He was looking for someone else, you saysomeone who was not you?
He was looking for little Miles. A portentous clearness now possessed me. Thats whom he was looking for.
But how do you know?
I know, I know, I know! My exaltation grew. And you know, my dear!
She didnt deny this, but I required, I felt, not even so much telling as that. She resumed in a moment, at any rate: What if he should see him?
Little Miles? Thats what he wants!
She looked immensely scared again. The child?
Heaven forbid![52] The man. He wants to appear to them. That he might was an awful conception, and yet, somehow, I could keep it at bay;[53] which, moreover, as we lingered there, was what I succeeded in practically proving. I had an absolute certainty that I should see again what I had already seen, but something within me said that by offering myself bravely as the sole subject of such experience, by accepting, by inviting, by surmounting it all, I should serve as an expiatory victim and guard the tranquility of my companions. The children, in especial, I should thus fence about and absolutely save. I recall one of the last things I said that night to Mrs. Grose.
It does strike me that my pupils have never mentioned
She looked at me hard as I musingly pulled up. 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 doesnt remember. She never heard or knew.
The circumstances of his death? I thought with some intensity. Perhaps not. But Miles would rememberMiles would know.
Ah, dont try him![54] broke from Mrs. Grose.
I returned her the look she had given me. Dont be afraid. I continued to think. It is rather odd.
That he has never spoken of him?
Never by the least allusion. And you tell me they were great friends?
Oh, it wasnt him! Mrs. Grose with emphasis declared. It was Quints own fancy. To play with him, I meanto spoil him. She paused a moment; then she added: Quint was much too free.[55]
This gave me, straight from my vision of his facesuch a face!a sudden sickness of disgust. Too free with my boy?
Too free with everyone!
I forbore, for the moment, to analyze this description further than by the reflection that a part of it applied to several of the members of the household, of the half-dozen maids and men who were still of our small colony. But there was everything, for our apprehension, in the lucky fact that no discomfortable legend, no perturbation of scullions, had ever, within anyones memory attached to the kind old place. It had neither bad name nor ill fame,[56] and Mrs. Grose, most apparently, only desired to cling to me and to quake in silence. I even put her, the very last thing of all, to the test. It was when, at midnight, she had her hand on the schoolroom door to take leave. I have it from you thenfor its of great importancethat he was definitely and admittedly bad?
Oh, not admittedly. I knew itbut the master didnt.
And you never told him?
Well, he didnt like tale-bearinghe hated complaints.[57] He was terribly short with anything of that kind, and if people were all right to him
He wouldnt be bothered with more? This squared well enough with my impressions of him: he was not a trouble-loving gentleman, nor so very particular perhaps about some of the company he kept. All the same, I pressed my interlocutress. I promise you I would have told!
She felt my discrimination. I daresay I was wrong. But, really, I was afraid.
Afraid of what?
Of things that man could do. Quint was so cleverhe was so deep.[58]
I took this in still more than, probably, I showed. You werent afraid of anything else? Not of his effect?
His effect? she repeated with a face of anguish and waiting while I faltered.
On innocent little precious lives. They were in your charge.
No, they were not in mine! she roundly and distressfully returned. The master believed in him and placed him here because he was supposed not to be well and the country air so good for him. So he had everything to say. Yesshe let me have iteven about them.
Themthat creature? I had to smother a kind of howl. And you could bear it!
No. I couldntand I cant now! And the poor woman burst into tears.
A rigid control, from the next day, was, as I have said, to follow them;[59] yet how often and how passionately, for a week, we came back together to the subject! Much as we had discussed it that Sunday night, I was, in the immediate later hours in especialfor it may be imagined whether I sleptstill haunted with the shadow of something she had not told me. I myself had kept back nothing, but there was a word Mrs. Grose had kept back. I was sure, moreover, by morning, that this was not from a failure of frankness, but because on every side there were fears. It seems to me indeed, in retrospect, that by the time the morrows sun was high I had restlessly read into the fact before us almost all the meaning they were to receive from subsequent and more cruel occurrences. What they gave me above all was just the sinister figure of the living manthe dead one would keep awhile!and of the months he had continuously passed at Bly, which, added up, made a formidable stretch. The limit of this evil time had arrived only when, on the dawn of a winters morning, Peter Quint was found, by a laborer going to early work, stone dead on the road from the village: a catastrophe explainedsuperficially at leastby a visible wound to his head; such a wound as might have been producedand as, on the final evidence, had beenby a fatal slip, in the dark and after leaving the public house, on the steepish icy slope, a wrong path altogether, at the bottom of which he lay. The icy slope, the turn mistaken at night and in liquor, accounted for muchpractically, in the end and after the inquest and boundless chatter, for everything; but there had been matters in his lifestrange passages and perils, secret disorders, vices more than suspectedthat would have accounted for a good deal more.
