The Turn of the Screw
a flash, my eyes unsealed. In the presence of what I saw I reeled
straight back upon my resistance.
Seated at my own table in clear noonday light I saw a person whom,
without my previous experience, I should have taken at the first blush
for some housemaid who might have stayed at home to look after the
place and who, availing herself of rare relief from observation and of
the schoolroom table and my pens, ink, and paper, had applied herself
to the considerable effort of a letter to her sweetheart. There was an
effort in the way that, while her arms rested on the table, her hands
with evident weariness supported her head; but at the moment I took
this in I had already become aware that, in spite of my entrance, her
attitude strangely persisted. Then it was—with the very act of its
announcing itself—that her identity flared up in a change of posture.
She rose, not as if she had heard me, but with an indescribable grand
melancholy of indifference and detachment, and, within a dozen feet of
me, stood there as my vile predecessor. Dishonored and tragic, she was
all before me; but even as I fixed and, for memory, secured it, the
awful image passed away. Dark as midnight in her black dress, her
haggard beauty and her unutterable woe, she had looked at me long
enough to appear to say that her right to sit at my table was as good
as mine to sit at hers. While these instants lasted, indeed, I had the
extraordinary chill of feeling that it was I who was the intruder. It
was as a wild protest against it that, actually addressing her—“You
terrible, miserable woman!”—I heard myself break into a sound that, by
the open door, rang through the long passage and the empty house. She
looked at me as if she heard me, but I had recovered myself and cleared
the air. There was nothing in the room the next minute but the sunshine
and a sense that I must stay.
XVI
I had so perfectly expected that the return of my pupils would be
marked by a demonstration that I was freshly upset at having to take
into account that they were dumb about my absence. Instead of gaily
denouncing and caressing me, they made no allusion to my having failed
them, and I was left, for the time, on perceiving that she too said
nothing, to study Mrs. Grose’s odd face. I did this to such purpose
that I made sure they had in some way bribed her to silence; a silence
that, however, I would engage to break down on the first private
opportunity. This opportunity came before tea: I secured five minutes
with her in the housekeeper’s room, where, in the twilight, amid a
smell of lately baked bread, but with the place all swept and
garnished, I found her sitting in pained placidity before the fire. So
I see her still, so I see her best: facing the flame from her straight
chair in the dusky, shining room, a large clean image of the “put
away”—of drawers closed and locked and rest without a remedy.
“Oh, yes, they asked me to say nothing; and to please them—so long as
they were there—of course I promised. But what had happened to you?”
“I only went with you for the walk,” I said. “I had then to come back
to meet a friend.”
She showed her surprise. “A friend—_you?_”
“Oh, yes, I have a couple!” I laughed. “But did the children give you a
reason?”
“For not alluding to your leaving us? Yes; they said you would like it
better. Do you like it better?”
My face had made her rueful. “No, I like it worse!” But after an
instant I added: “Did they say why I should like it better?”
“No; Master Miles only said, ‘We must do nothing but what she likes!’”
“I wish indeed he would. And what did Flora say?”
“Miss Flora was too sweet. She said, ‘Oh, of course, of course!’—and I
said the same.”
I thought a moment. “You were too sweet, too—I can hear you all. But
nonetheless, between Miles and me, it’s now all out.”
“All out?” My companion stared. “But what, miss?”
“Everything. It doesn’t matter. I’ve made up my mind. I came home, my
dear,” I went on, “for a talk with Miss Jessel.”
I had by this time formed the habit of having Mrs. Grose literally well
in hand in advance of my sounding that note; so that even now, as she
bravely blinked under the signal of my word, I could keep her
comparatively firm. “A talk! Do you mean she spoke?”
“It came to that. I found her, on my return, in the schoolroom.”
“And what did she say?” I can hear the good woman still, and the candor
of her stupefaction.
“That she suffers the torments—!”
It was this, of a truth, that made her, as she filled out my picture,
gape. “Do you mean,” she faltered, “—of the lost?”
“Of the lost. Of the damned. And that’s why, to share them—” I faltered
myself with the horror of it.
But my companion, with less imagination, kept me up. “To share them—?”
“She wants Flora.” Mrs. Grose might, as I gave it to her, fairly have
fallen away from me had I not been prepared. I still held her there, to
show I was. “As I’ve told you, however, it doesn’t matter.”
“Because you’ve made up your mind? But to what?”
“To everything.”
“And what do you call ‘everything’?”
“Why, sending for their uncle.”
“Oh, miss, in pity do,” my friend broke out. “ah, but I will, I _will!_
I see it’s the only way. What’s ‘out,’ as I told you, with Miles is
that if he thinks I’m afraid to—and has ideas of what he gains by
that—he shall see he’s mistaken. Yes, yes; his uncle shall have it here
from me on the spot (and before the boy himself, if necessary) that if
I’m to be reproached with having done nothing again about more school—”
“Yes, miss—” my companion pressed me.
“Well, there’s that awful reason.”
There were now clearly so many of these for my poor colleague that she
was excusable for being vague. “But—a—which?”
“Why, the letter from his old place.”
“You’ll show it to the master?”
“I ought to have done so on the instant.”
“Oh, no!” said Mrs. Grose with decision.
