry she launched was a silent one, the
effect of which was to make me more explicit. "They don't know, as yet,
quite how—but they're trying hard. They're seen only across, as it
were, and beyond—in strange places and on high places, the top of
towers, the roof of houses, the outside of windows, the further edge of
pools; but there's a deep design, on either side, to shorten the distance
and overcome the obstacle; and the success of the tempters is only a
question of time. They've only to keep to their suggestions of danger."
"For the children to come?"
"And perish in the attempt!" Mrs. Grose slowly got up, and I scrupulously
added: "Unless, of course, we can prevent!"
Standing there before me while I kept my seat, she visibly turned things
over. "Their uncle must do the preventing. He must take them away."
"And who's to make him?"
She had been scanning the distance, but she now dropped on me a foolish
face. "You, miss."
"By writing to him that his house is poisoned and his little nephew and
niece mad?"
"But if they ARE, miss?"
"And if I am myself, you mean? That's charming news to be sent him by a
governess whose prime undertaking was to give him no worry."
Mrs. Grose considered, following the children again. "Yes, he do hate
worry. That was the great reason—"
"Why those fiends took him in so long? No doubt, though his indifference
must have been awful. As I'm not a fiend, at any rate, I shouldn't take
him in."
My companion, after an instant and for all answer, sat down again and
grasped my arm. "Make him at any rate come to you."
I stared. "To ME?" I had a sudden fear of what she might do. "'Him'?"
"He ought to BE here—he ought to help."
I quickly rose, and I think I must have shown her a queerer face than ever
yet. "You see me asking him for a visit?" No, with her eyes on my face she
evidently couldn't. Instead of it even—as a woman reads another—she
could see what I myself saw: his derision, his amusement, his contempt for
the breakdown of my resignation at being left alone and for the fine
machinery I had set in motion to attract his attention to my slighted
charms. She didn't know—no one knew—how proud I had been to
serve him and to stick to our terms; yet she nonetheless took the measure,
I think, of the warning I now gave her. "If you should so lose your head
as to appeal to him for me—"
She was really frightened. "Yes, miss?"
"I would leave, on the spot, both him and you."
XIII
It was all very well to join them, but speaking to them proved quite as
much as ever an effort beyond my strength—offered, in close
quarters, difficulties as insurmountable as before. This situation
continued a month, and with new aggravations and particular notes, the
note above all, sharper and sharper, of the small ironic consciousness on
the part of my pupils. It was not, I am as sure today as I was sure then,
my mere infernal imagination: it was absolutely traceable that they were
aware of my predicament and that this strange relation made, in a manner,
for a long time, the air in which we moved. I don't mean that they had
their tongues in their cheeks or did anything vulgar, for that was not one
of their dangers: I do mean, on the other hand, that the element of the
unnamed and untouched became, between us, greater than any other, and that
so much avoidance could not have been so successfully effected without a
great deal of tacit arrangement. It was as if, at moments, we were
perpetually coming into sight of subjects before which we must stop short,
turning suddenly out of alleys that we perceived to be blind, closing with
a little bang that made us look at each other—for, like all bangs,
it was something louder than we had intended—the doors we had
indiscreetly opened. All roads lead to Rome, and there were times when it
might have struck us that almost every branch of study or subject of
conversation skirted forbidden ground. Forbidden ground was the question
of the return of the dead in general and of whatever, in especial, might
survive, in memory, of the friends little children had lost. There were
days when I could have sworn that one of them had, with a small invisible
nudge, said to the other: "She thinks she'll do it this time—but she
WON'T!" To "do it" would have been to indulge for instance—and for
once in a way—in some direct reference to the lady who had prepared
them for my discipline. They had a delightful endless appetite for
passages in my own history, to which I had again and again treated them;
they were in possession of everything that had ever happened to me, had
had, with every circumstance the story of my smallest adventures and of
those of my brothers and sisters and of the cat and the dog at home, as
well as many particulars of the eccentric nature of my father, of the
furniture and arrangement of our house, and of the conversation of the old
women of our village. There were things enough, taking one with another,
to chatter about, if one went very fast and knew by instinct when to go
round. They pulled with an art of their own the strings of my invention
and my memory; and nothing else perhaps, when I thought of such occasions
afterward, gave me so the suspicion of being watched from under cover. It
was in any case over MY life, MY past, and MY friends alone that we could
take anything like our ease—a state of affairs that led them
sometimes without the least pertinence to break out into sociable reminders.
I was invited—with no visible connection—to repeat afresh
Goody Gosling's celebrated mot or to confirm the details already supplied
as to the cleverness of the vicarage pony.
It was partly at such junctures as these and partly at quite different
ones that, with the turn my matters had now taken, my predicament, as I
have called it, grew most sensible. The fact that the days passed for me
without another encounter ought, it would have appeared, to have done
something toward soothing my nerves. Since the light brush, that second
night on the upper landing, of the presence of a woman at the foot of the
stair, I had seen nothing, whether in or out of the house, that one had
better not have seen. There was many a corner round which I expected to
come upon Quint, and many a situation that, in a merely sinister way,
would have favored the appearance of Miss Jessel. The summer had turned,
the summer had gone; the autumn had dropped upon Bly and had blown out
half our lights. The place, with its gray sky and withered garlands, its
bared spaces and scattered dead leaves, was like a theater after the
performance—all strewn with crumpled playbills. There were exactly
states of the air, conditions of sound and of stillness, unspeakable
impressions of the KIND of ministering moment, that brought back to me,
long enough to catch it, the feeling of the medium in which, that June
evening out of doors, I had had my first sight of Quint, and in which,
too, at those other instants, I had, after seeing him through the window,
looked for him in vain in the circle of shrubbery. I recognized the signs,
the portents—I recognized the moment, the spot. But they remained
unaccompanied and empty, and I continued unmolested; if unmolested one
could call a young woman whose sensibility had, in the most extraordinary
fashion, not declined but deepened. I had said in my talk with Mrs. Grose
on that horrid scene of Flora's by the lake—and had perplexed her by
so saying—that it would from that moment distress me much more to
lose my power than to keep it. I had then expressed what was vividly in my
mind: the truth that, whether the children really saw or not—since,
that is, it was not yet definitely proved—I greatly preferred, as a
safeguard, the fullness of my own exposure. I was ready to know the very
worst that was to be known. What I had then had an ugly glimpse of was
that my eyes might be sealed just while theirs were most opened. Well, my
eyes WERE sealed, it appeared, at present—a consummation for which
it seemed blasphemous not to thank God. There was, alas, a difficulty
about that: I would have thanked him with all my soul had I not had in a
proportionate measure this conviction of the secret of my pupils.
How can I retrace today the strange steps of my obsession? There were
times of our being together when I would have been ready to swear that,
literally, in my presence, but with my direct sense of it closed, they had
visitors who were known and were welcome. Then it was that, had I not been
deterred by the very chance that such an injury might prove greater than
the injury to be averted, my exultation would have broken out. "They're
here, they're here, you little wretches," I would have cried, "and you
can't deny it now!" The little wretches denied it with all the added
volume of their sociability and their tenderness, in just the crystal
depths of which—like the flash of a fish in a stream—the
mockery of their advantage peeped up. The shock, in truth, had sunk into
me still deeper than I knew on the night when, looking out to see either
Quint or Miss Jessel under the stars, I had beheld the boy over whose rest
I watched and who had immediately brought in with him—had
straightway, there, turned it on me—the lovely upward look with
which, from the battlements above me, the hideous apparition of Quint had
played. If it was a question of a scare, my discovery on this occasion had
scared me more than any other, and it was in the condition of nerves
produced by it that I made my actual inductions. They harassed me so that
sometimes, at odd moments, I shut myself up audibly to rehearse—it
was at once a fantastic relief and a renewed despair—the manner in
which I might come to the point. I approached it from one side and the
other while, in my room, I flung myself about, but I always broke down in
the monstrous utterance of names. As they died away on my lips, I said to
myself that I should indeed help them to represent something infamous, if,
by pronouncing them, I should violate as rare a little case of instinctive
delicacy as any schoolroom, probably, had ever known. When I said to
myself: "THEY have the manners to be silent, and you, trusted as you are,
the baseness to speak!" I felt myself crimson and I covered my face with
my hands. After these secret scenes I chattered more than ever, going on
volubly enough till one of our prodigious, palpable hushes occurred—I
can call them nothing else—the strange, dizzy lift or swim (I try
for terms!) into a stillness, a pause of all life, that had nothing to do
with the more or less noise that at the moment we might be engaged in
making and that I could hear through any deepened exhilaration or
quickened recitation or louder strum of the piano. Then it was that the
others, the outsiders, were there. Though they were not angels, they
"passed," as the French say, causing me, while they stayed, to tremble
with the fear of their addressing to their younger victims some yet more
infernal message or more vivid image than they had thought good enough for
myself.
What it was most impossible to get rid of was the cruel idea that,
whatever I had seen, Miles and Flora saw MORE—things terrible and
unguessable and that sprang from dreadful passages of intercourse in the
past. Such things naturally left on the surface, for the time, a chill
which we vociferously denied that we felt; and we had, all three, with
repetition, got into such splendid training that we went, each time,
almost automatically, to mark the close of the incident, through the very
same movements. It was striking of the children, at all events, to kiss me
inveterately with a kind of wild irrelevance and never to fail—one
or the other—of the precious question that had helped us through
many a peril. "When do you think he WILL come? Don't you think we OUGHT to
write?"—there was nothing like that inquiry, we found by experience,
for carrying off an awkwardness. "He" of course was their uncle in Harley
Street; and we lived in much profusion of theory that he might at any
moment arrive to mingle in our circle. It was impossible to have given
less encouragement than he had done to such a doctrine, but if we had not
had the doctrine to fall back upon we should have deprived each other of
some of our finest exhibitions. He never wrote to them—that may have
been selfish, but it was a part of the flattery of his trust of me; for
the way in which a man pays his highest tribute to a woman is apt to be
but by the more festal celebration of one of the sacred laws of his
comfort; and I held that I carried out the spirit of the pledge given not
to appeal to him when I let my charges understand that their own letters
were but charming literary exercises. They were too beautiful to be
posted; I kept them myself; I have them all to this hour. This was a rule
indeed which only added to the satiric effect of my being plied with the
supposition that he might at any moment be among us. It was exactly as if
my charges knew how almost more awkward than anything else that might be
for me. There appears to me, moreover, as I look back, no note in all this
more extraordinary than the mere fact that, in spite of my tension and of
their triumph, I never lost patience with them. Adorable they must in
truth have been, I now reflect, that I didn't in these days hate them!
