VIII
WHAT I had said to Mrs. Grose was true enough: there were
in the matter I had put before her depths and possibilities that
I lacked resolution to sound; so that when we met once more
in the wonder of it we were of a common mind about the
duty of resistance to extravagant fancies. We were to keep
our heads if we should keep nothing else—difficult indeed as
that might be in the face of what, in our prodigious
experience, was least to be questioned. Late that night, while
the house slept, we had another talk in my room, when she
went all the way with me as to its being beyond doubt that I
had seen exactly what I had seen. To hold her perfectly in the
pinch of that, I found I had only to ask her how, if I had
“made it up,” I came to be able to give, of each of the
persons appearing to me, a picture disclosing, to the last
detail, their special marks—a portrait on the exhibition of
which she had instantly recognised and named them. She
wished, of course,—small blame to her!—to sink the whole
subject; and I was quick to assure her that my own interest in
it had now violently taken the form of a search for the way to
escape from it. I encountered her on the ground of a
probability that with recurrence—for recurrence we took for
granted—I should get used to my danger, distinctly
professing that my personal exposure had suddenly become
the least of my discomforts. It was my new suspicion that
was intolerable; and yet even to this complication the later
hours of the day had brought a little ease.
On leaving her, after my first outbreak, I had of course
returned to my pupils, associating the right remedy for my
57
58 THE TURN OF THE SCREW
dismay with that sense of their charm which I had already
found to be a thing I could positively cultivate and which had
never failed me yet. I had simply, in other words, plunged
afresh into Flora’s special society and there become aware—
it was almost a luxury!—that she could put her little
conscious hand straight upon the spot that ached. She had
looked at me in sweet speculation and then had accused me
to my face of having “cried.” I had supposed I had brushed
away the ugly signs: but I could literally—for the time, at all
events—rejoice, under this fathomless charity, that they had
not entirely disappeared. To gaze into the depths of blue of
the child’s eyes and pronounce their loveliness a trick of
premature cunning was to be guilty of a cynicism in
preference to which I naturally preferred to abjure my
judgment and, so far as might be, my agitation. I couldn’t
abjure for merely wanting to, but I could repeat to Mrs.
Grose—as I did there, over and over, in the small hours—
that with their voices in the air, their pressure on one’s heart
and their fragrant faces against one’s cheek, everything fell
to the ground but their incapacity and their beauty. It was a
pity that, somehow, to settle this once for all, I had equally to
re-enumerate the signs of subtlety that, in the afternoon, by
the lake, had made a miracle of my show of self-possession.
It was a pity to be obliged to re-investigate the certitude of
the moment itself and repeat how it had come to me as a
revelation that the inconceivable communion I then surprised
was a matter, for either party, of habit. It was a pity that I
should have had to quaver out again the reasons for my not
having, in my delusion, so much as questioned that the little
girl saw our visitant even as I actually saw Mrs. Grose
herself, and that she wanted, by just so much as she did thus
see, to make me suppose she didn’t, and at the same time,
without showing anything, arrive at a guess as to whether I
HENRY JAMES 59
myself did! It was a pity that I needed once more to describe
the portentous little activity by which she sought to divert
my attention—the perceptible increase of movement, the
greater intensity of play, the singing, the gabbling of
nonsense, and the invitation to romp.
Yet if I had not indulged, to prove there was nothing in
it, in this review, I should have missed the two or three dim
elements of comfort that still remained to me. I should not
for instance have been able to asseverate to my friend that I
was certain—which was so much to the good—that I at least
had not betrayed myself. I should not have been prompted,
by stress of need, by desperation of mind,—I scarce know
what to call it,—to invoke such further aid to intelligence as
might spring from pushing my colleague fairly to the wall.
She had told me, bit by bit, under pressure, a great deal; but a
small shifty spot on the wrong side of it all still sometimes
brushed my brow like the wing of a bat; and I remember how
on this occasion—for the sleeping house and the
concentration alike of our danger and our watch seemed to
help—I felt the importance of giving the last jerk to the
curtain. “I don’t believe anything so horrible,” I recollect
saying; “no, let us put it definitely, my dear, that I don’t. But
if I did, you know, there’s a thing I should require now, just
without sparing you the least bit more—oh, not a scrap,
come!—to get out of you. What was it you had in mind
when, in our distress, before Miles came back, over the letter
from his school, you said, under my insistence, that you
didn’t pretend for him that he had not literally ever been
‘bad’? He has not literally ‘ever,’ in these weeks that I
myself have lived with him and so closely watched him; he
has been an imperturbable little prodigy of delightful,
loveable goodness. Therefore you might perfectly have made
the claim for him if you had not, as it happened, seen an
60 THE TURN OF THE SCREW
exception to take. What was your exception, and to what
passage in your personal observation of him did you refer?”
