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 fairy-tale 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
81
82 THE TURN OF THE SCREW
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:
HENRY JAMES 83
“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?”
84 THE TURN OF THE SCREW
“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 break-down 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 none the less 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.”