“I’ll put it before him,” I went on inexorably, “that I can’t undertake
to work the question on behalf of a child who has been expelled—”
“For we’ve never in the least known what!” Mrs. Grose declared.
“For wickedness. For what else—when he’s so clever and beautiful and
perfect? Is he stupid? Is he untidy? Is he infirm? Is he ill-natured?
He’s exquisite—so it can be only _that_; and that would open up the
whole thing. After all,” I said, “it’s their uncle’s fault. If he left
here such people—!”
“He didn’t really in the least know them. The fault’s mine.” She had
turned quite pale.
“Well, you shan’t suffer,” I answered.
“The children shan’t!” she emphatically returned.
I was silent awhile; we looked at each other. “Then what am I to tell
him?”
“You needn’t tell him anything. _I’ll_ tell him.”
I measured this. “Do you mean you’ll write—?” Remembering she couldn’t,
I caught myself up. “How do you communicate?”
“I tell the bailiff. _He_ writes.”
“And should you like him to write our story?”
My question had a sarcastic force that I had not fully intended, and it
made her, after a moment, inconsequently break down. The tears were
again in her eyes. “Ah, miss, _you_ write!”
“Well—tonight,” I at last answered; and on this we separated.
XVII
I went so far, in the evening, as to make a beginning. The weather had
changed back, a great wind was abroad, and beneath the lamp, in my
room, with Flora at peace beside me, I sat for a long time before a
blank sheet of paper and listened to the lash of the rain and the
batter of the gusts. Finally I went out, taking a candle; I crossed the
passage and listened a minute at Miles’s door. What, under my endless
obsession, I had been impelled to listen for was some betrayal of his
not being at rest, and I presently caught one, but not in the form I
had expected. His voice tinkled out. “I say, you there—come in.” It was
a gaiety in the gloom!
I went in with my light and found him, in bed, very wide awake, but
very much at his ease. “Well, what are _you_ up to?” he asked with a
grace of sociability in which it occurred to me that Mrs. Grose, had
she been present, might have looked in vain for proof that anything was
“out.”
I stood over him with my candle. “How did you know I was there?”
“Why, of course I heard you. Did you fancy you made no noise? You’re
like a troop of cavalry!” he beautifully laughed.
“Then you weren’t asleep?”
“Not much! I lie awake and think.”
I had put my candle, designedly, a short way off, and then, as he held
out his friendly old hand to me, had sat down on the edge of his bed.
“What is it,” I asked, “that you think of?”
“What in the world, my dear, but _you?_”
“Ah, the pride I take in your appreciation doesn’t insist on that! I
had so far rather you slept.”
“Well, I think also, you know, of this queer business of ours.”
I marked the coolness of his firm little hand. “Of what queer business,
Miles?”
“Why, the way you bring me up. And all the rest!”
I fairly held my breath a minute, and even from my glimmering taper
there was light enough to show how he smiled up at me from his pillow.
“What do you mean by all the rest?”
“Oh, you know, you know!”
I could say nothing for a minute, though I felt, as I held his hand and
our eyes continued to meet, that my silence had all the air of
admitting his charge and that nothing in the whole world of reality was
perhaps at that moment so fabulous as our actual relation. “Certainly
you shall go back to school,” I said, “if it be that that troubles you.
But not to the old place—we must find another, a better. How could I
know it did trouble you, this question, when you never told me so,
never spoke of it at all?” His clear, listening face, framed in its
smooth whiteness, made him for the minute as appealing as some wistful
patient in a children’s hospital; and I would have given, as the
resemblance came to me, all I possessed on earth really to be the nurse
or the sister of charity who might have helped to cure him. Well, even
as it was, I perhaps might help! “Do you know you’ve never said a word
to me about your school—I mean the old one; never mentioned it in any
way?”
He seemed to wonder; he smiled with the same loveliness. But he clearly
gained time; he waited, he called for guidance. “Haven’t I?” It wasn’t
for _me_ to help him—it was for the thing I had met!
Something in his tone and the expression of his face, as I got this
from him, set my heart aching with such a pang as it had never yet
known; so unutterably touching was it to see his little brain puzzled
and his little resources taxed to play, under the spell laid on him, a
part of innocence and consistency. “No, never—from the hour you came
back. You’ve never mentioned to me one of your masters, one of your
comrades, nor the least little thing that ever happened to you at
school. Never, little Miles—no, never—have you given me an inkling of
anything that _may_ have happened there. Therefore you can fancy how
much I’m in the dark. Until you came out, that way, this morning, you
had, since the first hour I saw you, scarce even made a reference to
anything in your previous life. You seemed so perfectly to accept the
present.” It was extraordinary how my absolute conviction of his secret
precocity (or whatever I might call the poison of an influence that I
dared but half to phrase) made him, in spite of the faint breath of his
inward trouble, appear as accessible as an older person—imposed him
almost as an intellectual equal. “I thought you wanted to go on as you
are.”
It struck me that at this he just faintly colored. He gave, at any
rate, like a convalescent slightly fatigued, a languid shake of his
head. “I don’t—I don’t. I want to get away.”
“You’re tired of Bly?”
“Oh, no, I like Bly.”
“Well, then—?”
“Oh, _you_ know what a boy wants!”