It was a dreadfully austere inquiry, but levity was not
our note, and, at any rate, before the grey dawn admonished
us to separate I had got my answer. What my friend had had
in mind proved to be immensely to the purpose. It was
neither more nor less than the circumstance that for a period
of several months Quint and the boy had been perpetually
together. It was in fact the very appropriate truth that she had
ventured to criticise the propriety, to hint at the incongruity,
of so close an alliance, and even to go so far on the subject as
a frank overture to Miss Jessel. Miss Jessel had, with a most
strange manner, requested her to mind her business, and the
good woman had, on this, directly approached little Miles.
What she had said to him, since I pressed, was that she liked
to see young gentlemen not forget their station.
I pressed again, of course, at this. “You reminded him
that Quint was only a base menial?”
“As you might say! And it was his answer, for one
thing, that was bad.”
“And for another thing?” I waited. “He repeated your
words to Quint?”
“No, not that. It’s just what he wouldn’t!” she could still
impress upon me. “I was sure, at any rate,” she added, “that
he didn’t. But he denied certain occasions.”
“What occasions?”
“When they had been about together quite as if Quint
were his tutor—and a very grand one—and Miss Jessel only
for the little lady. When he had gone off with the fellow, I
mean, and spent hours with him.”
“He then prevaricated about it—he said he hadn’t?” Her
assent was clear enough to cause me to add in a moment: “I
see. He lied.”
HENRY JAMES 61
“Oh!” Mrs. Grose mumbled. This was a suggestion that
it didn’t matter; which indeed she backed up by a further
remark. “You see, after all, Miss Jessel didn’t mind. She
didn’t forbid him.”
I considered. “Did he put that to you as a justification?”
At this she dropped again. “No, he never spoke of it.”
“Never mentioned her in connection with Quint?”
She saw, visibly flushing, where I was coming out.
“Well, he didn’t show anything. He denied,” she repeated;
“he denied.”
Lord, how I pressed her now! “So that you could see he
knew what was between the two wretches?”
“I don’t know—I don’t know!” the poor woman
groaned.
“You do know, you dear thing,” I replied; “only you
haven’t my dreadful boldness of mind, and you keep back,
out of timidity and modesty and delicacy, even the
impression that, in the past, when you had, without my aid,
to flounder about in silence, most of all made you miserable.
But I shall get it out of you yet! There was something in the
boy that suggested to you,” I continued, “that he covered and
concealed their relation.”
“Oh, he couldn’t prevent—”
“Your learning the truth? I dare say! But, heavens,” I
fell, with vehemence, a-thinking, “what it shows that they
must, to that extent, have succeeded in making of him!”
“Ah, nothing that’s not nice now!” Mrs. Grose
lugubriously pleaded.
“I don’t wonder you looked queer,” I persisted, “when I
mentioned to you the letter from his school!”
“I doubt if I looked as queer as you!” she retorted with
homely force. “And if he was so bad then as that comes to,
how is he such an angel now?”
62 THE TURN OF THE SCREW
“Yes, indeed—and if he was a fiend at school! How,
how, how? Well,” I said in my torment, “you must put it to
me again, but I shall not be able to tell you for some days.
Only, put it to me again!” I cried in a way that made my
friend stare. “There are directions in which I must not for the
present let myself go.” Meanwhile I returned to her first
example—the one to which she had just previously
referred—of the boy’s happy capacity for an occasional slip.
“If Quint—on your remonstrance at the time you speak of—
was a base menial, one of the things Miles said to you, I find
myself guessing, was that you were another.” Again her
admission was so adequate that I continued: “And you
forgave him that?”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“Oh, yes!” And we exchanged there, in the stillness, a
sound of the oddest amusement. Then I went on: “At all
events, while he was with the man—”
“Miss Flora was with the woman. It suited them all!”
It suited me, too, I felt, only too well; by which I mean
that it suited exactly the particularly deadly view I was in the
very act of forbidding myself to entertain. But I so far
succeeded in checking the expression of this view that I will
throw, just here, no further light on it than may be offered by
the mention of my final observation to Mrs. Grose. “His
having lied and been impudent are, I confess, less engaging
specimens than I had hoped to have from you of the outbreak
in him of the little natural man. Still,” I mused, “they must
do, for they make me feel more than ever that I must watch.”
It made me blush, the next minute, to see in my friend’s
face how much more unreservedly she had forgiven him than
her anecdote struck me as presenting to my own tenderness
an occasion for doing. This came out when, at the
HENRY JAMES 63
schoolroom door, she quitted me. “Surely you don’t accuse
him—”
“Of carrying on an intercourse that he conceals from
me? Ah, remember that, until further evidence, I now accuse
nobody.” Then, before shutting her out to go, by another
passage, to her own place, “I must just wait,” I wound up.
