VII
I got hold of Mrs. Grose as soon after this as I could; and I can give no intelligible account of how I fought out the interval. Yet I still hear myself cry as I fairly threw myself into her arms: They knowits too monstrous: they know, they know!
And what on earth? I felt her incredulity as she held me.
Why, all that we knowand heaven knows what else besides! Then, as she released me, I made it out to her, made it out perhaps only now with full coherency even to myself. Two hours ago, in the gardenI could scarce articulateFlora saw!
Mrs. Grose took it as she might have taken a blow in the stomach. She has told you? she panted.
Not a wordthats the horror. She kept it to herself! The child of eight, that child! Unutterable still, for me, was the stupefaction of it.
Mrs. Grose, of course, could only gape the wider. Then how do you know?
I was thereI saw with my eyes: saw that she was perfectly aware.
Do you mean aware of him?
Noof her. I was conscious as I spoke that I looked prodigious things, for I got the slow reflection of them in my companions face. Another personthis time; but a figure of quite as unmistakeable horror and evil: a woman in black, pale and dreadfulwith such an air also, and such a face!on the other side of the lake. I was there with the childquiet for the hour; and in the midst of it she came.
Came howfrom where?
From where they come from! She just appeared and stood therebut not so near.
And without coming nearer?
Oh, for the effect and the feeling, she might have been as close as you!
My friend, with an odd impulse, fell back a step. Was she someone youve never seen?
Yes. But someone the child has. Someone you have. Then, to show how I had thought it all out: My predecessorthe one who died.
Miss Jessel?
Miss Jessel. You dont believe me? I pressed.
She turned right and left in her distress. How can you be sure?
This drew from me, in the state of my nerves, a flash of impatience. Then ask Florashes sure! But I had no sooner spoken than I caught myself up. No, for Gods sake, dont! Shell say she isntshell lie!
Mrs. Grose was not too bewildered instinctively to protest. Ah, how can you?
Because Im clear. Flora doesnt want me to know.
Its only then to spare you.
No, nothere 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 dont know what I dont seewhat I dont fear!
Mrs. Grose tried to keep up with me. You mean youre afraid of seeing her again?
Oh, no; thats nothingnow! Then I explained. Its of not seeing her.
But my companion only looked wan. I dont understand you.
Why, its that the child may keep it upand that the child assuredly willwithout my knowing it.
At the image of this possibility Mrs. Grose for a moment collapsed, yet presently to pull herself together again, as if from the positive force of the sense of what, should we yield an inch, there would really be to give way to. Dear, dearwe must keep our heads! And after all, if she doesnt mind it! She even tried a grim joke. Perhaps she likes it!
Likes such thingsa scrap of an infant!
Isnt it just a proof of her blessed innocence? my friend bravely inquired.
She brought me, for the instant, almost round. Oh, we must clutch at thatwe must cling to it! If it isnt a proof of what you say, its a proof ofGod knows what! For the womans a horror of horrors.
Mrs. Grose, at this, fixed her eyes a minute on the ground; then at last raising them, Tell me how you know, she said.
Then you admit its 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 meanso wickedly?
Dear me, noI could have borne that. She gave me never a glance. She only fixed the child.
Mrs. Grose tried to see it. Fixed her?
Ah, with such awful eyes!
She stared at mine as if they might really have resembled them. Do you mean of dislike?
God help us, no. Of something much worse.
Worse than dislike?this left her indeed at a loss.
With a determinationindescribable. With a kind of fury of intention.
I made her turn pale. Intention?
To get hold of her. Mrs. Groseher eyes just lingering on minegave a shudder and walked to the window; and while she stood there looking out I completed my statement. Thats what Flora knows.
After a little she turned round. The person was in black, you say?
In mourningrather poor, almost shabby. Butyeswith extraordinary beauty. I now recognised to what I had at last, stroke by stroke, brought the victim of my confidence, for she quite visibly weighed this. Oh, handsomevery, very, I insisted; wonderfully handsome. But infamous.
