XXII
YET it was when she had got off—and I missed her on the
spot—that the great pinch really came. If I had counted on
what it would give me to find myself alone with Miles, I
speedily perceived, at least, that it would give me a measure.
No hour of my stay in fact was so assailed with
apprehensions as that of my coming down to learn that the
carriage containing Mrs. Grose and my younger pupil had
already rolled out of the gates. Now I was, I said to myself,
face to face with the elements, and for much of the rest of the
day, while I fought my weakness, I could consider that I had
been supremely rash. It was a tighter place still than I had yet
turned round in; all the more that, for the first time, I could
see in the aspect of others a confused reflection of the crisis.
What had happened naturally caused them all to stare; there
was too little of the explained, throw out whatever we might,
in the suddenness of my colleague’s act. The maids and the
men looked blank; the effect of which on my nerves was an
aggravation until I saw the necessity of making it a positive
aid. It was precisely, in short, by just clutching the helm that
I avoided total wreck; and I dare say that, to bear up at all, I
became, that morning, very grand and very dry. I welcomed
the consciousness that I was charged with much to do, and I
caused it to be known as well that, left thus to myself, I was
quite remarkably firm. I wandered with that manner, for the
next hour or two, all over the place and looked, I have no
doubt, as if I were ready for any onset. So, for the benefit of
whom it might concern, I paraded with a sick heart.
133
134 THE TURN OF THE SCREW
The person it appeared least to concern proved to be, till
dinner, little Miles himself. My perambulations had given
me, meanwhile, no glimpse of him, but they had tended to
make more public the change taking place in our relation as a
consequence of his having at the piano, the day before, kept
me, in Flora’s interest, so beguiled and befooled. The stamp
of publicity had of course been fully given by her
confinement and departure, and the change itself was now
ushered in by our non-observance of the regular custom of
the schoolroom. He had already disappeared when, on my
way down, I pushed open his door, and I learned below that
he had breakfasted—in the presence of a couple of the
maids—with Mrs. Grose and his sister. He had then gone
out, as he said, for a stroll; than which nothing, I reflected,
could better have expressed his frank view of the abrupt
transformation of my office. What he would now permit this
office to consist of was yet to be settled: there was a queer
relief, at all events—I mean for myself in especial—in the
renouncement of one pretension. If so much had sprung to
the surface, I scarce put it too strongly in saying that what
had perhaps sprung highest was the absurdity of our
prolonging the fiction that I had anything more to teach him.
It sufficiently stuck out that, by tacit little tricks in which
even more than myself he carried out the care for my dignity,
I had had to appeal to him to let me off straining to meet him
on the ground of his true capacity. He had at any rate his
freedom now; I was never to touch it again; as I had amply
shown, moreover, when, on his joining me in the schoolroom
the previous night, I had uttered, on the subject of the
interval just concluded, neither challenge nor hint. I had too
much, from this moment, my other ideas. Yet when he at last
arrived, the difficulty of applying them, the accumulations of
my problem, were brought straight home to me by the
HENRY JAMES 135
beautiful little presence on which what had occurred had as
yet, for the eye, dropped neither stain nor shadow.
To mark, for the house, the high state I cultivated I
decreed that my meals with the boy should be served, as we
called it, downstairs; so that I had been awaiting him in the
ponderous pomp of the room outside of the window of which
I had had from Mrs. Grose, that first scared Sunday, my flash
of something it would scarce have done to call light. Here at
present I felt afresh—for I had felt it again and again—how
my equilibrium depended on the success of my rigid will, the
will to shut my eyes as tight as possible to the truth that what
I had to deal with was, revoltingly, against nature. I could
only get on at all by taking “nature” into my confidence and
my account, by treating my monstrous ordeal as a push in a
direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, but demanding,
after all, for a fair front, only another turn of the screw of
ordinary human virtue. No attempt, none the less, could well
require more tact than just this attempt to supply, one’s self,
all the nature. How could I put even a little of that article
into a suppression of reference to what had occurred? How,
on the other hand, could I make a reference without a new
plunge into the hideous obscure? Well, a sort of answer, after
a time, had come to me, and it was so far confirmed as that I
was met, incontestably, by the quickened vision of what was
rare in my little companion. It was indeed as if he had found
even now—as he had so often found at lessons—still some
other delicate way to ease me off. Wasn’t there light in the
fact which, as we shared our solitude, broke out with a
specious glitter it had never yet quite worn?—the fact that
(opportunity aiding, precious opportunity which had now
come) it would be preposterous, with a child so endowed, to
forego the help one might wrest from absolute intelligence?
What had his intelligence been given him for but to save
136 THE TURN OF THE SCREW
him? Mightn’t one, to reach his mind, risk the stretch of an
angular arm over his character? It was as if, when we were
face to face in the dining-room, he had literally shown me
the way. The roast mutton was on the table, and I had
dispensed with attendance. Miles, before he sat down, stood
a moment with his hands in his pockets and looked at the
joint, on which he seemed on the point of passing some
humorous judgment. But what he presently produced was: “I
say, my dear, is she really very awfully ill?”
“Little Flora? Not so bad but that she’ll presently be
better. London will set her up. Bly had ceased to agree with
her. Come here and take your mutton.”
He alertly obeyed me, carried the plate carefully to his
seat, and, when he was established, went on. “Did Bly
disagree with her so terribly suddenly?”
“Not so suddenly as you might think. One had seen it
coming on.”
“Then why didn’t you get her off before?”
“Before what?”
“Before she became too ill to travel.”
I found myself prompt. “She’s not too ill to travel: she
only might have become so if she had stayed. This was just
the moment to seize. The journey will dissipate the
influence”—oh, I was grand!—“and carry it off.”
“I see, I see”—Miles, for that matter, was grand, too.
He settled to his repast with the charming little “table
manner” that, from the day of his arrival, had relieved me of
all grossness of admonition. Whatever he had been driven
from school for, it was not for ugly feeding. He was
irreproachable, as always, today; but he was unmistakeably
more conscious. He was discernibly trying to take for
granted more things than he found, without assistance, quite
easy; and he dropped into peaceful silence while he felt his
HENRY JAMES 137
situation. Our meal was of the briefest—mine a vain
pretence, and I had the things immediately removed. While
this was done Miles stood again with his hands in his little
pockets and his back to me—stood and looked out of the
wide window through which, that other day, I had seen what
pulled me up. We continued silent while the maid was with
us—as silent, it whimsically occurred to me, as some young
couple who, on their wedding-journey, at the inn, feel shy in
the presence of the waiter. He turned round only when the
waiter had left us. “Well—so we’re alone!”
