# The Turn of the Screw (B1 edition)

*Henry James*

## Prologue

The story had held us round the fire almost without breathing. Someone made the obvious remark that it was gruesome. A strange tale told on Christmas Eve in an old house should be exactly that. Apart from this, I remember no comment. Then somebody happened to say something else. It was the only case he had met in which such a visit had come to a child.

The case, I should say, was about an apparition in an old house just like ours. A dreadful figure had appeared to a little boy who slept in the room with his mother. In his terror, he woke her up. But she did not manage to calm his fear and send him back to sleep. Before she could do so, she saw the same thing herself, the thing that had frightened him.

It was this remark that drew a reply from Douglas. It did not come at once, but later in the evening, and it led to something interesting. Someone else told a story that was not very good, and I saw that Douglas was not listening. I took this as a sign that he had a story of his own to tell. We would only have to wait. In fact we waited until two nights later. But that same evening, before we went off to bed, he told us what was on his mind.

"I quite agree about Griffin's ghost, or whatever it was. It appeared first to the little boy, at such a young age, and that adds something special. But it's not the first case of this charming kind that I know of with a child in it. If one child gives the effect another turn of the screw, what do you say to *two* children—?"

"We say, of course," somebody cried, "that they give two turns! Also that we want to hear about them."

I can still see Douglas there in front of the fire. He had stood up and turned his back to it. His hands were in his pockets, and he looked down at the man who had spoken. "Nobody but me has ever heard it, until now. It's really too horrible." Of course, several voices said that this made the story even more valuable. Our friend prepared his triumph quietly and cleverly. He looked round at the rest of us and went on: "It's beyond everything. Nothing at all that I know comes near it."

"For pure terror?" I remember asking.

He seemed to say that it was not as simple as that. He really did not know how to describe it. He passed his hand over his eyes and made a small, pained face. "For dreadful—dreadfulness!"

"Oh, how delicious!" cried one of the women.

He paid no attention to her. He looked at me, but as if he saw the thing he spoke of instead of me. "For general strange ugliness and horror and pain."

"Well then," I said, "just sit right down and begin."

He turned round to the fire, kicked a log and watched it for a moment. Then he faced us again. "I can't begin. I shall have to send to town." Everyone groaned at this and complained a lot. After that, still lost in his thoughts, he explained. "The story's written down. It's in a locked drawer, and it hasn't been out for years. I could write to my man and send him the key. He could send the packet down just as he finds it."

He seemed to say this to me in particular. He almost seemed to ask for my help, so that he would not hold back. He had broken a long silence, thick like ice that had formed over many winters. He had had his reasons for keeping quiet for so long. The others did not like the delay, but I was charmed by his careful doubts. I begged him to write by the first post and to let us hear the story soon. Then I asked him if the experience had been his own. His answer came quickly. "Oh, thank God, no!"

"And is the written account yours? Did you write 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 handwriting." He stopped again. "A woman's. She has been dead for twenty years. She sent me these pages before she died."

Everyone was listening now. Of course somebody made a teasing joke, or at least drew the obvious conclusion. Douglas put the idea aside without a smile, but also without anger.

"She was a most charming person, but she was ten years older than I was. She was my sister's governess," he said quietly. "She was the most pleasant woman I've ever known in that kind of position. She would have been good enough for any position at all. It was long ago, and this story happened long before that. I was at Trinity. I came home for my second summer, and I found her there. I was at home a lot that year—it was a beautiful one. In her free hours we had some walks and talks in the garden. In those talks she seemed to me terribly clever and nice. Oh yes, don't grin. I liked her very much. And I'm 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 only that she said so. I knew she hadn't. I was sure; I could see it. You'll easily understand why when you hear."

"Because the thing had been such a fright?"

He kept his eyes on me. "You'll easily understand," he said again. "*You* will."

I looked hard at him too. "I see. She was in love."

He laughed for the first time. "You *are* sharp. Yes, she was in love. That is, she had been. It came out—she couldn't tell her story without it coming out. I saw it, and she saw that I saw it. But neither of us spoke of it. I remember the time and the place. It was the corner of the lawn, in the shade of the great beech trees. It was a long, hot summer afternoon. It wasn't a scene for shivering with fear; but oh—!" He left the fire and dropped back into his chair.

"You'll get the packet on Thursday morning?" I asked.

"Probably not until the second post."

"Well then; after dinner—"

"You'll all meet me here?" He looked round at us again. "Isn't anybody leaving?" He said it almost as if he hoped so.

"Everybody will stay!"

"*I* will"—and "*I* will!" cried the ladies who had planned to leave. But Mrs. Griffin wanted to know a little more. "Who was it she was in love with?"

"The story will tell," I answered for him.

"Oh, I can't wait for the story!"

"The story *won't* tell," said Douglas. "Not in any plain, common way."

"That's a pity, then. That's the only way I ever understand."

"Won't *you* tell, Douglas?" somebody else asked.

He jumped to his feet again. "Yes—tomorrow. Now I must go to bed. Good night." He quickly picked up a candlestick and left us, a little puzzled. From our end of the great brown hall we heard his steps on the stairs. Then 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.

"All the more reason—at that age! But it's rather nice, the way he has kept quiet for so long."

"Forty years!" Griffin added.

"And now he has broken out at last."

"This breaking out," I replied, "will make Thursday night a tremendous occasion." Everyone agreed with me so much that we lost interest in everything else. The last story had been told, even if it was incomplete, like the first part of a serial. We shook hands and "candlestuck," as somebody joked, and went to bed.

The next day I learned that a letter with the key had gone to his London apartments by the first post. In the end everyone knew about this. But in spite of that—or perhaps because of it—we left him completely alone until after dinner. We waited until the hour of the evening that best suited the kind of feeling we were hoping for. Then he became as open as we could wish. He even told us his best reason for this. We heard it from him by the fire in the hall. We had enjoyed our small thrills there the night before. It seemed that the story he had promised to read us needed a few words of introduction. Without them we would not understand it properly.

Let me say clearly here, so that it is done: this story is what I shall give you. It comes from an exact copy that I made myself much later. Poor Douglas gave me the manuscript before his death, when he knew his death was near. It reached him on the third of these days. On the same spot, on the night of the fourth, he began to read it to our small, silent group. It had an enormous effect. The ladies who had said they would stay did not, of course, stay, thank heaven. They left, because of plans already made. They said they were leaving in a rage of curiosity. It had been caused by the hints Douglas had already used to excite us. But this only made his last small audience closer and more select. It kept us round the fire, all sharing the same thrill.

The first of these hints was this. The written story began at a point after things had, in a way, already started. So we had to know the following facts. His old friend was the youngest of several daughters of a poor country parson. At the age of twenty she took her first job teaching in a schoolroom. She came up to London, very nervous, to answer an advertisement in person. She had already exchanged a few letters with the man who placed it. She presented herself to be judged at a house in Harley Street. It seemed to her huge and grand. The future employer turned out to be a gentleman, a bachelor in the prime of life. She was a nervous, anxious girl from a Hampshire vicarage. She had never seen such a man, except in a dream or an old novel. It was easy to recognize his type; luckily, it never dies out. He was handsome and bold and pleasant, relaxed and cheerful and kind. Of course she found him charming and splendid. But what won her most of all was the way he put the whole thing to her. He presented it as a kind of favor, something he would be grateful to her for. This gave her the courage she showed later. She imagined him as rich, but as terribly extravagant with money. She saw him in a glow of high fashion, good looks, expensive habits and charming ways with women. For his home in town he had a big house. It was full of things from his travels and trophies from his hunting. But he wanted her to go at once to his country home, an old family place in Essex.

The parents of a small nephew and a small niece had died in India. After that, he had become their guardian. They were the children of a younger brother, a soldier, whom he had lost two years before. By the strangest chance, these children were now very much his responsibility. This was strange for a man in his position. He lived alone, without the right kind of experience or the smallest bit of patience. It had all been a great worry. No doubt he had made a series of mistakes. But he felt very sorry for the poor little things and had done all he could. In particular, he had sent them to his other house, because of course the right place for them was the country. He had kept them there from the start, with the best people he could find to look after them. He had even given up his own servants to serve them. Whenever he could, he went down himself to see how they were doing. The awkward thing was that they had almost no other relations. And his own business took up all his time. He had given them Bly, which was healthy and safe. He had put an excellent woman, Mrs. Grose, at the head of their small household. But she was only in charge below stairs, among the servants. He was sure his visitor would like her. She had once been his mother's maid. She was now the housekeeper, and for the moment she was also looking after the little girl. She had no children of her own, and luckily she was extremely fond of the child. There were plenty of people to help. But of course the young lady who went down as governess would have the highest authority. In the holidays she would also have to look after the small boy. He had been at school for one term—very young to be sent away, but what else could be done? The holidays were about to begin, so he would be back any day now. At first the two children had had a young lady to look after them, but sadly they had lost her. She had done very well for them—she was a most respectable person—until her death. That death was very awkward. It had left no choice but to send little Miles to school. Since then, Mrs. Grose had done what she could for Flora, in manners and such things. There were also a cook, a housemaid, a dairywoman, an old pony, an old groom and an old gardener. All of them were also thoroughly respectable.

Douglas had got this far with his picture when someone asked a question. "And what did the former governess die of? Of so much respectability?"

Our friend answered quickly. "That will come out. I don't tell things before their time."

"Excuse me—I thought that was just what you *are* doing."

"In the new governess's place," I suggested, "I would have wanted to know if the job brought with it—"

"Necessary danger to life?" Douglas finished my thought. "She did want to know, and she did find out. You shall hear tomorrow what she found out. Meanwhile, of course, the future seemed rather grim to her. She was young, without experience and nervous. She saw serious duties ahead, little company and really great loneliness. She hesitated. She took a couple of days to ask for advice and to think. But the salary he offered was much higher than her modest hopes. At a second meeting she faced the facts bravely and accepted the job."

With this, Douglas paused. For the benefit of the company, I added—

"The moral, of course, is the charm of the splendid young man. She gave in to it."

He got up and went to the fire, as he had done the night before. He stirred a log with his foot. Then he stood for a moment with his back to us. "She saw him only twice."

"Yes, but that's just the beauty of her passion."

A little to my surprise, Douglas turned round to me at this. "It *was* the beauty of it. There were others," he went on, "who hadn't given in. He told her honestly about all his difficulty. For several women who applied, the conditions had been too much. Somehow they were simply afraid. It sounded dull—it sounded strange. And it sounded even more so because of his main condition."

"Which was—?"

"That she should never trouble him—but never, never. She must never ask him for help, never complain, never write about anything. She must answer all questions herself and get all money from his solicitor. She must take the whole thing over and leave him alone. She promised to do this. She told me about one moment. He was free of his problem and delighted, and for a moment he held her hand. He thanked her for her sacrifice, and she already felt rewarded."

"But was that all her reward?" one of the ladies asked.

"She never saw him again."

"Oh!" said the lady. Our friend left us again at once. So this was the only other important word on the subject until the next night. Then he sat in the best chair by the corner of the fireplace. He opened the faded red cover of a thin, old-fashioned album with gold edges. In fact the reading took more than one night. But on the first evening the same lady asked another question. "What is your title?"

"I haven't one."

"Oh, *I* have!" I said. But Douglas did not listen to me. He had begun to read with a fine clearness. It was as if the beauty of the writer's handwriting had been turned into sound.

### Glossary

- **gruesome**: very unpleasant and frightening, often about death.
- **apparition**: a strange figure that appears, like a ghost.
- **another turn of the screw**: one more twist that makes a situation even more intense.
- **manuscript**: a text written by hand.
- **governess**: a woman who lives with a family and teaches their children at home.
- **parson**: a priest of a country church.
- **vicarage**: the house of a country priest.
- **bachelor**: a man who is not married.
- **guardian**: a person who legally looks after a child whose parents are dead.
- **solicitor**: a lawyer who deals with money and papers.
- **"candlestuck"**: a joke word: they all took their candlesticks to go to bed.

## I

I remember the whole beginning as a series of ups and downs. It was like a little seesaw of good feelings and bad ones. In town I had risen to meet his request. But after that, I had a couple of very bad days. I was full of doubt again. In fact I felt sure I had made a mistake. I was in this state of mind during the long hours in the coach. It bumped and swung all the way to the stopping place. There a carriage from the house was to meet me. I had been told that this had been ordered. Toward the end of the June afternoon, I found a comfortable fly waiting for me. I drove at that hour, on a lovely day, through the summer countryside. Its sweetness seemed to offer me a friendly welcome. My courage rose again. As we turned into the avenue, I felt a great relief. This probably only showed how low my courage had fallen. I suppose I had expected, or feared, something very sad. So what greeted me was a pleasant surprise. I remember the broad, clear front of the house as a most pleasant picture. Its windows were open, the curtains were fresh, and two maids were looking out. I remember the lawn and the bright flowers. I remember the crunch of my wheels on the gravel. I remember the tops of the trees, where the rooks circled and cawed in the golden sky. The scene had a greatness that made it very different from my own small, poor home. At once a polite woman appeared at the door, holding a little girl by the hand. She made me a curtsy as good as if I were the mistress of the house or an important visitor. In Harley Street I had got a smaller idea of the place. As I remembered that, I thought the owner even more of a gentleman. It suggested that I might enjoy even more than he had promised.

I had no "drop" again until the next day. I was carried happily through the following hours by meeting the younger of my pupils. The little girl with Mrs. Grose seemed to me at once a wonderful creature. It was a great piece of luck to have to do with her. She was the most beautiful child I had ever seen. Later I wondered why my employer had not told me more about her. I slept little that night—I was too excited. I remember that this surprised me too. It stayed with me and added to my feeling that I was being treated very generously. There was the large, impressive room, one of the best in the house. There was the great bed, almost fit for a king, as I felt. There were the full curtains with patterns on them. There were the long mirrors, in which for the first time I could see myself from head to foot. All these things struck me as extra gifts, "thrown in" with the job. So was the wonderful charm of my small pupil. It was also "thrown in," from the first moment, that I would get on well with Mrs. Grose. I'm afraid I had worried about this rather a lot in the coach. In fact only one thing in those first impressions might have made me draw back again. That was how clearly glad she was to see me. Within half an hour I saw how glad she was. She was a stout, simple, plain, clean, healthy woman. She was so glad that she was actually careful not to show it too much. Even then I wondered a little why she did not want to show it. If I had thought about it more, and been suspicious, it might of course have made me uneasy.

But it was a comfort that there could be no uneasiness about anything as heavenly as my little girl. Her bright image and her angelic beauty probably caused my restlessness more than anything else. Before morning, it made me get up several times and walk about my room. I wanted to take in the whole picture and what lay ahead. From my open window I watched the faint summer dawn. I looked at the parts of the rest of the house that I could see. As the darkness faded, the first birds began to sing. And I listened. I had imagined one or two sounds that were less natural. They had come not from outside, but from inside the house. I listened in case they came again. There had been a moment when I believed I heard, faint and far away, the cry of a child. There had been another moment when I found myself starting, as if a light footstep passed my door. But these fancies were not strong enough to stay with me, and I threw them off. Only now do they come back to me. They come back in the light, or I should rather say the darkness, of other, later events.

To watch, teach and "form" little Flora would clearly make a happy and useful life. Downstairs we had agreed that after this first night she would naturally sleep in my room. Her small white bed was already set up there for that reason. I had taken on the whole care of her. She had stayed with Mrs. Grose just this last time for one reason. We wanted to be kind about her natural shyness and about my strangeness to her. The child herself had been completely open and brave about her shyness, in the oddest way. She let us discuss it and let it decide our plans. She showed no sign of being uncomfortable. She had the deep, sweet calm of one of Raphael's holy infants. In spite of her shyness, I felt quite sure she would soon like me. This was part of why I already liked Mrs. Grose herself. I could see her pleasure in my admiration and wonder as I sat at supper. There were four tall candles. My pupil sat between them, in a high chair and a bib, brightly facing me over bread and milk. Naturally, while Flora was there, some things could pass between us only in looks. They were looks of great delight, and hints that were vague and roundabout.

"And the little boy—does he look like her? Is he also so very remarkable?"

One wouldn't flatter a child. "Oh, miss, *most* remarkable. If you think well of this one!" She stood there with a plate in her hand, smiling brightly at our companion. Flora looked from one of us to the other with calm, heavenly eyes. There was nothing in them to stop us.

"Yes; if I do—?"

"You *will* be carried away by the little gentleman!"

"Well, that, I think, is what I came for—to be carried away. I'm afraid, however," I remember wanting to add, "I'm rather easily carried away. I was carried away in London!"

I can still see Mrs. Grose's broad face as she took this in. "In Harley Street?"

"In Harley Street."

"Well, miss, you're not the first—and you won't be the last."

"Oh, I don't claim," I could laugh, "to be the only one. My other pupil, anyway, comes back tomorrow, as I understand?"

"Not tomorrow—Friday, miss. He arrives by the coach, as you did, with the guard to look after him. The same carriage is to meet him."

At once I said what I thought. It would be the right thing, and also the pleasant and friendly thing. I should be waiting for him with his little sister when the coach arrived. Mrs. Grose agreed with this idea so warmly that I took her manner as a kind of comforting promise. It promised that we would always agree on every question. And thank heaven, that promise was never broken! Oh, she was glad I was there!

What I felt the next day was not really a reaction against the happiness of my arrival. At most, I suppose, it was a slight feeling of weight. It came from seeing more fully how large my new situation was. I walked round it, looked up at it and took it in. It had a size and weight that I had not been ready for. Faced with it, I felt a little scared again, and also a little proud. In all this excitement my lessons were certainly delayed. I decided that my first duty was to win the child. I had to make her feel she knew me, in the gentlest ways I could find. I spent the day outdoors with her. I arranged with her, to her great delight, that she, and only she, should show me the place. She showed it to me step by step, room by room and secret by secret. She talked about it in a funny, delightful, childish way. In half an hour we had become great friends. She was so young, but all through our little tour I was struck by her confidence and courage. We went through empty rooms and dull corridors. We went up crooked staircases that made me stop. We even went to the top of an old square tower with battlements, which made me dizzy. And everywhere her morning music rang out and led me on. She was ready to tell me many more things than she asked.

I have not seen Bly since the day I left it. I dare say that it would now look rather smaller to my older, wiser eyes. But my little guide danced in front of me round corners and pattered down passages. She had golden hair and a blue frock. And I saw the place as a castle in a romance, where a rosy fairy lived. It was the kind of place that would make all storybooks and fairytales seem dull to a child. Wasn't it just a storybook that I had fallen asleep and dreamed over? No. It was a big, ugly, old, but convenient house. It still had some parts of an even older building, half replaced and half still in use. I had the fancy that we were almost lost in it. We were like a handful of passengers on a great drifting ship. Well, strangely, I was at the helm!

### Glossary

- **seesaw**: a long board that goes up and down, with a child on each end; here, feelings going up and down.
- **fly**: a small light carriage for hire.
- **avenue**: a road with trees on both sides leading to a big house.
- **rooks**: large black birds like crows.
- **curtsy**: a small bow made by a woman bending her knees.
- **"thrown in"**: given as an extra, without asking for more.
- **Raphael's holy infants**: the calm, beautiful babies in paintings by the painter Raphael.
- **frock**: a girl's dress.
- **battlements**: the wall with gaps along the top of a tower or castle.
- **at the helm**: steering a ship; in charge.

## II

I felt that I was at the helm even more strongly two days later. That day I drove over with Flora to meet the little gentleman, as Mrs. Grose called him. I felt it all the more because of something that happened on the second evening. It had upset me deeply. On the whole, as I have said, the first day had been comforting. But I was to see it end in sharp worry. The postbag came late that evening. It held a letter for me in my employer's handwriting. But there were only a few words in it. Inside it was another letter, addressed to him, with its seal still unbroken.

"This, I recognize, is from the headmaster, and the headmaster's an awful bore. Read him, please; deal with him; but be sure you don't report to me. Not a word. I'm off!"

It cost me a great effort to break the seal. It was so great that I took a long time to get to it. At last I took the unopened letter up to my room. I only started on it just before going to bed. I should have let it wait until morning, because it gave me a second night without sleep. The next day I had no one to ask for advice, and I was full of worry. In the end it was too much for me. I decided to open my heart at least to Mrs. Grose.

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

She gave me a look that I noticed at the time. Then, with a quick blank face, she clearly tried to take it back. "But aren't they all—?"

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

As I watched her, she went red, and she knew it. "They won't take him?"

"They absolutely refuse."

At this she raised her eyes, which she had turned away from me. I saw them fill with kind tears. "What has he done?"

I hesitated. Then I thought it best simply to hand her my letter. But she did not take it. She just put her hands behind her back. She shook her head sadly. "Such things are not for me, miss."

My adviser couldn't read! I felt bad about my mistake and tried to make it smaller as well as I could. I opened my letter again to read it out to her. Then I stopped, folded it up once more and put it back in my pocket. "Is he really *bad*?"

The tears were still in her eyes. "Do the gentlemen say so?"

"They don't go into any details. They simply say they're sorry that it's impossible to keep him. That can have only one meaning."

Mrs. Grose listened, with deep feeling and in silence. She did not ask me what this meaning might be. So I went on, to put the thing clearly to my own mind, with only her presence to help me. "That he's a danger to the others."

At this, with one of the quick changes of simple people, she suddenly blazed up. "Master Miles! *him* a danger?"

Her good faith in him poured out so strongly. I had not yet seen the child. Yet my very fears made me jump to see how silly the idea was. To meet my friend better, I found myself saying it at once in a sarcastic way. "To his poor little innocent friends!"

"It's too dreadful," cried Mrs. Grose, "to say such cruel things! Why, he's hardly ten years old."

"Yes, yes; it would be impossible to believe."

She was clearly grateful that I said this. "See him, miss, first. *Then* believe it!"

At once I felt a new impatience to see him. It was the beginning of a curiosity that grew deeper, almost to pain, through all the next hours. Mrs. Grose knew, I could tell, what she had caused in me. She went on with confidence. "You might as well believe it of the little lady. Bless her," she added the next moment—"*look* at her!"

I turned and saw Flora standing at the open door. Ten minutes before, I had left her in the schoolroom with a sheet of white paper and a pencil. She also had a copy of nice "round O's" to write. In her little way she showed that she had freed herself completely from boring duties. But she looked at me with a great childish light in her eyes. It seemed to say that she had only done it because she loved me. That love had made her follow me. I needed nothing more to feel the full force of Mrs. Grose's comparison. I caught my pupil in my arms and covered her with kisses. In them there was a sob, as if I were asking her to forgive me.

Still, for the rest of the day I watched for another chance to speak to my colleague. Toward evening I began to imagine that she was trying to avoid me. I remember that I caught up with her on the staircase. We went down together, and at the bottom I stopped her. I held her there with a hand on her arm. "I take what you said to me at noon to mean that *you've* never known him to be bad."

