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turnofthescrew_text.txt
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The Turn of the Screw
by Henry James
Contents
THE TURN OF THE SCREW
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
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—?”
“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 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.”
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.
“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 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 afterward showed was that he put the whole thing to her as
a kind of favor, 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 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, 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 learned.
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 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.
I
I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a
little seesaw of the right throbs and the wrong. After rising, in town,
to meet his appeal, I had at all events a couple of very bad days—found
myself doubtful again, felt indeed sure I had made a mistake. In this
state of mind I spent the long hours of bumping, swinging coach that
carried me to the stopping place at which I was to be met by a vehicle
from the house. This convenience, I was told, had been ordered, and I
found, toward the close of the June afternoon, a commodious fly in
waiting for me. Driving at that hour, on a lovely day, through a
country to which the summer sweetness seemed to offer me a friendly
welcome, my fortitude mounted afresh and, as we turned into the avenue,
encountered a reprieve that was probably but a proof of the point to
which it had sunk. I suppose I had expected, or had dreaded, something
so melancholy that what greeted me was a good surprise. I remember as a
most pleasant impression the broad, clear front, its open windows and
fresh curtains and the pair of maids looking out; I remember the lawn
and the bright flowers and the crunch of my wheels on the gravel and
the clustered treetops over which the rooks circled and cawed in the
golden sky. The scene had a greatness that made it a different affair
from my own scant home, and there immediately appeared at the door,
with a little girl in her hand, a civil person who dropped me as decent
a curtsy as if I had been the mistress or a distinguished visitor. I
had received in Harley Street a narrower notion of the place, and that,
as I recalled it, made me think the proprietor still more of a
gentleman, suggested that what I was to enjoy might be something beyond
his promise.
I had no drop again till the next day, for I was carried triumphantly
through the following hours by my introduction to the younger of my
pupils. The little girl who accompanied Mrs. Grose appeared to me on
the spot a creature so charming as to make it a great fortune to have
to do with her. She was the most beautiful child I had ever seen, and I
afterward wondered that my employer had not told me more of her. I
slept little that night—I was too much excited; and this astonished me,
too, I recollect, remained with me, adding to my sense of the
liberality with which I was treated. The large, impressive room, one of
the best in the house, the great state bed, as I almost felt it, the
full, figured draperies, the long glasses in which, for the first time,
I could see myself from head to foot, all struck me—like the
extraordinary charm of my small charge—as so many things thrown in. It
was thrown in as well, from the first moment, that I should get on with
Mrs. Grose in a relation over which, on my way, in the coach, I fear I
had rather brooded. The only thing indeed that in this early outlook
might have made me shrink again was the clear circumstance of her being
so glad to see me. I perceived within half an hour that she was so
glad—stout, simple, plain, clean, wholesome woman—as to be positively
on her guard against showing it too much. I wondered even then a little
why she should wish not to show it, and that, with reflection, with
suspicion, might of course have made me uneasy.
But it was a comfort that there could be no uneasiness in a connection
with anything so beatific as the radiant image of my little girl, the
vision of whose angelic beauty had probably more than anything else to
do with the restlessness that, before morning, made me several times
rise and wander about my room to take in the whole picture and
prospect; to watch, from my open window, the faint summer dawn, to look
at such portions of the rest of the house as I could catch, and to
listen, while, in the fading dusk, the first birds began to twitter,
for the possible recurrence of a sound or two, less natural and not
without, but within, that I had fancied I heard. There had been a
moment when I believed I recognized, faint and far, the cry of a child;
there had been another when I found myself just consciously starting as
at the passage, before my door, of a light footstep. But these fancies
were not marked enough not to be thrown off, and it is only in the
light, or the gloom, I should rather say, of other and subsequent
matters that they now come back to me. To watch, teach, “form” little
Flora would too evidently be the making of a happy and useful life. It
had been agreed between us downstairs that after this first occasion I
should have her as a matter of course at night, her small white bed
being already arranged, to that end, in my room. What I had undertaken
was the whole care of her, and she had remained, just this last time,
with Mrs. Grose only as an effect of our consideration for my
inevitable strangeness and her natural timidity. In spite of this
timidity—which the child herself, in the oddest way in the world, had
been perfectly frank and brave about, allowing it, without a sign of
uncomfortable consciousness, with the deep, sweet serenity indeed of
one of Raphael’s holy infants, to be discussed, to be imputed to her,
and to determine us—I feel quite sure she would presently like me. It
was part of what I already liked Mrs. Grose herself for, the pleasure I
could see her feel in my admiration and wonder as I sat at supper with
four tall candles and with my pupil, in a high chair and a bib,
brightly facing me, between them, over bread and milk. There were
naturally things that in Flora’s presence could pass between us only as
prodigious and gratified looks, obscure and roundabout allusions.
