VI
IT took of course more than that particular passage to place
us together in presence of what we had now to live with as
we could—my dreadful liability to impressions of the order
so vividly exemplified, and my companion’s knowledge,
henceforth,—a knowledge half consternation and half
compassion,—of that liability. There had been, this evening,
after the revelation that left me, for an hour, so prostrate—
there had been, for either of us, no attendance on any service
but a little service of tears and vows, of prayers and
promises, a climax to the series of mutual challenges and
pledges that had straightway ensued on our retreating
together to the schoolroom and shutting ourselves up there to
have everything out. The result of our having everything out
was simply to reduce our situation to the last rigour of its
elements. She herself had seen nothing, not the shadow of a
shadow, and nobody in the house but the governess was in
the governess’s plight; yet she accepted without directly
impugning my sanity the truth as I gave it to her, and ended
by showing me, on this ground, an awe-stricken tenderness,
an expression of the sense of my more than questionable
privilege, of which the very breath has remained with me as
that of the sweetest of human charities.
What was settled between us, accordingly, that night,
was that we thought we might bear things together; and I was
not even sure that, in spite of her exemption, it was she who
had the best of the burden. I knew at this hour, I think, as
well as I knew later what I was capable of meeting to shelter
my pupils; but it took me some time to be wholly sure of
42
HENRY JAMES 43
what my honest ally was prepared for to keep terms with so
compromising a contract. I was queer company enough—
quite as queer as the company I received; but as I trace over
what we went through I see how much common ground we
must have found in the one idea that, by good fortune, could
steady us. It was the idea, the second movement, that led me
straight out, as I may say, of the inner chamber of my dread.
I could take the air in the court, at least, and there Mrs. Grose
could join me. Perfectly can I recall now the particular way
strength came to me before we separated for the night. We
had gone over and over every feature of what I had seen.
“He was looking for someone else, you say—someone
who was not you?”
“He was looking for little Miles.” A portentous
clearness now possessed me. “That’s whom he was looking
for.”
“But how do you know?”
“I know, I know, I know!” My exaltation grew. “And
you know, my dear!”
She didn’t deny this, but I required, I felt, not even so
much telling as that. She resumed in a moment, at any rate:
“What if he should see him?”
“Little Miles? That’s what he wants!”
She looked immensely scared again. “The child?”
“Heaven forbid! The man. He wants to appear to them.”
That he might was an awful conception, and yet, somehow, I
could keep it at bay; which, moreover, as we lingered there,
was what I succeeded in practically proving. I had an
absolute certainty that I could see again what I had already
seen, but something within me said that by offering myself
bravely as the sole subject of such experience, by accepting,
by inviting, by surmounting it all, I should serve as an
expiatory victim and guard the tranquillity of my
44 THE TURN OF THE SCREW
companions. The children, in especial, I should thus fence
about and absolutely save. I recall one of the last things I
said that night to Mrs. Grose.
“It does strike me that my pupils have never
mentioned—”
She looked at me hard as I musingly pulled up. “His
having been here and the time they were with him?”
“The time they were with him, and his name, his
presence, his history, in any way.”
“Oh, the little lady doesn’t remember. She never heard
or knew.”
“The circumstances of his death?” I thought with some
intensity. “Perhaps not. But Miles would remember—Miles
would know.”
“Ah, don’t try him!” broke from Mrs. Grose.
I returned her the look she had given me. “Don’t be
afraid.” I continued to think. “It is rather odd.”
“That he has never spoken of him?”
“Never by the least allusion. And you tell me they were
‘great friends’?”
“Oh, it wasn’t him!” Mrs. Grose with emphasis
declared. “It was Quint’s own fancy. To play with him, I
mean—to spoil him.” She paused a moment; then she added:
“Quint was much too free.”
This gave me, straight from my vision of his face—such
a face!—a sudden sickness of disgust. “Too free with my
boy?”
“Too free with everyone!”