I scarce know how to put my story into words that shall be a credible picture of my state of mind; but I was in these days literally able to find a joy in the extraordinary flight of heroism the occasion demanded of me. I now saw that I had been asked for a service admirable and difficult; and there would be a greatness in letting it be seenoh, in the right quarter!that I could succeed where many another girl might have failed. It was an immense help to meI confess I rather applaud myself as I look back!that I saw my service so strongly and so simply. I was there to protect and defend the little creatures in the world the most bereaved and the most lovable, the appeal of whose helplessness had suddenly become only too explicit, a deep, constant ache of ones own committed heart. We were cut off, really, together; we were united in our danger. They had nothing but me, and Iwell, I had them. It was in short a magnificent chance. This chance presented itself to me in an image richly material. I was a screenI was to stand before them.[60] The more I saw, the less they would. I began to watch them in a stifled suspense, a disguised excitement that might well, had it continued too long, have turned to something like madness. What saved me, as I now see, was that it turned to something else altogether. It didnt last as suspenseit was superseded by horrible proofs. Proofs, I say, yesfrom the moment I really took hold.
This moment dated from an afternoon hour that I happened to spend in the grounds with the younger of my pupils alone. We had left Miles indoors, on the red cushion of a deep window seat; he had wished to finish a book, and I had been glad to encourage a purpose so laudable in a young man whose only defect was an occasional excess of the restless. His sister, on the contrary, had been alert to come out, and I strolled with her half an hour, seeking the shade, for the sun was still high and the day exceptionally warm. I was aware afresh, with her, as we went, of how, like her brother, she contrivedit was the charming thing in both childrento let me alone without appearing to drop me and to accompany me without appearing to surround. They were never importunate and yet never listless. My attention to them all really went to seeing them amuse themselves immensely without me: this was a spectacle they seemed actively to prepare and that engaged me as an active admirer. I walked in a world of their inventionthey had no occasion whatever to draw upon mine; so that my time was taken only with being, for them, some remarkable person or thing that the game of the moment required and that was merely, thanks to my superior, my exalted stamp, a happy and highly distinguished sinecure. I forget what I was on the present occasion; 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, and, as we had lately begun geography, the lake was the Sea of Azof.[61]
Suddenly, in these circumstances, I became aware that, on the other side of the Sea of Azof, we had an interested spectator.[62] The way this knowledge gathered in me was the strangest thing in the worldthe strangest, that is, except the very much stranger in which it quickly merged itself. I had sat down with a piece of workfor I was something or other that could siton the old stone bench which overlooked the pond; and in this position I began to take in with certitude, and yet without direct vision, the presence, at a distance, of a third person. The old trees, the thick shrubbery, made a great and pleasant shade, but it was all suffused with the brightness of the hot, still hour. There was no ambiguity in anything; none whatever, at least, in the conviction I from one moment to another found myself forming as to what I should see straight before me and across the lake as a consequence of raising my eyes. They were attached at this juncture to the stitching in which I was engaged, and I can feel once more the spasm of my effort not to move them till I should so have steadied myself as to be able to make up my mind what to do. There was an alien object in viewa figure whose right of presence I instantly, passionately questioned. I recollect counting over perfectly the possibilities, reminding myself that nothing was more natural, for instance, then the appearance of one of the men about the place, or even of a messenger, a postman, or a tradesmans boy, from the village. That reminder had as little effect on my practical certitude as I was consciousstill even without lookingof its having upon the character and attitude of our visitor. Nothing was more natural than that these things should be the other things that they absolutely were not.
Of the positive identity of the apparition I would assure myself as soon as the small clock of my courage should have ticked out the right second; meanwhile, with an effort that was already sharp enough, I transferred my eyes straight to little Flora, who, at the moment, was about ten yards away. My heart had stood still for an instant with the wonder and terror of the question whether she too would see; and I held my breath while I waited for what a cry from her, what some sudden innocent sign either of interest or of alarm, would tell me. I waited, but nothing came; then, in the first placeand there is something more dire in this, I feel, than in anything I have to relateI was determined by a sense that, within a minute, all sounds from her had previously dropped; and, in the second, by the circumstance that, also within the minute, she had, in her play, turned her back to the water. This was her attitude when I at last looked at herlooked with the confirmed conviction that we were still, together, under direct personal notice. She had picked up a small flat piece of wood, which happened to have in it a little hole that had evidently suggested to her the idea of sticking in another fragment that might figure as a mast and make the thing a boat. This second morsel, as I watched her, she was very markedly and intently attempting to tighten in its place. My apprehension of what she was doing sustained me so that after some seconds I felt I was ready for more. Then I again shifted my eyesI faced what I had to face.
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.[63] 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 unmistakable 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.[64]
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.[65] 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.[66] 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.[67]
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 recognized 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.