“And the little boy—does he look like her? Is he too so very
remarkable?”
One wouldn’t flatter a child. “Oh, miss, _most_ remarkable. If you
think well of this one!”—and she stood there with a plate in her hand,
beaming at our companion, who looked from one of us to the other with
placid heavenly eyes that contained nothing to check us.
“Yes; if I do—?”
“You _will_ be carried away by the little gentleman!”
“Well, that, I think, is what I came for—to be carried away. I’m
afraid, however,” I remember feeling the impulse to add, “I’m rather
easily carried away. I was carried away in London!”
I can still see Mrs. Grose’s broad face as she took this in. “In Harley
Street?”
“In Harley Street.”
“Well, miss, you’re not the first—and you won’t be the last.”
“Oh, I’ve no pretension,” I could laugh, “to being the only one. My
other pupil, at any rate, as I understand, comes back tomorrow?”
“Not tomorrow—Friday, miss. He arrives, as you did, by the coach, under
care of the guard, and is to be met by the same carriage.”
I forthwith expressed that the proper as well as the pleasant and
friendly thing would be therefore that on the arrival of the public
conveyance I should be in waiting for him with his little sister; an
idea in which Mrs. Grose concurred so heartily that I somehow took her
manner as a kind of comforting pledge—never falsified, thank
heaven!—that we should on every question be quite at one. Oh, she was
glad I was there!
What I felt the next day was, I suppose, nothing that could be fairly
called a reaction from the cheer of my arrival; it was probably at the
most only a slight oppression produced by a fuller measure of the
scale, as I walked round them, gazed up at them, took them in, of my
new circumstances. They had, as it were, an extent and mass for which I
had not been prepared and in the presence of which I found myself,
freshly, a little scared as well as a little proud. Lessons, in this
agitation, certainly suffered some delay; I reflected that my first
duty was, by the gentlest arts I could contrive, to win the child into
the sense of knowing me. I spent the day with her out-of-doors; I
arranged with her, to her great satisfaction, that it should be she,
she only, who might show me the place. She showed it step by step and
room by room and secret by secret, with droll, delightful, childish
talk about it and with the result, in half an hour, of our becoming
immense friends. Young as she was, I was struck, throughout our little
tour, with her confidence and courage with the way, in empty chambers
and dull corridors, on crooked staircases that made me pause and even
on the summit of an old machicolated square tower that made me dizzy,
her morning music, her disposition to tell me so many more things than
she asked, rang out and led me on. I have not seen Bly since the day I
left it, and I daresay that to my older and more informed eyes it would
now appear sufficiently contracted. But as my little conductress, with
her hair of gold and her frock of blue, danced before me round corners
and pattered down passages, I had the view of a castle of romance
inhabited by a rosy sprite, such a place as would somehow, for
diversion of the young idea, take all color out of storybooks and
fairytales. Wasn’t it just a storybook over which I had fallen adoze
and adream? No; it was a big, ugly, antique, but convenient house,
embodying a few features of a building still older, half-replaced and
half-utilized, in which I had the fancy of our being almost as lost as
a handful of passengers in a great drifting ship. Well, I was,
strangely, at the helm!
