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, difficulties as
insurmountable as before. This
situation continued a month, and with new aggravations and particular notes,
the note above all, sharper and sharper, of the small
ironic consciousness on the
part of my pupils. It was not, I am as sure today as I was sure then, my
mere infernal imagination: it was absolutely traceable that they
were aware of my predicament
and that this strange relation made, in a manner, for a long time, the
air in which we moved. I 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 arrangement. It was as if, at
moments, we were perpetually
coming into sight of subjects before which we must stop short, turning
suddenly out of alleys that we perceived to be blind, closing
with a little bang that made
us look at each other— for, like all bangs, it was something louder than
we had intended— the doors we had indiscreetly opened. All
roads lead to Rome, and there
were times when it might have struck us that almost every branch of study
or subject of conversation skirted forbidden ground.
Forbidden ground was the question
of the return of the dead in general and of whatever, in especial, might
survive, in memory, of the friends little children had lost.
There were days when I could
have sworn that one of them had, with a small invisible nudge, said to
the other: "She thinks 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 adventures and of those of my brothers and sisters
and of the cat and the dog at home, as well as
many particulars of the eccentric
nature of my father, of the furniture and arrangement of our house, and
of the conversation of the old women of our village. There
were things enough, taking one
with another, to chatter about, if one went very fast and knew by instinct
when to go round. They pulled with an art of their own the
strings of my invention and
my memory; and nothing else perhaps, when I thought of such occasions afterward,
gave me so the suspicion of being watched from
under cover. It was in any case
over my life, my past, and my friends alone that we could take anything
like our ease— a state of affairs that led them sometimes
without the least pertinence
to break out into sociable reminders. I was invited— with no visible connection—
to repeat afresh Goody Gosling's celebrated mot or to
confirm the details already
supplied as to the cleverness of the vicarage pony.
It was partly at such junctures
as these and partly at quite different ones that, with the turn my matters
had now taken, my predicament, as I have called it, grew most
sensible. The fact that the
days passed for me without another encounter ought, it would have appeared,
to have done something toward soothing my nerves. Since
the light brush, that second
night on the upper landing, of the presence of a woman at the foot of the
stair, I 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 impressions
of the kind of ministering moment, that brought back to
me, long enough to catch it,
the feeling of the medium in which, that June evening out of doors, I had
had my first sight of Quint, and in which, too, at those other
instants, I had, after seeing
him through the window, looked for him in vain in the circle of shrubbery.
I recognized the signs, the portents— I recognized the moment,
the spot. But they remained
unaccompanied and empty, and I continued unmolested; if unmolested one
could call a young woman whose sensibility had, in the most
extraordinary fashion, not declined
but deepened. I had said in my talk with Mrs. Grose on that horrid scene
of 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 exposure. I was
ready to know the very worst
that was to be known. What I had then had an ugly glimpse of was that my
eyes might be sealed just while theirs were most opened.
Well, my eyes were sealed, it
appeared, at present— a consummation for which it seemed blasphemous not
to thank God. There was, alas, a difficulty about that: I
would have thanked him with
all my soul had I not had in a proportionate measure this conviction of
the secret of my pupils.
How can I retrace today the strange
steps of my obsession? There were times of our being together when I would
have been ready to swear that, literally, in my
presence, but with my direct
sense of it closed, they had visitors who were known and were welcome.
Then it was that, had I not been deterred by the very chance
that such an injury might prove
greater than the injury to be averted, my exultation would have broken
out. "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 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 should violate
as rare a little case of instinctive delicacy as any school-room, probably,
had ever known. When I said to myself: "They have the
manners to be silent, and you,
trusted as you are, the baseness to speak!" I felt myself crimson and I
covered my face with my hands. After these secret scenes I
chattered more than ever, going
on volubly enough till one of our prodigious, palpable hushes occurred—
I can call them nothing else— the strange, dizzy lift or swim
(I try for terms!) into a stillness,
a pause of all life, that had nothing to do with the more or less noise
that at the moment we might be engaged in making and that I
could hear through any deepened
exhilaration or quickened recitation or louder strum of the piano. Then
it was that the others, the outsiders, were there. Though
they were not angels, they "passed,"
as the French say causing me, while they stayed, to tremble with the fear
of their addressing to their younger victims some yet
more infernal message or more
vivid image than they had thought good enough for myself.
