The turn of the screw by Henry James
THE TURN OF THE SCREW
HENRY JAMES
PREFACE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16 CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
PREFACE
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 Griffins ghost, or whatever it was that its appearing
first to the little boy, at so tender an age, adds a particular touch. But its 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. Its 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: Its 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 cant 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 storys
written. Its 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 thathe 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. Ive never lost
it.
Then your manuscript?
Is in old, faded ink, and in the most beautiful hand. He hung fire again. A womans.
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 sisters governess, he
quietly said. She was the most agreeable woman Ive 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; dont grin: I liked her
extremely and am glad to this day to think she liked me, too. If she hadnt she wouldnt have
told me. She had never told anyone. It wasnt simply that she said so, but that I knew she
hadnt. I was sure; I could see. Youll easily judge why when you hear.
Because the thing had been such a scare?
He continued to fix me. Youll 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 couldnt 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 wasnt a scene for a shudder; but oh! He quitted the fire and
dropped back into his chair.
Youll receive the packet Thursday morning? I inquired.
Probably not till the second post.
Well then; after dinner
Youll all meet me here? He looked us round again. Isnt 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 cant wait for the story!
The story WONT tell, said Douglas; not in any literal, vulgar way.
Mores the pity, then. Thats the only way I ever understand.
Wont 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 dont 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 its 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 didnt, 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, offhand 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 friends answer was prompt. That will come out. I dont anticipate.
Excuse me I thought that was just what you ARE doing.
In her successors 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 thats 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 hadnt 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 havent 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 authors hand. CHAPTER 1
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; towatch, 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 Raphaels 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
Floras 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 wouldnt 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. Im afraid, however, I
remember feeling the impulse to add, Im rather easily carried away. I was carried away in
London!
I can still see Mrs. Groses broad face as she took this in. In Harley Street?
In Harley Street.
Well, miss, youre not the first and you wont be the last.
Oh, Ive 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 wouldbe 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. Wasnt 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! CHAPTER 2
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 headmasters an
awful bore. Read him, please; deal with him; but mind you dont report. Not a word. Im 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 childs 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 arent they all?
Sent home yes. But only for the holidays. Miles may never go back at all.
Consciously, under my attention, she reddened. They wont 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 couldnt 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
hes 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, myvery 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!
Its too dreadful, cried Mrs. Grose, to say such cruel things! Why, hes 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 os, 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. Groses 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 YOUVE 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 dont 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 hell 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 thats HIS way - the masters.
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 wasnt 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 shes gone. I wont 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 dont know what there was in this brevity of Mrs. Groses 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. CHAPTER 3
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 doesnt 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 Ill stand by you. Well see
it out.
Well 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 anddifficult 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 dont 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 didnt 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 kindlight 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 was
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 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 was 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. Thats 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 thequestion, 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. CHAPTER 4
It was not that I didnt 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 cant 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 couldnt
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 dont 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 its 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 boys 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 glovesthat 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 wont 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 the same, and seen, this time, as he had been seen before, from the waist up, the
window, though the dining room was on the ground floor, not going down to the terrace on
which he stood. His face was close to the glass, yet the effect of this better view was, strangely,
only to show me how intense the former had been. He remained but a few seconds long
enough to convince me he also saw and recognized; but it was as if I had been looking at him
for years and had known him always. Something, however, happened this time that had not
happened before; his stare into my face, through the glass and across the room, was as deep
and hard as then, but it quitted me for a moment during which I could still watch it, see it fix
successively several other things. On the spot there came to me the added shock of a certitude
that it was not for me he had come there. He had come for someone else.
The flash of this knowledge for it was knowledge in the midst of dread produced
in me the most extraordinary effect, started as I stood there, a sudden vibration of duty and
courage. I say courage because I was beyond all doubt already far gone. I bounded straight out
of the door again, reached that of the house, got, in an instant, upon the drive, and, passing
along the terrace as fast as I could rush, turned a corner and came full in sight. But it was in
sight of nothing now my visitor had vanished. I stopped, I almost dropped, with the real
relief of this; but I took in the whole scene I gave him time to reappear. I call it time, but how
long was it? I cant speak to the purpose today of the duration of these things. That kind of
measure must have left me: they couldnt have lasted as they actually appeared to me to last.
The terrace and the whole place, the lawn and the garden beyond it, all I could see of the park,
were empty with a great emptiness. There were shrubberies and big trees, but I remember the
clear assurance I felt that none of them concealed him. He was there or was not there: not there
if I didnt see him. I got hold of this; then, instinctively, instead of returning as I had come,
went to the window. It was confusedly present to me that I ought to place myself where he had
stood. I did so; I applied my face to the pane and looked, as he had looked, into the room. As if,
at this moment, to show me exactly what his range had been, Mrs. Grose, as I had done for
himself just before, came in from the hall. With this I had the full image of a repetition of what
had already occurred. She saw me as I had seen my own visitant; she pulled up short as I had
done; I gave her something of the shock that I had received. She turned white, and this made
me ask myself if I had blanched as much. She stared, in short, and retreated on just MY lines,
and I knew she had then passed out and come round to me and that I should presently meether. I remained where I was, and while I waited I thought of more things than one. But theres
only one I take space to mention. I wondered why SHE should be scared. CHAPTER 5
Oh, she let me know as soon as, round the corner of the house, she loomed again into
view. What in the name of goodness is the matter? She was now flushed and out of breath.
I said nothing till she came quite near. With me? I must have made a wonderful face.
Do I show it?
Youre as white as a sheet. You look awful.
I considered; I could meet on this, without scruple, any innocence. My need to
respect the bloom of Mrs. Groses had dropped, without a rustle, from my shoulders, and if I
wavered for the instant it was not with what I kept back. I put out my hand to her and she took
it; I held her hard a little, liking to feel her close to me. There was a kind of support in the shy
heave of her surprise. You came for me for church, of course, but I cant go.
Has anything happened?
Yes. You must know now. Did I look very queer?
Through this window? Dreadful!
Well, I said, Ive been frightened. Mrs. Groses eyes expressed plainly that SHE
had no wish to be, yet also that she knew too well her place not to be ready to share with me
any marked inconvenience. Oh, it was quite settled that she MUST share! Just what you saw
from the dining room a minute ago was the effect of that. What I saw just before was much
worse.
Her hand tightened. What was it?
An extraordinary man. Looking in.
What extraordinary man?
I havent the least idea.
Mrs. Grose gazed round us in vain. Then where is he gone?
I know still less.
Have you seen him before?
Yes once. On the old tower.
She could only look at me harder. Do you mean hes a stranger?
Oh, very much!
Yet you didnt tell me?
No for reasons. But now that youve guessed.
Mrs. Groses round eyes encountered this charge. Ah, I havent guessed! she said very
simply. How can I if YOU dont imagine?
I dont in the very least.Youve seen him nowhere but on the tower?
And on this spot just now.
Mrs. Grose looked round again. What was he doing on the tower?
Only standing there and looking down at me.
She thought a minute. Was he a gentleman?
I found I had no need to think. No. She gazed in deeper wonder. No.
Then nobody about the place? Nobody from the village?
Nobody nobody. I didnt tell you, but I made sure.
She breathed a vague relief: this was, oddly, so much to the good. It only went indeed
a little way. But if he isnt a gentleman
What IS he? Hes a horror.
A horror?
Hes God help me if I know WHAT he is!
Mrs. Grose looked round once more; she fixed her eyes on the duskier distance, then,
pulling herself together, turned to me with abrupt inconsequence. Its time we should be at
church.
Oh, Im not fit for church!
Wont it do you good?
It wont do THEM! I nodded at the house.
The children?
I cant leave them now.
Youre afraid?
I spoke boldly. Im afraid of HIM.
Mrs. Groses large face showed me, at this, for the first time, the faraway faint
glimmer of a consciousness more acute: I somehow made out in it the delayed dawn of an idea
I myself had not given her and that was as yet quite obscure to me. It comes back to me that I
thought instantly of this as something I could get from her; and I felt it to be connected with
the desire she presently showed to know more. When was it on the tower?
About the middle of the month. At this same hour.
Almost at dark, said Mrs. Grose.
Oh, no, not nearly. I saw him as I see you.
Then how did he get in?
And how did he get out? I laughed. I had no opportunity to ask him! This evening,
you see, I pursued, he has not been able to get in.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. Dont 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 didnt 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 couldnt 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?
Ive been dying to tell you. But hes 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 theyre rather small and very fixed. His mouths wide, and
his lips are thin, and except for his little whiskers hes 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.
Ive never seen one, but so I suppose them. Hes tall, active, erect, I continued, but
never no, never! a gentleman.
My companions 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 somebodys clothes. Theyre smart, but theyre not his own.
She broke into a breathless affirmative groan: Theyre the masters!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. CHAPTER 6
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 companions 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 governesss 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. THATS
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 didnt 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? Thats 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 doesnt 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, dont try him! broke from Mrs. Grose.
I returned her the look she had given me. Dont 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 wasnt HIM! Mrs. Grose with emphasis declared. It was Quints 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
anyones 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 its of great importance which he was
definitely and admittedly bad?
Oh, not admittedly. I knew it but the master didnt.
And you never told him?
Well, he didnt like tale-bearing he hated complaints. He was terribly short with
anything of that kind, and if people were all right to HIMHe wouldnt 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 werent 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 couldnt and I cant 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 morrows sun was
high I had restlessly read into the fact 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 winters 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 of me. I now saw that I had been asked for a service admirableand 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 ones 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 didnt 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 feelonce 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, then the
appearance of one of the men about the place, or even of a messenger, a postman, or a
tradesmans 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. CHAPTER 7
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 its 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 thats 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 companions 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 youve 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 dont 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...
SHES sure! But I had no sooner spokenthan I caught myself up. No, for Gods sake, DONT!
Shell say she isnt... shell lie!
Mrs. Grose was not too bewildered instinctively to protest.Ah, how CAN you?Because Im clear. Flora doesnt want me to know.
Its 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 dont know what I DONT see... what I DONT fear!
Mrs. Grose tried to keep up with me. You mean youre afraid of seeing her again?
Oh, no; thats nothing... now! Then I explained. Its of NOT seeing her.
But my companion only looked wan. I dont understand you.
Why, its 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 doesnt mind it...! She even tried a grim joke. Perhaps she likes it!
Likes SUCH things... a scrap of an infant!
Isnt 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 isnt a proof of what you say, its a proof of... God knows what! For the
womans 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 its 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.
THATS 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...?
Oh, of their rank, their condition, she brought it woefully out. SHE was a lady.
I turned it over; I again saw. Yes,she was a lady.
And he so dreadfully below, said Mrs. Grose.
I felt that I doubtless neednt press too hard, in such company, on the place of a
servant in the scale; but there was nothing to prevent an acceptance of my companions own
measure of my predecessors abasement. There was a way to deal with that, and I dealt; the
more readily for my full vision on the evidence of our employers late clever, good-looking
own man; impudent, assured, spoiled, depraved. The fellow was a hound.
Mrs. Grose considered as if it were perhaps a little a case for a sense of shades. Ive
never seen one like him. He did what he wished.
With HER?
With them all.
It was as if now in my friends own eyes Miss Jessel had again appeared. I seemed at
any rate, for an instant, to see their evocation of her as distinctly as I had seen her by the pond;
and I brought out with decision: It must have been also what SHE wished!
Mrs. Groses face signified that it had been indeed, but she said at the same time:
Poor woman, she paid for it!
Then you do know what she died of? I asked.
No, I know nothing. I wanted not to know; I was glad enough I didnt; and I thankedheaven she was well out of this!
Yet you had, then, your idea...
Of her real reason for leaving? Oh, yes, as to that. She couldnt have stayed. Fancy it
here... for a governess! And afterward I imagined... and I still imagine. And what I imagine is
dreadful.
Not so dreadful as what I do, I replied; on which I must have shown her... as I was
indeed but too conscious... a front of miserable defeat. It brought out again all her compassion
for me, and at the renewed touch of her kindness my power to resist broke down. I burst, as I
had, the other time, made her burst, into tears; she took me to her motherly breast, and my
lamentation overflowed. I dont do it! I sobbed in despair; I dont save or shield them! Its far
worse than I dreamed... theyre lost! CHAPTER 8
What I had said to Mrs. Grose was true enough: there were in the matter I had put
before her depths and possibilities that I lacked resolution to sound; so that when we met once
more in the wonder of it we were of a common mind about the duty of resistance to
extravagant fancies. We were to keep our heads if we should keep nothing else difficult
indeed as that might be in the face of what, in our prodigious experience, was least to be
questioned. Late that night, while the house slept, we had another talk in my room, when she
went all the way with me as to its being beyond doubt that I had seen exactly what I had seen.
To hold her perfectly in the pinch of that, I found I had only to ask her how, if I had made it
up, I came to be able to give, of each of the persons appearing to me, a picture disclosing, to
the last detail, their special marks, a portrait on the exhibition of which she had instantly
recognized and named them. She wished of course, small blame to her!, to sink the whole
subject; and I was quick to assure her that my own interest in it had now violently taken the
form of a search for the way to escape from it. I encountered her on the ground of a probability
that with recurrence... for recurrence we took for granted... I should get used to my danger,
distinctly professing that my personal exposure had suddenly become the least of my
discomforts. It was my new suspicion that was intolerable; and yet even to this complication
the later hours of the day had brought a little ease.