II
This came home to me when, two days later, I drove over with Flora to
meet, as Mrs. Grose said, the little gentleman; and all the more for an
incident that, presenting itself the second evening, had deeply
disconcerted me. The first day had been, on the whole, as I have
expressed, reassuring; but I was to see it wind up in keen
apprehension. The postbag, that evening—it came late—contained a letter
for me, which, however, in the hand of my employer, I found to be
composed but of a few words enclosing another, addressed to himself,
with a seal still unbroken. “This, I recognize, is from the headmaster,
and the headmaster’s an awful bore. Read him, please; deal with him;
but mind you don’t report. Not a word. I’m off!” I broke the seal with
a great effort—so great a one that I was a long time coming to it; took
the unopened missive at last up to my room and only attacked it just
before going to bed. I had better have let it wait till morning, for it
gave me a second sleepless night. With no counsel to take, the next
day, I was full of distress; and it finally got so the better of me
that I determined to open myself at least to Mrs. Grose.
“What does it mean? The child’s dismissed his school.”
She gave me a look that I remarked at the moment; then, visibly, with a
quick blankness, seemed to try to take it back. “But aren’t they all—?”
“Sent home—yes. But only for the holidays. Miles may never go back at
all.”
Consciously, under my attention, she reddened. “They won’t take him?”
“They absolutely decline.”
At this she raised her eyes, which she had turned from me; I saw them
fill with good tears. “What has he done?”
I hesitated; then I judged best simply to hand her my letter—which,
however, had the effect of making her, without taking it, simply put
her hands behind her. She shook her head sadly. “Such things are not
for me, miss.”
My counselor couldn’t read! I winced at my mistake, which I attenuated
as I could, and opened my letter again to repeat it to her; then,
faltering in the act and folding it up once more, I put it back in my
pocket. “Is he really _bad_?”
The tears were still in her eyes. “Do the gentlemen say so?”
“They go into no particulars. They simply express their regret that it
should be impossible to keep him. That can have only one meaning.” Mrs.
Grose listened with dumb emotion; she forbore to ask me what this
meaning might be; so that, presently, to put the thing with some
coherence and with the mere aid of her presence to my own mind, I went
on: “That he’s an injury to the others.”
At this, with one of the quick turns of simple folk, she suddenly
flamed up. “Master Miles! _him_ an injury?”
There was such a flood of good faith in it that, though I had not yet
seen the child, my very fears made me jump to the absurdity of the
idea. I found myself, to meet my friend the better, offering it, on the
spot, sarcastically. “To his poor little innocent mates!”
“It’s too dreadful,” cried Mrs. Grose, “to say such cruel things! Why,
he’s scarce ten years old.”
“Yes, yes; it would be incredible.”
She was evidently grateful for such a profession. “See him, miss,
first. _Then_ believe it!” I felt forthwith a new impatience to see
him; it was the beginning of a curiosity that, for all the next hours,
was to deepen almost to pain. Mrs. Grose was aware, I could judge, of
what she had produced in me, and she followed it up with assurance.
“You might as well believe it of the little lady. Bless her,” she added
the next moment—“_look_ at her!”
I turned and saw that Flora, whom, ten minutes before, I had
established in the schoolroom with a sheet of white paper, a pencil,
and a copy of nice “round O’s,” now presented herself to view at the
open door. She expressed in her little way an extraordinary detachment
from disagreeable duties, looking to me, however, with a great childish
light that seemed to offer it as a mere result of the affection she had
conceived for my person, which had rendered necessary that she should
follow me. I needed nothing more than this to feel the full force of
Mrs. Grose’s comparison, and, catching my pupil in my arms, covered her
with kisses in which there was a sob of atonement.
