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THE TURN OF
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DOVER -THRIFT -EDITIONS

The Turn of the Screw

HENRY JAMES

DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.

New York
 DOVER THRIFT EDITIONS
Editor: Stanley Appelbaum

Published in Canada by General Publishing Company, Ltd.,

30 Lesmill Road, Don Mills, Toronto, Ontario.
Published in the United Kingdom by Constable and Company, Ltd.,
3 The Lanchesters, 162-164 Fulham Palace Road, London W6 9ER.
This Dover edition, first published in 1991, contains the complete
text of the story originally published in the volume
The Two Magics (The Macmillan Company, New York and London, 1898)
after its serialization in Collier's Weekly
between the January 27th and April 16th issues, 1898.
The "Note" on the facing page was prepared
specially for the present edition.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Dover Publications, Inc.
31 East 2nd Street
Mineola, NY. 11501

Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data

James, Henry, 1843-1916.

The turn of the screw / Henry James.
p. cm. — (Dover thrift editions
ISBN 0-486-26684-2 (pbk.)
I. Title. II. Series.
PS2116.T8 1991
813'. 4— dc20 90-20572
CIP
 Note

THE AMERICAN NOVELIST and short-story writer Henry James (1843—

1916), younger brother of the psychologist William James, lived in England
for the greater part of his last forty years. The Turn of the Screw (1898), one
of the most celebrated ghost stories of all time, is an excellent example of
his narrative skills. In this tour de force of consciously created ambiguity
(who is to be believed, who is to be trusted? what is actually occurring?),
James's intricate verbal dissection of the most complex thoughts and inde-
finable emotions makes a massive contribution to the overpowering density
of the atmosphere.
 The Turn of the Screw

The STORY HAD held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but ex-
cept the obvious remark that it was gruesome,
on Christmas Eve in an
as,

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 imme- —
diately, but later in the evening —
a reply that had the interesting conse-
quence to which I Someone else told a story not particularly
call attention.

effective, whichsaw he was not following. This I took for a sign that he
I

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 it's not the first occurrence of its charming kind that I know to have
involved a child. If the child gives the effect another turn of the screw,
?"
what do you say to two children
"We say, of course," somebody exclaimed, "that they give two turns! Also
that we want to hear about them."
I can see Douglas there before the fire, to which he had got up to present
his back, looking down at his interlocutor with his hands in his pockets.
"Nobody but me, till now, has ever heard. It's quite too horrible." This,
naturally, was declared by several voices to give the thing the utmost price,
and our friend, with quiet art, prepared his triumph by turning his eyes
 "

Henry James

over the rest of us and going on: "It's beyond everything. Nothing at all that
I know touches it.

"For sheer terror?'' I remember asking.

He seemed to say it was not so simple as that; to be really at a loss how to
qualify it. He passed his hand over his eyes, made a little wincing grimace.
"For dreadful — dreadfulness!"
"Oh, how delicious!" cried one of the women.
He took no notice of her; he looked at me, but as if, instead of me, he saw
what he spoke of. "For general uncanny ugliness and horror and pain."
"Well then," I said, "just sit right down and begin."
He turned round to the fire, gave a kick to a log, watched it an instant.
Then as he faced us again: "I can't begin. I shall have to send to town."
There was a unanimous groan at this, and much reproach; after which, in
his preoccupied way, he explained. "The story's written. It's in a locked
drawer —it has not been out for years. I could write to my man and enclose

the key; he could send down the packet as he finds it." It was to me in
particular that he appeared to propound this —
appeared almost to appeal
for aid not to hesitate. He had broken a thickness of ice, the formation of
many a winter; had had his reasons for a long silence. The others resented
postponement, but it was just his scruples that charmed me. I adjured him
to write by the first post and to agree with us for an early hearing; then I
asked him if the experience in question had been his own. To this his
answer was prompt. "Oh, thank God, no!"
"And is the record yours? You took the thing down?"
"Nothing but the impression. I took that here" —
he tapped his heart.
"I've never lost it."
?"
"Then your manuscript
"Is in old, faded ink, and in the most beautiful hand." He hung fire
again. "A woman's. She has been dead these twenty years. She sent me the
pages in question before she died." They were all listening now, and of
course there was somebody to be arch, or at any rate to draw the inference.
But if he put the inference by without a smile it was also without irrita-
tion. "She was a most charming person, but she was ten years older than I.

She was my sister's governess," he quietly said. "She was the most agree-
able woman I've ever known in her position; she would have been worthy of
any whatever. It was long ago, and this episode was long before. I was at
Trinity, and I found her at home on my coming down the second summer. I
—
was much there that year it was a beautiful one; and we had, in her off-
hours, some strolls and talks in the garden —
talks in which she struck me
as awfully clever and nice. Oh yes; don't grin: I liked her extremely and am
glad to this day to think she liked me, too. If she hadn't she wouldn't have
told me. She had never told anyone. It wasn't simply that she said so, but
 "

The Turn of the Screw

thatI knew she hadn't. was sure; could see. You'll easily judge
I I why
when you hear."
"Because the thing had been such a scare?"
He continued to fix me. "You'll easily judge," he repeated: "you will."
I fixed him, too. "I see. She was in love."

He laughed for the first time. "You are acute. Yes, she was in love. That
is, she had been. That came out— she couldn't tell her story without its
coming out. I saw it, and she saw I saw it; but neither of us spoke of it. I
—
remember the time and the place the corner of the lawn, the shade of the
great beeches and the long, hot summer afternoon. It wasn't a scene for a
shudder; but oh !" He quitted the fire
and dropped back into his chair.
"You'll receive the packet Thursday morning?" I inquired.
"Probably not till the second post."
"
"Well then; after dinner
"You'll all meet me here?" He looked us round again. "Isn't anybody
going?" It was almost the tone of hope.
"Everybody will stay!"
"J will —
and / will!" cried the ladies whose departure had been fixed.
Mrs. Griffin, however, expressed the need for a little more light. "Who was
it she was in love with?"
"The story will tell," I took upon myself to reply.
"Oh, I can't wait for the story!"
"The story won't tell," said Douglas; "not in any literal, vulgar way."
"Mores the pity, then. That's the only way I ever understand."
"Won't you tell, Douglas?" somebody else inquired.
He sprang to his feet again. "Yes tomorrow. Now — I must go to bed.
Good And quickly catching up a candlestick, he left us slightly
night."
bewildered. From our end of the great brown hall we heard his step on the
stair; whereupon Mrs. Griffin spoke. "Well, if I don't know who she was in

love with, I know who he was."

"She was ten years older," said her husband.
"Raison de plus — at that age! But it's rather nice, his long reticence."
"Forty years!" Griffin put in.

"With this outbreak at last.

"The outbreak," I returned, "will make a tremendous occasion of

Thursday night;" and everyone so agreed with me that, in the light of it, we
lost all attention for everything else. The last story, however incomplete

and like the mere opening of a serial, had been told; we handshook and
"candlestuck," as somebody said, and went to bed.
I knew the next day that a letter containing the key had, by the first post,

gone off to his London apartments; but in spite of or perhaps just on —

—
account of the eventual diffusion of this knowledge we quite let him
 Henry James

alone till after dinner, such an hour of the evening, in fact, as might
till

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 intel-
ligence a few words of prologue. Let me say here distinctly, to have done
with it, that this narrative, from an exact transcript of my own made much
later, is what I shall presently give. Poor Douglas, before his death when —
it was in sight —
committed to me the manuscript that reached him on the
third of these days and that, on the same spot, with immense effect, he
began to read to our hushed little circle on the night of the fourth. The
departing ladies who had said they would stay didn't, of course, thank
heaven, stay: they departed, in consequence of arrangements made, in a
rage of curiosity, as they professed, produced by the touches with which he
had already worked us up. But that only made his little final auditory more
compact and select, kept it, round the hearth, subject to a common thrill.
The first of these touches conveyed that the written statement took up
the tale at a point after it had, in a manner, begun. The fact to be in
possession of was therefore that his old friend, the youngest of several
daughters of a poor country parson, had, at the age of twenty, on taking
service for the first time in the schoolroom, come up to London, in
trepidation, to answer an advertisement that had already placed
in person
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 imme-
diately 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
 — "

The Turn of the Screw

of chances for a man in his position — lone man without

a the right sort of
experience or a grain of patience — very on
heavily hands.It had all
his
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 The awkward thing was that they had practically
they were doing.
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 and who had
would like
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 She would also have, in
authority.
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 dairy-
woman, an old pony, an old groom, and an old gardener, all likewise
thoroughly respectable.
So far had Douglas presented his picture when someone put a question.
—
"And what did the former governess die of? of so much respectability?"
Our friend's answer was prompt. "That will come out. I don't anticipate.
"Excuse me —
I thought that was just what you are doing."

"In her successor's place," I suggested, "I should have wished to learn if
"
the office brought with it

"Necessary danger to life?" Douglas completed my thought. "She did

wish to learn, and she did learn. You shall hear tomorrow what she
learned. Meanwhile, of course, the prospect struck her as slightly grim.
She was young, untried, nervous: it was a vision of serious duties and little
company, of really great loneliness. She hesitated —
took a couple of days to
consult and consider. But the salary offered much exceeded her modest
measure, and on a second interview she faced the music, she engaged."
 —

Henry James

And Douglas, with this, made a pause that, for the benefit of the company,
moved me to throw in
"The moral of which was of course the seduction exercised by the
splendid young man. She succumbed to it."
He got up and, as he had done the night before, went to the fire, gave a
stir to a log with his foot, then stood a moment with his back to us. "She

saw him only twice."

"Yes, but that's just the beauty ofher passion."
A little to my surprise, Douglas turned round to me. "It was the
on this,

beauty of it. There were others," he went on, "who hadn't succumbed. He
told her frankly all his difficulty — that for several applicants the condi-
tionshad been prohibitive. They were, somehow, simply afraid. It sounded
dull —
it sounded strange; and all the more so because of his main condi-

tion."
"Which was ?"

"That she should never trouble him —

but never, never: neither appeal
nor complain nor write about anything; only meet all questions herself,
receive all moneys from his solicitor, take the whole thing over and let him
alone. She promised to do this, and she mentioned to me that when, for a
moment, disburdened, delighted, he held her hand, thanking her for the
sacrifice, she already felt rewarded."
"But was that all her reward?" one of the ladies asked.
"She never saw him again."
"Oh!" said the lady; which, as our friend immediately left us again, was
the only other word of importance contributed to the subject till, the next
night, by the corner of the hearth, in the best chair, he opened the faded
red cover of a thin old-fashioned gilt-edged album. The whole thing took
indeed more nights than one, but on the first occasion the same lady put
another question. "What is your title?"
"I haven't one."
"Oh, I have!" I said. But Douglas, without heeding me, had begun to
read with a fine clearness that was like a rendering to the ear of the beauty
of his author's hand.

