XXIV
MY sense of how he received this suffered for a minute from
something that I can describe only as a fierce split of my
attention—a stroke that at first, as I sprang straight up,
reduced me to the mere blind movement of getting hold of
him, drawing him close, and, while I just fell for support
against the nearest piece of furniture, instinctively keeping
him with his back to the window. The appearance was full
upon us that I had already had to deal with here: Peter Quint
had come into view like a sentinel before a prison. The next
thing I saw was that, from outside, he had reached the
window, and then I knew that, close to the glass and glaring
in through it, he offered once more to the room his white
face of damnation. It represents but grossly what took place
within me at the sight to say that on the second my decision
was made; yet I believe that no woman so overwhelmed ever
in so short a time recovered her grasp of the act. It came to
me in the very horror of the immediate presence that the act
would be, seeing and facing what I saw and faced, to keep
the boy himself unaware. The inspiration—I can call it by no
other name—was that I felt how voluntarily, how
transcendently, I might. It was like fighting with a demon for
a human soul, and when I had fairly so appraised it I saw
how the human soul—held out, in the tremor of my hands, at
arm’s length—had a perfect dew of sweat on a lovely
childish forehead. The face that was close to mine was as
white as the face against the glass, and out of it presently
came a sound, not low nor weak, but as if from much further
away, that I drank like a waft of fragrance.
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144 THE TURN OF THE SCREW
“Yes—I took it.”
At this, with a moan of joy, I enfolded, I drew him
close; and while I held him to my breast, where I could feel
in the sudden fever of his little body the tremendous pulse of
his little heart, I kept my eyes on the thing at the window and
saw it move and shift its posture. I have likened it to a
sentinel, but its slow wheel, for a moment, was rather the
prowl of a baffled beast. My present quickened courage,
however, was such that, not too much to let it through, I had
to shade, as it were, my flame. Meanwhile the glare of the
face was again at the window, the scoundrel fixed as if to
watch and wait. It was the very confidence that I might now
defy him, as well as the positive certitude, by this time, of
the child’s unconsciousness, that made me go on. “What did
you take it for?”
“To see what you said about me.”
“You opened the letter?”
“I opened it.”
My eyes were now, as I held him off a little again, on
Miles’s own face, in which the collapse of mockery showed
me how complete was the ravage of uneasiness. What was
prodigious was that at last, by my success, his sense was
sealed and his communication stopped: he knew that he was
in presence, but knew not of what, and knew still less that I
also was and that I did know. And what did this strain of
trouble matter when my eyes went back to the window only
to see that the air was clear again and—by my personal
triumph—the influence quenched? There was nothing there.
I felt that the cause was mine and that I should surely get all.
“And you found nothing!”—I let my elation out.
He gave the most mournful, thoughtful little headshake.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing, nothing!” I almost shouted in my joy.
HENRY JAMES 145
“Nothing, nothing,” he sadly repeated.
I kissed his forehead; it was drenched. “So what have
you done with it?”
“I’ve burnt it.”
“Burnt it?” It was now or never. “Is that what you did at
school?”
Oh, what this brought up! “At school?”
“Did you take letters?—or other things?”
“Other things?” He appeared now to be thinking of
something far off and that reached him only through the
pressure of his anxiety. Yet it did reach him. “Did I steal?”
I felt myself redden to the roots of my hair as well as
wonder if it were more strange to put to a gentleman such a
question or to see him take it with allowances that gave the
very distance of his fall in the world. “Was it for that you
mightn’t go back?”
The only thing he felt was rather a dreary little surprise.
“Did you know I mightn’t go back?”
“I know everything.”
He gave me at this the longest and strangest look.
“Everything?”
“Everything. Therefore did you—?” But I couldn’t say
it again.
Miles could, very simply. “No. I didn’t steal.”
My face must have shown him I believed him utterly;
yet my hands—but it was for pure tenderness—shook him as
if to ask him why, if it was all for nothing, he had
condemned me to months of torment. “What then did you
do?”
He looked in vague pain all round the top of the room
and drew his breath, two or three times over, as if with
difficulty. He might have been standing at the bottom of the
146 THE TURN OF THE SCREW
sea and raising his eyes to some faint green twilight. “Well—
I said things.”
“Only that?”
“They thought it was enough!”
“To turn you out for?”
Never, truly, had a person “turned out” shown so little
to explain it as this little person! He appeared to weigh my
question, but in a manner quite detached and almost helpless.
“Well, I suppose I oughtn’t.”