Nonetheless, the rest of the day I watched for further occasion to
approach my colleague, especially as, toward evening, I began to fancy
she rather sought to avoid me. I overtook her, I remember, on the
staircase; we went down together, and at the bottom I detained her,
holding her there with a hand on her arm. “I take what you said to me
at noon as a declaration that _you’ve_ never known him to be bad.”
She threw back her head; she had clearly, by this time, and very
honestly, adopted an attitude. “Oh, never known him—I don’t pretend
_that!_”
I was upset again. “Then you _have_ known him—?”
“Yes indeed, miss, thank God!”
On reflection I accepted this. “You mean that a boy who never is—?”
“Is no boy for _me!_”
I held her tighter. “You like them with the spirit to be naughty?”
Then, keeping pace with her answer, “So do I!” I eagerly brought out.
“But not to the degree to contaminate—”
“To contaminate?”—my big word left her at a loss. I explained it. “To
corrupt.”
She stared, taking my meaning in; but it produced in her an odd laugh.
“Are you afraid he’ll corrupt _you?_” She put the question with such a
fine bold humor that, with a laugh, a little silly doubtless, to match
her own, I gave way for the time to the apprehension of ridicule.
But the next day, as the hour for my drive approached, I cropped up in
another place. “What was the lady who was here before?”
“The last governess? She was also young and pretty—almost as young and
almost as pretty, miss, even as you.”
“Ah, then, I hope her youth and her beauty helped her!” I recollect
throwing off. “He seems to like us young and pretty!”
“Oh, he _did_,” Mrs. Grose assented: “it was the way he liked
everyone!” She had no sooner spoken indeed than she caught herself up.
“I mean that’s _his_ way—the master’s.”
I was struck. “But of whom did you speak first?”
She looked blank, but she colored. “Why, of _him_.”
“Of the master?”
“Of who else?”
There was so obviously no one else that the next moment I had lost my
impression of her having accidentally said more than she meant; and I
merely asked what I wanted to know. “Did _she_ see anything in the
boy—?”
“That wasn’t right? She never told me.”
I had a scruple, but I overcame it. “Was she careful—particular?”
Mrs. Grose appeared to try to be conscientious. “About some
things—yes.”
“But not about all?”
Again she considered. “Well, miss—she’s gone. I won’t tell tales.”
“I quite understand your feeling,” I hastened to reply; but I thought
it, after an instant, not opposed to this concession to pursue: “Did
she die here?”
“No—she went off.”
I don’t know what there was in this brevity of Mrs. Grose’s that struck
me as ambiguous. “Went off to die?” Mrs. Grose looked straight out of
the window, but I felt that, hypothetically, I had a right to know what
young persons engaged for Bly were expected to do. “She was taken ill,
you mean, and went home?”
“She was not taken ill, so far as appeared, in this house. She left it,
at the end of the year, to go home, as she said, for a short holiday,
to which the time she had put in had certainly given her a right. We
had then a young woman—a nursemaid who had stayed on and who was a good
girl and clever; and _she_ took the children altogether for the
interval. But our young lady never came back, and at the very moment I
was expecting her I heard from the master that she was dead.”
I turned this over. “But of what?”
“He never told me! But please, miss,” said Mrs. Grose, “I must get to
my work.”
III
Her thus turning her back on me was fortunately not, for my just
preoccupations, a snub that could check the growth of our mutual
esteem. We met, after I had brought home little Miles, more intimately
than ever on the ground of my stupefaction, my general emotion: so
monstrous was I then ready to pronounce it that such a child as had now
been revealed to me should be under an interdict. I was a little late
on the scene, and I felt, as he stood wistfully looking out for me
before the door of the inn at which the coach had put him down, that I
had seen him, on the instant, without and within, in the great glow of
freshness, the same positive fragrance of purity, in which I had, from
the first moment, seen his little sister. He was incredibly beautiful,
and Mrs. Grose had put her finger on it: everything but a sort of
passion of tenderness for him was swept away by his presence. What I
then and there took him to my heart for was something divine that I
have never found to the same degree in any child—his indescribable
little air of knowing nothing in the world but love. It would have been
impossible to carry a bad name with a greater sweetness of innocence,
and by the time I had got back to Bly with him I remained merely
bewildered—so far, that is, as I was not outraged—by the sense of the
horrible letter locked up in my room, in a drawer. As soon as I could
compass a private word with Mrs. Grose I declared to her that it was
grotesque.