I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a

seesaw of the right throbs and the wrong. After rising, in town, to
little

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
 —
The Turn of the Screw

stopping place which I was to be met by a vehicle from the house. This
at

convenience, was told, had been ordered, and I found, toward the close of
I

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 sur-
prise. 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 de-
cent 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 gentle-
man, 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 be ing
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 m^ little girl, the vision of
 Henry James

whose angelic beauty had probably more than anything else todo with the
restlessness that, before morning, made me several times rise and wander
about my room to take in the whole picture and prospect; to watch, from
my open window, the faint summer dawn, to look at such portions of the
rest of the house as I could catch, and to listen, while, in the fading dusk,
the first birds began to twitter, for the possible recurrence of a sound or
two, less natural and not without, but within, that I had fancied I heard.
There had been a moment when I believed I recognized, faint and far, the
cry of a child; there had been another when I found myself just consciously
starting as at the passage, before my door, of a light footstep. But these
fancies were not marked enough not to be thrown off, and it is only in the
light, or the gloom, I should rather say, of other and subsequent matters
that they now come back to me. To watch, teach, "form" little Flora would
too evidently be the making of a happy and useful life. It had been agreed
between us downstairs that after this first occasion I should have her as a
matter of course at night, her small white bed being already arranged, to
that end, in my room. What I had undertaken was the whole care of her,
and she had remained, just this last time, with Mrs. Grose only as an
effect of our consideration for my inevitable strangeness and her natural
timidity. In spite of this timidity —
which the child herself, in the oddest
way in the world, had been perfectly frank and brave about, allowing it,
without a sign of uncomfortable consciousness, with the deep, sweet
serenity indeed of one of Raphael's holy infants, to be discussed, to be
imputed to her, and to determine us I— felt quite sure she would presently
like me. It was part of what I already liked Mrs. Grose herself for, the
pleasure I my admiration and wonder as I sat at supper
could see her feel in
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 wouldn't flatter a child. "Oh, miss, most remarkable. If you think
well of this one!" —
and she stood there with a plate in her hand, beaming
at our companion, who looked from one of us to the other with placid

heavenly eyes that contained nothing to check us.

"Yes: if I do ?"

'^Ynn will he rarripH awav by the little gentleman!"

"
Well, that, I think is what I came for
T
— to be carried away. I'm afraid,
however. " I remember feeling the impulse to add, "I'm rather easily carried
away. I was carrieoTaway in London!"
I can still see Mrs. Grose's broad face as she took this in. "In Harley
Street?"
 The Turn of the Screw

"
"Jn Harlev Streets
'

^
Well. miss you're not the
h i
first —
and vou wont be the last."
"Oh, no pretension," I could laugh, "to being the only one. My other
I've

pupil,. at any rate, as I understand, comes back tomorrow?"

"Not tomorrow —
Friday, miss. He arrives, as you did, by the coach,
under care of the guard, and is to be met by the same carriage."
I forthwith expressed that the proper as well as the pleasant and friendly

thing would be therefore that on the arrival of the public conveyance I

should be in waiting for him with his little sister; an idea in which Mrs.
Grose concurred so heartily that I somehow took her manner as a kind of
comforting pledge —
never falsified, thank heaven! that we should on —
every question be quite at one. Oh, she was glad I was there!
What I felt I suppose, nothing that could be fairly
the next day was,
called a reactionfrom 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 circum-
stances. 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 who might show me the place. She showed
should be she, she only,
it step by stepand room by room and secret by secret, with droll, delight-
ful, childish talk about it and with the result, in half an hour, of our

becoming immense friends. Young as she was, I was struck, throughout

our little tour, with her confidence and courage, with the way, in empty
chambers and dull corridors, on crooked staircases that made me pause
and even on the summit of an old machicolated square tower that made me
dizzy, her morning music, her disposition to tell me so many more things
than she asked, rang out and led me on. I have not seen Bly since the day I
left it, and I daresay that to my older and more informed eyes it would now

appear sufficiently contracted. But as my little conductress, with her hair

of gold and her frock of blue, danced before me round corners and pattered
down passages, I had the view of a castle of romance inhabited by a rosy
sprite, such a place as would somehow, for diversion of the young idea, take
all color out of storybooks and fairytales. Wasn't it just a storybook over

which I had fallen adoze and adream? No; it was a big, ugly, antique, but
convenient house, embodying a few features of a building still older, half-
replaced and half-utilized, in which I had the fancy of our being almost as
lost as a handful of passengers in a great drifting ship. Well, I was,
strangely, at the helm!
 »

10 Henry James

II - ~~ " ' '

—
This came home to me when, two days later, I drove over with Flora to
meet, as Mrs. Grose said, the little gentleman; and all the more for an
incident that, presenting itself the second evening, had deeply discon-
certed me. The first day had been, on the whole, as I have expressed,
reassuring; but I was to see it wind up in keen apprehension. The postbag,
that evening —
it came late —
contained a letter for me, which, however, in
the hand of my employer, I found to be composed but of a few words
enclosing another, addressed to himself, with a seal still unbroken. "This,
I recognize, is from the headmaster, and the headmaster's an awful bore.

Read him, please; deal with him; but mind you don't report. Not a word.
I'm off!" I broke the seal with a great effort —
so great a one that I was a
long time coming to it; took the unopened missive at last up to my room and
only attacked it just before going to bed. I had better have let it wait till
morning, for it gave me a second sleepless night. With no counsel to take,
the next day, I was full of distress; and it finally got so the better of me that
I determined to open myself at least to Mrs. Grose.

"What does it mean? The child's dismissed his school."

She gave me a look that I remarked at the moment; then, visibly, with a
quick blankness, seemed to try to take it back. "But aren't they all ?"

"Sent home —
yes. But only for the holidays. Miles may never go back at
all."

Consciously, under my attention, she reddened. "They won't take him?"

"They absolutely decline."
At this she raised her eyes, which she had turned from me; I saw them
fill with good tears. "What has he done?"

I hesitated; then I judged best simply to hand her my letter which, —

however, had the effect of making her, without taking it, simply put her
hands behind her. She shook her head sadly. "Such things are not for me,
miss."
My counselor couldn't read! I winced at my mistake, which I attenuated
as I could, and opened my letter again to repeat it to her; then, faltering in
the act and folding it up once more, I put it back in my pocket. "Is he really
bad?"
The
tears were still in her eyes. "Do the gentlemen say so?"
"They go into no particulars. They simply express their regret that it
should be impossible to keep him. That can have only one meaning. " Mrs.
Grose listened with dumb emotion; she forbore to ask me what this
meaning might be; so that, presently, to put the thing with some coherence
 — 1

The Turn of the Screw 1

and with the mere aid of her presence to my own mind, I went on: "That
he's an injury to the others."
At this, with one of the quick turns of simple folk, she suddenly flamed
up. "Master Miles! him an injury?"
There was such a flood of good faith in it that, though I had not yet seen
the child, my very fears made me jump to the absurdity of the idea. I found
myself, to meet my friend the better, offering it, on the spot, sarcastically.
"To his poor little innocent mates!"
"Its too dreadful," cried Mrs. Grose, "to say such cruel things! Why,
he's scarce ten years old."
"Yes, yes; it would be incredible."

She was evidently grateful for such a profession. "See him, miss, first.
Then believe it!" I felt forthwith a new impatience to see him; it was
the beginning of a curiosity that, for all the next hours, was to deepen al-
most to pain. Mrs. Grose was aware, I could judge, of what she had pro-
duced 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, I had estab-

ten minutes before,
lished in the schoolroom with a sheet of white paper, a pencil,and a copy of
nice "round o's," now presented herself to view at the open door. She
expressed in her little way an extraordinary detachment from disagreeable
duties, looking to me, however, with a great childish light that seemed to
offer it as a mere result of the affection she had conceived for my person,
which had rendered necessary that she should follow me. I needed nothing
more than this to feel the full force of Mrs. Grose's comparison, and,
catching my pupil in my arms, covered her with kisses in which there was
a sob of atonement.
Nonetheless, the rest of the day I watched for further occasion to
approach my colleague, especially as, toward evening, I began to fancy she

rather sought to avoid me. I overtook her, I remember, on the staircase; we

went down together, and at the bottom I detained her, holding her there
with a hand on her arm. "I take what you said to me at noon as a declaration
that you've never known him to be bad."
She threw back her head; she had clearly, by this time, and very
"Oh, never known him I don't pretend
honestly, adopted an attitude. —
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,
 2 " —

1 Henry James

keeping pace with her answer, "So do eagerly brought out. "But not to
the degree to contaminate
— I!" I

"To contaminate?" — my big word left her at a loss. I explained it. "To
corrupt."
She stared, taking my meaning in; but it produced in her an odd laugh.
"Are you afraid he'll corrupt you?" She put the question with such a fine
bold humorwith a laugh, a little silly doubtless, to match her own, I
that,
gave way apprehension of ridicule.
for the time to the
But the next day, as the hour for my drive approached, I cropped up in
another place. "What was the lady who was here before?"
"The last governess? She was also young and pretty — almost as young
and almost as pretty, miss, even as you."
"Ah, then, I hope her youth and her beauty helped her!" I recollect
throwing off. "He seems to like us young and pretty!"
"Oh, he did" Mrs. Grose assented: "it was the way he liked everyone!"
She had no sooner spoken indeed than she caught herself up. "I mean
that's his way —
the 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 wasn't right? She never told me."
I had a scruple, but I overcame it. "Was she careful particular?" —
Mrs. Grose appeared to try to be conscientious. "About some things
yes."
"But not about all?"
Again she considered. "Well, miss —
she's gone. I won't tell tales."
"I quite understand your feeling," I hastened to reply; but I thought it,

after an instant, not opposed to this concession to pursue: "Did she die
here?"
"No — she went off."
Iknow what there was in this brevity of Mrs. Grose's that struck
don't
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
 3

The Turn of the Screw 1

time she had put in had certainly given her a right. We had then a young
woman — nursemaid who had stayed on and who was a good girl and
a
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."

Ill

Her thus turning her back on me was fortunately not, for my just preoc-
cupations, 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 had now been revealed to me

that such a child as
should be under an interdict. I was a little late on the scene, and I felt, as
he stood wistfully looking out for me before the door of the inn at which the
coach had put him down, that I had seen him, on the instant, without and
within, in the great glow of freshness, the same positive fragrance of
purity, in which I had, from the first moment, seen his little sister. He was
incredibly beautiful, and Mrs. Grose had put her finger on it: everything
but a sort of passion of tenderness for him was swept away by his presence.
What I then and there took him to my heart for was something divine that I
have never found to the same degree in any child —
his indescribable little
air of knowing nothing in the world but love. It would have been impossible
to carry a bad name with a greater sweetness of innocence, and by the time
I had got back to Bly with him I remained merely bewildered —
so far, that
is, as I was not outraged — by the sense of the horrible letter locked up in
my room, in a drawer. As soon as I could compass a private word with Mrs.
Grose I declared to her that it was grotesque.
?"
She promptly understood me. "You mean the cruel charge
"It doesn't live an instant. My dear woman, look at him!"
She smiled at my pretention to have discovered his charm. "I assure
you, miss, I do nothing else! What will you say, then?" she immediately
added.
"In answer to the letter?" I had made up my mind. "Nothing."
"And to his uncle?"
I was incisive. "Nothing."

"And to the boy himself?"

 4 —

1 Henry James

I was wonderful. "Nothing.''

She gave with her apron a great wipe to her mouth. "Then I'll stand by
you. We'll see it out.''

