The Turn of the Screw
by Henry James
Contents
THE TURN OF THE SCREW I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII XIII XIV XV XVI XVII XVIII XIX XX XXI XXII XXIII XXIV
THE TURN OF THE SCREW
The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless,but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house,a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to say that it was the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child. The case, I may mention, was that of an apparition in just such an old house as had gathered us for the occasion—an appearance, of a dreadful kind, to a little boy sleeping in the room with his mother and waking her up in the terror of it; waking her not to dissipate his dread and soothe him to sleep again, but to encounter also, herself, before she had succeeded in doing so, the same sight that had shaken him. It was this observation that drew from Douglas—not immediately, but later in the evening—a reply that had the interesting consequence to which I call attention. Someone else told a story not particularly effective, which I saw he was not following. This I took for a sign that he had himself something to produce and that we should only have to wait. We waited in fact till two nights later; but that same evening, before we scattered, he brought out what was in his mind.
“I quite agree—in regard to Griffin’s ghost,or whatever it was—that its appearing first to the little boy, at so tender an age,adds a particular touch. But it’s not the first occurrence of its charming kind that I know to have involved a child.If the child gives the effect another turn of the screw, what do you say to _two_ children—?”
“We say, of course,” somebody exclaimed, “that they give two turns!Also that we want to hear about them.”
I can see Douglas there before the fire, to which he had got up to present his back,looking down at his interlocutor with his hands in his pockets. “Nobody but me, till now,has ever heard. It’s quite too horrible.” This, naturally,was declared by several voices to give the thing the utmost price, and our friend, with quiet art,prepared his triumph by turning his eyes over the rest of us and going on: “It’s beyond everything. Nothing at all that I know touches it.”
“For sheer terror?” I remember asking.
He seemed to say it was not so simple as that; to be really at a loss how to qualify it.He passed his hand over his eyes, made a little wincing grimace. “For dreadful—dreadfulness!”
“Oh, how delicious!” cried one of the women.
He took no notice of her; he looked at me, but as if, instead of me, he saw what he spoke of.“For general uncanny ugliness and horror and pain.”
“Well then,” I said, “just sit right down and begin.”
He turned round to the fire, gave a kick to a log, watched it an instant. Then as he faced us again:“I can’t begin. I shall have to send to town.” There was a unanimous groan at this,and much reproach; after which, in his preoccupied way, he explained. “The story’s written.It’s in a locked drawer—it has not been out for years. I could write to my man and enclose the key;he could send down the packet as he finds it.” It was to me in particular that he appeared to propound this—appeared almost to appeal for aid not to hesitate.He had broken a thickness of ice, the formation of many a winter;had had his reasons for a long silence. The others resented postponement,but it was just his scruples that charmed me.I adjured him to write by the first post and to agree with us for an early hearing;then I asked him if the experience in question had been his own. To this his answer was prompt. “Oh, thank God, no!”
“And is the record yours?You took the thing down?”
“Nothing but the impression. I took that _here_”—he tapped his heart. “I’ve never lost it.”
“Then your manuscript—?”
“Is in old, faded ink, and in the most beautiful hand.” He hung fire again. “A woman’s.She has been dead these twenty years. She sent me the pages in question before she died.” They were all listening now, and of course there was somebody to be arch,or at any rate to draw the inference. But if he put the inference by without a smile it was also without irritation.“She was a most charming person, but she was ten years older than I. She was my sister’s governess,” he quietly said. “She was the most agreeable woman I’ve ever known in her position;she would have been worthy of any whatever. It was long ago, and this episode was long before.I was at Trinity, and I found her at home on my coming down the second summer.I was much there that year—it was a beautiful one; and we had, in her off-hours,some strolls and talks in the garden—talks in which she struck me as awfully clever and nice.Oh yes; don’t grin: I liked her extremely and am glad to this day to think she liked me, too.If she hadn’t she wouldn’t have told me. She had never told anyone.It wasn’t simply that she said so, but that I knew she hadn’t. I was sure; I could see. You’ll easily judge why when you hear.”
