XVII
I WENT so far, in the evening, as to make a beginning. The
weather had changed back, a great wind was abroad, and
beneath the lamp, in my room, with Flora at peace beside
me, I sat for a long time before a blank sheet of paper and
listened to the lash of the rain and the batter of the gusts.
Finally I went out, taking a candle; I crossed the passage and
listened a minute at Miles’s door. What, under my endless
obsession, I had been impelled to listen for was some
betrayal of his not being at rest, and I presently caught one,
but not in the form I had expected. His voice tinkled out. “I
say, you there—come in.” It was a gaiety in the gloom!
I went in with my light and found him, in bed, very
wide awake, but very much at his ease. “Well, what are you
up to?” he asked with a grace of sociability in which it
occurred to me that Mrs. Grose, had she been present, might
have looked in vain for proof that anything was “out.”
I stood over him with my candle. “How did you know I
was there?”
“Why, of course I heard you. Did you fancy you made
no noise? You’re like a troop of cavalry!” he beautifully
laughed.
“Then you weren’t asleep?”
“Not much! I lie awake and think.”
I had put my candle, designedly, a short way off, and
then, as he held out his friendly old hand to me, had sat down
on the edge of his bed. “What is it,” I asked, “that you think
of?”
“What in the world, my dear, but you?”
104
HENRY JAMES 105
“Ah, the pride I take in your appreciation doesn’t insist
on that! I had so far rather you slept.”
“Well, I think also, you know, of this queer business of
ours.”
I marked the coolness of his firm little hand. “Of what
queer business, Miles?”
“Why, the way you bring me up. And all the rest!”
I fairly held my breath a minute, and even from my
glimmering taper there was light enough to show how he
smiled up at me from his pillow. “What do you mean by all
the rest?”
“Oh, you know, you know!”
I could say nothing for a minute, though I felt, as I held
his hand and our eyes continued to meet, that my silence had
all the air of admitting his charge and that nothing in the
whole world of reality was perhaps at that moment so
fabulous as our actual relation. “Certainly you shall go back
to school,” I said, “if it be that that troubles you. But not to
the old place—we must find another, a better. How could I
know it did trouble you, this question, when you never told
me so, never spoke of it at all?” His clear, listening face,
framed in its smooth whiteness, made him for the minute as
appealing as some wistful patient in a children’s hospital;
and I would have given, as the resemblance came to me, all I
possessed on earth really to be the nurse or the sister of
charity who might have helped to cure him. Well, even as it
was, I perhaps might help! “Do you know you’ve never said
a word to me about your school—I mean the old one; never
mentioned it in any way?”
He seemed to wonder; he smiled with the same
loveliness. But he clearly gained time; he waited, he called
for guidance. “Haven’t I?” It wasn’t for me to help him—it
was for the thing I had met!
106 THE TURN OF THE SCREW
Something in his tone and the expression of his face, as
I got this from him, set my heart aching with such a pang as
it had never yet known; so unutterably touching was it to see
his little brain puzzled and his little resources taxed to play,
under the spell laid on him, a part of innocence and
consistency. “No, never—from the hour you came back.
You’ve never mentioned to me one of your masters, one of
your comrades, nor the least little thing that ever happened to
you at school. Never, little Miles—no, never—have you
given me an inkling of anything that may have happened
there. Therefore you can fancy how much I’m in the dark.
Until you came out, that way, this morning, you had, since
the first hour I saw you, scarce even made a reference to
anything in your previous life. You seemed so perfectly to
accept the present.” It was extraordinary how my absolute
conviction of his secret precocity (or whatever I might call
the poison of an influence that I dared but half to phrase)
made him, in spite of the faint breath of his inward trouble,
appear as accessible as an older person—imposed him
almost as an intellectual equal. “I thought you wanted to go
on as you are.”
It struck me that at this he just faintly coloured. He
gave, at any rate, like a convalescent slightly fatigued, a
languid shake of his head. “I don’t—I don’t. I want to get
away.”
