XX
JUST as in the churchyard with Miles, the whole thing was
upon us. Much as I had made of the fact that this name had
never once, between us, been sounded, the quick, smitten
glare with which the child’s face now received it fairly
likened my breach of the silence to the smash of a pane of
glass. It added to the interposing cry, as if to stay the blow,
that Mrs. Grose, at the same instant, uttered over my
violence—the shriek of a creature scared, or rather wounded,
which, in turn, within a few seconds, was completed by a
gasp of my own. I seized my colleague’s arm. “She’s there,
she’s there!”
Miss Jessel stood before us on the opposite bank exactly
as she had stood the other time, and I remember, strangely,
as the first feeling now produced in me, my thrill of joy at
having brought on a proof. She was there, and I was
justified; she was there, and I was neither cruel nor mad. She
was there for poor scared Mrs. Grose, but she was there most
for Flora; and no moment of my monstrous time was perhaps
so extraordinary as that in which I consciously threw out to
her—with the sense that, pale and ravenous demon as she
was, she would catch and understand it—an inarticulate
message of gratitude. She rose erect on the spot my friend
and I had lately quitted, and there was not, in all the long
reach of her desire, an inch of her evil that fell short. This
first vividness of vision and emotion were things of a few
seconds, during which Mrs. Grose’s dazed blink across to
where I pointed struck me as a sovereign sign that she too at
last saw, just as it carried my own eyes precipitately to the
119
120 THE TURN OF THE SCREW
child. The revelation then of the manner in which Flora was
affected startled me, in truth, far more than it would have
done to find her also merely agitated, for direct dismay was
of course not what I had expected. Prepared and on her guard
as our pursuit had actually made her, she would repress
every betrayal; and I was therefore shaken, on the spot, by
my first glimpse of the particular one for which I had not
allowed. To see her, without a convulsion of her small pink
face, not even feign to glance in the direction of the prodigy I
announced, but only, instead of that, turn at me an expression
of hard, still gravity, an expression absolutely new and
unprecedented and that appeared to read and accuse and
judge me—this was a stroke that somehow converted the
little girl herself into the very presence that could make me
quail. I quailed even though my certitude that she thoroughly
saw was never greater than at that instant, and in the
immediate need to defend myself I called it passionately to
witness. “She’s there, you little unhappy thing—there, there,
there, and you see her as well as you see me!” I had said
shortly before to Mrs. Grose that she was not at these times a
child, but an old, old woman, and that description of her
could not have been more strikingly confirmed than in the
way in which, for all answer to this, she simply showed me,
without a concession, an admission, of her eyes, a
countenance of deeper and deeper, of indeed suddenly quite
fixed, reprobation. I was by this time—if I can put the whole
thing at all together—more appalled at what I may properly
call her manner than at anything else, though it was
simultaneously with this that I became aware of having Mrs.
Grose also, and very formidably, to reckon with. My elder
companion, the next moment, at any rate, blotted out
everything but her own flushed face and her loud, shocked
HENRY JAMES 121
protest, a burst of high disapproval. “What a dreadful turn, to
be sure, Miss! Where on earth do you see anything?”
I could only grasp her more quickly yet, for even while
she spoke the hideous plain presence stood undimmed and
undaunted. It had already lasted a minute, and it lasted while
I continued, seizing my colleague, quite thrusting her at it
and presenting her to it, to insist with my pointing hand.
“You don’t see her exactly as we see?—you mean to say you
don’t now—now? She’s as big as a blazing fire! Only look,
dearest woman, look—!” She looked, even as I did, and gave
me, with her deep groan of negation, repulsion,
compassion—the mixture with her pity of her relief at her
exemption—a sense, touching to me even then, that she
would have backed me up if she could. I might well have
needed that, for with this hard blow of the proof that her eyes
were hopelessly sealed I felt my own situation horribly
crumble, I felt—I saw—my livid predecessor press, from her
position, on my defeat, and I was conscious, more than all, of
what I should have from this instant to deal with in the
astounding little attitude of Flora. Into this attitude Mrs.
Grose immediately and violently entered, breaking, even
while there pierced through my sense of ruin a prodigious
private triumph, into breathless reassurance.