"We'll see it out!" I ardently echoed, giving her my hand to make it

a vow.
She held me there a moment, then whisked up her apron again with her
"
detached hand. "Would you mind, miss, if I used the freedom
"To kiss me? No!" I took the good creature in my arms and, after we had
embraced like sisters, felt still more fortified and indignant.
This, at all events, was for the time: a time so full that, as I recall the
way it reminds me of all the art I now need to make it a little
went, it

distinct. What I look back at with amazement is the situation I accepted. I

had undertaken, with my companion, to see it out, and I was under a
charm, apparently, that could smooth away the extent and the far and
difficult connections of such an effort. I was lifted aloft on a great wave of
infatuation and pity. I found it simple, in my ignorance, my confusion, and
perhaps my conceit, to assume that I could deal with a boy whose educa-
tion 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 what suddenly broke into this gives
all, that
the previous time a charm
that hush in which something
of stillness —
gathers or crouches. The change was actually like the spring of a
beast.
 5

The Turn of the Screw 1

In the first weeks the days were long; they often, at their finest, gave me
what used to call my own hour, the hour when, for my pupils, teatime and
I

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 myself tranquil and justified; doubtless, perhaps, also to
to feel
reflect that by discretion, my quiet good sense and general high
my
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 had expected. I daresay I fancied myself, in
I

short, a remarkable young woman and took comfort in the faith that this
would more publicly appear. Well, I needed to be remarkable to offer a
front to the remarkable things that presently gave their first sign.
It was plump, one afternoon, in the middle of my very hour: the children

were tucked away, and I had come out for my stroll. One of the thoughts
that, as I don't in the least shrink now from noting, used to be with me in
these wanderings was that it would be as charming as a charming story
suddenly to meet someone. Someone would appear there at the turn of a
path and would stand before me and smile and approve. I didn't ask more
than that —
I only asked that he should know; and the only way to be sure

he knew would be to see it, and the kind light of it, in his handsome face.
—
That was exactly present to me by which I mean the face was when, —
on the first of these occasions, at the end of a long June day, I stopped short
on emerging from one of the plantations and coming into view of the house.
—
What arrested me on the spot and with a shock much greater than any
vision had allowed for —
was the sense that my imagination had, in a flash,
turned real. He did stand there! —
but high up, beyond the lawn and at the
very top of the tower to which, on that first morning, little Flora had
conducted me. This tower was one of a pair —
square, incongruous, crene-
lated structures —
that were distinguished, for some reason, though I
could see little difference, as the new and the old. They flanked opposite
ends of the house and were probably architectural absurdities, redeemed
in a measure indeed by not being wholly disengaged nor of a height too
pretentious, dating, in their gingerbread antiquity, from a romantic revival
that was already a respectable past. I admired them, had fancies about
them, for we could all profit in a degree, especially when they loomed
through the dusk, by the grandeur of their actual battlements; yet it was
 —
a

16 Henry James

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 man who met my eyes was not the person I had
first: the
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 ofits appearance, become a solitude. To

me making my statement here with a deliberation with which I

at least,

have never made it, the whole feeling of the moment returns. It was as if,
while I took in — —
what I did take in all the rest of the scene had been
stricken with death. I can hear again, as I write, the intense hush in
which the sounds of evening dropped. The rooks stopped cawing in the
golden sky, and the friendly hour lost, for the minute, all its voice. But
there was no other change in nature, unless indeed it were a change that I
saw with a stranger sharpness. The gold was still in the sky, the clearness
in the air, and the man who looked at me over the battlements was as
definite as a picture in a frame. That's how I thought, with extraordinary
quickness, of each person that he might have been and that he was not. We
were confronted across our distance quite long enough for me to ask myself
with intensity who then he was and to feel, as an effect of my inability to
say, a wonder that in a few instants more became intense.

The great question, or one of these, is, afterward, I know, with regard to
certain matters, the question of how long they have lasted. Well, this
matter of mine, think what you will of lasted while I caught at a dozen
it,

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? —
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 hiswearing no hat —
seemed to fix me, from his position,
with just the question, just the scrutiny through the fading light, that his
own presence provoked. We were too far apart to call to each other, but
there was a moment at which, at shorter range, some challenge between
us, breaking the hush, would have been the right result of our straight
 The Turn of the Screw 1

mutual stare. He wasone of the angles, the one away from the house,
in
very erect, as it I saw him
struck me, and with both hands on the ledge. So
as I see the letters I form on this page; then, exactly, after a minute, as if to
add to the spectacle, he slowly changed his place —
passed, looking at me
hard all the while, to the opposite corner of the platform. Yes, I had the
sharpest sense that during this transit he never took his eyes from me, and
I can see at this moment the way his hand, as he went, passed from one of

the crenelations to the next. He stopped at the other corner, but less long,
and even as he turned away still markedly fixed me. He turned away; that
was all I knew.

IV

It was not that I didn't wait, on this occasion, for more, for I was rooted as
deeply as I was shaken. Was there a "secret" at Bly —
a mystery of Udolpho
or an insane, an unmentionable relative kept in unsuspected confinement?
I can't say how
long I turned it over, or how long, in a confusion of curiosity
and dread, remained where I had had my collision; I only recall that
I

when I re-entered the house darkness had quite closed in. Agitation, in the
interval, certainly had held me and driven me, for I must, in circling about
the place, have walked three miles; but I was to be, later on, so much more
overwhelmed that this mere dawn of alarm was a comparatively human
chill. The most singular part of it, in fact —
singular as the rest had
been —was the part I became, in the hall, aware of in meeting Mrs. Grose.
This picture comes back to me in the general train —
the impression, as I
received it on my return, of the wide white panelled space, bright in the
lamplight and with its portraits and red carpet, and of the good surprised
look of my friend, which immediately told me she had missed me. It came
to me straightway, under her contact, that, with plain heartiness, mere
relieved anxiety at my appearance, she knew nothing whatever that could
bear upon the incident I had there ready for her. I had not suspected in
advance that her comfortable face would pull me up, and I somehow
measured the importance of what I had seen by my thus finding myself
hesitate to mention it. Scarce anything in the whole history seems to me so
odd as this fact that my real beginning of fear was one, as I may say, with
the instinct of sparing my companion. On the spot, accordingly, in the
pleasant hall and with her eyes on me, I, for a reason that I couldn't then
have phrased, achieved an inward resolution —
offered a vague pretext for
my lateness and, with the plea of the beauty of the night and of the heavy
dew and wet feet, went as soon as possible to my room.
 8

1 Henry James

Here it was another affair; here, for many days after, it was a queer
enough. There were hours, from day
affair 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 complication. The shock I had suffered must have sharpened
all my senses; I felt sure, at the end of three days and as the result of mere

closer attention, that I had not been practiced upon by the servants nor
made the object of any "game." Of whatever it was that I knew, nothing
was known around me. There was but one sane inference: someone had
taken a liberty rather gross. That was what, repeatedly, I dipped into my
room and locked the door to say to myself. We had been, collectively,
subject to an intrusion; some unscrupulous traveler, curious in old houses,
had made his way in unobserved, enjoyed the prospect from the best point
of view, and then stolen out as he came. If he had given me such a bold hard
stare, that was but a part of his indiscretion. The good thing, after all, was
that we should surely see no more of him.
This was not so good a thing, I admit, as not to leave me to judge that
what, essentially, made nothing else much signify was simply my charming
work. My charming work was just my life with Miles and Flora, and
through nothing could I so like it as through feeling that I could throw
myself into it in trouble. The attraction of my small charges was a constant
joy, leading me to wonder afresh at the vanity of my original fears, the

distaste I had begun by entertaining for the probable gray prose of my

office. There was to be no gray prose, it appeared, and no long grind; so

how could work not be charming that presented itself as daily beauty? It
was all the romance of the nursery and the poetry of the schoolroom. I
don't mean by this, of course, that we studied only fiction and verse; I
mean I can express no otherwise the sort of interest my companions
inspired. How can I describe that except by saying that instead of growing
used to —
them and 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 boy's conduct at school. It had been promptly given
me, I have noted, to face that mystery without a pang. Perhaps even it
—
would be nearer the truth to say that without a word he himself had —
cleared it up. He had made the whole charge absurd. My conclusion
bloomed there with the real rose flush of his innocence: he was only too
 The Turn of the Screw 19

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 — turns 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
been chastised. If he had been wicked
a direct disproof of his having really
he would have "caught" it, and I should have caught it by the rebound —
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 knew I was. But I gave myself up to it; it was an antidote to
perfectly
any pain, and had more pains than one. I was in receipt in these days of
I

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 conse-
quence of which, as the day declined, I had arranged with Mrs. Grose
that, should the evening show improvement, we would attend together the
late service. The rain happily stopped, and I prepared for our walk, which,
through the park and by the good road to the village, would be a matter of
twenty minutes. Coming downstairs to meet my colleague in the hall, I
remembered a pair of gloves that had required three stitches and that had
received them —
with a publicity perhaps not edifying —
while I sat with
the children at their tea, served on Sundays, by exception, in that cold,
clean temple of mahogany and brass, the "grown-up" dining room. The
gloves had been dropped there, and I turned in to recover them. The day
was gray enough, but the afternoon light still lingered, and it enabled me,
on crossing the threshold, not only to recognize, on a chair near the wide
window, then closed, the articles I wanted, but to become aware of a
person on the other side of the window and looking straight in. One step
into the room had sufficed; my vision was instantaneous; it was all there.
20 Henry ]ames

The person looking straight in was the person who had already appeared to
me. He appeared thus again with I won't say greater distinctness, for that
was impossible, but with a nearness that represented a forward stride in
our intercourse and made me, as I met him, catch my breath and turn cold.
—
He was the same he was 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 can't speak to the purpose today of the duration of these things. That

kind of measure must have left me: they couldn't 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 didn't 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
 The Turn of the Screw 21

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 meet her. I

remained where I was, and while I waited I thought of more things than
one. But there's only one I take space to mention. I wondered why she
should be scared.

Oh, she let me know assoon 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?"
"You're 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. Grose's 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 can't go."
"Has anything happened?"
"Yes. You must know now. Did I look very queer?"
"Through this window? Dreadful!"
"Well," I said, "I've been frightened." Mrs. Grose's 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 7 saw —
just before was much —
worse."
Her hand tightened. "What was it?"

"An extraordinary man. Looking in."

"What extraordinary man?"
"I haven't 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 he's a stranger?"
"Oh, very much!"
"Yet you didn't tell me?"
22 Henry James

"No — But now that you've guessed

for reasons.
"

Mrs. Grose's round eyes encountered this charge. "Ah, I haven't

guessed!'' she said very simply. "How can I if you don't imagine?''
"I don't in the very least."
"You've 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 didn't 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 isn't a gentleman
"What is he? He's a horror."
"A horror?"
"He's —
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 inconse-
quence. "It's time we should be at church."

"Oh, I'm not fit for church!"

"Won't it do you good?"
"It won't do them !" I nodded at the house.

"The children?"
"I can't leave them now."
?"
"You're afraid
I spoke boldly. "I'm afraid of him."
Mrs. Grose's 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 I myself had not given her and that was as
of an idea
yet quite obscure to comes back to me that I thought instantly of this
me. It

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
 The Turn of the Screw 23

turned away a I waited an instant; then I brought out: "Go to

little.

church. Goodbye. must watch."

I

Slowly she faced me again. "Do you fear for them?"

We met in another long look. "Don't you?" Instead of answering she
came nearer to the window and, for a minute, applied her face to the glass.
"You see how he could see," I meanwhile went on.
She didn't move. "How long was he here?"
"Till I came out. I came to meet him."
Mrs. Grose at last turned round, and there was still more in her face. "J
couldn't have come out."
"Neither could I!" I laughed again. "But I did come. I have my duty."
"So have I mine," she replied; after which she added: "What is he like?"
been dying to tell you. But he's like nobody."
"I've
"Nobody?" she echoed.
"He has no hat. " Then seeing in her face that she already, in this, with a
deeper dismay, found a touch of picture, I quickly added stroke to stroke.
"He has red hair, very red, close-curling, and a pale face, long in shape,
with straight, good features and little, rather queer whiskers that are as
red as his hair. His eyebrows are, somehow, darker; they look particularly
arched and as if they might move a good deal. His eyes are sharp, strange
awfully; but I only know clearly that they're rather small and very fixed.
His mouth's wide, and his lips are thin, and except for his little whiskers
he's quite clean-shaven. He gives me a sort of sense of looking like an
actor.
"An actor!" It was impossible to resemble one less, at least, than Mrs.
Grose at that moment.
"I've never seen one, but so I suppose them. He's tall, active, erect," I
continued, "but never no, never! —a gentleman." —
My companion's face had blanched as I went on; her round eyes started
and her mild mouth gaped. "A gentleman?" she gasped, confounded,
stupefied: "a gentleman he?"
"You know him then?"
She visibly tried to hold herself. "But he is handsome?"
I saw the way to help her. "Remarkably!"