She threw back her head. By this time she had clearly, and very honestly, decided where she stood. "Oh, never known him—I don't pretend *that!*"

I was upset again. "Then you *have* known him—?"

"Yes indeed, miss, thank God!"

When I thought about it, I accepted this. "You mean that a boy who never is—?"

"Is no boy for *me!*"

I held her tighter. "You like them to have the spirit to be naughty?" Then, keeping up with her answer, I eagerly added, "So do I! But not so much that they contaminate—"

"To contaminate?" My big word confused her. I explained it. "To corrupt."

She stared, taking in my meaning. But it made her laugh in an odd way. "Are you afraid he'll corrupt *you?*"

She asked this with such fine, bold humor that I laughed too, to match her. My laugh was a little silly, no doubt. For the moment I gave up, because I was afraid of looking foolish.

But the next day, as the time for my drive came near, I came at the question from another side. "What was the lady like 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 remember saying lightly. "He seems to like us young and pretty!"

"Oh, he *did*," Mrs. Grose agreed. "It was the way he liked everyone!" But as soon as she had spoken, she stopped herself. "I mean that's *his* way—the master's."

I was struck by this. "But who were you speaking of first?"

She looked blank, but she went red. "Why, of *him*."

"Of the master?"

"Of who else?"

There was so clearly no one else that the next moment I lost my impression. I no longer thought that she had by accident said more than she meant. I simply asked what I wanted to know. "Did *she* see anything in the boy—?"

"That wasn't right? She never told me."

I had a small doubt about asking, but I got over it. "Was she careful—strict about things?"

Mrs. Grose seemed to try hard to be honest. "About some things—yes."

"But not about all?"

Again she thought. "Well, miss—she's gone. I won't tell tales."

"I quite understand your feeling," I quickly replied. But after a moment I thought I could still ask one more thing without going against it. "Did she die here?"

"No—she went off."

I don't know what it was in Mrs. Grose's short answer. But it struck me as having more than one meaning. "Went off to die?"

Mrs. Grose looked straight out of the window. But I felt that I had a right, in theory, to know this. What were young women hired for Bly expected to do? "She became ill, you mean, and went home?"

"She didn't become ill in this house, as far as anyone could see. She left it at the end of the year to go home, as she said, for a short holiday. She had certainly earned it with the time she had worked here. Then we had a young woman—a nursemaid who had stayed on. She was a good girl and clever, and *she* took over the children completely in the meantime. 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 thought about this. "But of what?"

"He never told me! But please, miss," said Mrs. Grose, "I must get to my work."

### Glossary

- **at the helm**: steering a ship; in charge.
- **postbag**: the bag in which letters are brought to a house.
- **seal**: a piece of wax that closes a letter, so you can see if it has been opened.
- **headmaster**: the head of a school.
- **bore**: a boring person.
- **dismissed**: sent away from a school for ever.
- **contaminate**: to make something dirty or bad by touching it.
- **corrupt**: to make someone bad.
- **tell tales**: say bad things about other people, often things they did in secret.
- **nursemaid**: a young woman servant who looks after small children.

## III

Luckily, her turning her back on me like this was not a snub. It did not stop our respect for each other from growing, and I had more important things to think about. After I had brought little Miles home, we were closer than ever. What brought us together was my amazement and all my emotion. I had now seen what kind of child he was. I was ready to say it was shocking that he should be under a ban.

I arrived a little late. He was standing in front of the door of the inn where the coach had left him. He was looking out for me a little sadly. At that moment I felt that I had seen him at once, outside and inside. I saw him in the same great glow of freshness as his little sister. He had the same sweet smell of purity that I had found in her from the first moment. He was incredibly beautiful, and Mrs. Grose had been exactly right. When he was there, every feeling was swept away except a kind of passion of tenderness for him. I took him to my heart, then and there, for something heavenly. I have never found it so strongly in any other child. It was his little air, which I cannot describe, of knowing nothing in the world but love. Nobody could have carried a bad name with sweeter innocence. By the time I got back to Bly with him, I was simply puzzled—when I was not angry. I kept thinking of the horrible letter, locked in a drawer in my room. As soon as I could get a private word with Mrs. Grose, I told her that it was ridiculous.

She understood me at once. "You mean the cruel charge—?"

"It can't live for a moment. My dear woman, *look* at him!"

She smiled at my claim to have discovered his charm. "I promise you, miss, I do nothing else! What will you say, then?" she added at once.

"In answer to the letter?" I had made up my mind. "Nothing."

"And to his uncle?"

I was sharp and firm. "Nothing."

"And to the boy himself?"

I was wonderful. "Nothing."

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

"We'll see it out!" I repeated with passion. I gave her my hand to make it a promise.

She held me there for a moment. Then she lifted her apron again with her free hand. "Would you mind, miss, if I used the freedom—"

"To kiss me? No!" I took the good woman in my arms. We held each other like sisters, and after that I felt even stronger and angrier.

This, anyway, was how it was for a time. That time was so full that I need all my skill now to make it a little clear. I look back with amazement at the situation I accepted. With my companion, I had promised to see it out. And I was under a charm, it seems. It made me ignore how big the effort was, and how far and difficult its results might reach. I was lifted high on a great wave of love and pity. I knew nothing, I was confused, and perhaps I was too proud of myself. So I found it easy to believe I could manage this boy. His education for the world was just about to begin. Today I can't even remember my plan for the end of his holidays. I can't remember how I meant him to go back to his studies. That charming summer we all had the idea that he was to have lessons with me. But I now feel that for weeks the lessons must have been rather my own. At first, certainly, I learned something that my small, closed-in life had never taught me. I learned to be amused, and even amusing, and not to think about tomorrow. In a way, it was the first time I had known space and air and freedom. It was the first time I had known all the music of summer and all the mystery of nature. And then people were kind and thoughtful to me—and that was sweet. Oh, it was a trap—not planned, but deep. It caught my imagination, my fine feelings and perhaps my vanity. It caught whatever in me was most easily excited. The best way to describe it all is to say that I was off my guard. The children gave me so little trouble. They were so extraordinarily gentle. I used to wonder, though only vaguely, how the rough future would treat them. All futures are rough! It might hurt them. They had the fresh glow of health and happiness. Yet I felt as if I were in charge of two little nobles, princes of royal blood. For them, everything would have to be closed in and protected. In my fancy, their later years could take only one form. They would be a romantic, really royal extension of the garden and the park. Of course, perhaps what suddenly broke into all this makes the time before it seem charmingly still. It was a hush in which something gathers or crouches, waiting. The change was really like the sudden leap of a wild beast.

In the first weeks the days were long. On the best of them I often had what I used to call my own hour. It was the time after my pupils' tea and bedtime. Before I went to bed myself, I had a short time alone. I liked my companions very much, but this hour was what I liked most in the day. I liked it best of all as the light faded. Or rather, I should say, the day lingered. The last calls of the last birds came from the old trees. The sky was pink. Then I could take a walk in the grounds. I could enjoy the beauty and grandeur of the place almost as if I owned it. That feeling amused and flattered me. At these moments it was a pleasure to feel calm and in the right. No doubt I also liked to think that I was pleasing him—if he ever thought of it! He was the man who had asked this of me. I pleased him by my careful behavior, my quiet good sense and my correct manners. I was doing what he had sincerely hoped for and directly asked of me. And the fact that I *could* do it, after all, was an even greater joy than I had expected. In short, I dare say I imagined myself a remarkable young woman. I took comfort in the belief that people would one day see this more openly. Well, I needed to be remarkable. I had to stand up to the remarkable things that soon gave their first sign.

It happened suddenly one afternoon, right in the middle of my own hour. The children were tucked away in bed, and I had come out for my walk. I am not ashamed now to mention one of the thoughts I used to have on these walks. It would be as charming as a charming story to meet someone suddenly. Someone would appear at the turn of a path. He would stand in front of me, and smile, and approve. I didn't ask for more than that. I only asked that he should *know*. I could only be sure he knew by seeing it in his handsome face, in its kind light. That face was exactly in my mind on the first of these occasions. It was at the end of a long June day. I came out of one of the plantations, where the house came into view, and I stopped short. What stopped me on the spot was the feeling that my imagination had, in a flash, turned real. It was a much greater shock than any dream had prepared me for. He did stand there!—but high up, beyond the lawn, at the very top of the tower. It was the tower that little Flora had taken me to on that first morning.

This tower was one of a pair. They were square and odd-looking, with battlements along the top. For some reason they were called the new tower and the old tower, although I could see little difference. They stood at opposite ends of the house. They were probably silly pieces of building. But they were saved a little by not standing quite apart from the house, and by not being too high. Their old look was only decoration, like the sugar on a gingerbread house. They came from a time of romantic fashion in building, which was already a respectable part of the past. I admired them and had fancies about them. We could all enjoy the grandeur of their real battlements, especially when they rose up through the dusk. But it was not at such a height that the figure I had so often imagined seemed most in place.

I remember that this figure, in the clear evening light, made me gasp twice, with two clear feelings. The first was the shock of my first surprise. The second was the shock of my second surprise. My second was a violent understanding that my first had been a mistake. The man who met my eyes was not the person I had too quickly believed. So a confusion came over my eyes and mind. After all these years, I cannot hope to give a living picture of it. A young woman brought up quietly at home may well be afraid of an unknown man in a lonely place. And a few more seconds made me sure of something. The figure in front of me was not anyone I knew. And it was not the image in my mind either. I had not seen it in Harley Street. I had not seen it anywhere. Also, in the strangest way, the place had at once become lonely and empty. It was simply because the figure had appeared. I am telling this now more carefully than I have ever told it. And for me at least, the whole feeling of that moment comes back. While I took in what I did take in, the rest of the scene seemed struck dead. As I write, I can hear again the deep hush in which the evening sounds dropped away. The rooks stopped cawing in the golden sky. For that minute, the friendly hour lost all its voice. But nothing else in nature changed—unless I simply saw it all more sharply than before. The gold was still in the sky and the clearness in the air. The man who looked at me over the battlements was as clear as a picture in a frame. That's how I thought, extraordinarily quickly, of every person he might have been and was not. We faced each other across the distance for quite long enough. I had time to ask myself hard who he was. And because I could not say, I felt a wonder that, in a few more moments, became intense.

I know that afterward, with certain things, the great question, or one of them, is how long they lasted. Well, think what you like of it, this thing of mine lasted for a certain time. It lasted while I grabbed at a dozen possibilities. None of them, as far as I could see, made things any better. For there had been someone in the house that I knew nothing about. And above all, for how long? It lasted while I felt a little offended. My position demanded that there should be no such ignorance and no such person. And it lasted while this visitor seemed to fix me from where he stood. Through the fading light, he seemed to ask me the same question. He gave me the same hard look that his own presence raised in me. He wore no hat. I remember a touch of strange freedom in this, a sign that he felt at home. We were too far apart to call to each other. But at one moment, if we had been closer, one of us would have challenged the other. It would have broken the hush. It would have been the right result of the way we stared straight at each other.

He was in one of the corners, the one away from the house. He stood very straight, it seemed to me, with both hands on the ledge. I saw him as clearly as I see the letters I am writing on this page. Then, after a minute, he slowly changed his place, as if to add to the show. He passed to the opposite corner of the top of the tower, looking hard at me all the while. Yes, I felt very sharply that he never took his eyes off me as he crossed. And I can still see his hand as he went. It passed from one gap in the battlements to the next. He stopped at the other corner, but for a shorter time. And even as he turned away, he still clearly kept his eyes on me. He turned away; that was all I knew.

### Glossary

- **snub**: an unfriendly act that shows you do not want to talk to someone.
- **under a ban**: not allowed to do something, here not allowed back at school.
- **see it out**: keep going with something difficult until the end.
- **off my guard**: not ready for danger or trouble.
- **crouches**: bends low, like an animal ready to jump.
- **leap**: a big, sudden jump.
- **plantations**: groups of trees planted together.
- **battlements**: the wall with gaps along the top of a tower or castle.
- **gingerbread house**: a small sweet house made of cake, with sugar decorations.
- **rooks**: large black birds like crows.

## IV

On this occasion I did wait for more. I was rooted to the spot as deeply as I was shaken. Was there a "secret" at Bly? Was it a mystery like the one in Udolpho? Or was there a mad relative, someone nobody could speak of, locked away where no one suspected? I can't say how long I thought about it. I can't say how long I stayed where I had had my shock, full of curiosity and fear. I only remember that when I went back into the house, it was quite dark. In the meantime my nerves had certainly held me and driven me on. As I circled the place, I must have walked three miles. But later I was to be so much more overwhelmed. Compared with that, this first dawn of alarm was only a fairly human chill.

The strangest part of it, in fact, was what I noticed in the hall when I met Mrs. Grose. The rest had been strange too. This picture comes back to me with everything else. I remember the wide, white space of the hall, with its wooden panels. It was bright in the lamplight, with its portraits and its red carpet. And I remember the kind, surprised look of my friend. It told me at once that she had missed me. As soon as I was with her, I understood something. Her plain warmth was simply relief that I had come back. She knew nothing at all that had anything to do with what I had ready to tell her. I had not expected that her comfortable face would stop me. Yet I found myself hesitating to mention what I had seen. In a way, I measured its importance by this. Hardly anything in the whole story seems to me as odd as this. My real fear began at the same moment as the instinct to protect my companion. So there in the pleasant hall, with her eyes on me, I made a silent decision. I could not have explained the reason then. I gave a vague excuse for being late. I spoke of the beauty of the night, the heavy dew and my wet feet. Then I went to my room as soon as I could.

Here it was a different matter. For many days afterward it was a strange matter indeed. Every day there were hours, or at least moments, when I had to shut myself away to think. I even took these moments from my clear duties. It was not yet that I was more nervous than I could bear. It was rather that I was very afraid of becoming so. For I had to face a simple, clear truth. I could find no explanation at all of the visitor. I could not understand how I was connected to him. And yet the connection seemed to me so close.

I soon saw that I could look into any problems in the household without asking open questions. I could do it without making people talk. The shock I had had must have sharpened all my senses. At the end of three days, simply by watching more closely, I felt sure of something. The servants had not played a trick on me. I had not been made the object of any "game." Whatever I knew, nobody around me knew it. There was only one sensible explanation. Someone had taken a rather rude liberty. Again and again I slipped into my room and locked the door to tell myself this. We had all had an intruder. Some traveler with no sense of right and wrong, curious about old houses, had got in without being seen. He had enjoyed the view from the best place and then crept out again the way he came. He had given me such a bold, hard stare. But that was only part of his bad manners. The good thing, after all, was that we would surely see no more of him.

I admit this was not such a good thing that it settled everything. What really made everything else unimportant was simply my charming work. My charming work was just my life with Miles and Flora. And I liked it most of all because I could throw myself into it when I was in trouble. My small pupils' charm was a constant joy. It made me wonder again how silly my first fears had been. I had expected to dislike the dull, gray side of my job. But it seemed there was to be no dull, gray side and no long, hard labor. So how could my work not be charming, when it came to me as daily beauty? It was all the romance of the nursery and the poetry of the schoolroom. Of course, I don't mean that we studied only stories and poems. I mean that I can't describe the interest the children woke in me in any other way. How else can I describe it, except by saying this? Instead of growing used to them, I made constant new discoveries. And that's a wonder for a governess—I call all my fellow governesses to witness!

There was one area, certainly, where these discoveries stopped. Deep darkness still covered the question of the boy's behavior at school. I have said that I was quickly able to face that mystery without pain. Perhaps it would be even truer to say that he himself had cleared it up, without a word. He had made the whole charge ridiculous. My conclusion grew out of the real rosy glow of his innocence. He was only too fine and good for the horrid little dirty world of school. And he had paid a price for it. I thought sharply about such differences. When someone is far finer than others, the majority always come to hate it and want revenge. That majority could even include stupid, mean headmasters.

Both the children had a gentleness that kept them, how shall I say it, almost impersonal. It certainly made it quite impossible to punish them. This gentleness was their only fault, and it never made Miles a muff. They were like the cherubs in the old story, who had—morally, anyway—nothing to whack! I remember feeling, especially with Miles, as if he had no history at all. We expect a small child to have only a short one. But there was something in this beautiful little boy, extraordinarily sensitive and yet extraordinarily happy. It struck me that he began again each day, more than any child of his age I have seen. He had never suffered for a second. I took this as direct proof that he had never really been punished. If he had been wicked, he would have "caught it." And I would have caught it too, as it bounced back—I would have found the mark. I found nothing at all, and so he was an angel. He never spoke of his school. He never mentioned a friend or a teacher. And I, for my part, was far too disgusted to mention them. Of course I was under a spell. And the wonderful part is that even at the time I knew perfectly well that I was. But I gave myself up to it. It was a cure for any pain, and I had more than one pain. In those days I was getting worrying letters from home, where things were not going well. But when I was with my children, what in the world mattered? That was the question I used to ask in my short moments alone. I was dazzled by their loveliness.

There was a Sunday—to go on with my story—when it rained very hard for many hours. So we could not make our usual walk to church. As the day went on, I arranged something with Mrs. Grose. If the evening got better, we would go together to the late service. Luckily the rain stopped, and I got ready for our walk. Through the park and along the good road to the village, it would take twenty minutes. I came downstairs to meet my colleague in the hall. Then I remembered a pair of gloves. They had needed three stitches, and they had got them. I had sewn them at the children's tea, rather publicly, which was perhaps not a good example. On Sundays, as an exception, tea was served in the "grown-up" dining room. It was a cold, clean temple of mahogany and brass. The gloves had been left there, and I turned in to get them.

The day was gray enough, but the afternoon light still lingered. As I stepped through the door, I saw the gloves on a chair near the wide window, which was closed. But I also became aware of a person on the other side of the window, looking straight in. One step into the room was enough. I saw it all in an instant; it was all there. The person looking straight in was the person who had already appeared to me. He appeared again now. I won't say more clearly, because that was impossible. But he was nearer, and this was a step forward in our contact with each other. As I met him, it made me catch my breath and turn cold. He was the same—he was the same. This time, as before, I saw him from the waist up. The dining room was on the ground floor. But the window did not reach down to the terrace where he stood. His face was close to the glass. Yet strangely, this better view only showed me how intense the first one had been. He stayed only a few seconds. It was long enough to convince me that he also saw and recognized me. But it was as if I had been looking at him for years and had always known him. This time, however, something happened that had not happened before. His stare into my face, through the glass and across the room, was as deep and hard as before. But it left me for a moment. I could still watch it as it fixed on several other things, one after another. At once I felt the added shock of being certain of something. It was not for me that he had come there. He had come for someone else.

The flash of this knowledge had the most extraordinary effect on me. It was knowledge in the middle of fear. As I stood there, it started a sudden thrill of duty and courage in me. I say courage, because I was without any doubt already deeply caught up in it. I rushed straight out of the door again and reached the door of the house. In an instant I was on the drive. I ran along the terrace as fast as I could. Then I turned a corner and came in full view of the spot. But now there was nothing to see—my visitor had vanished. I stopped. I almost fell down with real relief. But I took in the whole scene—I gave him time to appear again. I call it time, but how long was it? Today I can't say anything useful about how long these things lasted. I must have lost that kind of measure. They could not really have lasted as long as they seemed to me. The terrace and the whole place were empty with a great emptiness. So were the lawn, the garden beyond it, and all I could see of the park. There were shrubberies and big trees. But I remember feeling quite sure that none of them hid him. He was there or he was not there: not there if I didn't see him.

I held on to this. Then, without thinking, I went to the window instead of going back the way I had come. I felt, in a confused way, that I ought to stand where he had stood. I did so. I put my face to the glass and looked into the room, as he had looked. And just at this moment Mrs. Grose came in from the hall, as I had done just before. It was as if she wanted to show me exactly how far he could see. So I had the full picture of a repetition of what had already happened. She saw me as I had seen my own visitor. She stopped 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 gone as pale. In short, she stared, and then she went back just the way *I* had gone. I knew she had gone out and would come round to me. Soon I would meet her. I stayed where I was. While I waited, I thought of more than one thing. But I'll take the space to mention only one. I wondered why *she* should be scared.

### Glossary

- **Udolpho**: a castle full of dark secrets in a famous old frightening novel.
- **dew**: small drops of water that form on grass at night.
- **taken a liberty**: done something rude, without permission.
- **intruder**: a person who goes into a place where they are not allowed.
- **muff**: a weak, clumsy boy.
- **cherubs**: baby angels in old paintings, often shown only as a head with wings.
- **whack**: to hit hard, as a punishment.
- **nursery**: the room in a house where small children play and sleep.
- **mahogany and brass**: dark, expensive wood and a shiny yellow metal.
- **terrace**: a flat paved area next to a house.
- **shrubberies**: areas of bushes.

## V

Oh, she let me know as soon as she appeared again round the corner of the house. “What in the name of goodness is the matter—?” Her face was red now, and she was out of breath.

I said nothing until 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 thought for a moment. Now I could face any innocence without worrying about it. Before, I had felt I must protect Mrs. Grose’s innocence and keep it fresh. That need had fallen from my shoulders without a sound. If I hesitated for a moment, it was not because of what I was keeping back. I put out my hand to her and she took it. I held her hard for a little, because I liked to feel her close to me. Her shy, surprised movement gave me a kind of support. “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 strange?”

“Through this window? Dreadful!”

“Well,” I said, “I’ve been frightened.” Mrs. Grose’s eyes showed plainly that *she* had no wish to be frightened. But they also showed that she knew her place too well. She was ready to share any real trouble with me. Oh, it was quite settled that she *must* share it! “What you saw from the dining room a minute ago was the effect of that. What *I* saw—just before—was much worse.”

Her hand held mine more tightly. “What was it?”

“An extraordinary man. Looking in.”

“What extraordinary man?”

“I haven’t the least idea.”

Mrs. Grose looked all round us, but she saw nothing. “Then where has he gone?”

“I know even less about that.”

“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?”

“No—for reasons. But now that you’ve guessed—”

Mrs. Grose’s round eyes met my words as if I had accused her. “Ah, I haven’t guessed!” she said very simply. “How can I, if *you* have no idea?”

“I have none at all.”

“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 for a minute. “Was he a gentleman?”

I found I had no need to think. “No.” She looked at me in deeper wonder. “No.”

“Then nobody from the house? Nobody from the village?”

“Nobody—nobody. I didn’t tell you, but I made sure.”

She gave a vague sigh of relief. Strangely, this seemed a good thing to her. But it only helped a little. “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 darker distance. Then she pulled herself together and turned to me. What she said had nothing to do with our talk. “It’s time we were at church.”

“Oh, I’m not fit for church!”

“Won’t it do you good?”

“It won’t do *them* any good!” I nodded at the house.