Would exasperation, however, if relief had longer been postponed, finally
have betrayed me? It little matters, for relief arrived. I call it relief,
though it was only the relief that a snap brings to a strain or the burst
of a thunderstorm to a day of suffocation. It was at least change, and it
came with a rush.
XIV
Walking to church a certain Sunday morning, I had little Miles at my side
and his sister, in advance of us and at Mrs. Grose's, well in sight. It
was a crisp, clear day, the first of its order for some time; the night
had brought a touch of frost, and the autumn air, bright and sharp, made
the church bells almost gay. It was an odd accident of thought that I
should have happened at such a moment to be particularly and very
gratefully struck with the obedience of my little charges. Why did they
never resent my inexorable, my perpetual society? Something or other had
brought nearer home to me that I had all but pinned the boy to my shawl
and that, in the way our companions were marshaled before me, I might have
appeared to provide against some danger of rebellion. I was like a gaoler
with an eye to possible surprises and escapes. But all this belonged—I
mean their magnificent little surrender—just to the special array of
the facts that were most abysmal. Turned out for Sunday by his uncle's
tailor, who had had a free hand and a notion of pretty waistcoats and of
his grand little air, Miles's whole title to independence, the rights of
his sex and situation, were so stamped upon him that if he had suddenly
struck for freedom I should have had nothing to say. I was by the
strangest of chances wondering how I should meet him when the revolution
unmistakably occurred. I call it a revolution because I now see how, with
the word he spoke, the curtain rose on the last act of my dreadful drama,
and the catastrophe was precipitated. "Look here, my dear, you know," he
charmingly said, "when in the world, please, am I going back to school?"
Transcribed here the speech sounds harmless enough, particularly as
uttered in the sweet, high, casual pipe with which, at all interlocutors,
but above all at his eternal governess, he threw off intonations as if he
were tossing roses. There was something in them that always made one
"catch," and I caught, at any rate, now so effectually that I stopped as
short as if one of the trees of the park had fallen across the road. There
was something new, on the spot, between us, and he was perfectly aware
that I recognized it, though, to enable me to do so, he had no need to
look a whit less candid and charming than usual. I could feel in him how
he already, from my at first finding nothing to reply, perceived the
advantage he had gained. I was so slow to find anything that he had plenty
of time, after a minute, to continue with his suggestive but inconclusive
smile: "You know, my dear, that for a fellow to be with a lady ALWAYS—!"
His "my dear" was constantly on his lips for me, and nothing could have
expressed more the exact shade of the sentiment with which I desired to
inspire my pupils than its fond familiarity. It was so respectfully easy.
But, oh, how I felt that at present I must pick my own phrases! I remember
that, to gain time, I tried to laugh, and I seemed to see in the beautiful
face with which he watched me how ugly and queer I looked. "And always
with the same lady?" I returned.
He neither blanched nor winked. The whole thing was virtually out between
us. "Ah, of course, she's a jolly, 'perfect' lady; but, after all, I'm a
fellow, don't you see? that's—well, getting on."
I lingered there with him an instant ever so kindly. "Yes, you're getting
on." Oh, but I felt helpless!
I have kept to this day the heartbreaking little idea of how he seemed to
know that and to play with it. "And you can't say I've not been awfully
good, can you?"
I laid my hand on his shoulder, for, though I felt how much better it
would have been to walk on, I was not yet quite able. "No, I can't say
that, Miles."
"Except just that one night, you know—!"
"That one night?" I couldn't look as straight as he.
"Why, when I went down—went out of the house."
"Oh, yes. But I forget what you did it for."
"You forget?"—he spoke with the sweet extravagance of childish
reproach. "Why, it was to show you I could!"
"Oh, yes, you could."
"And I can again."
I felt that I might, perhaps, after all, succeed in keeping my wits about
me. "Certainly. But you won't."
"No, not THAT again. It was nothing."
"It was nothing," I said. "But we must go on."
He resumed our walk with me, passing his hand into my arm. "Then when AM I
going back?"
I wore, in turning it over, my most responsible air. "Were you very happy
at school?"
He just considered. "Oh, I'm happy enough anywhere!"
"Well, then," I quavered, "if you're just as happy here—!"
"Ah, but that isn't everything! Of course YOU know a lot—"
"But you hint that you know almost as much?" I risked as he paused.
"Not half I want to!" Miles honestly professed. "But it isn't so much
that."
"What is it, then?"
"Well—I want to see more life."
"I see; I see." We had arrived within sight of the church and of various
persons, including several of the household of Bly, on their way to it and
clustered about the door to see us go in. I quickened our step; I wanted
to get there before the question between us opened up much further; I
reflected hungrily that, for more than an hour, he would have to be
silent; and I thought with envy of the comparative dusk of the pew and of
the almost spiritual help of the hassock on which I might bend my knees. I
seemed literally to be running a race with some confusion to which he was
about to reduce me, but I felt that he had got in first when, before we
had even entered the churchyard, he threw out—
"I want my own sort!"
It literally made me bound forward. "There are not many of your own sort,
Miles!" I laughed. "Unless perhaps dear little Flora!"
"You really compare me to a baby girl?"
This found me singularly weak. "Don't you, then, LOVE our sweet Flora?"
"If I didn't—and you, too; if I didn't—!" he repeated as if
retreating for a jump, yet leaving his thought so unfinished that, after
we had come into the gate, another stop, which he imposed on me by the
pressure of his arm, had become inevitable. Mrs. Grose and Flora had
passed into the church, the other worshippers had followed, and we were,
for the minute, alone among the old, thick graves. We had paused, on the
path from the gate, by a low, oblong, tablelike tomb.
"Yes, if you didn't—?"
He looked, while I waited, at the graves. "Well, you know what!" But he
didn't move, and he presently produced something that made me drop
straight down on the stone slab, as if suddenly to rest. "Does my uncle
think what YOU think?"
I markedly rested. "How do you know what I think?"
"Ah, well, of course I don't; for it strikes me you never tell me. But I
mean does HE know?"
"Know what, Miles?"
"Why, the way I'm going on."
I perceived quickly enough that I could make, to this inquiry, no answer
that would not involve something of a sacrifice of my employer. Yet it
appeared to me that we were all, at Bly, sufficiently sacrificed to make
that venial. "I don't think your uncle much cares."
Miles, on this, stood looking at me. "Then don't you think he can be made
to?"
"In what way?"
"Why, by his coming down."
"But who'll get him to come down?"
"I will!" the boy said with extraordinary brightness and emphasis.
He gave me another look charged with that expression and then marched off
alone into church.
XV
The business was practically settled from the moment I never followed him.
It was a pitiful surrender to agitation, but my being aware of this had
somehow no power to restore me. I only sat there on my tomb and read into
what my little friend had said to me the fullness of its meaning; by the
time I had grasped the whole of which I had also embraced, for absence,
the pretext that I was ashamed to offer my pupils and the rest of the
congregation such an example of delay. What I said to myself above all was
that Miles had got something out of me and that the proof of it, for him,
would be just this awkward collapse. He had got out of me that there was
something I was much afraid of and that he should probably be able to make
use of my fear to gain, for his own purpose, more freedom. My fear was of
having to deal with the intolerable question of the grounds of his
dismissal from school, for that was really but the question of the horrors
gathered behind. That his uncle should arrive to treat with me of these
things was a solution that, strictly speaking, I ought now to have desired
to bring on; but I could so little face the ugliness and the pain of it
that I simply procrastinated and lived from hand to mouth. The boy, to my
deep discomposure, was immensely in the right, was in a position to say to
me: "Either you clear up with my guardian the mystery of this interruption
of my studies, or you cease to expect me to lead with you a life that's so
unnatural for a boy." What was so unnatural for the particular boy I was
concerned with was this sudden revelation of a consciousness and a plan.
That was what really overcame me, what prevented my going in. I walked
round the church, hesitating, hovering; I reflected that I had already,
with him, hurt myself beyond repair. Therefore I could patch up nothing,
and it was too extreme an effort to squeeze beside him into the pew: he
would be so much more sure than ever to pass his arm into mine and make me
sit there for an hour in close, silent contact with his commentary on our
talk. For the first minute since his arrival I wanted to get away from
him. As I paused beneath the high east window and listened to the sounds
of worship, I was taken with an impulse that might master me, I felt,
completely should I give it the least encouragement. I might easily put an
end to my predicament by getting away altogether. Here was my chance;
there was no one to stop me; I could give the whole thing up—turn my
back and retreat. It was only a question of hurrying again, for a few
preparations, to the house which the attendance at church of so many of
the servants would practically have left unoccupied. No one, in short,
could blame me if I should just drive desperately off. What was it to get
away if I got away only till dinner? That would be in a couple of hours,
at the end of which—I had the acute prevision—my little pupils
would play at innocent wonder about my nonappearance in their train.
"What DID you do, you naughty, bad thing? Why in the world, to worry us so—and
take our thoughts off, too, don't you know?—did you desert us at the
very door?" I couldn't meet such questions nor, as they asked them, their
false little lovely eyes; yet it was all so exactly what I should have to
meet that, as the prospect grew sharp to me, I at last let myself go.
I got, so far as the immediate moment was concerned, away; I came straight
out of the churchyard and, thinking hard, retraced my steps through the
park. It seemed to me that by the time I reached the house I had made up
my mind I would fly. The Sunday stillness both of the approaches and of
the interior, in which I met no one, fairly excited me with a sense of
opportunity. Were I to get off quickly, this way, I should get off without
a scene, without a word. My quickness would have to be remarkable,
however, and the question of a conveyance was the great one to settle.
Tormented, in the hall, with difficulties and obstacles, I remember
sinking down at the foot of the staircase—suddenly collapsing there
on the lowest step and then, with a revulsion, recalling that it was
exactly where more than a month before, in the darkness of night and just
so bowed with evil things, I had seen the specter of the most horrible of
women. At this I was able to straighten myself; I went the rest of the way
up; I made, in my bewilderment, for the schoolroom, where there were
objects belonging to me that I should have to take. But I opened the door
to find again, in a flash, my eyes unsealed. In the presence of what I saw
I reeled straight back upon my resistance.
Seated at my own table in clear noonday light I saw a person whom, without
my previous experience, I should have taken at the first blush for some
housemaid who might have stayed at home to look after the place and who,
availing herself of rare relief from observation and of the schoolroom
table and my pens, ink, and paper, had applied herself to the considerable
effort of a letter to her sweetheart. There was an effort in the way that,
while her arms rested on the table, her hands with evident weariness
supported her head; but at the moment I took this in I had already become
aware that, in spite of my entrance, her attitude strangely persisted.