"And dressed ?"

"In somebody's clothes. They're smart, but they're not his own."
She broke into a breathless affirmative groan: "They're the master's!"
I caught it up. "You do know him?"
She faltered but a second. "Quint!" she cried.
"Quint?"
"Peter Quint — his own man, his valet, when he was here!"
"When the master was?"
24 Henry James

Gaping but meeting me, she pieced it all together. "He never wore
still,

his hat, but —

he did wear well, there were waistcoats missed. They were
both here —
last year. Then the master went, and Quint was alone."
I followed, but halting a little. "Alone?"

"Alone with us." Then, as from a deeper depth, "In charge," she added.
"And what became of him?"
She hung fire so long that I was still more mystified. "He went, too," she
brought out at last.
"Went where?"
Her expression, at this, became extraordinary. "God knows where! He
died."
"Died?" I almost shrieked.
She seemed fairly to square herself, plant herself more firmly to utter
the wonder of it. "Yes. Mr. Quint is dead."

VI

It took of coursemore 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 compan-

ion s knowledge, henceforth —

a knowledge half consternation and half
compassion —
of that liability. There had been, this evening, after the
revelation that left me, for an hour, so prostrate —
there had been, for
either of us, no attendance on any service but a little service of tears and
vows, of prayers and promises, a climax to the series of mutual challenges
and pledges that had straightway ensued on our retreating together to the
schoolroom and shutting ourselves up there to have everything out. The
result of our having everything out was simply to reduce our situation to
the last rigor of its elements. She herself had seen nothing, not the shadow
of a shadow, and nobody in the house but the governess was in the
governess's plight; yet she accepted without directly impugning my sanity
the truth as I gave it to her, and ended by showing me, on this ground, an
awestricken tenderness, an expression of the sense of my more than
questionable privilege, of which the very breath has remained with me as
that of the sweetest ofhuman 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
 The Turn of the Screw 25

honest was prepared for to keep terms with so compromising a con-

ally

tract. I —
was queer company enough quite as queer as the company I
received; but as I trace over what we went through I see how much
common ground we must have found in the one idea that, by good fortune,
could steady us. It was the idea, the second movement, that led me straight
out, as I may say, of the inner chamber of my dread. I could take the air in
the court, at least, and there Mrs. Grose could join me. Perfectly can I
recall now the particular way strength came to me before we separated for
the night. We had gone over and over every feature of what I had seen.
—
"He was looking for someone else, you say someone who was not you?"
"He was looking for little Miles." A portentous clearness now possessed
me. "That's whom he was looking for."
"But how do you know?"
"I know, I know, I know!" My exaltation grew. "And you know, my dear!"

She didn't deny this, but I required, I felt, not even so much telling as
that. She resumed in a moment, at any rate: "What if he should see him?"
"Little Miles? That's what he wants!"
She looked immensely scared again. "The child?"
"Heaven forbid! The man. He wants to appear to them." That he might
was an awful conception, and yet, somehow, I could keep it at bay; which,
moreover, as we lingered there, was what I succeeded in practically
proving. I had an absolute certainty that I should see again what I had
already seen, but something within me said that by offering myself bravely
as the sole subject of such experience, by accepting, by inviting, by
surmounting it all, I should serve as an expiatory victim and guard the
tranquility of my companions. The children, in especial, I should thus
fence about and absolutely save. I recall one of the last things I said that
night to Mrs. Grose.
"
"It does strike me that my pupils have never mentioned
She looked at me hard as I musingly pulled up. "His having
been here
and the time they were with him?"
"The time they were with him, and his name, his presence, his history,
in any way.
"Oh, the little lady doesn't remember. She never heard or knew."
"The circumstances of his death?" I thought with some intensity. "Per-
haps not. But Miles would remember —
Miles would know."
"Ah, don't try him!" broke from Mrs. Grose.
I returned her the look she had given me. "Don't be afraid. " I continued

to think. "It is rather odd."

"That he has never spoken of him?"
"Never by the least allusion. And you tell me they were great friends'?"
"Oh, it wasn't him!" Mrs. Grose with emphasis declared. "It was
 " — — a"

26 Henry James

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! —
sudden sickness of disgust. "Too free with my boy?"
"Too free with everyone!"
I forbore, for the moment, to analyze this description further than by
the reflection that a part of it applied to several of the members of the
household, of the half-dozen maids and men who were still of our small
colony. But there was everything, for our apprehension, in the lucky fact
that no discomfortable legend, no perturbation of scullions, had ever,
within anyone's memory attached to the kind old place. It had neither bad
name nor ill fame, and Mrs. Grose, most apparently, only desired to cling
to me and to quake in silence. I even put her, the very last thing of all, to
the test. It was when, at midnight, she had her hand on the schoolroom
door to take leave. "I have it from you then —
for it's of great importance
that he was definitely and admittedly bad?"
—
"Oh, not admittedly. / knew it but the master didn't."
"And you never told him?"
"Well, he didn't like tale-bearing —
he hated complaints. He was terribly
"
short with anything of that kind, and if people were all right to him
"He wouldn't be bothered with more?" This squared well enough with
my impression 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 / would have told!"
She felt my discrimination. "I daresay I was wrong. But, really, I was
afraid.
"Afraid of what?"
"Of things that man could do. Quint was so clever — he was so deep.
I took this in still more than, probably, I showed. "You weren't afraid of
anything else? Not of his effect ?"

"His effect?" she repeated with a face of anguish and waiting while I

faltered.
"On innocentlittle 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. — she
Yes" let me have it
— "even about them."
"Them — that creature?" I had to smother a kind of howl. "And you could
bear it!"

"No. I couldn't — and I can't now!" And the poor woman burst into
tears.
A rigid control, from the next day, was, as I have said, to follow them; yet
 The Turn of the Screw 27

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 hours in especial
later —
for it may be imagined whether I

slept — still haunted with the shadow of something she had not told me. I

myself had kept back nothing, but there was a word Mrs. Grose had kept
back. I was sure, moreover, by morning, that this was not from a failure of
frankness, but because on every side there were fears. It seems to me
indeed, in retrospect, that by the time the morrow's sun was high had I

restlessly read into the facts before us almost all the meaning they were to
receive from subsequent and more cruel occurrences. What they gave me
above all —
was just the sinister figure of the living man the dead one would
keep awhile! —
and of the months he had continuously passed at Bly,
which, added up, made a formidable stretch. The limit of this evil time had
arrived only when, on the dawn of a 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 admirable and difficult; and there
—
would be a greatness in letting it be seen oh, in the right quarter! that —
I could succeed where many another girl might have failed. It was an

—
immense help to me I confess I rather applaud myself as I look back!
that I saw my service so strongly and so simply. I was there to protect and
defend the little creatures in the world the most bereaved and the most
lovable, the appeal of whose helplessness had suddenly become only too
explicit, a deep, constant ache of one's own committed heart. We were cut
together; we were united in our danger. They had nothing but
off, really,

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
28 Henry James

didn't last as suspense — was superseded by

it horrible proofs. Proofs, I

say, yes — from the moment took

I really hold.
This moment dated from an afternoon hour that happened to spend in
I

the grounds with the younger of my We had left Miles

pupils alone.
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 excep-
tionally 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 list-
less. My attention to them all really went to seeing them amuse themselves

immensely without me: this was a spectacle they seemed actively to pre-
pare and that engaged me as an active admirer. 1 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 and pleasant shade, but it was all
a great
suffused with the brightness of the hot, still hour. There was no ambiguity
in anything; none whatever, at least, in the conviction I from one moment
to another found myself forming as to what I should see straight before me
and across the lake as a consequence of raising my eyes. They were
attached at this juncture to the stitching in which I was engaged, and I can
feel once more the spasm of my effort not to move them till I should so have
steadied myself as to be able to make up my mind what to do. There was an
alien object in view —
a figure whose right of presence I instantly, passion-
ately questioned. I recollect counting over perfectly the possibilities, re-
 The Turn of the Screw 29

minding myself that nothing was more natural, for instance, than the
appearance of one of the men about the place, or even of a messenger, a
postman, or a tradesman's boy, from the village. That reminder had as little
effect on my practical certitude as I was conscious —
still even without

looking —
of its having upon the character and attitude of our visitor.
Nothing was more natural than that these things should be the other
things that they absolutely were not.
Of the positive identity of the apparition I would assure myself as soon
as the small clock of my courage should have ticked out the right second;
meanwhile, with an effort that was already sharp enough, I transferred my
eyes straight to little Flora, who, at the moment, was about ten yards away.
My heart had stood still for an instant with the wonder and terror of the
question whether she too would see; and I held my breath while I waited
for what a cry from her, what some sudden innocent sign either of interest
or of alarm, would tell me. I waited, but nothing came; then, in the first
place — and there is something more dire in this, I feel, than in anything I
have to relate —
I was determined by a sense that, within a minute, all

sounds from her had previously dropped; and, in the second, by the
circumstance that, also within the minute, she had, in her play, turned
her back to the water. This was her attitude when I at last looked at her
looked with the confirmed conviction that we were still, together, under
direct personal notice. She had picked up a small flat piece of wood, which
happened to have in it a little hole that had evidently suggested to her the
idea of sticking in another fragment that might figure as a mast and make
the thing a boat. This second morsel, as I watched her, she was very
markedly and intently attempting to tighten in its place. My apprehension
of what she was doing sustained me so that after some seconds I felt I was
ready for more. Then I again shifted my eyes —
I faced what I had to face.

VII

I got hold of Mrs. Grose as soon after this as I could; and I can give no
intelligible account of how I fought out the interval. Yet I still hear myself
cry as I fairly threw myself into her arms: "They know — it's too monstrous:

they know, they know!"

"And what on earth ?" I felt her incredulity as she held me.

—
"Why, all that we know and heaven knows what else besides!" Then,
as she released me, I made it out to her, made it out perhaps only now with
full coherency even to myself. "Two hours ago, in the garden"
— —
I could

scarce articulate "Flora saw ." 1

 " — " —

30 Henry James

Mrs. Grose took it as she might have taken a blow in the stomach. "She
has told you?" she panted.
"Not a word — that's the horror. She kept it to herself! The child of
eight, that child!" Unutterableme, was the stupefaction of it.
still, for
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
you've never seen?"
But someone the child has. Someone you have." Then, to show
"Yes.
how had thought it all out: "My predecessor
I the one who died." —
"Miss Jessel?"
"Miss Jessel. You don't believe me?" I pressed.
She turned right and left in her distress. "How can you be sure?"
This drew from me, in the state of my nerves, a flash of impatience.
"Then ask Flora she's sure!" But I had no sooner spoken than I caught
myself up. "No, for God's sake, don'tl She'll say she isn't she'll lie!" —
Mrs. Grose was not too bewildered instinctively to protest. "Ah, how can
you?"
"Because I'm clear. Flora doesn't want me to know."
"It's only then to spare you."
"No, no —
there are depths, depths! The more I go over it, the more I see
in it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear. I don't know what I don't

see — what I don't fear!"