She promptly understood me. “You mean the cruel charge—?”
“It doesn’t live an instant. My dear woman, _look_ at him!”
She smiled at my pretention to have discovered his charm. “I assure
you, miss, I do nothing else! What will you say, then?” she immediately
added.
“In answer to the letter?” I had made up my mind. “Nothing.”
“And to his uncle?”
I was incisive. “Nothing.”
“And to the boy himself?”
I was wonderful. “Nothing.”
She gave with her apron a great wipe to her mouth. “Then I’ll stand by
you. We’ll see it out.”
“We’ll see it out!” I ardently echoed, giving her my hand to make it a
vow.
She held me there a moment, then whisked up her apron again with her
detached hand. “Would you mind, miss, if I used the freedom—”
“To kiss me? No!” I took the good creature in my arms and, after we had
embraced like sisters, felt still more fortified and indignant.
This, at all events, was for the time: a time so full that, as I recall
the way it went, it reminds me of all the art I now need to make it a
little distinct. What I look back at with amazement is the situation I
accepted. I had undertaken, with my companion, to see it out, and I was
under a charm, apparently, that could smooth away the extent and the
far and difficult connections of such an effort. I was lifted aloft on
a great wave of infatuation and pity. I found it simple, in my
ignorance, my confusion, and perhaps my conceit, to assume that I could
deal with a boy whose education for the world was all on the point of
beginning. I am unable even to remember at this day what proposal I
framed for the end of his holidays and the resumption of his studies.
Lessons with me, indeed, that charming summer, we all had a theory that
he was to have; but I now feel that, for weeks, the lessons must have
been rather my own. I learned something—at first, certainly—that had
not been one of the teachings of my small, smothered life; learned to
be amused, and even amusing, and not to think for the morrow. It was
the first time, in a manner, that I had known space and air and
freedom, all the music of summer and all the mystery of nature. And
then there was consideration—and consideration was sweet. Oh, it was a
trap—not designed, but deep—to my imagination, to my delicacy, perhaps
to my vanity; to whatever, in me, was most excitable. The best way to
picture it all is to say that I was off my guard. They gave me so
little trouble—they were of a gentleness so extraordinary. I used to
speculate—but even this with a dim disconnectedness—as to how the rough
future (for all futures are rough!) would handle them and might bruise
them. They had the bloom of health and happiness; and yet, as if I had
been in charge of a pair of little grandees, of princes of the blood,
for whom everything, to be right, would have to be enclosed and
protected, the only form that, in my fancy, the afteryears could take
for them was that of a romantic, a really royal extension of the garden
and the park. It may be, of course, above all, that what suddenly broke
into this gives the previous time a charm of stillness—that hush in
which something gathers or crouches. The change was actually like the
spring of a beast.
In the first weeks the days were long; they often, at their finest,
gave me what I used to call my own hour, the hour when, for my pupils,
teatime and bedtime having come and gone, I had, before my final
retirement, a small interval alone. Much as I liked my companions, this
hour was the thing in the day I liked most; and I liked it best of all
when, as the light faded—or rather, I should say, the day lingered and
the last calls of the last birds sounded, in a flushed sky, from the
old trees—I could take a turn into the grounds and enjoy, almost with a
sense of property that amused and flattered me, the beauty and dignity
of the place. It was a pleasure at these moments to feel myself
tranquil and justified; doubtless, perhaps, also to reflect that by my
discretion, my quiet good sense and general high propriety, I was
giving pleasure—if he ever thought of it!—to the person to whose
pressure I had responded. What I was doing was what he had earnestly
hoped and directly asked of me, and that I _could_, after all, do it
proved even a greater joy than I had expected. I daresay I fancied
myself, in short, a remarkable young woman and took comfort in the
faith that this would more publicly appear. Well, I needed to be
remarkable to offer a front to the remarkable things that presently
gave their first sign.
