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
85
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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
afterwards, 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
HENRY JAMES 87
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 favoured 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 grey sky and withered
garlands, its bared spaces and scattered dead leaves, was like
a theatre 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 recognised the signs, the portents—I
recognised 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 fulness 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
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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
HENRY JAMES 89
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 ’til 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
90 THE TURN OF THE SCREW
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.