What it was most impossible to
get rid of was the cruel idea that, whatever I had seen, Miles and Flora
saw more— things terrible and unguessable and that sprang
from dreadful passages of intercourse
in the past. Such things naturally left on the surface, for the time, a
child which we vociferously denied that we felt; and we had,
all three, with repetition,
got into such splendid training that we went, each time, almost automatically,
to mark the close of the incident, through the very same
movements. It was striking of
the children, at all events to kiss me inveterately with a kind of wild
irrelevance and never to fail— one or the other— of the precious
question that had helped us
through many a peril. "When do you think he will come? 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 celebration of one of the sacred laws of
his comfort; and I held that
I carried out the spirit of the pledge given not to appeal to him when
I let my charges understand that their own letters were but charming
literary exercises. They were
too beautiful to be posted; I kept them myself; I have them all to this
hour. This was a rule indeed which only added to the satiric effect
of my being plied with the supposition
that he might at any moment be among us. It was exactly as if my charges
knew how almost more awkward than anything else
that might be for me. There
appears to me, moreover, as I look back, no note in all this more extraordinary
than the mere fact that, in spite of my tension and of their
triumph, I never lost patience
with them. Adorable they must in truth have been, I now reflect, that I
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 call
it relief, though it was only the relief that a snap brings to a strain
or the burst of a thunderstorm
to a day of suffocation. It was at least change, and it came with a rush.
XIV
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 I had all but pinned the boy to my shawl and that, in the
way our companions were marshaled
before me, I might have appeared to provide against some danger of rebellion.
I was like a gaoler with an eye to possible
surprises and escapes. But all
this belonged— I mean their magnificent little surrender— just to the special
array of the facts that were most abysmal. Turned out for
Sunday by his 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 uttered in the sweet, high, casual pipe
with which, at all interlocutors, but above all at his eternal
governess, he threw off intonations
as if he were tossing roses. There was something in them that always made
one "catch," and I caught, at any rate, now so
effectually that I stopped as
short as if one of the trees of the park had fallen across the road. There
was something new, on the spot, between us, and he was
perfectly aware that I recognized
it, though, to enable me to do so, he had no need to look a whit less candid
and charming than usual. I could feel in him how he
already, from my at first finding
nothing to reply, perceived the advantage he had gained. I was so slow
to find anything that he had plenty of time, after a minute, to
continue with his suggestive
but inconclusive smile: "You know, my dear, that for a fellow to be with
a lady always——!" His "my dear" was constantly on his lips
for me, and nothing could have
expressed more the exact shade of the sentiment with which I desired to
inspire my pupils than its fond familiarity. It was so
respectfully easy.
But, oh, how I felt that at present
I must pick my own phrases! I remember that, to gain time, I tried to laugh,
and I seemed to see in the beautiful face with which he
watched me how ugly and queer
I looked. "And always with the same lady?" I returned.
He neither blanched nor winked.
The whole thing was virtually out between us. "Ah, of course, 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 you?"
I laid my hand on his shoulder,
for, though I felt how much better it would have been to walk on, I was
not yet quite able. "No, I 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 reproach. "Why, it was to show you I
could!"
"Oh, yes, you could."
"And I can again."
I felt that I might, perhaps,
after all, succeed in keeping my wits about me. "Certainly. But you won't."
"No, not that again. It was nothing."
"It was nothing," I said. "But
we must go on."
He resumed our walk with me,
passing his hand into my arm. "Then when am I going back?"
I wore, in turning it over, my
most responsible air. "Were you very happy at school?"
He just considered. "Oh, 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 to see more life."
"I see; I see." We had arrived
within sight of the church and of various persons, including several of
the household of Bly, on their way to it and clustered about the
door to see us go in. I quickened
our step; I wanted to get there before the question between us opened up
much further; I reflected hungrily that, for more than an
hour, he would have to be silent;
and I thought with envy of the comparative dusk of the pew and of the almost
spiritual help of the hassock on which I might bend
my knees. I seemed literally
to be running a race with some confusion to which he was about to reduce
me, but I felt that he had got in first when, before we had
even entered the churchyard,
he threw out—
"I want my own sort!"
It literally made me bound forward.
"There are not many of your own sort, Miles!" I laughed. "Unless perhaps
dear little Flora!"
"You really compare me to a baby
girl?"
This found me singularly weak.
"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."