Then it was—with the very act of its announcing itself—that
her identity flared up in a change of posture. She rose, not as if she had
heard me, but with an indescribable grand melancholy of indifference and
detachment, and, within a dozen feet of me, stood there as my vile
predecessor. Dishonored and tragic, she was all before me; but even as I
fixed and, for memory, secured it, the awful image passed away. Dark as
midnight in her black dress, her haggard beauty and her unutterable woe,
she had looked at me long enough to appear to say that her right to sit at
my table was as good as mine to sit at hers. While these instants lasted,
indeed, I had the extraordinary chill of feeling that it was I who was the
intruder. It was as a wild protest against it that, actually addressing
her—"You terrible, miserable woman!"—I heard myself break into
a sound that, by the open door, rang through the long passage and the
empty house. She looked at me as if she heard me, but I had recovered
myself and cleared the air. There was nothing in the room the next minute
but the sunshine and a sense that I must stay.
XVI
I had so perfectly expected that the return of my pupils would be marked
by a demonstration that I was freshly upset at having to take into account
that they were dumb about my absence. Instead of gaily denouncing and
caressing me, they made no allusion to my having failed them, and I was
left, for the time, on perceiving that she too said nothing, to study Mrs.
Grose's odd face. I did this to such purpose that I made sure they had in
some way bribed her to silence; a silence that, however, I would engage to
break down on the first private opportunity. This opportunity came before
tea: I secured five minutes with her in the housekeeper's room, where, in
the twilight, amid a smell of lately baked bread, but with the place all
swept and garnished, I found her sitting in pained placidity before the
fire. So I see her still, so I see her best: facing the flame from her
straight chair in the dusky, shining room, a large clean image of the "put
away"—of drawers closed and locked and rest without a remedy.
"Oh, yes, they asked me to say nothing; and to please them—so long
as they were there—of course I promised. But what had happened to
you?"
"I only went with you for the walk," I said. "I had then to come back to
meet a friend."
She showed her surprise. "A friend—YOU?"
"Oh, yes, I have a couple!" I laughed. "But did the children give you a
reason?"
"For not alluding to your leaving us? Yes; they said you would like it
better. Do you like it better?"
My face had made her rueful. "No, I like it worse!" But after an instant I
added: "Did they say why I should like it better?"
"No; Master Miles only said, 'We must do nothing but what she likes!'"
"I wish indeed he would. And what did Flora say?"
"Miss Flora was too sweet. She said, 'Oh, of course, of course!'—and
I said the same."
I thought a moment. "You were too sweet, too—I can hear you all. But
nonetheless, between Miles and me, it's now all out."
"All out?" My companion stared. "But what, miss?"
"Everything. It doesn't matter. I've made up my mind. I came home, my
dear," I went on, "for a talk with Miss Jessel."
I had by this time formed the habit of having Mrs. Grose literally well in
hand in advance of my sounding that note; so that even now, as she bravely
blinked under the signal of my word, I could keep her comparatively firm.
"A talk! Do you mean she spoke?"
"It came to that. I found her, on my return, in the schoolroom."
"And what did she say?" I can hear the good woman still, and the candor of
her stupefaction.
"That she suffers the torments—!"
It was this, of a truth, that made her, as she filled out my picture,
gape. "Do you mean," she faltered, "—of the lost?"
"Of the lost. Of the damned. And that's why, to share them-" I faltered
myself with the horror of it.
But my companion, with less imagination, kept me up. "To share them—?"
"She wants Flora." Mrs. Grose might, as I gave it to her, fairly have
fallen away from me had I not been prepared. I still held her there, to
show I was. "As I've told you, however, it doesn't matter."
"Because you've made up your mind? But to what?"
"To everything."
"And what do you call 'everything'?"
"Why, sending for their uncle."
"Oh, miss, in pity do," my friend broke out. "ah, but I will, I WILL! I
see it's the only way. What's 'out,' as I told you, with Miles is that if
he thinks I'm afraid to—and has ideas of what he gains by that—he
shall see he's mistaken. Yes, yes; his uncle shall have it here from me on
the spot (and before the boy himself, if necessary) that if I'm to be
reproached with having done nothing again about more school—"
"Yes, miss—" my companion pressed me.
"Well, there's that awful reason."
There were now clearly so many of these for my poor colleague that she was
excusable for being vague. "But—a—which?"
"Why, the letter from his old place."
"You'll show it to the master?"
"I ought to have done so on the instant."
"Oh, no!" said Mrs. Grose with decision.
"I'll put it before him," I went on inexorably, "that I can't undertake to
work the question on behalf of a child who has been expelled—"
"For we've never in the least known what!" Mrs. Grose declared.
"For wickedness. For what else—when he's so clever and beautiful and
perfect? Is he stupid? Is he untidy? Is he infirm? Is he ill-natured? He's
exquisite—so it can be only THAT; and that would open up the whole
thing. After all," I said, "it's their uncle's fault. If he left here such
people—!"
"He didn't really in the least know them. The fault's mine." She had
turned quite pale.
"Well, you shan't suffer," I answered.
"The children shan't!" she emphatically returned.
I was silent awhile; we looked at each other. "Then what am I to tell
him?"
"You needn't tell him anything. I'll tell him."
I measured this. "Do you mean you'll write—?" Remembering she
couldn't, I caught myself up. "How do you communicate?"
"I tell the bailiff. HE writes."
"And should you like him to write our story?"
My question had a sarcastic force that I had not fully intended, and it
made her, after a moment, inconsequently break down. The tears were again
in her eyes. "Ah, miss, YOU write!"
"Well—tonight," I at last answered; and on this we separated.
XVII
I went so far, in the evening, as to make a beginning. The weather had
changed back, a great wind was abroad, and beneath the lamp, in my room,
with Flora at peace beside me, I sat for a long time before a blank sheet
of paper and listened to the lash of the rain and the batter of the gusts.
Finally I went out, taking a candle; I crossed the passage and listened a
minute at Miles's door. What, under my endless obsession, I had been
impelled to listen for was some betrayal of his not being at rest, and I
presently caught one, but not in the form I had expected. His voice
tinkled out. "I say, you there—come in." It was a gaiety in the
gloom!
I went in with my light and found him, in bed, very wide awake, but very
much at his ease. "Well, what are YOU up to?" he asked with a grace of
sociability in which it occurred to me that Mrs. Grose, had she been
present, might have looked in vain for proof that anything was "out."
I stood over him with my candle. "How did you know I was there?"
"Why, of course I heard you. Did you fancy you made no noise? You're like
a troop of cavalry!" he beautifully laughed.
"Then you weren't asleep?"
"Not much! I lie awake and think."
I had put my candle, designedly, a short way off, and then, as he held out
his friendly old hand to me, had sat down on the edge of his bed. "What is
it," I asked, "that you think of?"
"What in the world, my dear, but YOU?"
"Ah, the pride I take in your appreciation doesn't insist on that! I had
so far rather you slept."
"Well, I think also, you know, of this queer business of ours."
I marked the coolness of his firm little hand. "Of what queer business,
Miles?"
"Why, the way you bring me up. And all the rest!"
I fairly held my breath a minute, and even from my glimmering taper there
was light enough to show how he smiled up at me from his pillow. "What do
you mean by all the rest?"
"Oh, you know, you know!"
I could say nothing for a minute, though I felt, as I held his hand and
our eyes continued to meet, that my silence had all the air of admitting
his charge and that nothing in the whole world of reality was perhaps at
that moment so fabulous as our actual relation. "Certainly you shall go
back to school," I said, "if it be that that troubles you. But not to the
old place—we must find another, a better. How could I know it did
trouble you, this question, when you never told me so, never spoke of it
at all?" His clear, listening face, framed in its smooth whiteness, made
him for the minute as appealing as some wistful patient in a children's
hospital; and I would have given, as the resemblance came to me, all I
possessed on earth really to be the nurse or the sister of charity who
might have helped to cure him. Well, even as it was, I perhaps might help!
"Do you know you've never said a word to me about your school—I mean
the old one; never mentioned it in any way?"
He seemed to wonder; he smiled with the same loveliness. But he clearly
gained time; he waited, he called for guidance. "Haven't I?" It wasn't for
ME to help him—it was for the thing I had met!
Something in his tone and the expression of his face, as I got this from
him, set my heart aching with such a pang as it had never yet known; so
unutterably touching was it to see his little brain puzzled and his little
resources taxed to play, under the spell laid on him, a part of innocence
and consistency. "No, never—from the hour you came back. You've
never mentioned to me one of your masters, one of your comrades, nor the
least little thing that ever happened to you at school. Never, little
Miles—no, never—have you given me an inkling of anything that
MAY have happened there. Therefore you can fancy how much I'm in the dark.
Until you came out, that way, this morning, you had, since the first hour
I saw you, scarce even made a reference to anything in your previous life.
You seemed so perfectly to accept the present." It was extraordinary how
my absolute conviction of his secret precocity (or whatever I might call
the poison of an influence that I dared but half to phrase) made him, in
spite of the faint breath of his inward trouble, appear as accessible as
an older person—imposed him almost as an intellectual equal. "I
thought you wanted to go on as you are."
It struck me that at this he just faintly colored. He gave, at any rate,
like a convalescent slightly fatigued, a languid shake of his head. "I
don't—I don't. I want to get away."
"You're tired of Bly?"
"Oh, no, I like Bly."
"Well, then—?"
"Oh, YOU know what a boy wants!"
I felt that I didn't know so well as Miles, and I took temporary refuge.
"You want to go to your uncle?"
Again, at this, with his sweet ironic face, he made a movement on the
pillow. "Ah, you can't get off with that!"
I was silent a little, and it was I, now, I think, who changed color. "My
dear, I don't want to get off!"
"You can't, even if you do. You can't, you can't!"—he lay
beautifully staring. "My uncle must come down, and you must completely
settle things."
"If we do," I returned with some spirit, "you may be sure it will be to
take you quite away."
"Well, don't you understand that that's exactly what I'm working for?
You'll have to tell him—about the way you've let it all drop: you'll
have to tell him a tremendous lot!"
The exultation with which he uttered this helped me somehow, for the
instant, to meet him rather more. "And how much will YOU, Miles, have to
tell him? There are things he'll ask you!"
He turned it over. "Very likely. But what things?"
"The things you've never told me. To make up his mind what to do with you.
He can't send you back—"
"Oh, I don't want to go back!" he broke in. "I want a new field."