I forbore, for the moment, to analyse this description
further than by the reflection that a part of it applied to
several of the members of the household, of the half-dozen
maids and men who were still of our small colony. But there
was everything, for our apprehension, in the lucky fact that
HENRY JAMES 45
no discomfortable legend, no perturbation of scullions, had
ever, within anyone’s memory, attached to the kind old
place. It had neither bad name nor ill fame, and Mrs. Grose,
most apparently, only desired to cling to me and to quake in
silence. I even put her, the very last thing of all, to the test. It
was when, at midnight, she had her hand on the schoolroom
door to take leave. “I have it from you then—for it’s of great
importance—that he was definitely and admittedly bad?”
“Oh, not admittedly. I knew it—but the master didn’t.”
“And you never told him?”
“Well, he didn’t like tale-bearing—he hated complaints.
He was terribly short with anything of that kind, and if
people were all right to him—”
“He wouldn’t be bothered with more?” This squared
well enough with my impressions of him: he was not a
trouble-loving gentleman, nor so very particular perhaps
about some of the company he kept. All the same, I pressed
my interlocutress. “I promise you I would have told!”
She felt my discrimination. “I dare say I was wrong.
But, really, I was afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
“Of things that man could do. Quint was so clever—he
was so deep.”
I took this in still more than, probably, I showed. “You
weren’t afraid of anything else? Not of his effect—?”
“His effect?” she repeated with a face of anguish and
waiting while I faltered.
“On innocent little precious lives. They were in your
charge.”
“No, they were not in mine!” she roundly and
distressfully returned. “The master believed in him and
placed him here because he was supposed not to be well and
46 THE TURN OF THE SCREW
the country air so good for him. So he had everything to say.
Yes”—she let me have it—“even about them.”
“Them—that creature?” I had to smother a kind of
howl. “And you could bear it!”
“No. I couldn’t—and I can’t now!” And the poor
woman burst into tears.
A rigid control, from the next day, was, as I have said,
to follow them; yet how often and how passionately, for a
week, we came back together to the subject! Much as we had
discussed it that Sunday night, I was, in the immediate later
hours in especial—for it may be imagined whether I slept—
still haunted with the shadow of something she had not told
me. I myself had kept back nothing, but there was a word
Mrs. Grose had kept back. I was sure, moreover, by morning,
that this was not from a failure of frankness, but because on
every side there were fears. It seems to me indeed, in
retrospect, that by the time the morrow’s sun was high I had
restlessly read into the facts before us almost all the meaning
they were to receive from subsequent and more cruel
occurrences. What they gave me above all was just the
sinister figure of the living man—the dead one would keep
awhile!—and of the months he had continuously passed at
Bly, which, added up, made a formidable stretch. The limit
of this evil time had arrived only when, on the dawn of a
winter’s morning, Peter Quint was found, by a labourer
going to early work, stone dead on the road from the village:
a catastrophe explained—superficially at least—by a visible
wound to his head; such a wound as might have been
produced—and as, on the final evidence, had been—by a
fatal slip, in the dark and after leaving the public house, on
the steepish icy slope, a wrong path, altogether, at the bottom
of which he lay. The icy slope, the turn mistaken at night and
in liquor, accounted for much—practically, in the end and
HENRY JAMES 47
after the inquest and boundless chatter, for everything; but
there had been matters in his life—strange passages and
perils, secret disorders, vices more than suspected—that
would have accounted for a good deal more.
I scarce know how to put my story into words that shall
be a credible picture of my state of mind; but I was in these
days literally able to find a joy in the extraordinary flight of
heroism the occasion demanded of me. I now saw that I had
been asked for a service admirable and difficult; and there
would be a greatness in letting it be seen—oh, in the right
quarter!—that I could succeed where many another girl
might have failed. It was an immense help to me—I confess
I rather applaud myself as I look back!—that I saw my
service so strongly and so simply. I was there to protect and
defend the little creatures in the world the most bereaved and
the most loveable, the appeal of whose helplessness had
suddenly become only too explicit, a deep, constant ache of
one’s own committed heart. We were cut off, really,
together; we were united in our danger. They had nothing but
me, and I—well, I had them. It was in short a magnificent
chance. This chance presented itself to me in an image richly
material. I was a screen—I was to stand before them. The
more I saw, the less they would. I began to watch them in a
stifled suspense, a disguised excitement that might well, had
it continued too long, have turned to something like
madness. What saved me, as I now see, was that it turned to
something else altogether. It didn’t last as suspense—it was
superseded by horrible proofs. Proofs, I say, yes—from the
moment I really took hold.