It was plump, one afternoon, in the middle of my very hour: the
children were tucked away, and I had come out for my stroll. One of the
thoughts that, as I don’t in the least shrink now from noting, used to
be with me in these wanderings was that it would be as charming as a
charming story suddenly to meet someone. Someone would appear there at
the turn of a path and would stand before me and smile and approve. I
didn’t ask more than that—I only asked that he should _know;_ and the
only way to be sure he knew would be to see it, and the kind light of
it, in his handsome face. That was exactly present to me—by which I
mean the face was—when, on the first of these occasions, at the end of
a long June day, I stopped short on emerging from one of the
plantations and coming into view of the house. What arrested me on the
spot—and with a shock much greater than any vision had allowed for—was
the sense that my imagination had, in a flash, turned real. He did
stand there!—but high up, beyond the lawn and at the very top of the
tower to which, on that first morning, little Flora had conducted me.
This tower was one of a pair—square, incongruous, crenelated
structures—that were distinguished, for some reason, though I could see
little difference, as the new and the old. They flanked opposite ends
of the house and were probably architectural absurdities, redeemed in a
measure indeed by not being wholly disengaged nor of a height too
pretentious, dating, in their gingerbread antiquity, from a romantic
revival that was already a respectable past. I admired them, had
fancies about them, for we could all profit in a degree, especially
when they loomed through the dusk, by the grandeur of their actual
battlements; yet it was not at such an elevation that the figure I had
so often invoked seemed most in place.
It produced in me, this figure, in the clear twilight, I remember, two
distinct gasps of emotion, which were, sharply, the shock of my first
and that of my second surprise. My second was a violent perception of
the mistake of my first: the man who met my eyes was not the person I
had precipitately supposed. There came to me thus a bewilderment of
vision of which, after these years, there is no living view that I can
hope to give. An unknown man in a lonely place is a permitted object of
fear to a young woman privately bred; and the figure that faced me
was—a few more seconds assured me—as little anyone else I knew as it
was the image that had been in my mind. I had not seen it in Harley
Street—I had not seen it anywhere. The place, moreover, in the
strangest way in the world, had, on the instant, and by the very fact
of its appearance, become a solitude. To me at least, making my
statement here with a deliberation with which I have never made it, the
whole feeling of the moment returns. It was as if, while I took in—what
I did take in—all the rest of the scene had been stricken with death. I
can hear again, as I write, the intense hush in which the sounds of
evening dropped. The rooks stopped cawing in the golden sky, and the
friendly hour lost, for the minute, all its voice. But there was no
other change in nature, unless indeed it were a change that I saw with
a stranger sharpness. The gold was still in the sky, the clearness in
the air, and the man who looked at me over the battlements was as
definite as a picture in a frame. That’s how I thought, with
extraordinary quickness, of each person that he might have been and
that he was not. We were confronted across our distance quite long
enough for me to ask myself with intensity who then he was and to feel,
as an effect of my inability to say, a wonder that in a few instants
more became intense.