On leaving her, after my first outbreak, I had of course returned to my pupils,
associating the right remedy for my dismay with that sense of their charm which I had already
found to be a thing I could positively cultivate and which had never failed me yet. I had simply,
in other words, plunged afresh into Floras special society and there become aware it was
almost a luxury! that she could put her little conscious hand straight upon the spot that
ached. She had looked at me in sweet speculation and then had accused me to my face of
having cried. I had supposed I had brushed away the ugly signs: but I could literally for the
time, at all events rejoice, under this fathomless charity, that they had not entirely
disappeared. To gaze into the depths of blue of the childs eyes and pronounce their loveliness
a trick of premature cunning was to be guilty of a cynicism in preference to which I naturally
preferred to abjure my judgment and, so far as might be, my agitation. I couldnt abjure for
merely wanting to, but I could repeat to Mrs. Grose as I did there, over and over, in the small
hours that with their voices in the air, their pressure on ones heart, and their fragrant faces
against ones cheek, everything fell to the ground but their incapacity and their beauty. It was
a pity that, somehow, to settle this once for all, I had equally to re-enumerate the signs of
subtlety that, in the afternoon, by the lake had made a miracle of my show of self-possession. It
was a pity to be obliged to reinvestigate the certitude of the moment itself and repeat how it
had come to me as a revelation that the inconceivable communion I then surprised was a
matter, for either party, of habit. It was a pity that I should have had to quaver out again the
reasons for my not having, in my delusion, so much as questioned that the little girl saw our
visitant even as I actually saw Mrs. Grose herself, and that she wanted, by just so much as she
did thus see, to make me suppose she didnt, and at the same time, without showing anything,
arrive at a guess as to whether I myself did! It was a pity that I needed once more to describethe portentous little activity by which she sought to divert my attention the perceptible
increase of movement, the greater intensity of play, the singing, the gabbling of nonsense, and
the invitation to romp.
Yet if I had not indulged, to prove there was nothing in it, in this review, I should have
missed the two or three dim elements of comfort that still remained to me. I should not for
instance have been able to asseverate to my friend that I was certain which was so much to
the good that I at least had not betrayed myself. I should not have been prompted, by stress
of need, by desperation of mind I scarce know what to call it to invoke such further aid to
intelligence as might spring from pushing my colleague fairly to the wall. She had told me, bit
by bit, under pressure, a great deal; but a small shifty spot on the wrong side of it all still
sometimes brushed my brow like the wing of a bat; and I remember how on this occasion for
the sleeping house and the concentration alike of our danger and our watch seemed to help I
felt the importance of giving the last jerk to the curtain. I dont believe anything so horrible, I
recollect saying; no, let us put it definitely, my dear, that I dont. But if I did, you know,
theres a thing I should require now, just without sparing you the least bit more oh, not a
scrap, come! to get out of you. What was it you had in mind when, in our distress, before
Miles came back, over the letter from his school, you said, under my insistence, that you didnt
pretend for him that he had not literally EVER been `bad? He has NOT literally ever, in these
weeks that I myself have lived with him and so closely watched him; he has been an
imperturbable little prodigy of delightful, lovable goodness. Therefore you might perfectly
have made the claim for him if you had not, as it happened, seen an exception to take. What
was your exception, and to what passage in your personal observation of him did you refer?
It was a dreadfully austere inquiry, but levity was not our note, and, at any rate,
before the gray dawn admonished us to separate I had got my answer. What my friend had
had in mind proved to be immensely to the purpose. It was neither more nor less than the
circumstance that for a period of several months Quint and the boy had been perpetually
together. It was in fact the very appropriate truth that she had ventured to criticize the
propriety, to hint at the incongruity, of so close an alliance, and even to go so far on the
subject as a frank overture to Miss Jessel. Miss Jessel had, with a most strange manner,
requested her to mind her business, and the good woman had, on this, directly approached
little Miles. What she had said to him, since I pressed, was that SHE liked to see young
gentlemen not forget their station.
I pressed again, of course, at this. You reminded him that Quint was only a base
menial?
As you might say! And it was his answer, for one thing, that was bad.
And for another thing? I waited. He repeated your words to Quint?
No, not that. Its just what he WOULDNT! she could still impress upon me. I was
sure, at any rate, she added, that he didnt. But he denied certain occasions.
What occasions?
When they had been about together quite as if Quint were his tutor and a verygrand one and Miss Jessel only for the little lady. When he had gone off with the fellow, I
mean, and spent hours with him.
He then prevaricated about it he said he hadnt? Her assent was clear enough to
cause me to add in a moment: I see. He lied.
Oh! Mrs. Grose mumbled. This was a suggestion that it didnt matter; which indeed
she backed up by a further remark. You see, after all, Miss Jessel didnt mind. She didnt forbid
him.
I considered. Did he put that to you as a justification?
At this she dropped again. No, he never spoke of it.
Never mentioned her in connection with Quint?
She saw, visibly flushing, where I was coming out. Well, he didnt show anything. He
denied, she repeated; he denied.
Lord, how I pressed her now! So that you could see he knew what was between the
two wretches?
I dont know I dont know! the poor woman groaned.
You do know, you dear thing, I replied; only you havent my dreadful boldness of
mind, and you keep back, out of timidity and modesty and delicacy, even the impression that,
in the past, when you had, without my aid, to flounder about in silence, most of all made you
miserable. But I shall get it out of you yet! There was something in the boy that suggested to
you, I continued, that he covered and concealed their relation.
Oh, he couldnt prevent
Your learning the truth? I daresay! But, heavens, I fell, with vehemence, athinking,
what it shows that they must, to that extent, have succeeded in making of him!
Ah, nothing thats not nice NOW! Mrs. Grose lugubriously pleaded.
I dont wonder you looked queer, I persisted, when I mentioned to you the letter
from his school!
I doubt if I looked as queer as you! she retorted with homely force. And if he was so
bad then as that comes to, how is he such an angel now?
Yes, indeed and if he was a fiend at school! How, how, how? Well, I said in my
torment, you must put it to me again, but I shall not be able to tell you for some days. Only,
put it to me again! I cried in a way that made my friend stare. There are directions in which I
must not for the present let myself go. Meanwhile I returned to her first example the one to
which she had just previously referred of the boys happy capacity for an occasional slip. If
Quint on your remonstrance at the time you speak of was a base menial, one of the things
Miles said to you, I find myself guessing, was that you were another. Again her admission was
so adequate that I continued: And you forgave him that?
Wouldnt YOU?Oh, yes! And we exchanged there, in the stillness, a sound of the oddest amusement.
Then I went on: At all events, while he was with the man
Miss Flora was with the woman. It suited them all!
It suited me, too, I felt, only too well; by which I mean that it suited exactly the
particularly deadly view I was in the very act of forbidding myself to entertain. But I so far
succeeded in checking the expression of this view that I will throw, just here, no further light
on it than may be offered by the mention of my final observation to Mrs. Grose. His having
lied and been impudent are, I confess, less engaging specimens than I had hoped to have from
you of the outbreak in him of the little natural man. Still, I mused, They must do, for they
make me feel more than ever that I must watch.
It made me blush, the next minute, to see in my friends face how much more
unreservedly she had forgiven him than her anecdote struck me as presenting to my own
tenderness an occasion for doing. This came out when, at the schoolroom door, she quitted me.
Surely you dont accuse HIM
Of carrying on an intercourse that he conceals from me? Ah, remember that, until
further evidence, I now accuse nobody. Then, before shutting her out to go, by another
passage, to her own place, I must just wait, I wound up. CHAPTER 9
I waited and waited, and the days, as they elapsed, took something from my
consternation. A very few of them, in fact, passing, in constant sight of my pupils, without a
fresh incident, sufficed to give to grievous fancies and even to odious memories a kind of brush
of the sponge. I have spoken of the surrender to their extraordinary childish grace as a thing I
could actively cultivate, and it may be imagined if I neglected now to address myself to this
source for whatever it would yield. Stranger than I can express, certainly, was the effort to
struggle against my new lights; it would doubtless have been, however, a greater tension still
had it not been so frequently successful. I used to wonder how my little charges could help
guessing that I thought strange things about them; and the circumstances that these things
only made them more interesting was not by itself a direct aid to keeping them in the dark. I
trembled lest they should see that they WERE so immensely more interesting. Putting things
at the worst, at all events, as in meditation I so often did, any clouding of their innocence
could only be - blameless and foredoomed as they were a reason the more for taking risks.
There were moments when, by an irresistible impulse, I found myself catching them up and
pressing them to my heart. As soon as I had done so I used to say to myself: What will they
think of that? Doesnt it betray too much? It would have been easy to get into a sad, wild
tangle about how much I might betray; but the real account, I feel, of the hours of peace that I
could still enjoy was that the immediate charm of my companions was a beguilement still
effective even under the shadow of the possibility that it was studied. For if it occurred to me
that I might occasionally excite suspicion by the little outbreaks of my sharper passion for
them, so too I remember wondering if I mightnt see a queerness in the traceable increase of
their own demonstrations.
They were at this period extravagantly and preternaturally fond of me; which, after
all, I could reflect, was no more than a graceful response in children perpetually bowed over
and hugged. The homage of which they were so lavish succeeded, in truth, for my nerves, quite
as well as if I never appeared to myself, as I may say, literally to catch them at a purpose in it.
They had never, I think, wanted to do so many things for their poor protectress; I mean
though they got their lessons better and better, which was naturally what would please her
most in the way of diverting, entertaining, surprising her; reading her passages, telling her
stories, acting her charades, pouncing out at her, in disguises, as animals and historical
characters, and above all astonishing her by the pieces they had secretly got by heart and
could interminably recite. I should never get to the bottom were I to let myself go even now -
of the prodigious private commentary, all under still more private correction, with which, in
these days, I overscored their full hours. They had shown me from the first a facility for
everything, a general faculty which, taking a fresh start, achieved remarkable flights. They got
their little tasks as if they loved them, and indulged, from the mere exuberance of the gift, in
the most unimposed little miracles of memory. They not only popped out at me as tigers and as
Romans, but as Shakespeareans, astronomers, and navigators. This was so singularly the case
that it had presumably much to do with the fact as to which, at the present day, I am at a loss
for a different explanation: I allude to my unnatural composure on the subject of anotherschool for Miles. What I remember is that I was content not, for the time, to open the
question, and that contentment must have sprung from the sense of his perpetually striking
show of cleverness. He was too clever for a bad governess, for a parsons daughter, to spoil; and
the strangest if not the brightest thread in the pensive embroidery I just spoke of was the
impression I might have got, if I had dared to work it out, that he was under some influence
operating in his small intellectual life as a tremendous incitement.
If it was easy to reflect, however, that such a boy could postpone school, it was at
least as marked that for such a boy to have been kicked out by a schoolmaster was a
mystification without end. Let me add that in their company now and I was careful almost
never to be out of it I could follow no scent very far. We lived in a cloud of music and love
and success and private theatricals. The musical sense in each of the children was of the
quickest, but the elder in especial had a marvelous knack of catching and repeating. The
schoolroom piano broke into all gruesome fancies; and when that failed there were
confabulations in corners, with a sequel of one of them going out in the highest spirits in order
to come in as something new. I had had brothers myself, and it was no revelation to me that
little girls could be slavish idolaters of little boys. What surpassed everything was that there
was a little boy in the world who could have for the inferior age, sex, and intelligence so fine a
consideration. They were extraordinarily at one, and to say that they never either quarreled or
complained is to make the note of praise coarse for their quality of sweetness. Sometimes,
indeed, when I dropped into coarseness, I perhaps came across traces of little understandings
between them by which one of them should keep me occupied while the other slipped away.
There is a naive side, I suppose, in all diplomacy; but if my pupils practiced upon me, it was
surely with the minimum of grossness. It was all in the other quarter that, after a lull, the
grossness broke out.
I find that I really hang back; but I must take my plunge. In going on with the record
of what was hideous at Bly, I not only challenge the most liberal faith for which I little care;
but and this is another matter I renew what I myself suffered, I again push my way through
it to the end. There came suddenly an hour after which, as I look back, the affair seems to me
to have been all pure suffering; but I have at least reached the heart of it, and the straightest
road out is doubtless to advance. One evening with nothing to lead up or to prepare it I felt
the cold touch of the impression that had breathed on me the night of my arrival and which,
much lighter then, as I have mentioned, I should probably have made little of in memory had
my subsequent sojourn been less agitated. I had not gone to bed; I sat reading by a couple of
candles. There was a roomful of old books at Bly last-century fiction, some of it, which, to the
extent of a distinctly deprecated renown, but never to so much as that of a stray specimen,
had reached the sequestered home and appealed to the unavowed curiosity of my youth. I
remember that the book I had in my hand was Fieldings Amelia; also that I was wholly awake.
I recall further both a general conviction that it was horribly late and a particular objection to
looking at my watch. I figure, finally, that the white curtain draping, in the fashion of those
days, the head of Floras little bed, shrouded, as I had assured myself long before, the
perfection of childish rest. I recollect in short that, though I was deeply interested in my
author, I found myself, at the turn of a page and with his spell all scattered, looking straight upfrom him and hard at the door of my room. There was a moment during which I listened,
reminded of the faint sense I had had, the first night, of there being something undefinably
astir in the house, and noted the soft breath of the open casement just move the half-drawn
blind. Then, with all the marks of a deliberation that must have seemed magnificent had there
been anyone to admire it, I laid down my book, rose to my feet, and, taking a candle, went
straight out of the room and, from the passage, on which my light made little impression,
noiselessly closed and locked the door.
I can say now neither what determined nor what guided me, but I went straight along
the lobby, holding my candle high, till I came within sight of the tall window that presided
over the great turn of the staircase. At this point I precipitately found myself aware of three
things. They were practically simultaneous, yet they had flashes of succession. My candle,
under a bold flourish, went out, and I perceived, by the uncovered window, that the yielding
dusk of earliest morning rendered it unnecessary. Without it, the next instant, I saw that there
was someone on the stair. I speak of sequences, but I required no lapse of seconds to stiffen
myself for a third encounter with Quint. The apparition had reached the landing halfway up
and was therefore on the spot nearest the window, where at sight of me, it stopped short and
fixed me exactly as it had fixed me from the tower and from the garden. He knew me as well as
I knew him; and so, in the cold, faint twilight, with a glimmer in the high glass and another on
the polish of the oak stair below, we faced each other in our common intensity. He was
absolutely, on this occasion, a living, detestable, dangerous presence. But that was not the
wonder of wonders; I reserve this distinction for quite another circumstance: the circumstance
that dread had unmistakably quitted me and that there was nothing in me there that didnt
meet and measure him.