“You’re tired of Bly?”
“Oh, no, I like Bly.”
“Well, then—?”
“Oh, you know what a boy wants!”
I felt that I didn’t know so well as Miles, and I took
temporary refuge. “You want to go to your uncle?”
Again, at this, with his sweet ironic face, he made a
movement on the pillow. “Ah, you can’t get off with that!”
HENRY JAMES 107
I was silent a little, and it was I, now, I think, who
changed colour. “My dear, I don’t want to get off!”
“You can’t, even if you do. You can’t, you can’t!”—he
lay beautifully staring. “My uncle must come down, and you
must completely settle things.”
“If we do,” I returned with some spirit, “you may be
sure it will be to take you quite away.”
“Well, don’t you understand that that’s exactly what
I’m working for? You’ll have to tell him—about the way
you’ve let it all drop: you’ll have to tell him a tremendous
lot!”
The exultation with which he uttered this helped me
somehow, for the instant, to meet him rather more. “And
how much will you, Miles, have to tell him? There are things
he’ll ask you!”
He turned it over. “Very likely. But what things?”
“The things you’ve never told me. To make up his mind
what to do with you. He can’t send you back—”
“Oh, I don’t want to go back!” he broke in. “I want a
new field.”
He said it with admirable serenity, with positive
unimpeachable gaiety; and doubtless it was that very note
that most evoked for me the poignancy, the unnatural
childish tragedy, of his probable reappearance at the end of
three months with all this bravado and still more dishonour.
It overwhelmed me now that I should never be able to bear
that, and it made me let myself go. I threw myself upon him
and in the tenderness of my pity I embraced him. “Dear little
Miles, dear little Miles—!”
My face was close to his, and he let me kiss him, simply
taking it with indulgent good humour. “Well, old lady?”
“Is there nothing—nothing at all that you want to tell
me?”
108 THE TURN OF THE SCREW
He turned off a little, facing round toward the wall and
holding up his hand to look at as one had seen sick children
look. “I’ve told you—I told you this morning.”
Oh, I was sorry for him! “That you just want me not to
worry you?”
He looked round at me now, as if in recognition of my
understanding him; then ever so gently, “To let me alone,”
he replied.
There was even a singular little dignity in it, something
that made me release him, yet, when I had slowly risen,
linger beside him. God knows I never wished to harass him,
but I felt that merely, at this, to turn my back on him was to
abandon or, to put it more truly, to lose him. “I’ve just begun
a letter to your uncle,” I said.
“Well, then, finish it!”
I waited a minute. “What happened before?”
He gazed up at me again. “Before what?”
“Before you came back. And before you went away.”
For some time he was silent, but he continued to meet
my eyes. “What happened?”
It made me, the sound of the words, in which it seemed
to me that I caught for the very first time a small faint quaver
of consenting consciousness—it made me drop on my knees
beside the bed and seize once more the chance of possessing
him. “Dear little Miles, dear little Miles, if you knew how I
want to help you! It’s only that, it’s nothing but that, and I’d
rather die than give you a pain or do you a wrong—I’d rather
die than hurt a hair of you. Dear little Miles”—oh, I brought
it out now even if I should go too far—“I just want you to
help me to save you!” But I knew in a moment after this that
I had gone too far. The answer to my appeal was
instantaneous, but it came in the form of an extraordinary
blast and chill, a gust of frozen air, and a shake of the room
HENRY JAMES 109
as great as if, in the wild wind, the casement had crashed in.
The boy gave a loud, high shriek, which, lost in the rest of
the shock of sound, might have seemed, indistinctly, though
I was so close to him, a note either of jubilation or of terror. I
jumped to my feet again and was conscious of darkness. So
for a moment we remained, while I stared about me and saw
that the drawn curtains were unstirred and the window tight.
“Why, the candle’s out!” I then cried.
“It was I who blew it, dear!” said Miles.