He said it with admirable serenity, with positive unimpeachable gaiety;
and doubtless it was that very note that most evoked for me the poignancy,
the unnatural childish tragedy, of his probable reappearance at the end of
three months with all this bravado and still more dishonor. It overwhelmed
me now that I should never be able to bear that, and it made me let myself
go. I threw myself upon him and in the tenderness of my pity I embraced
him. "Dear little Miles, dear little Miles—!"
My face was close to his, and he let me kiss him, simply taking it with
indulgent good humor. "Well, old lady?"
"Is there nothing—nothing at all that you want to tell me?"
He turned off a little, facing round toward the wall and holding up his
hand to look at as one had seen sick children look. "I've told you—I
told you this morning."
Oh, I was sorry for him! "That you just want me not to worry you?"
He looked round at me now, as if in recognition of my understanding him;
then ever so gently, "To let me alone," he replied.
There was even a singular little dignity in it, something that made me
release him, yet, when I had slowly risen, linger beside him. God knows I
never wished to harass him, but I felt that merely, at this, to turn my
back on him was to abandon or, to put it more truly, to lose him. "I've
just begun a letter to your uncle," I said.
"Well, then, finish it!"
I waited a minute. "What happened before?"
He gazed up at me again. "Before what?"
"Before you came back. And before you went away."
For some time he was silent, but he continued to meet my eyes. "What
happened?"
It made me, the sound of the words, in which it seemed to me that I caught
for the very first time a small faint quaver of consenting consciousness—it
made me drop on my knees beside the bed and seize once more the chance of
possessing him. "Dear little Miles, dear little Miles, if you KNEW how I
want to help you! It's only that, it's nothing but that, and I'd rather
die than give you a pain or do you a wrong—I'd rather die than hurt
a hair of you. Dear little Miles"—oh, I brought it out now even if I
SHOULD go too far—"I just want you to help me to save you!" But I
knew in a moment after this that I had gone too far. The answer to my
appeal was instantaneous, but it came in the form of an extraordinary
blast and chill, a gust of frozen air, and a shake of the room as great as
if, in the wild wind, the casement had crashed in. The boy gave a loud,
high shriek, which, lost in the rest of the shock of sound, might have
seemed, indistinctly, though I was so close to him, a note either of
jubilation or of terror. I jumped to my feet again and was conscious of
darkness. So for a moment we remained, while I stared about me and saw
that the drawn curtains were unstirred and the window tight. "Why, the
candle's out!" I then cried.
"It was I who blew it, dear!" said Miles.
XVIII
The next day, after lessons, Mrs. Grose found a moment to say to me
quietly: "Have you written, miss?"
"Yes—I've written." But I didn't add—for the hour—that
my letter, sealed and directed, was still in my pocket. There would be
time enough to send it before the messenger should go to the village.
Meanwhile there had been, on the part of my pupils, no more brilliant,
more exemplary morning. It was exactly as if they had both had at heart to
gloss over any recent little friction. They performed the dizziest feats
of arithmetic, soaring quite out of MY feeble range, and perpetrated, in
higher spirits than ever, geographical and historical jokes. It was
conspicuous of course in Miles in particular that he appeared to wish to
show how easily he could let me down. This child, to my memory, really
lives in a setting of beauty and misery that no words can translate; there
was a distinction all his own in every impulse he revealed; never was a
small natural creature, to the uninitiated eye all frankness and freedom,
a more ingenious, a more extraordinary little gentleman. I had perpetually
to guard against the wonder of contemplation into which my initiated view
betrayed me; to check the irrelevant gaze and discouraged sigh in which I
constantly both attacked and renounced the enigma of what such a little
gentleman could have done that deserved a penalty. Say that, by the dark
prodigy I knew, the imagination of all evil HAD been opened up to him: all
the justice within me ached for the proof that it could ever have flowered
into an act.
He had never, at any rate, been such a little gentleman as when, after our
early dinner on this dreadful day, he came round to me and asked if I
shouldn't like him, for half an hour, to play to me. David playing to Saul
could never have shown a finer sense of the occasion. It was literally a
charming exhibition of tact, of magnanimity, and quite tantamount to his
saying outright: "The true knights we love to read about never push an
advantage too far. I know what you mean now: you mean that—to be let
alone yourself and not followed up—you'll cease to worry and spy
upon me, won't keep me so close to you, will let me go and come. Well, I
'come,' you see—but I don't go! There'll be plenty of time for that.
I do really delight in your society, and I only want to show you that I
contended for a principle." It may be imagined whether I resisted this
appeal or failed to accompany him again, hand in hand, to the schoolroom.
He sat down at the old piano and played as he had never played; and if
there are those who think he had better have been kicking a football I can
only say that I wholly agree with them. For at the end of a time that
under his influence I had quite ceased to measure, I started up with a
strange sense of having literally slept at my post. It was after luncheon,
and by the schoolroom fire, and yet I hadn't really, in the least, slept:
I had only done something much worse—I had forgotten. Where, all
this time, was Flora? When I put the question to Miles, he played on a
minute before answering and then could only say: "Why, my dear, how do I
know?"—breaking moreover into a happy laugh which, immediately
after, as if it were a vocal accompaniment, he prolonged into incoherent,
extravagant song.
I went straight to my room, but his sister was not there; then, before
going downstairs, I looked into several others. As she was nowhere about
she would surely be with Mrs. Grose, whom, in the comfort of that theory,
I accordingly proceeded in quest of. I found her where I had found her the
evening before, but she met my quick challenge with blank, scared
ignorance. She had only supposed that, after the repast, I had carried off
both the children; as to which she was quite in her right, for it was the
very first time I had allowed the little girl out of my sight without some
special provision. Of course now indeed she might be with the maids, so
that the immediate thing was to look for her without an air of alarm. This
we promptly arranged between us; but when, ten minutes later and in
pursuance of our arrangement, we met in the hall, it was only to report on
either side that after guarded inquiries we had altogether failed to trace
her. For a minute there, apart from observation, we exchanged mute alarms,
and I could feel with what high interest my friend returned me all those I
had from the first given her.
"She'll be above," she presently said—"in one of the rooms you
haven't searched."
"No; she's at a distance." I had made up my mind. "She has gone out."
Mrs. Grose stared. "Without a hat?"
I naturally also looked volumes. "Isn't that woman always without one?"
"She's with HER?"
"She's with HER!" I declared. "We must find them."
My hand was on my friend's arm, but she failed for the moment, confronted
with such an account of the matter, to respond to my pressure. She
communed, on the contrary, on the spot, with her uneasiness. "And where's
Master Miles?"
"Oh, HE'S with Quint. They're in the schoolroom."
"Lord, miss!" My view, I was myself aware—and therefore I suppose my
tone—had never yet reached so calm an assurance.
"The trick's played," I went on; "they've successfully worked their plan.
He found the most divine little way to keep me quiet while she went off."
"'Divine'?" Mrs. Grose bewilderedly echoed.
"Infernal, then!" I almost cheerfully rejoined. "He has provided for
himself as well. But come!"
She had helplessly gloomed at the upper regions. "You leave him—?"
"So long with Quint? Yes—I don't mind that now."
She always ended, at these moments, by getting possession of my hand, and
in this manner she could at present still stay me. But after gasping an
instant at my sudden resignation, "Because of your letter?" she eagerly
brought out.
I quickly, by way of answer, felt for my letter, drew it forth, held it
up, and then, freeing myself, went and laid it on the great hall table.
"Luke will take it," I said as I came back. I reached the house door and
opened it; I was already on the steps.
My companion still demurred: the storm of the night and the early morning
had dropped, but the afternoon was damp and gray. I came down to the drive
while she stood in the doorway. "You go with nothing on?"
"What do I care when the child has nothing? I can't wait to dress," I
cried, "and if you must do so, I leave you. Try meanwhile, yourself,
upstairs."
"With THEM?" Oh, on this, the poor woman promptly joined me!
XIX
We went straight to the lake, as it was called at Bly, and I daresay
rightly called, though I reflect that it may in fact have been a sheet of
water less remarkable than it appeared to my untraveled eyes. My
acquaintance with sheets of water was small, and the pool of Bly, at all
events on the few occasions of my consenting, under the protection of my
pupils, to affront its surface in the old flat-bottomed boat moored there
for our use, had impressed me both with its extent and its agitation. The
usual place of embarkation was half a mile from the house, but I had an
intimate conviction that, wherever Flora might be, she was not near home.
She had not given me the slip for any small adventure, and, since the day
of the very great one that I had shared with her by the pond, I had been
aware, in our walks, of the quarter to which she most inclined. This was
why I had now given to Mrs. Grose's steps so marked a direction—a
direction that made her, when she perceived it, oppose a resistance that
showed me she was freshly mystified. "You're going to the water, Miss?—you
think she's IN—?"
"She may be, though the depth is, I believe, nowhere very great. But what
I judge most likely is that she's on the spot from which, the other day,
we saw together what I told you."
"When she pretended not to see—?"
"With that astounding self-possession? I've always been sure she wanted to
go back alone. And now her brother has managed it for her."
Mrs. Grose still stood where she had stopped. "You suppose they really
TALK of them?"
"I could meet this with a confidence! They say things that, if we heard
them, would simply appall us."
"And if she IS there—"
"Yes?"
"Then Miss Jessel is?"
"Beyond a doubt. You shall see."
"Oh, thank you!" my friend cried, planted so firm that, taking it in, I
went straight on without her. By the time I reached the pool, however, she
was close behind me, and I knew that, whatever, to her apprehension, might
befall me, the exposure of my society struck her as her least danger. She
exhaled a moan of relief as we at last came in sight of the greater part
of the water without a sight of the child. There was no trace of Flora on
that nearer side of the bank where my observation of her had been most
startling, and none on the opposite edge, where, save for a margin of some
twenty yards, a thick copse came down to the water. The pond, oblong in
shape, had a width so scant compared to its length that, with its ends out
of view, it might have been taken for a scant river. We looked at the
empty expanse, and then I felt the suggestion of my friend's eyes. I knew
what she meant and I replied with a negative headshake.
"No, no; wait! She has taken the boat."
My companion stared at the vacant mooring place and then again across the
lake. "Then where is it?"
"Our not seeing it is the strongest of proofs. She has used it to go over,
and then has managed to hide it."
"All alone—that child?"
"She's not alone, and at such times she's not a child: she's an old, old
woman." I scanned all the visible shore while Mrs. Grose took again, into
the queer element I offered her, one of her plunges of submission; then I
pointed out that the boat might perfectly be in a small refuge formed by
one of the recesses of the pool, an indentation masked, for the hither
side, by a projection of the bank and by a clump of trees growing close to
the water.