I had plenty of anguish after that extraordinary moment, but I had, thank God, no
terror. And he knew I had not I found myself at the end of an instant magnificently aware of
this. I felt, in a fierce rigor of confidence, that if I stood my ground a minute I should cease
for the time, at least to have him to reckon with; and during the minute, accordingly, the
thing was as human and hideous as a real interview: hideous just because it WAS human, as
human as to have met alone, in the small hours, in a sleeping house, some enemy, some
adventurer, some criminal. It was the dead silence of our long gaze at such close quarters that
gave the whole horror, huge as it was, its only note of the unnatural. If I had met a murderer in
such a place and at such an hour, we still at least would have spoken. Something would have
passed, in life, between us; if nothing had passed, one of us would have moved. The moment
was so prolonged that it would have taken but little more to make me doubt if even I were in
life. I cant express what followed it save by saying that the silence itself which was indeed in
a manner an attestation of my strength - became the element into which I saw the figure
disappear; in which I definitely saw it turn as I might have seen the low wretch to which it had
once belonged turn on receipt of an order, and pass, with my eyes on the villainous back that
no hunch could have more disfigured, straight down the staircase and into the darkness in
which the next bend was lost. CHAPTER 10
I remained awhile at the top of the stair, but with the effect presently of
understanding that when my visitor had gone, he had gone: then I returned to my room. The
foremost thing I saw there by the light of the candle I had left burning was that Floras little
bed was empty; and on this I caught my breath with all the terror that, five minutes before, I
had been able to resist. I dashed at the place in which I had left her lying and over which (for
the small silk counterpane and the sheets were disarranged) the white curtains had been
deceivingly pulled forward; then my step, to my unutterable relief, produced an answering
sound: I perceived an agitation of the window blind, and the child, ducking down, emerged
rosily from the other side of it. She stood there in so much of her candor and so little of her
nightgown, with her pink bare feet and the golden glow of her curls. She looked intensely
grave, and I had never had such a sense of losing an advantage acquired (the thrill of which
had just been so prodigious) as on my consciousness that she addressed me with a reproach.
You naughty: where HAVE you been?- instead of challenging her own irregularity I found
myself arraigned and explaining. She herself explained, for that matter, with the loveliest,
eagerest simplicity. She had known suddenly, as she lay there, that I was out of the room, and
had jumped up to see what had become of me. I had dropped, with the joy of her
reappearance, back into my chair feeling then, and then only, a little faint; and she had
pattered straight over to me, thrown herself upon my knee, given herself to be held with the
flame of the candle full in the wonderful little face that was still flushed with sleep. I remember
closing my eyes an instant, yieldingly, consciously, as before the excess of something beautiful
that shone out of the blue of her own. You were looking for me out of the window? I said.
You thought I might be walking in the grounds?
Well, you know, I thought someone was she never blanched as she smiled out that
at me.
Oh, how I looked at her now! And did you see anyone?
Ah, NO! she returned, almost with the full privilege of childish inconsequence,
resentfully, though with a long sweetness in her little drawl of the negative.
At that moment, in the state of my nerves, I absolutely believed she lied; and if I once
more closed my eyes it was before the dazzle of the three or four possible ways in which I
might take this up. One of these, for a moment, tempted me with such singular intensity that,
to withstand it, I must have gripped my little girl with a spasm that, wonderfully, she
submitted to without a cry or a sign of fright. Why not break out at her on the spot and have it
all over? - give it to her straight in her lovely little lighted face? You see, you see, you KNOW
that you do and that you already quite suspect I believe it; therefore, why not frankly confess
it to me, so that we may at least live with it together and learn perhaps, in the strangeness of
our fate, where we are and what it means? This solicitation dropped, alas, as it came: if I could
immediately have succumbed to it I might have spared myself well, youll see what. Instead
of succumbing I sprang again to my feet, looked at her bed, and took a helpless middle way.
Why did you pull the curtain over the place to make me think you were still there?Flora luminously considered; after which, with her little divine smile: Because I dont
like to frighten you!
But if I had, by your idea, gone out?
She absolutely declined to be puzzled; she turned her eyes to the flame of the candle
as if the question were as irrelevant, or at any rate as impersonal, as Mrs. Marcet or nine-times-
nine. Oh, but you know, she quite adequately answered, that you might come back, you
dear, and that you HAVE! And after a little, when she had got into bed, I had, for a long time,
by almost sitting on her to hold her hand, to prove that I recognized the pertinence of my
return.
You may imagine the general complexion, from that moment, of my nights. I
repeatedly sat up till I didnt know when; I selected moments when my roommate
unmistakably slept, and, stealing out, took noiseless turns in the passage and even pushed as
far as to where I had last met Quint. But I never met him there again; and I may as well say at
once that I on no other occasion saw him in the house. I just missed, on the staircase, on the
other hand, a different adventure. Looking down it from the top I once recognized the
presence of a woman seated on one of the lower steps with her back presented to me, her body
half-bowed and her head, in an attitude of woe, in her hands. I had been there but an instant,
however, when she vanished without looking round at me. I knew, nonetheless, exactly what
dreadful face she had to show; and I wondered whether, if instead of being above I had been
below, I should have had, for going up, the same nerve I had lately shown Quint. Well, there
continued to be plenty of chance for nerve. On the eleventh night after my latest encounter
with that gentleman - they were all numbered now I had an alarm that perilously skirted it
and that indeed, from the particular quality of its unexpectedness, proved quite my sharpest
shock. It was precisely the first night during this series that, weary with watching, I had felt
that I might again without laxity lay myself down at my old hour. I slept immediately and, as I
afterward knew, till about one oclock; but when I woke it was to sit straight up, as completely
roused as if a hand had shook me. I had left a light burning, but it was now out, and I felt an
instant certainty that Flora had extinguished it. This brought me to my feet and straight, in the
darkness, to her bed, which I found she had left. A glance at the window enlightened me
further, and the striking of a match completed the picture.
The child had again got up this time blowing out the taper, and had again, for some
purpose of observation or response, squeezed in behind the blind and was peering out into the
night. That she now saw - as she had not, I had satisfied myself, the previous time was proved
to me by the fact that she was disturbed neither by my reillumination nor by the haste I made
to get into slippers and into a wrap. Hidden, protected, absorbed, she evidently rested on the
sill - the casement opened forward and gave herself up. There was a great still moon to help
her, and this fact had counted in my quick decision. She was face to face with the apparition
we had met at the lake, and could now communicate with it as she had not then been able to
do. What I, on my side, had to care for was, without disturbing her, to reach, from the
corridor, some other window in the same quarter. I got to the door without her hearing me; I
got out of it, closed it, and listened, from the other side, for some sound from her. While Istood in the passage I had my eyes on her brothers door, which was but ten steps off and
which, indescribably, produced in me a renewal of the strange impulse that I lately spoke of as
my temptation. What if I should go straight in and march to HIS window? what if, by risking
to his boyish bewilderment a revelation of my motive, I should throw across the rest of the
mystery the long halter of my boldness?
This thought held me sufficiently to make me cross to his threshold and pause again. I
preternaturally listened; I figured to myself what might portentously be; I wondered if his bed
were also empty and he too were secretly at watch. It was a deep, soundless minute, at the end
of which my impulse failed. He was quiet; he might be innocent; the risk was hideous; I turned
away. There was a figure in the grounds a figure prowling for a sight, the visitor with whom
Flora was engaged; but it was not the visitor most concerned with my boy. I hesitated afresh,
but on other grounds and only for a few seconds; then I had made my choice. There were
empty rooms at Bly, and it was only a question of choosing the right one. The right one
suddenly presented itself to me as the lower one though high above the gardens in the
solid corner of the house that I have spoken of as the old tower. This was a large, square
chamber, arranged with some state as a bedroom, the extravagant size of which made it so
inconvenient that it had not for years, though kept by Mrs. Grose in exemplary order, been
occupied. I had often admired it and I knew my way about in it; I had only, after just faltering
at the first chill gloom of its disuse, to pass across it and unbolt as quietly as I could one of the
shutters. Achieving this transit, I uncovered the glass without a sound and, applying my face to
the pane, was able, the darkness without being much less than within, to see that I
commanded the right direction. Then I saw something more. The moon made the night
extraordinarily penetrable and showed me on the lawn a person, diminished by distance, who
stood there motionless and as if fascinated, looking up to where I had appeared looking, that
is, not so much straight at me as at something that was apparently above me. There was clearly
another person above me there was a person on the tower; but the presence on the lawn was
not in the least what I had conceived and had confidently hurried to meet. The presence on the
lawn I felt sick as I made it out was poor little Miles himself. CHAPTER 11
It was not till late next day that I spoke to Mrs. Grose; the rigor with which I kept my
pupils in sight making it often difficult to meet her privately, and the more as we each felt the
importance of not provoking on the part of the servants quite as much as on that of the
children any suspicion of a secret flurry or that of a discussion of mysteries. I drew a great
security in this particular from her mere smooth aspect. There was nothing in her fresh face to
pass on to others my horrible confidences. She believed me, I was sure, absolutely: if she hadnt
I dont know what would have become of me, for I couldnt have borne the business alone. But
she was a magnificent monument to the blessing of a want of imagination, and if she could see
in our little charges nothing but their beauty and amiability, their happiness and cleverness,
she had no direct communication with the sources of my trouble. If they had been at all visibly
blighted or battered, she would doubtless have grown, on tracing it back, haggard enough to
match them; as matters stood, however, I could feel her, when she surveyed them, with her
large white arms folded and the habit of serenity in all her look, thank the Lords mercy that if
they were ruined the pieces would still serve. Flights of fancy gave place, in her mind, to a
steady fireside glow, and I had already begun to perceive how, with the development of the
conviction that as time went on without a public accident our young things could, after all,
look out for themselves, she addressed her greatest solicitude to the sad case presented by
their instructress. That, for myself, was a sound simplification: I could engage that, to the
world, my face should tell no tales, but it would have been, in the conditions, an immense
added strain to find myself anxious about hers.
At the hour I now speak of she had joined me, under pressure, on the terrace, where,
with the lapse of the season, the afternoon sun was now 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 witchs 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 thestaircase 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 couldnt
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 didnt 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 Im bad I AM bad!
I see, I see its 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. CHAPTER 12
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. Thats
what he gave them a taste of at school.
Lord, you do change! cried my friend.
I dont 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 Ive watched and waited the more Ive 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 theyre steeped in
their vision of the dead restored. Hes not reading to her, I declared; theyre talking of THEM
theyre talking horrors! I go on, I know, as if I were crazy; and its a wonder Im not. What
Ive 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. Its a game, I went on; its 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 havent been good
theyve only been absent. It has been easy to live with them, because theyre simply leading a
life of their own. Theyre not mine theyre not ours. Theyre his and theyre hers!
Quints and that womans?
Quints and that womans. 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 worseeven 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. Dont 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 dont know, as yet, quite how but theyre trying hard. Theyre
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 theres 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. Theyve 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 whos 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? Thats 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 Im not a fiend, at any rate, I shouldnt 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 couldnt. Instead of iteven - as a woman reads another she could see what I myself saw: his derision, his
amusement, his contempt for the breakdown of my resignation at being left alone and for the
fine machinery I had set in motion to attract his attention to my slighted charms. She didnt
know no one knew how proud I had been to serve him and to stick to our terms; yet she
nonetheless took the measure, I think, of the warning I now gave her. If you should so lose
your head as to appeal to him for me
She was really frightened. Yes, miss?
I would leave, on the spot, both him and you. CHAPTER 13
It was all very well to join them, but speaking to them proved quite as much as ever
an effort beyond my strength offered, in close quarters, difficulties as insurmountable as
before. This situation continued a month, and with new aggravations and particular notes, the
note above all, sharper and sharper, of the small ironic consciousness on the part of my pupils.
It was not, I am as sure today as I was sure then, my mere infernal imagination: it was
absolutely traceable that they were aware of my predicament and that this strange relation
made, in a manner, for a long time, the air in which we moved. I dont mean that they had their
tongues in their cheeks or did anything vulgar, for that was not one of their dangers: I do mean,
on the other hand, that the element of the unnamed and untouched became, between us,
greater than any other, and that so much avoidance could not have been so successfully
effected without a great deal of tacit arrangement. It was as if, at moments, we were
perpetually coming into sight of subjects before which we must stop short, turning suddenly
out of alleys that we perceived to be blind, closing with a little bang that made us look at each
other for, like all bangs, it was something louder than we had intended the doors we had
indiscreetly opened. All roads lead to Rome, and there were times when it might have struck
us that almost every branch of study or subject of conversation skirted forbidden ground.
Forbidden ground was the question of the return of the dead in general and of whatever, in
especial, might survive, in memory, of the friends little children had lost. There were days when
I could have sworn that one of them had, with a small invisible nudge, said to the other: She
thinks shell do it this time but she WONT! To do it would have been to indulge for
instance and for once in a way in some direct reference to the lady who had prepared them
for my discipline. They had a delightful endless appetite for passages in my own history, to
which I had again and again treated them; they were in possession of everything that had ever
happened to me, had had, with every circumstance the story of my smallest adventures and of
those of my brothers and sisters and of the cat and the dog at home, as well as many particulars
of the eccentric nature of my father, of the furniture and arrangement of our house, and of the
conversation of the old women of our village. There were things enough, taking one with
another, to chatter about, if one went very fast and knew by instinct when to go round. They
pulled with an art of their own the strings of my invention and my memory; and nothing else
perhaps, when I thought of such occasions afterward, gave me so the suspicion of being
watched from under cover. It was in any case over MY life, MY past, and MY friends alone that
we could take anything like our ease a state of affairs that led them sometimes without the
least pertinence to break out into sociable reminders. I was invited with no visible
connection to repeat afresh Goody Goslings celebrated mot or to confirm the details
already supplied as to the cleverness of the vicarage pony.
It was partly at such junctures as these and partly at quite different ones that, with
the turn my matters had now taken, my predicament, as I have called it, grew most sensible.
