The Turn of the Screw
agreeable; and we sat there together while, before us, at a distance,
but within call if we wished, the children strolled to and fro in one
of their most manageable moods. They moved slowly, in unison, below us,
over the lawn, the boy, as they went, reading aloud from a storybook
and passing his arm round his sister to keep her quite in touch. Mrs.
Grose watched them with positive placidity; then I caught the
suppressed intellectual creak with which she conscientiously turned to
take from me a view of the back of the tapestry. I had made her a
receptacle of lurid things, but there was an odd recognition of my
superiority—my accomplishments and my function—in her patience under my
pain. She offered her mind to my disclosures as, had I wished to mix a
witch’s broth and proposed it with assurance, she would have held out a
large clean saucepan. This had become thoroughly her attitude by the
time that, in my recital of the events of the night, I reached the
point of what Miles had said to me when, after seeing him, at such a
monstrous hour, almost on the very spot where he happened now to be, I
had gone down to bring him in; choosing then, at the window, with a
concentrated need of not alarming the house, rather that method than a
signal more resonant. I had left her meanwhile in little doubt of my
small hope of representing with success even to her actual sympathy my
sense of the real splendor of the little inspiration with which, after
I had got him into the house, the boy met my final articulate
challenge. As soon as I appeared in the moonlight on the terrace, he
had come to me as straight as possible; on which I had taken his hand
without a word and led him, through the dark spaces, up the staircase
where Quint had so hungrily hovered for him, along the lobby where I
had listened and trembled, and so to his forsaken room.
Not a sound, on the way, had passed between us, and I had wondered—oh,
_how_ I had wondered!—if he were groping about in his little mind for
something plausible and not too grotesque. It would tax his invention,
certainly, and I felt, this time, over his real embarrassment, a
curious thrill of triumph. It was a sharp trap for the inscrutable! He
couldn’t play any longer at innocence; so how the deuce would he get
out of it? There beat in me indeed, with the passionate throb of this
question an equal dumb appeal as to how the deuce _I_ should. I was
confronted at last, as never yet, with all the risk attached even now
to sounding my own horrid note. I remember in fact that as we pushed
into his little chamber, where the bed had not been slept in at all and
the window, uncovered to the moonlight, made the place so clear that
there was no need of striking a match—I remember how I suddenly
dropped, sank upon the edge of the bed from the force of the idea that
he must know how he really, as they say, “had” me. He could do what he
liked, with all his cleverness to help him, so long as I should
continue to defer to the old tradition of the criminality of those
caretakers of the young who minister to superstitions and fears. He
“had” me indeed, and in a cleft stick; for who would ever absolve me,
who would consent that I should go unhung, if, by the faintest tremor
of an overture, I were the first to introduce into our perfect
intercourse an element so dire? No, no: it was useless to attempt to
convey to Mrs. Grose, just as it is scarcely less so to attempt to
suggest here, how, in our short, stiff brush in the dark, he fairly
shook me with admiration. I was of course thoroughly kind and merciful;
never, never yet had I placed on his little shoulders hands of such
tenderness as those with which, while I rested against the bed, I held
him there well under fire. I had no alternative but, in form at least,
to put it to him.
“You must tell me now—and all the truth. What did you go out for? What
were you doing there?”
I can still see his wonderful smile, the whites of his beautiful eyes,
and the uncovering of his little teeth shine to me in the dusk. “If I
tell you why, will you understand?” My heart, at this, leaped into my
mouth. _Would_ he tell me why? I found no sound on my lips to press it,
and I was aware of replying only with a vague, repeated, grimacing nod.
He was gentleness itself, and while I wagged my head at him he stood
there more than ever a little fairy prince. It was his brightness
indeed that gave me a respite. Would it be so great if he were really
going to tell me? “Well,” he said at last, “just exactly in order that
you should do this.”
“Do what?”
“Think me—for a change—_bad!_” I shall never forget the sweetness and
gaiety with which he brought out the word, nor how, on top of it, he
bent forward and kissed me. It was practically the end of everything. I
met his kiss and I had to make, while I folded him for a minute in my
arms, the most stupendous effort not to cry. He had given exactly the
account of himself that permitted least of my going behind it, and it
was only with the effect of confirming my acceptance of it that, as I
presently glanced about the room, I could say—
“Then you didn’t undress at all?”
He fairly glittered in the gloom. “Not at all. I sat up and read.”
“And when did you go down?”
“At midnight. When I’m bad I _am_ bad!”
“I see, I see—it’s charming. But how could you be sure I would know
it?”
“Oh, I arranged that with Flora.” His answers rang out with a
readiness! “She was to get up and look out.”
“Which is what she did do.” It was I who fell into the trap!
“So she disturbed you, and, to see what she was looking at, you also
looked—you saw.”
“While you,” I concurred, “caught your death in the night air!”
He literally bloomed so from this exploit that he could afford
radiantly to assent. “How otherwise should I have been bad enough?” he
asked. Then, after another embrace, the incident and our interview
closed on my recognition of all the reserves of goodness that, for his
joke, he had been able to draw upon.