The great question, or one of these, is, afterward, I know, with regard
to certain matters, the question of how long they have lasted. Well,
this matter of mine, think what you will of it, lasted while I caught
at a dozen possibilities, none of which made a difference for the
better, that I could see, in there having been in the house—and for how
long, above all?—a person of whom I was in ignorance. It lasted while I
just bridled a little with the sense that my office demanded that there
should be no such ignorance and no such person. It lasted while this
visitant, at all events—and there was a touch of the strange freedom,
as I remember, in the sign of familiarity of his wearing no hat—seemed
to fix me, from his position, with just the question, just the scrutiny
through the fading light, that his own presence provoked. We were too
far apart to call to each other, but there was a moment at which, at
shorter range, some challenge between us, breaking the hush, would have
been the right result of our straight mutual stare. He was in one of
the angles, the one away from the house, very erect, as it struck me,
and with both hands on the ledge. So I saw him as I see the letters I
form on this page; then, exactly, after a minute, as if to add to the
spectacle, he slowly changed his place—passed, looking at me hard all
the while, to the opposite corner of the platform. Yes, I had the
sharpest sense that during this transit he never took his eyes from me,
and I can see at this moment the way his hand, as he went, passed from
one of the crenelations to the next. He stopped at the other corner,
but less long, and even as he turned away still markedly fixed me. He
turned away; that was all I knew.
IV
It was not that I didn’t wait, on this occasion, for more, for I was
rooted as deeply as I was shaken. Was there a “secret” at Bly—a mystery
of Udolpho or an insane, an unmentionable relative kept in unsuspected
confinement? I can’t say how long I turned it over, or how long, in a
confusion of curiosity and dread, I remained where I had had my
collision; I only recall that when I re-entered the house darkness had
quite closed in. Agitation, in the interval, certainly had held me and
driven me, for I must, in circling about the place, have walked three
miles; but I was to be, later on, so much more overwhelmed that this
mere dawn of alarm was a comparatively human chill. The most singular
part of it, in fact—singular as the rest had been—was the part I
became, in the hall, aware of in meeting Mrs. Grose. This picture comes
back to me in the general train—the impression, as I received it on my
return, of the wide white panelled space, bright in the lamplight and
with its portraits and red carpet, and of the good surprised look of my
friend, which immediately told me she had missed me. It came to me
straightway, under her contact, that, with plain heartiness, mere
relieved anxiety at my appearance, she knew nothing whatever that could
bear upon the incident I had there ready for her. I had not suspected
in advance that her comfortable face would pull me up, and I somehow
measured the importance of what I had seen by my thus finding myself
hesitate to mention it. Scarce anything in the whole history seems to
me so odd as this fact that my real beginning of fear was one, as I may
say, with the instinct of sparing my companion. On the spot,
accordingly, in the pleasant hall and with her eyes on me, I, for a
reason that I couldn’t then have phrased, achieved an inward
resolution—offered a vague pretext for my lateness and, with the plea
of the beauty of the night and of the heavy dew and wet feet, went as
soon as possible to my room.
Here it was another affair; here, for many days after, it was a queer
affair enough. There were hours, from day to day—or at least there were
moments, snatched even from clear duties—when I had to shut myself up
to think. It was not so much yet that I was more nervous than I could
bear to be as that I was remarkably afraid of becoming so; for the
truth I had now to turn over was, simply and clearly, the truth that I
could arrive at no account whatever of the visitor with whom I had been
so inexplicably and yet, as it seemed to me, so intimately concerned.
It took little time to see that I could sound without forms of inquiry
and without exciting remark any domestic complications. The shock I had
suffered must have sharpened all my senses; I felt sure, at the end of
three days and as the result of mere closer attention, that I had not
been practiced upon by the servants nor made the object of any “game.”
Of whatever it was that I knew, nothing was known around me. There was
but one sane inference: someone had taken a liberty rather gross. That
was what, repeatedly, I dipped into my room and locked the door to say
to myself. We had been, collectively, subject to an intrusion; some
unscrupulous traveler, curious in old houses, had made his way in
unobserved, enjoyed the prospect from the best point of view, and then
stolen out as he came. If he had given me such a bold hard stare, that
was but a part of his indiscretion. The good thing, after all, was that
we should surely see no more of him.