“The children?”

“I can’t leave them now.”

“You’re afraid—?”

I spoke boldly. “I’m afraid of *him*.”

At this, Mrs. Grose’s large face showed me something for the first time. It was a faint light, far away, of a sharper understanding. I somehow saw in it the slow dawn of an idea. I had not given her this idea myself, and it was still quite unclear to me. I remember that I thought of it at once as something I could get from her. And I felt it was connected with her wish to know more, which she soon showed. “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 chance to ask him! This evening, you see,” I went on, “he hasn’t been able to get in.”

“He only peeps?”

“I hope he will do nothing more than that!” She had now let go of my hand, and she turned away a little. I waited a moment. Then I said: “Go to church. Goodbye. I must watch.”

Slowly she turned to face me again. “Do you fear for them?”

We looked at each other for another long moment. “Don’t *you?*” Instead of answering, she went nearer to the window. For a minute she put her face to the glass. “You see how he could see,” I went on meanwhile.

She didn’t move. “How long was he here?”

“Until I came out. I came out to meet him.”

At last Mrs. Grose turned round, and there was even more in her face. “*I* 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. Then she added: “What is he like?”

“I’ve been dying to tell you. But he’s like nobody.”

“Nobody?” she repeated.

“He has no hat.” Then I saw in her face that this already gave her part of a picture. It made her even more upset. So I quickly added more details, one after another. “He has red hair, very red, with tight curls. He has a pale face, long in shape, with straight, good features. He has little, rather strange whiskers that are as red as his hair. His eyebrows are somehow darker. They look very arched, as if they could move a lot. His eyes are sharp and strange—awfully strange. But I only know clearly that they’re rather small and very fixed. His mouth is wide and his lips are thin. Apart from his little whiskers, he’s quite clean-shaven. He gives me a sort of feeling that he looks like an actor.”

“An actor!” At that moment, nobody could look less like an actor than Mrs. Grose.

“I’ve never seen one, but that’s how I imagine them. He’s tall, active, straight,” I continued, “but never—no, never!—a gentleman.”

As I went on, my companion’s face had gone white. Her round eyes opened wide and her gentle mouth fell open. “A gentleman?” she gasped. She was confused and amazed. “A gentleman, *he?*”

“You know him, then?”

She clearly tried to control herself. “But he *is* handsome?”

I saw how I could help her. “Remarkably!”

“And dressed—?”

“In somebody’s clothes. They’re smart, but they’re not his own.”

She broke into a breathless groan that meant yes. “They’re the master’s!”

I caught it up at once. “You *do* know him?”

She hesitated for only a second. “Quint!” she cried.

“Quint?”

“Peter Quint—his own man, his valet, when he was here!”

“When the master was?”

She was still staring with her mouth open, but she looked at me and put it all together. “He never wore his hat, but he did wear—well, some waistcoats went missing. They were both here—last year. Then the master went, and Quint was alone.”

I followed her, but a little slowly. “Alone?”

“Alone with *us*.” Then she added, as if from somewhere deeper: “In charge.”

“And what happened to him?”

She waited so long before she answered that I was even more puzzled. “He went, too,” she said at last.

“Went where?”

At this, her face took on an extraordinary look. “God knows where! He died.”

“Died?” I almost screamed.

She seemed to stand up straight and plant her feet more firmly, to say the amazing thing. “Yes. Mr. Quint is dead.”

### Glossary

- **as white as a sheet**: very pale, usually because of fear or shock.
- **peep**: to look at something quickly and secretly.
- **whiskers**: hair growing on the sides of a man’s face.
- **arched**: curved like a bridge.
- **clean-shaven**: with no beard or moustache.
- **the master**: the man who employs the servants; here, the children’s uncle.
- **valet**: a man’s personal servant who looks after his clothes.
- **waistcoat**: a short jacket without sleeves worn under a coat.
- **in charge**: having control of a place or of people.

## VI

Of course, it took more than that one talk to bring us together. We had to face what we now had to live with, as well as we could. On my side, there was my terrible habit of receiving impressions of the kind I had just shown so clearly. On her side, there was her knowledge of this habit from now on. It was a knowledge that was half shock and half pity. That evening the discovery left me lying weak and broken for an hour. After that, neither of us went to any church service. We had only a little service of our own, of tears and vows, of prayers and promises. We had gone together to the schoolroom and shut ourselves in there to talk everything out. At once we had begun to question each other and to make promises to each other. Our little service was the end and the high point of all that. Talking everything out simply brought our situation down to its hardest, plainest facts. She herself had seen nothing, not the shadow of a shadow. Nobody in the house except the governess was in the governess’s difficult position. Yet she accepted the truth as I told it to her. She did not openly question whether I was sane. In the end, she showed me a tenderness that was full of awe. It showed what she felt about my strange gift, which was a very doubtful gift. The memory of that tenderness has stayed with me as the sweetest kindness one person can show another.

So that night we agreed that we could probably bear things together. She was free from seeing anything. Yet I was not even sure that she had the lighter part of the burden. I think I knew then, as well as I knew later, what I could face to protect my pupils. But it took me some time to be quite sure what my honest friend was ready for. Our agreement could get her into serious trouble, and I did not know how far she would keep to it. I was strange company for her—quite as strange as the company that had come to me. But when I go over what we lived through, I see how much we must have shared one idea. By good luck, that one idea *could* steady us. This idea was my second step. As I might say, it led me straight out of the inner room of my fear. Out there in the courtyard, at least, I could breathe fresh air, and there Mrs. Grose could join me. I can remember perfectly now how strength came to me before we parted for the night. We had gone over and over every detail 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 clearness full of warning now filled my mind. “*That’s* who he was looking for.”

“But how do you know?”

“I know, I know, I know!” My excitement grew. “And *you* know, my dear!”

She didn’t deny this, but I felt I did not even need her to say that much. In a moment, anyway, she went on: “What if *he* should see him?”

“Little Miles? That’s what he wants!”

She looked terribly scared again. “The child?”

“Heaven forbid! The man. He wants to appear to *them*.”

The idea that he might do it was awful. And yet, somehow, I could keep it away from me. As we stayed there talking, I really managed to prove that I could. I was completely sure that I would see again what I had already seen. But something inside me said this: I would bravely offer myself as the only one to have such experiences. I would accept it all, invite it all and rise above it all. Then I would be the victim who suffers to pay for the others. I would keep my companions safe and calm. Above all, I would put a fence round the children in this way and save them completely. I remember one of the last things I said to Mrs. Grose that night.

“It does strike me that my pupils have never mentioned—”

She looked at me hard as I stopped to think. “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.”

“How he died?” I thought hard. “Perhaps not. But Miles would remember—Miles would know.”

“Ah, don’t try him!” Mrs. Grose burst out.

I gave her back the look she had given me. “Don’t be afraid.” I went on thinking. “It *is* rather odd.”

“That he has never spoken of him?”

“Never, not even with the smallest hint. And you tell me they were ‘great friends’?”

“Oh, it wasn’t *him!*” Mrs. Grose said strongly. “It was Quint’s own idea. To play with him, I mean—to spoil him.” She paused a moment. Then she added: “Quint was much too free.”

Straight away I saw his face again—*such* a face! It gave me a sudden sick feeling of disgust. “Too free with *my* boy?”

“Too free with everyone!”

For the moment I did not look more closely at these words. I only thought that part of them applied to several people in the household. These were the half-dozen maids and men who still lived in our small community. But for our fears, it meant everything that one lucky fact was true. As far as anyone remembered, no unpleasant story had ever been told about the kind old place. The kitchen servants had never been upset by anything. It had no bad name and no bad reputation. And Mrs. Grose clearly wanted only to hold on to me and shake in silence. At the very end, I even tested her. It was at midnight, when she had her hand on the schoolroom door to leave.

“So you tell me—and it’s very important—that he was definitely bad, and openly known to be bad?”

“Oh, not openly. *I* knew it—but the master didn’t.”

“And you never told him?”

“Well, he didn’t like people telling tales—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 fitted well enough with my impressions of him. He was not a gentleman who liked trouble. And perhaps he was not very careful about some of the people *he* spent his time with. All the same, I pressed her. “I promise you *I* would have told!”

She felt that I was judging her. “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 even more than I probably showed. “You weren’t afraid of anything else? Not of his effect—?”

“His effect?” she repeated. Her face was full of pain, and she waited while I hesitated.

“On innocent, precious little lives. They were in your care.”

“No, they were not in mine!” she answered, firmly and unhappily. “The master trusted him and put him here. He was supposed not to be well, and the country air was so good for him. So he had the right to say everything. Yes”—she let me have it—“even about *them*.”

“Them—that creature?” I had to hold back 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.

From the next day, as I have said, we kept our tears under strict control. Yet how often and how passionately we came back to the subject together during that week! We had talked about it a great deal that Sunday night. Still, I was haunted by the shadow of something she had not told me, especially in the hours just after. You can imagine whether I slept. I myself had kept back nothing, but there was a word that Mrs. Grose had kept back. By morning I was also sure of something else. She had not kept it back because she was dishonest. She had kept it back because there were fears on every side. Looking back, it seems to me that I had already done something. I had done it by the time the sun was high the next day. I had restlessly read into the facts almost all the meaning that later, crueller events were to give them. Above all, the facts gave me the evil figure of the living man—the dead one could wait a while! They also gave me the months he had spent at Bly without a break. Added up, they made a frighteningly long time. This evil time ended only on a winter morning, at dawn. A laborer going to early work found Peter Quint lying stone dead on the road from the village. There was a wound to his head that anyone could see. This explained the terrible event, on the surface at least. Such a wound might have been caused by a fatal slip in the dark. And according to the final evidence, it *had* been caused like that. He had left the public house and slipped on a rather steep, icy slope. It was the wrong path altogether, and he lay at the bottom of it. The icy slope and the wrong turn, taken at night and while drunk, explained a lot. In the end, after the inquest and endless gossip, they explained practically everything. But there had been things in his life that could have explained a good deal more. There were strange events and dangers, secret wrongdoings, and vices that people more than suspected.

I hardly know how to put my story into words. I want them to give a believable picture of my state of mind. But in those days I could truly find joy in the great act of heroism that the situation asked of me. I now saw that I had been asked to do a fine and difficult service. And there would be something great in letting people see it—oh, the right person! They would see that I could succeed where many other girls might have failed. It helped me enormously that I saw my duty so strongly and so simply. I admit that I rather praise myself for it as I look back! I was there to protect and defend two little creatures. No one in the world had lost more than they had, and no one was easier to love. Their helplessness called out to me, and suddenly that call had become far too clear. It was a deep, constant ache in my own heart, which was given to them completely. We were really cut off together, joined by our danger. They had nothing but me, and I—well, I had *them*. In short, it was a magnificent chance. This chance came to me as a very solid picture. I was a screen—I was to stand in front of them. The more I saw, the less they would see. I began to watch them in tense, silent waiting, with a hidden excitement. If it had gone on too long, it might well have turned into something like madness. I now see what saved me: it turned into something else altogether. It didn’t stay as tense waiting. Horrible proofs took its place. Yes, I say proofs—from the moment I really took hold of things.

That moment came one afternoon. I happened to spend an hour in the grounds alone with the younger of my pupils. We had left Miles indoors, on the red cushion of a deep window seat. He had wanted to finish a book. I had been glad to encourage such a good wish in a young man. His only fault was that he was sometimes too restless. His sister, on the other hand, had been eager to come out. I walked slowly with her for half an hour, looking for shade. The sun was still high and the day was unusually warm. As we went, I noticed again how she, like her brother, managed one thing. She could leave me alone without seeming to drop me. And she could keep me company without seeming to crowd round me. This was the charming thing in both children. They never bothered me with demands, and yet they were never dull. All my attention really went into watching them have a wonderful time without me. They seemed to prepare this show on purpose, and I took part in it as an active admirer. I walked in a world they had invented. They never needed to use my imagination at all. So my time was spent only in being some remarkable person or thing that their game needed at that moment. Because I was so important and grand, it was always a happy and very honored part. There was no real work in it. I forget what I was this time. 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. We had lately begun geography, so the lake was the Sea of Azof.

Suddenly, while we were there, I became aware of something. On the other side of the Sea of Azof, we had an interested watcher. The way this knowledge grew in me was the strangest thing in the world. That is, it was the strangest thing except one, which was much, much stranger. My knowledge quickly turned into that. I had sat down with some sewing on the old stone bench above the pond. In the game I was something or other that was allowed to sit. Sitting there, I began to feel for certain that a third person was present at a distance. Yet I did not see this person directly. The old trees and the thick bushes made a wide, pleasant shade. But the brightness of the hot, still hour filled everything. Nothing was unclear. At least, there was nothing unclear in the belief that grew in me from one moment to the next. I knew what I would see straight in front of me, across the lake, if I raised my eyes. At that moment my eyes were fixed on my sewing. I can still feel how hard I tried not to move them. I wanted to wait until I was steady enough to decide what to do. There was something strange in view—a figure. At once, and with passion, I questioned its right to be there. I remember going carefully through all the possibilities. I reminded myself that nothing was more natural than this. For example, it could be one of the men who worked on the place. Or it could be a messenger, a postman or a shop boy from the village. This reminder did nothing to change my certainty. And I felt, still without looking, that it did nothing to change the nature and manner of our visitor either. Nothing was more natural than for the figure to be one of those other things. And it absolutely was not.

I would make sure who the apparition was. I would do it as soon as the small clock of my courage had ticked out the right second. Meanwhile, with an effort that was already painful, I moved my eyes straight to little Flora. At that moment she was about ten yards away. For an instant my heart had stood still. Would she see it too? The question filled me with wonder and terror. I held my breath and waited. A cry from her, or some sudden innocent sign of interest or fear, would tell me. I waited, but nothing came. Then two things decided me. I feel there is something more terrible in them than in anything else I have to tell. First, I sensed that during the last minute, all sounds from her had stopped. Second, during that same minute she had turned her back to the water in her play. She was standing like this when I at last looked at her. As I looked, I was surer than ever that we were both still being watched, closely and directly. She had picked up a small flat piece of wood. It happened to have a little hole in it. Clearly, this had given her an idea. She would stick another piece into the hole as a mast and make the thing into a boat. As I watched her, she was trying very hard and carefully to fix this second piece in its place. Seeing what she was doing gave me strength. After some seconds I felt I was ready for more. Then I moved my eyes again—I faced what I had to face.

### Glossary

- **vow**: a serious promise.
- **pupil**: a child who is taught by a teacher.
- **spoil**: to give a child too much of what it wants, so that its character becomes worse.
- **laborer**: a person who does hard work with their hands, for example on a farm.
- **public house**: a pub, a place where people drink alcohol.
- **inquest**: an official inquiry into how someone died.
- **vice**: a very bad or immoral habit.
- **screen**: something that stands in front of a thing to hide or protect it.
- **apparition**: a strange figure that appears, like a ghost.
- **mast**: the tall pole on a boat that holds the sail.

## VII

I found Mrs. Grose as soon as I could after this. I cannot give any clear account of how I struggled through the time in between. Yet I can still hear it. I almost threw myself into her arms and cried out: “They *know*—it’s too terrible: they know, they know!”

“And what on earth—?” As she held me, I felt that she could not believe it.

“Why, all that *we* know—and heaven knows what else besides!” Then, as she let me go, I explained it to her. Perhaps only now did it become fully clear, even to myself. “Two hours ago, in the garden”—I could hardly speak—“Flora *saw!*”

Mrs. Grose took it as if someone had hit her 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!” I still could not find words for how shocked I was.

Of course, Mrs. Grose could only stare at me with her mouth open even wider. “Then how do you know?”

“I was there—I saw with my eyes. I saw that she knew perfectly well.”

“Do you mean she knew about *him?*”

“No—about *her*.” As I spoke, I knew that my face showed terrible things. I saw them slowly appear in my companion’s face too. “It was another person this time. But it was a figure of the same clear horror and evil. It was a woman in black, pale and dreadful—with such a look, too, and such a face! She was on the other side of the lake. I was there with the child. It was a quiet hour, and in the middle of it she came.”

“Came how—from where?”

“From where they come from! She just appeared and stood there—but not so near.”

“And she didn’t come nearer?”

“Oh, in the effect and the feeling, she might have been as close as you!”

My friend, with a strange sudden movement, stepped back. “Was she someone you’ve never seen?”

“Yes. But someone the child has seen. Someone *you* have seen.” Then, to show how I had thought it all out, I said: “My predecessor—the one who died.”

“Miss Jessel?”

“Miss Jessel. You don’t believe me?” I pressed her.

She turned right and left in her distress. “How can you be sure?”

My nerves were so bad that this made me flash out in impatience. “Then ask Flora—*she’s* sure!” But as soon as I had spoken, I stopped myself. “No, for God’s sake, *don’t!* She’ll say she isn’t sure—she’ll lie!”

Mrs. Grose was confused, but not too confused to protest at once. “Ah, how *can* you?”

“Because I see it clearly. Flora doesn’t want me to know.”

“Then it’s only 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 follow me. “You mean you’re afraid of seeing her again?”

“Oh, no; that’s nothing—now!” Then I explained. “I’m afraid of *not* seeing her.”

But my companion only looked pale and tired. “I don’t understand you.”

“Why, I mean the child may keep it up—and the child surely *will*—without my knowing it.”

When she pictured this, Mrs. Grose almost fell apart for a moment. But soon she pulled herself together again. If we gave way an inch, we would really have to give way to something. It was as if she felt strongly what that would be. “Dear, dear—we must keep our heads! And after all, if she doesn’t mind it—!” She even tried a grim joke. “Perhaps she likes it!”

“Likes *such* things—a tiny little child!”

“Isn’t it just a proof of her blessed innocence?” my friend asked bravely.

For a moment she almost won me over. “Oh, we must hold on to *that*—we must cling to it! If it isn’t a proof of what you say, it’s a proof of—God knows what! Because the woman is a horror of horrors.”

At this, Mrs. Grose looked at the ground for a minute. Then at last she raised her eyes. “Tell me how you know,” she said.

“Then you admit that’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 never gave me a glance. She only fixed her eyes on the child.”

Mrs. Grose tried to picture it. “Fixed her eyes on her?”

“Ah, with such awful eyes!”

She stared at my eyes as if they might really look like those eyes. “Do you mean eyes full of dislike?”

“God help us, no. Full of something much worse.”

“Worse than dislike?” This really left her at a loss.

“With a determination—I can’t describe it. With a kind of fierce purpose.”

I made her turn pale. “Purpose?”

“To get hold of her.” Mrs. Grose’s eyes stayed on mine for a moment. Then she shivered and walked to the window. While she stood there looking out, I finished what I had to say. “*That’s* what Flora knows.”

After a little while she turned round. “The person was in black, you say?”

“In mourning clothes—rather poor, almost shabby. But—yes—with extraordinary beauty.” Now I saw where I had brought her, step by step. I had told her everything, and now she was the victim of what I told her. She was clearly weighing this. “Oh, handsome—very, very handsome,” I insisted; “wonderfully handsome. But infamous.”

She slowly came back to me. “Miss Jessel—*was* infamous.” Once more she took my hand in both of hers. She held it very tightly, as if to make me strong against the new fear this news might give me. “They were both infamous,” she said at last.

So for a little while we faced it together once more. And I really found some help in seeing it so clearly now. “I understand,” I said, “that you were very decent not to speak until now. But the time has certainly come to tell me the whole thing.” She seemed to agree, but still only in silence. When I saw that, I went on: “I must have it now. What did she die of? Come, there was something between them.”

“There was everything.”

“In spite of the difference—?”

“Oh, of their rank, their position”—she said it sadly. “*She* was a lady.”

I thought about it, and again I saw. “Yes—she was a lady.”

“And he was so terribly far below her,” said Mrs. Grose.

I felt that I should not say too much about how low a servant stood in society. After all, I was talking to a servant. But nothing stopped me from accepting her own judgment of how low my predecessor had fallen. There was a way to deal with that, and I dealt with it. It was easier because I could now see him clearly, from the evidence. He had been our employer’s clever, good-looking “own” man, who was now dead. He was rude, sure of himself, spoiled and wicked. “The fellow was a hound.”

Mrs. Grose thought about it. Perhaps she felt there were finer differences to see here. “I’ve never seen anyone like him. He did what he wished.”

“With *her?*”

“With them all.”

It was as if Miss Jessel had appeared again, now in my friend’s own eyes. For a moment, at least, I seemed to see her picture in them. It was as clear as when I had seen her by the pond. And I said firmly: “It must have been what *she* wished, too!”

Mrs. Grose’s face showed that it had indeed been so. But at the same time she said: “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 that I didn’t know. And I thanked heaven she was well out of this!”

“Yet you had your idea, then—”

“Of her real reason for leaving? Oh, yes—about that. She couldn’t have stayed. Imagine it here—for a governess! And afterwards I imagined—and I still imagine. And what I imagine is dreadful.”

“Not so dreadful as what *I* imagine,” I replied. I must have shown her a face of miserable defeat, and I knew it only too well. It brought out all her pity for me again. When I felt her kindness once more, I could not hold out any longer. I burst into tears, as I had made her burst into tears the other time. She held me close against her, like a mother, and my crying poured out. “I don’t do it!” I sobbed in despair. “I don’t save or protect them! It’s far worse than I dreamed—they’re lost!”

### Glossary

- **predecessor**: the person who had a job before you.
- **mourning**: black clothes worn after someone dies.
- **shabby**: old and worn, in poor condition.
- **infamous**: known for very bad behaviour.
- **rank**: a person’s position in society.
- **a lady**: a woman of good social class.
- **hound**: a hunting dog; also an old word for a low, bad man.
- **keep our heads**: stay calm in a difficult situation.
- **cling to**: hold on to something tightly.

## VIII

What I had said to Mrs. Grose was true enough. There were depths and possibilities in the matter I had put before her. I did not have the courage to explore them. So when we met again, still full of wonder, we agreed on one duty. We had to fight against wild fancies. We had to keep our heads, even if we kept nothing else. That was hard indeed, because some parts of our amazing experience could hardly be questioned at all. Late that night, while the house slept, we had another talk in my room. She agreed with me completely that I had, beyond doubt, seen exactly what I had seen. To hold her firmly to that, I found I only had to ask her one question. If I had “made it up,” how could I describe each of the persons who had appeared to me? How could I give a picture that showed their special marks, to the last detail? When I gave her these portraits, she had recognised them at once and named them. Of course, she wanted to bury the whole subject—and who could blame her? I quickly told her that my own interest in it had now changed, and strongly. Now I was only searching for a way to escape from it. We talked about a possibility. The visits would come again—we took that for granted—and then perhaps I would get used to my danger. I said clearly that my own danger had suddenly become the smallest of my troubles. It was my new suspicion that I could not bear. And yet the later hours of the day had made even this a little easier.