“Because the thing had been such a scare?”
He continued to fix me. “You’ll easily judge,” he repeated: “_you_ will.”
I fixed him, too. “I see. She was in love.”
He laughed for the first time. “You _are_ acute. Yes, she was in love. That is, she had been.That came out—she couldn’t tell her story without its coming out. I saw it, and she saw I saw it;but neither of us spoke of it. I remember the time and the place—the corner of the lawn,the shade of the great beeches and the long, hot summer afternoon. It wasn’t a scene for a shudder; but oh—!” He quitted the fire and dropped back into his chair.
“You’ll receive the packet Thursday morning?” I inquired.
“Probably not till the second post.”
“Well then; after dinner—”
“You’ll all meet me here?” He looked us round again. “Isn’t anybody going?” It was almost the tone of hope.
“Everybody will stay!”
“_I_ will”—and “_I_ will!” cried the ladies whose departure had been fixed. Mrs. Griffin, however,expressed the need for a little more light. “Who was it she was in love with?”
“The story will tell,” I took upon myself to reply.
“Oh, I can’t wait for the story!”
“The story _won’t_ tell,” said Douglas; “not in any literal, vulgar way.”
“More’s the pity, then. That’s the only way I ever understand.”
“Won’t _you_ tell, Douglas?” somebody else inquired.
He sprang to his feet again. “Yes—tomorrow. Now I must go to bed. Good night.” And quickly catching up a candlestick, he left us slightly bewildered.From our end of the great brown hall we heard his step on the stair; whereupon Mrs. Griffin spoke.“Well, if I don’t know who she was in love with, I know who _he_ was.”
“She was ten years older,” said her husband.
“_Raison de plus_—at that age!But it’s rather nice, his long reticence.”
“Forty years!” Griffin put in.
“With this outbreak at last.”
“The outbreak,” I returned, “will make a tremendous occasion of Thursday night;” and everyone so agreed with me that, in the light of it,we lost all attention for everything else. The last story,however incomplete and like the mere opening of a serial, had been told;we handshook and “candlestuck,” as somebody said, and went to bed.
I knew the next day that a letter containing the key had, by the first post,gone off to his London apartments; but in spite of—or perhaps just on account of—the eventual diffusion of this knowledge we quite let him alone till after dinner, till such an hour of the evening, in fact, as might best accord with the kind of emotion on which our hopes were fixed. Then he became as communicative as we could desire and indeed gave us his best reason for being so. We had it from him again before the fire in the hall, as we had had our mild wonders of the previous night. It appeared that the narrative he had promised to read us really required for a proper intelligence a few words of prologue. Let me say here distinctly, to have done with it, that this narrative, from an exact transcript of my own made much later, is what I shall presently give. Poor Douglas, before his death—when it was in sight—committed to me the manuscript that reached him on the third of these days and that, on the same spot, with immense effect, he began to read to our hushed little circle on the night of the fourth. The departing ladies who had said they would stay didn’t, of course, thank heaven, stay: they departed, in consequence of arrangements made, in a rage of curiosity, as they professed, produced by the touches with which he had already worked us up. But that only made his little final auditory more compact and select, kept it, round the hearth, subject to a common thrill.
The first of these touches conveyed that the written statement took up the tale at a point after it had,in a manner, begun. The fact to be in possession of was therefore that his old friend,the youngest of several daughters of a poor country parson, had, at the age of twenty,on taking service for the first time in the schoolroom, come up to London, in trepidation,to answer in person an advertisement that had already placed her in brief correspondence with the advertiser.This person proved, on her presenting herself, for judgment, at a house in Harley Street,that impressed her as vast and imposing—this prospective patron proved a gentleman,a bachelor in the prime of life, such a figure as had never risen, save in a dream or an old novel,before a fluttered, anxious girl out of a Hampshire vicarage. One could easily fix his type;it never, happily, dies out. He was handsome and bold and pleasant, off-hand and gay and kind.He struck her, inevitably, as gallant and splendid,but what took her most of all and gave her the courage she afterward showed was that he put the whole thing to her as a kind of favor,an obligation he should gratefully incur. She conceived him as rich,but as fearfully extravagant—saw him all in a glow of high fashion, of good looks,of expensive habits, of charming ways with women.He had for his own town residence a big house filled with the spoils of travel and the trophies of the chase;but it was to his country home, an old family place in Essex,that he wished her immediately to proceed.