She slowly came back to me. Miss Jesselwas infamous. She once more took my hand in both her own, holding it as tight as if to fortify me against the increase of alarm I might draw from this disclosure. They were both infamous, she finally said.
So, for a little, we faced it once more together; and I found absolutely a degree of help in seeing it now so straight. I appreciate, I said, the great decency of your not having hitherto spoken; but the time has certainly come to give me the whole thing. She appeared to assent to this, but still only in silence; seeing which I went on: I must have it now. Of what did she die? Come, there was something between them.
There was everything.
In spite of the difference?
Oh, of their rank, their conditionshe brought it woefully out. She was a lady.
I turned it over; I again saw. Yesshe was a lady.
And he so dreadfully below, said Mrs. Grose.
I felt that I doubtless neednt press too hard, in such company, on the place of a servant in the scale; but there was nothing to prevent an acceptance of my companions own measure of my predecessors abasement. There was a way to deal with that, and I dealt; the more readily for my full visionon the evidenceof our employers late clever, good-looking own man; impudent, assured, spoiled, depraved. The fellow was a hound.
Mrs. Grose considered as if it were perhaps a little a case for a sense of shades. Ive never seen one like him. He did what he wished.
With her?
With them all.
It was as if now in my friends own eyes Miss Jessel had again appeared. I seemed at any rate, for an instant, to see their evocation of her as distinctly as I had seen her by the pond; and I brought out with decision: It must have been also what she wished!
Mrs. Groses face signified that it had been indeed, but she said at the same time: Poor womanshe paid for it!
Then you do know what she died of? I asked.
There was everything.
In spite of the difference?
Oh, of their rank, their conditionshe brought it woefully out. She was a lady.
I turned it over; I again saw. Yesshe was a lady.
And he so dreadfully below, said Mrs. Grose.
I felt that I doubtless neednt press too hard, in such company, on the place of a servant in the scale; but there was nothing to prevent an acceptance of my companions own measure of my predecessors abasement. There was a way to deal with that, and I dealt; the more readily for my full visionon the evidenceof our employers late clever, good-looking own man; impudent, assured, spoiled, depraved. The fellow was a hound.
Mrs. Grose considered as if it were perhaps a little a case for a sense of shades. Ive never seen one like him. He did what he wished.
With her?
With them all.
It was as if now in my friends own eyes Miss Jessel had again appeared. I seemed at any rate, for an instant, to see their evocation of her as distinctly as I had seen her by the pond; and I brought out with decision: It must have been also what she wished!
Mrs. Groses face signified that it had been indeed, but she said at the same time: Poor womanshe paid for it!
Then you do know what she died of? I asked.
NoI know nothing. I wanted not to know; I was glad enough I didnt; and I thanked heaven she was well out of this!
Yet you had, then, your idea
Of her real reason for leaving? Oh, yesas to that. She couldnt have stayed. Fancy it herefor a governess! And afterwards I imaginedand I still imagine. And what I imagine is dreadful.
Not so dreadful as what I do, I replied; on which I must have shown heras I was indeed but too consciousa front of miserable defeat. It brought out again all her compassion for me, and at the renewed touch of her kindness my power to resist broke down. I burst, as I had, the other time, made her burst, into tears; she took me to her motherly breast, and my lamentation overflowed. I dont do it! I sobbed in despair; I dont save or shield them! Its far worse than I dreamedtheyre lost!