“She isn’t there, little lady, and nobody’s there—and
you never see nothing, my sweet! How can poor Miss
Jessel—when poor Miss Jessel’s dead and buried? We know,
don’t we, love?”—and she appealed, blundering in, to the
child. “It’s all a mere mistake and a worry and a joke—and
we’ll go home as fast as we can!”
Our companion, on this, had responded with a strange,
quick primness of propriety, and they were again, with Mrs.
Grose on her feet, united, as it were, in pained opposition to
me. Flora continued to fix me with her small mask of
122 THE TURN OF THE SCREW
reprobation, and even at that minute I prayed God to forgive
me for seeming to see that, as she stood there holding tight to
our friend’s dress, her incomparable childish beauty had
suddenly failed, had quite vanished. I’ve said it already—she
was literally, she was hideously, hard; she had turned
common and almost ugly. “I don’t know what you mean. I
see nobody. I see nothing. I never have. I think you’re cruel.
I don’t like you!” Then, after this deliverance, which might
have been that of a vulgarly pert little girl in the street, she
hugged Mrs. Grose more closely and buried in her skirts the
dreadful little face. In this position she produced an almost
furious wail. “Take me away, take me away—oh, take me
away from her!”
“From me?” I panted.
“From you—from you!” she cried.
Even Mrs. Grose looked across at me dismayed, while I
had nothing to do but communicate again with the figure
that, on the opposite bank, without a movement, as rigidly
still as if catching, beyond the interval, our voices, was as
vividly there for my disaster as it was not there for my
service. The wretched child had spoken exactly as if she had
got from some outside source each of her stabbing little
words, and I could therefore, in the full despair of all I had to
accept, but sadly shake my head at her. “If I had ever
doubted, all my doubt would at present have gone. I’ve been
living with the miserable truth, and now it has only too much
closed round me. Of course I’ve lost you: I’ve interfered, and
you’ve seen—under her dictation”—with which I faced,
over the pool again, our infernal witness—“the easy and
perfect way to meet it. I’ve done my best, but I’ve lost you.
Good-bye.” For Mrs. Grose I had an imperative, an almost
frantic “Go, go!” before which, in infinite distress, but
mutely possessed of the little girl and clearly convinced, in
HENRY JAMES 123
spite of her blindness, that something awful had occurred
and some collapse engulfed us, she retreated, by the way we
had come, as fast as she could move.
Of what first happened when I was left alone I had no
subsequent memory. I only knew that at the end of, I
suppose, a quarter of an hour, an odorous dampness and
roughness, chilling and piercing my trouble, had made me
understand that I must have thrown myself, on my face, on
the ground and given way to a wildness of grief. I must have
lain there long and cried and sobbed, for when I raised my
head the day was almost done. I got up and looked a
moment, through the twilight, at the grey pool and its blank,
haunted edge, and then I took, back to the house, my dreary
and difficult course. When I reached the gate in the fence the
boat, to my surprise, was gone, so that I had a fresh
reflection to make on Flora’s extraordinary command of the
situation. She passed that night, by the most tacit, and I
should add, were not the word so grotesque a false note, the
happiest of arrangements, with Mrs. Grose. I saw neither of
them on my return, but, on the other hand, as by an
ambiguous compensation, I saw a great deal of Miles. I
saw—I can use no other phrase—so much of him that it was
as if it were more than it had ever been. No evening I had
passed at Bly had the portentous quality of this one; in spite
of which—and in spite also of the deeper depths of
consternation that had opened beneath my feet—there was
literally, in the ebbing actual, an extraordinarily sweet
sadness. On reaching the house I had never so much as
looked for the boy; I had simply gone straight to my room to
change what I was wearing and to take in, at a glance, much
material testimony to Flora’s rupture. Her little belongings
had all been removed. When later, by the schoolroom fire, I
was served with tea by the usual maid, I indulged, on the
124 THE TURN OF THE SCREW
article of my other pupil, in no inquiry whatever. He had his
freedom now—he might have it to the end! Well, he did
have it; and it consisted—in part at least—of his coming in at
about eight o’clock and sitting down with me in silence. On
the removal of the tea things I had blown out the candles and
drawn my chair closer: I was conscious of a mortal coldness
and felt as if I should never again be warm. So, when he
appeared, I was sitting in the glow with my thoughts. He
paused a moment by the door as if to look at me; then—as if
to share them—came to the other side of the hearth and sank
into a chair. We sat there in absolute stillness; yet he wanted,
I felt, to be with me.