He had been left, by the death of their parents in India,guardian to a small nephew and a small niece, children of a younger, a military brother,whom he had lost two years before. These children were,by the strangest of chances for a man in his position—a lone man without the right sort of experience or a grain of patience—very heavily on his hands.It had all been a great worry and, on his own part doubtless, a series of blunders,but he immensely pitied the poor chicks and had done all he could;had in particular sent them down to his other house,the proper place for them being of course the country, and kept them there, from the first,with the best people he could find to look after them,parting even with his own servants to wait on them and going down himself, whenever he might,to see how they were doing. The awkward thing was that they had practically no other relations and that his own affairs took up all his time.He had put them in possession of Bly, which was healthy and secure,and had placed at the head of their little establishment—but below stairs only—an excellent woman,Mrs. Grose, whom he was sure his visitor would like and who had formerly been maid to his mother.She was now housekeeper and was also acting for the time as superintendent to the little girl,of whom, without children of her own, she was, by good luck, extremely fond.There were plenty of people to help, but of course the young lady who should go down as governess would be in supreme authority.She would also have, in holidays, to look after the small boy,who had been for a term at school—young as he was to be sent, but what else could be done?—and who, as the holidays were about to begin, would be back from one day to the other.There had been for the two children at first a young lady whom they had had the misfortune to lose.She had done for them quite beautifully—she was a most respectable person—till her death,the great awkwardness of which had, precisely, left no alternative but the school for little Miles.Mrs. Grose, since then, in the way of manners and things, had done as she could for Flora;and there were, further, a cook, a housemaid, a dairywoman, an old pony, an old groom,and an old gardener, all likewise thoroughly respectable.
So far had Douglas presented his picture when someone put a question.“And what did the former governess die of?—of so much respectability?”
Our friend’s answer was prompt. “That will come out. I don’t anticipate.”
“Excuse me—I thought that was just what you _are_ doing.”
“In her successor’s place,” I suggested,“I should have wished to learn if the office brought with it—”
“Necessary danger to life?” Douglas completed my thought. “She did wish to learn, and she did learn.You shall hear tomorrow what she learned. Meanwhile, of course,the prospect struck her as slightly grim. She was young, untried, nervous:it was a vision of serious duties and little company, of really great loneliness.She hesitated—took a couple of days to consult and consider.But the salary offered much exceeded her modest measure,and on a second interview she faced the music, she engaged.” And Douglas, with this,made a pause that, for the benefit of the company, moved me to throw in—
“The moral of which was of course the seduction exercised by the splendid young man. She succumbed to it.”
He got up and, as he had done the night before, went to the fire,gave a stir to a log with his foot, then stood a moment with his back to us. “She saw him only twice.”
“Yes, but that’s just the beauty of her passion.”
A little to my surprise, on this, Douglas turned round to me. “It _was_ the beauty of it.There were others,” he went on, “who hadn’t succumbed.He told her frankly all his difficulty—that for several applicants the conditions had been prohibitive.They were, somehow, simply afraid. It sounded dull—it sounded strange;and all the more so because of his main condition.”
“Which was—?”
“That she should never trouble him—but never, never:neither appeal nor complain nor write about anything; only meet all questions herself,receive all moneys from his solicitor, take the whole thing over and let him alone.She promised to do this, and she mentioned to me that when, for a moment, disburdened, delighted,he held her hand, thanking her for the sacrifice, she already felt rewarded.”
“But was that all her reward?” one of the ladies asked.
“She never saw him again.”
“Oh!” said the lady; which, as our friend immediately left us again,was the only other word of importance contributed to the subject till, the next night,by the corner of the hearth, in the best chair,he opened the faded red cover of a thin old-fashioned gilt-edged album.The whole thing took indeed more nights than one,but on the first occasion the same lady put another question. “What is your title?”
