III
HER thus turning her back on me was fortunately not, for my
just preoccupations, a snub that could check the growth of
our mutual esteem. We met, after I had brought home little
Miles, more intimately than ever on the ground of my
stupefaction, my general emotion: so monstrous was I then
ready to pronounce it that such a child as had now been
revealed to me should be under an interdict. I was a little late
on the scene, and I felt, as he stood wistfully looking out for
me before the door of the inn at which the coach had put him
down, that I had seen him, on the instant, without and within,
in the great glow of freshness, the same positive fragrance of
purity, in which I had, from the first moment, seen his little
sister. He was incredibly beautiful, and Mrs. Grose had put
her finger on it: everything but a sort of passion of
tenderness for him was swept away by his presence. What I
then and there took him to my heart for was something
divine that I have never found to the same degree in any
child—his indescribable little air of knowing nothing in the
world but love. It would have been impossible to carry a bad
name with a greater sweetness of innocence, and by the time
I had got back to Bly with him I remained merely
bewildered—so far, that is, as I was not outraged—by the
sense of the horrible letter locked up in my room, in a
drawer. As soon as I could compass a private word with Mrs.
Grose I declared to her that it was grotesque.
She promptly understood me. “You mean the cruel
charge—?”
23
24 THE TURN OF THE SCREW
“It doesn’t live an instant. My dear woman, look at
him!”
She smiled at my pretension to have discovered his
charm. “I assure you, Miss, I do nothing else! What will you
say, then?” she immediately added.
“In answer to the letter?” I had made up my mind.
“Nothing.”
“And to his uncle?”
I was incisive. “Nothing.”
“And to the boy himself?”
I was wonderful. “Nothing.”
She gave with her apron a great wipe to her mouth.
“Then I’ll stand by you. We’ll see it out.”
“We’ll see it out!” I ardently echoed, giving her my
hand to make it a vow.
She held me there a moment, then whisked up her apron
again with her detached hand. “Would you mind, Miss, if I
used the freedom—”
“To kiss me? No!” I took the good creature in my arms
and, after we had embraced like sisters, felt still more
fortified and indignant.
This, at all events, was for the time: a time so full that,
as I recall the way it went, it reminds me of all the art I now
need to make it a little distinct. What I look back at with
amazement is the situation I accepted. I had undertaken, with
my companion, to see it out, and I was under a charm,
apparently, that could smooth away the extent and the far
and difficult connections of such an effort. I was lifted aloft
on a great wave of infatuation and pity. I found it simple, in
my ignorance, my confusion, and perhaps my conceit, to
assume that I could deal with a boy whose education for the
world was all on the point of beginning. I am unable even to
remember at this day what proposal I framed for the end of
HENRY JAMES 25
his holidays and the resumption of his studies. Lessons with
me, indeed, that charming summer, we all had a theory that
he was to have; but I now feel that, for weeks, the lessons
must have been rather my own. I learnt something—at first
certainly—that had not been one of the teachings of my
small, smothered life; learnt to be amused, and even
amusing, and not to think for the morrow. It was the first
time, in a manner, that I had known space and air and
freedom, all the music of summer and all the mystery of
nature. And then there was consideration—and consideration
was sweet. Oh, it was a trap—not designed, but deep—to my
imagination, to my delicacy, perhaps to my vanity; to
whatever, in me, was most excitable. The best way to picture
it all is to say that I was off my guard. They gave me so little
trouble—they were of a gentleness so extraordinary. I used
to speculate—but even this with a dim disconnectedness—as
to how the rough future (for all futures are rough!) would
handle them and might bruise them. They had the bloom of
health and happiness; and yet, as if I had been in charge of a
pair of little grandees, of princes of the blood, for whom
everything, to be right, would have to be enclosed and
protected, the only form that, in my fancy, the after-years
could take for them was that of a romantic, a really royal
extension of the garden and the park. It may be, of course,
above all, that what suddenly broke into this gives the
previous time a charm of stillness—that hush in which
something gathers or crouches. The change was actually like
the spring of a beast.
In the first weeks the days were long; they often, at their
finest, gave me what I used to call my own hour, the hour
when, for my pupils, tea-time and bed-time having come and
gone, I had, before my final retirement, a small interval
alone. Much as I liked my companions, this hour was the
26 THE TURN OF THE SCREW
thing in the day I liked most; and I liked it best of all when,
as the light faded—or rather, I should say, the day lingered
and the last calls of the last birds sounded, in a flushed sky,
from the old trees—I could take a turn into the grounds and
enjoy, almost with a sense of property that amused and
flattered me, the beauty and dignity of the place. It was a
pleasure at these moments to feel myself tranquil and
justified; doubtless, perhaps, also to reflect that by my
discretion, my quiet good sense and general high propriety, I
was giving pleasure—if he ever thought of it!—to the person
to whose pressure I had responded. What I was doing was
what he had earnestly hoped and directly asked of me, and
that I could, after all, do it proved even a greater joy than I
had expected. I dare say I fancied myself, in short, a
remarkable young woman and took comfort in the faith that
this would more publicly appear. Well, I needed to be
remarkable to offer a front to the remarkable things that
presently gave their first sign.