After my first outburst I had left her and gone back to my pupils, of course. I knew the right cure for my fear: I had to feel their charm. I had already found that I could really grow this feeling in myself, and it had never failed me yet. In other words, I had simply thrown myself again into Flora’s special company. And there I had noticed something—it was almost a luxury! She could put her little knowing hand straight on the place that hurt. She had looked at me sweetly, wondering. Then she had told me to my face that I had “cried.” I had thought I had wiped away the ugly signs. But for the moment, at least, I could truly be glad that they had not quite disappeared. Her kindness seemed to have no bottom, like deep water. I could look into the deep blue of the child’s eyes and call their loveliness a trick. It would be a cunning too old for her years. But that would be a hard, cold suspicion. Rather than be guilty of it, I naturally chose to give up my own judgment. And I gave up my alarm too, as far as I could. I couldn’t give them up just by wanting to. But I could repeat something to Mrs. Grose. I did it over and over, in the small hours of the night. Their voices were in the air, I said. They pressed close to one’s heart, and their sweet-smelling faces were against one’s cheek. At such times everything else fell away. There was nothing left but their helplessness and their beauty. It was a pity that I had to list again the signs of cleverness I had seen by the lake. Somehow I needed to do it to settle this once and for all. That afternoon, those signs had made my calm, controlled manner seem like a miracle. It was a pity that I had to examine again the certainty of that moment. It had come to me then like a sudden revelation: the unbelievable contact I had caught them in was, for both of them, a matter of habit. It was a pity that I had to repeat my reasons again, with a shaking voice. In my delusion, I had not even questioned one thing: that the little girl saw our visitor. I was sure she saw it as clearly as I actually saw Mrs. Grose herself. And I was sure that, because she saw it, she wanted me to believe she didn’t. At the same time, without showing anything, she wanted to guess whether I saw it too! It was a pity that I needed to describe once more her busy little activity, which seemed full of meaning. She had tried to draw my attention away. I had noticed how she moved more, played harder, sang and chattered nonsense, and invited me to romp with her.

Yet I went over all this again, to prove there was nothing in it. If I had not done so, I would have missed the two or three faint comforts that I still had. For example, I could not have told my friend firmly that I was sure of one thing. That was so much to the good. *I*, at least, had not given myself away. And I would not have been driven to do something else. Great need and desperation drove me—I hardly know what to call it. I would not have tried to understand more by pushing my colleague right up against the wall. Under pressure, she had told me a great deal, bit by bit. But there was still a small, uncertain spot somewhere on the wrong side of it all. Sometimes it brushed my forehead like the wing of a bat. On this occasion, I remember, I felt how important it was to give the curtain one last pull. The sleeping house seemed to help, and so did our danger and our watch, both so close and so strong. “I don’t believe anything so horrible,” I remember saying. “No, let’s say it plainly, my dear: I don’t. But if I did, there’s something I would now need to get out of you. And I wouldn’t spare you the smallest bit more—oh, not a scrap, come! Before Miles came back, we were upset about the letter from his school. I pressed you, and you said something. You said you didn’t claim that he had never been ‘bad’ at all. What did you have in mind? In these weeks I have lived with him myself and watched him closely. And he has *not* been bad, not ‘ever,’ not once. He has been a calm little wonder of delightful, lovable goodness. So you could easily have made that claim for him. But it seems you had seen an exception. What was it? What event that you saw yourself were you thinking of?”

It was a terribly stern question. But we were not in the mood for joking. And anyway, I got my answer before the grey dawn warned us to separate. What my friend had had in mind turned out to be very important. It was simply this: for several months, Quint and the boy had always been together. In fact, she had dared to criticise such a close friendship. She had hinted that it was not proper or suitable. She had even gone so far as to speak openly to Miss Jessel about it. Miss Jessel, in a very strange manner, had told her to mind her own business. After this, the good woman had gone directly to little Miles. I pressed her, and she told me what she had said to him. She had said that *she* liked to see young gentlemen not forget their station.

Of course, I pressed her again at this. “You reminded him that Quint was only a base menial?”

“You could say that! And for one thing, it was his answer that was bad.”

“And for another thing?” I waited. “He repeated your words to Quint?”

“No, not that. That’s just what he *wouldn’t* do!” She could still make me feel this strongly. “I was sure, anyway,” she added, “that he didn’t. But he denied certain occasions.”

“What occasions?”

“When they had been about together just as if Quint were his tutor—and a very grand one. Miss Jessel was only for the little lady. When he had gone off with the fellow, I mean, and spent hours with him.”

“So he avoided the truth about it—he said he hadn’t?” She agreed so clearly that I added in a moment: “I see. He lied.”

“Oh!” Mrs. Grose mumbled. She seemed to suggest that it didn’t matter. And she supported this with another remark. “You see, after all, Miss Jessel didn’t mind. She didn’t forbid him.”

I thought about it. “Did he give you that as his excuse?”

At this she sank again. “No, he never spoke of it.”

“He never mentioned her in connection with Quint?”

She saw where I was going, and her face went red. “Well, he didn’t show anything. He denied,” she repeated; “he denied.”

Lord, how I pressed her now! “So you could see that he knew what was going on 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 don’t have my terrible boldness of mind. You are shy and modest and delicate, so you keep things back. You even keep back the impression that made you most unhappy in the past. Then you had to struggle along in silence, without my help. But I’ll get it out of you yet! There was something in the boy,” I continued, “that made you think he was covering up and hiding their relationship.”

“Oh, he couldn’t prevent—”

“Your learning the truth? I daresay! But heavens!” I said hotly, as I thought about it. “It shows what they must have succeeded in making of him!”

“Ah, nothing that isn’t nice *now!*” Mrs. Grose pleaded sadly.

“I’m not surprised you looked strange,” I went on, “when I mentioned the letter from his school to you!”

“I doubt if I looked as strange as you!” she answered back, with simple force. “And if he was as bad as all that back then, how is he such an angel now?”

“Yes, indeed—and if he was a devil at school! How, how, how? Well,” I said in my torment, “you must ask me again. But I won’t be able to tell you for some days. Only, ask me again!” I cried, in a way that made my friend stare. “There are some directions in which I mustn’t let my thoughts go for now.” Meanwhile I went back to her first example, the one she had mentioned just before. It showed the boy’s happy ability to slip up now and then. “At the time you speak of, you complained, and you called Quint a base menial. Then I guess that one of the things Miles said to you was that you were another one.” Again she admitted it so fully that I went on: “And you forgave him that?”

“Wouldn’t *you?*”

“Oh, yes!” And there in the stillness, we both made a sound of the strangest amusement. Then I went on: “Anyway, while he was with the man—”

“Miss Flora was with the woman. It suited them all!”

I felt that it suited me too, only too well. I mean that it fitted exactly with a very deadly view of things. At that very moment I was forbidding myself to think it. But I managed to stop myself from saying it. So here I will give no more light on it than my last remark to Mrs. Grose. “I admit that his lying and his rudeness are less pleasant examples than I had hoped for. I had hoped you would tell me of some natural, ordinary boyish naughtiness breaking out in him. Still,” I said thoughtfully, “they must do. They make me feel more than ever that I must watch.”

The next minute, I blushed when I saw my friend’s face. She had forgiven him much more completely than I felt I could, even with all my tenderness. Her story did not seem to me to give me a reason to forgive him so easily. This came out when she left me at the schoolroom door. “Surely you don’t accuse *him*—”

“Of keeping up a secret contact that he hides from me? Ah, remember that, until there’s more evidence, I accuse nobody now.” Then, before I shut the door behind her, I finished. She was going by another passage to her own room. “I must just wait,” I said.

### Glossary

- **keep our heads**: stay calm and sensible in a difficult situation.
- **delusion**: a false belief that a person holds very strongly.
- **romp**: to play in a wild, noisy, happy way.
- **colleague**: a person who works with you.
- **station**: a person’s position or class in society.
- **base menial**: a low servant (said in an unkind way).
- **tutor**: a private teacher for one child.
- **wretch**: a bad or very unhappy person.
- **daresay**: (old) I suppose; probably.

## IX

I waited and waited, and as the days passed they took away some of my alarm. In fact, only a very few such days were needed. I watched my pupils all the time, and nothing new happened. This was enough to wipe away my painful fancies and even my hateful memories, as if with a sponge. I have said that I could actively grow my surrender to their extraordinary childish grace. You can imagine whether I failed to turn to it now, for whatever help it could give. It was a stranger effort than I can say to struggle against the new things I had understood. But it would surely have been an even greater strain if it had not succeeded so often. I used to wonder how my little pupils could fail to guess that I thought strange things about them. These things only made them more interesting to me. But that alone did not help me keep them in the dark. I trembled in case they saw that they *were* so very much more interesting to me now. When I thought things over, I often imagined the worst. But even then, they were blameless, and their fate was already decided. So any cloud on their innocence was only one more reason for me to take risks. There were moments when a strong impulse came over me, and I could not stop it. 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 show too much?” It would have been easy to get into a sad, wild tangle about how much I might show. But I feel there is a true reason why I could still enjoy hours of peace. My companions’ charm, close at hand, still worked on me. It still charmed me, even under the shadow of a possibility: that it was all done on purpose. I thought that I might sometimes make them suspicious with my little outbursts of strong love for them. In the same way, I remember wondering whether I might see something strange in their own displays of love. These were clearly growing.

At this time they were wildly fond of me, more than seemed natural. But after all, I thought, this was only a sweet reply from children who were always being bent over and hugged. They gave me so much love and attention. And in truth, it calmed my nerves just as well as if I had never seemed, as I might say, to catch them doing it on purpose. I don’t think they had ever wanted to do so many things for their poor protector. Of course, they learned their lessons better and better, and naturally that pleased her most. But I mean other things too. They tried to amuse her, entertain her and surprise her. They read passages to her, told her stories and acted out charades. They jumped out at her in disguises, as animals and as people from history. Above all, they amazed her with the “pieces” they had secretly learned by heart and could recite for ever. In those days I filled their busy hours with my own endless private comments, which I corrected even more privately. If I let myself go, even now, I would never get to the bottom of them. From the beginning they had shown me that they could do everything easily. Their general talent, starting fresh, reached remarkable heights. They did their little tasks as if they loved them. Out of pure joy in their gift, they did little miracles of memory that nobody had asked for. They didn’t only pop out at me as tigers and as Romans. They also came as characters from Shakespeare, as astronomers and as sailors who explore the seas. This was so very true that it probably explains something. Even today I cannot find any other explanation for it. I mean the strange calm I felt about another school for Miles. I remember that I was happy not to raise the question for the time being. That happiness must have come from my feeling about his constant, striking cleverness. He was too clever for a bad governess, for a parson’s daughter, to spoil. My thoughtful private comments were like a piece of embroidery. And in it there was one thread that was the strangest, if not the brightest. It was an impression I might have had, if I had dared to work it out. Some influence seemed to be working in his small mind, pushing him on very strongly.

It was easy to think that such a boy could put off school. But for such a boy to have been “kicked out” by a schoolmaster was just as clearly an endless mystery. Let me add one more thing. I was careful almost never to leave the children’s company now. And in their company I could not follow any trail very far. We lived in a cloud of music and love and success and acting games. Both children had a very quick ear for music. But the elder, especially, had a marvelous knack of catching and repeating. The schoolroom piano broke up all my grim fancies. When that failed, there were secret talks in corners. After them, one of the children would go out in the highest spirits, in order to “come in” as something new. I had had brothers myself. So it was no surprise to me that little girls could worship little boys like slaves. What was more amazing than anything was something else. Here was a little boy who could be so kind and thoughtful to someone younger, weaker and less clever. He could be like that to a girl. The two of them were wonderfully close. They never quarrelled or complained. But to say only this is praise far too rough for their sweetness. Sometimes, indeed, I fell into rough suspicions. Then perhaps I found signs of little secret agreements between them. One of them would keep me busy while the other slipped away. There is a *naïf* side, I suppose, in all clever planning. But if my pupils played tricks on me, it was surely with the very least roughness. It was all on the other side that the roughness broke out, after a quiet time.

I find that I really want to hold back. But I must jump in. I am going on with the story of the horrible things at Bly. In doing so, I challenge even the most open-minded reader to believe me—but I care little for that. And there is another matter. I live through what I suffered again, and I push my way through it again to the end. Suddenly there came an hour after which, as I look back, the whole affair seems to have been pure suffering. But at least I have reached the heart of it. And surely the straightest way out is to go forward. One evening, with nothing to lead up to it or prepare for it, I felt a cold touch. It was the same impression that had breathed on me on the night I arrived. It had been much lighter then, as I have said. If my stay had been less troubled after that, I would probably have thought little of it later. I had not gone to bed. I sat reading by the light of two candles. There was a roomful of old books at Bly. Some of them were novels from the last century. Such books had a bad name, and their bad name had reached my quiet, faraway home. But not even a single copy had ever reached it. These books appealed to the curiosity of my youth, which I never admitted. I remember that the book in my hand was Fielding’s *Amelia*. I also remember that I was fully awake. I remember, too, a general feeling that it was horribly late. And I did not want to look at my watch. Finally, I picture the white curtain at the head of Flora’s little bed, in the fashion of those days. Long before, I had made sure that it hid a child in perfect, peaceful sleep. In short, I remember that I was deeply interested in my author. But at the turn of a page, his spell was broken. I found myself looking straight up from him and hard at the door of my room. For a moment I listened. I remembered the faint feeling I had had on the first night. I had felt that something was moving in the house, though I could not say what. I noticed the soft air from the open casement just move the half-drawn blind. Then I acted with great care and calm. It would have looked magnificent if anyone had been there to admire it. I put down my book and stood up. I took a candle and went straight out of the room. My light hardly lit up the passage. From there, without a sound, I closed and locked the door.

I can’t say now what made me decide or what guided me. But I went straight along the lobby, holding my candle high. At last I came in sight of the tall window that stood over the great turn of the staircase. At this point I suddenly became aware of three things. They happened almost at the same time, yet they came like flashes, one after another. First, with a sudden bold flicker, my candle went out. Through the uncovered window, I saw that the soft grey light of earliest morning made the candle unnecessary. The next instant, without the candle, I saw that there was someone on the stairs. I speak of one thing after another. But I needed no time at all to prepare myself for a third meeting with Quint. The apparition had reached the landing halfway up. So it was at the place nearest the window. When it saw me, it stopped short and fixed its eyes on me. It did this exactly as it had done from the tower and from the garden. He knew me as well as I knew him. And so, in the cold, faint half-light, we faced each other with the same intense attention. There was a faint shine on the high glass, and another on the polished oak stairs below. This time he was completely a living, hateful, dangerous presence. But that was not the greatest wonder of all. I keep that for something quite different. My fear had clearly left me. There was nothing in me that did not face him and measure him.

I felt plenty of pain after that extraordinary moment. But thank God, I felt no terror. And he knew I didn’t—after an instant I was wonderfully sure of this. I felt a fierce, hard confidence. If I held my ground for a minute, I would be free of him—for the time, at least. So during that minute the thing was as human and as horrible as a real meeting. It was horrible just because it *was* human. It was as human as meeting some enemy, alone, in the small hours, in a sleeping house. It could have been some adventurer or some criminal. Only one thing made the whole horror, huge as it was, seem unnatural. It was the dead silence of our long stare, so close to each other. If I had met a murderer in such a place at such an hour, we would at least have spoken. Something would have passed between us, as it does in life. If nothing had passed, one of us would have moved. The moment lasted so long that very little more would have made me doubt whether even *I* was alive. I can only describe what followed in one way. The silence itself became the thing into which I saw the figure disappear. In a way, that silence was a proof of my strength. In it, I clearly saw the figure turn. It turned as the low wretch it had once belonged to might have turned when he received an order. I watched his evil back. A hump could not have made it uglier. He went straight down the staircase and into the darkness where the next turn of the stairs was lost.

### Glossary

- **charade**: a game in which you act out a word for others to guess.
- **recite**: to say a poem or text aloud from memory.
- **by heart**: completely from memory.
- **knack**: a special skill for doing something easily.
- **naïf**: (French) simple and innocent, not clever or tricky.
- **casement**: a window that opens outwards like a door.
- **blind**: a cover pulled down over a window.
- **lobby**: a passage or hall inside a building.
- **landing**: the flat area at the top of stairs or between two sets of stairs.
- **wretch**: a bad or very unhappy person.

## X

I stayed for a while at the top of the stairs. Then I slowly understood that my visitor had gone, and was really gone. So I returned to my room. I had left a candle burning there. By its light, the first thing I saw was that Flora's little bed was empty. At this I caught my breath. I felt all the terror that I had been able to fight five minutes before. I rushed to the place where I had left her lying. The small silk cover and the sheets were all in disorder. The white curtains had been pulled forward over the bed to trick me. Then my step, to my huge relief, brought an answering sound. I saw the window blind move, and the child ducked down and came out, rosy, from behind it. She stood there in her nightgown, with her pink bare feet and golden curls, open and honest. She looked very serious.

I had a strong feeling that I was losing an advantage. I had just won it, and the thrill of it had been enormous. But now she spoke to me as if I were the one to blame. “You naughty: where *have* you been?” Instead of asking about her own strange behaviour, I found myself accused and explaining. She explained too, with the loveliest, most eager simplicity. As she lay there, she had suddenly known that I was out of the room. So she had jumped up to see what had happened to me.

In my joy at seeing her again, I had dropped back into my chair. Only then did I feel a little faint. She had run straight over to me on her little feet and climbed onto my knee. She let me hold her, with the candlelight full on her wonderful little face, still pink from sleep. I remember closing my eyes for a moment. I did it on purpose, giving way, as if before something too beautiful. That beauty shone out of the blue of her eyes.

“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 smiled at me as she said it, and she never went pale.

Oh, how I looked at her now! “And did you see anyone?”

“Ah, *no!*” she answered. She said it almost with the right of a child to make no sense. She sounded hurt, yet there was a long sweetness in the way she drew out her “no”.

At that moment, with my nerves in such a state, I was completely sure she was lying. I closed my eyes again. I was dazzled by the three or four ways in which I might deal with this. One of them tempted me very strongly for a moment. To fight it, I must have held my little girl in a sudden hard grip. Wonderfully, she accepted it without a cry or any sign of fear. Why not break out at her right there and have it all over? Why not say it straight into her lovely little face in the candlelight?

“You see, you see, you *know* that you do. And you already suspect that I believe it. So why not just tell me honestly? Then at least we can live with it together. And perhaps, in our strange fate, we can learn where we are and what it means.”

But this temptation dropped away as quickly as it came. If I had given in to it at once, I might have saved myself from—well, you'll see what. Instead of giving in, I jumped to my feet again and looked at her bed. I took a weak middle way.

“Why did you pull the curtain over the place to make me think you were still there?”

Flora thought about it, her face bright and clear. Then, with her little heavenly smile, she said: “Because I don't like to frighten you!”

“But if I had, as you thought, gone out—?”

She simply refused to be puzzled. She turned her eyes to the candle flame. She seemed to think the question had nothing to do with her. To her it seemed as unimportant as a school lesson from Mrs. Marcet, or nine times nine. “Oh, but you know,” she answered, quite well enough, “that you might come back, you dear, and that you *have!*”

A little later she got into bed. Then, for a long time, I almost sat on her to hold her hand. I did it to show her that I understood why my coming back mattered.

You can imagine what my nights were like after that. Again and again I sat up until I didn't know what time it was. I chose moments when I was sure my little roommate was asleep. Then I crept out and walked silently up and down the passage. I even went as far as the place where I had last met Quint. But I never met him there again. I may as well say now that I never again saw him in the house.

On the staircase, however, I just missed a different adventure. Once, looking down from the top, I saw a woman sitting on one of the lower steps. Her back was turned to me. Her body was half bent over, and her head was in her hands, as if in deep grief. I had been there only a moment when she vanished without looking round at me. All the same, I knew exactly what dreadful face she had to show. I wondered something else, too. What if I had been below her instead of above? Would I have had the same courage to go up that I had just shown Quint?

Well, there was still plenty of chance for courage. On the eleventh night after my last meeting with that gentleman, I had a fright. I counted all the nights now. This fright came dangerously close to a meeting. Because it was so unexpected, it was in fact my sharpest shock.

It was the first night in all this time that I let myself go to bed at my old hour. I was tired of watching. I felt I could do it again without being careless. I fell asleep at once. As I learned later, I slept until about one o'clock. But when I woke, I sat straight up. I was as fully awake as if a hand had shaken me. I had left a light burning, but now it was out. At once I felt sure that Flora had put it out. This brought me to my feet. I went straight through the darkness to her bed. I found that she had left it. A look at the window told me more, and when I struck a match I saw the whole picture.

The child had got up again. This time she had blown out the taper. Again she had squeezed in behind the blind, to watch or perhaps to answer something. She was looking out into the night. This time she really saw something. Last time, I had made sure, she had not. I knew it because nothing disturbed her. My new light did not disturb her. My hurry to put on my slippers and a wrap did not disturb her either. She was hidden, safe and lost in what she was doing. She was clearly leaning on the sill, because the casement opened outwards. She was giving herself up to it completely. A great still moon was helping her, and this had counted in my quick decision. She was face to face with the figure we had met at the lake. Now she could communicate with it, as she had not been able to do then.

What I had to do was reach another window on the same side of the house. I had to do it from the corridor, without disturbing her. I got to the door without her hearing me. I went out, closed the door and listened from the other side for any sound from her. As I stood in the passage, my eyes were on her brother's door. It was only ten steps away. In a way I can't describe, it brought back the strange impulse that I have called my temptation. What if I went straight in and marched to *his* window? He was a boy and might be confused. I would risk showing him why I had come. What if, by taking that risk, my boldness could catch the rest of the mystery, like a long rope thrown over it?

This thought held me long enough to make me cross to his door and stop again. I listened with all my strength. I pictured what might be happening inside. I wondered if his bed was empty too, and if he was also secretly watching. It was a deep, silent minute. At the end of it my impulse failed. He was quiet. He might be innocent. The risk was terrible. I turned away.

There was a figure in the grounds, searching for someone to see. It was the visitor that Flora was busy with. But it was not the visitor who cared most about my boy. I hesitated again, but for other reasons, and only for a few seconds. Then I made my choice.

There were empty rooms at Bly. It was only a question of choosing the right one. Suddenly the right one came to my mind. It was the lower room in the solid corner of the house that I have called the old tower. It was still high above the gardens. It was a large, square room, set up quite grandly as a bedroom. It was so huge that it was not practical. So nobody had slept in it for years, though Mrs. Grose kept it in perfect order. I had often admired it, and I knew my way around it. At first I hesitated a little at the cold gloom of a room nobody used. Then I only had to cross it and open one of the shutters as quietly as I could. I did this. I uncovered the glass without a sound and put my face to the window. Outside it was much less dark than inside. I could see that I was looking in the right direction.