“I haven’t one.”
“Oh, _I_ have!” I said. But Douglas, without heeding me,had begun to read with a fine clearness that was like a rendering to the ear of the beauty of his author’s hand.
I
I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops,a little seesaw of the right throbs and the wrong. After rising, in town, to meet his appeal,I had at all events a couple of very bad days—found myself doubtful again,felt indeed sure I had made a mistake. In this state of mind I spent the long hours of bumping,swinging coach that carried me to the stopping place at which I was to be met by a vehicle from the house.This convenience, I was told, had been ordered, and I found,toward the close of the June afternoon, a commodious fly in waiting for me. Driving at that hour,on a lovely day, through a country to which the summer sweetness seemed to offer me a friendly welcome,my fortitude mounted afresh and, as we turned into the avenue,encountered a reprieve that was probably but a proof of the point to which it had sunk.I suppose I had expected, or had dreaded,something so melancholy that what greeted me was a good surprise.I remember as a most pleasant impression the broad, clear front,its open windows and fresh curtains and the pair of maids looking out;I remember the lawn and the bright flowers and the crunch of my wheels on the gravel and the clustered treetops over which the rooks circled and cawed in the golden sky. The scene had a greatness that made it a different affair from my own scant home, and there immediately appeared at the door, with a little girl in her hand, a civil person who dropped me as decent a curtsy as if I had been the mistress or a distinguished visitor. I had received in Harley Street a narrower notion of the place, and that, as I recalled it, made me think the proprietor still more of a gentleman, suggested that what I was to enjoy might be something beyond his promise.
I had no drop again till the next day, for I was carried triumphantly through the following hours by my introduction to the younger of my pupils.The little girl who accompanied Mrs. Grose appeared to me on the spot a creature so charming as to make it a great fortune to have to do with her.She was the most beautiful child I had ever seen,and I afterward wondered that my employer had not told me more of her.I slept little that night—I was too much excited; and this astonished me too, I recollect,remained with me, adding to my sense of the liberality with which I was treated. The large,impressive room, one of the best in the house, the great state bed, as I almost felt it, the full,figured draperies, the long glasses in which, for the first time,I could see myself from head to foot, all struck me—like the extraordinary charm of my small charge—as so many things thrown in.It was thrown in as well, from the first moment, that I should get on with Mrs.Grose in a relation over which, on my way, in the coach, I fear I had rather brooded.The only thing indeed that in this early outlook might have made me shrink again was the clear circumstance of her being so glad to see me.I perceived within half an hour that she was so glad—stout, simple, plain, clean,wholesome woman—as to be positively on her guard against showing it too much.I wondered even then a little why she should wish not to show it, and that, with reflection,with suspicion, might of course have made me uneasy.
But it was a comfort that there could be no uneasiness in a connection with anything so beatific as the radiant image of my little girl,the vision of whose angelic beauty had probably more than anything else to do with the restlessness that,before morning, made me several times rise and wander about my room to take in the whole picture and prospect;to watch, from my open window, the faint summer dawn,to look at such portions of the rest of the house as I could catch, and to listen, while,in the fading dusk, the first birds began to twitter,for the possible recurrence of a sound or two, less natural and not without, but within,that I had fancied I heard. There had been a moment when I believed I recognized, faint and far,the cry of a child; there had been another when I found myself just consciously starting as at the passage,before my door, of a light footstep. But these fancies were not marked enough not to be thrown off,and it is only in the light, or the gloom, I should rather say,of other and subsequent matters that they now come back to me. To watch, teach,“form” little Flora would too evidently be the making of a happy and useful life.It had been agreed between us downstairs that after this first occasion I should have her as a matter of course at night,her small white bed being already arranged, to that end, in my room.What I had undertaken was the whole care of her, and she had remained, just this last time,with Mrs. Grose only as an effect of our consideration for my inevitable strangeness and her natural timidity.In spite of this timidity—which the child herself, in the oddest way in the world,had been perfectly frank and brave about, allowing it,without a sign of uncomfortable consciousness, with the deep,sweet serenity indeed of one of Raphael’s holy infants, to be discussed, to be imputed to her,and to determine us—I feel quite sure she would presently like me.It was part of what I already liked Mrs. Grose herself for,the pleasure I could see her feel in my admiration and wonder as I sat at supper with four tall candles and with my pupil,in a high chair and a bib, brightly facing me, between them, over bread and milk.There were naturally things that in Flora’s presence could pass between us only as prodigious and gratified looks, obscure and roundabout allusions.
