XI
IT was not till late next day that I spoke to Mrs. Grose; the
rigour 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 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
76
HENRY JAMES 77
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 splendour 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
78 THE TURN OF THE SCREW
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
HENRY JAMES 79
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?”
80 THE TURN OF THE SCREW
“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.