The fact that the days passed for me without another encounter ought, it would have
appeared, to have done something toward soothing my nerves. Since the light brush, that
second night on the upper landing, of the presence of a woman at the foot of the stair, I hadseen nothing, whether in or out of the house, that one had better not have seen. There was
many a corner round which I expected to come upon Quint, and many a situation that, in a
merely sinister way, would have favored the appearance of Miss Jessel. The summer had
turned, the summer had gone; the autumn had dropped upon Bly and had blown out half our
lights. The place, with its gray sky and withered garlands, its bared spaces and scattered dead
leaves, was like a theater after the performance all strewn with crumpled playbills. There
were exactly states of the air, conditions of sound and of stillness, unspeakable impressions of
the KIND of ministering moment, that brought back to me, long enough to catch it, the
feeling of the medium in which, that June evening out of doors, I had had my first sight of
Quint, and in which, too, at those other instants, I had, after seeing him through the window,
looked for him in vain in the circle of shrubbery. I recognized the signs, the portents I
recognized the moment, the spot. But they remained unaccompanied and empty, and I
continued unmolested; if unmolested one could call a young woman whose sensibility had, in
the most extraordinary fashion, not declined but deepened. I had said in my talk with Mrs.
Grose on that horrid scene of Floras by the lake and had perplexed her by so saying that it
would from that moment distress me much more to lose my power than to keep it. I had then
expressed what was vividly in my mind: the truth that, whether the children really saw or not
since, that is, it was not yet definitely proved I greatly preferred, as a safeguard, the fullness
of my own exposure. I was ready to know the very worst that was to be known. What I had
then had an ugly glimpse of was that my eyes might be sealed just while theirs were most
opened. Well, my eyes WERE sealed, it appeared, at present a consummation for which it
seemed blasphemous not to thank God. There was, alas, a difficulty about that: I would have
thanked him with all my soul had I not had in a proportionate measure this conviction of the
secret of my pupils.
How can I retrace today the strange steps of my obsession? There were times of our
being together when I would have been ready to swear that, literally, in my presence, but with
my direct sense of it closed, they had visitors who were known and were welcome. Then it was
that, had I not been deterred by the very chance that such an injury might prove greater than
the injury to be averted, my exultation would have broken out. Theyre here, theyre here, you
little wretches, I would have cried, and you cant deny it now! The little wretches denied it
with all the added volume of their sociability and their tenderness, in just the crystal depths of
which like the flash of a fish in a stream the mockery of their advantage peeped up. The
shock, in truth, had sunk into me still deeper than I knew on the night when, looking out to see
either Quint or Miss Jessel under the stars, I had beheld the boy over whose rest I watched and
who had immediately brought in with him - had straightway, there, turned it on me the
lovely upward look with which, from the battlements above me, the hideous apparition of
Quint had played. If it was a question of a scare, my discovery on this occasion had scared me
more than any other, and it was in the condition of nerves produced by it that I made my
actual inductions. They harassed me so that sometimes, at odd moments, I shut myself up
audibly to rehearse - it was at once a fantastic relief and a renewed despair - the manner in
which I might come to the point. I approached it from one side and the other while, in my
room, I flung myself about, but I always broke down in the monstrous utterance of names. Asthey died away on my lips, I said to myself that I should indeed help them to represent
something infamous, if, by pronouncing them, I should violate as rare a little case of instinctive
delicacy as any schoolroom, probably, had ever known. When I said to myself: THEY have the
manners to be silent, and you, trusted as you are, the baseness to speak! I felt myself crimson
and I covered my face with my hands. After these secret scenes I chattered more than ever,
going on volubly enough till one of our prodigious, palpable hushes occurred I can call them
nothing else - the strange, dizzy lift or swim (I try for terms!) into a stillness, a pause of all life,
that had nothing to do with the more or less noise that at the moment we might be engaged in
making and that I could hear through any deepened exhilaration or quickened recitation or
louder strum of the piano. Then it was that the others, the outsiders, were there. Though they
were not angels, they passed, as the French say, causing me, while they stayed, to tremble
with the fear of their addressing to their younger victims some yet more infernal message or
more vivid image than they had thought good enough for myself.
What it was most impossible to get rid of was the cruel idea that, whatever I had
seen, Miles and Flora saw MORE things terrible and unguessable and that sprang from
dreadful passages of intercourse in the past. Such things naturally left on the surface, for the
time, a chill which we vociferously denied that we felt; and we had, all three, with repetition,
got into such splendid training that we went, each time, almost automatically, to mark the
close of the incident, through the very same movements. It was striking of the children, at all
events, to kiss me inveterately with a kind of wild irrelevance and never to fail one or the
other - of the precious question that had helped us through many a peril. When do you think
he WILL come? Dont you think we OUGHT to write? there was nothing like that inquiry,
we found by experience, for carrying off an awkwardness. He of course was their uncle in
Harley Street; and we lived in much profusion of theory that he might at any moment arrive to
mingle in our circle. It was impossible to have given less encouragement than he had done to
such a doctrine, but if we had not had the doctrine to fall back upon we should have deprived
each other of some of our finest exhibitions. He never wrote to them that may have been
selfish, but it was a part of the flattery of his trust of me; for the way in which a man pays his
highest tribute to a woman is apt to be but by the more festal celebration of one of the sacred
laws of his comfort; and I held that I carried out the spirit of the pledge given not to appeal to
him when I let my charges understand that their own letters were but charming literary
exercises. They were too beautiful to be posted; I kept them myself; I have them all to this
hour. This was a rule indeed which only added to the satiric effect of my being plied with the
supposition that he might at any moment be among us. It was exactly as if my charges knew
how almost more awkward than anything else that might be for me. There appears to me,
moreover, as I look back, no note in all this more extraordinary than the mere fact that, in
spite of my tension and of their triumph, I never lost patience with them. Adorable they must
in truth have been, I now reflect, that I didnt in these days hate them! Would exasperation,
however, if relief had longer been postponed, finally have betrayed me? It little matters, for
relief arrived. I call it relief, though it was only the relief that a snap brings to a strain or the
burst of a thunderstorm to a day of suffocation. It was at least change, and it came with a rush. CHAPTER 14
Walking to church a certain Sunday morning, I had little Miles at my side and his
sister, in advance of us and at Mrs. Groses, well in sight. It was a crisp, clear day, the first of its
order for some time; the night had brought a touch of frost, and the autumn air, bright and
sharp, made the church bells almost gay. It was an odd accident of thought that I should have
happened at such a moment to be particularly and very gratefully struck with the obedience of
my little charges. Why did they never resent my inexorable, my perpetual society? Something
or other had brought nearer home to me that I had all but pinned the boy to my shawl and
that, in the way our companions were marshaled before me, I might have appeared to provide
against some danger of rebellion. I was like a gaoler with an eye to possible surprises and
escapes. But all this belonged I mean their magnificent little surrender - just to the special
array of the facts that were most abysmal. Turned out for Sunday by his uncles tailor, who had
had a free hand and a notion of pretty waistcoats and of his grand little air, Miless whole title
to independence, the rights of his sex and situation, were so stamped upon him that if he had
suddenly struck for freedom I should have had nothing to say. I was by the strangest of chances
wondering how I should meet him when the revolution unmistakably occurred. I call it a
revolution because I now see how, with the word he spoke, the curtain rose on the last act of
my dreadful drama, and the catastrophe was precipitated. Look here, my dear, you know, he
charmingly said, when in the world, please, am I going back to school?
Transcribed here the speech sounds harmless enough, particularly as uttered in the
sweet, high, casual pipe with which, at all interlocutors, but above all at his eternal governess,
he threw off intonations as if he were tossing roses. There was something in them that always
made one catch, and I caught, at any rate, now so effectually that I stopped as short as if one
of the trees of the park had fallen across the road. There was something new, on the spot,
between us, and he was perfectly aware that I recognized it, though, to enable me to do so, he
had no need to look a whit less candid and charming than usual. I could feel in him how he
already, from my at first finding nothing to reply, perceived the advantage he had gained. I
was so slow to find anything that he had plenty of time, after a minute, to continue with his
suggestive but inconclusive smile: You know, my dear, that for a fellow to be with a lady
ALWAYS! His my dear was constantly on his lips for me, and nothing could have expressed
more the exact shade of the sentiment with which I desired to inspire my pupils than its fond
familiarity. It was so respectfully easy.
But, oh, how I felt that at present I must pick my own phrases! I remember that, to
gain time, I tried to laugh, and I seemed to see in the beautiful face with which he watched me
how ugly and queer I looked. And always with the same lady? I returned.
He neither blanched nor winked. The whole thing was virtually out between us. Ah,
of course, shes a jolly, `perfect lady; but, after all, Im a fellow, dont you see? thats well,
getting on.
I lingered there with him an instant ever so kindly. Yes, youre getting on. Oh, but I
felt helpless!I have kept to this day the heartbreaking little idea of how he seemed to know that
and to play with it. And you cant say Ive not been awfully good, can you?
I laid my hand on his shoulder, for, though I felt how much better it would have been
to walk on, I was not yet quite able. No, I cant say that, Miles.
Except just that one night, you know!
That one night? I couldnt look as straight as he.
Why, when I went down went out of the house.
Oh, yes. But I forget what you did it for.
You forget? he spoke with the sweet extravagance of childish reproach. Why, it
was to show you I could!
Oh, yes, you could.
And I can again.
I felt that I might, perhaps, after all, succeed in keeping my wits about me. Certainly.
But you wont.
No, not THAT again. It was nothing.
It was nothing, I said. But we must go on.
He resumed our walk with me, passing his hand into my arm. Then when AM I going
back?
I wore, in turning it over, my most responsible air. Were you very happy at school?
He just considered. Oh, Im happy enough anywhere!
Well, then, I quavered, if youre just as happy here
!
Ah, but that isnt everything! Of course YOU know a lot
But you hint that you know almost as much? I risked as he paused.
Not half I want to! Miles honestly professed. But it isnt so much that.
What is it, then?
Well I want to see more life.
I see; I see. We had arrived within sight of the church and of various persons,
including several of the household of Bly, on their way to it and clustered about the door to see
us go in. I quickened our step; I wanted to get there before the question between us opened
up much further; I reflected hungrily that, for more than an hour, he would have to be silent;
and I thought with envy of the comparative dusk of the pew and of the almost spiritual help of
the hassock on which I might bend my knees. I seemed literally to be running a race with some
confusion to which he was about to reduce me, but I felt that he had got in first when, before
we had even entered the churchyard, he threw out.
I want my own sort!It literally made me bound forward. There are not many of your own sort, Miles! I
laughed. Unless perhaps dear little Flora!
You really compare me to a baby girl?
This found me singularly weak. Dont you, then, LOVE our sweet Flora?
If I didnt and you, too; if I didnt
! he repeated as if retreating for a jump, yet
leaving his thought so unfinished that, after we had come into the gate, another stop, which he
imposed on me by the pressure of his arm, had become inevitable. Mrs. Grose and Flora had
passed into the church, the other worshippers had followed, and we were, for the minute,
alone among the old, thick graves. We had paused, on the path from the gate, by a low,
oblong, tablelike tomb.
Yes, if you didnt?
He looked, while I waited, at the graves. Well, you know what! But he didnt move,
and he presently produced something that made me drop straight down on the stone slab, as if
suddenly to rest. Does my uncle think what YOU think?
I markedly rested. How do you know what I think?
Ah, well, of course I dont; for it strikes me you never tell me. But I mean does HE
know?
Know what, Miles?
Why, the way Im going on.
I perceived quickly enough that I could make, to this inquiry, no answer that would
not involve something of a sacrifice of my employer. Yet it appeared to me that we were all, at
Bly, sufficiently sacrificed to make that venial. I dont think your uncle much cares.
Miles, on this, stood looking at me. Then dont you think he can be made to?
In what way?
Why, by his coming down.
But wholl get him to come down?
I will! the boy said with extraordinary brightness and emphasis. He gave me another
look charged with that expression and then marched off alone into church. CHAPTER 15
The business was practically settled from the moment I never followed him. It was a
pitiful surrender to agitation, but my being aware of this had somehow no power to restore
me. I only sat there on my tomb and read into what my little friend had said to me the fullness
of its meaning; by the time I had grasped the whole of which I had also embraced, for absence,
the pretext that I was ashamed to offer my pupils and the rest of the congregation such an
example of delay. What I said to myself above all was that Miles had got something out of me
and that the proof of it, for him, would be just this awkward collapse. He had got out of me
that there was something I was much afraid of and that he should probably be able to make
use of my fear to gain, for his own purpose, more freedom. My fear was of having to deal with
the intolerable question of the grounds of his dismissal from school, for that was really but the
question of the horrors gathered behind. That his uncle should arrive to treat with me of these
things was a solution that, strictly speaking, I ought now to have desired to bring on; but I
could so little face the ugliness and the pain of it that I simply procrastinated and lived from
hand to mouth. The boy, to my deep discomposure, was immensely in the right, was in a
position to say to me: Either you clear up with my guardian the mystery of this interruption of
my studies, or you cease to expect me to lead with you a life thats so unnatural for a boy.
What was so unnatural for the particular boy I was concerned with was this sudden revelation
of a consciousness and a plan.
That was what really overcame me, what prevented my going in. I walked round the
church, hesitating, hovering; I reflected that I had already, with him, hurt myself beyond
repair. Therefore I could patch up nothing, and it was too extreme an effort to squeeze beside
him into the pew: he would be so much more sure than ever to pass his arm into mine and make
me sit there for an hour in close, silent contact with his commentary on our talk. For the first
minute since his arrival I wanted to get away from him. As I paused beneath the high east
window and listened to the sounds of worship, I was taken with an impulse that might master
me, I felt, completely should I give it the least encouragement. I might easily put an end to my
predicament by getting away altogether. Here was my chance; there was no one to stop me; I
could give the whole thing up turn my back and retreat. It was only a question of hurrying
again, for a few preparations, to the house which the attendance at church of so many of the
servants would practically have left unoccupied. No one, in short, could blame me if I should
just drive desperately off. What was it to get away if I got away only till dinner? That would be
in a couple of hours, at the end of which - I had the acute prevision my little pupils would
play at innocent wonder about my nonappearance in their train.
What DID you do, you naughty, bad thing? Why in the world, to worry us so and
take our thoughts off, too, dont you know? - did you desert us at the very door? I couldnt
meet such questions nor, as they asked them, their false little lovely eyes; yet it was all so
exactly what I should have to meet that, as the prospect grew sharp to me, I at last let myself
go.