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. It was a pitiful surrender
to agitation, but my being aware of this had somehow no power
to restore me. I only sat there
on my tomb and read into what my little friend had said to me the fullness
of its meaning; by the time I had grasped the whole of which
I had also embraced, for absence,
the pretext that I was ashamed to offer my pupils and the rest of the congregation
such an example of delay. What I said to myself
above all was that Miles had
got something out of me and that the proof of it, for him, would be just
this awkward collapse. He had got out of me that there was
something I was much afraid
of and that he should probably be able to make use of my fear to gain,
for his own purpose, more freedom. My fear was of having to
deal with the intolerable question
of the grounds of his dismissal from school, for that was really but the
question of the horrors gathered behind. That his uncle should
arrive to treat with me of these
things was a solution that, strictly speaking, I ought now to have desired
to bring on; but I could so little face the ugliness and the pain
of it that I simply procrastinated
and lived from hand to mouth. The boy, to my deep discomposure, was immensely
in the right, was in a position to say to me:
"Either you clear up with my
guardian the mystery of this interruption of my studies, or you cease to
expect me to lead with you a life 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 nothing, and it was too extreme an effort to squeeze beside him
into the pew: he would be so much more sure than ever to
pass his arm into mine and make
me sit there for an hour in close, silent contact with his commentary on
our talk. For the first minute since his arrival I wanted to get
away from him. As I paused beneath
the high east window and listened to the sounds of worship, I was taken
with an impulse that might master me, I felt, completely
should I give it the least encouragement.
I might easily put an end to my predicament by getting away altogether.
Here was my chance; there was no one to stop me;
I could give the whole thing
up— turn my back and retreat. It was only a question of hurrying again,
for a few preparations, to the house which the attendance at
church of so many of the servants
would practically have left unoccupied. No one, in short, could blame me
if I should just drive desperately off. What was it to get
away if I got away only till
dinner? That would be in a couple of hours, at the end of which— I had
the acute prevision— my little pupils would play at innocent
wonder about my nonappearance
in their train.
"What did you do, you naughty,
bad thing? Why in the world, to worry us so— and take our thoughts off,
too, 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
before, in the darkness of night
and just so bowed with evil things I had seen the specter of the most horrible
of women. At this I was able to straighten my self; I
went the rest of the way up;
I made, in my bewilderment, for the schoolroom, where there were objects
belonging to me that I should have to take. But I opened the
door to find again, in a flash,
my eyes unsealed. In the presence of what I saw I reeled straight back
upon my resistance.
Seated at my own table in clear
noonday light I saw a person whom without my previous experience I should
have taken at the first blush for some housemaid who
might have stayed at home to
look after the place and who, availing herself of rare relief from observation
and of the schoolroom table and my pens, ink, and paper,
had applied herself to the considerable
effort of a letter to her sweetheart. There was an effort in the way that,
while her arms rested on the table, her hands with
evident weariness supported
her head; but at the moment I took this in I had already become aware that,
in spite of my entrance, her attitude strangely persisted.
Then it was— with the very act
of its announcing itself— that her identity flared up in a change of posture.
She rose, not as if she had heard me, but with an
indescribable grand melancholy
of indifference and detachment, and, within a dozen feet of me, stood there
as my vile predecessor. Dishonored and tragic, she was
all before me; but even as I
fixed and, for memory, secured it, the awful image passed away. Dark as
midnight in her black dress her haggard beauty and her
unutterable woe, she had looked
at me long enough to appear to say that her right to sit at my table was
as good as mine to sit at hers. While these instants lasted,
indeed, I had the extraordinary
chill of feeling that it was I who was the intruder. It was as a wild protest
against it that, I 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 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, "for a talk with
Miss Jessel."
I had by this time formed the
habit of having Mrs. Grose literally well in hand in advance of my sounding
that note: so that even now, as she bravely blinked under the
signal of my word, I could keep
her comparatively firm. "A talk! Do you mean she spoke?"
"It came to that. I found her,
on my return, in the schoolroom."
"And what did she say?" I can
hear the good woman still, and the candor of her stupefaction.
"That she suffers the torments——!"
It was this, of a truth, that
made her, as she filled out my picture, gape. "Do you mean," she faltered,
"— of the lost?"
"Of the lost. Of the dammed.
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.
"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.
End of Part Four - Go to Part
Five... 