"But if the boat's there, where on earth's SHE?" my colleague anxiously
asked.
"That's exactly what we must learn." And I started to walk further.
"By going all the way round?"
"Certainly, far as it is. It will take us but ten minutes, but it's far
enough to have made the child prefer not to walk. She went straight over."
"Laws!" cried my friend again; the chain of my logic was ever too much for
her. It dragged her at my heels even now, and when we had got halfway
round—a devious, tiresome process, on ground much broken and by a
path choked with overgrowth—I paused to give her breath. I sustained
her with a grateful arm, assuring her that she might hugely help me; and
this started us afresh, so that in the course of but few minutes more we
reached a point from which we found the boat to be where I had supposed
it. It had been intentionally left as much as possible out of sight and
was tied to one of the stakes of a fence that came, just there, down to
the brink and that had been an assistance to disembarking. I recognized,
as I looked at the pair of short, thick oars, quite safely drawn up, the
prodigious character of the feat for a little girl; but I had lived, by
this time, too long among wonders and had panted to too many livelier
measures. There was a gate in the fence, through which we passed, and that
brought us, after a trifling interval, more into the open. Then, "There
she is!" we both exclaimed at once.
Flora, a short way off, stood before us on the grass and smiled as if her
performance was now complete. The next thing she did, however, was to
stoop straight down and pluck—quite as if it were all she was there
for—a big, ugly spray of withered fern. I instantly became sure she
had just come out of the copse. She waited for us, not herself taking a
step, and I was conscious of the rare solemnity with which we presently
approached her. She smiled and smiled, and we met; but it was all done in
a silence by this time flagrantly ominous. Mrs. Grose was the first to
break the spell: she threw herself on her knees and, drawing the child to
her breast, clasped in a long embrace the little tender, yielding body.
While this dumb convulsion lasted I could only watch it—which I did
the more intently when I saw Flora's face peep at me over our companion's
shoulder. It was serious now—the flicker had left it; but it
strengthened the pang with which I at that moment envied Mrs. Grose the
simplicity of HER relation. Still, all this while, nothing more passed
between us save that Flora had let her foolish fern again drop to the
ground. What she and I had virtually said to each other was that pretexts
were useless now. When Mrs. Grose finally got up she kept the child's
hand, so that the two were still before me; and the singular reticence of
our communion was even more marked in the frank look she launched me.
"I'll be hanged," it said, "if I'll speak!"
It was Flora who, gazing all over me in candid wonder, was the first. She
was struck with our bareheaded aspect. "Why, where are your things?"
"Where yours are, my dear!" I promptly returned.
She had already got back her gaiety, and appeared to take this as an
answer quite sufficient. "And where's Miles?" she went on.
There was something in the small valor of it that quite finished me: these
three words from her were, in a flash like the glitter of a drawn blade,
the jostle of the cup that my hand, for weeks and weeks, had held high and
full to the brim that now, even before speaking, I felt overflow in a
deluge. "I'll tell you if you'll tell ME—" I heard myself say, then
heard the tremor in which it broke.
"Well, what?"
Mrs. Grose's suspense blazed at me, but it was too late now, and I brought
the thing out handsomely. "Where, my pet, is Miss Jessel?"
XX
Just as in the churchyard with Miles, the whole thing was upon us. Much as
I had made of the fact that this name had never once, between us, been
sounded, the quick, smitten glare with which the child's face now received
it fairly likened my breach of the silence to the smash of a pane of
glass. It added to the interposing cry, as if to stay the blow, that Mrs.
Grose, at the same instant, uttered over my violence—the shriek of a
creature scared, or rather wounded, which, in turn, within a few seconds,
was completed by a gasp of my own. I seized my colleague's arm. "She's
there, she's there!"
Miss Jessel stood before us on the opposite bank exactly as she had stood
the other time, and I remember, strangely, as the first feeling now
produced in me, my thrill of joy at having brought on a proof. She was
there, and I was justified; she was there, and I was neither cruel nor
mad. She was there for poor scared Mrs. Grose, but she was there most for
Flora; and no moment of my monstrous time was perhaps so extraordinary as
that in which I consciously threw out to her—with the sense that,
pale and ravenous demon as she was, she would catch and understand it—an
inarticulate message of gratitude. She rose erect on the spot my friend
and I had lately quitted, and there was not, in all the long reach of her
desire, an inch of her evil that fell short. This first vividness of
vision and emotion were things of a few seconds, during which Mrs. Grose's
dazed blink across to where I pointed struck me as a sovereign sign that
she too at last saw, just as it carried my own eyes precipitately to the
child. The revelation then of the manner in which Flora was affected
startled me, in truth, far more than it would have done to find her also
merely agitated, for direct dismay was of course not what I had expected.
Prepared and on her guard as our pursuit had actually made her, she would
repress every betrayal; and I was therefore shaken, on the spot, by my
first glimpse of the particular one for which I had not allowed. To see
her, without a convulsion of her small pink face, not even feign to glance
in the direction of the prodigy I announced, but only, instead of that,
turn at ME an expression of hard, still gravity, an expression absolutely
new and unprecedented and that appeared to read and accuse and judge me—this
was a stroke that somehow converted the little girl herself into the very
presence that could make me quail. I quailed even though my certitude that
she thoroughly saw was never greater than at that instant, and in the
immediate need to defend myself I called it passionately to witness.
"She's there, you little unhappy thing—there, there, THERE, and you
see her as well as you see me!" I had said shortly before to Mrs. Grose
that she was not at these times a child, but an old, old woman, and that
description of her could not have been more strikingly confirmed than in
the way in which, for all answer to this, she simply showed me, without a
concession, an admission, of her eyes, a countenance of deeper and deeper,
of indeed suddenly quite fixed, reprobation. I was by this time—if I
can put the whole thing at all together—more appalled at what I may
properly call her manner than at anything else, though it was
simultaneously with this that I became aware of having Mrs. Grose also,
and very formidably, to reckon with. My elder companion, the next moment,
at any rate, blotted out everything but her own flushed face and her loud,
shocked protest, a burst of high disapproval. "What a dreadful turn, to be
sure, miss! Where on earth do you see anything?"
I could only grasp her more quickly yet, for even while she spoke the
hideous plain presence stood undimmed and undaunted. It had already lasted
a minute, and it lasted while I continued, seizing my colleague, quite
thrusting her at it and presenting her to it, to insist with my pointing
hand. "You don't see her exactly as WE see?—you mean to say you
don't now—NOW? She's as big as a blazing fire! Only look, dearest
woman, LOOK—!" She looked, even as I did, and gave me, with her deep
groan of negation, repulsion, compassion—the mixture with her pity
of her relief at her exemption—a sense, touching to me even then,
that she would have backed me up if she could. I might well have needed
that, for with this hard blow of the proof that her eyes were hopelessly
sealed I felt my own situation horribly crumble, I felt—I saw—my
livid predecessor press, from her position, on my defeat, and I was
conscious, more than all, of what I should have from this instant to deal
with in the astounding little attitude of Flora. Into this attitude Mrs.
Grose immediately and violently entered, breaking, even while there
pierced through my sense of ruin a prodigious private triumph, into
breathless reassurance.
"She isn't there, little lady, and nobody's there—and you never see
nothing, my sweet! How can poor Miss Jessel—when poor Miss Jessel's
dead and buried? WE know, don't we, love?"—and she appealed,
blundering in, to the child. "It's all a mere mistake and a worry and a
joke—and we'll go home as fast as we can!"
Our companion, on this, had responded with a strange, quick primness of
propriety, and they were again, with Mrs. Grose on her feet, united, as it
were, in pained opposition to me. Flora continued to fix me with her small
mask of reprobation, and even at that minute I prayed God to forgive me
for seeming to see that, as she stood there holding tight to our friend's
dress, her incomparable childish beauty had suddenly failed, had quite
vanished. I've said it already—she was literally, she was hideously,
hard; she had turned common and almost ugly. "I don't know what you mean.
I see nobody. I see nothing. I never HAVE. I think you're cruel. I don't
like you!" Then, after this deliverance, which might have been that of a
vulgarly pert little girl in the street, she hugged Mrs. Grose more
closely and buried in her skirts the dreadful little face. In this
position she produced an almost furious wail. "Take me away, take me away—oh,
take me away from HER!"
"From ME?" I panted.
"From you—from you!" she cried.
Even Mrs. Grose looked across at me dismayed, while I had nothing to do
but communicate again with the figure that, on the opposite bank, without
a movement, as rigidly still as if catching, beyond the interval, our
voices, was as vividly there for my disaster as it was not there for my
service. The wretched child had spoken exactly as if she had got from some
outside source each of her stabbing little words, and I could therefore,
in the full despair of all I had to accept, but sadly shake my head at
her. "If I had ever doubted, all my doubt would at present have gone. I've
been living with the miserable truth, and now it has only too much closed
round me. Of course I've lost you: I've interfered, and you've seen—under
HER dictation"—with which I faced, over the pool again, our infernal
witness—"the easy and perfect way to meet it. I've done my best, but
I've lost you. Goodbye." For Mrs. Grose I had an imperative, an almost
frantic "Go, go!" before which, in infinite distress, but mutely possessed
of the little girl and clearly convinced, in spite of her blindness, that
something awful had occurred and some collapse engulfed us, she retreated,
by the way we had come, as fast as she could move.
Of what first happened when I was left alone I had no subsequent memory. I
only knew that at the end of, I suppose, a quarter of an hour, an odorous
dampness and roughness, chilling and piercing my trouble, had made me
understand that I must have thrown myself, on my face, on the ground and
given way to a wildness of grief. I must have lain there long and cried
and sobbed, for when I raised my head the day was almost done. I got up
and looked a moment, through the twilight, at the gray pool and its blank,
haunted edge, and then I took, back to the house, my dreary and difficult
course. When I reached the gate in the fence the boat, to my surprise, was
gone, so that I had a fresh reflection to make on Flora's extraordinary
command of the situation. She passed that night, by the most tacit, and I
should add, were not the word so grotesque a false note, the happiest of
arrangements, with Mrs. Grose. I saw neither of them on my return, but, on
the other hand, as by an ambiguous compensation, I saw a great deal of
Miles. I saw—I can use no other phrase—so much of him that it
was as if it were more than it had ever been. No evening I had passed at
Bly had the portentous quality of this one; in spite of which—and in
spite also of the deeper depths of consternation that had opened beneath
my feet—there was literally, in the ebbing actual, an
extraordinarily sweet sadness. On reaching the house I had never so much
as looked for the boy; I had simply gone straight to my room to change
what I was wearing and to take in, at a glance, much material testimony to
Flora's rupture. Her little belongings had all been removed. When later,
by the schoolroom fire, I was served with tea by the usual maid, I
indulged, on the article of my other pupil, in no inquiry whatever. He had
his freedom now—he might have it to the end! Well, he did have it;
and it consisted—in part at least—of his coming in at about
eight o'clock and sitting down with me in silence. On the removal of the
tea things I had blown out the candles and drawn my chair closer: I was
conscious of a mortal coldness and felt as if I should never again be
warm. So, when he appeared, I was sitting in the glow with my thoughts. He
paused a moment by the door as if to look at me; then—as if to share
them—came to the other side of the hearth and sank into a chair. We
sat there in absolute stillness; yet he wanted, I felt, to be with me.