VIII
What I had said to Mrs. Grose was true enough: there were in the matter I had put before her depths and possibilities that I lacked resolution to sound; so that when we met once more in the wonder of it we were of a common mind about the duty of resistance to extravagant fancies. We were to keep our heads if we should keep nothing elsedifficult indeed as that might be in the face of what, in our prodigious experience, was least to be questioned. Late that night, while the house slept, we had another talk in my room, when she went all the way with me as to its being beyond doubt that I had seen exactly what I had seen. To hold her perfectly in the pinch of that, I found I had only to ask her how, if I had made it up, I came to be able to give, of each of the persons appearing to me, a picture disclosing, to the last detail, their special marksa portrait on the exhibition of which she had instantly recognised and named them. She wished, of course,small blame to her!to sink the whole subject; and I was quick to assure her that my own interest in it had now violently taken the form of a search for the way to escape from it. I encountered her on the ground of a probability that with recurrencefor recurrence we took for grantedI should get used to my danger, distinctly professing that my personal exposure had suddenly become the least of my discomforts. It was my new suspicion that was intolerable; and yet even to this complication the later hours of the day had brought a little ease.
On leaving her, after my first outbreak, I had of course returned to my pupils, associating the right remedy for my dismay with that sense of their charm which I had already found to be a thing I could positively cultivate and which had never failed me yet. I had simply, in other words, plunged afresh into Floras special society and there become awareit was almost a luxury!that she could put her little conscious hand straight upon the spot that ached. She had looked at me in sweet speculation and then had accused me to my face of having cried. I had supposed I had brushed away the ugly signs: but I could literallyfor the time, at all eventsrejoice, under this fathomless charity, that they had not entirely disappeared. To gaze into the depths of blue of the childs eyes and pronounce their loveliness a trick of premature cunning was to be guilty of a cynicism in preference to which I naturally preferred to abjure my judgment and, so far as might be, my agitation. I couldnt abjure for merely wanting to, but I could repeat to Mrs. Groseas I did there, over and over, in the small hoursthat with their voices in the air, their pressure on ones heart and their fragrant faces against ones cheek, everything fell to the ground but their incapacity and their beauty. It was a pity that, somehow, to settle this once for all, I had equally to re-enumerate the signs of subtlety that, in the afternoon, by the lake, had made a miracle of my show of self-possession. It was a pity to be obliged to re-investigate the certitude of the moment itself and repeat how it had come to me as a revelation that the inconceivable communion I then surprised was a matter, for either party, of habit. It was a pity that I should have had to quaver out again the reasons for my not having, in my delusion, so much as questioned that the little girl saw our visitant even as I actually saw Mrs. Grose herself, and that she wanted, by just so much as she did thus see, to make me suppose she didnt, and at the same time, without showing anything, arrive at a guess as to whether I myself did! It was a pity that I needed once more to describe the portentous little activity by which she sought to divert my attentionthe perceptible increase of movement, the greater intensity of play, the singing, the gabbling of nonsense, and the invitation to romp.
Yet if I had not indulged, to prove there was nothing in it, in this review, I should have missed the two or three dim elements of comfort that still remained to me. I should not for instance have been able to asseverate to my friend that I was certainwhich was so much to the goodthat I at least had not betrayed myself. I should not have been prompted, by stress of need, by desperation of mind,I scarce know what to call it,to invoke such further aid to intelligence as might spring from pushing my colleague fairly to the wall. She had told me, bit by bit, under pressure, a great deal; but a small shifty spot on the wrong side of it all still sometimes brushed my brow like the wing of a bat; and I remember how on this occasionfor the sleeping house and the concentration alike of our danger and our watch seemed to helpI felt the importance of giving the last jerk to the curtain. I dont believe anything so horrible, I recollect saying; no, let us put it definitely, my dear, that I dont. But if I did, you know, theres a thing I should require now, just without sparing you the least bit moreoh, not a scrap, come!to get out of you. What was it you had in mind when, in our distress, before Miles came back, over the letter from his school, you said, under my insistence, that you didnt pretend for him that he had not literally ever been bad? He has not literally ever, in these weeks that I myself have lived with him and so closely watched him; he has been an imperturbable little prodigy of delightful, loveable goodness. Therefore you might perfectly have made the claim for him if you had not, as it happened, seen an exception to take. What was your exception, and to what passage in your personal observation of him did you refer?