The Turn of the Screw
THE story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless,
but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on
Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should
essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody
happened to say that it was the only case he had met in
which such a visitation had fallen on a child. The case, I may
mention, was that of an apparition in just such an old house
as had gathered us for the occasion—an appearance, of a
dreadful kind, to a little boy sleeping in the room with his
mother and waking her up in the terror of it; waking her not
to dissipate his dread and soothe him to sleep again, but to
encounter also, herself, before she had succeeded in doing
so, the same sight that had shaken him. It was this
observation that drew from Douglas—not immediately, but
later in the evening—a reply that had the interesting
consequence to which I call attention. Someone else told a
story not particularly effective, which I saw he was not
following. This I took for a sign that he had himself
something to produce and that we should only have to wait.
We waited in fact till two nights later; but that same evening,
before we scattered, he brought out what was in his mind.
“I quite agree—in regard to Griffin’s ghost, or whatever
it was—that its appearing first to the little boy, at so tender
an age, adds a particular touch. But it’s not the first
occurrence of its charming kind that I know to have involved
a child. If the child gives the effect another turn of the screw,
what do you say to two children—?”
3
4 THE TURN OF THE SCREW
“We say, of course,” somebody exclaimed, “that they
give two turns! Also that we want to hear about them.”
I can see Douglas there before the fire, to which he had
got up to present his back, looking down at his interlocutor
with his hands in his pockets. “Nobody but me, till now, has
ever heard. It’s quite too horrible.” This, naturally, was
declared by several voices to give the thing the utmost price,
and our friend, with quiet art, prepared his triumph by
turning his eyes over the rest of us and going on: “It’s
beyond everything. Nothing at all that I know touches it.”
“For sheer terror?” I remember asking.
He seemed to say it was not so simple as that; to be
really at a loss how to qualify it. He passed his hand over his
eyes, made a little wincing grimace. “For dreadful—
dreadfulness!”
“Oh, how delicious!” cried one of the women.
He took no notice of her; he looked at me, but as if,
instead of me, he saw what he spoke of. “For general
uncanny ugliness and horror and pain.”
“Well then,” I said, “just sit right down and begin.”
He turned round to the fire, gave a kick to a log,
watched it an instant. Then as he faced us again: “I can’t
begin. I shall have to send to town.” There was a unanimous
groan at this, and much reproach; after which, in his
preoccupied way, he explained. “The story’s written. It’s in a
locked drawer—it has not been out for years. I could write to
my man and enclose the key; he could send down the packet
as he finds it.” It was to me in particular that he appeared to
propound this—appeared almost to appeal for aid not to
hesitate. He had broken a thickness of ice, the formation of
many a winter; had had his reasons for a long silence. The
others resented postponement, but it was just his scruples
that charmed me. I adjured him to write by the first post and
HENRY JAMES 5
to agree with us for an early hearing; then I asked him if the
experience in question had been his own. To this his answer
was prompt. “Oh, thank God, no!”
“And is the record yours? You took the thing down?”
“Nothing but the impression. I took that here”—he
tapped his heart. “I’ve never lost it.”
“Then your manuscript—?”
“Is in old, faded ink, and in the most beautiful hand.”
He hung fire again. “A woman’s. She has been dead these
twenty years. She sent me the pages in question before she
died.” They were all listening now, and of course there was
somebody to be arch, or at any rate to draw the inference.
But if he put the inference by without a smile it was also
without irritation. “She was a most charming person, but she
was ten years older than I. She was my sister’s governess,”
he quietly said. “She was the most agreeable woman I’ve
ever known in her position; she would have been worthy of
any whatever. It was long ago, and this episode was long
before. I was at Trinity, and I found her at home on my
coming down the second summer. I was much there that
year—it was a beautiful one; and we had, in her off-hours,
some strolls and talks in the garden—talks in which she
struck me as awfully clever and nice. Oh yes; don’t grin: I
liked her extremely and am glad to this day to think she liked
me too. If she hadn’t she wouldn’t have told me. She had
never told anyone. It wasn’t simply that she said so, but that
I knew she hadn’t. I was sure; I could see. You’ll easily
judge why when you hear.”
“Because the thing had been such a scare?”
He continued to fix me. “You’ll easily judge,” he
repeated: “you will.”
I fixed him, too. “I see. She was in love.”
