The Turn of the Screw
of me. I now saw that I had been asked for a service admirable and
difficult; and there would be a greatness in letting it be seen—oh, in
the right quarter!—that I could succeed where many another girl might
have failed. It was an immense help to me—I confess I rather applaud
myself as I look back!—that I saw my service so strongly and so simply.
I was there to protect and defend the little creatures in the world the
most bereaved and the most lovable, the appeal of whose helplessness
had suddenly become only too explicit, a deep, constant ache of one’s
own committed heart. We were cut off, really, together; we were united
in our danger. They had nothing but me, and I—well, I had _them_. It
was in short a magnificent chance. This chance presented itself to me
in an image richly material. I was a screen—I was to stand before them.
The more I saw, the less they would. I began to watch them in a stifled
suspense, a disguised excitement that might well, had it continued too
long, have turned to something like madness. What saved me, as I now
see, was that it turned to something else altogether. It didn’t last as
suspense—it was superseded by horrible proofs. Proofs, I say, yes—from
the moment I really took hold.
This moment dated from an afternoon hour that I happened to spend in
the grounds with the younger of my pupils alone. We had left Miles
indoors, on the red cushion of a deep window seat; he had wished to
finish a book, and I had been glad to encourage a purpose so laudable
in a young man whose only defect was an occasional excess of the
restless. His sister, on the contrary, had been alert to come out, and
I strolled with her half an hour, seeking the shade, for the sun was
still high and the day exceptionally warm. I was aware afresh, with
her, as we went, of how, like her brother, she contrived—it was the
charming thing in both children—to let me alone without appearing to
drop me and to accompany me without appearing to surround. They were
never importunate and yet never listless. My attention to them all
really went to seeing them amuse themselves immensely without me: this
was a spectacle they seemed actively to prepare and that engaged me as
an active admirer. I walked in a world of their invention—they had no
occasion whatever to draw upon mine; so that my time was taken only
with being, for them, some remarkable person or thing that the game of
the moment required and that was merely, thanks to my superior, my
exalted stamp, a happy and highly distinguished sinecure. I forget what
I was on the present occasion; I only remember that I was something
very important and very quiet and that Flora was playing very hard. We
were on the edge of the lake, and, as we had lately begun geography,
the lake was the Sea of Azof.
Suddenly, in these circumstances, I became aware that, on the other
side of the Sea of Azof, we had an interested spectator. The way this
knowledge gathered in me was the strangest thing in the world—the
strangest, that is, except the very much stranger in which it quickly
merged itself. I had sat down with a piece of work—for I was something
or other that could sit—on the old stone bench which overlooked the
pond; and in this position I began to take in with certitude, and yet
without direct vision, the presence, at a distance, of a third person.
The old trees, the thick shrubbery, made a great and pleasant shade,
but it was all suffused with the brightness of the hot, still hour.
There was no ambiguity in anything; none whatever, at least, in the
conviction I from one moment to another found myself forming as to what
I should see straight before me and across the lake as a consequence of
raising my eyes. They were attached at this juncture to the stitching
in which I was engaged, and I can feel once more the spasm of my effort
not to move them till I should so have steadied myself as to be able to
make up my mind what to do. There was an alien object in view—a figure
whose right of presence I instantly, passionately questioned. I
recollect counting over perfectly the possibilities, reminding myself
that nothing was more natural, for instance, than the appearance of one
of the men about the place, or even of a messenger, a postman, or a
tradesman’s boy, from the village. That reminder had as little effect
on my practical certitude as I was conscious—still even without
looking—of its having upon the character and attitude of our visitor.
Nothing was more natural than that these things should be the other
things that they absolutely were not.
Of the positive identity of the apparition I would assure myself as
soon as the small clock of my courage should have ticked out the right
second; meanwhile, with an effort that was already sharp enough, I
transferred my eyes straight to little Flora, who, at the moment, was
about ten yards away. My heart had stood still for an instant with the
wonder and terror of the question whether she too would see; and I held
my breath while I waited for what a cry from her, what some sudden
innocent sign either of interest or of alarm, would tell me. I waited,
but nothing came; then, in the first place—and there is something more
dire in this, I feel, than in anything I have to relate—I was
determined by a sense that, within a minute, all sounds from her had
previously dropped; and, in the second, by the circumstance that, also
within the minute, she had, in her play, turned her back to the water.
This was her attitude when I at last looked at her—looked with the
confirmed conviction that we were still, together, under direct
personal notice. She had picked up a small flat piece of wood, which
happened to have in it a little hole that had evidently suggested to
her the idea of sticking in another fragment that might figure as a
mast and make the thing a boat. This second morsel, as I watched her,
she was very markedly and intently attempting to tighten in its place.
My apprehension of what she was doing sustained me so that after some
seconds I felt I was ready for more. Then I again shifted my eyes—I
faced what I had to face.
VII
I got hold of Mrs. Grose as soon after this as I could; and I can give
no intelligible account of how I fought out the interval. Yet I still
hear myself cry as I fairly threw myself into her arms: “They
_know_—it’s too monstrous: they know, they know!”