Mrs. Grose tried to keep up with me. "You mean you're afraid of seeing
her again?"
"Oh, no; that's nothing — now!" Then I explained. "It's of not seeing
her.
But my companion only looked wan. "I don't understand you."
—
"Why, it's that the child may keep it up and that the child assuredly
will —
without my knowing it."
 The Turn of the Screw 3

At the image of this possibility Mrs. Grose for a moment collapsed, yet
presently to pull herself together again, as if from the positive force of the

sense of what, should we yield an inch, there would really be to give way to.

"Dear, dear — we must keep our heads! And after all, if she doesn't mind
it — She even
!"
grim
tried a "Perhaps she joke. likes it!"
"Likes such things — scrap of an a infant!"
"Isn't it just a proof of her blessed innocence?" my friend bravely
inquired.
She brought me, for the instant, almost round. "Oh, we must clutch at
that —
we must cling to it! If it isn't a proof of what you say, it's a proof of
God knows what! For the woman's a horror of horrors."
Mrs. Grose, at this, fixed her eyes a minute on the ground; then at last
raising them, "Tell me how you know," she said.
"Then you admit it's what she was?" I cried.
"Tell me how you know," my friend simply repeated.
"Know? By seeing her! By the way she looked."
"At you, do you mean — so wickedly?"
"Dear me, no — I could have borne that. She gave me never a glance. She
only fixed the child."
Mrs. Grose tried to see it. "Fixed her?"
"Ah, with such awful eyes!"
She stared at mine as if they might really have resembled them. "Do you
mean of dislike?"
"God help us, no. Of something much worse."
"Worse than dislike?" —
this left her indeed at a loss.
"With a determination —
indescribable. With a kind of fury of inten-
tion."
I made her turn pale. "Intention?"
"To get hold of her. " Mrs. Grose —
her eyes just lingering on mine gave —
a shudder and walked window; and while she stood there looking out
to the
I completed my statement. "That's what Flora knows."

After a little she turned round. "The person was in black, you say?"
"In mourning —
rather poor, almost shabby. But yes with extraordi- — —
nary 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
 " " "

32 Henry James

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 needn't 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 companion's own measure of my predecessor's abase-
ment. There was a way to deal with that, and I dealt; the more readily for
— —
my full vision on the evidence of our employer's 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. "I've never seen one like him. He did what he wished."
"With her?"
"With them all."
It was as if now in my friend's 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. Grose's 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 didn't;
and I thanked heaven she was well out of this!"
"
"Yet you had, then, your idea
—
"Of her real reason for leaving? Oh, yes as to that. She couldn't 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 / 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 don't do it!" I sobbed in de-
spair; "I don't save or shield them! It's far worse than I dreamed — they're
lost!"
 The Turn of the Screw 33

VIII

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 —
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 Flora's 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 disap-
peared. To gaze into the depths of blue of the child's 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 couldn't 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 one's heart, and
their fragrant faces against one's cheek, everything fell to the ground but
 —

34 Henry ]ames

their incapacity and their beauty. It was a pity that, somehow, to settle this
once for had equally to re-enumerate the signs of subtlety that, in the
all, I

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 gir! 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 didn't, 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 describe the portentous
little activity by which she sought to divert my attention —
the perceptible
increase of movement, the greater intensity of play, the singing, the gab-
bling of nonsense, and the invitation to romp.
Yet if I had not indulged, to prove there was nothing in it, in this re-
view, 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 asseve-

rate to my friend that I was certain —

which was so much to the good
that / 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 push-
ing 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 don't believe anything so horrible," I

recollect saying; "no, let us put it definitely, my dear, that I don't. But if I

did, you know, there's a thing I should require now, just without sparing
you the least — —
more oh, not a scrap, come! to get out of you. What
bit
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
didn't 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 de-

lightful, 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 observa-
tion 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
 The Turn of the Screw 35

answer. What my friend had had in mind proved to be immensely to the

purpose. Itwas 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. It's just what he wouldn't ." she could still impress upon
1

me. "I was sure, at any rate," she added, "that he didn't. But he denied
certain occasions."
"What occasions?"
"When they had been about together quite as if Quint were his tutor
—
and a very grand 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 hadn't?" 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 didn't matter;
which indeed she backed up by a further remark. "You see, after all, Miss
Jessel didn't mind. She didn't 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 didn't show
anything. He denied," she repeated; "he denied."
Lord, how pressed her now! "So that you could see he knew what was
I

between the two wretches?"

"I don't know —I don't know!" the poor woman groaned.

"You do know, you dear thing," I replied; "only you haven't 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 couldn't prevent
36 Henry James

"Your learning the truth? I daresay! But, heavens," I fell, with vehe-
mence, athinking, "what it shows that they must, to that extent, have
succeeded in making of him!"
"Ah, nothing that's not nice now ." Mrs. Grose lugubriously pleaded.
1

"I don't 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 tome 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 boy's 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 ade-
quate that I continued: "And you forgave him that?"
"Wouldn't 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 friend's 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 don't 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.
 The Turn of the Screw 37

IX

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 circumstance
that these things onlymade 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 There were moments when, by an irresistible
for taking risks.
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? Doesn't 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 mightn't see a queer-

ness 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 purpose in it.
say, literally to catch them at a

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
38 Henry James

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 naviga-
tors. 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 another
school 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 parson's daughter, to spoil; and the strangest if not the
brightest thread in the pensive embroidery I just spoke of was the impres-
sion 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 incite-
ment.
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 extraordi-
narily 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

understandings between them by which one of them should keep me

little

occupied while the other slipped away. There is a naive side, I suppose, in
diplomacy; but if my pupils practiced upon me, it was surely with
all the
minimum of grossness. It was all in the other quarter that, after a lull, the
grossness broke out.
 The Turn of the Screw 39

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 —
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 un-
avowed curiosity of my youth. I remember that the book I had in my hand
was Fielding's 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 up from
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 At this
that presided over the great turn of the staircase.
point I found myself aware of three things. They were prac-
precipitately
tically 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
 —

40 Henry James

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 didn't 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 / were in life. I can't
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.

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 re-
turned to my room. The foremost thing I saw there by the light of the
candle I had left burning was that bed was empty; and on this I
Flora's little
caught my breath with all I had been
the terror that, five minutes before,
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
 The Turn of the Screw 41

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,
something beautiful that
yieldingly, consciously, as before the excess of
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 incon-
sequence, 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, you'll 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?"
42 Henry James

Flora luminously considered; after which, with her little divine smile:
"Because I don't like to frighten you!"
?"
"But if I had, by your idea, gone out
She absolutely declined be puzzled; she turned her eyes to the flame of
to
the candle as if the question were as irrelevant, or at any rate as imper-
sonal, asMrs. 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 didn't 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, Ihad 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 o'clock; 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, was now out, and I felt an instant certainty that
but it

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 win-
dow 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
 The Turn of the Screw 43

evidently rested on the — the

casement opened forward and gave
sill —
herself up. There was moon to help her, and this fact had
a great still

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 I stood
in the passage I had my eyes on her brother's 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 bewilder-
ment 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; wondered if his bed were also empty and he too were
I

secretly at watch. was a deep, soundless minute, at the end of which my

It

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 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 — house that I have spoken of as the old
in the solid corner of the
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 occu-
pied. 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.
44 Henry James

XI

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 of a discussion of mysteries. drew a great security in this
I

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 hadn't I don't know what would have become of me,
for I couldn't 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 Lord's 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 witch's broth and proposed it with
 The Turn of the Screw 45

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 the staircase 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 couldn't 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 / 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.
 — —

46 Henry James

"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 wagged my head at him he stood there more than ever a
I

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 didn't undress at all?"
He gloom. "Not at all. I sat up and read."
fairly glittered in the

"And when did you go down?"

"At midnight. When I'm bad I am bad!"
"I see, I see —
it's charming. But how could you be sure I would
know it?"

"Oh, I arranged that with Flora." His answers rang out with a readi-
ness! "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.
 The Turn of the Screw 47

XII

The particular impression had received proved in the morning light, I

I

repeat, not quite successfully presentable to Mrs. Grose, though I rein-

forced 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. That's what he gave them a taste of at school."
"Lord, you do change!" cried my friend.
"I don't 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 I've watched and
waited the more I've 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 they're steeped in their vision of
the dead restored. He's not reading to her," I declared; "they're talking of
them — they're talking horrors! I if I were crazy; and it's a
go on, I know, as
wonder I'm not. What I've 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. It's a game," I

went on; "it's 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 haven't been good — they've only been absent. It has been
easy to live with them, because they're simply leading a life of their own.
They're not mine — they're not ours. They're his and they're hers!"
"Quint's and that woman's?"
"Quint's and that woman's. They want to get to them."
 " " " "

48 Henry James

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 withstill, to keep up the work of demons,
that evil
is what brings the others back.
"Laws!" said my friend under her breath. The exclamation was homely,
but it my further proof of what, in the bad
revealed a real acceptance of
time — had been a worse even than this!
for there 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?" echoed so loud that Miles and Flora, as they passed at their
I

distance, paused an instant in their walk and looked at us. "Don't 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 don't know, as yet,
quite how — but They're seen only
they're trying hard. across, as it were,
and beyond — strange places and on high
in the places, top of towers, the
roof of houses, the outside of windows, the further edge of pools; but
there's 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.
They've 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 scru-
pulously 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 who's 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? That's 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 indif-
 The Turn of the Screw 49

ference must have been awful. As I'm not a fiend, at any rate, I shouldn't
take him in."
My companion, an instant and for all answer, sat down again and
after
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
—
as a woman reads another
she evidently couldn't. Instead of it even she —
could see whatmyself saw: his derision, his amusement, his contempt for
I

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 didn't 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.

XIII

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, diffi-
culties 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 imagina-
tion: 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 don't 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 arrange-
ment. 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
50 Henry James

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
she'll do it this time —
but she won't!" 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 adven-
tures 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 re-
minders. 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 and partly at quite different ones
partly at such junctures as these
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 had
seen 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 impres-

sions 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
 The Turn of the Screw 51

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 —
recognized the moment, the spot. But they remained unaccompanied and
empty, and I continued unmolested;
unmolested one could call a young
if

woman whose most extraordinary fashion, not

sensibility had, in the
declined but deepened. I had said in my talk with Mrs. Grose on that
horrid scene of Flora's 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 I was ready to know the very worst that was to be
exposure.
known. What had then had an ugly glimpse of was that my eyes might be
I

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

visitorswho 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.
"They're here, they're here, you little wretches," I would have cried, "and
you can't 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
52 Henry James

names. As they died away on my lips, I said to myself that I should indeed
help them to represent something infamous if, by pronouncing them, I
little case of instinctive delicacy as any schoolroom,
should violate as rare a
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 do with the more or less noise that at the moment
had nothing to
we might be engaged making and that I could hear through any deep-
in
ened 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 was most impossible to get rid of was the cruel idea that,
it

whatever had seen, Miles and Flora saw more things terrible and
I —
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 automat-
ically, to mark the same movements.
close of the incident, through the very
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? Don't 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 celebra-
tion 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
 The Turn of the Screw 53

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 didn't 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

though it was only the relief that a snap brings to a strain or

call it relief,

the burst of a thunderstorm to a day of suffocation. It was at least change,

and it came with a rush.

xrv

Walking to church a certain Sunday morning, I had little Miles at my side

and his sister, in advance of us and at Mrs. Grose's, 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 Ihad 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 uncle's tailor, who had had a free
hand and a notion of pretty waistcoats and of his grand little air, Miles's
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
all interlocutors, but
uttered in the sweet, high, casual pipe with which, at
above all at his eternal governess, he threw off intonations as if he were
54 Henry James

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 con-

stantlyon 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 must pick my own phrases! I
that at present I

remember that, to gain time, and I seemed to see in the

I tried to laugh,
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, she's a jolly, perfect' lady; but, after all, I'm a
fellow, don't you see? that's — well, getting on."
I lingered there with him an instant ever so kindly. "Yes, you're 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 can't say I've not been awfully good,
can vou
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 can't say that,
Miles."
!"
"Except just that one night, you know
"That one night?" I couldn't 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 re-
proach. "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 won't."
"No, not that again. It was nothing."
was nothing," I said. "But we must go on."
"It
He resumed our walk with me, passing his hand into my arm. "Then
when am I going back?"
 The Turn of the Screw 55

I wore, in turning it over, my most responsible air. "Were you very happy
at school?"