6 THE TURN OF THE SCREW
He laughed for the first time. “You are acute. Yes, she
was in love. That is, she had been. That came out—she
couldn’t tell her story without its coming out. I saw it, and
she saw I saw it; but neither of us spoke of it. I remember the
time and the place—the corner of the lawn, the shade of the
great beeches and the long, hot summer afternoon. It wasn’t
a scene for a shudder; but oh—!” He quitted the fire and
dropped back into his chair.
“You’ll receive the packet Thursday morning?” I
inquired.
“Probably not till the second post.”
“Well then; after dinner—”
“You’ll all meet me here?” He looked us round again.
“Isn’t anybody going?” It was almost the tone of hope.
“Everybody will stay!”
“I will—and I will!” cried the ladies whose departure
had been fixed. Mrs. Griffin, however, expressed the need
for a little more light. “Who was it she was in love with?”
“The story will tell,” I took upon myself to reply.
“Oh, I can’t wait for the story!”
“The story won’t tell,” said Douglas; “not in any literal,
vulgar way.”
“More’s the pity, then. That’s the only way I ever
understand.”
“Won’t you tell, Douglas?” somebody else inquired.
He sprang to his feet again. “Yes—tomorrow. Now I
must go to bed. Good-night.” And quickly catching up a
candlestick, he left us slightly bewildered. From our end of
the great brown hall we heard his step on the stair;
whereupon Mrs. Griffin spoke. “Well, if I don’t know who
she was in love with, I know who he was.”
“She was ten years older,” said her husband.
HENRY JAMES 7
“Raison de plus—at that age! But it’s rather nice, his
long reticence.”
“Forty years!” Griffin put in.
“With this outbreak at last.”
“The outbreak,” I returned, “will make a tremendous
occasion of Thursday night;” and everyone so agreed with
me that, in the light of it, we lost all attention for everything
else. The last story, however incomplete and like the mere
opening of a serial, had been told; we handshook and
“candlestuck,” as somebody said, and went to bed.
I knew the next day that a letter containing the key had,
by the first post, gone off to his London apartments; but in
spite of—or perhaps just on account of—the eventual
diffusion of this knowledge we quite let him alone till after
dinner, till such an hour of the evening, in fact, as might best
accord with the kind of emotion on which our hopes were
fixed. Then he became as communicative as we could desire
and indeed gave us his best reason for being so. We had it
from him again before the fire in the hall, as we had had our
mild wonders of the previous night. It appeared that the
narrative he had promised to read us really required for a
proper intelligence a few words of prologue. Let me say here
distinctly, to have done with it, that this narrative, from an
exact transcript of my own made much later, is what I shall
presently give. Poor Douglas, before his death—when it was
in sight—committed to me the manuscript that reached him
on the third of these days and that, on the same spot, with
immense effect, he began to read to our hushed little circle
on the night of the fourth. The departing ladies who had said
they would stay didn’t, of course, thank heaven, stay: they
departed, in consequence of arrangements made, in a rage of
curiosity, as they professed, produced by the touches with
which he had already worked us up. But that only made his
8 THE TURN OF THE SCREW
little final auditory more compact and select, kept it, round
the hearth, subject to a common thrill.
The first of these touches conveyed that the written
statement took up the tale at a point after it had, in a manner,
begun. The fact to be in possession of was therefore that his
old friend, the youngest of several daughters of a poor
country parson, had, at the age of twenty, on taking service
for the first time in the schoolroom, come up to London, in
trepidation, to answer in person an advertisement that had
already placed her in brief correspondence with the
advertiser. This person proved, on her presenting herself, for
judgment, at a house in Harley Street, that impressed her as
vast and imposing—this prospective patron proved a
gentleman, a bachelor in the prime of life, such a figure as
had never risen, save in a dream or an old novel, before a
fluttered, anxious girl out of a Hampshire vicarage. One
could easily fix his type; it never, happily, dies out. He was
handsome and bold and pleasant, off-hand and gay and kind.
He struck her, inevitably, as gallant and splendid, but what
took her most of all and gave her the courage she afterwards
showed was that he put the whole thing to her as a kind of
favour, an obligation he should gratefully incur. She
conceived him as rich, but as fearfully extravagant—saw him
all in a glow of high fashion, of good looks, of expensive
habits, of charming ways with women. He had for his own
town residence a big house filled with the spoils of travel and
the trophies of the chase; but it was to his country home, an
old family place in Essex, that he wished her immediately to
proceed.