“And the little boy—does he look like her?Is he too so very remarkable?”
One wouldn’t flatter a child. “Oh, miss, _most_ remarkable. If you think well of this one!”—and she stood there with a plate in her hand, beaming at our companion,who looked from one of us to the other with placid heavenly eyes that contained nothing to check us.
“Yes; if I do—?”
“You _will_ be carried away by the little gentleman!”
“Well, that, I think, is what I came for—to be carried away. I’m afraid, however,” I remember feeling the impulse to add, “I’m rather easily carried away. I was carried away in London!”
I can still see Mrs. Grose’s broad face as she took this in. “In Harley Street?”
“In Harley Street.”
“Well, miss, you’re not the first—and you won’t be the last.”
“Oh, I’ve no pretension,” I could laugh, “to being the only one. My other pupil, at any rate, as I understand, comes back tomorrow?”
“Not tomorrow—Friday, miss. He arrives, as you did, by the coach, under care of the guard, and is to be met by the same carriage.”
I forthwith expressed that the proper as well as the pleasant and friendly thing would be therefore that on the arrival of the public conveyance I should be in waiting for him with his little sister; an idea in which Mrs. Grose concurred so heartily that I somehow took her manner as a kind of comforting pledge—never falsified, thank heaven!—that we should on every question be quite at one. Oh, she was glad I was there!
What I felt the next day was, I suppose,nothing that could be fairly called a reaction from the cheer of my arrival;it was probably at the most only a slight oppression produced by a fuller measure of the scale,as I walked round them, gazed up at them, took them in, of my new circumstances. They had,as it were, an extent and mass for which I had not been prepared and in the presence of which I found myself,freshly, a little scared as well as a little proud. Lessons, in this agitation,certainly suffered some delay; I reflected that my first duty was,by the gentlest arts I could contrive, to win the child into the sense of knowing me.I spent the day with her out-of-doors; I arranged with her, to her great satisfaction,that it should be she, she only, who might show me the place.She showed it step by step and room by room and secret by secret, with droll, delightful,childish talk about it and with the result, in half an hour, of our becoming immense friends.Young as she was, I was struck, throughout our little tour,with her confidence and courage with the way, in empty chambers and dull corridors,on crooked staircases that made me pause and even on the summit of an old machicolated square tower that made me dizzy,her morning music, her disposition to tell me so many more things than she asked,rang out and led me on. I have not seen Bly since the day I left it,and I daresay that to my older and more informed eyes it would now appear sufficiently contracted.But as my little conductress, with her hair of gold and her frock of blue,danced before me round corners and pattered down passages,I had the view of a castle of romance inhabited by a rosy sprite, such a place as would somehow,for diversion of the young idea, take all color out of storybooks and fairytales.Wasn’t it just a storybook over which I had fallen adoze and adream?No; it was a big, ugly, antique, but convenient house,embodying a few features of a building still older, half-replaced and half-utilized,in which I had the fancy of our being almost as lost as a handful of passengers in a great drifting ship. Well, I was, strangely, at the helm!