“And what on earth—?” I felt her incredulity as she held me.
“Why, all that _we_ know—and heaven knows what else besides!” Then, as
she released me, I made it out to her, made it out perhaps only now
with full coherency even to myself. “Two hours ago, in the garden”—I
could scarce articulate—“Flora _saw!_”
Mrs. Grose took it as she might have taken a blow in the stomach. “She
has told you?” she panted.
“Not a word—that’s the horror. She kept it to herself! The child of
eight, _that_ child!” Unutterable still, for me, was the stupefaction
of it.
Mrs. Grose, of course, could only gape the wider. “Then how do you
know?”
“I was there—I saw with my eyes: saw that she was perfectly aware.”
“Do you mean aware of _him?_”
“No—of _her_.” I was conscious as I spoke that I looked prodigious
things, for I got the slow reflection of them in my companion’s face.
“Another person—this time; but a figure of quite as unmistakable horror
and evil: a woman in black, pale and dreadful—with such an air also,
and such a face!—on the other side of the lake. I was there with the
child—quiet for the hour; and in the midst of it she came.”
“Came how—from where?”
“From where they come from! She just appeared and stood there—but not
so near.”
“And without coming nearer?”
“Oh, for the effect and the feeling, she might have been as close as
you!”
My friend, with an odd impulse, fell back a step. “Was she someone
you’ve never seen?”
“Yes. But someone the child has. Someone _you_ have.” Then, to show how
I had thought it all out: “My predecessor—the one who died.”
“Miss Jessel?”
“Miss Jessel. You don’t believe me?” I pressed.
She turned right and left in her distress. “How can you be sure?”
This drew from me, in the state of my nerves, a flash of impatience.
“Then ask Flora—_she’s_ sure!” But I had no sooner spoken than I caught
myself up. “No, for God’s sake, _don’t!_ She’ll say she isn’t—she’ll
lie!”
Mrs. Grose was not too bewildered instinctively to protest. “Ah, how
_can_ you?”
“Because I’m clear. Flora doesn’t want me to know.”
“It’s only then to spare you.”
“No, no—there are depths, depths! The more I go over it, the more I see
in it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear. I don’t know what I
_don’t_ see—what I _don’t_ fear!”
Mrs. Grose tried to keep up with me. “You mean you’re afraid of seeing
her again?”
“Oh, no; that’s nothing—now!” Then I explained. “It’s of _not_ seeing
her.”
But my companion only looked wan. “I don’t understand you.”
“Why, it’s that the child may keep it up—and that the child assuredly
_will_—without my knowing it.”
At the image of this possibility Mrs. Grose for a moment collapsed, yet
presently to pull herself together again, as if from the positive force
of the sense of what, should we yield an inch, there would really be to
give way to. “Dear, dear—we must keep our heads! And after all, if she
doesn’t mind it—!” She even tried a grim joke. “Perhaps she likes it!”
“Likes _such_ things—a scrap of an infant!”
“Isn’t it just a proof of her blessed innocence?” my friend bravely
inquired.
She brought me, for the instant, almost round. “Oh, we must clutch at
_that_—we must cling to it! If it isn’t a proof of what you say, it’s a
proof of—God knows what! For the woman’s a horror of horrors.”
Mrs. Grose, at this, fixed her eyes a minute on the ground; then at
last raising them, “Tell me how you know,” she said.
“Then you admit it’s what she was?” I cried.
“Tell me how you know,” my friend simply repeated.
“Know? By seeing her! By the way she looked.”
“At you, do you mean—so wickedly?”
“Dear me, no—I could have borne that. She gave me never a glance. She
only fixed the child.”
Mrs. Grose tried to see it. “Fixed her?”
“Ah, with such awful eyes!”
She stared at mine as if they might really have resembled them. “Do you
mean of dislike?”
“God help us, no. Of something much worse.”
“Worse than dislike?”—this left her indeed at a loss.
“With a determination—indescribable. With a kind of fury of intention.”
I made her turn pale. “Intention?”
“To get hold of her.” Mrs. Grose—her eyes just lingering on mine—gave a
shudder and walked to the window; and while she stood there looking out
I completed my statement. “_That’s_ what Flora knows.”
After a little she turned round. “The person was in black, you say?”
“In mourning—rather poor, almost shabby. But—yes—with extraordinary
beauty.” I now recognized to what I had at last, stroke by stroke,
brought the victim of my confidence, for she quite visibly weighed
this. “Oh, handsome—very, very,” I insisted; “wonderfully handsome. But
infamous.”
She slowly came back to me. “Miss Jessel—_was_ infamous.” She once more
took my hand in both her own, holding it as tight as if to fortify me
against the increase of alarm I might draw from this disclosure. “They
were both infamous,” she finally said.
So, for a little, we faced it once more together; and I found
absolutely a degree of help in seeing it now so straight. “I
appreciate,” I said, “the great decency of your not having hitherto
spoken; but the time has certainly come to give me the whole thing.”
She appeared to assent to this, but still only in silence; seeing which
I went on: “I must have it now. Of what did she die? Come, there was
something between them.”
“There was everything.”
“In spite of the difference—?”