XXI
Before a new day, in my room, had fully broken, my eyes opened to Mrs.
Grose, who had come to my bedside with worse news. Flora was so markedly
feverish that an illness was perhaps at hand; she had passed a night of
extreme unrest, a night agitated above all by fears that had for their
subject not in the least her former, but wholly her present, governess. It
was not against the possible re-entrance of Miss Jessel on the scene that
she protested—it was conspicuously and passionately against mine. I
was promptly on my feet of course, and with an immense deal to ask; the
more that my friend had discernibly now girded her loins to meet me once
more. This I felt as soon as I had put to her the question of her sense of
the child's sincerity as against my own. "She persists in denying to you
that she saw, or has ever seen, anything?"
My visitor's trouble, truly, was great. "Ah, miss, it isn't a matter on
which I can push her! Yet it isn't either, I must say, as if I much needed
to. It has made her, every inch of her, quite old."
"Oh, I see her perfectly from here. She resents, for all the world like
some high little personage, the imputation on her truthfulness and, as it
were, her respectability. 'Miss Jessel indeed—SHE!' Ah, she's
'respectable,' the chit! The impression she gave me there yesterday was, I
assure you, the very strangest of all; it was quite beyond any of the
others. I DID put my foot in it! She'll never speak to me again."
Hideous and obscure as it all was, it held Mrs. Grose briefly silent; then
she granted my point with a frankness which, I made sure, had more behind
it. "I think indeed, miss, she never will. She do have a grand manner
about it!"
"And that manner"—I summed it up—"is practically what's the
matter with her now!"
Oh, that manner, I could see in my visitor's face, and not a little else
besides! "She asks me every three minutes if I think you're coming in."
"I see—I see." I, too, on my side, had so much more than worked it
out. "Has she said to you since yesterday—except to repudiate her
familiarity with anything so dreadful—a single other word about Miss
Jessel?"
"Not one, miss. And of course you know," my friend added, "I took it from
her, by the lake, that, just then and there at least, there WAS nobody."
"Rather! and, naturally, you take it from her still."
"I don't contradict her. What else can I do?"
"Nothing in the world! You've the cleverest little person to deal with.
They've made them—their two friends, I mean—still cleverer
even than nature did; for it was wondrous material to play on! Flora has
now her grievance, and she'll work it to the end."
"Yes, miss; but to WHAT end?"
"Why, that of dealing with me to her uncle. She'll make me out to him the
lowest creature—!"
I winced at the fair show of the scene in Mrs. Grose's face; she looked
for a minute as if she sharply saw them together. "And him who thinks so
well of you!"
"He has an odd way—it comes over me now," I laughed,"—of
proving it! But that doesn't matter. What Flora wants, of course, is to
get rid of me."
My companion bravely concurred. "Never again to so much as look at you."
"So that what you've come to me now for," I asked, "is to speed me on my
way?" Before she had time to reply, however, I had her in check. "I've a
better idea—the result of my reflections. My going WOULD seem the
right thing, and on Sunday I was terribly near it. Yet that won't do. It's
YOU who must go. You must take Flora."
My visitor, at this, did speculate. "But where in the world—?"
"Away from here. Away from THEM. Away, even most of all, now, from me.
Straight to her uncle."
"Only to tell on you—?"
"No, not 'only'! To leave me, in addition, with my remedy."
She was still vague. "And what IS your remedy?"
"Your loyalty, to begin with. And then Miles's."
She looked at me hard. "Do you think he—?"
"Won't, if he has the chance, turn on me? Yes, I venture still to think
it. At all events, I want to try. Get off with his sister as soon as
possible and leave me with him alone." I was amazed, myself, at the spirit
I had still in reserve, and therefore perhaps a trifle the more
disconcerted at the way in which, in spite of this fine example of it, she
hesitated. "There's one thing, of course," I went on: "they mustn't,
before she goes, see each other for three seconds." Then it came over me
that, in spite of Flora's presumable sequestration from the instant of her
return from the pool, it might already be too late. "Do you mean," I
anxiously asked, "that they HAVE met?"
At this she quite flushed. "Ah, miss, I'm not such a fool as that! If I've
been obliged to leave her three or four times, it has been each time with
one of the maids, and at present, though she's alone, she's locked in
safe. And yet—and yet!" There were too many things.
"And yet what?"
"Well, are you so sure of the little gentleman?"
"I'm not sure of anything but YOU. But I have, since last evening, a new
hope. I think he wants to give me an opening. I do believe that—poor
little exquisite wretch!—he wants to speak. Last evening, in the
firelight and the silence, he sat with me for two hours as if it were just
coming."
Mrs. Grose looked hard, through the window, at the gray, gathering day.
"And did it come?"
"No, though I waited and waited, I confess it didn't, and it was without a
breach of the silence or so much as a faint allusion to his sister's
condition and absence that we at last kissed for good night. All the
same," I continued, "I can't, if her uncle sees her, consent to his seeing
her brother without my having given the boy—and most of all because
things have got so bad—a little more time."
My friend appeared on this ground more reluctant than I could quite
understand. "What do you mean by more time?"
"Well, a day or two—really to bring it out. He'll then be on MY side—of
which you see the importance. If nothing comes, I shall only fail, and you
will, at the worst, have helped me by doing, on your arrival in town,
whatever you may have found possible." So I put it before her, but she
continued for a little so inscrutably embarrassed that I came again to her
aid. "Unless, indeed," I wound up, "you really want NOT to go."
I could see it, in her face, at last clear itself; she put out her hand to
me as a pledge. "I'll go—I'll go. I'll go this morning."
I wanted to be very just. "If you SHOULD wish still to wait, I would
engage she shouldn't see me."
"No, no: it's the place itself. She must leave it." She held me a moment
with heavy eyes, then brought out the rest. "Your idea's the right one. I
myself, miss—"
"Well?"
"I can't stay."
The look she gave me with it made me jump at possibilities. "You mean
that, since yesterday, you HAVE seen—?"
She shook her head with dignity. "I've HEARD—!"
"Heard?"
"From that child—horrors! There!" she sighed with tragic relief. "On
my honor, miss, she says things—!" But at this evocation she broke
down; she dropped, with a sudden sob, upon my sofa and, as I had seen her
do before, gave way to all the grief of it.
It was quite in another manner that I, for my part, let myself go. "Oh,
thank God!"
She sprang up again at this, drying her eyes with a groan. "'Thank God'?"
"It so justifies me!"
"It does that, miss!"
I couldn't have desired more emphasis, but I just hesitated. "She's so
horrible?"
I saw my colleague scarce knew how to put it. "Really shocking."
"And about me?"
"About you, miss—since you must have it. It's beyond everything, for
a young lady; and I can't think wherever she must have picked up—"
"The appalling language she applied to me? I can, then!" I broke in with a
laugh that was doubtless significant enough.
It only, in truth, left my friend still more grave. "Well, perhaps I ought
to also—since I've heard some of it before! Yet I can't bear it,"
the poor woman went on while, with the same movement, she glanced, on my
dressing table, at the face of my watch. "But I must go back."
I kept her, however. "Ah, if you can't bear it—!"
"How can I stop with her, you mean? Why, just FOR that: to get her away.
Far from this," she pursued, "far from THEM-"
"She may be different? She may be free?" I seized her almost with joy.
"Then, in spite of yesterday, you BELIEVE—"
"In such doings?" Her simple description of them required, in the light of
her expression, to be carried no further, and she gave me the whole thing
as she had never done. "I believe."
Yes, it was a joy, and we were still shoulder to shoulder: if I might
continue sure of that I should care but little what else happened. My
support in the presence of disaster would be the same as it had been in my
early need of confidence, and if my friend would answer for my honesty, I
would answer for all the rest. On the point of taking leave of her,
nonetheless, I was to some extent embarrassed. "There's one thing, of
course—it occurs to me—to remember. My letter, giving the
alarm, will have reached town before you."
I now perceived still more how she had been beating about the bush and how
weary at last it had made her. "Your letter won't have got there. Your
letter never went."
"What then became of it?"
"Goodness knows! Master Miles—"
"Do you mean HE took it?" I gasped.
She hung fire, but she overcame her reluctance. "I mean that I saw
yesterday, when I came back with Miss Flora, that it wasn't where you had
put it. Later in the evening I had the chance to question Luke, and he
declared that he had neither noticed nor touched it." We could only
exchange, on this, one of our deeper mutual soundings, and it was Mrs.
Grose who first brought up the plumb with an almost elated "You see!"
"Yes, I see that if Miles took it instead he probably will have read it
and destroyed it."
"And don't you see anything else?"
I faced her a moment with a sad smile. "It strikes me that by this time
your eyes are open even wider than mine."
They proved to be so indeed, but she could still blush, almost, to show
it. "I make out now what he must have done at school." And she gave, in
her simple sharpness, an almost droll disillusioned nod. "He stole!"
I turned it over—I tried to be more judicial. "Well—perhaps."
She looked as if she found me unexpectedly calm. "He stole LETTERS!"
She couldn't know my reasons for a calmness after all pretty shallow; so I
showed them off as I might. "I hope then it was to more purpose than in
this case! The note, at any rate, that I put on the table yesterday," I
pursued, "will have given him so scant an advantage—for it contained
only the bare demand for an interview—that he is already much
ashamed of having gone so far for so little, and that what he had on his
mind last evening was precisely the need of confession." I seemed to
myself, for the instant, to have mastered it, to see it all. "Leave us,
leave us"—I was already, at the door, hurrying her off. "I'll get it
out of him. He'll meet me—he'll confess. If he confesses, he's
saved. And if he's saved—"
"Then YOU are?" The dear woman kissed me on this, and I took her farewell.