XII
The particular impression I had received proved in the morning light, I
repeat, not quite successfully presentable to Mrs. Grose, though I
reinforced it with the mention of still another remark that he had made
before we separated. “It all lies in half a dozen words,” I said to
her, “words that really settle the matter. ‘Think, you know, what I
_might_ do!’ He threw that off to show me how good he is. He knows down
to the ground what he ‘might’ do. That’s what he gave them a taste of
at school.”
“Lord, you do change!” cried my friend.
“I don’t change—I simply make it out. The four, depend upon it,
perpetually meet. If on either of these last nights you had been with
either child, you would clearly have understood. The more I’ve watched
and waited the more I’ve felt that if there were nothing else to make
it sure it would be made so by the systematic silence of each. _Never_,
by a slip of the tongue, have they so much as alluded to either of
their old friends, any more than Miles has alluded to his expulsion.
Oh, yes, we may sit here and look at them, and they may show off to us
there to their fill; but even while they pretend to be lost in their
fairytale they’re steeped in their vision of the dead restored. He’s
not reading to her,” I declared; “they’re talking of _them_—they’re
talking horrors! I go on, I know, as if I were crazy; and it’s a wonder
I’m not. What I’ve seen would have made _you_ so; but it has only made
me more lucid, made me get hold of still other things.”
My lucidity must have seemed awful, but the charming creatures who were
victims of it, passing and repassing in their interlocked sweetness,
gave my colleague something to hold on by; and I felt how tight she
held as, without stirring in the breath of my passion, she covered them
still with her eyes. “Of what other things have you got hold?”
“Why, of the very things that have delighted, fascinated, and yet, at
bottom, as I now so strangely see, mystified and troubled me. Their
more than earthly beauty, their absolutely unnatural goodness. It’s a
game,” I went on; “it’s a policy and a fraud!”
“On the part of little darlings—?”
“As yet mere lovely babies? Yes, mad as that seems!” The very act of
bringing it out really helped me to trace it—follow it all up and piece
it all together. “They haven’t been good—they’ve only been absent. It
has been easy to live with them, because they’re simply leading a life
of their own. They’re not mine—they’re not ours. They’re his and
they’re hers!”
“Quint’s and that woman’s?”
“Quint’s and that woman’s. They want to get to them.”
Oh, how, at this, poor Mrs. Grose appeared to study them! “But for
what?”
“For the love of all the evil that, in those dreadful days, the pair
put into them. And to ply them with that evil still, to keep up the
work of demons, is what brings the others back.”
“Laws!” said my friend under her breath. The exclamation was homely,
but it revealed a real acceptance of my further proof of what, in the
bad time—for there had been a worse even than this!—must have occurred.
There could have been no such justification for me as the plain assent
of her experience to whatever depth of depravity I found credible in
our brace of scoundrels. It was in obvious submission of memory that
she brought out after a moment: “They _were_ rascals! But what can they
now do?” she pursued.
“Do?” I echoed so loud that Miles and Flora, as they passed at their
distance, paused an instant in their walk and looked at us. “Don’t they
do enough?” I demanded in a lower tone, while the children, having
smiled and nodded and kissed hands to us, resumed their exhibition. We
were held by it a minute; then I answered: “They can destroy them!” At
this my companion did turn, but the inquiry she launched was a silent
one, the effect of which was to make me more explicit. “They don’t
know, as yet, quite how—but they’re trying hard. They’re seen only
across, as it were, and beyond—in strange places and on high places,
the top of towers, the roof of houses, the outside of windows, the
further edge of pools; but there’s a deep design, on either side, to
shorten the distance and overcome the obstacle; and the success of the
tempters is only a question of time. They’ve only to keep to their
suggestions of danger.”
“For the children to come?”
“And perish in the attempt!” Mrs. Grose slowly got up, and I
scrupulously added: “Unless, of course, we can prevent!”
Standing there before me while I kept my seat, she visibly turned
things over. “Their uncle must do the preventing. He must take them
away.”
“And who’s to make him?”
She had been scanning the distance, but she now dropped on me a foolish
face. “You, miss.”
“By writing to him that his house is poisoned and his little nephew and
niece mad?”
“But if they _are_, miss?”
“And if I am myself, you mean? That’s charming news to be sent him by a
governess whose prime undertaking was to give him no worry.”
Mrs. Grose considered, following the children again. “Yes, he do hate
worry. That was the great reason—”
“Why those fiends took him in so long? No doubt, though his
indifference must have been awful. As I’m not a fiend, at any rate, I
shouldn’t take him in.”
My companion, after an instant and for all answer, sat down again and
grasped my arm. “Make him at any rate come to you.”
I stared. “To _me?_” I had a sudden fear of what she might do. “‘Him’?”
“He ought to _be_ here—he ought to help.”
I quickly rose, and I think I must have shown her a queerer face than
ever yet. “You see me asking him for a visit?” No, with her eyes on my
face she evidently couldn’t. Instead of it even—as a woman reads
another—she could see what I myself saw: his derision, his amusement,