This moment dated from an afternoon hour that I
happened to spend in the grounds with the younger of my
pupils alone. We had left Miles indoors, on the red cushion
of a deep window-seat; he had wished to finish a book, and I
48 THE TURN OF THE SCREW
had been glad to encourage a purpose so laudable in a young
man whose only defect was an occasional excess of the
restless. His sister, on the contrary, had been alert to come
out, and I strolled with her half an hour, seeking the shade,
for the sun was still high and the day exceptionally warm. I
was aware afresh, with her, as we went, of how, like her
brother, she contrived—it was the charming thing in both
children—to let me alone without appearing to drop me and
to accompany me without appearing to surround. They were
never importunate and yet never listless. My attention to
them all really went to seeing them amuse themselves
immensely without me: this was a spectacle they seemed
actively to prepare and that engaged me as an active admirer.
I walked in a world of their invention—they had no occasion
whatever to draw upon mine; so that my time was taken only
with being, for them, some remarkable person or thing that
the game of the moment required and that was merely,
thanks to my superior, my exalted stamp, a happy and highly
distinguished sinecure. I forget what I was on the present
occasion; I only remember that I was something very
important and very quiet and that Flora was playing very
hard. We were on the edge of the lake, and, as we had lately
begun geography, the lake was the Sea of Azof.
Suddenly, in these circumstances, I became aware that,
on the other side of the Sea of Azof, we had an interested
spectator. The way this knowledge gathered in me was the
strangest thing in the world—the strangest, that is, except the
very much stranger in which it quickly merged itself. I had
sat down with a piece of work—for I was something or other
that could sit—on the old stone bench which overlooked the
pond; and in this position I began to take in with certitude,
and yet without direct vision, the presence, at a distance, of a
third person. The old trees, the thick shrubbery, made a great
HENRY JAMES 49
and pleasant shade, but it was all suffused with the
brightness of the hot, still hour. There was no ambiguity in
anything; none whatever, at least, in the conviction I from
one moment to another found myself forming as to what I
should see straight before me and across the lake as a
consequence of raising my eyes. They were attached at this
juncture to the stitching in which I was engaged, and I can
feel once more the spasm of my effort not to move them till I
should so have steadied myself as to be able to make up my
mind what to do. There was an alien object in view—a figure
whose right of presence I instantly, passionately questioned.
I recollect counting over perfectly the possibilities,
reminding myself that nothing was more natural, for
instance, then the appearance of one of the men about the
place, or even of a messenger, a postman, or a tradesman’s
boy, from the village. That reminder had as little effect on
my practical certitude as I was conscious—still even without
looking—of its having upon the character and attitude of our
visitor. Nothing was more natural than that these things
should be the other things that they absolutely were not.
Of the positive identity of the apparition I would assure
myself as soon as the small clock of my courage should have
ticked out the right second; meanwhile, with an effort that
was already sharp enough, I transferred my eyes straight to
little Flora, who, at the moment, was about ten yards away.
My heart had stood still for an instant with the wonder and
terror of the question whether she too would see; and I held
my breath while I waited for what a cry from her, what some
sudden innocent sign either of interest or of alarm, would tell
me. I waited, but nothing came; then, in the first place—and
there is something more dire in this, I feel, than in anything I
have to relate—I was determined by a sense that, within a
minute, all sounds from her had previously dropped; and, in
50 THE TURN OF THE SCREW
the second, by the circumstance that, also within the minute,
she had, in her play, turned her back to the water. This was
her attitude when I at last looked at her—looked with the
confirmed conviction that we were still, together, under
direct personal notice. She had picked up a small flat piece
of wood, which happened to have in it a little hole that had
evidently suggested to her the idea of sticking in another
fragment that might figure as a mast and make the thing a
boat. This second morsel, as I watched her, she was very
markedly and intently attempting to tighten in its place. My
apprehension of what she was doing sustained me so that
after some seconds I felt I was ready for more. Then I again
shifted my eyes—I faced what I had to face.