"I'll save you without him!" she cried as she went.
XXII
Yet it was when she had got off—and I missed her on the spot—that
the great pinch really came. If I had counted on what it would give me to
find myself alone with Miles, I speedily perceived, at least, that it
would give me a measure. No hour of my stay in fact was so assailed with
apprehensions as that of my coming down to learn that the carriage
containing Mrs. Grose and my younger pupil had already rolled out of the
gates. Now I WAS, I said to myself, face to face with the elements, and
for much of the rest of the day, while I fought my weakness, I could
consider that I had been supremely rash. It was a tighter place still than
I had yet turned round in; all the more that, for the first time, I could
see in the aspect of others a confused reflection of the crisis. What had
happened naturally caused them all to stare; there was too little of the
explained, throw out whatever we might, in the suddenness of my
colleague's act. The maids and the men looked blank; the effect of which
on my nerves was an aggravation until I saw the necessity of making it a
positive aid. It was precisely, in short, by just clutching the helm that
I avoided total wreck; and I dare say that, to bear up at all, I became,
that morning, very grand and very dry. I welcomed the consciousness that I
was charged with much to do, and I caused it to be known as well that,
left thus to myself, I was quite remarkably firm. I wandered with that
manner, for the next hour or two, all over the place and looked, I have no
doubt, as if I were ready for any onset. So, for the benefit of whom it
might concern, I paraded with a sick heart.
The person it appeared least to concern proved to be, till dinner, little
Miles himself. My perambulations had given me, meanwhile, no glimpse of
him, but they had tended to make more public the change taking place in
our relation as a consequence of his having at the piano, the day before,
kept me, in Flora's interest, so beguiled and befooled. The stamp of
publicity had of course been fully given by her confinement and departure,
and the change itself was now ushered in by our nonobservance of the
regular custom of the schoolroom. He had already disappeared when, on my
way down, I pushed open his door, and I learned below that he had
breakfasted—in the presence of a couple of the maids—with Mrs.
Grose and his sister. He had then gone out, as he said, for a stroll; than
which nothing, I reflected, could better have expressed his frank view of
the abrupt transformation of my office. What he would not permit this
office to consist of was yet to be settled: there was a queer relief, at
all events—I mean for myself in especial—in the renouncement
of one pretension. If so much had sprung to the surface, I scarce put it
too strongly in saying that what had perhaps sprung highest was the
absurdity of our prolonging the fiction that I had anything more to teach
him. It sufficiently stuck out that, by tacit little tricks in which even
more than myself he carried out the care for my dignity, I had had to
appeal to him to let me off straining to meet him on the ground of his
true capacity. He had at any rate his freedom now; I was never to touch it
again; as I had amply shown, moreover, when, on his joining me in the
schoolroom the previous night, I had uttered, on the subject of the
interval just concluded, neither challenge nor hint. I had too much, from
this moment, my other ideas. Yet when he at last arrived, the difficulty
of applying them, the accumulations of my problem, were brought straight
home to me by the beautiful little presence on which what had occurred had
as yet, for the eye, dropped neither stain nor shadow.
To mark, for the house, the high state I cultivated I decreed that my
meals with the boy should be served, as we called it, downstairs; so that
I had been awaiting him in the ponderous pomp of the room outside of the
window of which I had had from Mrs. Grose, that first scared Sunday, my
flash of something it would scarce have done to call light. Here at
present I felt afresh—for I had felt it again and again—how my
equilibrium depended on the success of my rigid will, the will to shut my
eyes as tight as possible to the truth that what I had to deal with was,
revoltingly, against nature. I could only get on at all by taking "nature"
into my confidence and my account, by treating my monstrous ordeal as a
push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, but demanding,
after all, for a fair front, only another turn of the screw of ordinary
human virtue. No attempt, nonetheless, could well require more tact than
just this attempt to supply, one's self, ALL the nature. How could I put
even a little of that article into a suppression of reference to what had
occurred? How, on the other hand, could I make reference without a new
plunge into the hideous obscure? Well, a sort of answer, after a time, had
come to me, and it was so far confirmed as that I was met, incontestably,
by the quickened vision of what was rare in my little companion. It was
indeed as if he had found even now—as he had so often found at
lessons—still some other delicate way to ease me off. Wasn't there
light in the fact which, as we shared our solitude, broke out with a
specious glitter it had never yet quite worn?—the fact that
(opportunity aiding, precious opportunity which had now come) it would be
preposterous, with a child so endowed, to forego the help one might wrest
from absolute intelligence? What had his intelligence been given him for
but to save him? Mightn't one, to reach his mind, risk the stretch of an
angular arm over his character? It was as if, when we were face to face in
the dining room, he had literally shown me the way. The roast mutton was
on the table, and I had dispensed with attendance. Miles, before he sat
down, stood a moment with his hands in his pockets and looked at the
joint, on which he seemed on the point of passing some humorous judgment.
But what he presently produced was: "I say, my dear, is she really very
awfully ill?"
"Little Flora? Not so bad but that she'll presently be better. London will
set her up. Bly had ceased to agree with her. Come here and take your
mutton."
He alertly obeyed me, carried the plate carefully to his seat, and, when
he was established, went on. "Did Bly disagree with her so terribly
suddenly?"
"Not so suddenly as you might think. One had seen it coming on."
"Then why didn't you get her off before?"
"Before what?"
"Before she became too ill to travel."
I found myself prompt. "She's NOT too ill to travel: she only might have
become so if she had stayed. This was just the moment to seize. The
journey will dissipate the influence"—oh, I was grand!—"and
carry it off."
"I see, I see"—Miles, for that matter, was grand, too. He settled to
his repast with the charming little "table manner" that, from the day of
his arrival, had relieved me of all grossness of admonition. Whatever he
had been driven from school for, it was not for ugly feeding. He was
irreproachable, as always, today; but he was unmistakably more conscious.
He was discernibly trying to take for granted more things than he found,
without assistance, quite easy; and he dropped into peaceful silence while
he felt his situation. Our meal was of the briefest—mine a vain
pretense, and I had the things immediately removed. While this was done
Miles stood again with his hands in his little pockets and his back to me—stood
and looked out of the wide window through which, that other day, I had
seen what pulled me up. We continued silent while the maid was with us—as
silent, it whimsically occurred to me, as some young couple who, on their
wedding journey, at the inn, feel shy in the presence of the waiter. He
turned round only when the waiter had left us. "Well—so we're
alone!"
XXIII
"Oh, more or less." I fancy my smile was pale. "Not absolutely. We
shouldn't like that!" I went on.
"No—I suppose we shouldn't. Of course we have the others."
"We have the others—we have indeed the others," I concurred.
"Yet even though we have them," he returned, still with his hands in his
pockets and planted there in front of me, "they don't much count, do
they?"
I made the best of it, but I felt wan. "It depends on what you call
'much'!"
"Yes"—with all accommodation—"everything depends!" On this,
however, he faced to the window again and presently reached it with his
vague, restless, cogitating step. He remained there awhile, with his
forehead against the glass, in contemplation of the stupid shrubs I knew
and the dull things of November. I had always my hypocrisy of "work,"
behind which, now, I gained the sofa. Steadying myself with it there as I
had repeatedly done at those moments of torment that I have described as
the moments of my knowing the children to be given to something from which
I was barred, I sufficiently obeyed my habit of being prepared for the
worst. But an extraordinary impression dropped on me as I extracted a
meaning from the boy's embarrassed back—none other than the
impression that I was not barred now. This inference grew in a few minutes
to sharp intensity and seemed bound up with the direct perception that it
was positively HE who was. The frames and squares of the great window were
a kind of image, for him, of a kind of failure. I felt that I saw him, at
any rate, shut in or shut out. He was admirable, but not comfortable: I
took it in with a throb of hope. Wasn't he looking, through the haunted
pane, for something he couldn't see?—and wasn't it the first time in
the whole business that he had known such a lapse? The first, the very
first: I found it a splendid portent. It made him anxious, though he
watched himself; he had been anxious all day and, even while in his usual
sweet little manner he sat at table, had needed all his small strange
genius to give it a gloss. When he at last turned round to meet me, it was
almost as if this genius had succumbed. "Well, I think I'm glad Bly agrees
with ME!"
"You would certainly seem to have seen, these twenty-four hours, a good
deal more of it than for some time before. I hope," I went on bravely,
"that you've been enjoying yourself."
"Oh, yes, I've been ever so far; all round about—miles and miles
away. I've never been so free."
He had really a manner of his own, and I could only try to keep up with
him. "Well, do you like it?"
He stood there smiling; then at last he put into two words—"Do YOU?"—more
discrimination than I had ever heard two words contain. Before I had time
to deal with that, however, he continued as if with the sense that this
was an impertinence to be softened. "Nothing could be more charming than
the way you take it, for of course if we're alone together now it's you
that are alone most. But I hope," he threw in, "you don't particularly
mind!"
"Having to do with you?" I asked. "My dear child, how can I help minding?
Though I've renounced all claim to your company—you're so beyond me—I
at least greatly enjoy it. What else should I stay on for?"
He looked at me more directly, and the expression of his face, graver now,
struck me as the most beautiful I had ever found in it. "You stay on just
for THAT?"
"Certainly. I stay on as your friend and from the tremendous interest I
take in you till something can be done for you that may be more worth your
while. That needn't surprise you." My voice trembled so that I felt it
impossible to suppress the shake. "Don't you remember how I told you, when
I came and sat on your bed the night of the storm, that there was nothing
in the world I wouldn't do for you?"
"Yes, yes!" He, on his side, more and more visibly nervous, had a tone to
master; but he was so much more successful than I that, laughing out
through his gravity, he could pretend we were pleasantly jesting. "Only
that, I think, was to get me to do something for YOU!"
"It was partly to get you to do something," I conceded. "But, you know,
you didn't do it."
"Oh, yes," he said with the brightest superficial eagerness, "you wanted
me to tell you something."
"That's it. Out, straight out. What you have on your mind, you know."
"Ah, then, is THAT what you've stayed over for?"
He spoke with a gaiety through which I could still catch the finest little
quiver of resentful passion; but I can't begin to express the effect upon
me of an implication of surrender even so faint. It was as if what I had
yearned for had come at last only to astonish me. "Well, yes—I may
as well make a clean breast of it, it was precisely for that."
He waited so long that I supposed it for the purpose of repudiating the
assumption on which my action had been founded; but what he finally said
was: "Do you mean now—here?"
