I
I REMEMBER the whole beginning as a succession of flights
and drops, a little see-saw 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 curtsey 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
12
HENRY JAMES 13
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
afterwards 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
14 THE TURN OF THE SCREW
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
recognised, 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 felt 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
HENRY JAMES 15
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!—
16 THE TURN OF THE SCREW
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 dare say 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 colour out of
storybooks and fairy-tales. Wasn’t it just a storybook over
HENRY JAMES 17
which I had fallen a-doze and a-dream? No; it was a big,
ugly, antique, but convenient house, embodying a few
features of a building still older, half replaced and half
utilised, 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!
