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.[68]
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 afterward 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![69]
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 recognized and named them. She wished of coursesmall 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 reinvestigate 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 attention[70]the 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 mindI scarce know what to call itto 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, lovable 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?
It was a dreadfully austere inquiry, but levity was not our note, and, at any rate, before the gray dawn admonished us to separate I had got my answer. What my friend had had in mind proved to be immensely to the purpose. It was neither more nor less than the circumstance that for a period of several months Quint and the boy had been perpetually together. It was in fact the very appropriate truth that she had ventured to criticize the propriety, to hint at the incongruity, of so close an alliance, and even to go so far on the subject as a frank overture to Miss Jessel. Miss Jessel had, with a most strange manner, requested her to mind her business, and the good woman had, on this, directly approached little Miles. What she had said to him, since I pressed, was that she liked to see young gentlemen not forget their station.
I pressed again, of course, at this. You reminded him that Quint was only a base menial?
As you might say! And it was his answer, for one thing, that was bad.
And for another thing? I waited. He repeated your words to Quint?
No, not that. Its just what he wouldnt! she could still impress upon me. I was sure, at any rate, she added, that he didnt. But he denied certain occasions.
What occasions?
When they had been about together quite as if Quint were his tutorand a very grand oneand Miss Jessel only for the little lady. When he had gone off with the fellow, I mean, and spent hours with him.
He then prevaricated about ithe said he hadnt? Her assent was clear enough to cause me to add in a moment: I see. He lied.
Oh! Mrs. Grose mumbled. This was a suggestion that it didnt matter; which indeed she backed up by a further remark. You see, after all, Miss Jessel didnt mind. She didnt forbid him.
I considered. Did he put that to you as a justification?
At this she dropped again. No, he never spoke of it.
Never mentioned her in connection with Quint?
She saw, visibly flushing, where I was coming out. Well, he didnt show anything. He denied, she repeated; he denied.
Lord, how I pressed her now! So that you could see he knew what was between the two wretches?
I dont knowI dont know! the poor woman groaned.
You do know, you dear thing, I replied; only you havent my dreadful boldness of mind, and you keep back, out of timidity and modesty and delicacy, even the impression that, in the past, when you had, without my aid, to flounder about in silence, most of all made you miserable. But I shall get it out of you yet! There was something in the boy that suggested to you, I continued, that he covered and concealed their relation.
Oh, he couldnt prevent
Your learning the truth? I daresay! But, heavens, I fell, with vehemence, athinking,[71] what it shows that they must, to that extent, have succeeded in making of him!
Ah, nothing thats not nice now! Mrs. Grose lugubriously pleaded.
I dont wonder you looked queer, I persisted, when I mentioned to you the letter from his school!
I doubt if I looked as queer as you! she retorted with homely force. And if he was so bad then as that comes to, how is he such an angel now?
Yes, indeedand if he was a fiend at school! How, how, how? Well, I said in my torment, you must put it to me again, but I shall not be able to tell you for some days. Only, put it to me again! I cried in a way that made my friend stare. There are directions in which I must not for the present let myself go. Meanwhile I returned to her first examplethe one to which she had just previously referredof the boys happy capacity for an occasional slip. If Quinton your remonstrance at the time you speak ofwas a base menial, one of the things Miles said to you, I find myself guessing, was that you were another. Again her admission was so adequate that I continued: And you forgave him that?
Wouldnt you?
Oh, yes! And we exchanged there, in the stillness, a sound of the oddest amusement. Then I went on: At all events, while he was with the man
Miss Flora was with the woman. It suited them all!
It suited me, too, I felt, only too well; by which I mean that it suited exactly the particularly deadly view I was in the very act of forbidding myself to entertain. But I so far succeeded in checking the expression of this view that I will throw, just here, no further light on it than may be offered by the mention of my final observation to Mrs. Grose. His having lied and been impudent are, I confess, less engaging specimens than I had hoped to have from you of the outbreak in him of the little natural man. Still, I mused, They must do, for they make me feel more than ever that I must watch.
It made me blush, the next minute, to see in my friends face how much more unreservedly she had forgiven him than her anecdote struck me as presenting to my own tenderness an occasion for doing. This came out when, at the schoolroom door, she quitted me. Surely you dont accuse him
Of carrying on an intercourse that he conceals from me? Ah, remember that, until further evidence, I now accuse nobody. Then, before shutting her out to go, by another passage, to her own place, I must just wait, I wound up.
IX
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. I have spoken of the surrender to their extraordinary childish grace as a thing I could actively cultivate, and it may be imagined if I neglected now to address myself to this source for whatever it would yield. Stranger than I can express, certainly, was the effort to struggle against my new lights; it would doubtless have been, however, a greater tension still had it not been so frequently successful. I used to wonder how my little charges could help guessing that I thought strange things about them; and the circumstances that these things only made them more interesting was not by itself a direct aid to keeping them in the dark. I trembled lest they should see that they were so immensely more interesting. Putting things at the worst, at all events, as in meditation I so often did, any clouding of their innocence could only beblameless and foredoomed as they werea reason the more for taking risks. There were moments when, by an irresistible impulse, I found myself catching them up and pressing them to my heart. As soon as I had done so I used to say to myself: What will they think of that? Doesnt it betray too much? It would have been easy to get into a sad, wild tangle about how much I might betray; but the real account, I feel, of the hours of peace that I could still enjoy was that the immediate charm of my companions was a beguilement still effective even under the shadow of the possibility that it was studied. For if it occurred to me that I might occasionally excite suspicion by the little outbreaks of my sharper passion for them, so too I remember wondering if I mightnt see a queerness in the traceable increase of their own demonstrations.
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. The homage of which they were so lavish succeeded, in truth, for my nerves, quite as well as if I never appeared to myself, as I may say, literally to catch them at a purpose in it. They had never, I think, wanted to do so many things for their poor protectress; I meanthough they got their lessons better and better, which was naturally what would please her mostin 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. I should never get to the bottomwere I to let myself go even nowof the prodigious private commentary, all under still more private correction, with which, in these days, I overscored their full hours. They had shown me from the first a facility for everything, a general faculty which, taking a fresh start, achieved remarkable flights. 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. They not only popped out at me as tigers and as Romans, but as Shakespeareans, astronomers, and navigators. 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. What I remember is that I was content not, for the time, to open the question, and that contentment must have sprung from the sense of his perpetually striking show of cleverness. He was too clever for a bad governess, for a parsons daughter, to spoil; and the strangest if not the brightest thread in the pensive embroidery I just spoke of was the impression I might have got, if I had dared to work it out, that he was under some influence operating in his small intellectual life as a tremendous incitement.[72]