The Turn of the Screw
“He only peeps?”
“I hope it will be confined to that!” She had now let go my hand; she
turned away a little. I waited an instant; then I brought out: “Go to
church. Goodbye. I must watch.”
Slowly she faced me again. “Do you fear for them?”
We met in another long look. “Don’t _you?_” Instead of answering she
came nearer to the window and, for a minute, applied her face to the
glass. “You see how he could see,” I meanwhile went on.
She didn’t move. “How long was he here?”
“Till I came out. I came to meet him.”
Mrs. Grose at last turned round, and there was still more in her face.
“_I_ couldn’t have come out.”
“Neither could I!” I laughed again. “But I did come. I have my duty.”
“So have I mine,” she replied; after which she added: “What is he
like?”
“I’ve been dying to tell you. But he’s like nobody.”
“Nobody?” she echoed.
“He has no hat.” Then seeing in her face that she already, in this,
with a deeper dismay, found a touch of picture, I quickly added stroke
to stroke. “He has red hair, very red, close-curling, and a pale face,
long in shape, with straight, good features and little, rather queer
whiskers that are as red as his hair. His eyebrows are, somehow,
darker; they look particularly arched and as if they might move a good
deal. His eyes are sharp, strange—awfully; but I only know clearly that
they’re rather small and very fixed. His mouth’s wide, and his lips are
thin, and except for his little whiskers he’s quite clean-shaven. He
gives me a sort of sense of looking like an actor.”
“An actor!” It was impossible to resemble one less, at least, than Mrs.
Grose at that moment.
“I’ve never seen one, but so I suppose them. He’s tall, active, erect,”
I continued, “but never—no, never!—a gentleman.”
My companion’s face had blanched as I went on; her round eyes started
and her mild mouth gaped. “A gentleman?” she gasped, confounded,
stupefied: “a gentleman _he?_”
“You know him then?”
She visibly tried to hold herself. “But he _is_ handsome?”
I saw the way to help her. “Remarkably!”
“And dressed—?”
“In somebody’s clothes.” “They’re smart, but they’re not his own.”
She broke into a breathless affirmative groan: “They’re the master’s!”
I caught it up. “You _do_ know him?”
She faltered but a second. “Quint!” she cried.
“Quint?”
“Peter Quint—his own man, his valet, when he was here!”
“When the master was?”
Gaping still, but meeting me, she pieced it all together. “He never
wore his hat, but he did wear—well, there were waistcoats missed. They
were both here—last year. Then the master went, and Quint was alone.”
I followed, but halting a little. “Alone?”
“Alone with _us_.” Then, as from a deeper depth, “In charge,” she
added.
“And what became of him?”
She hung fire so long that I was still more mystified. “He went, too,”
she brought out at last.
“Went where?”
Her expression, at this, became extraordinary. “God knows where! He
died.”
“Died?” I almost shrieked.
She seemed fairly to square herself, plant herself more firmly to utter
the wonder of it. “Yes. Mr. Quint is dead.”
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 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 rigor 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 awestricken 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 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 should 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 tranquility of my 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 analyze 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 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 daresay 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 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 laborer
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 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