"There couldn't be a better place or time." He looked round him uneasily,
and I had the rare—oh, the queer!—impression of the very first
symptom I had seen in him of the approach of immediate fear. It was as if
he were suddenly afraid of me—which struck me indeed as perhaps the
best thing to make him. Yet in the very pang of the effort I felt it vain
to try sternness, and I heard myself the next instant so gentle as to be
almost grotesque. "You want so to go out again?"
"Awfully!" He smiled at me heroically, and the touching little bravery of
it was enhanced by his actually flushing with pain. He had picked up his
hat, which he had brought in, and stood twirling it in a way that gave me,
even as I was just nearly reaching port, a perverse horror of what I was
doing. To do it in ANY way was an act of violence, for what did it consist
of but the obtrusion of the idea of grossness and guilt on a small
helpless creature who had been for me a revelation of the possibilities of
beautiful intercourse? Wasn't it base to create for a being so exquisite a
mere alien awkwardness? I suppose I now read into our situation a
clearness it couldn't have had at the time, for I seem to see our poor
eyes already lighted with some spark of a prevision of the anguish that
was to come. So we circled about, with terrors and scruples, like fighters
not daring to close. But it was for each other we feared! That kept us a
little longer suspended and unbruised. "I'll tell you everything," Miles
said—"I mean I'll tell you anything you like. You'll stay on with
me, and we shall both be all right, and I WILL tell you—I WILL. But
not now."
"Why not now?"
My insistence turned him from me and kept him once more at his window in a
silence during which, between us, you might have heard a pin drop. Then he
was before me again with the air of a person for whom, outside, someone
who had frankly to be reckoned with was waiting. "I have to see Luke."
I had not yet reduced him to quite so vulgar a lie, and I felt
proportionately ashamed. But, horrible as it was, his lies made up my
truth. I achieved thoughtfully a few loops of my knitting. "Well, then, go
to Luke, and I'll wait for what you promise. Only, in return for that,
satisfy, before you leave me, one very much smaller request."
He looked as if he felt he had succeeded enough to be able still a little
to bargain. "Very much smaller—?"
"Yes, a mere fraction of the whole. Tell me"—oh, my work preoccupied
me, and I was offhand!—"if, yesterday afternoon, from the table in
the hall, you took, you know, my letter."
XXIV
My sense of how he received this suffered for a minute from something that
I can describe only as a fierce split of my attention—a stroke that
at first, as I sprang straight up, reduced me to the mere blind movement
of getting hold of him, drawing him close, and, while I just fell for
support against the nearest piece of furniture, instinctively keeping him
with his back to the window. The appearance was full upon us that I had
already had to deal with here: Peter Quint had come into view like a
sentinel before a prison. The next thing I saw was that, from outside, he
had reached the window, and then I knew that, close to the glass and
glaring in through it, he offered once more to the room his white face of
damnation. It represents but grossly what took place within me at the
sight to say that on the second my decision was made; yet I believe that
no woman so overwhelmed ever in so short a time recovered her grasp of the
ACT. It came to me in the very horror of the immediate presence that the
act would be, seeing and facing what I saw and faced, to keep the boy
himself unaware. The inspiration—I can call it by no other name—was
that I felt how voluntarily, how transcendently, I MIGHT. It was like
fighting with a demon for a human soul, and when I had fairly so appraised
it I saw how the human soul—held out, in the tremor of my hands, at
arm's length—had a perfect dew of sweat on a lovely childish
forehead. The face that was close to mine was as white as the face against
the glass, and out of it presently came a sound, not low nor weak, but as
if from much further away, that I drank like a waft of fragrance.
"Yes—I took it."
At this, with a moan of joy, I enfolded, I drew him close; and while I
held him to my breast, where I could feel in the sudden fever of his
little body the tremendous pulse of his little heart, I kept my eyes on
the thing at the window and saw it move and shift its posture. I have
likened it to a sentinel, but its slow wheel, for a moment, was rather the
prowl of a baffled beast. My present quickened courage, however, was such
that, not too much to let it through, I had to shade, as it were, my
flame. Meanwhile the glare of the face was again at the window, the
scoundrel fixed as if to watch and wait. It was the very confidence that I
might now defy him, as well as the positive certitude, by this time, of
the child's unconsciousness, that made me go on. "What did you take it
for?"
"To see what you said about me."
"You opened the letter?"
"I opened it."
My eyes were now, as I held him off a little again, on Miles's own face,
in which the collapse of mockery showed me how complete was the ravage of
uneasiness. What was prodigious was that at last, by my success, his sense
was sealed and his communication stopped: he knew that he was in presence,
but knew not of what, and knew still less that I also was and that I did
know. And what did this strain of trouble matter when my eyes went back to
the window only to see that the air was clear again and—by my
personal triumph—the influence quenched? There was nothing there. I
felt that the cause was mine and that I should surely get ALL. "And you
found nothing!"—I let my elation out.
He gave the most mournful, thoughtful little headshake. "Nothing."
"Nothing, nothing!" I almost shouted in my joy.
"Nothing, nothing," he sadly repeated.
I kissed his forehead; it was drenched. "So what have you done with it?"
"I've burned it."
"Burned it?" It was now or never. "Is that what you did at school?"
Oh, what this brought up! "At school?"
"Did you take letters?—or other things?"
"Other things?" He appeared now to be thinking of something far off and
that reached him only through the pressure of his anxiety. Yet it did
reach him. "Did I STEAL?"
I felt myself redden to the roots of my hair as well as wonder if it were
more strange to put to a gentleman such a question or to see him take it
with allowances that gave the very distance of his fall in the world. "Was
it for that you mightn't go back?"
The only thing he felt was rather a dreary little surprise. "Did you know
I mightn't go back?"
"I know everything."
He gave me at this the longest and strangest look. "Everything?"
"Everything. Therefore DID you—?" But I couldn't say it again.
Miles could, very simply. "No. I didn't steal."
My face must have shown him I believed him utterly; yet my hands—but
it was for pure tenderness—shook him as if to ask him why, if it was
all for nothing, he had condemned me to months of torment. "What then did
you do?"
He looked in vague pain all round the top of the room and drew his breath,
two or three times over, as if with difficulty. He might have been
standing at the bottom of the sea and raising his eyes to some faint green
twilight. "Well—I said things."
"Only that?"
"They thought it was enough!"
"To turn you out for?"
Never, truly, had a person "turned out" shown so little to explain it as
this little person! He appeared to weigh my question, but in a manner
quite detached and almost helpless. "Well, I suppose I oughtn't."
"But to whom did you say them?"
He evidently tried to remember, but it dropped—he had lost it. "I
don't know!"
He almost smiled at me in the desolation of his surrender, which was
indeed practically, by this time, so complete that I ought to have left it
there. But I was infatuated—I was blind with victory, though even
then the very effect that was to have brought him so much nearer was
already that of added separation. "Was it to everyone?" I asked.
"No; it was only to—" But he gave a sick little headshake. "I don't
remember their names."
"Were they then so many?"
"No—only a few. Those I liked."
Those he liked? I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker
obscure, and within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity the
appalling alarm of his being perhaps innocent. It was for the instant
confounding and bottomless, for if he WERE innocent, what then on earth
was I? Paralyzed, while it lasted, by the mere brush of the
question, I let him go a little, so that, with a deep-drawn sigh, he
turned away from me again; which, as he faced toward the clear window, I
suffered, feeling that I had nothing now there to keep him from. "And did
they repeat what you said?" I went on after a moment.
He was soon at some distance from me, still breathing hard and again with
the air, though now without anger for it, of being confined against his
will. Once more, as he had done before, he looked up at the dim day as if,
of what had hitherto sustained him, nothing was left but an unspeakable
anxiety. "Oh, yes," he nevertheless replied—"they must have repeated
them. To those THEY liked," he added.
There was, somehow, less of it than I had expected; but I turned it over.
"And these things came round—?"
"To the masters? Oh, yes!" he answered very simply. "But I didn't know
they'd tell."
"The masters? They didn't—they've never told. That's why I ask you."
He turned to me again his little beautiful fevered face. "Yes, it was too
bad."
"Too bad?"
"What I suppose I sometimes said. To write home."
I can't name the exquisite pathos of the contradiction given to such a
speech by such a speaker; I only know that the next instant I heard myself
throw off with homely force: "Stuff and nonsense!" But the next after that
I must have sounded stern enough. "What WERE these things?"
My sternness was all for his judge, his executioner; yet it made him avert
himself again, and that movement made ME, with a single bound and an
irrepressible cry, spring straight upon him. For there again, against the
glass, as if to blight his confession and stay his answer, was the hideous
author of our woe—the white face of damnation. I felt a sick swim at
the drop of my victory and all the return of my battle, so that the
wildness of my veritable leap only served as a great betrayal. I saw him,
from the midst of my act, meet it with a divination, and on the perception
that even now he only guessed, and that the window was still to his own
eyes free, I let the impulse flame up to convert the climax of his dismay
into the very proof of his liberation. "No more, no more, no more!" I
shrieked, as I tried to press him against me, to my visitant.
"Is she HERE?" Miles panted as he caught with his sealed eyes the
direction of my words. Then as his strange "she" staggered me and, with a
gasp, I echoed it, "Miss Jessel, Miss Jessel!" he with a sudden fury gave
me back.
I seized, stupefied, his supposition—some sequel to what we had done
to Flora, but this made me only want to show him that it was better still
than that. "It's not Miss Jessel! But it's at the window—straight
before us. It's THERE—the coward horror, there for the last time!"
At this, after a second in which his head made the movement of a baffled
dog's on a scent and then gave a frantic little shake for air and light,
he was at me in a white rage, bewildered, glaring vainly over the place
and missing wholly, though it now, to my sense, filled the room like the
taste of poison, the wide, overwhelming presence. "It's HE?"
I was so determined to have all my proof that I flashed into ice to
challenge him. "Whom do you mean by 'he'?"
"Peter Quint—you devil!" His face gave again, round the room, its
convulsed supplication. "WHERE?"
They are in my ears still, his supreme surrender of the name and his
tribute to my devotion. "What does he matter now, my own?—what will
he EVER matter? I have you," I launched at the beast, "but he has
lost you forever!" Then, for the demonstration of my work, "There, THERE!"
I said to Miles.
But he had already jerked straight round, stared, glared again, and seen
but the quiet day. With the stroke of the loss I was so proud of he
uttered the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss, and the grasp with
which I recovered him might have been that of catching him in his fall. I
caught him, yes, I held him—it may be imagined with what a passion;
but at the end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was that I held.
We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had
stopped.