Then I saw something more. The moon made the night very easy to see through. On the lawn it showed me a person, made small by the distance. The person stood there without moving, as if held by a spell. They were looking up towards the place where I had appeared. That is, they were looking not so much straight at me as at something that seemed to be above me. There was clearly another person above me. There was a person on the tower. But the figure on the lawn was not at all what I had imagined and hurried so boldly to meet. The figure on the lawn—I felt sick as I made it out—was poor little Miles himself.

### Glossary

- **blind**: a cover pulled down over a window.
- **nightgown**: a long loose dress worn in bed.
- **Mrs. Marcet**: a writer of school books for children.
- **taper**: a thin candle.
- **wrap**: a loose piece of clothing you put round yourself to keep warm.
- **sill**: the flat shelf at the bottom of a window.
- **casement**: a window that opens outwards like a door.
- **shutters**: wooden covers on the inside or outside of a window.
- **the old tower**: one of the two square towers at the ends of the house at Bly.

## XI

I did not speak to Mrs. Grose until late the next day. I kept my pupils in sight so strictly that it was often hard to meet her alone. We both felt it was important not to make anyone suspicious. The servants must not think, any more than the children, that we were secretly worried or discussing mysteries. Her calm, smooth face made me feel very safe in this. There was nothing in her fresh face that could pass my horrible secrets on to others.

She believed me completely, I was sure of that. If she hadn't, I don't know what would have become of me. I couldn't have carried the whole thing alone. But she was a wonderful example of how lucky it is to have no imagination. She could see nothing in our little children but their beauty and sweetness, their happiness and cleverness. So she had no direct contact with the causes of my trouble. If they had looked hurt or damaged in any way, she would have traced it back. Then, no doubt, she would have looked as worn and ill as they did. But as things were, I could watch her as she looked at them. She stood with her large white arms folded and her usual peaceful look. I could feel her thanking the Lord. She seemed to think that even if they were ruined, the pieces would still be useful.

In her mind, wild ideas were replaced by a steady glow, like a fire at home. Time went on, and nothing happened that anyone else could see. So she was becoming sure that our young ones could look after themselves after all. I had already begun to notice the result. She now worried most about the sad case of their teacher. For me, this made things simpler, and that was good. I could promise that my face would tell the world nothing. But in those conditions, it would have been a huge extra strain to worry about her face too.

At the time I am now describing, I had asked her, quite firmly, to join me on the terrace. The season was changing, and the afternoon sun was pleasant there now. We sat together. In front of us, a little way off, the children were walking slowly up and down. They were close enough to call if we wanted. They were in one of their easiest, quietest moods. They moved slowly together over the lawn below us. As they went, the boy read aloud from a storybook. He kept his arm round his sister to hold her close.

Mrs. Grose watched them with complete calm. Then I could almost hear her mind working hard. She was doing her duty and turning to me, to see the hidden side of things. It was like looking at the back of a tapestry. I had made her a container for terrible, shocking things. But she was patient with my pain, and in that I saw something strange. She accepted that I was above her, in my learning and my position. She opened her mind to whatever I told her. Suppose I had wanted to make a witch's broth and suggested it confidently. Then she would have held out a large clean saucepan.

This was fully her attitude by the time I reached a certain point in my story of the night. It was the moment when Miles spoke to me. I had seen him on the lawn at that terrible hour. It was almost the very spot where he happened to be walking now. Then I had gone down to bring him in. At the window I had chosen to do that, rather than make a louder signal. I badly needed not to wake and frighten the house.

I had already told Mrs. Grose that I had little hope of making her feel it properly. She was full of sympathy, but I doubted I could show her the true splendour of the boy's answer. It was a clever little idea of his, and he gave it when I finally asked my question in the house. As soon as I appeared on the terrace in the moonlight, he came straight to me. I took his hand without a word. I led him through the dark spaces of the house. We went up the staircase where Quint had waited for him so hungrily. We went along the passage where I had listened and trembled. And so we came to his empty room.

Not a sound passed between us on the way. And I wondered—oh, *how* I wondered! Was he searching in his little mind for some excuse? Would he find one that sounded true and not too silly? It would certainly test his cleverness. This time I could see that he was really embarrassed. And over that I felt a strange thrill of triumph. Here was a sharp trap for a boy nobody could read! He couldn't pretend to be innocent any longer. So how on earth would he get out of it? But with the same strong beat of my heart, I silently asked myself another question. How on earth would *I* get out of it?

For the first time, I truly faced all the danger. Even now, it was risky for me to speak of my own horrible ideas. I remember how we went into his little room. The bed had not been slept in at all. The window was uncovered, and the moonlight made the room so clear that no match was needed. I remember how I suddenly sank down on the edge of the bed. The thought hit me hard: he must know that he really, as people say, “had” me. He could do whatever he liked, with all his cleverness to help him. He could do it as long as I followed an old rule. That rule says that people who look after children commit a crime if they feed their fears and superstitions.

He “had” me indeed, and there was no way out. Suppose I gave the smallest sign of starting such a talk. Then I would be the first to bring something so terrible into our perfect friendship. Who would ever forgive me? Who would agree that I should not be hanged for it? No, no. It was useless to try to make Mrs. Grose understand. It is almost as useless to try to show it here. In our short, stiff meeting in the dark, he truly shook me with admiration.

Of course I was very kind and gentle with him. Never before had I put my hands on his little shoulders with such tenderness. I sat resting against the bed and held him there, as if under fire. I had no choice. At least in form, I had to ask him.

“You must tell me now—and all the truth. What did you go out for? What were you doing there?”

I can still see his wonderful smile shining at me in the half dark. I can see the whites of his beautiful eyes and his little teeth. “If I tell you why, will you understand?”

At this my heart jumped into my mouth. *Would* he tell me why? I could find no words to push him. I only knew that I nodded at him again and again, with a strange twisted face. He was gentleness itself. While I nodded, he stood there more than ever like a little fairy prince. In fact his brightness gave me a short rest. Would he be so bright 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 how sweetly and cheerfully he said that word. And then he bent forward and kissed me. It was really the end of everything. I took his kiss. I held him in my arms for a minute. I had to try harder than ever before not to cry. He had explained himself in exactly the way that let me least look behind his words. I accepted it, and to show that, I looked round the room and said—

“Then you didn't undress at all?”

His eyes shone in the darkness. “Not at all. I sat up and read.”

“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 came out so quickly and readily! “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,” he said, “and, to see what she was looking at, you also looked—you saw.”

“While you,” I agreed, “nearly caught your death of cold in the night air!”

He was so pleased with his clever trick that he could happily agree, glowing. “How otherwise should I have been bad enough?” he asked.

Then we hugged again, and that ended the incident and our talk. I could only admire all the goodness he had in store. He had been able to use it all for his joke.

### Glossary

- **pupils**: children who are taught by a teacher.
- **terrace**: a flat paved area next to a house.
- **tapestry**: a heavy cloth with a picture woven into it; its back shows the hidden threads.
- **witch's broth**: a magic soup that a witch cooks, often for evil purposes.
- **saucepan**: a deep metal pot for cooking.
- **superstitions**: beliefs in magic, luck or strange powers that are not based on reason.
- **hanged**: killed by a rope round the neck, as a punishment.
- **fairy prince**: a beautiful young prince in a fairy tale.
- **caught your death of cold**: became very ill from being out in the cold.

## XII

As I have said, in the morning light my special impression was not quite easy to present to Mrs. Grose. I tried to make it stronger. I told her about one more thing he had said before we parted.

“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 out lightly to show me how good he is. He knows perfectly well 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 understand it now. The four of them, you can be sure, meet all the time. If you had been with either child on one of these last nights, you would clearly have understood. The more I've watched and waited, the more I've felt something. If nothing else made it certain, their silence would. Each of them keeps silent, always, as if by a plan. *Never*, even by a slip of the tongue, have they mentioned either of their old friends. And Miles has never mentioned being sent away from school. Oh, yes, we may sit here and look at them. And they may show off to us down there as much as they like. But even while they pretend to be lost in their fairy tale, they're full of their vision. They see the dead brought back. He's not reading to her,” I said firmly. “They're talking of *them*—they're talking horrors! I know I go on as if I were mad. It's a wonder I'm not. What I've seen would have made *you* mad. But it has only made me see more clearly. It has made me get hold of still other things.”

My clear vision must have seemed terrible to her. But the charming children it fell on were passing up and down in front of us, close and sweet together. They gave my friend something to hold on to. I felt how tightly she held on. My strong feeling did not move her, and she kept her eyes on them.

“What other things have you got hold of?”

“Why, the very things that have delighted me and charmed me. And yet, deep down, as I now so strangely see, they have puzzled and troubled me. Their beauty, which is more than human. Their goodness, which is completely unnatural. It's a game,” I went on. “It's a plan and a trick!”

“By those little darlings—?”

“Who are still just lovely babies? Yes, mad as that seems!” Just saying it out loud really helped me to trace it. I could follow it all and put the pieces 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.”

Oh, how poor Mrs. Grose seemed to study the children at this! “But for what?”

“For the love of all the evil that the pair put into them in those dreadful days. And they want to keep feeding them that evil, to go on with the work of devils. That is what brings the others back.”

“Laws!” said my friend under her breath. It was a simple country word. But it showed that she really accepted my new proof. She accepted what must have happened in the bad time. And there had been a time even worse than this! Nothing could support me better than her plain agreement. From her own experience, she agreed with how deeply wicked I believed our two villains had been. After a moment, as if her memory gave way, she said: “They *were* bad ones! But what can they do now?” she went on.

“Do?” I repeated it so loudly that Miles and Flora stopped for a moment as they passed in the distance. They looked at us. “Don't they do enough?” I asked in a lower voice. The children smiled and nodded and blew kisses to us. Then they went on with their show. We watched them for a minute. Then I answered: “They can destroy them!”

At this my friend did turn to me. Her question was a silent one, and it made me say more clearly what I meant.

“They don't know yet quite how—but they're trying hard. They're seen only across a distance, and beyond things. They appear in strange places and high places. They're on the tops of towers and the roofs of houses. They're outside windows, or on the far edge of pools. But on both sides there's a deep plan to shorten the distance and get past the barrier. The tempters will succeed. It's only a question of time. They only need to keep suggesting danger.”

“For the children to come?”

“And die in trying!”

Mrs. Grose slowly got up. I was careful to add: “Unless, of course, we can stop it!”

She stood there in front of me while I stayed sitting. I could see her thinking things over. “Their uncle must do the stopping. He must take them away.”

“And who's going to make him?”

She had been looking into the distance. Now she looked down at me with a silly face. “You, miss.”

“By writing to him that his house is poisoned, and his little nephew and niece are mad?”

“But if they *are*, miss?”

“And if I am mad myself, you mean? That's charming news for him to get from a governess. My main promise was to give him no worry.”

Mrs. Grose thought about it, watching the children again. “Yes, he do hate worry. That was the great reason—”

“Why those devils fooled him for so long? No doubt it was. But he must have cared terribly little. Anyway, I'm not a devil, so I wouldn't fool him.”

My friend waited a moment. Then, as her only answer, she sat down again and took hold of my arm. “Make him come to you, at least.”

I stared. “To *me?*” I was suddenly afraid of what she might do. “‘Him’?”

“He ought to *be* here—he ought to help.”

I stood up quickly. I think my face must have looked stranger than ever before. “Can you see me asking him to visit?”

No, looking at my face, she clearly couldn't. Instead, as one woman reads another, she could see what I saw myself. She saw how he would laugh at me. He would be amused, and he would look down on me. He would think I had failed to accept being left alone. He would think I had cleverly set things up to get his attention. He would think I wanted him to notice the charms he had ignored. She didn't know how proud I had been to serve him and keep to our agreement. No one knew. And yet I think she understood how serious my warning was.

“If you should ever lose your head and write to him for me—”

She was really frightened. “Yes, miss?”

“I would leave, at once, both him and you.”

### Glossary

- **half a dozen**: six.
- **a slip of the tongue**: a mistake in speaking, when you say something you did not mean to say.
- **show off**: to do things so that others will watch and admire you.
- **Laws!**: an old country word of surprise, like “Lord!”.
- **villains**: very bad people.
- **tempters**: people who try to make someone do something wrong.
- **barrier**: something that blocks the way between two places.
- **governess**: a woman who lives with a family and teaches their children at home.
- **lose your head**: to stop thinking calmly and do something foolish.

## XIII

It was easy enough to join the children. But speaking to them about it was still beyond my strength. When we were close together, the difficulties were as impossible to get over as before. This went on for a month. There were new troubles and new signs. Above all, there was one sign that grew sharper and sharper. My pupils seemed to have a small, mocking awareness of my difficulty.

I am as sure today as I was then that this was not just my own wicked imagination. It was perfectly clear that they knew about my trouble. For a long time this strange situation was, in a way, the air we lived in. I don't mean that they secretly laughed at me or did anything rude. That was never one of their dangers. But I do mean something else. The thing that was never named and never touched became the biggest thing between us. And we could not have avoided it so well without a great deal of silent agreement.

At moments it was as if we kept coming in sight of subjects where we had to stop short. We kept turning suddenly out of little streets that we saw had no way through. We kept shutting doors that we had carelessly opened. They closed with a little bang that made us look at each other. Like all bangs, it was louder than we had meant. They say that all roads lead to Rome. And there were times when it seemed that almost every lesson or subject of talk came close to forbidden ground.

The forbidden ground was the return of the dead in general. In particular, it was whatever the children might still remember of the friends they had lost. There were days when I could have sworn one of them gave the other a small, invisible push. I imagined one saying to the other: “She thinks she'll do it this time—but she *won't!*” To “do it” would have meant, for example, to speak directly, just for once, of the lady who had taught them before me.

They had a lovely, endless hunger for stories from my own life. I had told them these stories again and again. They knew everything that had ever happened to me. They had heard all about my smallest adventures, with every detail. They knew the adventures of my brothers and sisters, and of the cat and the dog at home. They knew a lot about my father's odd character. They knew about the furniture and the rooms in our house. They knew what the old women of our village talked about. All in all, there were enough things to chatter about. But you had to go very fast and know by instinct when to go around something.

They had their own special skill in pulling the strings of my imagination and my memory. When I thought about these times afterwards, nothing else gave me such a strong feeling. I suspected that I was being watched from a hiding place. In any case, it was only about *my* life, *my* past and *my* friends that we could feel at all at ease. Because of this, they sometimes broke out with friendly little requests that had nothing to do with anything. With no clear reason, they would ask me to repeat Goody Gosling's famous witty saying. Or they would ask me to repeat the details about how clever the vicarage pony was.

At moments like these, and at quite different ones too, my difficulty became most painful. Things had now taken a new turn. The days passed for me without another meeting. You might think this would have calmed my nerves a little. On that second night on the upper landing, I had briefly seen the woman at the foot of the stairs. Since then I had seen nothing that it was better not to see, in the house or outside it. There were many corners where I expected to come upon Quint. There were many places that, in a dark way, would have suited an appearance of Miss Jessel.

The summer had turned, and the summer had gone. The autumn had fallen on Bly and blown out half our lights. The place had a grey sky and dead flowers, bare spaces and scattered dead leaves. It was like a theatre after the show, with old programmes thrown everywhere. Sometimes the air was a certain way, or there was a certain sound or stillness. I had feelings I can't describe about the *kind* of moment it was. These things brought back the feeling of that June evening outdoors. That was when I had first seen Quint. The feeling stayed long enough for me to catch it. They brought back those other moments, too. After I had seen him through the window, I had looked for him in vain among the bushes.

I recognized the signs, the warnings. I recognized the moment and the place. But they stayed empty, with no one in them, and nobody troubled me. Well, if you can call me untroubled. I was a young woman whose senses had not grown weaker, but had strangely grown deeper.

After that terrible scene with Flora by the lake, I had said something to Mrs. Grose. It had puzzled her. I said that from then on, losing my power would upset me much more than keeping it. I was saying what was clear in my mind. Perhaps the children really saw, perhaps not. It was not yet fully proved. Either way, I much preferred to be fully open to it myself, as a protection. I was ready to know the very worst that there was to know. I had had an ugly glimpse of something. My eyes might be closed just when the children's eyes were most open.

Well, it seemed that my eyes *were* closed now. It seemed almost wicked not to thank God for this. But sadly there was a problem. I would have thanked him with all my soul. But I was just as strongly sure of my pupils' secret.

How can I trace again today the strange steps of my fixed idea? There were times when we were together and I would have sworn something. I would have sworn that the children had visitors whom they knew and welcomed. I would have sworn that they were really there in front of me. Only my own eyes for them were closed. At those times I almost broke out in triumph. Only one thing stopped me. Speaking might do more harm than the harm I wanted to prevent.

“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 even more friendliness and tenderness. But in the clear depths of that friendliness, something showed for a moment. It was like the flash of a fish in a stream. It was the mockery of knowing they had the advantage.

In fact the shock had gone deeper into me than I knew. It was the shock of that night on the lawn. I had looked out to see Quint or Miss Jessel under the stars. Instead I had seen the boy whose sleep I was guarding. He had brought it in with him at once. Straight away he had turned it on me. It was the lovely upward look that the hideous figure of Quint had used on me from the battlements above. If it was a question of fear, this discovery had frightened me more than any other. My nerves were in that state when I reached my real conclusions.

These thoughts troubled me so much that sometimes, at odd moments, I shut myself in my room. There I practised out loud how I might come to the point. It was a wild relief and, at the same time, a new despair. I came at it from one side and then the other, throwing myself around the room. But I always broke down when I had to say the names. They were too terrible to say. As they died on my lips, I said something to myself. If I spoke the names, I would help them to mean something wicked. The children had a rare natural sense of what should not be said. Perhaps no schoolroom had ever known anything like it. By speaking, I would break it.

I said to myself: “*They* have the good manners to be silent. And you, who are trusted, are low enough to speak!” Then I felt my face go red, and I covered it with my hands.

After these secret scenes I chattered more than ever. I went on talking quickly until one of our great hushes came. They were so strong that you could almost touch them. I can't call them anything else. It was a strange, dizzy rise, or a kind of swimming, into stillness. I am trying to find the words! All life seemed to stop. It had nothing to do with how much noise we were making at the moment. I could hear the hush through any amount of laughter or quick reciting or loud piano playing. That was when the others, the outsiders, were there.

They were not angels, but they “passed,” as the French say. While they stayed, I trembled with fear. Perhaps they were giving their younger victims some even more evil message. Perhaps they were showing them some clearer picture than they had thought good enough for me.

The hardest thing to get rid of was a cruel idea. Whatever I had seen, Miles and Flora saw *more*. They saw terrible things that nobody could guess. These things came from dreadful dealings in the past. Of course, things like this left a chill on the surface for a while. We all loudly denied that we felt it. With practice, all three of us had become so well trained that we did the same things each time. We did them almost without thinking, to show the incident was over.

The children, at any rate, did something striking. They always kissed me, with a kind of wild suddenness that had nothing to do with anything. And one of them never failed to ask the precious question that had helped us through many dangers.

“When do you think he *will* come? Don't you think we *ought* to write?”

We found by experience that nothing was better than that question for getting past an awkward moment. “He”, of course, was their uncle in Harley Street. We had many ideas that he might arrive at any moment and join our little group. He had given no encouragement at all to this idea. But without it to fall back on, we would have lost some of our finest performances for each other.

He never wrote to them. That may have been selfish. But it was part of how flattering his trust in me was. A man often pays a woman his highest compliment in a certain way. He honours one of the sacred rules of his own comfort. I had promised not to write to him for help. I felt I kept to the spirit of that promise in one way. I let the children understand that their own letters were only charming writing exercises. They were too beautiful to be posted. I kept them myself. I have them all to this hour.

This rule only made it more ironic when they kept telling me he might be among us at any moment. It was exactly as if the children knew that this would be more awkward for me than almost anything else. As I look back, one thing in all this seems most extraordinary to me. In spite of my strain and their triumph, I never lost patience with them. They must truly have been lovable, I now think, since I didn't hate them in those days!

But if relief had been delayed longer, would my anger have given me away in the end? It doesn't matter much, because relief came. I call it relief. But it was only the relief that a snap brings to something pulled tight. Or the relief of a thunderstorm after a hot, airless day. At least it was a change, and it came with a rush.

### Glossary

- **pupils**: children who are taught by a teacher.
- **all roads lead to Rome**: a saying: every way ends in the same place.
- **forbidden ground**: a subject that you must not talk about.
- **Goody Gosling**: an old woman from the governess's home village.
- **vicarage**: the house of a country priest.
- **battlements**: the wall with gaps along the top of a tower or castle.
- **wretches**: bad or unhappy people; here, said in anger to the children.
- **“passed,” as the French say**: the French say “an angel passes” when a group suddenly goes silent.
- **ironic**: funny or strange because it is the opposite of what you would expect.

## XIV

One Sunday morning I was walking to church. Little Miles was at my side. His sister was in front of us with Mrs. Grose, well within sight. It was a crisp, clear day, the first of its kind for some time. There had been a touch of frost in the night. The autumn air was bright and sharp, and it made the church bells sound almost cheerful.

By a strange chance of thought, something struck me at that moment. I felt very grateful that my little pupils were so obedient. Why did they never mind my company? I was with them all the time, and I never let them go. Something had made me see it more clearly. I had almost pinned the boy to my shawl. And the way I kept the others walking in front of me looked like a guard against rebellion. I was like a jailer, watching for surprises and escapes. But their wonderful little surrender, I mean, was part of the darkest facts of all.

Miles was dressed for Sunday by his uncle's tailor. The tailor had been given a free hand. He had ideas about pretty waistcoats and about Miles's grand little manner. So Miles looked fully like a young gentleman. His right to be independent was stamped all over him. He was a boy, and he had his position. If he had suddenly demanded his freedom, I would have had nothing to say. By the strangest chance, I was just wondering how I would face that. Then the revolution clearly came. I call it a revolution because I now see what it was. With the words he spoke, the curtain rose on the last act of my dreadful drama. The disaster was suddenly on its way.

“Look here, my dear, you know,” he said charmingly, “when in the world, please, am I going back to school?”

Written down here, the words sound harmless enough. They sounded even more harmless in his sweet, high, easy voice. He spoke like that to everyone, but most of all to his ever-present governess. He threw his words out lightly, as if he were tossing roses. But there was always something in them that made you stop and catch them. And now, at any rate, I caught them so well that I stopped short. It was as if one of the trees of the park had fallen across the road.

At that moment something new was between us. He knew perfectly well that I saw it. But he did not need to look any less open and charming than usual. At first I found nothing to answer. I could feel that he already saw the advantage he had won. I was so slow to find anything to say that he had plenty of time. After a minute he went on, with a smile that hinted at something but said nothing clear.

