The Turn of the Screw: Chapters 9–17

I waited and waited, and the days, as they elapsed, took something from my consternation.

A very few of them, in fact, passing, in constant sight of my pupils, without a fresh incident sufficed to give to grievous fancies and even to odious memories a kind of brush of the sponge.

They were at this period extravagantly and preternaturally fond of me; which, after all, I could reflect, was no more than a graceful response in children perpetually bowed over and hugged.

They had never, I think, wanted to do so many things for their poor protectress; I mean--though they got their lessons better and better, which was naturally what would please her most--in the way of diverting, entertaining, surprising her; reading her passages, telling her stories, acting her charades, pouncing out at her, in disguises, as animals and historical characters, and above all astonishing her by the "pieces" they had secretly got by heart and could interminably recite.

They got their little tasks as if they loved them, and indulged, from the mere exuberance of the gift, in the most unimposed little miracles of memory.

This was so singularly the case that it had presumably much to do with the fact as to which, at the present day, I am at a loss for a different explanation: I allude to my unnatural composure on the subject of another school for Miles.

One evening--with nothing to lead up or to prepare it--I felt the cold touch of the impression that had breathed on me the night of my arrival and which, much lighter then, as I have mentioned, I should probably have made little of in memory had my subsequent sojourn been less agitated.

She looked intensely grave, and I had never had such a sense of losing an advantage acquired (the thrill of which had just been so prodigious) as on my consciousness that she addressed me with a reproach. "You naughty: where have you been?"

Flora luminously considered, after which, with her little divine smile: "Because I don't like to frighten you!"

The moon made the night extraordinarily penetrable and showed me on the lawn a person, diminished by distance, who stood there motionless and as if fascinated, looking up to where I had appeared--looking, that is, not so much straight at me as at something that was apparently above me.

Flights of fancy gave place, in her mind, to a steady fireside glow, and I had already begun to perceive how, with the development of the conviction that--as time went on without a public accident--our young things could, after all, look out for themselves, she addressed her greatest solicitude to the sad case presented by their instructress.

then I caught the suppressed intellectual creak with which she conscientiously turned to take from me a view of the back of the tapestry.

I had made her a receptacle of lurid things, but there was an odd recognition of my superiority--my accomplishments and my function--in her patience under my pain.

It was a sharp trap for the inscrutable!

He "had" me indeed, and in a cleft stick; for who would ever absolve me, who would consent that I should go unhung, if, by the faintest tremor of an overture, I were the first to introduce into our perfect intercourse an element so dire?

I met his kiss and I had to make, while I folded him for a minute in my arms, the most stupendous effort not to cry.

I go on, I know, as if I were crazy; and it's a wonder I'm not. What I've seen would have made you so; but it has only made me more lucid, made me get hold of still other things."

At this my companion did turn, but the inquiry she launched was a silent one, the effect of which was to make me more explicit.

Instead of it even--as a woman reads another--she could see what I myself saw: his derision, his amusement, his contempt for the breakdown of my resignation at being left alone and for the fine machinery I had set in motion to attract his attention to my slighted charms.

It was all very well to join them, but speaking to them proved quite as much as ever an effort beyond my strength--offered, in close quarters, difficulties as insurmountable as before.

This situation continued a month, and with new aggravations and particular notes, the note above all, sharper and sharper, of the small ironic consciousness on the part of my pupils.

I don't mean that they had their tongues in their cheeks or did anything vulgar, for that was not one of their dangers: I do mean, on the other hand, that the element of the unnamed and untouched became, between us, greater than any other, and that so much avoidance could not have been so successfully effected without a great deal of tacit arrangement.

I recognized the signs, the portents--I recognized the moment, the spot.

Well, my eyes were sealed, it appeared, at present--a consummation for which it seemed blasphemous not to thank God.

Then it was that, had I not been deterred by the very chance that such an injury might prove greater than the injury to be averted, my exultation would have broken out.

After these secret scenes I chattered more than ever, going on volubly enough till one of our prodigious, palpable hushes occurred--

It was striking of the children, at all events to kiss me inveterately with a kind of wild irrelevance and never to fail--one or the other--of the precious question that had helped us through many a peril. "When do you think he will come? Don't you think we ought to write?"

I call it a revolution because I now see how, with the word he spoke, the curtain rose on the last act of my dreadful drama, and the catastrophe was precipitated.

There was something new, on the spot, between us, and he was perfectly aware that I recognized it, though, to enable me to do so, he had no need to look a whit less candid and charming than usual.

She rose, not as if she had heard me, but with an indescribable grand melancholy of indifference and detachment, and, within a dozen feet of me, stood there as my vile predecessor.

This opportunity came before tea: I secured five minutes with her in the housekeeper's room, where, in the twilight, amid a smell of lately baked bread, but with the place all swept and garnished, I found her sitting in pained placidity before the fire.

"I'll put it before him," I went on inexorably, "that I can't undertake to work the question on behalf of a child who has been expelled--"

His dear, listening face, framed in its smooth whiteness, made him for the minute as appealing as some wistful patient in a children's hospital; and I would have given, as the resemblance came to me, all I possessed on earth really to be the nurse or the sister of charity who might have helped to cure him.

It was extraordinary how my absolute conviction of his secret precocity (or whatever I might call the poison of an influence that I dared but half to phrase) made him, in spite of the faint breath of his inward trouble, appear as accessible as an older person--imposed him almost as an intellectual equal.

He gave, at any rate, like a convalescent slightly fatigued, a languid shake of his head.

He said it with admirable serenity, with positive unimpeachable gaiety; and doubtless it was that very note that most evoked for me the poignancy, the unnatural childish tragedy, of his probable reappearance at the end of three months with all this bravado and still more dishonor.

The boy gave a loud, high shriek, which, lost in the rest of the shock of sound, might have seemed, indistinctly, though I was so close to him, a note either of jubilation or of terror.