He just considered. "Oh, I'm happy enough anywhere!"

!"
"Well, then," I quavered, "if you're just as happy here
"
"Ah, but that isn't 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 isn't so much
that.
"What is it, then?"
"Well — I want more life."
to see
"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. "Don't you, then, love our sweet Flora?"
"If I didn't —
and you, too; if I didn't !" 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 didn't
He looked, while I waited, about at the graves. "Well, you know what!"
But he didn't 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 don't; for it strikes me you never tell me. But I
mean does he know?"
"Know what, Miles?"
"Why, the way I'm going on."
56 Henry James

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 don't think your uncle much cares."
Miles, on this, stood looking at me. "Then don't you think he can be
made to?"
"In what way?"
"Why, by his coming down."
"But who'll 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.

XV
The business was practically settled from the moment I never followed
him. was a pitiful surrender to agitation, but my being aware of this had
It

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 congrega-
tion 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 that's 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
 The Turn of the Screw 57

nothing, and it extreme an effort to squeeze beside him into the

was too
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, don't you know? did you desert us—
at the very door?" I couldn't 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 of the 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 and just so bowed with

before, in the darkness of night
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
 —

58 Henry James

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 per-
sisted. Then it was — —
with the very act of its announcing itself that her
identity flared up in a change of posture. She rose, not as if she had heard
me, but with an indescribable grand melancholy of indifference and
detachment, and, within a dozen feet of me, stood there as my vile
predecessor. Dishonored and tragic, she was all before me; but even as I
fixed and, for memory, secured it, the awful image passed away. Dark as
midnight in her black dress, her haggard beauty and her unutterable woe,
she had looked at me long enough to appear to say that her right to sit at my
table was as good as mine to sit at hers. While these instants lasted,
indeed, I had the extraordinary chill of feeling that it was I who was the
intruder. It was as a wild protest against it that, actually addressing her
"You terrible, miserable woman!" — I heard myself break into a sound that,

by the open door, rang through the long passage and the empty house. She
looked at me as if she heard me, but I had recovered myself and cleared the
air. There was nothing in the room the next minute but the sunshine and a

sense that I must stay.

XVI

I had so perfectly expected that the return of my pupils would be marked by

a demonstration that I was freshly upset at having to take into account that

they were dumb about my absence. Instead of gaily denouncing and

caressing me, they made no allusion to my having failed them, and I was
left, for the time, on perceiving that she too said nothing, to study Mrs.

Grose's odd face. I did this to such purpose that I made sure they had in
some way bribed her to silence; a silence that, however, I would engage to
break down on the first private opportunity. This opportunity came before
tea: I secured five minutes with her in the housekeeper's room, where, in

the twilight, amid a smell of lately baked bread, but with the place all
swept and garnished, I found her sitting in pained placidity before the fire.
So I see her still, so I see her best: facing the flame from her straight chair
in the dusky, shining room, a large clean image of the "put away" — of
drawers closed and locked and rest without a remedy.
"Oh, yes, they asked me to say nothing; and to please them — so long
 The Turn of the Screw 59

as they were there — of course I promised. But what had happened

to you?"
"I only went with you for the walk," I said. "I had then to come back to

meet a friend.
She showed her surprise. "A friend you?"
"Oh, yes, I have a couple!" I laughed. "But did the children give you a
reason?"
"For not alluding to your leaving us? Yes; they said you would like it

better. Do you like it better?"

My face had made her rueful. "No, I like it worse!" But after an instant
I added: "Did they say why I should like it better?"
"
"No; Master Miles only said, 'We must do nothing but what she likes!'

"I wish indeed he would! And what did Flora say?"

"Miss Flora was too sweet. She said, 'Oh, of course, of course!' — and I

said the same."

I thought a moment. "You were too sweet, too — I can hear you all. But
nonetheless, between Miles and me, it's now all out."
"All out?" My companion stared. "But what, miss?"
"Everything. It doesn't matter. I've made up my mind. I came home, my
dear," I went on, with Miss Jessel."
"for a talk
I had by this time formed the habit of having Mrs. Grose literally well in

hand advance of my sounding that note; so that even now, as she bravely
in
blinked under the signal of my word, I could keep her comparatively firm.
"A talk! Do you mean she spoke?"
"Itcame to that. I found her, on my return, in the schoolroom."
"And what did she say?" I can hear the good woman still, and the candor
of her stupefaction.
!"
"That she suffers the torments
It was this, of a truth, that made her, as she filled out my picture, gape.

"Do you mean," she faltered, " of the lost?" —

"Of the lost. Of the damned. And that's why, to share them "
I

faltered myself with the horror of it.

But my companion, with less imagination, kept me up. "To share
them ?"

"She wants Flora." Mrs. Grose might, as I gave it to her, fairly have
fallen away from me had I not been prepared. I still held her there, to show
I was. "As I've told you, however, it doesn't matter."
"Because you've made up your mind? But to what?"
"To everything.
"And what do you call everything?"
"Why, sending for their uncle."
"Oh, miss, in pity do," my friend broke out.
60 Henry James

"Ah, but I will, I will! I see it's the only way. What's out,' as I told you,
with Miles is that if he thinks I'm afraid to — and has ideas of what he
gains by that — he shall see he's mistaken. Yes, yes; his uncle shall have
it here from me on the spot (and before the boy himself, if necessary) that
if I'm to be reproached with having done nothing again about more
"
school
"Yes, miss "
my companion pressed me.
"Well, there's that awful reason."
There were now clearly so many of these for my poor colleague that she
was excusable for being vague. "But a which?" ——
"Why, the letter from his old place."
"You'll show it to the master?"
"I ought to have done so on the instant."

"Oh, no!" said Mrs. Grose with decision.

"I'll put it before him," I went on inexorably, "that I can't undertake to
"
work the question on behalf of a child who has been expelled
"For we've never in the least known what!" Mrs. Grose declared.
"For wickedness. For what else —
when he's so clever and beautiful and
perfect? Is he stupid? Is he untidy? Is he infirm? Is he ill-natured? He's
exquisite —
so it can be only that; and that would open up the whole thing.
!"
After all," I said, "it's their uncle's fault. If he left here such people
"He didn't really in the least know them. The fault's mine." She had
turned quite pale.
"Well, you shan't suffer," I answered.
"The children shan't!" she emphatically returned.
I was silent awhile; we looked at each other. "Then what am I to tell
him?"
"You needn't tell him anything. I'll tell him."
I measured this. "Do you mean you'll write ?" Remembering she
couldn't, I caught myself up. "How do you communicate?"
"I tell the bailiff. He writes."
"And should you like him to write our story?"
My question had a sarcastic force that I had not fully intended, and it
made her, after a moment, inconsequently break down. The tears were
again in her eyes. Ah, miss, you write!"
"Well —
tonight," I at last answered; and on this we separated.
 The Turn of the Screw 61

XVII

I went so far, in the evening, as to make a beginning. The weather had

changed back, a great wind was abroad, and beneath the lamp, in my room,
with Flora at peace beside me, I sat for a long time before a blank sheet of
paper and listened to the lash of the rain and the batter of the gusts. Finally
I went out, taking a candle; I crossed the passage and listened a minute at

Miles's door. What, under my endless obsession, I had been impelled to

listen for was some betrayal of his not being at rest, and I presently caught
one, but not in the form I had expected. His voice tinkled out. "I say, you
there — come in." It was a gaiety in the gloom!
I went in with my light and found him, in bed, very wide awake, but

very much at his ease. "Well, what are you up to?" he asked with a grace of
sociability in which it occurred to me that Mrs. Grose, had she been
present, might have looked in vain for proof that anything was "out."
I stood over him with my candle. "How did you know I was there?"

"Why, of course I heard you. Did you fancy you made no noise? You're
like a troop of cavalry!" he beautifully laughed.
"Then you weren't asleep?"
"Not much! I lie awake and think."
I had put my candle, designedly, a short way off, and then, as he held out

his friendly old hand to me, had sat down on the edge of his bed. "What is
it," I asked, "that you think of?"

"What in the world, my dear, but you?"

"Ah, the pride I take in your appreciation doesn't insist on that! I had so
far rather you slept."
"Well, I think also, you know, of this queer business of ours."
I marked the coolness of his firm little hand. "Of what queer business,

Miles?"
"Why, the way you bring me up. And all the rest!"
I fairly held my breath a minute, and even from my glimmering taper
there was light enough to show how he smiled up at me from his pillow.
"What do you mean by all the rest?"
"Oh, you know, you know!"
I could say nothing for a minute, though I felt, as I held his hand and our
eyes continued to meet, that my silence had all the air of admitting his
charge and that nothing in the whole world of reality was perhaps at that
moment so fabulous as our actual relation. "Certainly you shall go back to
school," I said, "if it be that that troubles you. But not to the old place we —
must find another, a better. How could I know it did trouble you, this
 — I

62 Henry James

question, when you never told me so, never spoke of it at all?" His clear,
listening face, framed in its smooth whiteness, made him for the minute as
appealing as some wistful patient in a children's hospital; and I would have
given, as the resemblance came to me, all I possessed on earth really to be
the nurse or the sister of charity who might have helped to cure him. Well,
even as it was, I perhaps might help! "Do you know you've never said a word
to me about your school —
I mean the old one; never mentioned it in any

way?"
He seemed to wonder; he smiled with the same loveliness. But he clearly
gained time; he waited, he called for guidance. "Haven't I?" It wasn't for
—
me to help him it was for the thing I had met!
Something in his tone and the expression of his face, as I got this from
him, set my heart aching with such a pang as it had never yet known; so
unutterably touching was it to see his little brain puzzled and his little
resources taxed to play, under the spell laid on him, a part of innocence and
consistency. "No, never —
from the hour you came back. You've never
mentioned to me one of your masters, one of your comrades, nor the least
little thing that ever happened to you at school. Never, little Miles no, —
never —
have you given me an inkling of anything that may have happened
there. Therefore you can fancy how much I'm in the dark. Until you came
out, that way, this morning, you had, since the first hour I saw you, scarce
even made a reference to anything in your previous life. You seemed so
perfectly to accept the present." It was extraordinary how my absolute
conviction of his secret precocity (or whatever I might call the poison of an
influence that I dared but half to phrase) made him, in spite of the faint
breath of his inward trouble, appear as accessible as an older person
imposed him almost as an intellectual equal. "I thought you wanted to go
on as you are."
It struck me that at this he just faintly colored. He gave, at any rate, like

a convalescent slightly fatigued, a languid shake of his head. "I don't —

don't. I want to get away."
"You're tired of Bly?"
"Oh, no, I like Bly."
"Well, then ?"