“You know, my dear, that for a fellow to be with a lady *always*—!”

He always called me “my dear”. Nothing could better show the exact feeling I wanted to give my pupils. It was so loving and familiar. It was so easy, and yet so respectful.

But oh, how I felt that now I had to choose my own words carefully! I remember that I tried to laugh, to gain time. He watched me with his beautiful face. In it I seemed to see how ugly and strange I looked.

“And always with the same lady?” I answered.

He didn't go pale and he didn't blink. The whole thing was really out in the open between us now. “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 stayed there with him a moment, very kindly. “Yes, you're getting on.” Oh, but I felt helpless!

To this day I have kept one small, heartbreaking idea. He seemed to know how helpless I felt, and to play with it. “And you can't say I've not been awfully good, can you?”

I put my hand on his shoulder. I felt it would have been much better to walk on, but I could not yet. “No, I can't say that, Miles.”

“Except just that one night, you know—!”

“That one night?” I couldn't look at him as straight as he looked at me.

“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 a child's sweet, exaggerated hurt. “Why, it was to show you I could!”

“Oh, yes, you could.”

“And I can again.”

I felt that perhaps, after all, I could manage to stay calm. “Certainly. But you won't.”

“No, not *that* again. It was nothing.”

“It was nothing,” I said. “But we must go on.”

He walked on with me again, putting his hand through my arm. “Then when *am* I going back?”

As I thought about it, I put on my most serious, responsible face. “Were you very happy at school?”

He thought for a moment. “Oh, I'm happy enough anywhere!”

“Well, then,” I said in a shaky voice, “if you're just as happy here—!”

“Ah, but that isn't everything! Of course *you* know a lot—”

He stopped, and I took a risk. “But you mean that you know almost as much?”

“Not half what I want to!” Miles said honestly. “But it isn't so much that.”

“What is it, then?”

“Well—I want to see more life.”

“I see; I see.”

We had now come in sight of the church. Various people were there, including several of the household from Bly. They were on their way in, and they stood in a group by the door to watch us go in. I walked faster. I wanted to get there before the question between us opened up much further. I thought hungrily that he would have to be silent for more than an hour. I thought with envy of the half dark of the pew. I thought of the kneeling cushion, the hassock, where I could bend my knees. It would be almost a holy help to me.

I seemed to be running a race against some confusion that he was about to throw me into. But I felt he had got there first. Before we had even entered the churchyard, he threw out—

“I want my own sort!”

It really made me jump 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 strangely weak. “Don't you, then, *love* our sweet Flora?”

“If I didn't—and you, too; if I didn't—!” he repeated. He seemed to step back, as if to take a run before a jump. But he left his thought unfinished. We came in through the gate, and then he pressed my arm. I had to stop again. Mrs. Grose and Flora had gone into the church. The other people had followed them. For the moment we were alone among the old, crowded graves. We had stopped on the path from the gate, beside a low, long tomb shaped like a table.

“Yes, if you didn't—?”

While I waited, he looked at the graves. “Well, you know what!”

But he didn't move. And soon he said something that made me drop straight down onto the stone of the tomb. It was as if I suddenly needed to rest. “Does my uncle think what *you* think?”

I made a show of resting. “How do you know what I think?”

“Ah, well, of course I don't. It seems to me you never tell me. But I mean, does *he* know?”

“Know what, Miles?”

“Why, the way I'm going on.”

I quickly saw a problem. Any answer I gave would mean sacrificing my employer a little. But it seemed to me that we at Bly had all been sacrificed enough. So this small fault could be forgiven.

“I don't think your uncle much cares.”

At this, Miles 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, very brightly and firmly.

He gave me one more look full of that same bright feeling. Then he marched off alone into the church.

### Glossary

- **crisp**: cold, dry and fresh (about the weather).
- **pupils**: children who are taught by a teacher.
- **jailer**: a person who guards prisoners in a prison.
- **tailor**: a person who makes clothes, especially for men.
- **waistcoats**: short jackets without sleeves worn under a coat.
- **governess**: a woman who lives with a family and teaches their children at home.
- **pew**: a long wooden seat in a church.
- **hassock**: a cushion for kneeling on in church.
- **tomb**: a stone structure over a grave.

## XV

Everything was really settled from the moment I did not follow him. It was a pitiful surrender to my nerves. I knew this, but somehow that knowledge had no power to help me. I only sat there on my tomb. I read into my little friend's words the full depth of their meaning. By the time I understood all of it, I had also found an excuse for staying outside. I told myself I was ashamed to show my pupils and everyone else in church such an example of lateness.

What I said to myself above all was this: Miles had got something out of me. And for him, the proof would be just this awkward collapse of mine. He had got out of me that there was something I was very afraid of. He could probably use my fear to gain more freedom for his own purpose. My fear was of having to face the unbearable question of why he had been sent away from school. That was really the question of the horrors gathered behind it. His uncle could come and deal with these things with me. Strictly speaking, I ought now to have wanted to bring that about. But I could so little face the ugliness and the pain of it. So I simply put things off and lived from hand to mouth. To my deep distress, the boy was completely in the right. He was in a position to say to me: “Either you clear up with my guardian the mystery of why my studies have stopped. Or you stop expecting me to live like this with you. It's such an unnatural life for a boy.” And what was so unnatural for this particular boy was something else. It was this sudden sign that he was aware of things and had a plan.

That was what really overcame me. That was what stopped me from going in. I walked round the church, hesitating and hovering. I thought that, with him, I had already hurt myself beyond repair. So I could mend nothing. It was too great an effort to squeeze in beside him in the pew. He would be more sure than ever to put his arm through mine. He would make me sit there for an hour in close, silent contact with his thoughts about our talk. For the first minute since he came, I wanted to get away from him.

I stopped under the high east window and listened to the sounds of the service. A sudden impulse took hold of me. I felt it might master me completely if I gave it the least encouragement. I could easily end my difficult situation by going away altogether. Here was my chance. There was no one to stop me. I could give the whole thing up—turn my back and leave. I only had to hurry back to the house to make a few preparations. So many of the servants were at church that the house would be almost empty. In short, no one could blame me if I just drove wildly away.

But what was the use of getting away if I got away only till dinner? That would be in a couple of hours. And at the end of them—I could see it sharply—my little pupils would act out an innocent surprise. They would wonder aloud why I had not come into church with them.

“What *did* you do, you naughty, bad thing? Why in the world did you leave us at the very door? You worried us so—and you took our minds off everything, too, don't you know?”

I couldn't face such questions. I couldn't face their false, lovely little eyes as they asked them. Yet this was exactly what I would have to face. As I saw it more and more sharply, I at last let myself go.

For the moment, at least, I got away. I came straight out of the churchyard. Thinking hard, I went back the way I had come, through the park. By the time I reached the house, I felt I had made up my mind to run away. It was all Sunday stillness, on the paths and inside the house, and I met no one. This stillness excited me with a sense of opportunity. If I left quickly, like this, I would leave without a scene and without a word. But I would have to be remarkably quick. The great question to settle was how to travel, and what carriage to take.

In the hall I was tormented by difficulties and obstacles. I remember sinking down at the foot of the staircase. I suddenly collapsed there on the lowest step. Then, with a shock of disgust, I remembered something. It was exactly here that I had seen the specter of the most horrible of women. That was more than a month before, in the darkness of night. And she had been bent just like this, bowed down with evil things. At this thought I was able to sit up straight. I went the rest of the way upstairs. Confused, I went to the schoolroom, where there were things of mine that I would have to take. But I opened the door, and in a flash my eyes were unsealed again. What I saw made me stagger back—straight back into my will to resist.

At my own table, in the clear light of noon, I saw a person. Without my earlier experience, I would at first have taken her for a housemaid. I would have thought she had stayed at home to look after the place. For once nobody was watching her. So she was using the schoolroom table and my pens, ink and paper. And she had set herself the hard task of writing a letter to her sweetheart. There was effort in the way she sat. Her arms rested on the table, and her hands held up her head, as if she were very tired.

But even as I took this in, I noticed something. Although I had come in, she strangely stayed just as she was. Then she changed her position, and in that very moment I knew who she was. She rose, but not as if she had heard me. She rose with a strange, grand sadness, as if nothing mattered to her and she stood apart from everything. And there, less than a dozen feet from me, stood my wicked predecessor. Dishonored and tragic, she was all there before me. But even as I fixed the picture and kept it safe in my memory, the awful image passed away.

She was dark as midnight in her black dress, with her haggard beauty and her endless sorrow. She had looked at me long enough to seem to say something. Her right to sit at my table, she seemed to say, was as good as my right to sit at hers. While those moments lasted, I had the strange chill of feeling that *I* was the intruder. It was as a wild protest against this that I spoke to her.

“You terrible, miserable woman!”

I heard my own cry go out through the open door. It 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. The next minute there was nothing in the room but the sunshine—and a sense that I must stay.

### Glossary

- **tomb**: a stone structure over a grave.
- **pew**: a long wooden seat in a church.
- **live from hand to mouth**: to deal only with today and make no plans for tomorrow.
- **guardian**: a person who legally looks after a child whose parents are dead.
- **specter**: a strange figure of a dead person that appears, like a ghost.
- **unsealed**: opened; here, her eyes can see the strange figures again.
- **predecessor**: the person who had a job before you.
- **haggard**: looking very tired, thin and unhappy.
- **intruder**: a person who goes into a place where they should not be.

## XVI

I had fully expected the children to make a fuss when they came back. So I was upset all over again to find that they said nothing about my absence. They did not cheerfully scold me or hug me. They made no mention of the fact that I had let them down. Then I saw that Mrs. Grose, too, said nothing. So for the moment I was left to study her strange face. I studied it so well that I felt sure of one thing. The children had in some way bribed her to keep silent. But I promised myself I would break that silence at the first private chance.

The chance came before tea. I got five minutes with her in the housekeeper's room. It was twilight there. There was a smell of freshly baked bread, and the whole place was swept and tidy. I found her sitting before the fire, calm but sad. That is how I still see her, and how I see her best. She faces the flames from her straight chair in the dark, shining room. She is a large, clean picture of things “put away”—of drawers closed and locked. She is a picture of a rest that nothing can cure.

“Oh, yes, they asked me to say nothing,” she said. “And to please them—as 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. “Then I had to come back to meet a friend.”

She looked surprised. “A friend—*you?*”

“Oh, yes, I have a couple!” I laughed. “But did the children give you a reason?”

“For not mentioning that you left us? Yes. They said you would like it better. Do you like it better?”

My face had made her sorry. “No, I like it worse!” But after a moment 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 really wish 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 for a moment. “You were too sweet, too—I can hear you all. But all the same, 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.”

By this time I had got into a habit. I held Mrs. Grose firmly, quite literally, before I said such things. So even now, as she bravely blinked at my words, I could keep her fairly steady.

“A talk! Do you mean she spoke?”

“It came to that. When I got back, I found her in the schoolroom.”

“And what did she say?” I can still hear the good woman, and her honest amazement.

“That she suffers the torments—!”

It was this, in truth, that made her stare open-mouthed as she filled in my picture. “Do you mean,” she said, hesitating, “—of the lost?”

“Of the lost. Of the damned. And that's why, to share them—” I hesitated myself, because of the horror of it.

But my companion, who had less imagination, kept me going. “To share them—?”

“She wants Flora.”

As I said it, Mrs. Grose might almost have fallen away from me. But I was ready for that. I still held her there, to show her that I was ready. “As I've told you, however, it doesn't matter.”

“Because you've made up your mind? But to do what?”

“To do everything.”

“And what do you call ‘everything’?”

“Why, sending for their uncle.”

“Oh, miss, for pity's sake, do!” my friend cried out.

“Ah, but I will, I *will!* I see it's the only way. What's ‘out’ with Miles, as I told you, is this. He thinks I'm afraid to do it. He has ideas of what he can gain by that. Well, he shall see he's wrong. Yes, yes. His uncle shall hear it from me, here and now, and in front of the boy himself, if necessary. If I'm to be blamed for doing nothing again about more school—”

“Yes, miss—” my companion urged me.

“Well, there's that awful reason.”

By now there were clearly so many awful reasons for my poor colleague. So she could be forgiven for being vague. “But—er—which one?”

“Why, the letter from his old school.”

“You'll show it to the master?”

“I ought to have done that at once.”

“Oh, no!” said Mrs. Grose firmly.

“I'll make it clear to him,” I went on, without mercy. “I can't take on the question for a child who has been expelled—”

“And we've never had the least idea what for!” 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 weak or sickly? Is he bad-tempered? He's wonderful—so it can only be *that*. And that would open up the whole thing. After all,” I said, “it's their uncle's fault. If he left such people here—!”

“He didn't really know them at all. The fault's mine.” She had turned quite pale.

“Well, you shan't suffer,” I answered.

“The children shan't!” she said strongly.

I was silent for a while, and we looked at each other. “Then what am I to tell him?”

“You needn't tell him anything. *I'll* tell him.”

I thought about this. “Do you mean you'll write—?” Then I remembered that she couldn't, and I stopped myself. “How do you send him news?”

“I tell the bailiff. *He* writes.”

“And would you like him to write our story?”

My question sounded more sarcastic than I had really meant. After a moment, and for no clear reason, it made her break down. The tears were in her eyes again. “Ah, miss, *you* write!”

“Well—tonight,” I answered at last. And with that we parted.

### Glossary

- **make a fuss**: to show a lot of excitement or complaint about something.
- **bribed**: gave someone something so that they would do what you want.
- **housekeeper**: the woman in charge of the servants and work of a big house.
- **twilight**: the time of evening when it is getting dark.
- **it's all out**: everything is now open and known between two people.
- **the torments of the lost**: the terrible pain of souls that are punished after death.
- **the damned**: people who are punished forever after death.
- **expelled**: sent away from a school for ever.
- **bailiff**: a man who manages a farm or estate for the owner.

## XVII

That evening I went so far as to make a beginning. The weather had changed back, and a great wind was blowing. Flora was beside me, at peace. I sat in my room under the lamp for a long time, in front of a blank sheet of paper. I listened to the rain beating and the strong winds hitting the house. At last I went out, taking a candle. I crossed the passage and listened for a minute at Miles's door. My endless obsession had driven me to listen for some sign that he was not asleep. And soon I did catch one, but not in the form I had expected. His voice rang out brightly.

“I say, you there—come in.”

It was cheerfulness in the gloom!

I went in with my light and found him in bed. He was very wide awake, but very much at his ease.

“Well, what are *you* up to?” he asked, in a pleasant, friendly way.

It struck me that Mrs. Grose would have found no proof here that anything was “out.” If she had been there, she would have looked for it in vain.

I stood over him with my candle. “How did you know I was there?”

“Why, of course I heard you. Did you think you made no noise? You're like a troop of cavalry!” He laughed beautifully.

“Then you weren't asleep?”

“Not much! I lie awake and think.”

I had put my candle down a short way off, on purpose. Then he held out his friendly old hand to me, and I 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, I'm proud that you think so well of me, but you don't have to go that far! I would much rather you slept.”

“Well, I think also, you know, of this queer business of ours.”

I noticed how cool his firm little hand was. “Of what queer business, Miles?”

“Why, the way you bring me up. And all the rest!”

I almost held my breath for a minute. Even my little flickering candle gave enough light to show how he smiled up at me from his pillow.

“What do you mean by all the rest?”

“Oh, you know, you know!”

For a minute I could say nothing. I held his hand, and our eyes went on meeting. I felt that my silence looked like an admission that he was right. And perhaps nothing in the whole real world was so unbelievable at that moment as our actual relationship.

“Certainly you shall go back to school,” I said, “if that is what troubles you. But not to the old place—we must find another, a better one. How could I know this question troubled you? You never told me so. You never spoke of it at all.”

His clear, listening face lay framed in the smooth white pillow. For that minute he seemed as touching as some sad, patient child in a children's hospital. The likeness came to me, and I wished I could be the nurse or nun who helped to cure him. I would have given everything I owned on earth for that. Well, even as things were, perhaps I might help!

“Do you know you've never said a word to me about your school? I mean the old one. You've never mentioned it in any way.”

He seemed to wonder, and he smiled with the same loveliness. But he was clearly gaining time. He waited; he was calling for guidance.

“Haven't I?”

It wasn't for *me* to help him—it was for the thing I had met!

Something in his voice and in his face, as he said this, made my heart ache. It was a pain greater than any I had known yet. It was so deeply touching to see his little brain puzzled. His little powers were stretched to play a part, under the spell laid on him. It was a part of innocence, a part that had to make sense.

“No, never—from the hour you came back. You've never mentioned one of your teachers to me, or one of your friends. You've never told me the smallest thing that happened to you at school. Never, little Miles—no, never—have you given me the slightest hint of anything that *may* have happened there. So you can imagine how much I'm in the dark. Until you spoke out like that this morning, you had hardly mentioned your earlier life at all. That's been true since the first hour I saw you. You seemed to accept the present so perfectly.”

I was completely sure that he secretly knew things far too early for his age. Or I might call it the poison of an influence that I only half dared to put into words. And this certainty did a strange thing. There was a faint sign of his inner trouble. But in spite of it, my certainty made him seem as easy to talk to as an older person. It made him almost my equal in mind.

“I thought you wanted to go on as you are.”

It seemed to me that at this he went a little red. Like a tired boy getting better after an illness, he slowly shook his head.

“I don't—I 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 as well as Miles did. So for the moment I took shelter in another question.

“You want to go to your uncle?”

Again, at this, he moved on the pillow, with his sweet, mocking face. “Ah, you can't get off with that!”

I was silent a little. I think it was I, now, 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 there, staring beautifully. “My uncle must come down, and you must settle things completely.”

“If we do,” I answered with some spirit, “you may be sure it will be to take you away altogether.”

“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!”

He said this with such triumph that, for the moment, it somehow helped me to face him better.

“And how much will *you* have to tell him, Miles? There are things he'll ask you!”

He thought it over. “Very likely. But what things?”

“The things you've never told me. He'll need them 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 said it with wonderful calm and with a cheerfulness no one could fault. And no doubt it was just that cheerfulness that made me feel the sadness of it most. It was an unnatural, childish tragedy. He would probably turn up again at the end of three months. He would come with all this bold show and with even more dishonor. I suddenly felt I would never be able to bear that. It made me let myself go. Full of tender pity, I threw my arms around him and hugged him.

“Dear little Miles, dear little Miles—!”

My face was close to his, and he let me kiss him. He simply accepted it with kind good humor. “Well, old lady?”

“Is there nothing—nothing at all that you want to tell me?”

He turned away a little, toward the wall. He held up his hand and looked at it, the way sick children do.

“I've told you—I told you this morning.”

Oh, I was sorry for him! “That you just want me not to worry you?”

Now he looked round at me, as if he saw that I understood him. Then he answered, ever so gently, “To let me alone.”

There was even a strange little dignity in it. It made me let go of him. I slowly stood up, but I stayed beside him. God knows I never wanted to torment him. But I felt that if I simply turned my back on him now, I would be leaving him. To put it more truly, I would be losing him.

“I've just begun a letter to your uncle,” I said.

“Well, then, finish it!”

I waited a minute. “What happened before?”

He looked up at me again. “Before what?”

“Before you came back. And before you went away.”

For some time he was silent, but he went on meeting my eyes. “What happened?”

Then I heard the sound of those words. For the very first time, I seemed to catch in them a small, faint tremble. It was the tremble of a mind ready to give in. It made me drop to my knees beside the bed and try once more to win him for myself.

“Dear little Miles, dear little Miles, if you *knew* how I want to help you! It's only that, it's nothing but that. I'd rather die than hurt you or do you wrong. I'd rather die than hurt a hair of your head. Dear little Miles—” Oh, I said it now, even if I *should* go too far. “I just want you to help me to save you!”

But a moment later I knew that I had gone too far. The answer to my plea came at once. But it came as an extraordinary blast of cold, a rush of frozen air. The room shook as hard as if the casement had crashed in, in the wild wind. The boy gave a loud, high shriek. It was lost in the rest of the shock of sound. I was very close to him, yet I could not tell what it was. It might have been a cry of joy, or a cry of terror. I jumped to my feet again and saw only darkness. So we stayed for a moment. I stared about me and saw that the drawn curtains had not moved. The window was shut tight.

“Why, the candle's out!” I cried.

“It was I who blew it, dear!” said Miles.

### Glossary

- **obsession**: an idea or worry that fills your mind all the time.
- **a troop of cavalry**: a large group of soldiers on horses.
- **queer**: strange, odd.
- **nun**: a woman who lives in a religious community; some nuns worked as nurses.
- **spell**: a magic power that controls someone.
- **influence**: the power to change how someone thinks or acts.
- **old lady**: Miles's playful name for the governess.
- **casement**: a window that opens outwards like a door.
- **shriek**: a short, loud, high cry.

## XVIII

The next day, after lessons, Mrs. Grose found a moment to speak to me quietly. “Have you written, miss?”

“Yes—I've written.”

But for the moment I didn't add something. My letter was sealed and addressed, but it was still in my pocket. There would be time enough to send it before the messenger went to the village.

Meanwhile my pupils had never had a more brilliant, more perfect morning. It was exactly as if they both wanted to smooth over our recent little quarrel. They did the most dizzying tricks of arithmetic. These went far beyond *my* weak powers. And they made jokes about geography and history, in higher spirits than ever. It was very clear, of course, in Miles above all. He seemed to want to show how easily he could let me down.

In my memory this child really lives in a setting of beauty and misery that no words can describe. There was something special and all his own in every impulse he showed. To an innocent eye, he was all honesty and freedom, just a small, natural creature. Yet there was never a cleverer or more extraordinary little gentleman.

I always had to be on my guard. Because of what I knew, I was always in danger of staring at him in wonder. I had to stop my useless stares and my hopeless sighs. With them I kept attacking the puzzle, and then giving it up. The puzzle was this: what could such a little gentleman have done to deserve a punishment? Let's say that, by the dark wonder I knew of, his mind *had* been opened to all evil. Still, all the sense of justice in me longed for proof. I wanted proof that those ideas had ever grown into an act.

At any rate, he had never been such a little gentleman as he was on this dreadful day. It was after our early dinner. He came round to me and asked if I would like him to play to me for half an hour. David playing music to King Saul could never have chosen his moment better. It was truly a charming show of tact and of generosity. It was as good as saying to me openly:

“The true knights we love to read about never push an advantage too far. I know what you mean now. You want to be left alone yourself and not chased with questions. So in return you'll stop worrying me and spying on me. You won't keep me so close to you. You'll let me come and go. Well, I ‘come,’ you see—but I don't go! There'll be plenty of time for that. I really do love being with you. I only want to show you that I was fighting for a principle.”

