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 fulness 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.
96
HENRY JAMES 97
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 non-appearance 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
98 THE TURN OF THE SCREW
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 spectre 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
HENRY JAMES 99
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.
Dishonoured 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.