"Oh, you know what a boy wants!"

I felt that I didn't 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 can't get off with that!"
I was silent a little, and it was I, now, I think, who changed color. "My
dear, I don't want to get off!"
"You can't, even if you do. You can't, you can't!" — he lay beautifully
 The Turn of the Screw 63

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, don't you understand that that's exactly what I'm working for?
You'll have to tell him — about the way you've let it all drop: you'll have to
tell him a tremendous lot!"

The which he uttered this helped me somehow, for the

exultation with
instant, tomeet him rather more. "And how much will you, Miles, have to
tell him? There are things he'll ask you!"

He turned it over. "Very likely. But what things?"

"The things you've never told me. To make up his mind what to do with
"
you. He can't send you back
"Oh, I don't want to go back!" he broke in. "I want a new field."
He with admirable serenity, with positive unimpeachable gaiety;
said it

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. threw myself upon him and in the tenderness of my pity I embraced
I
!"
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. "I've 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. "I've 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
64

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! It's only that, it's nothing but
that, and I'd rather die than give you a pain or do you a wrong I'd rather —
die than hurt a hair of you.
— Dear little Miles" — oh, I brought it out now
even if I should go too farwant you to help me to save you!" But I
"I just
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 frozen air, 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, indis-
tinctly, 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 candle's out!" I then
cried.
"It was I who blew it, dear!" said Miles.

XVIII

The next day, after lessons, Mrs. Grose found a moment to say to me
quietly: "Have you written, miss?"
"Yes —
I've written." But I didn't 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
 The Turn of the Screw 65

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
shouldn't 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 —
you'll cease to worry and spy upon
me, won't keep me so close to you, will let me go and come. Well, I 'come,'
you see —
but I don't go! There'll 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 hadn't 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 / 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 with Mrs. 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 igno-
rance. 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 pur-
suance 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
 "

66 Henry James

alarms, and I could feel with what high interest my friend returned me all
had from the given her.
those I first

"She'll be above," she presently said

— "in one of the rooms you haven't
searched.
"No; she's at a distance.'' I had made up my mind. "She has gone out."
Mrs. Grose stared. "Without a hat?"
I naturally also looked volumes. "Isn't that woman always without one?"

"She's with her?"

"She's with her!" I declared. "We must find them."
My hand was on my friend's 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
where's Master Miles?"
"Oh, he's with Quint. They're 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 trick's played," I went on; "they've 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 don't 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 on the great hall table. "Luke
it

will take it," I said as I came back. I reached the house door and opened it;
Iwas already on the steps.
My companion still demurred: the storm of the night and the early
morning had dropped, 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 can't 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!
 The Turn of the Screw 67

XIX

We went straight to the lake, as it was and I daresay rightly

called at Bly,
called,though I reflect that it may been a sheet of water less
in fact have
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. Grose's steps so marked a direction —
a direction that made
her, when she perceived it, oppose a resistance that showed me she was
freshly mystified. "You're going to the water, miss?
?"
—
you think she's
in
"She may be, though the depth is, I believe, nowhere very great. But
what I judge most likely is that she's 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? I've 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 appal 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
 a

68 Henry James

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 friend's 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?"
"She's not alone,and at such times she's not a child: she's an old, old
woman." scanned all the visible shore while Mrs. Grose took again, into
I

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 boat's there, where on earth's she?" my colleague anxiously
asked.
"That's 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 it's 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 —
 The Turn of the Screw 69

big, ugly spray of withered fern. became sure she had just come
I instantly
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
Flora's face peep at me over our companion's 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
had virtually said to each
I

other was that pretexts were useless now. When Mrs. Grose finally got up
she kept the child's 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. "I'll be hanged," it said, "if III 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 where s 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 and that now, even before speaking, I felt overflow
in a deluge. "I'll tell you if you'll tell me "
I heard myself say, then
heard the tremor in which it broke.
"Well, what?"
Mrs. Grose's suspense blazed at me, but it was too late now, and I

brought the thing out handsomely. "Where, my pet, is Miss Jessel?"

XX
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 child's 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
 70 Henry ]ames

rather wounded, which, in turn, within a few seconds, was completed by a

gasp of my own. I seized my colleague's arm. "She's there, she's 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 pro-
duced 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
i
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. Grose's 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 ap-
peared 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. "She's 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, reproba-
tion. 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?"
 The Turn of the Screw 71

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
r hand. "You don't see her exactly as we see? — you mean to say you don't
now now? She's 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
I entered, breaking, even while there pierced through my sense of ruin a
I prodigious private triumph, into breathless reassurance.
f "She isn't there, and nobody's there and you never see
little lady, —
1 nothing, my sweet! How can poor Miss Jessel —
when poor Miss Jessel's
dead and buried? We know, don't we, love?" —
and she appealed, blunder-
ing in, to the child. "It's all a mere mistake and a worry and a joke — and
we'll 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 friend's
dress, her incomparable childish beauty had suddenly failed, had quite
vanished. I've said it already — she was literally, she was hideously, hard;
she had turned common and almost ugly. "I don't know what you mean. I

see nobody. I see nothing. I never have. I think you're cruel. I don't 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 herl"
"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
72 Henry ]ames

outside source each of her stabbing little words, and I could therefore, in

the full despair of had to accept, but sadly shake my head at her. "If I
all I

had ever doubted, all my doubt would at present have gone. I've been living
with the miserable truth, and now it has only too much closed round me.
Of course I've lost you: I've interfered, and you've seen under her —
——
dictation"
witness
with which I faced, over the pool again, our infernal
"the easy and perfect way to meet it. I've done my best, but I've
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 Flora's
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 Flora's 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 o'clock 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
 The Turn of the Screw 73

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.

XXI

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 had put to her the question of her sense of the child's
I

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 isn't a matter on
which can push her! Yet it isn't either, I must
I 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, she's 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! She'll 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 what's the matter
with her now!"
Oh, that manner, I could see in my visitor's face, and not a little else

besides! "She asks me every three minutes if I think you're coming in."
"I see — too, on my side, had so much more than worked it out.
I see. " I,

"Has she said you since yesterday

to —
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.
74 Henry James

"Rather! And, naturally, you take itfrom her still."

"I don't contradict her. What else can I do?"

"Nothing in the world! You've the cleverest little person to deal with.
They've 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 she'll work it to the end."
"Yes, miss; but to what end?"
"Why, that of dealing with me to her uncle. She'll make me out to him
!"
the lowest creature
I winced at the fair show of the scene in Mrs. Grose's 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 doesn't 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 you've 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. "I've 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 won't do. It's 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 Miles's."
?"
She looked at me hard. "Do you think he
"Won't, 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. "There's one thing,
of course," I went on: "they mustn't, before she goes, see each other for
three seconds." Then it came over me that, in spite of Flora's 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, I'm not such a fool as that! If I've
been obliged to leave her three or four times, it has been each time with
one of the maids, and at present, though she's alone, she's locked in safe.
—
And yet and yet!" There were too many things.
"And yet what?"
 The Turn of the Screw 75

"Well, are you so sure of the little gentleman?"

"I'm 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 and

to speak. Last evening, in the firelight
the silence, he sat with me
two hours as if it were just coming."
for
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 didn't, and it was without
abreach of the silence or so much as a faint allusion to his sister's condition
and absence that we at last kissed for good night. All the same," I contin-
ued, "I can't, 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. He'll 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. "I'll go — I'll go. I'll go this morning."
I wanted to be very just. "If you should wish still to wait, I would engage
she shouldn't see me."
"No, no: it's the place itself. She must leave it." She held me a moment
with heavy eyes, then brought out the rest. "Your idea's the right one. I
"
myself, miss
"Well?"
"I can't 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. "I've 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!"
 " " "

76 Henry James

"It does that, miss!"

I couldn't have desired more emphasis, but I just hesitated. "She's so
horrible?''
saw my colleague scarce knew how to put it. "Really shocking."
I

"And about me?"

"About you, miss —
since you must have it. Its beyond everything, for a
"
young lady; and I can't think wherever she must have picked up
"The 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 I've heard some of it before! Yet I can't 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/or 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 if I might
shoulder to shoulder:
continue sure of that I what else happened. My
should care but little

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, nonethe-
less, I was to some extent embarrassed. "There's 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 won't have got there. Your
letter never went.
"What then became
"Goodness knows! Master Miles
of it?"
—
"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 wasn't 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!"
 The Turn of the Screw 77

"Yes, I see that if Miles took it instead he probably will have read it and
destroyed it."

"And don't you see anything else?"

faced her a moment with a sad smile. "It strikes me that by this time
I

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 couldn't 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. "I'll get it out of him. He'll meet
—
me he'll confess. If he confesses, he's saved. And if he's saved
"

"Then you are?" The dear woman kissed me on this, and I took her
farewell. "I'll save you without him!" she cried as she went.

XXII

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 No hour of my stay in fact was so assailed with apprehen-
a measure.
sions 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 had been
I

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 colleague's 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

 I

78 Henry James

just clutching the helm that I avoided total wreck; and I dare say that, to
bear up became, that morning, very grand and very dry. I welcomed
at all, I

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 Flora's 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 now permit this office
to consist of was yet to be settled: there was a queer relief, at all events —
—
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 nor shadow.
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 de-
pended on the success of my rigid will, the will to shut my eyes as tight as
 The Turn of the Screw 79

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, one's 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 was met, incontestably, by the quickened vision of

confirmed as that I

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 Wasn't there light in the fact which, as we shared our
off.

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? Mightn't 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 she'll 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 didn't you get her off before?"
"Before what?"
"Before she became too ill to travel.
found myself prompt. "She's not too ill to travel: she only might have
I

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 the charming little "table manner" that, from the day of his
80 Henry James

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 irreproach-
able, 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 we're alone!" —

XXIII

"Oh, more or less." I fancy my smile was pale. "Not absolutely. We

shouldn't like that!" I went on.
—
"No I suppose we shouldn't. 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 don't 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
— "every thing depends!" On this, how-
ever, he faced to the window again and with his vague,
presently reached it

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 boy's 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
of shut out. He was admirable, but not comfortable: I took it in with a
 The Turn of the Screw 81

throb of hope. Wasn't he looking, through the haunted pane, for something
he couldn't see? —
and wasn't 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
lastturned round to meet me, it was almost as if this genius had suc-
cumbed. "Well, I think I'm glad Bly agrees with mel"
"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
you've been enjoying yourself."
"Oh, yes, I've been ever so far; all round about — miles and miles away.
I've 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
He
it?"

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 we're alone together now it's you
that are alone most. But I hope," he threw in, "you don't particularly
mind!"
"Having to do with you?" I asked. "My dear child, how can I help
minding? Though I've renounced all claim to your company you're —
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. stay on as your friend and from the tremendous interest I
I

take in you something can be done for you that may be more worth your
till

while. That needn't surprise you." My voice trembled so that I felt it

impossible to suppress the shake. "Don't 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 wouldn't 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 didn't do it."
"Oh, yes," he said with the brightest superficial eagerness, "you wanted
me to tell you something.
82 Henry James

"That's it. What you have on your mind, you know."