You can imagine whether I said no to this request. Of course I went with him again, hand in hand, to the schoolroom. He sat down at the old piano and played as he had never played before. Some people may think he would have done better to be out kicking a football. I can only say that I fully agree with them.

Under his influence I had quite stopped counting the time. At the end of it I jumped up with a strange feeling. I felt as if I had really fallen asleep on duty, like a guard at his post. It was after luncheon, and I was by the schoolroom fire. And yet I hadn't really slept at all. I had only done something much worse—I had forgotten. Where, all this time, was Flora?

When I asked Miles, he played on for a minute before he answered. Then he could only say, “Why, my dear, how do *I* know?”

And he broke into a happy laugh. Straight after, he carried the laugh on into wild, senseless song, as if he were singing along with his playing.

I went straight to my room, but his sister was not there. Then, before going downstairs, I looked into several other rooms. She was nowhere around, so she would surely be with Mrs. Grose. Comforted by this idea, I went to look for her. I found her where I had found her the evening before. But when I quickly questioned her, she looked blank and frightened. She knew nothing. She had only supposed that after the meal I had taken both the children away. She was quite right to think so. It was the very first time I had let the little girl out of my sight without some special arrangement.

Of course, she might be with the maids now. So the first thing was to look for her without seeming alarmed. We quickly agreed on this between us. Ten minutes later, as we had arranged, we met in the hall. But we both had the same news. We had asked carefully, and we had found no trace of her at all. For a minute, where no one could see us, we exchanged silent looks of alarm. I could feel how my friend now paid me back, with interest. She returned all the alarm I had given her from the start.

“She'll be upstairs,” she said after a moment, “in one of the rooms you haven't searched.”

“No. She's far away.” I had made up my mind. “She has gone out.”

Mrs. Grose stared. “Without a hat?”

Of course my own look said a great deal too. “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 faced with this account of things, she did not for the moment answer my pressure. Instead she stood there, alone with her own worry.

“And where's Master Miles?”

“Oh, *he's* with Quint. They're in the schoolroom.”

“Lord, miss!”

I knew myself that my view had never yet been so calm and sure. So I suppose my voice was calm and sure as well.

“The trick's played,” I went on. “They've carried out their plan successfully. He found the most divine little way to keep me quiet while she went off.”

“‘Divine’?” Mrs. Grose repeated, confused.

“Devilish, then!” I answered, almost cheerfully. “He has taken care of himself as well. But come!”

She had looked up, helplessly and gloomily, toward the rooms upstairs. “You leave him—?”

“So long with Quint? Yes—I don't mind that now.”

At such moments she always ended by taking hold of my hand. And in this way she could still stop me now. She gasped for a moment at my sudden calm acceptance. Then she said eagerly, “Because of your letter?”

For an answer, I quickly felt for my letter and took it out. I held it up. Then I pulled myself free, and went and laid it on the great hall table.

“Luke will take it,” I said as I came back.

I reached the house door and opened it. I was already on the steps. My companion still held back. The storm of the night and the early morning had died down, 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 on? I can't wait to dress,” I cried. “And if you must dress, I'll leave you behind. Meanwhile, try upstairs yourself.”

“With *them?*”

Oh, at this the poor woman joined me at once!

### Glossary

- **sealed**: closed, so that no one can read a letter without opening it.
- **arithmetic**: working with numbers: adding, taking away, and so on.
- **David and Saul**: a story in the Bible: young David played music to calm King Saul.
- **tact**: the skill of saying or doing the right thing without upsetting people.
- **knights**: brave soldiers of long ago, in stories, who follow rules of honor.
- **principle**: a rule or idea that you believe is right.
- **luncheon**: an old word for the midday meal.
- **divine**: very lovely; also, coming from God.

## XIX

We went straight to the lake, as it was called at Bly. I daresay that was the right name for it. But I think now it may really have been a less remarkable stretch of water than it seemed to me. I had not traveled, and I knew very little about lakes. A few times I had agreed to go out on it in the old flat-bottomed boat. It was kept there for our use. My pupils were there to protect me. And on those few times, at least, the pool of Bly had seemed to me both large and rough.

The usual place to get into the boat was half a mile from the house. But I had a deep feeling that Flora was not near home, wherever she might be. She had not slipped away from me for some small adventure. And there was the day of the very great adventure I had shared with her by the pond. Since then I had noticed something on our walks. I knew which way she most liked to go. That was why I now led Mrs. Grose so firmly in one direction. When she saw where we were going, she held back. I could see that she was puzzled all over again.

“You're going to the water, miss?—you think she's *in*—?”

“She may be, though the water isn't very deep anywhere, I believe. But I think it's most likely that she's at the spot where we saw it the other day. You know—what I told you.”

“When she pretended not to see—?”

“With that amazing calm? 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 answer this with complete confidence! “They say things that would simply horrify us if we heard them.”

“And if she *is* there—”

“Yes?”

“Then Miss Jessel is?”

“Without a doubt. You shall see.”

“Oh, thank you!” my friend cried.

She stood so firmly where she was that, seeing this, I went straight on without her. But by the time I reached the pool, she was close behind me. I knew what she was thinking. Whatever she feared might happen to me, staying with me seemed the smallest danger to her.

At last we came in sight of most of the water, and there was no sign of the child. Mrs. Grose let out a moan of relief. There was no trace of Flora on the near bank. That was where I had watched her that day and been so shocked. There was none on the opposite edge either. There, a thick copse came down to the water, except for an open strip of about twenty yards. The pond was oblong. It was so narrow compared to its length that it looked like a small river. That was because its ends were out of view. We looked at the empty water. Then I felt my friend's eyes on me, suggesting something. I knew what she meant, and I shook my head.

“No, no. Wait! She has taken the boat.”

My companion stared at the empty place where the boat was usually tied. Then she looked across the lake again. “Then where is it?”

“The fact that we can't see it is the strongest proof. She has used it to go across, and then she 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.”

I searched the whole shore that we could see. Meanwhile Mrs. Grose once again gave in to the strange world I offered her. Then I pointed something out. The boat might easily be in a small hidden bay, in one of the hollows of the pool. From our side, it was hidden by a point of the bank. It was also hidden by a group of trees growing close to the water.

“But if the boat's there, where on earth is *she?*” my colleague asked anxiously.

“That's exactly what we must find out.” And I started to walk on.

“By going all the way round?”

“Certainly, though it's far. It will only take us ten minutes. But it's far enough to make the child prefer not to walk. She went straight across.”

“Laws!” my friend cried again. My chain of reasoning was always too much for her. Even now it pulled her along at my heels.

When we had got halfway round, I stopped to let her catch her breath. It was a winding, tiring way. The ground was very rough, and the path was blocked with plants. I held her up with a grateful arm. I told her that she could help me enormously. This got us going again. In just a few more minutes we reached a place where we found the boat, exactly where I had guessed. It had been left as far out of sight as possible, on purpose. It was tied to one of the posts of a fence. Just there, the fence came down to the edge of the water. The fence had helped someone to get out of the boat.

I looked at the pair of short, thick oars, pulled up quite safely. I saw what an amazing thing this was for a little girl to do. But by this time I had lived too long among wonders. I had already kept pace with far wilder things. There was a gate in the fence, and we went through it. After a short way, it brought us out into the open. Then we both cried out at once.

“There she is!”

Flora stood before us on the grass, a short way off. She smiled as if her performance was now complete. But the next thing she did was to bend straight down and pick a big, ugly spray of dead fern. She did it as if that were the only reason she was there. At once I felt sure that she had just come out of the copse.

She waited for us, without taking a step herself. I was aware of the strange seriousness with which we walked toward her. She smiled and smiled, and we met. But it all happened in silence, and by now the silence was plainly full of threat.

Mrs. Grose was the first to break the spell. She dropped to her knees and pulled the child to her. Mrs. Grose held the little girl's small, soft body in a long hug. While this silent, shaking hug went on, I could only watch. I watched all the harder when I saw Flora's face peep at me over our companion's shoulder. It was serious now. The light had gone out of it. But it made my pain sharper. At that moment I envied Mrs. Grose for the simple relationship *she* had with the child.

Still, all this time, nothing more passed between us. Flora only let her silly fern drop to the ground again. But she and I had in effect told each other something. We had said that excuses were useless now.

When Mrs. Grose finally got up, she kept hold of the child's hand. So the two of them still stood in front of me. And the strange silence between us showed even more clearly in the frank look she gave me. “I'll be hanged,” it said, “if *I'll* speak!”

It was Flora who spoke first. She looked me all over in open wonder. She was struck by the fact that we had no hats on.

“Why, where are your things?”

“Where yours are, my dear!” I answered at once.

She had already got back her cheerfulness. She seemed to take this as quite enough of an answer.

“And where's Miles?” she went on.

There was something in her small bravery that quite finished me. For weeks and weeks I had held a cup high, filled to the brim. Her three words flashed like a sword pulled from its case. They knocked against that cup. And now, even before I spoke, I felt it overflow in a flood.

“I'll tell you if you'll tell *me*—” I heard myself say. Then I heard my voice shake and break.

“Well, what?”

Mrs. Grose's anxious look blazed at me. But it was too late now, and I said it out boldly.

“Where, my pet, is Miss Jessel?”

### Glossary

- **flat-bottomed boat**: a simple boat with a flat floor, for calm water.
- **copse**: a small group of trees.
- **oblong**: longer than it is wide.
- **oars**: long poles with a flat end, used to move a boat through water.
- **fern**: a green plant with long, feathery leaves.
- **Laws!**: an old exclamation, like "Lord!".
- **I'll be hanged**: an old way of saying "I certainly won't".
- **brim**: the top edge of a cup or glass.
- **my pet**: a loving way to speak to a child.

## XX

Just as in the churchyard with Miles, the whole thing was suddenly upon us. I had made a great deal of the fact that this name had never once been spoken between us. Now the child's face took it with a quick, struck glare. That look made my breaking of the silence seem like the smash of a pane of glass. At the same moment Mrs. Grose cried out at my violence, as if to stop a blow. It was the shriek of a creature scared, or rather wounded. Within a few seconds a gasp of my own followed it. I seized my friend'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. I remember, strangely, the first feeling this produced in me. It was a thrill of joy at having brought on a proof. She was there, and I was proved right. She was there, and I was neither cruel nor mad. She was there for poor scared Mrs. Grose, but she was there most for Flora. Perhaps no moment of my terrible time was so extraordinary as this one. I knowingly sent her a message of thanks without words. I felt that she would catch it and understand it, pale and greedy demon as she was. She stood up straight on the very spot my friend and I had just left. In all the long reach of her desire, there was not an inch of her evil that fell short.

This first sharp seeing and feeling lasted only a few seconds. During them, Mrs. Grose blinked, dazed, across to where I pointed. To me this seemed a clear sign that she too saw at last. It made my own eyes jump quickly to the child. The way Flora was affected startled me far more than plain fear would have done. Of course I had not expected her to show open alarm. Our search had made her ready and on her guard. So she would hold back every sign that could give her away. But now I saw one sign that I had not expected, and it shook me on the spot. Her small pink face did not move at all. She did not even pretend to look where I said the wonder was. Instead she turned on *me* a look of hard, still seriousness. It was a look completely new, like nothing before. It seemed to read me, accuse me and judge me. Somehow this turned the little girl herself into the very presence that could make me shrink. I shrank, even though I had never been more certain that she saw it all. I needed at once to defend myself, and I passionately called on her to admit it.

“She's there, you little unhappy thing—there, there, *there*, and you see her as well as you see me!”

A little while before, I had said something to Mrs. Grose. At these times, I said, Flora was not a child but an old, old woman. Nothing could have proved this more clearly than the way she answered me now. Her only answer was her face. Her eyes admitted nothing and gave way in nothing. Her face showed deeper and deeper disapproval, and then a disapproval suddenly quite fixed. By this time—if I can put it all together—her manner shocked me more than anything else. Yet at the very same moment I knew that I also had Mrs. Grose to deal with. And I knew that this would be hard. The next moment my older companion blotted out everything except her own flushed face. She burst out in a loud, shocked protest, full of strong disapproval.

“What a dreadful turn, to be sure, miss! Where on earth do you see anything?”

I could only grab her even harder. For even while she spoke, the plain, horrible presence stood there, clear and unafraid. It had already lasted a minute. It went on lasting while I held my friend. I almost pushed her toward it, as if to present her to it, and I kept pointing with my 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, just as I did. She gave a deep groan that said no, full of disgust and pity. Mixed with her pity was her relief that she did not have to see. Even then it touched me. I felt that she would have backed me up if she could. I might well have needed that. This hard blow proved that her eyes were hopelessly sealed. With it I felt my own position crumble horribly. I felt—I saw—my deathly pale predecessor pressing on my defeat from where she stood. Most of all, I knew what I would have to deal with from this moment on: Flora's astonishing little attitude. Mrs. Grose at once threw herself into this attitude, with violence. She broke into breathless comfort for the child. And even then, through my sense of ruin, I felt a huge private triumph.

“She isn't there, little lady, and nobody's there—and you never see nothing, my sweet! How can poor Miss Jessel—when poor Miss Jessel's dead and buried? *We* know, don't we, love?” She turned clumsily to the child for agreement. “It's all a mere mistake and a worry and a joke—and we'll go home as fast as we can!”

At this, our little companion answered with a strange, quick stiffness, very proper and correct. Mrs. Grose was on her feet again. Once more the two of them were united, as it were, against me, hurt and opposed. Flora kept fixing me with her small mask of disapproval. Even at that minute I prayed God to forgive me for what I seemed to see. As she stood there holding tight to our friend's dress, her matchless childish beauty had suddenly failed. It had quite vanished. I've said it already—she was really, horribly 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!”

She spoke like a rude, cheeky little girl in the street. After this, she hugged Mrs. Grose more closely and buried her dreadful little face in her skirts. In this position she gave an almost furious wail.

“Take me away, take me away—oh, take me away from *her!*”

“From *me?*” I gasped.

“From you—from you!” she cried.

Even Mrs. Grose looked across at me in dismay. I could do nothing but turn again to the figure on the opposite bank. It did not move. It stood as rigidly still as if it were catching our voices across the distance. It was there as clearly for my disaster as it had not been there for my help. The wretched child had spoken exactly as if each of her stabbing little words came from some outside source. So, in the full despair of all I had to accept, I could only shake my head at her sadly.

“If 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—with *her* telling you what to do—the easy and perfect way to meet it.” As I said “her,” I faced our evil witness across the pool again. “I've done my best, but I've lost you. Goodbye.”

To Mrs. Grose I gave an urgent, almost wild “Go, go!” She was in endless distress, but she held the little girl and said nothing. In spite of her blindness, she was clearly sure that something awful had happened. She felt that some collapse had swallowed us up. She went back the way we had come, as fast as she could move.

I have no memory of what happened first when I was left alone. I only know that after about a quarter of an hour I felt the ground. It was damp and rough and had a strong smell. Its chill pierced through my trouble. It made me understand that I must have thrown myself face down on the ground. I must have given way to a wild grief. I must have lain there a long time, crying and sobbing. For when I raised my head, the day was almost over. I got up and looked for a moment through the twilight at the gray pool and its blank, haunted edge. Then I took my sad and difficult way back to the house.

When I reached the gate in the fence, the boat, to my surprise, was gone. This made me think again about Flora's extraordinary control of the situation. She spent that night with Mrs. Grose. It was arranged without a word. I would even call it the happiest of arrangements, if that word did not sound so strangely wrong. I saw neither of them when I got back. But on the other hand, as a strange kind of payment, I saw a great deal of Miles. I saw—I can use no other phrase—so much of him that it seemed more than ever before.

No evening I had spent at Bly was as full of dark meaning as this one. Deeper pits of fear had opened under my feet. Yet in spite of all this, there was truly an extraordinarily sweet sadness in those passing hours. When I reached the house, I had not even looked for the boy. I had simply gone straight to my room to change my clothes. There I saw at a glance plenty of proof of Flora's break with me. All her little things had been taken away.

Later, by the schoolroom fire, the usual maid served me tea. I did not let myself ask a single question about my other pupil. He had his freedom now—he might have it to the end! Well, he did have it. And part of it, at least, was this: at about eight o'clock he came in and sat down with me in silence. When the tea things were taken away, I had blown out the candles and pulled my chair closer. I felt a deadly coldness, as if I would never be warm again. So when he appeared, I was sitting in the glow with my thoughts. He stopped for a moment by the door, as if to look at me. Then, as if to share my thoughts, he came to the other side of the fireplace. He sank into a chair. We sat there in complete stillness. Yet he wanted, I felt, to be with me.

### Glossary

- **pane of glass**: one flat piece of glass in a window.
- **predecessor**: the person who had a job before you.
- **demon**: an evil spirit.
- **sealed**: closed tight, so that nothing can get in or out; here, unable to see.
- **disapproval**: the feeling that someone has done something wrong.
- **mask**: a cover for the face; here, a hard face that hides real feelings.
- **wail**: a long, loud, sad cry.
- **dismay**: a sudden feeling of shock and worry.
- **twilight**: the weak light just after the sun goes down.

## XXI

The new day had not fully broken when I opened my eyes in my room. Mrs. Grose was at my bedside with worse news. Flora was so clearly feverish that perhaps an illness was coming. She had spent a night of great unrest. Above all, the night had been troubled by fears. These fears were not at all about her former governess. They were wholly about her present one. She did not protest against Miss Jessel coming back on the scene. Openly and passionately, she protested against *my* coming in. Of course I was quickly on my feet, with a great deal to ask. I could see that my friend had now prepared herself to face me once more. I felt this as soon as I asked her what she thought of the child's honesty compared with mine.

“She persists in denying to you that she saw, or has ever seen, anything?”

My visitor was truly very troubled. “Ah, miss, it isn't a matter on which I can push her! Yet it isn't either, I must say, as if I much needed to. It has made her, every inch of her, quite old.”

“Oh, I see her perfectly from here. She's offended, just like some grand little person. She hates any doubt about her truthfulness and, as it were, about her respectability. ‘Miss Jessel indeed—*she!*’ Ah, she's ‘respectable,’ the chit! The impression she gave me there yesterday was, I promise 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.”

It was all so horrible and so dark that it kept Mrs. Grose silent for a moment. Then she agreed with me openly. I felt sure there was more behind her words.

“I think indeed, miss, she never will. She do have a grand manner about it!”

“And that manner,” I said, to sum it up, “is really what's the matter with her now!”

Oh, that manner! I could see it in my visitor's face, and quite a lot else besides.

“She asks me every three minutes if I think you're coming in.”

“I see—I see.” I, too, on my side, had worked out much more than that. “Has she said to you since yesterday a single other word about Miss Jessel? I mean, apart from denying that she knows anything so dreadful?”

“Not one, miss. And of course you know,” my friend added. “By the lake I took it from her that, just then and there at least, there *was* nobody.”

“Rather! And, naturally, you take it from 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—even cleverer than nature did. For it was wonderful material to play on! Flora has her complaint now, and she'll use it to the end.”

“Yes, miss; but to *what* end?”

“Why, to deal with me through her uncle. She'll make me out to him to be the lowest creature—!”

I winced at how clearly Mrs. Grose's face showed the scene. For a minute she looked as if she could sharply see the two of them together.

“And him who thinks so well of you!”

“He has an odd way of proving it—it comes over me now!” I laughed. “But that doesn't matter. What Flora wants, of course, is to get rid of me.”

My companion bravely agreed. “Never again to so much as look at you.”

“So you've come to me now to send me on my way?” I asked. But before she had time to answer, I stopped her. “I've a better idea. I've been thinking about it. 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.”

At this my visitor did begin to wonder. “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, as well, with my remedy.”

She still did not understand. “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 turn on me, if he has the chance? Yes, I still dare to think so. At all events, I want to try. Get away with his sister as soon as possible and leave me alone with him.”

I was amazed myself at the courage I still had in reserve. So perhaps I was a little more upset when, in spite of this fine show of it, she hesitated.

“There's one thing, of course,” I went on. “Before she goes, they mustn't see each other for three seconds.”

Then a thought came to me. Flora had probably been kept apart from the moment she came back from the pool. Yet it might already be too late.

“Do you mean,” I asked anxiously, “that they *have* met?”

At this she went quite red. “Ah, miss, I'm not such a fool as that! If I've had 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?”

“Well, are you so sure of the little gentleman?”

“I'm not sure of anything but *you*. But since last evening I have a new hope. I think he wants to give me a chance. I do believe that he wants to speak—poor, lovely little wretch! Last evening, in the firelight and the silence, he sat with me for two hours. It was as if it were just coming.”

Mrs. Grose looked hard through the window at the gray day that was slowly growing.

“And did it come?”

“No. Though I waited and waited, I admit it didn't. We didn't break the silence. We didn't even speak once of his sister's illness and absence. And at last we kissed each other good night. All the same,” I went on, “her uncle may see her. If he does, I can't agree to his seeing her brother too soon. First I must give the boy a little more time. That matters most of all, because things have got so bad.”

My friend seemed more unwilling about this 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, and you see how important that is. If nothing comes, I shall only fail. And at the worst, you will have helped me. You'll do whatever you find possible when you arrive in town.”

So I put it to her. But for a little while she was still embarrassed in a way I could not read. So I came to her help again.

“Unless, indeed,” I finished, “you really want *not* to go.”

At last I could see her face clear. She put out her hand to me as a promise.

“I'll go—I'll go. I'll go this morning.”

I wanted to be very fair. “If you *should* still wish to wait, I promise she wouldn't see me.”

“No, no: it's the place itself. She must leave it.” She held me a moment with heavy eyes. Then she brought out the rest. “Your idea's the right one. I myself, miss—”

“Well?”

“I can't stay.”

The look she gave me with this 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 a tragic kind of relief. “On my honor, miss, she says things—!”

But at the memory of it she broke down. With a sudden sob she dropped onto my sofa. As I had seen her do before, she gave way to all her grief.

I, for my part, let myself go in quite a different way. “Oh, thank God!”

At this she jumped up again, drying her eyes with a groan. “‘Thank God’?”

“It proves me so right!”

“It does that, miss!”

I could not have wished for a stronger answer, but I hesitated a little. “She's so horrible?”

I saw that my friend hardly knew how to put it. “Really shocking.”

“And about me?”

“About you, miss—since you must have it. It's beyond everything, for a young lady. And I can't think wherever she must have picked up—”

“The terrible language she used about me? I can, then!” I broke in. I laughed, and my laugh no doubt meant a good deal.

In truth, it only made my friend still more serious.

“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. As she said it, she glanced at the face of my watch on my dressing table. “But I must go back.”

But I kept her. “Ah, if you can't bear it—!”