This was not so good a thing, I admit, as not to leave me to judge that
what, essentially, made nothing else much signify was simply my
charming work. My charming work was just my life with Miles and Flora,
and through nothing could I so like it as through feeling that I could
throw myself into it in trouble. The attraction of my small charges was
a constant joy, leading me to wonder afresh at the vanity of my
original fears, the distaste I had begun by entertaining for the
probable gray prose of my office. There was to be no gray prose, it
appeared, and no long grind; so how could work not be charming that
presented itself as daily beauty? It was all the romance of the nursery
and the poetry of the schoolroom. I don’t mean by this, of course, that
we studied only fiction and verse; I mean I can express no otherwise
the sort of interest my companions inspired. How can I describe that
except by saying that instead of growing used to them—and it’s a marvel
for a governess: I call the sisterhood to witness!—I made constant
fresh discoveries. There was one direction, assuredly, in which these
discoveries stopped: deep obscurity continued to cover the region of
the boy’s conduct at school. It had been promptly given me, I have
noted, to face that mystery without a pang. Perhaps even it would be
nearer the truth to say that—without a word—he himself had cleared it
up. He had made the whole charge absurd. My conclusion bloomed there
with the real rose flush of his innocence: he was only too fine and
fair for the little horrid, unclean school-world, and he had paid a
price for it. I reflected acutely that the sense of such differences,
such superiorities of quality, always, on the part of the
majority—which could include even stupid, sordid headmasters—turn
infallibly to the vindictive.
Both the children had a gentleness (it was their only fault, and it
never made Miles a muff) that kept them—how shall I express it?—almost
impersonal and certainly quite unpunishable. They were like the cherubs
of the anecdote, who had—morally, at any rate—nothing to whack! I
remember feeling with Miles in especial as if he had had, as it were,
no history. We expect of a small child a scant one, but there was in
this beautiful little boy something extraordinarily sensitive, yet
extraordinarily happy, that, more than in any creature of his age I
have seen, struck me as beginning anew each day. He had never for a
second suffered. I took this as a direct disproof of his having really
been chastised. If he had been wicked he would have “caught” it, and I
should have caught it by the rebound—I should have found the trace. I
found nothing at all, and he was therefore an angel. He never spoke of
his school, never mentioned a comrade or a master; and I, for my part,
was quite too much disgusted to allude to them. Of course I was under
the spell, and the wonderful part is that, even at the time, I
perfectly knew I was. But I gave myself up to it; it was an antidote to
any pain, and I had more pains than one. I was in receipt in these days
of disturbing letters from home, where things were not going well. But
with my children, what things in the world mattered? That was the
question I used to put to my scrappy retirements. I was dazzled by
their loveliness.
There was a Sunday—to get on—when it rained with such force and for so
many hours that there could be no procession to church; in consequence
of which, as the day declined, I had arranged with Mrs. Grose that,
should the evening show improvement, we would attend together the late
service. The rain happily stopped, and I prepared for our walk, which,
through the park and by the good road to the village, would be a matter
of twenty minutes. Coming downstairs to meet my colleague in the hall,
I remembered a pair of gloves that had required three stitches and that
had received them—with a publicity perhaps not edifying—while I sat
with the children at their tea, served on Sundays, by exception, in
that cold, clean temple of mahogany and brass, the “grown-up” dining
room. The gloves had been dropped there, and I turned in to recover
them. The day was gray enough, but the afternoon light still lingered,
and it enabled me, on crossing the threshold, not only to recognize, on
a chair near the wide window, then closed, the articles I wanted, but
to become aware of a person on the other side of the window and looking
straight in. One step into the room had sufficed; my vision was
instantaneous; it was all there. The person looking straight in was the
person who had already appeared to me. He appeared thus again with I
won’t say greater distinctness, for that was impossible, but with a
nearness that represented a forward stride in our intercourse and made
me, as I met him, catch my breath and turn cold. He was the same—he was