I got, so far as the immediate moment was concerned, away; I came straight out ofthe churchyard and, thinking hard, retraced my steps through the park. It seemed to me that
by the time I reached the house I had made up my mind I would fly. The Sunday stillness both
of the approaches and of the interior, in which I met no one, fairly excited me with a sense of
opportunity. Were I to get off quickly, this way, I should get off without a scene, without a
word. My quickness would have to be remarkable, however, and the question of a conveyance
was the great one to settle. Tormented, in the hall, with difficulties and obstacles, I remember
sinking down at the foot of the staircase suddenly collapsing there on the lowest step and
then, with a revulsion, recalling that it was exactly where more than a month before, in the
darkness of night and just so bowed with evil things, I had seen the specter of the most
horrible of women. At this I was able to straighten myself; I went the rest of the way up; I
made, in my bewilderment, for the schoolroom, where there were objects belonging to me
that I should have to take. But I opened the door to find again, in 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. CHAPTER 16
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. Groses 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
housekeepers 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, its now all out.
All out? My companion stared. But what, miss?
Everything. It doesnt matter. Ive 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 thats 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 Ive told you, however, it
doesnt matter.
Because youve 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 its the only way. Whats `out, as I told you, with Miles is
that if he thinks Im afraid to and has ideas of what he gains by that - he shall see hes
mistaken. Yes, yes; his uncle shall have it here from me on the spot (and before the boy himself,
if necessary) that if Im to be reproached with having done nothing again about more school.
Yes, miss my companion pressed me.
Well, theres 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.
Youll show it to the master?
I ought to have done so on the instant.
Oh, no! said Mrs. Grose with decision.
Ill put it before him, I went on inexorably, that I cant undertake to work the
question on behalf of a child who has been expelled
For weve never in the least known what! Mrs. Grose declared.
For wickedness. For what else when hes so clever and beautiful and perfect? Is he
stupid? Is he untidy? Is he infirm? Is he ill-natured? Hes exquisite so it can be only THAT;
and that would open up the whole thing. After all, I said, its their uncles fault. If he left here
such people!
He didnt really in the least know them. The faults mine. She had turned quite pale.
Well, you shant suffer, I answered.
The children shant! she emphatically returned.I was silent awhile; we looked at each other. Then what am I to tell him?
You neednt tell him anything. Ill tell him.
I measured this. Do you mean youll write ? Remembering she couldnt, 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. CHAPTER 17
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 Miless 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? Youre like a troop of
cavalry! he beautifully laughed.
Then you werent 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 doesnt 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 childrens
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 youve 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. Havent I? It wasnt 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. Youve 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 Im 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 dont I dont. I want to get
away.
Youre tired of Bly?
Oh, no, I like Bly.
Well, then?
Oh, YOU know what a boy wants!
I felt that I didnt know so well as Miles, and I took temporary refuge. You want to
go to your uncle?
Again, at this, with his sweet ironic face, he made a movement on the pillow. Ah, you
cant get off with that!
I was silent a little, and it was I, now, I think, who changed color. My dear, I dont
want to get off!
You cant, even if you do. You cant, you cant! he lay beautifully staring. My uncle
must come down, and you must completely settle things.
If we do, I returned with some spirit, you may be sure it will be to take you quite
away.
Well, dont you understand that thats exactly what Im working for? Youll have to
tell him about the way youve let it all drop: youll have to tell him a tremendous lot!
The exultation with which he uttered this helped me somehow, for the instant, tomeet him rather more. And how much will YOU, Miles, have to tell him? There are things hell
ask you!
He turned it over. Very likely. But what things?
The things youve never told me. To make up his mind what to do with you. He cant
send you back
Oh, I dont want to go back! he broke in. I want a new field.
He said it with admirable serenity, with positive unimpeachable gaiety; and
doubtless it was that very note that most evoked for me the poignancy, the unnatural childish
tragedy, of his probable reappearance at the end of three months with all this bravado and still
more dishonor. It overwhelmed me now that I should never be able to bear that, and it made
me let myself go. I threw myself upon him and in the tenderness of my pity I embraced him.
Dear little Miles, dear little Miles!
My face was close to his, and he let me kiss him, simply taking it with indulgent good
humor. Well, old lady?
Is there nothing nothing at all that you want to tell me?
He turned off a little, facing round toward the wall and holding up his hand to look at
as one had seen sick children look. Ive told you I told you this morning.
Oh, I was sorry for him! That you just want me not to worry you?
He looked round at me now, as if in recognition of my understanding him; then ever
so gently, To let me alone, he replied.
There was even a singular little dignity in it, something that made me release him, yet,
when I had slowly risen, linger beside him. God knows I never wished to harass him, but I felt
that merely, at this, to turn my back on him was to abandon or, to put it more truly, to lose
him. Ive just begun a letter to your uncle, I said.
Well, then, finish it!
I waited a minute. What happened before?
He gazed up at me again. Before what?
Before you came back. And before you went away.
For some time he was silent, but he continued to meet my eyes. What happened?
It made me, the sound of the words, in which it seemed to me that I caught for the
very first time a small faint quaver of consenting consciousness it made me drop on my knees
beside the bed and seize once more the chance of possessing him. Dear little Miles, dear little
Miles, if you KNEW how I want to help you! Its only that, its nothing but that, and Id rather
die than give you a pain or do you a wrong - Id rather die than hurt a hair of you. Dear little
Miles - oh, I brought it out now even if I SHOULD go too far I just want you to help me to
save you! But I knew in a moment after this that I had gone too far. The answer to my appeal
was instantaneous, but it came in the form of an extraordinary blast and chill, a gust of frozenair, and a shake of the room as great as if, in the wild wind, the casement had crashed in. The
boy gave a loud, high shriek, which, lost in the rest of the shock of sound, might have seemed,
indistinctly, though I was so close to him, a note either of jubilation or of terror. I jumped to
my feet again and was conscious of darkness. So for a moment we remained, while I stared
about me and saw that the drawn curtains were unstirred and the window tight. Why, the
candles out! I then cried.
It was I who blew it, dear! said Miles. CHAPTER 18
The next day, after lessons, Mrs. Grose found a moment to say to me quietly: Have
you written, miss?
Yes Ive written. But I didnt add for the hour that my letter, sealed and
directed, was still in my pocket. There would be time enough to send it before the messenger
should go to the village. Meanwhile there had been, on the part of my pupils, no more brilliant,
more exemplary morning. It was exactly as if they had both had at heart to gloss over any
recent little friction. They performed the dizziest feats of arithmetic, soaring quite out of MY
feeble range, and perpetrated, in higher spirits than ever, geographical and historical jokes. It
was conspicuous of course in Miles in particular that he appeared to wish to show how easily
he could let me down. This child, to my memory, really lives in a setting of beauty and misery
that no words can translate; there was a distinction all his own in every impulse he revealed;
never was a small natural creature, to the uninitiated eye all frankness and freedom, a more
ingenious, a more extraordinary little gentleman. I had perpetually to guard against the
wonder of contemplation into which my initiated view betrayed me; to check the irrelevant
gaze and discouraged sigh in which I constantly both attacked and renounced the enigma of
what such a little gentleman could have done that deserved a penalty. Say that, by the dark
prodigy I knew, the imagination of all evil HAD been opened up to him: all the justice within
me ached for the proof that it could ever have flowered into an act.
He had never, at any rate, been such a little gentleman as when, after our early dinner
on this dreadful day, he came round to me and asked if I shouldnt like him, for half an hour, to
play to me. David playing to Saul could never have shown a finer sense of the occasion. It was
literally a charming exhibition of tact, of magnanimity, and quite tantamount to his saying
outright: The true knights we love to read about never push an advantage too far. I know what
you mean now: you mean that - to be let alone yourself and not followed up youll cease to
worry and spy upon me, wont keep me so close to you, will let me go and come. Well, I come,
you see but I dont go! Therell be plenty of time for that. I do really delight in your society,
and I only want to show you that I contended for a principle. It may be imagined whether I
resisted this appeal or failed to accompany him again, hand in hand, to the schoolroom. He sat
down at the old piano and played as he had never played; and if there are those who think he
had better have been kicking a football I can only say that I wholly agree with them. For at the
end of a time that under his influence I had quite ceased to measure, I started up with a
strange sense of having literally slept at my post. It was after luncheon, and by the schoolroom
fire, and yet I hadnt really, in the least, slept: I had only done something much worse - I had
forgotten. Where, all this time, was Flora? When I put the question to Miles, he played on a
minute before answering and then could only say: Why, my dear, how do I know? breaking
moreover into a happy laugh which, immediately after, as if it were a vocal accompaniment, he
prolonged into incoherent, extravagant song.
I went straight to my room, but his sister was not there; then, before going
downstairs, I looked into several others. As she was nowhere about she would surely be withMrs. Grose, whom, in the comfort of that theory, I accordingly proceeded in quest of. I found
her where I had found her the evening before, but she met my quick challenge with blank,
scared ignorance. She had only supposed that, after the repast, I had carried off both the
children; as to which she was quite in her right, for it was the very first time I had allowed the
little girl out of my sight without some special provision. Of course now indeed she might be
with the maids, so that the immediate thing was to look for her without an air of alarm. This we
promptly arranged between us; but when, ten minutes later and in pursuance of our
arrangement, we met in the hall, it was only to report on either side that after guarded
inquiries we had altogether failed to trace her. For a minute there, apart from observation, we
exchanged mute alarms, and I could feel with what high interest my friend returned me all
those I had from the first given her.
Shell be above, she presently said, in one of the rooms you havent searched.
No; shes at a distance. I had made up my mind. She has gone out.
Mrs. Grose stared. Without a hat?
I naturally also looked volumes. Isnt that woman always without one?
Shes with HER?
Shes with HER! I declared. We must find them.
My hand was on my friends arm, but she failed for the moment, confronted with such
an account of the matter, to respond to my pressure. She communed, on the contrary, on the
spot, with her uneasiness. And wheres Master Miles?
Oh, HES with Quint. Theyre in the schoolroom.
Lord, miss! My view, I was myself aware - and therefore I suppose my tone - had
never yet reached so calm an assurance.
The tricks played, I went on; theyve successfully worked their plan. He found the
most divine little way to keep me quiet while she went off.
Divine? Mrs. Grose bewilderedly echoed.
Infernal, then! I almost cheerfully rejoined. He has provided for himself as well. But
come!
She had helplessly gloomed at the upper regions. You leave him?
So long with Quint? Yes I dont mind that now.
She always ended, at these moments, by getting possession of my hand, and in this
manner she could at present still stay me. But after gasping an instant at my sudden
resignation, Because of your letter? she eagerly brought out.
I quickly, by way of answer, felt for my letter, drew it forth, held it up, and then,
freeing myself, went and laid it on the great hall table. Luke will take it, I said as I came back.
I reached the house door and opened it; I was already on the steps.
My companion still demurred: the storm of the night and the early morning haddropped, but the afternoon was damp and gray. I came down to the drive while she stood in
the doorway. You go with nothing on?
What do I care when the child has nothing? I cant wait to dress, I cried, and if you
must do so, I leave you. Try meanwhile, yourself, upstairs.
With THEM? Oh, on this, the poor woman promptly joined me! CHAPTER 19
We went straight to the lake, as it was called at Bly, and I daresay rightly called,
though I reflect that it may in fact have been a sheet of water less remarkable than it appeared
to my untraveled eyes. My acquaintance with sheets of water was small, and the pool of Bly, at
all events on the few occasions of my consenting, under the protection of my pupils, to affront
its surface in the old flat-bottomed boat moored there for our use, had impressed me both
with its extent and its agitation. The usual place of embarkation was half a mile from the
house, but I had an intimate conviction that, wherever Flora might be, she was not near home.
She had not given me the slip for any small adventure, and, since the day of the very great one
that I had shared with her by the pond, I had been aware, in our walks, of the quarter to which
she most inclined. This was why I had now given to Mrs. Groses steps so marked a direction a
direction that made her, when she perceived it, oppose a resistance that showed me she was
freshly mystified. Youre going to the water, Miss? - you think shes IN?
She may be, though the depth is, I believe, nowhere very great. But what I judge
most likely is that shes on the spot from which, the other day, we saw together what I told
you.
When she pretended not to see?
With that astounding self-possession? Ive always been sure she wanted to go back
alone. And now her brother has managed it for her.
Mrs. Grose still stood where she had stopped. You suppose they really TALK of
them?
I could meet this with a confidence! They say things that, if we heard them, would
simply appall us.
And if she IS there
Yes?
Then Miss Jessel is?
Beyond a doubt. You shall see.
Oh, thank you! my friend cried, planted so firm that, taking it in, I went straight on
without her. By the time I reached the pool, however, she was close behind me, and I knew
that, whatever, to her apprehension, might befall me, the exposure of my society struck her as
her least danger. She exhaled a moan of relief as we at last came in sight of the greater part of
the water without a sight of the child. There was no trace of Flora on that nearer side of the
bank where my observation of her had been most startling, and none on the opposite edge,
where, save for a margin of some twenty yards, a thick copse came down to the water. The
pond, oblong in shape, had a width so scant compared to its length that, with its ends out of
view, it might have been taken for a scant river. We looked at the empty expanse, and then I
felt the suggestion of my friends eyes. I knew what she meant and I replied with a negative
headshake.No, no; wait! She has taken the boat.
My companion stared at the vacant mooring place and then again across the lake.
Then where is it?
Our not seeing it is the strongest of proofs. She has used it to go over, and then has
managed to hide it.
All alone that child?
Shes not alone, and at such times shes not a child: shes an old, old woman. I
scanned all the visible shore while Mrs. Grose took again, into the queer element I offered her,
one of her plunges of submission; then I pointed out that the boat might perfectly be in a small
refuge formed by one of the recesses of the pool, an indentation masked, for the hither side, by
a projection of the bank and by a clump of trees growing close to the water.
But if the boats there, where on earths SHE? my colleague anxiously asked.
Thats exactly what we must learn. And I started to walk further.
By going all the way round?
Certainly, far as it is. It will take us but ten minutes, but its far enough to have made
the child prefer not to walk. She went straight over.