II
This came home to me when, two days later, I drove over with Flora to meet, as Mrs. Grose said,the little gentleman; and all the more for an incident that, presenting itself the second evening,had deeply disconcerted me. The first day had been, on the whole, as I have expressed, reassuring;but I was to see it wind up in keen apprehension. The postbag,that evening—it came late—contained a letter for me, which, however, in the hand of my employer,I found to be composed but of a few words enclosing another, addressed to himself,with a seal still unbroken. “This, I recognize, is from the headmaster,and the headmaster’s an awful bore. Read him, please; deal with him; but mind you don’t report. Not a word. I’m off!” I broke the seal with a great effort—so great a one that I was a long time coming to it;took the unopened missive at last up to my room and only attacked it just before going to bed.I had better have let it wait till morning, for it gave me a second sleepless night.With no counsel to take, the next day, I was full of distress;and it finally got so the better of me that I determined to open myself at least to Mrs. Grose.
“What does it mean?The child’s dismissed his school.”
She gave me a look that I remarked at the moment; then, visibly, with a quick blankness,seemed to try to take it back. “But aren’t they all—?”
“Sent home—yes. But only for the holidays. Miles may never go back at all.”
Consciously, under my attention, she reddened. “They won’t take him?”
“They absolutely decline.”
At this she raised her eyes, which she had turned from me; I saw them fill with good tears. “What has he done?”
I hesitated; then I judged best simply to hand her my letter—which, however,had the effect of making her, without taking it, simply put her hands behind her.She shook her head sadly. “Such things are not for me, miss.”
My counselor couldn’t read!I winced at my mistake, which I attenuated as I could,and opened my letter again to repeat it to her; then,faltering in the act and folding it up once more, I put it back in my pocket. “Is he really _bad_?”
The tears were still in her eyes. “Do the gentlemen say so?”
“They go into no particulars. They simply express their regret that it should be impossible to keep him.That can have only one meaning.” Mrs. Grose listened with dumb emotion;she forbore to ask me what this meaning might be; so that, presently,to put the thing with some coherence and with the mere aid of her presence to my own mind,I went on: “That he’s an injury to the others.”
At this, with one of the quick turns of simple folk, she suddenly flamed up. “Master Miles!_him_ an injury?”
There was such a flood of good faith in it that, though I had not yet seen the child,my very fears made me jump to the absurdity of the idea. I found myself,to meet my friend the better, offering it, on the spot, sarcastically. “To his poor little innocent mates!”
“It’s too dreadful,” cried Mrs. Grose, “to say such cruel things!Why, he’s scarce ten years old.”
“Yes, yes; it would be incredible.”
She was evidently grateful for such a profession. “See him, miss, first. _Then_ believe it!” I felt forthwith a new impatience to see him; it was the beginning of a curiosity that,for all the next hours, was to deepen almost to pain. Mrs. Grose was aware, I could judge,of what she had produced in me, and she followed it up with assurance.“You might as well believe it of the little lady. Bless her,” she added the next moment—“_look_ at her!”
I turned and saw that Flora, whom, ten minutes before,I had established in the schoolroom with a sheet of white paper, a pencil,and a copy of nice “round O’s,” now presented herself to view at the open door.She expressed in her little way an extraordinary detachment from disagreeable duties,looking to me, however, with a great childish light that seemed to offer it as a mere result of the affection she had conceived for my person,which had rendered necessary that she should follow me.I needed nothing more than this to feel the full force of Mrs. Grose’s comparison, and,catching my pupil in my arms, covered her with kisses in which there was a sob of atonement.
Nonetheless, the rest of the day I watched for further occasion to approach my colleague,especially as, toward evening, I began to fancy she rather sought to avoid me. I overtook her,I remember, on the staircase; we went down together, and at the bottom I detained her,holding her there with a hand on her arm.“I take what you said to me at noon as a declaration that _you’ve_ never known him to be bad.”
She threw back her head; she had clearly, by this time, and very honestly, adopted an attitude. “Oh, never known him—I don’t pretend _that!_”
I was upset again. “Then you _have_ known him—?”
“Yes indeed, miss, thank God!”
On reflection I accepted this. “You mean that a boy who never is—?”
“Is no boy for _me!_”
I held her tighter. “You like them with the spirit to be naughty?” Then, keeping pace with her answer, “So do I!” I eagerly brought out. “But not to the degree to contaminate—”
“To contaminate?”—my big word left her at a loss. I explained it. “To corrupt.”