“How can I stay with her, you mean? Why, just *for* that: to get her away. Far from this,” she went on, “far from *them*—”

“She may be different? She may be free?” I took hold of her almost with joy. “Then, in spite of yesterday, you *believe*—”

“In such doings?” Her face said so much that her simple words needed nothing more. For the first time she gave me the whole thing. “I believe.”

Yes, it was a joy. We were still standing shoulder to shoulder. If I could stay sure of that, I would care very little what else happened. She would support me now, in the face of disaster, just as she had at the start. That was when I first needed someone to trust. If my friend would answer for my honesty, I would answer for all the rest. Still, when I was about to say goodbye to her, I felt a little awkward.

“There's one thing, of course, to remember—it has just come to me. My letter, giving the alarm, will have reached town before you.”

Now I saw even more clearly how she had been avoiding the point. I saw how tired this had made her at last.

“Your letter won't have got there. Your letter never went.”

“What then became of it?”

“Goodness knows! Master Miles—”

“Do you mean *he* took it?” I gasped.

She held back, but then she got over her unwillingness.

“I mean that yesterday, when I came back with Miss Flora, I saw it wasn't where you had put it. Later in the evening I had the chance to question Luke. He said that he had neither noticed nor touched it.”

We could only give each other one of our deepest looks, as if measuring how deep the thing went. It was Mrs. Grose who spoke first, almost in triumph.

“You see!”

“Yes, I see that if Miles took it instead, he probably read it and destroyed it.”

“And don't you see anything else?”

I faced her a moment with a sad smile. “It seems to me that by this time your eyes are open even wider than mine.”

They were indeed, as it turned out. But she could still almost blush to show it.

“I make out now what he must have done at school.” In her simple, sharp way she gave a nod. It was almost funny, and full of lost hopes. “He stole!”

I thought it over. I tried to be more like a judge. “Well—perhaps.”

She looked as if she found me surprisingly calm. “He stole *letters!*”

She could not know my reasons for being calm, and after all they were not very deep. So I showed them off as well as I could.

“I hope then it was for a better purpose than in this case! Anyway, the note I put on the table yesterday will have helped him very little. It only asked plainly for a meeting. So he is already very ashamed of going so far for so little. And what was on his mind last evening was exactly the need to confess.”

For a moment I felt that I had mastered the whole thing and could see it all. I was already at the door, hurrying her off.

“Leave us, leave us. 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 at this, and I said goodbye to her. “I'll save you without him!” she cried as she went.

### Glossary

- **chit**: a cheeky, rude young girl (an old word).
- **put my foot in it**: said or did something that made a situation worse.
- **respectability**: being seen by others as good, proper and honest.
- **remedy**: something that makes a bad situation better.
- **loyalty**: staying true to and supporting someone.
- **wretch**: a poor, unhappy person (here said with pity and love).
- **horrors**: very shocking or terrible things.
- **confess**: to say openly that you have done something wrong.

## XXII

Yet the real squeeze came when she had gone, and I missed her at once. I had hoped for something from being alone with Miles. I soon saw, at least, that it would show me how things truly stood. In fact, no hour of my stay was so full of fears as one moment that morning. I came downstairs and learned that the carriage was already out of the gates. It was carrying Mrs. Grose and my younger pupil. Now I *was*, I told myself, face to face with the storm. For much of the rest of the day I fought my weakness. I could see that I had been very, very rash. It was a tighter corner than any I had been in yet. This was all the more so because, for the first time, I could see the crisis in other people's faces. It showed there in a confused way. What had happened naturally made them all stare. My friend had left so suddenly. However we tried to explain it, too little was explained. The maids and the men looked blank. At first this made my nerves worse. Then I saw that I had to turn it into a help. In short, I avoided a total wreck only by holding tight to the helm. And I dare say that, to keep going at all, I became very grand and very cold that morning. I was glad to feel that I had a great deal to do. I also let it be known that, left alone like this, I was very firm. For the next hour or two I walked all over the place with that manner. No doubt I looked as if I were ready for any attack. So, for anyone it might concern, I marched about with a sick heart.

Until dinner, the person it seemed to concern least was little Miles himself. On my walks I did not see him at all. But they did make the change in our relationship more public. This change had come because of the piano, the day before. He had kept me so charmed and fooled there, for Flora's sake. Of course her being shut away and her leaving had already made it public. And now the change began with something new: we did not keep to our usual schoolroom hours. On my way down, I had pushed open his door, but he had already gone. Downstairs I learned that he had had breakfast with Mrs. Grose and his sister. A couple of the maids had been there too. Then he had gone out, he said, for a walk. I thought that nothing could show more frankly how he saw my sudden change of position. It was still not settled what he would allow my position to be. But at any rate I felt a strange relief, for myself above all. I could give up one pretense. So much had come to the surface. And perhaps the thing that came up highest was this. It was absurd to go on pretending I had anything more to teach him. It was very plain to see. He had used little silent tricks, and in them he took even more care of my dignity than I did. Through them I had really had to ask him to excuse me. I could no longer try to meet him at the level of his true ability. At any rate, he had his freedom now. I was never to touch it again. I had already shown this clearly the night before. He had joined me in the schoolroom, and I had asked nothing about the hours just past. I had not even hinted at them. From this moment I had my other ideas, and they filled my mind. Yet at last he arrived. Then the difficulty of using those ideas, and the whole weight of my problem, came straight home to me. It was his beautiful little presence that did it. To the eye, all that had happened had not yet left a stain or a shadow on him.

I wanted to show the house the high position I held. So I ordered that my meals with the boy should be served “downstairs,” as we called it. So I had been waiting for him in the heavy grandness of the dining room. Outside its window, on that first frightened Sunday, I had got from Mrs. Grose a flash of something. It would hardly be right to call it light. Here, now, I felt again what I had felt again and again. My balance depended on the success of my stiff, strong will. This was the will to shut my eyes as tight as I could to one truth. The truth was that what I had to deal with was against nature, in a disgusting way. I could only go on at all by taking “nature” into my trust and into my plans. I treated my terrible ordeal as a push in a direction that was unusual and unpleasant, of course. But to face it well, it needed after all only another turn of the screw of ordinary human goodness. Still, no attempt could need more tact than this one. I had to supply *all* the nature myself. How could I put even a little of it into staying silent about what had happened? On the other hand, how could I speak of it without a new plunge into that horrible darkness? Well, after a while a kind of answer had come to me. And it was confirmed, without any doubt, when I saw more sharply what was so rare in my little companion. It was really as if he had found, even now, some other gentle way to help me. He had so often done this at lessons. As we shared our time alone, one fact began to shine with a bright, false glitter. It had never quite shone like this before. The chance had come now, a precious chance. And it would be foolish, with a child so gifted, not to use the help of his perfect intelligence. Why had he been given his intelligence, if not to save him? To reach his mind, might I not risk a stiff, awkward reach across his character? It was as if, when we were face to face in the dining room, he had shown me the way.

The roast mutton was on the table, and I had sent the servants away. Before Miles sat down, he stood a moment with his hands in his pockets. He looked at the meat as if he were about to make some joke about it. But what he finally said was this:

“I say, my dear, is she really very awfully ill?”

“Little Flora? Not so bad that she won't soon be better. London will make her well again. Bly had stopped agreeing with her. Come here and take your mutton.”

He quickly obeyed me. He carried his plate carefully to his seat, and when he was settled, he 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.”

I found I had my answer ready. “She's *not* too ill to travel. She only might have become so if she had stayed. This was just the moment to seize. The journey will break up the influence”—oh, I was grand!—“and carry it away.”

“I see, I see.” Miles, for that matter, was grand too. He settled down to his meal with his charming little “table manners.” From the day he arrived, they had saved me from ever having to correct him rudely. Whatever he had been sent away from school for, it was not for eating in an ugly way. Today, as always, he was perfect. But he was clearly more self-conscious. I could see him trying to take many things for granted. Without help, he did not find them quite easy. And he fell into a peaceful silence while he felt his way. Our meal was very short. Mine was only a pretense, and I had the things taken away at once. While this was done, Miles stood again with his back to me and his hands in his little pockets. He stood and looked out of the wide window. Through it, that other day, I had seen what stopped me short. We stayed silent while the maid was with us. It came to me, as a funny thought, that we were like a young couple on their wedding journey. At an inn, such a couple feel shy while the waiter is there. He turned round only when the waiter had left us.

“Well—so we're alone!”

### Glossary

- **helm**: the wheel or handle used to steer a ship.
- **rash**: acting too quickly, without thinking enough.
- **pretense**: acting as if something is true when it is not.
- **dignity**: a person's sense of their own worth and respect.
- **ordeal**: a very hard and painful experience.
- **another turn of the screw**: one more twist that makes something stronger or more intense.
- **tact**: skill in saying or doing the right thing without hurting anyone.
- **mutton**: meat from a sheep.
- **table manners**: the polite way a person behaves while eating.

## XXIII

“Oh, more or less.” I think 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 agreed.

He was still standing in front of me, with his hands in his pockets. “Yet even though we have them,” he answered, “they don't much count, do they?”

I did my best, but I felt weak and pale. “It depends on what you call ‘much’!”

“Yes,” he said, very willing to agree, “everything depends!”

At this, however, he turned to the window again. He walked slowly over to it with his vague, restless, thinking step. He stayed there for a while with his forehead against the glass. He was looking at the stupid shrubs I knew and the dull things of November. I always had my “work” to hide behind, though it was only a pretense. With it, I now reached the sofa. I had often done this before, in those moments of pain I have described. Those were the moments when I knew the children were busy with something I was shut out of. Now I held on to my “work” in the same way. And I kept to my habit of being ready for the worst. But as I read the boy's embarrassed back, an extraordinary feeling came over me. I felt that I was not shut out now. In a few minutes this idea grew very sharp and strong. It seemed tied to something I saw directly. It was *he* who was shut out now. The frames and squares of the great window were like a picture of failure for him. At any rate, I felt that I saw him shut in or shut out. He was admirable, but he was not comfortable. I saw it with a leap 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 missed something like this? The first, the very first! I found it a wonderful sign. It made him anxious, though he watched himself. He had been anxious all day. Even at the table he had kept his usual sweet little manner. But he had needed all his small, strange genius to cover it up. At last he turned round to meet me. Then it was almost as if this genius had given way.

“Well, I think I'm glad Bly agrees with *me!*”

“You certainly seem to have seen a lot more of it in these twenty-four hours. More 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 really had a manner of his own, and I could only try to keep up with him. “Well, do you like it?”

He stood there smiling. Then at last he said two words. “Do *you?*” I had never heard two words hold so much fine meaning. But before I had time to deal with that, he went on. He seemed to feel that he had been rude and that he must soften it.

“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 added, “you don't particularly mind!”

“Having to do with you?” I asked. “My dear child, how can I help minding? I've given up all claim to your company—you're so far beyond me. But at least I greatly enjoy it. What else should I stay on for?”

He looked at me more directly. His face was more serious now. Its look seemed to me the most beautiful I had ever seen in it.

“You stay on just for *that?*”

“Certainly. I stay on as your friend, because of the great interest I take in you. I'll stay till something can be done for you that may be more worth your while. That needn't surprise you.” My voice was shaking so much that I could not stop it. “Don't you remember the night of the storm? I came and sat on your bed. I told you that there was nothing in the world I wouldn't do for you.”

“Yes, yes!” He, on his side, was more and more clearly nervous. He had to control his voice. But he did it much better than I did. He laughed through his seriousness, and so he could pretend we were only having a pleasant joke. “Only that, I think, was to get me to do something for *you!*”

“It was partly to get you to do something,” I admitted. “But, you know, you didn't do it.”

“Oh, yes,” he said, with the brightest eagerness on the surface. “You wanted me to tell you something.”

“That's it. Out, straight out. What you have on your mind, you know.”

“Ah, then, is *that* what you've stayed over for?”

He spoke cheerfully. But through it I could still hear the finest little tremble of angry feeling. This was a sign that he might give in, though a very faint one. I can't begin to describe how it affected me. It was as if what I had longed for had come at last, only to astonish me.

“Well, yes—I may as well be completely honest. It was exactly for that.”

He waited so long that I thought he was going to deny the idea my whole plan was built on. But what he finally said was this:

“Do you mean now—here?”

“There couldn't be a better place or time.”

He looked round him uneasily. I had a rare impression—oh, a strange one! It was the very first sign I had seen in him that fear was coming close. It was as if he were suddenly afraid of me. And indeed, I thought, perhaps that was the best thing I could make him feel. Yet even as I tried, I felt the pain of it. I felt it was useless to try being stern. And the next moment I heard myself speak so gently that it was almost ridiculous.

“You want so much to go out again?”

“Awfully!” He smiled at me like a hero. His little bravery was all the more touching because he went red with pain. He had brought his hat in with him, and now he had picked it up. He stood turning it round and round in his hands. I was so near the end of my journey, so near the harbor. Yet the way he did this gave me a strange, twisted horror of what I was doing. To do it in *any* way was an act of violence. For what was I doing? I was pushing the idea of something ugly and guilty onto a small, helpless creature. And this creature had shown me what a beautiful friendship between people could be. Wasn't it low to make such a lovely being feel a strange, awkward discomfort? I suppose I now see our situation more clearly than I could have seen it then. For I seem to see our poor eyes already lit with a spark. It was as if we could see the deep pain that was coming. So we circled around each other, full of fears and doubts. We were like fighters who did not dare to come close. But it was for each other that we were afraid! That kept us a little longer apart and unhurt.

“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?”

Because I pressed him, he turned away from me. Once more he stood at his window in silence. You could have heard a pin drop between us. Then he was in front of me again. He looked like a person who had someone waiting for him outside, someone he really had to deal with.

“I have to see Luke.”

I had never before pushed him to so cheap a lie, and I felt ashamed in the same measure. But, horrible as it was, his lies made up my truth. Thoughtfully I knitted a few loops.

“Well, then, go to Luke, and I'll wait for what you promise. Only, in return for that, do one very much smaller thing for me before you leave me.”

He looked as if he felt he had won enough to bargain a little more. “Very much smaller—?”

“Yes, a tiny part of the whole.” Oh, I was very busy with my work, and I spoke as if it were nothing! “Tell me if, yesterday afternoon, from the table in the hall, you took, you know, my letter.”

### Glossary

- **shrubs**: small bushes.
- **pane**: one flat piece of glass in a window.
- **haunted**: visited by strange figures or spirits; full of a strange, frightening feeling.
- **genius**: a very great natural talent.
- **stern**: hard and serious, not gentle.
- **harbor**: a safe place on the coast where ships can stay; here, the end of a hard journey.
- **you could have heard a pin drop**: it was completely silent.
- **bargain**: to talk with someone to get a better deal.

## XXIV

For a minute I could not take in how he received this. My attention was suddenly and fiercely split in two. I can describe it only like that. At first it left me with nothing but one blind movement. I sprang straight up and got hold of him. I drew him close. I fell back against the nearest piece of furniture for support. And without thinking, I kept him with his back to the window. The figure I had already had to deal with here was full upon us. Peter Quint had come into view like a guard in front of a prison. The next thing I saw was that he had reached the window from outside. Then I knew that he was close to the glass, glaring in through it. Once more he showed the room his white face of damnation. To say that I made my decision in a second gives only a rough idea of what happened inside me. Yet I believe that no woman so overwhelmed ever got back her hold on the *act* so quickly. In the very horror of that close presence, I knew what the act must be. I would see and face what I saw and faced. And I would keep the boy himself from knowing. The inspiration came to me—I can call it by no other name. I felt that I *might* do it, by my own free will, in a way far beyond the ordinary. It was like fighting with a demon for a human soul. When I had fully judged it like this, I looked at the human soul. I was holding him out at arm's length in my shaking hands. And on his lovely childish forehead there was a perfect dew of sweat. The face close to mine was as white as the face against the glass. Soon a sound came out of it. It was not low or weak, but it seemed to come from much further away. I drank it in like a breath of sweet perfume.

“Yes—I took it.”

At this, with a moan of joy, I put my arms round him and drew him close. I held him to me, and I could feel his sudden fever and the hard beating of his little heart. All the while I kept my eyes on the thing at the window. I saw it move and change its position. I have compared it to a guard. But for a moment its slow turning was more like the prowling of a baffled beast. My new, sharper courage was so strong that I had to hide it a little. I had to shade my flame, as it were, so that it did not shine through. Meanwhile the glaring face was at the window again. The villain stood fixed there, as if to watch and wait. I felt sure that now I could defy him. And I was quite certain by this time that the child knew nothing. That was what made me go on.

“What did you take it for?”

“To see what you said about me.”

“You opened the letter?”

“I opened it.”

I held him a little away from me again, and now my eyes were on Miles's own face. In it his mocking manner had broken down. This showed me how deeply his unease had damaged him. The wonderful thing was this: at last, through my success, his sense was sealed and his contact was stopped. He knew that he was in the presence of something, but he did not know what. And he knew even less that I was in its presence too, and that I did know. And what did his trouble matter? My eyes went back to the window, and I saw that the air was clear again. By my own triumph, the influence had been put out. There was nothing there. I felt that the victory was mine, and that I would surely get *everything*.

“And you found nothing!” I let my joy out.

He gave the saddest, most thoughtful little shake of his head. “Nothing.”

“Nothing, nothing!” I almost shouted in my joy.

“Nothing, nothing,” he repeated sadly.

I kissed his forehead. It was wet through. “So what have you done with it?”

“I've burned it.”

“Burned it?” It was now or never. “Is that what you did at school?”

Oh, what this brought up! “At school?”

“Did you take letters?—or other things?”

“Other things?” He now seemed to be thinking of something far away. It reached him only through the weight of his anxiety. Yet it did reach him. “Did I *steal?*”

I felt myself go red to the roots of my hair. I wondered which was stranger. Was it stranger to ask a gentleman such a question? Or to see him accept it so easily? The way he took it showed how far he had fallen in the world.

“Was it for that you mightn't go back?”

All he felt was a dull little surprise. “Did you know I mightn't go back?”

“I know everything.”

At this he gave me 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 that I believed him completely. Yet my hands shook him. It was out of pure tenderness. It was as if I were asking him a question. Why had he made me suffer for months, if it was all for nothing?

“What then did you do?”

He looked in a vague pain all round the top of the room. Two or three times he drew his breath, as if with difficulty. He might have been standing at the bottom of the sea. He might have been raising his eyes to some faint green twilight above.

“Well—I said things.”

“Only that?”

“They thought it was enough!”

“To turn you out for?”

Truly, no one who was ever “turned out” showed so little to explain it as this little person! He seemed to think about my question. But he did it in a way that was quite distant and almost helpless.

“Well, I suppose I oughtn't.”

“But to whom did you say them?”

He clearly tried to remember, but it slipped away—he had lost it. “I don't know!”

He almost smiled at me in the loneliness of his surrender. By this time his surrender was really so complete that I ought to have stopped there. But I was carried away—I was blind with victory. Even then, what should have brought him so much nearer was already pushing us further apart.

“Was it to everyone?” I asked.

“No; it was only to—” But he gave a sick little shake of his head. “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 deeper darkness. Within a minute a terrible fear had come to me, out of my very pity. Perhaps he was innocent. For that moment it was confusing and had no bottom. For if he *were* innocent, what on earth was *I?* While it lasted, the mere touch of the question froze me. I let him go a little. With a deep sigh, he turned away from me again. He faced toward the clear window, and I let him. I felt that there was nothing there now to keep him from.

“And did they repeat what you said?” I went on after a moment.

He was soon some distance away from me. He was still breathing hard. Again he looked like someone shut in against his will, though now he was not angry about it. Once more, as he had done before, he looked up at the dim day. It was as if nothing was left of what had kept him going, except a fear too deep for words.

“Oh, yes,” he answered all the same. “They must have repeated them. To those *they* liked,” he added.

Somehow there was less in this than I had expected. But I thought it over.

“And these things came round—?”

“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 his beautiful little fevered face to me again. “Yes, it was too bad.”

“Too bad?”

“What I suppose I sometimes said. To write home.”

I can't describe how sad and touching it was. Such words did not fit at all with such a speaker. I only know that the next moment I heard myself say, in plain, strong, everyday words, “Stuff and nonsense!” But the moment after that, I must have sounded stern enough.

“What *were* these things?”

My sternness was all meant for his judge, the one who had punished him. Yet it made him turn away again. And that movement made *me* spring straight at him, in one jump, with a cry I could not hold back. For there again, against the glass, was the horrible cause of all our pain—the white face of damnation. It was there as if to ruin his confession and stop his answer. My head swam sickly as my victory dropped away and my whole battle came back. So my wild leap only gave everything away. In the middle of my act I saw him meet it with a guess. But I saw that even now he only guessed. To his own eyes, the window was still empty. So I let my impulse flame up. I wanted to turn the peak of his fear into the very proof that he was set free.

“No more, no more, no more!” I shrieked at my visitor, as I tried to press him to me.

“Is she *here?*” Miles gasped. With his sealed eyes he had caught the direction of my words.

His strange “she” shook me, and with a gasp I repeated it.

Then he threw it back at me with sudden fury. “Miss Jessel, Miss Jessel!”

Stunned, I grasped what he supposed. I took it as something that followed from what we had done to Flora. But it only made me want to show him that this was even better than that.

“It's not Miss Jessel! But it's at the window—straight in front of us. It's *there*—the cowardly horror, there for the last time!”

At this his head moved for a second like a dog that has lost a scent. Then it gave a wild little shake, as if for air and light. Next he turned on me in a white rage. He was confused, and he glared around the place in vain. He missed it completely, the wide, overwhelming presence. And yet to me it now filled the room like the taste of poison.

“It's *he?*”

I was so determined to have all my proof that I turned to ice to challenge him. “Whom do you mean by ‘he’?”

“Peter Quint—you devil!” Once more his face looked round the room, twisted and begging. “*Where?*”

I hear them in my ears still: his great giving-up of the name, and his tribute to my devotion.

“What does he matter now, my own?—what will he *ever* matter? *I* have you,” I threw at the beast, “but he has lost you forever!” Then, to show Miles what I had done, I said to him, “There, *there!*”

But he had already jerked straight round. He stared, he glared again, and he saw only the quiet day. At the stroke of the loss I was so proud of, he gave a cry. It was the cry of a creature thrown over a cliff into a deep pit. I grabbed him, and it might have been to catch him in his fall. I caught him, yes, I held him—you can imagine with what passion. But after 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.

### Glossary

- **damnation**: being punished forever after death.
- **demon**: an evil spirit.
- **baffled**: confused and stopped from getting what it wants.
- **defy**: to stand up against someone and refuse to be afraid of them.
- **villain**: a very bad person.
- **sealed**: closed tight; here, unable to see.
- **turned out**: sent away from a school for ever.
- **stern**: hard and serious, not gentle.
- **tribute**: something that shows respect or thanks.
- **dispossessed**: with something taken away from it: what it had, or what had held it.