Laws! cried my friend again; the chain of my logic was ever too much for her. It
dragged her at my heels even now, and when we had got halfway round a devious, tiresome
process, on ground much broken and by a path choked with overgrowth - I paused to give her
breath. I sustained her with a grateful arm, assuring her that she might hugely help me; and this
started us afresh, so that in the course of but few minutes more we reached a point from which
we found the boat to be where I had supposed it. It had been intentionally left as much as
possible out of sight and was tied to one of the stakes of a fence that came, just there, down to
the brink and that had been an assistance to disembarking. I recognized, as I looked at the pair
of short, thick oars, quite safely drawn up, the prodigious character of the feat for a little girl;
but I had lived, by this time, too long among wonders and had panted to too many livelier
measures. There was a gate in the fence, through which we passed, and that brought us, after a
trifling interval, more into the open. Then, There she is! we both exclaimed at once.
Flora, a short way off, stood before us on the grass and smiled as if her performance
was now complete. The next thing she did, however, was to stoop straight down and pluck
quite as if it were all she was there for a big, ugly spray of withered fern. I instantly became
sure she had just come out of the copse. She waited for us, not herself taking a step, and I was
conscious of the rare solemnity with which we presently approached her. She smiled and
smiled, and we met; but it was all done in a silence by this time flagrantly ominous. Mrs. Grose
was the first to break the spell: she threw herself on her knees and, drawing the child to her
breast, clasped in a long embrace the little tender, yielding body. While this dumb convulsion
lasted I could only watch it which I did the more intently when I saw Floras face peep at me
over our companions shoulder. It was serious now the flicker had left it; but it strengthened
the pang with which I at that moment envied Mrs. Grose the simplicity of HER relation. Still,all this while, nothing more passed between us save that Flora had let her foolish fern again
drop to the ground. What she and I had virtually said to each other was that pretexts were
useless now. When Mrs. Grose finally got up she kept the childs hand, so that the two were
still before me; and the singular reticence of our communion was even more marked in the
frank look she launched me. Ill be hanged, it said, if Ill speak!
It was Flora who, gazing all over me in candid wonder, was the first. She was struck
with our bareheaded aspect. Why, where are your things?
Where yours are, my dear! I promptly returned.
She had already got back her gaiety, and appeared to take this as an answer quite
sufficient. And wheres Miles? she went on.
There was something in the small valor of it that quite finished me: these three words
from her were, in a flash like the glitter of a drawn blade, the jostle of the cup that my hand,
for weeks and weeks, had held high and full to the brim that now, even before speaking, I felt
overflow in a deluge. Ill tell you if youll tell ME I heard myself say, then heard the tremor in
which it broke.
Well, what?
Mrs. Groses suspense blazed at me, but it was too late now, and I brought the thing
out handsomely. Where, my pet, is Miss Jessel? CHAPTER 20
Just as in the churchyard with Miles, the whole thing was upon us. Much as I had
made of the fact that this name had never once, between us, been sounded, the quick, smitten
glare with which the childs face now received it fairly likened my breach of the silence to the
smash of a pane of glass. It added to the interposing cry, as if to stay the blow, that Mrs. Grose,
at the same instant, uttered over my violence the shriek of a creature scared, or rather
wounded, which, in turn, within a few seconds, was completed by a gasp of my own. I seized
my colleagues arm. Shes there, shes there!
Miss Jessel stood before us on the opposite bank exactly as she had stood the other
time, and I remember, strangely, as the first feeling now produced in me, my thrill of joy at
having brought on a proof. She was there, and I was justified; she was there, and I was neither
cruel nor mad. She was there for poor scared Mrs. Grose, but she was there most for Flora; and
no moment of my monstrous time was perhaps so extraordinary as that in which I consciously
threw out to her with the sense that, pale and ravenous demon as she was, she would catch
and understand it an inarticulate message of gratitude. She rose erect on the spot my friend
and I had lately quitted, and there was not, in all the long reach of her desire, an inch of her
evil that fell short. This first vividness of vision and emotion were things of a few seconds,
during which Mrs. Groses dazed blink across to where I pointed struck me as a sovereign sign
that she too at last saw, just as it carried my own eyes precipitately to the child. The revelation
then of the manner in which Flora was affected startled me, in truth, far more than it would
have done to find her also merely agitated, for direct dismay was of course not what I had
expected. Prepared and on her guard as our pursuit had actually made her, she would repress
every betrayal; and I was therefore shaken, on the spot, by my first glimpse of the particular
one for which I had not allowed. To see her, without a convulsion of her small pink face, not
even feign to glance in the direction of the prodigy I announced, but only, instead of that, turn
at ME an expression of hard, still gravity, an expression absolutely new and unprecedented
and that appeared to read and accuse and judge me this was a stroke that somehow
converted the little girl herself into the very presence that could make me quail. I quailed even
though my certitude that she thoroughly saw was never greater than at that instant, and in the
immediate need to defend myself I called it passionately to witness. Shes there, you little
unhappy thing there, there, THERE, and you see her as well as you see me! I had said shortly
before to Mrs. Grose that she was not at these times a child, but an old, old woman, and that
description of her could not have been more strikingly confirmed than in the way in which, for
all answer to this, she simply showed me, without a concession, an admission, of her eyes, a
countenance of deeper and deeper, of indeed suddenly quite fixed, reprobation. I was by this
time - if I can put the whole thing at all together more appalled at what I may properly call
her manner than at anything else, though it was simultaneously with this that I became aware
of having Mrs. Grose also, and very formidably, to reckon with. My elder companion, the next
moment, at any rate, blotted out everything but her own flushed face and her loud, shocked
protest, a burst of high disapproval. What a dreadful turn, to be sure, miss! Where on earth
do you see anything?I could only grasp her more quickly yet, for even while she spoke the hideous plain
presence stood undimmed and undaunted. It had already lasted a minute, and it lasted while I
continued, seizing my colleague, quite thrusting her at it and presenting her to it, to insist with
my pointing hand. You dont see her exactly as WE see? - you mean to say you dont now
NOW? Shes as big as a blazing fire! Only look, dearest woman, LOOK
! She looked, even as
I did, and gave me, with her deep groan of negation, repulsion, compassion the mixture with
her pity of her relief at her exemption a sense, touching to me even then, that she would have
backed me up if she could. I might well have needed that, for with this hard blow of the proof
that her eyes were hopelessly sealed I felt my own situation horribly crumble, I felt I saw
my livid predecessor press, from her position, on my defeat, and I was conscious, more than all,
of what I should have from this instant to deal with in the astounding little attitude of Flora.
Into this attitude Mrs. Grose immediately and violently entered, breaking, even while there
pierced through my sense of ruin a prodigious private triumph, into breathless reassurance.
She isnt there, little lady, and nobodys there and you never see nothing, my sweet!
How can poor Miss Jessel when poor Miss Jessels dead and buried? WE know, dont we,
love? and she appealed, blundering in, to the child. Its all a mere mistake and a worry and a
joke and well go home as fast as we can!
Our companion, on this, had responded with a strange, quick primness of propriety,
and they were again, with Mrs. Grose on her feet, united, as it were, in pained opposition to
me. Flora continued to fix me with her small mask of reprobation, and even at that minute I
prayed God to forgive me for seeming to see that, as she stood there holding tight to our
friends dress, her incomparable childish beauty had suddenly failed, had quite vanished. Ive
said it already she was literally, she was hideously, hard; she had turned common and almost
ugly. I dont know what you mean. I see nobody. I see nothing. I never HAVE. I think youre
cruel. I dont like you!
Then, after this deliverance, which might have been that of a vulgarly pert little girl in
the street, she hugged Mrs. Grose more closely and buried in her skirts the dreadful little face.
In this position she produced an almost furious wail. Take me away, take me away oh, take
me away from HER!
From ME? I panted.
From you from you! she cried.
Even Mrs. Grose looked across at me dismayed, while I had nothing to do but
communicate again with the figure that, on the opposite bank, without a movement, as rigidly
still as if catching, beyond the interval, our voices, was as vividly there for my disaster as it was
not there for my service. The wretched child had spoken exactly as if she had got from some
outside source each of her stabbing little words, and I could therefore, in the full despair of all
I had to accept, but sadly shake my head at her. If I had ever doubted, all my doubt would at
present have gone. Ive been living with the miserable truth, and now it has only too much
closed round me. Of course Ive lost you: Ive interfered, and youve seen under HER
dictation with which I faced, over the pool again, our infernal witness the easy andperfect way to meet it. Ive done my best, but Ive lost you. Goodbye. For Mrs. Grose I had an
imperative, an almost frantic Go, go! before which, in infinite distress, but mutely possessed
of the little girl and clearly convinced, in spite of her blindness, that something awful had
occurred and some collapse engulfed us, she retreated, by the way we had come, as fast as she
could move.
Of what first happened when I was left alone I had no subsequent memory. I only
knew that at the end of, I suppose, a quarter of an hour, an odorous dampness and roughness,
chilling and piercing my trouble, had made me understand that I must have thrown myself, on
my face, on the ground and given way to a wildness of grief. I must have lain there long and
cried and sobbed, for when I raised my head the day was almost done. I got up and looked a
moment, through the twilight, at the gray pool and its blank, haunted edge, and then I took,
back to the house, my dreary and difficult course. When I reached the gate in the fence the
boat, to my surprise, was gone, so that I had a fresh reflection to make on Floras extraordinary
command of the situation. She passed that night, by the most tacit, and I should add, were not
the word so grotesque a false note, the happiest of arrangements, with Mrs. Grose. I saw
neither of them on my return, but, on the other hand, as by an ambiguous compensation, I saw
a great deal of Miles. I saw I can use no other phrase so much of him that it was as if it were
more than it had ever been. No evening I had passed at Bly had the portentous quality of this
one; in spite of which and in spite also of the deeper depths of consternation that had
opened beneath my feet there was literally, in the ebbing actual, an extraordinarily sweet
sadness. On reaching the house I had never so much as looked for the boy; I had simply gone
straight to my room to change what I was wearing and to take in, at a glance, much material
testimony to Floras rupture. Her little belongings had all been removed. When later, by the
schoolroom fire, I was served with tea by the usual maid, I indulged, on the article of my other
pupil, in no inquiry whatever. He had his freedom now he might have it to the end! Well, he
did have it; and it consisted in part at least of his coming in at about eight oclock and
sitting down with me in silence. On the removal of the tea things I had blown out the candles
and drawn my chair closer: I was conscious of a mortal coldness and felt as if I should never
again be warm. So, when he appeared, I was sitting in the glow with my thoughts. He paused a
moment by the door as if to look at me; then - as if to share them came to the other side of
the hearth and sank into a chair. We sat there in absolute stillness; yet he wanted, I felt, to be
with me. CHAPTER 21
Before a new day, in my room, had fully broken, my eyes opened to Mrs. Grose, who
had come to my bedside with worse news. Flora was so markedly feverish that an illness was
perhaps at hand; she had passed a night of extreme unrest, a night agitated above all by fears
that had for their subject not in the least her former, but wholly her present, governess. It was
not against the possible re-entrance of Miss Jessel on the scene that she protested it was
conspicuously and passionately against mine. I was promptly on my feet of course, and with an
immense deal to ask; the more that my friend had discernibly now girded her loins to meet me
once more. This I felt as soon as I had put to her the question of her sense of the childs
sincerity as against my own. She persists in denying to you that she saw, or has ever seen,
anything?
My visitors trouble, truly, was great. Ah, miss, it isnt a matter on which I can push
her! Yet it isnt either, I must say, as if I much needed to. It has made her, every inch of her,
quite old.
Oh, I see her perfectly from here. She resents, for all the world like some high little
personage, the imputation on her truthfulness and, as it were, her respectability. Miss Jessel
indeed SHE! Ah, shes respectable, the chit! The impression she gave me there yesterday
was, I assure you, the very strangest of all; it was quite beyond any of the others. I DID put my
foot in it! Shell never speak to me again.
Hideous and obscure as it all was, it held Mrs. Grose briefly silent; then she granted
my point with a frankness which, I made sure, had more behind it. I think indeed, miss, she
never will. She do have a grand manner about it!
And that manner I summed it up is practically whats the matter with her now!
Oh, that manner, I could see in my visitors face, and not a little else besides! She asks
me every three minutes if I think youre coming in.
I see - I see. I, too, on my side, had so much more than worked it out. Has she said
to you since yesterday except to repudiate her familiarity with anything so dreadful - a
single other word about Miss Jessel?
Not one, miss. And of course you know, my friend added, I took it from her, by the
lake, that, just then and there at least, there WAS nobody.
Rather! and, naturally, you take it from her still.
I dont contradict her. What else can I do?
Nothing in the world! Youve the cleverest little person to deal with. Theyve made
them their two friends, I mean still cleverer even than nature did; for it was wondrous
material to play on! Flora has now her grievance, and shell work it to the end.
Yes, miss; but to WHAT end?
Why, that of dealing with me to her uncle. Shell make me out to him the lowestcreature
!
I winced at the fair show of the scene in Mrs. Groses face; she looked for a minute as if
she sharply saw them together. And him who thinks so well of you!
He has an odd way it comes over me now, I laughed, of proving it! But that
doesnt matter. What Flora wants, of course, is to get rid of me.
My companion bravely concurred. Never again to so much as look at you.
So that what youve come to me now for, I asked, is to speed me on my way?
Before she had time to reply, however, I had her in check. Ive a better idea - the result of my
reflections. My going WOULD seem the right thing, and on Sunday I was terribly near it. Yet
that wont do. Its YOU who must go. You must take Flora.
My visitor, at this, did speculate. But where in the world?
Away from here. Away from THEM. Away, even most of all, now, from me. Straight
to her uncle.
Only to tell on you?
No, not `only! To leave me, in addition, with my remedy.
She was still vague. And what IS your remedy?
Your loyalty, to begin with. And then Miless.
She looked at me hard. Do you think he
?
Wont, if he has the chance, turn on me? Yes, I venture still to think it. At all events, I
want to try. Get off with his sister as soon as possible and leave me with him alone. I was
amazed, myself, at the spirit I had still in reserve, and therefore perhaps a trifle the more
disconcerted at the way in which, in spite of this fine example of it, she hesitated. Theres one
thing, of course, I went on: they mustnt, before she goes, see each other for three seconds.
Then it came over me that, in spite of Floras presumable sequestration from the instant of her
return from the pool, it might already be too late. Do you mean, I anxiously asked, that they
HAVE met?
