XXIII
“OH, more or less.” I fancy my smile was pale. “Not
absolutely. We shouldn’t like that!” I went on.
“No—I suppose we shouldn’t. Of course we have the
others.”
“We have the others—we have indeed the others,” I
concurred.
“Yet even though we have them,” he returned, still with
his hands in his pockets and planted there in front of me,
“they don’t much count, do they?”
I made the best of it, but I felt wan. “It depends on what
you call ‘much’!”
“Yes”—with all accommodation—“everything depends!”
On this, however, he faced to the window again and
presently reached it with his vague, restless, cogitating step.
He remained there awhile, with his forehead against the
glass, in contemplation of the stupid shrubs I knew and the
dull things of November. I had always my hypocrisy of
“work,” behind which, now, I gained the sofa. Steadying
myself with it there as I had repeatedly done at those
moments of torment that I have described as the moments of
my knowing the children to be given to something from
which I was barred, I sufficiently obeyed my habit of being
prepared for the worst. But an extraordinary impression
dropped on me as I extracted a meaning from the boy’s
embarrassed back—none other than the impression that I
was not barred now. This inference grew in a few minutes to
sharp intensity and seemed bound up with the direct
perception that it was positively he who was. The frames and
138
HENRY JAMES 139
squares of the great window were a kind of image, for him,
of a kind of failure. I felt that I saw him, at any rate, shut in
or shut out. He was admirable, but not comfortable: I took it
in with a throb of hope. Wasn’t he looking, through the
haunted pane, for something he couldn’t see?—and wasn’t it
the first time in the whole business that he had known such a
lapse? The first, the very first: I found it a splendid portent. It
made him anxious, though he watched himself; he had been
anxious all day and, even while in his usual sweet little
manner he sat at table, had needed all his small strange
genius to give it a gloss. When he at last turned round to
meet me, it was almost as if this genius had succumbed.
“Well, I think I’m glad Bly agrees with me!”
“You would certainly seem to have seen, these twenty-
four hours, a good deal more of it than for some time before.
I hope,” I went on bravely, “that you’ve been enjoying
yourself.”
“Oh, yes, I’ve been ever so far; all round about—miles
and miles away. I’ve never been so free.”
He had really a manner of his own, and I could only try
to keep up with him. “Well, do you like it?”
He stood there smiling; then at last he put into two
words—“Do you?”—more discrimination than I had ever
heard two words contain. Before I had time to deal with that,
however, he continued as if with the sense that this was an
impertinence to be softened. “Nothing could be more
charming than the way you take it, for of course if we’re
alone together now it’s you that are alone most. But I hope,”
he threw in, “you don’t particularly mind!”
“Having to do with you?” I asked. “My dear child, how
can I help minding? Though I’ve renounced all claim to your
company,—you’re so beyond me,—I at least greatly enjoy it.
What else should I stay on for?”
140 THE TURN OF THE SCREW
He looked at me more directly, and the expression of
his face, graver now, struck me as the most beautiful I had
ever found in it. “You stay on just for that?”
“Certainly. I stay on as your friend and from the
tremendous interest I take in you till something can be done
for you that may be more worth your while. That needn’t
surprise you.” My voice trembled so that I felt it impossible
to suppress the shake. “Don’t you remember how I told you,
when I came and sat on your bed the night of the storm, that
there was nothing in the world I wouldn’t do for you?”
“Yes, yes!” He, on his side, more and more visibly
nervous, had a tone to master; but he was so much more
successful than I that, laughing out through his gravity, he
could pretend we were pleasantly jesting. “Only that, I think,
was to get me to do something for you!”
“It was partly to get you to do something,” I conceded.
“But, you know, you didn’t do it.”
“Oh, yes,” he said with the brightest superficial
eagerness, “you wanted me to tell you something.”
“That’s it. Out, straight out. What you have on your
mind, you know.”
“Ah, then, is that what you’ve stayed over for?”
He spoke with a gaiety through which I could still catch
the finest little quiver of resentful passion; but I can’t begin
to express the effect upon me of an implication of surrender
even so faint. It was as if what I had yearned for had come at
last only to astonish me. “Well, yes—I may as well make a
clean breast of it. It was precisely for that.”
He waited so long that I supposed it for the purpose of
repudiating the assumption on which my action had been
founded; but what he finally said was: “Do you mean now—
here?”
HENRY JAMES 141
“There couldn’t be a better place or time.” He looked
round him uneasily, and I had the rare—oh, the queer!—
impression of the very first symptom I had seen in him of the
approach of immediate fear. It was as if he were suddenly
afraid of me—which struck me indeed as perhaps the best
thing to make him. Yet in the very pang of the effort I felt it
vain to try sternness, and I heard myself the next instant so
gentle as to be almost grotesque. “You want so to go out
again?”
“Awfully!” He smiled at me heroically, and the
touching little bravery of it was enhanced by his actually
flushing with pain. He had picked up his hat, which he had
brought in, and stood twirling it in a way that gave me, even
as I was just nearly reaching port, a perverse horror of what I
was doing. To do it in any way was an act of violence, for
what did it consist of but the obtrusion of the idea of
grossness and guilt on a small helpless creature who had
been for me a revelation of the possibilities of beautiful
intercourse? Wasn’t it base to create for a being so exquisite
a mere alien awkwardness? I suppose I now read into our
situation a clearness it couldn’t have had at the time, for I
seem to see our poor eyes already lighted with some spark of
a prevision of the anguish that was to come. So we circled
about, with terrors and scruples, like fighters not daring to
close. But it was for each other we feared! That kept us a
little longer suspended and unbruised. “I’ll tell you
everything,” Miles said—“I mean I’ll tell you anything you
like. You’ll stay on with me, and we shall both be all right
and I will tell you—I will. But not now.”
“Why not now?”
My insistence turned him from me and kept him once
more at his window in a silence during which, between us,
you might have heard a pin drop. Then he was before me
142 THE TURN OF THE SCREW
again with the air of a person for whom, outside, someone
who had frankly to be reckoned with was waiting. “I have to
see Luke.”
I had not yet reduced him to quite so vulgar a lie, and I
felt proportionately ashamed. But, horrible as it was, his lies
made up my truth. I achieved thoughtfully a few loops of my
knitting. “Well, then, go to Luke, and I’ll wait for what you
promise. Only, in return for that, satisfy, before you leave
me, one very much smaller request.”
He looked as if he felt he had succeeded enough to be
able still a little to bargain. “Very much smaller—?”
“Yes, a mere fraction of the whole. Tell me”—oh, my
work preoccupied me, and I was off-hand!—“if, yesterday
afternoon, from the table in the hall, you took, you know, my
letter.”