“But to whom did you say them?”
He evidently tried to remember, but it dropped—he had
lost it. “I don’t know!”
He almost smiled at me in the desolation of his
surrender, which was indeed practically, by this time, so
complete that I ought to have left it there. But I was
infatuated—I was blind with victory, though even then the
very effect that was to have brought him so much nearer was
already that of added separation. “Was it to everyone?” I
asked.
“No; it was only to—” But he gave a sick little
headshake. “I don’t remember their names.”
“Were they then so many?”
“No—only a few. Those I liked.”
Those he liked? I seemed to float not into clearness, but
into a darker obscure, and within a minute there had come to
me out of my very pity the appalling alarm of his being
perhaps innocent. It was for the instant confounding and
bottomless, for if he were innocent, what then on earth was
I? Paralysed, while it lasted, by the mere brush of the
question, I let him go a little, so that, with a deep-drawn sigh,
he turned away from me again; which, as he faced toward
the clear window, I suffered, feeling that I had nothing now
HENRY JAMES 147
there to keep him from. “And did they repeat what you
said?” I went on after a moment.
He was soon at some distance from me, still breathing
hard and again with the air, though now without anger for it,
of being confined against his will. Once more, as he had
done before, he looked up at the dim day as if, of what had
hitherto sustained him, nothing was left but an unspeakable
anxiety. “Oh, yes,” he nevertheless replied—“they must have
repeated them. To those they liked,” he added.
There was, somehow, less of it than I had expected; but
I turned it over. “And these things came round—?”
“To the masters? Oh, yes!” he answered very simply.
“But I didn’t know they’d tell.”
“The masters? They didn’t—they’ve never told. That’s
why I ask you.”
He turned to me again his little beautiful fevered face.
“Yes, it was too bad.”
“Too bad?”
“What I suppose I sometimes said. To write home.”
I can’t name the exquisite pathos of the contradiction
given to such a speech by such a speaker; I only know that
the next instant I heard myself throw off with homely force:
“Stuff and nonsense!” But the next after that I must have
sounded stern enough. “What were these things?”
My sternness was all for his judge, his executioner; yet
it made him avert himself again, and that movement made
me, with a single bound and an irrepressible cry, spring
straight upon him. For there again, against the glass, as if to
blight his confession and stay his answer, was the hideous
author of our woe—the white face of damnation. I felt a sick
swim at the drop of my victory and all the return of my
battle, so that the wildness of my veritable leap only served
as a great betrayal. I saw him, from the midst of my act, meet
148 THE TURN OF THE SCREW
it with a divination, and on the perception that even now he
only guessed, and that the window was still to his own eyes
free, I let the impulse flame up to convert the climax of his
dismay into the very proof of his liberation. “No more, no
more, no more!” I shrieked, as I tried to press him against
me, to my visitant.
“Is she here?” Miles panted as he caught with his sealed
eyes the direction of my words. Then as his strange “she”
staggered me and, with a gasp, I echoed it, “Miss Jessel,
Miss Jessel!” he with a sudden fury gave me back.
I seized, stupefied, his supposition—some sequel to
what we had done to Flora, but this made me only want to
show him that it was better still than that. “It’s not Miss
Jessel! But it’s at the window—straight before us. It’s
there—the coward horror, there for the last time!”
At this, after a second in which his head made the
movement of a baffled dog’s on a scent and then gave a
frantic little shake for air and light, he was at me in a white
rage, bewildered, glaring vainly over the place and missing
wholly, though it now, to my sense, filled the room like the
taste of poison, the wide, overwhelming presence. “It’s he?”
I was so determined to have all my proof that I flashed
into ice to challenge him. “Whom do you mean by ‘he’?”
“Peter Quint—you devil!” His face gave again, round
the room, its convulsed supplication. “Where?”
They are in my ears still, his supreme surrender of the
name and his tribute to my devotion. “What does he matter
now, my own?—what will he ever matter? I have you,” I
launched at the beast, “but he has lost you for ever!” Then,
for the demonstration of my work, “There, there!” I said to
Miles.
But he had already jerked straight round, stared, glared
again, and seen but the quiet day. With the stroke of the loss
HENRY JAMES 149
I was so proud of he uttered the cry of a creature hurled over
an abyss, and the grasp with which I recovered him might
have been that of catching him in his fall. I caught him, yes, I
held him—it may be imagined with what a passion; but at
the end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was that I
held. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart,
dispossessed, had stopped.