At this she quite flushed. Ah, miss, Im not such a fool as that! If Ive been obliged to
leave her three or four times, it has been each time with one of the maids, and at present,
though shes alone, shes locked in safe. And yet and yet! There were too many things.
And yet what?
Well, are you so sure of the little gentleman?
Im not sure of anything but YOU. But I have, since last evening, a new hope. I think
he wants to give me an opening. I do believe that poor little exquisite wretch! - he wants to
speak. Last evening, in the firelight and the silence, he sat with me for two hours as if it were
just coming.
Mrs. Grose looked hard, through the window, at the gray, gathering day. And did it
come?No, though I waited and waited, I confess it didnt, and it was without a breach of
the silence or so much as a faint allusion to his sisters condition and absence that we at last
kissed for good night. All the same, I continued, I cant, if her uncle sees her, consent to his
seeing her brother without my having given the boy and most of all because things have got
so bad - a little more time.
My friend appeared on this ground more reluctant than I could quite understand.
What do you mean by more time?
Well, a day or two really to bring it out. Hell then be on MY side of which you
see the importance. If nothing comes, I shall only fail, and you will, at the worst, have helped
me by doing, on your arrival in town, whatever you may have found possible. So I put it before
her, but she continued for a little so inscrutably embarrassed that I came again to her aid.
Unless, indeed, I wound up, you really want NOT to go.
I could see it, in her face, at last clear itself; she put out her hand to me as a pledge.
Ill go Ill go. Ill go this morning.
I wanted to be very just. If you SHOULD wish still to wait, I would engage she
shouldnt see me.
No, no: its the place itself. She must leave it. She held me a moment with heavy eyes,
then brought out the rest. Your ideas the right one. I myself, miss
Well?
I cant stay.
The look she gave me with it made me jump at possibilities. You mean that, since
yesterday, you HAVE seen?
She shook her head with dignity. Ive HEARD!
Heard?
From that child horrors! There! she sighed with tragic relief. On my honor, miss,
she says things! But at this evocation she broke down; she dropped, with a sudden sob, upon
my sofa and, as I had seen her do before, gave way to all the grief of it.
It was quite in another manner that I, for my part, let myself go. Oh, thank God!
She sprang up again at this, drying her eyes with a groan. Thank God?
It so justifies me!
It does that, miss!
I couldnt have desired more emphasis, but I just hesitated. Shes so horrible?
I saw my colleague scarce knew how to put it. Really shocking.
And about me?
About you, miss since you must have it. Its beyond everything, for a young lady;
and I cant think wherever she must have picked upThe appalling language she applied to me? I can, then! I broke in with a laugh that
was doubtless significant enough.
It only, in truth, left my friend still more grave. Well, perhaps I ought to also since
Ive heard some of it before! Yet I cant bear it, the poor woman went on while, with the same
movement, she glanced, on my dressing table, at the face of my watch. But I must go back.
I kept her, however. Ah, if you cant bear it!
How can I stop with her, you mean? Why, just FOR that: to get her away. Far from
this, she pursued, far from THEM
She may be different? She may be free? I seized her almost with joy. Then, in spite
of yesterday, you BELIEVE
In such doings? Her simple description of them required, in the light of her
expression, to be carried no further, and she gave me the whole thing as she had never done. I
believe.
Yes, it was a joy, and we were still shoulder to shoulder: if I might continue sure of
that I should care but little what else happened. My support in the presence of disaster would
be the same as it had been in my early need of confidence, and if my friend would answer for
my honesty, I would answer for all the rest. On the point of taking leave of her, nonetheless, I
was to some extent embarrassed. Theres one thing, of course it occurs to me to
remember. My letter, giving the alarm, will have reached town before you.
I now perceived still more how she had been beating about the bush and how weary
at last it had made her. Your letter wont have got there. Your letter never went.
What then became of it?
Goodness knows! Master Miles
Do you mean HE took it? I gasped.
She hung fire, but she overcame her reluctance. I mean that I saw yesterday, when I
came back with Miss Flora, that it wasnt where you had put it.
Later in the evening I had the chance to question Luke, and he declared that he had
neither noticed nor touched it. We could only exchange, on this, one of our deeper mutual
soundings, and it was Mrs. Grose who first brought up the plumb with an almost elated You
see!
Yes, I see that if Miles took it instead he probably will have read it and destroyed it.
And dont you see anything else?
I faced her a moment with a sad smile. It strikes me that by this time your eyes are
open even wider than mine.
They proved to be so indeed, but she could still blush, almost, to show it. I make out
now what he must have done at school. And she gave, in her simple sharpness, an almost droll
disillusioned nod. He stole!I turned it over I tried to be more judicial. Well perhaps.
She looked as if she found me unexpectedly calm. He stole LETTERS!
She couldnt know my reasons for a calmness after all pretty shallow; so I showed
them off as I might. I hope then it was to more purpose than in this case! The note, at any rate,
that I put on the table yesterday, I pursued, will have given him so scant an advantage for
it contained only the bare demand for an interview - that he is already much ashamed of
having gone so far for so little, and that what he had on his mind last evening was precisely the
need of confession. I seemed to myself, for the instant, to have mastered it, to see it all. Leave
us, leave us- I was already, at the door, hurrying her off. Ill get it out of him. Hell meet me -
hell confess. If he confesses, hes saved. And if hes saved
Then YOU are? The dear woman kissed me on this, and I took her farewell. Ill save
you without him! she cried as she went. CHAPTER 22
Yet it was when she had got off and I missed her on the spot that the great pinch
really came. If I had counted on what it would give me to find myself alone with Miles, I
speedily perceived, at least, that it would give me a measure. No hour of my stay in fact was so
assailed with apprehensions as that of my coming down to learn that the carriage containing
Mrs. Grose and my younger pupil had already rolled out of the gates. Now I WAS, I said to
myself, face to face with the elements, and for much of the rest of the day, while I fought my
weakness, I could consider that I had been supremely rash. It was a tighter place still than I
had yet turned round in; all the more that, for the first time, I could see in the aspect of others
a confused reflection of the crisis. What had happened naturally caused them all to stare; there
was too little of the explained, throw out whatever we might, in the suddenness of my
colleagues act. The maids and the men looked blank; the effect of which on my nerves was an
aggravation until I saw the necessity of making it a positive aid. It was precisely, in short, by
just clutching the helm that I avoided total wreck; and I dare say that, to bear up at all, I
became, that morning, very grand and very dry. I welcomed the consciousness that I was
charged with much to do, and I caused it to be known as well that, left thus to myself, I was
quite remarkably firm. I wandered with that manner, for the next hour or two, all over the
place and looked, I have no doubt, as if I were ready for any onset. So, for the benefit of whom
it might concern, I paraded with a sick heart.
The person it appeared least to concern proved to be, till dinner, little Miles himself.
My perambulations had given me, meanwhile, no glimpse of him, but they had tended to make
more public the change taking place in our relation as a consequence of his having at the
piano, the day before, kept me, in Floras interest, so beguiled and befooled. The stamp of
publicity had of course been fully given by her confinement and departure, and the change
itself was now ushered in by our nonobservance of the regular custom of the schoolroom. He
had already disappeared when, on my way down, I pushed open his door, and I learned below
that he had breakfasted in the presence of a couple of the maids with Mrs. Grose and his
sister. He had then gone out, as he said, for a stroll; than which nothing, I reflected, could
better have expressed his frank view of the abrupt transformation of my office. What he would
not permit this office to consist of was yet to be settled: there was a queer relief, at all events
I mean for myself in especial - in the renouncement of one pretension. If so much had sprung to
the surface, I scarce put it too strongly in saying that what had perhaps sprung highest was the
absurdity of our prolonging the fiction that I had anything more to teach him. It sufficiently
stuck out that, by tacit little tricks in which even more than myself he carried out the care for
my dignity, I had had to appeal to him to let me off straining to meet him on the ground of his
true capacity. He had at any rate his freedom now; I was never to touch it again; as I had amply
shown, moreover, when, on his joining me in the schoolroom the previous night, I had uttered,
on the subject of the interval just concluded, neither challenge nor hint. I had too much, from
this moment, my other ideas. Yet when he at last arrived, the difficulty of applying them, the
accumulations of my problem, were brought straight home to me by the beautiful little
presence on which what had occurred had as yet, for the eye, dropped neither stain norshadow.
To mark, for the house, the high state I cultivated I decreed that my meals with the
boy should be served, as we called it, downstairs; so that I had been awaiting him in the
ponderous pomp of the room outside of the window of which I had had from Mrs. Grose, that
first scared Sunday, my flash of something it would scarce have done to call light. Here at
present I felt afresh for I had felt it again and again - how my equilibrium depended on the
success of my rigid will, the will to shut my eyes as tight as possible to the truth that what I had
to deal with was, revoltingly, against nature. I could only get on at all by taking nature into
my confidence and my account, by treating my monstrous ordeal as a push in a direction
unusual, of course, and unpleasant, but demanding, after all, for a fair front, only another turn
of the screw of ordinary human virtue. No attempt, nonetheless, could well require more tact
than just this attempt to supply, ones self, ALL the nature. How could I put even a little of
that article into a suppression of reference to what had occurred? How, on the other hand,
could I make reference without a new plunge into the hideous obscure? Well, a sort of answer,
after a time, had come to me, and it was so far confirmed as that I was met, incontestably, by
the quickened vision of what was rare in my little companion. It was indeed as if he had found
even now as he had so often found at lessons still some other delicate way to ease me off.
Wasnt there light in the fact which, as we shared our solitude, broke out with a specious
glitter it had never yet quite worn? - the fact that (opportunity aiding, precious opportunity
which had now come) it would be preposterous, with a child so endowed, to forego the help
one might wrest from absolute intelligence? What had his intelligence been given him for but
to save him? Mightnt one, to reach his mind, risk the stretch of an angular arm over his
character? It was as if, when we were face to face in the dining room, he had literally shown me
the way. The roast mutton was on the table, and I had dispensed with attendance. Miles,
before he sat down, stood a moment with his hands in his pockets and looked at the joint, on
which he seemed on the point of passing some humorous judgment. But what he presently
produced was: I say, my dear, is she really very awfully ill?
Little Flora? Not so bad but that shell presently be better. London will set her up.
Bly had ceased to agree with her. Come here and take your mutton.
He alertly obeyed me, carried the plate carefully to his seat, and, when he was
established, went on. Did Bly disagree with her so terribly suddenly?
Not so suddenly as you might think. One had seen it coming on.
Then why didnt you get her off before?
Before what?
Before she became too ill to travel.
I found myself prompt. Shes NOT too ill to travel: she only might have become so if
she had stayed. This was just the moment to seize. The journey will dissipate the influence
oh, I was grand! and carry it off.
I see, I see Miles, for that matter, was grand, too. He settled to his repast with thecharming little table manner that, from the day of his arrival, had relieved me of all grossness
of admonition. Whatever he had been driven from school for, it was not for ugly feeding. He
was irreproachable, as always, today; but he was unmistakably more conscious. He was
discernibly trying to take for granted more things than he found, without assistance, quite
easy; and he dropped into peaceful silence while he felt his situation. Our meal was of the
briefest mine a vain pretense, and I had the things immediately removed. While this was
done Miles stood again with his hands in his little pockets and his back to me stood and
looked out of the wide window through which, that other day, I had seen what pulled me up.
We continued silent while the maid was with us - as silent, it whimsically occurred to me, as
some young couple who, on their wedding journey, at the inn, feel shy in the presence of the
waiter. He turned round only when the waiter had left us. Well so were alone! CHAPTER 23
Oh, more or less. I fancy my smile was pale. Not absolutely. We shouldnt like that!
I went on.
No I suppose we shouldnt. Of course we have the others.
We have the others we have indeed the others, I concurred.
Yet even though we have them, he returned, still with his hands in his pockets and
planted there in front of me, they dont much count, do they?
I made the best of it, but I felt wan. It depends on what you call `much!
Yes with all accommodation everything depends! On this, however, he faced
to the window again and presently reached it with his vague, restless, cogitating step. He
remained there awhile, with his forehead against the glass, in contemplation of the stupid
shrubs I knew and the dull things of November. I had always my hypocrisy of work, behind
which, now, I gained the sofa. Steadying myself with it there as I had repeatedly done at those
moments of torment that I have described as the moments of my knowing the children to be
given to something from which I was barred, I sufficiently obeyed my habit of being prepared
for the worst. But an extraordinary impression dropped on me as I extracted a meaning from
the boys embarrassed back none other than the impression that I was not barred now. This
inference grew in a few minutes to sharp intensity and seemed bound up with the direct
perception that it was positively HE who was. The frames and squares of the great window
were a kind of image, for him, of a kind of failure. I felt that I saw him, at any rate, shut in or
shut out. He was admirable, but not comfortable: I took it in with a throb of hope. Wasnt he
looking, through the haunted pane, for something he couldnt see? and wasnt it the first
time in the whole business that he had known such a lapse? The first, the very first: I found it a
splendid portent. It made him anxious, though he watched himself; he had been anxious all
day and, even while in his usual sweet little manner he sat at table, had needed all his small
strange genius to give it a gloss. When he at last turned round to meet me, it was almost as if
this genius had succumbed. Well, I think Im glad Bly agrees with ME!
You would certainly seem to have seen, these twenty-four hours, a good deal more of
it than for some time before. I hope, I went on bravely, that youve been enjoying yourself.
Oh, yes, Ive been ever so far; all round about miles and miles away. Ive never been
so free.
He had really a manner of his own, and I could only try to keep up with him. Well, do
you like it?
He stood there smiling; then at last he put into two words Do YOU? more
discrimination than I had ever heard two words contain. Before I had time to deal with that,
however, he continued as if with the sense that this was an impertinence to be softened.
Nothing could be more charming than the way you take it, for of course if were alone
together now its you that are alone most. But I hope, he threw in, you dont particularlymind!
Having to do with you? I asked. My dear child, how can I help minding? Though
Ive renounced all claim to your company youre so beyond me - I at least greatly enjoy it.
What else should I stay on for?
He looked at me more directly, and the expression of his face, graver now, struck me
as the most beautiful I had ever found in it. You stay on just for THAT?