It was plump, one afternoon, in the middle of my very
hour: the children were tucked away, and I had come out for
my stroll. One of the thoughts that, as I don’t in the least
shrink now from noting, used to be with me in these
wanderings was that it would be as charming as a charming
story suddenly to meet someone. Someone would appear
there at the turn of a path and would stand before me and
smile and approve. I didn’t ask more than that—I only asked
that he should know; and the only way to be sure he knew
would be to see it, and the kind light of it, in his handsome
face. That was exactly present to me—by which I mean the
face was—when, on the first of these occasions, at the end of
a long June day, I stopped short on emerging from one of the
plantations and coming into view of the house. What arrested
me on the spot—and with a shock much greater than any
HENRY JAMES 27
vision had allowed for—was the sense that my imagination
had, in a flash, turned real. He did stand there!—but high up,
beyond the lawn and at the very top of the tower to which,
on that first morning, little Flora had conducted me. This
tower was one of a pair—square, incongruous, crenelated
structures—that were distinguished, for some reason, though
I could see little difference, as the new and the old. They
flanked opposite ends of the house and were probably
architectural absurdities, redeemed in a measure indeed by
not being wholly disengaged nor of a height too pretentious,
dating, in their gingerbread antiquity, from a romantic
revival that was already a respectable past. I admired them,
had fancies about them, for we could all profit in a degree,
especially when they loomed through the dusk, by the
grandeur of their actual battlements; yet it was not at such an
elevation that the figure I had so often invoked seemed most
in place.
It produced in me, this figure, in the clear twilight, I
remember, two distinct gasps of emotion, which were,
sharply, the shock of my first and that of my second surprise.
My second was a violent perception of the mistake of my
first: the man who met my eyes was not the person I had
precipitately supposed. There came to me thus a
bewilderment of vision of which, after these years, there is
no living view that I can hope to give. An unknown man in a
lonely place is a permitted object of fear to a young woman
privately bred; and the figure that faced me was—a few
more seconds assured me—as little anyone else I knew as it
was the image that had been in my mind. I had not seen it in
Harley Street—I had not seen it anywhere. The place,
moreover, in the strangest way in the world, had, on the
instant, and by the very fact of its appearance, become a
solitude. To me at least, making my statement here with a
28 THE TURN OF THE SCREW
deliberation with which I have never made it, the whole
feeling of the moment returns. It was as if, while I took in—
what I did take in—all the rest of the scene had been stricken
with death. I can hear again, as I write, the intense hush in
which the sounds of evening dropped. The rooks stopped
cawing in the golden sky and the friendly hour lost, for the
minute, all its voice. But there was no other change in nature,
unless indeed it were a change that I saw with a stranger
sharpness. The gold was still in the sky, the clearness in the
air, and the man who looked at me over the battlements was
as definite as a picture in a frame. That’s how I thought, with
extraordinary quickness, of each person that he might have
been and that he was not. We were confronted across our
distance quite long enough for me to ask myself with
intensity who then he was and to feel, as an effect of my
inability to say, a wonder that in a few instants more became
intense.
The great question, or one of these, is, afterwards, I
know, with regard to certain matters, the question of how
long they have lasted. Well, this matter of mine, think what
you will of it, lasted while I caught at a dozen possibilities,
none of which made a difference for the better, that I could
see, in there having been in the house—and for how long,
above all?—a person of whom I was in ignorance. It lasted
while I just bridled a little with the sense that my office
demanded that there should be no such ignorance and no
such person. It lasted while this visitant, at all events,—and
there was a touch of the strange freedom, as I remember, in
the sign of familiarity of his wearing no hat,—seemed to fix
me, from his position, with just the question, just the scrutiny
through the fading light, that his own presence provoked. We
were too far apart to call to each other, but there was a
moment at which, at shorter range, some challenge between
HENRY JAMES 29
us, breaking the hush, would have been the right result of our
straight mutual stare. He was in one of the angles, the one
away from the house, very erect, as it struck me, and with
both hands on the ledge. So I saw him as I see the letters I
form on this page; then, exactly, after a minute, as if to add
to the spectacle, he slowly changed his place—passed,
looking at me hard all the while, to the opposite corner of the
platform. Yes, I had the sharpest sense that during this transit
he never took his eyes from me, and I can see at this moment
the way his hand, as he went, passed from one of the
crenelations to the next. He stopped at the other corner, but
less long, and even as he turned away still markedly fixed
me. He turned away; that was all I knew.
