The Turn of the Screw: Chapters 18–24

Meanwhile there had been, on the part of my pupils, no more brilliant, more exemplary morning.

It was conspicuous of course in Miles in particular that he appeared to wish to show how easily he could let me down.

This child, to my memory, really lives in a setting of beauty and misery that no words can translate; there was a distinction all his own in every impulse he revealed; never was a small natural creature, to the uninitiated eye all frankness and freedom, a more ingenious, a more extraordinary little gentleman.

By the time I reached the pool, however,--she was close behind me, and I knew that, whatever, to her apprehension, might befall me, the exposure of my society struck her as her least danger.

I sustained her with a grateful arm, assuring her that she might hugely help me; and this started us afresh, so that in the course of but few minutes more we reached a point from which we found the boat to be where I had supposed it.

She had already got back her gaiety, and appeared to take this as an answer quite sufficient, "And where's Miles?" she went on.

There was something in the small valor of it that quite finished me: these three words from her were, in a flash like the glitter of a drawn blade, the jostle of the cup that my hand, for weeks and weeks, had held high and full to the brim and that now, even before speaking, I felt overflow in a deluge.

Much as I had made of the fact that this name had never once, between us, been sounded, the quick, smitten glare with which the child's face now received it fairly likened my breach of the silence to the smash of a pane of glass.

It added to the interposing cry, as if to stay the blow, that Mrs. Grose, at the same instant, uttered over my violence--the shriek of a creature scared, or rather wounded, which, in turn, within a few seconds, was completed by a gasp of my own.

She was there for poor scared Mrs. Grose, but she was there most for Flora; and no moment of my monstrous time was perhaps so extraordinary as that in which I consciously threw out to her--with the sense that, pale and ravenous demon as she was, she would catch and understand it--an inarticulate message of gratitude.

To see her, without a convulsion of her small pink face, not even feign to glance in the direction of the prodigy I announced, but only, instead of that, turn at me an expression of hard, still gravity, an expression absolutely new and unprecedented and that appeared to read and accuse and judge me--this was a stroke that somehow converted the little girl herself into the very presence that could make me quail.

I had said shortly before to Mrs. Grose that she was not at these times a child, but an old, old woman, and that description of her could not have been more strikingly confirmed than in the way in which, for all answer to this, she simply showed me, without a concession, an admission, of her eyes, a countenance of deeper and deeper, of indeed suddenly quite fixed, reprobation.

I was by this time--if I can put the whole thing at all together--more appalled at what I may properly call her manner than at anything else, though it was simultaneously with this that I became aware of having Mrs. Grose also, and very formidably, to reckon with.

Only look, dearest woman, look--!" She looked, even as I did, and gave me, with her deep groan of negation, repulsion, compassion--the mixture with her pity of her relief at her exemption--a sense, touching to me even then, that she would have backed me up if she could.

I might well have needed that, for with this hard blow of the proof that her eyes were hopelessly sealed I felt my own situation horribly crumble, I felt--I saw--my livid predecessor press, from her position, on my defeat, and I was conscious, more than all, of what I should have from this instant to deal with in the astounding little attitude of Flora.

Flora continued to fix me with her small mask of reprobation, and even at that minute I prayed God to forgive me for seeming to see that, as she stood there holding tight to our friend's dress, her incomparable childish beauty had suddenly failed, had quite vanished.

Then, after this deliverance, which might have been that of a vulgarly pert little girl in the street, she hugged Mrs. Grose more closely and buried in her skirts the dreadful little face.

The wretched child had spoken exactly as if she had got from some outside source each of her stabbing little words, and I could therefore, in the full despair of all I had to accept, but sadly shake my head at her.

For Mrs. Grose I had an imperative, an almost frantic "Go, go!" before which, in infinite distress, but mutely possessed of the little girl and clearly convinced, in spite of her blindness, that something awful had occurred and some collapse engulfed us, she retreated, by the way we had come, as fast as she could move.

I saw neither of them on my return, but, on the other hand, as by an ambiguous compensation, I saw a great deal of Miles.

No evening I had passed at Bly had the portentous quality of this one; in spite of which--and in spite also of the deeper depths of consternation that had opened beneath my feet--there was literally, in the ebbing actual, an extraordinarily sweet sadness.

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

Flora has now her grievance, and she'll work it to the end."

I was amazed, myself, at the spirit I had still in reserve, and therefore perhaps a trifle the more disconcerted at the way in which, in spite of this fine example of it, she hesitated.

No hour of my stay in fact was so assailed with apprehensions as that of my coming down to learn that the carriage containing Mrs. Grose and my younger pupil had already rolled out of the gates.

I could only get on at all by taking "nature" into my confidence and my account, by treating my monstrous ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, but demanding, after all, for a fair front, only another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue.

But an extraordinary impression dropped on me as I extracted a meaning from the boy's embarrassed back--none other than the impression that I was not barred now.

When he at last turned round to meet me, it was almost as if this genius had succumbed.

"It was partly to get you to do something," I conceded.

It was as if what I had yearned for had come at last only to astonish me.

He had picked up his hat, which he had brought in, and stood twirling it in a way that gave me, even as I was just nearly reaching port, a perverse horror of what I was doing.

It was like fighting with a demon for a human soul, and when I had fairly so appraised it I saw how the human soul--held out, in the tremor of my hands, at arm's length--had a perfect dew of sweat on a lovely childish forehead.

It was the very confidence that I might now defy him, as well as the positive certitude, by this time, of the child's unconsciousness, that made me go on, "What did you take it for?"

My face must have shown him I believed him utterly; yet my hands--but it was for pure tenderness--shook him as if to ask him why, if it was all for nothing, he had condemned me to months of torment.

I can't name the exquisite pathos of the contradiction given to such a speech by such a speaker; I only know that the next instant I heard myself throw off with homely force: "Stuff and nonsense!"

My sternness was all for his judge, his executioner; yet it made him avert himself again, and that movement made me, with a single bound and an irrepressible cry, spring straight upon him.

I felt a sick swim at the drop of my victory and all the return of my battle, so that the wildness of my veritable leap only served as a great betrayal.

At this, after a second in which his head made the movement of a baffled dog's on a scent and then gave a frantic little shake for air and light, he was at me in a white rage, bewildered, glaring vainly over the place and missing wholly, though it now, to my sense, filled the room like the taste of poison, the wide, overwhelming presence.

"Peter Quint--you devil!" His face gave again, round the room, its convulsed supplication.

With the stroke of the loss I was so proud of he uttered the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss, and the grasp with which I recovered him might have been that of catching him in his fall.