Certainly. I stay on as your friend and from the tremendous interest I take in you till
something can be done for you that may be more worth your while. That neednt surprise you.
My voice trembled so that I felt it impossible to suppress the shake. Dont you remember how
I told you, when I came and sat on your bed the night of the storm, that there was nothing in
the world I wouldnt do for you?
Yes, yes! He, on his side, more and more visibly nervous, had a tone to master; but he
was so much more successful than I that, laughing out through his gravity, he could pretend
we were pleasantly jesting. Only that, I think, was to get me to do something for YOU!
It was partly to get you to do something, I conceded. But, you know, you didnt do
it.
Oh, yes, he said with the brightest superficial eagerness, you wanted me to tell you
something.
Thats it. Out, straight out. What you have on your mind, you know.
Ah, then, is THAT what youve stayed over for?
He spoke with a gaiety through which I could still catch the finest little quiver of
resentful passion; but I cant begin to express the effect upon me of an implication of
surrender even so faint. It was as if what I had yearned for had come at last only to astonish me.
Well, yes I may as well make a clean breast of it. it was precisely for that.
He waited so long that I supposed it for the purpose of repudiating the assumption
on which my action had been founded; but what he finally said was: Do you mean now
here?
There couldnt be a better place or time. He looked round him uneasily, and I had
the rare oh, the queer! impression of the very first symptom I had seen in him of the
approach of immediate fear. It was as if he were suddenly afraid of me which struck me
indeed as perhaps the best thing to make him. Yet in the very pang of the effort I felt it vain to
try sternness, and I heard myself the next instant so gentle as to be almost grotesque. You
want so to go out again?
Awfully! He smiled at me heroically, and the touching little bravery of it was
enhanced by his actually flushing with pain. He had picked up his hat, which he had brought
in, and stood twirling it in a way that gave me, even as I was just nearly reaching port, a
perverse horror of what I was doing. To do it in ANY way was an act of violence, for what did it
consist of but the obtrusion of the idea of grossness and guilt on a small helpless creature whohad been for me a revelation of the possibilities of beautiful intercourse? Wasnt it base to
create for a being so exquisite a mere alien awkwardness? I suppose I now read into our
situation a clearness it couldnt have had at the time, for I seem to see our poor eyes already
lighted with some spark of a prevision of the anguish that was to come. So we circled about,
with terrors and scruples, like fighters not daring to close. But it was for each other we feared!
That kept us a little longer suspended and unbruised. Ill tell you everything, Miles said,. I
mean Ill tell you anything you like. Youll stay on with me, and we shall both be all right, and I
WILL tell you I WILL. But not now.
Why not now?
My insistence turned him from me and kept him once more at his window in a silence
during which, between us, you might have heard a pin drop. Then he was before me again with
the air of a person for whom, outside, someone who had frankly to be reckoned with was
waiting. I have to see Luke.
I had not yet reduced him to quite so vulgar a lie, and I felt proportionately ashamed.
But, horrible as it was, his lies made up my truth. I achieved thoughtfully a few loops of my
knitting. Well, then, go to Luke, and Ill wait for what you promise. Only, in return for that,
satisfy, before you leave me, one very much smaller request.
He looked as if he felt he had succeeded enough to be able still a little to bargain.
Very much smaller?
Yes, a mere fraction of the whole. Tell me oh, my work preoccupied me, and I was
offhand! if, yesterday afternoon, from the table in the hall, you took, you know, my letter. CHAPTER 24
My sense of how he received this suffered for a minute from something that I can
describe only as a fierce split of my attention a stroke that at first, as I sprang straight up,
reduced me to the mere blind movement of getting hold of him, drawing him close, and, while
I just fell for support against the nearest piece of furniture, instinctively keeping him with his
back to the window. The appearance was full upon us that I had already had to deal with here:
Peter Quint had come into view like a sentinel before a prison. The next thing I saw was that,
from outside, he had reached the window, and then I knew that, close to the glass and glaring
in through it, he offered once more to the room his white face of damnation. It represents but
grossly what took place within me at the sight to say that on the second my decision was made;
yet I believe that no woman so overwhelmed ever in so short a time recovered her grasp of the
ACT. It came to me in the very horror of the immediate presence that the act would be, seeing
and facing what I saw and faced, to keep the boy himself unaware. The inspiration - I can call it
by no other name was that I felt how voluntarily, how transcendently, I MIGHT. It was like
fighting with a demon for a human soul, and when I had fairly so appraised it I saw how the
human soul held out, in the tremor of my hands, at arms length - had a perfect dew of sweat
on a lovely childish forehead. The face that was close to mine was as white as the face against
the glass, and out of it presently came a sound, not low nor weak, but as if from much further
away, that I drank like a waft of fragrance.
Yes I took it.
At this, with a moan of joy, I enfolded, I drew him close; and while I held him to my
breast, where I could feel in the sudden fever of his little body the tremendous pulse of his
little heart, I kept my eyes on the thing at the window and saw it move and shift its posture. I
have likened it to a sentinel, but its slow wheel, for a moment, was rather the prowl of a baffled
beast. My present quickened courage, however, was such that, not too much to let it through,
I had to shade, as it were, my flame. Meanwhile the glare of the face was again at the window,
the scoundrel fixed as if to watch and wait. It was the very confidence that I might now defy
him, as well as the positive certitude, by this time, of the childs unconsciousness, that made
me go on. What did you take it for?
To see what you said about me.
You opened the letter?
I opened it.
My eyes were now, as I held him off a little again, on Miless own face, in which the
collapse of mockery showed me how complete was the ravage of uneasiness. What was
prodigious was that at last, by my success, his sense was sealed and his communication
stopped: he knew that he was in presence, but knew not of what, and knew still less that I also
was and that I did know. And what did this strain of trouble matter when my eyes went back
to the window only to see that the air was clear again and by my personal triumph the
influence quenched? There was nothing there. I felt that the cause was mine and that I shouldsurely get ALL. And you found nothing! I let my elation out.
He gave the most mournful, thoughtful little headshake. Nothing.
Nothing, nothing! I almost shouted in my joy.
Nothing, nothing, he sadly repeated.
I kissed his forehead; it was drenched. So what have you done with it?
Ive burned it.
Burned it? It was now or never. Is that what you did at school?
Oh, what this brought up! At school?
Did you take letters? - or other things?
Other things? He appeared now to be thinking of something far off and that
reached him only through the pressure of his anxiety. Yet it did reach him. Did I STEAL?
I felt myself redden to the roots of my hair as well as wonder if it were more strange to
put to a gentleman such a question or to see him take it with allowances that gave the very
distance of his fall in the world. Was it for that you mightnt go back?
The only thing he felt was rather a dreary little surprise. Did you know I mightnt go
back?
I know everything.
He gave me at this the longest and strangest look. Everything?
Everything. Therefore DID you
? But I couldnt say it again.
Miles could, very simply. No. I didnt steal.
My face must have shown him I believed him utterly; yet my hands - but it was for
pure tenderness shook him as if to ask him why, if it was all for nothing, he had condemned
me to months of torment. What then did you do?
He looked in vague pain all round the top of the room and drew his breath, two or
three times over, as if with difficulty. He might have been standing at the bottom of the sea
and raising his eyes to some faint green twilight. Well
I said things.
Only that?
They thought it was enough!
To turn you out for?
Never, truly, had a person turned out shown so little to explain it as this little
person! He appeared to weigh my question, but in a manner quite detached and almost
helpless. Well, I suppose I oughtnt.
But to whom did you say them?
He evidently tried to remember, but it dropped he had lost it. I dont know!He almost smiled at me in the desolation of his surrender, which was indeed
practically, by this time, so complete that I ought to have left it there. But I was infatuated - I
was blind with victory, though even then the very effect that was to have brought him so much
nearer was already that of added separation. Was it to everyone? I asked.
No; it was only to But he gave a sick little headshake.
I dont remember their names.
Were they then so many?
No only a few. Those I liked.
Those he liked? I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker obscure, and
within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity the appalling alarm of his being
perhaps innocent. It was for the instant confounding and bottomless, for if he WERE
innocent, what then on earth was I? Paralyzed, while it lasted, by the mere brush of the
question, I let him go a little, so that, with a deep-drawn sigh, he turned away from me again;
which, as he faced toward the clear window, I suffered, feeling that I had nothing now there to
keep him from. And did they repeat what you said? I went on after a moment.
He was soon at some distance from me, still breathing hard and again with the air,
though now without anger for it, of being confined against his will. Once more, as he had done
before, he looked up at the dim day as if, of what had hitherto sustained him, nothing was left
but an unspeakable anxiety. Oh, yes, he nevertheless replied they must have repeated them.
To those THEY liked, he added.
There was, somehow, less of it than I had expected; but I turned it over. And these
things came round?
To the masters? Oh, yes! he answered very simply. But I didnt know theyd tell.
The masters? They didnt - theyve never told. Thats why I ask you.
He turned to me again his little beautiful fevered face. Yes, it was too bad.
Too bad?
What I suppose I sometimes said. To write home.
I cant name the exquisite pathos of the contradiction given to such a speech by such
a speaker; I only know that the next instant I heard myself throw off with homely force: Stuff
and nonsense! But the next after that I must have sounded stern enough. What WERE these
things?
My sternness was all for his judge, his executioner; yet it made him avert himself
again, and that movement made ME, with a single bound and an irrepressible cry, spring
straight upon him. For there again, against the glass, as if to blight his confession and stay his
answer, was the hideous author of our woe the white face of damnation. I felt a sick swim at
the drop of my victory and all the return of my battle, so that the wildness of my veritable leap
only served as a great betrayal. I saw him, from the midst of my act, meet it with a divination,
and on the perception that even now he only guessed, and that the window was still to his owneyes free, I let the impulse flame up to convert the climax of his dismay into the very proof of
his liberation. No more, no more, no more! I shrieked, as I tried to press him against me, to
my visitant.
Is she HERE? Miles panted as he caught with his sealed eyes the direction of my
words. Then as his strange she staggered me and, with a gasp, I echoed it, Miss Jessel, Miss
Jessel! he with a sudden fury gave me back.
I seized, stupefied, his supposition some sequel to what we had done to Flora, but
this made me only want to show him that it was better still than that. Its not Miss Jessel! But
its at the window straight before us. Its THERE - the coward horror, there for the last time!
At this, after a second in which his head made the movement of a baffled dogs on a
scent and then gave a frantic little shake for air and light, he was at me in a white rage,
bewildered, glaring vainly over the place and missing wholly, though it now, to my sense, filled
the room like the taste of poison, the wide, overwhelming presence. Its HE?
I was so determined to have all my proof that I flashed into ice to challenge him.
Whom do you mean by `he?
Peter Quint you devil! His face gave again, round the room, its convulsed
supplication. WHERE?
They are in my ears still, his supreme surrender of the name and his tribute to my
devotion. What does he matter now, my own? what will he EVER matter? I have you, I
launched at the beast, but he has lost you forever! Then, for the demonstration of my work,
There, THERE! I said to Miles.
But he had already jerked straight round, stared, glared again, and seen but the quiet
day. With the stroke of the loss I was so proud of he uttered the cry of a creature hurled over
an abyss, and the grasp with which I recovered him might have been that of catching him in his
fall. I caught him, yes, I held him it may be imagined with what a passion; but at the end of a
minute I began to feel what it truly was that I held. We were alone with the quiet day, and his
little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.
FINIS HENRY JAMES
Nascido na cidade de Nova York, EUA, de uma família rica, em 15 de abril de 1843,
HENRY JAMES foi o segundo de cinco filhos de sir Henry James, um importante filósofo e
teólogo de sua época. Entre os irmãos, outro nome de cultura se destacou, o do psicólogo e
filósofo pragmatista William James. Produziu ao longo de toda sua carreira uma vasta obra
literária que inclui 20 novelas, além de 112 histórias, 12 jogos e inúmeras críticas literárias.
Na juventude, Henry James manteve-se em trânsito entre a América e a Europa,
estudando em Genebra, Londres, Paris, Bolonha e Bonn. Estudou Direito nos Estados Unidos,
na Harvard Law School, mas, apenas por um ano, porque a Literatura o interessava muito mais.
Desde cedo, Henry James tinha lido clássicos da Literatura inglesa, americana, francesa e
alemã, além de traduções dos clássicos russos. Sempre se sentiu muito mais inclinado a viver
na Europa, achando a América hostil à vida de um homem que só queria dedicar-se à arte
literária, mas, o tema do americano atraído e, eventualmente, traído pelos valores do Velho
Mundo é frequente em sua obra. Enquanto viajava de Veneza a Paris, escreveu sua primeira
novela, Watch and Ward (1871). Obras como Roderick Hudson (1875), The American (1877) e
The Europeans abordam o tema das diferenças entre os dois continentes.
Em Paris, conheceu grandes nomes da literatura como Flaubert e o russo Turgueniev.
Fascinado pela Inglaterra, James viveu primeiro em Londres e depois em Rye, Sussex.
Considerava Londres uma espécie de capital da raça humana. Escreveu obras populares
como Daisy Miller (1879), A Portrait of a Lady (1882) e The Princess Casamassima (1886).
Produzindo vinte novelas e cerca de uma centena de contos, também escreveu várias peças de
teatro, mas teve sucesso limitado como dramaturgo. Atingiu um refinamento literário que
muitos críticos consideram incomparável em suas últimas obras, como What Maisie Knew
(1897), The Awkward Age (1899), The Wings of the Dove (1902) e The Golden Bowl (1904).
O estilo de Henry James revela um enorme domínio da língua inglesa. Em sua época,
o autor foi muito admirado por esse talento entre os literatos ingleses, da velha ou da nova
geração. Por fidelidade muito forte às coisas britânicas, Henry James acabou naturalizando-se
inglês em 1915, depois do início da Primeira Guerra Mundial. O acontecimento, aliás,
perturbou o espírito do civilizado e refinado escritor, que lamentou o horror de ter vivido
para testemunhar tudo aquilo. Faleceu em 28 de fevereiro de 1916, após sofrer um colapso em
dezembro do ano anterior. Enquanto aguardava a morte, exclamou: So this is it at last, the
distinguished thing!.
THE END
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