Out, straight out.
'Ah, then, what you've stayed over for?"
is that
He spoke with a gaiety through which I could still catch the finest little
quiver of resentful passion; but I can't 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 couldn't 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 who had been for me a revelation of the possibilities of beautiful
intercourse? Wasn't it base to create for a being so exquisite a mere alien
awkwardness? I suppose I now read into our situation a clearness it
couldn't 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. "I'll tell you everything," Miles said
—
"I mean I'll tell you

anything you like. You'll 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 propor-

tionately 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,
 The Turn of the Screw 83

and I'll 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
much ?"
bargain. "Very smaller
"Yes, a
— —
mere fraction of the whole. Tell me" oh, my work preoccupied
me, and Iwas offhand! "if, yesterday afternoon, from the table in the

hall, you took, you know, my letter."

xxrv

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 window. The appearance was full upon us that I had already
to the
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 with a moan of joy, I enfolded, I drew him close; and while I held
this,
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
 —

84 Henry James

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 child's 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 Miles's 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 should surely 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?"

burned it."
"I've
"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 mightn't go back?"
The only thing he felt was rather a dreary little surprise. "Did you know
I mightn't go back?"
"I know everything."
He gave me at this the longest and strangest look. "Everything?"
"Everything. Therefore did you ?" But I couldn't say it again.
Miles could, very simply. "No. I didn't steal."
My face must have shown him I believed him utterly; yet my hands
 The Turn of the Screw 85

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 round the top of the room and drew his
all

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 oughtn't."
"But to whom did you say them?"
He evidently tried to remember, but it dropped — he had lost it. "I don't
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 don't
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
86 Henry James

To the masters? Oh, yes!" he answered very simply. "But I didn't know
they'd tell."
"The masters? They didn't — they've never told. That's 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 can't 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 own eyes 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. "It's not Miss Jessel! But it's at the window — straight before us.
It's there — the coward horror, there for the last time!"
this, after a second in which his head made the movement of a baffled
At
dog's 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. "It's 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 —
 The Turn of the Screw 87

ever matter? / 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, and seen
stared, glared again,
but the quiet day. With the stroke of the was so proud of he uttered
loss I

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.
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Complete Sonnets, William Shakespeare. 80pp. 26686-9 $1.00
Selected Poems, Percy Bysshe Shelley. 128pp. 27558-2 $1.00
Selected Poems, Alfred Lord Tennyson. 112pp. 27282-6 $1.00
Christmas Carols: Complete Verses, Shane Weller (ed.). 64pp. 27397-0 $1.00
 DOVER -THRIFT -EDITIONS
All books complete and unabridged. All 5 3/ie" x S lA'\ paperbound.
Just $1.00-$2.00 in U.S.A.

POETRY (continued)
Great Love Poems, Shane Weller (ed.). 128pp. 27284-2 $1.00
Selected Poems, Walt Whitman. 128pp. 26878-0 $1.00
The Ballad of Reading Gaol and Other Poems, Oscar Wilde. 64pp. 27072-6 $1.00
Favorite Poems, William Wordsworth. 80pp. 27073-4 $1.00
Early Poems, William Butler Yeats. 128pp. 27808-5 $1.00

FICTION
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, Edwin A. Abbott. 96pp. 27263-X $1.00
Beowulf, Beowulf (trans, by R. K. Gordon). 64pp. 27264-8 $1.00

Civil War Stories, Ambrose Bierce. 128pp. 28038-1 $1.00

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll. 96pp. 27543-4 $1.00

O Pioneers!, Willa Cather. 128pp. 27785-2 $1.00

Five Great Short Stories, Anton Chekhov. 96pp. 26463-7 $1.00
Favorite Father Brown Stories, G. K. Chesterton. 96pp. 27545-0 $1.00

The Awakening, Kate Chopin. 128pp. 27786-0 $1.00

Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. 80pp. 26464-5 $1.00

The Secret Sharer and Other Stories, Joseph Conrad. 128pp. 27546-9 $1.00

The Open Boat and Other Stories, Stephen Crane. 128pp. 27547-7 $1.00

The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane. 112pp. 26465-3 $1.00

A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens. 80pp. 26865-9 $1.00
The Cricket on the Hearth and Other Christmas Stories, Charles Dickens. 128pp.
28039-X $1.00
Notes from the Underground, Fyodor Dostoyevsky. 96pp. 27053-X $1.00
Six Great Sherlock Holmes Stories, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. 112pp. 27055-6 $1.00

Where Angels Fear to Tread, E. M. Forster. 128pp. (Available in U.S. only) 27791-7
$1.00

The Overcoat and Other Short Stories, Nikolai Gogol. 112pp. 27057-2 $1.00

Great Ghost Stories, John Grafton (ed.). 112pp. 27270-2 $1.00

The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Short Stories, Bret Harte. 96pp. 27271-0 $1.00
The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne. 192pp. 28048-9 $2.00
Young Goodman Brown and Other Short Stories, Nathaniel Hawthorne. 128pp.
27060-2 $1.00
The Gift of the Magi and Other Short Stories, O. Henry. 96pp. 27061-0 $1.00

The Nutcracker and the Golden Pot, E. T. A. Hoffmann. 128pp. 27806-9 $1.00
The Beast in the Jungle and Other Stories, Henry James. 128pp. 27552-3 $1.00
The Turn of the Screw, Henry James. 96pp. 26684-2 $1.00

Dubliners, James Joyce. 160pp. 26870-5 $1.00

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce. 192pp. 28050-0 $2.00
 DOVER -THRIFT -EDITIONS
//
All books complete and unabridged. All 5 3/ie" x 8 1/4 ,
paperbound.
Just $1.00-$2.00 in U.S.A.

FICTION (continued)
The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories, Rudyard Kipling. 128pp. 28051-9
$1.00

Selected Short Stories, D. H. Lawrence. 128pp. 27794-1 $1.00

Green Tea and Other Ghost Stories, J. Sheridan LeFanu. 96pp. 27795-X $1.00
The Call of the Wild, Jack London. 64pp. 26472-6 $1.00
Five Great Short Stories, Jack London. 96pp. 27063-7 $1.00
White Fang, Jack London. 160pp. 26968-X $1.00
The Necklace and Other Short Stories, Guy de Maupassant. 128pp. 27064-5 $1.00

Bartleby and Benito Cereno, Herman Melville. 112pp. 26473-4 $1.00

The Gold-Bug and Other Tales, Edgar Allan Poe. 128pp. 26875-6 $1.00
The Queen of Spades and Other Stories, Alexander Pushkin. 128pp. 28054-3 $1.00
Three Lives, Gertrude Stein. 176pp. 28059-4 $2.00

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson. 64pp.
26688-5 $1.00
Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson. 160pp. 27559-0 $1.00
The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Short Stories, Leo Tolstoy. 144pp. 27805-0 $1.00
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain. 224pp. 28061-6 $2.00
The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories, Mark Twain. 128pp. 27069-6 $1.00
Candide, Voltaire (Francois-Marie Arouet). 112pp. 26689-3 $1.00
The Invisible Man, H. G. Wells. 112pp. (Available in U.S. only.) 27071-8 $1.00
Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton. 96pp. 26690-7 $1.00
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde. 192pp. 27807-7 $1.00

NONFICTION
The Devil's Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce. 144pp. 27542-6 $1.00
The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois. 176pp. 28041-1 $2.00
Self-Reliance and Other Essays, Ralph Waldo Emerson. 128pp. 27790-9 $1.00
Great Speeches, Abraham Lincoln. 112pp. 26872-1 $1.00
The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli. 80pp. 27274-5 $1.00
Symposium and Phaedrus, Plato. 96pp. 27798-4 $1.00

The Trial and Death of Socrates: Four Dialogues, Plato. 128pp. 27066-1 $1.00
Civil Disobedience and Other Essays, Henry David Thoreau. 96pp. 27563-9 $1.00
The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen. 256pp. 28062-4 $2.00

PLAYS
The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov. 64pp. 26682-6 $1.00
The Three Sisters, Anton Chekhov. 64pp. 27544-2 $1.00
The Way of the World, William Congreve. 80pp. 27787-9 $1.00
Medea, Euripides. 64pp. 27548-5 $1.00
The Mikado, William Schwenck Gilbert. 64pp. 27268-0 $1.00
 DOVE^THRI FT EDITIONS •

All books complete and unabridged. All 5 3/i6" x 8W, paperbound.

Just $1.00-$2.00 in U.S.A.

Hill
WBmam (continued)
Faust, Part One, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. 192pp. 28046-2 $2.00
She Stoops to Conquer, Oliver Goldsmith. 80pp. 26867-5 $1.00
A Doll's House, Henrik Ibsen. 80pp. 27062-9 $1.00
Hedda G abler, Henrik Ibsen. 80pp. 26469-6 $1.00
Volpone, Ben Jonson. 112pp. 28049-7 $1.00
The Misanthrope, Moliere. 64pp. 27065-3 $1.00

Hamlet, William Shakespeare. 128pp. 27278-8 $1.00

Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare. 80pp. 26876-4 $1.00
King Lear, William Shakespeare. 112pp. 28058-6 $1.00
Macbeth, William Shakespeare. 96pp. 27802-6 $1.00
A Midsummer Night's Dream, William Shakespeare. 80pp. 27067-X $1.00

Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare. 96pp. 27557-4 $1.00

Arms and the Man, George Bernard Shaw. 80pp. (Available in U.S. only.) 26476-9
$1.00

The School for Scandal, Richard Brinsley Sheridan. 96pp. 26687-7 $1.00

Antigone, Sophocles. 64pp. 27804-2 $1.00

Oedipus Rex, Sophocles. 64pp. 26877-2 $1.00
Miss Julie, August Strindberg. 64pp. 27281-8 $1.00
The Playboy of the Western World and Riders to the Sea, J. M. Synge. 80pp.
27562-0 $1.00
The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde. 64pp. 26478-5 $1.00

For acomplete descriptive list volumes in the Dover Thrift Editions series
of all

write for a free Dover and Literature Catalog (59047-X) to

Fiction .

Dover Publications, Inc., Dept. DTE, 31 E. 2nd Street, Mineola, NY 11501

 Henry James
THE TURN OF THE SCREW
Widely recognized one of literature's most gripping ghost
as
moral degradation concerns the sinister
stories, this classic tale of
transformation of two innocent children into flagrant liars and
hypocrites. The story begins when a governess arrives at an
English country estate to look after Miles, aged ten, and Flora,
eight. At first, everything appears normal but then events
gradually begin to weave a spell of psychological terror.

One night a ghost appears before the governess. It is the dead

lover of Miss Jessel, the former governess. Later, the ghost of
Miss Jessel herself appears before the governess and the little
Moreover, both the governess and the housekeeper suspect
girl.

that the two spirits have appeared to the boy in private. The
children, however, adamantly refuse to acknowledge the pres-
ence of the two spirits, in spite of indications that there is some
sort of evil communication going on between the children and
the ghosts.

Without resorting to clattering chains, demonic noises and other

melodramatic techniques, this elegantly told tale succeeds in
creating an atmosphere of tingling suspense and unspoken
horror matched by few other books in the genre. Known for his
probing psychological novels dealing with the upper classes,
James in this story tried his hand at the occult — and created a
masterpiece of the supernatural that has frightened and de-
lighted readers for nearly a century.

Unabridged and unaltered Dover (1991) republication of the

The Two Magics, by the Macmillan
text originally published in
Company, New York and London, 1898. 96pp. 5 3/ie x 8%.
Paperbound.

Free Dover Complete Catalog (59069-0) available upon request.

ISBN D-Mflb-EbbflM-E
90000

Sl.QD INUSA
$1.50 INCANADA
CQ.^Sp. IN U-K. 9 780486"266848