He had been left, by the death of their parents in India,
guardian to a small nephew and a small niece, children of a
younger, a military brother, whom he had lost two years
before. These children were, by the strangest of chances for a
HENRY JAMES 9
man in his position—a lone man without the right sort of
experience or a grain of patience—very heavily on his hands.
It had all been a great worry and, on his own part doubtless,
a series of blunders, but he immensely pitied the poor chicks
and had done all he could: had in particular sent them down
to his other house, the proper place for them being of course
the country, and kept them there, from the first, with the best
people he could find to look after them, parting even with his
own servants to wait on them and going down himself,
whenever he might, to see how they were doing. The
awkward thing was that they had practically no other
relations and that his own affairs took up all his time. He had
put them in possession of Bly, which was healthy and secure,
and had placed at the head of their little establishment—but
below stairs only—an excellent woman, Mrs. Grose, whom
he was sure his visitor would like and who had formerly
been maid to his mother. She was now housekeeper and was
also acting for the time as superintendent to the little girl, of
whom, without children of her own, she was, by good luck,
extremely fond. There were plenty of people to help, but of
course the young lady who should go down as governess
would be in supreme authority. She would also have, in
holidays, to look after the small boy, who had been for a
term at school—young as he was to be sent, but what else
could be done?—and who, as the holidays were about to
begin, would be back from one day to the other. There had
been for the two children at first a young lady whom they
had had the misfortune to lose. She had done for them quite
beautifully—she was a most respectable person—till her
death, the great awkwardness of which had, precisely, left no
alternative but the school for little Miles. Mrs. Grose, since
then, in the way of manners and things, had done as she
could for Flora; and there were, further, a cook, a housemaid,
10 THE TURN OF THE SCREW
a dairywoman, an old pony, an old groom, and an old
gardener, all likewise thoroughly respectable.
So far had Douglas presented his picture when someone
put a question. “And what did the former governess die
of?—of so much respectability?”
Our friend’s answer was prompt. “That will come out. I
don’t anticipate.”
“Excuse me—I thought that was just what you are
doing.”
“In her successor’s place,” I suggested, “I should have
wished to learn if the office brought with it—”
“Necessary danger to life?” Douglas completed my
thought. “She did wish to learn, and she did learn. You shall
hear tomorrow what she learnt. Meanwhile, of course, the
prospect struck her as slightly grim. She was young, untried,
nervous: it was a vision of serious duties and little company,
of really great loneliness. She hesitated—took a couple of
days to consult and consider. But the salary offered much
exceeded her modest measure, and on a second interview she
faced the music, she engaged.” And Douglas, with this, made
a pause that, for the benefit of the company, moved me to
throw in—
“The moral of which was of course the seduction
exercised by the splendid young man. She succumbed to it.”
He got up and, as he had done the night before, went to
the fire, gave a stir to a log with his foot, then stood a
moment with his back to us. “She saw him only twice.”
“Yes, but that’s just the beauty of her passion.”
A little to my surprise, on this, Douglas turned round to
me. “It was the beauty of it. There were others,” he went on,
“who hadn’t succumbed. He told her frankly all his
difficulty—that for several applicants the conditions had
been prohibitive. They were, somehow, simply afraid. It
HENRY JAMES 11
sounded dull—it sounded strange; and all the more so
because of his main condition.”
“Which was—?”
“That she should never trouble him—but never, never:
neither appeal nor complain nor write about anything; only
meet all questions herself, receive all moneys from his
solicitor, take the whole thing over and let him alone. She
promised to do this, and she mentioned to me that when, for
a moment, disburdened, delighted, he held her hand,
thanking her for the sacrifice, she already felt rewarded.”
“But was that all her reward?” one of the ladies asked.
“She never saw him again.”
“Oh!” said the lady; which, as our friend immediately
left us again, was the only other word of importance
contributed to the subject till, the next night, by the corner of
the hearth, in the best chair, he opened the faded red cover of
a thin old-fashioned gilt-edged album. The whole thing took
indeed more nights than one, but on the first occasion the
same lady put another question. “What is your title?”
“I haven’t one.”
“Oh, I have!” I said. But Douglas, without heeding me,
had begun to read with a fine clearness that was like a
rendering to the ear of the beauty of his author’s hand.
