The Turn of the Screw

I

II remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights anddrops, a little seesaw of the right throbs and the wrong.Afterrising, in town, to meet his appeal, I had at all events acouple of very bad days—found myself doubtful again, feltindeed sure I had made a mistake. In this state of mind I spent thelong hours of bumping, swinging coach that carried me to thestopping place at which I was to be met by a vehicle from thehouse. This convenience, I was told, had been ordered, and I found,toward the close of the June afternoon, a commodious fly in waitingfor me. Driving at that hour, on a lovely day, through a countrytowhich the summer sweetness seemed to offer me a friendly welcome,my fortitude mounted afresh and, as we turned into the avenue,encountered a reprieve that was probably but a proof of the pointto which it had sunk. I suppose I had expected, or had dreaded,something so melancholy that what greeted me was a good surprise. Iremember as a most pleasant impression the broad, clear front, itsopen windows and fresh curtains and the pair of maids looking out;I remember the lawn and the bright flowers and thecrunch of mywheels on the gravel and the clustered treetops over which therooks circled and cawed in the golden sky. The scene had agreatness that made it a different affair from my own scant home,and there immediately appeared at the door, with a little girl inher hand, a civil person who dropped me as decent a curtsy as if Ihad been the mistress or a distinguished visitor. I had received inHarley Street a narrower notion of the place, and that, as Irecalled it, made me think the proprietor still more of agentleman, suggested that what I was to enjoy might be somethingbeyond his promise.

I had no drop again till the next day, for I was carriedtriumphantly through the following hours by my introduction to theyounger of my pupils. The little girlwho accompanied Mrs. Groseappeared to me on the spot a creature so charming as to make it agreat fortune to have to do with her. She was the most beautifulchild I had ever seen, and I afterward wondered that my employerhad not told me more of her. I slept little that night—I wastoo much excited; and this astonished me, too, I recollect,remained with me, adding to my sense of the liberality with which Iwas treated. The large, impressive room, one of the best in thehouse, the great state bed, as I almost felt it, the full, figureddraperies, the long glasses in which, for the first time, I couldsee myself from head to foot, all struck me—like theextraordinary charm of my small charge—as so many thingsthrown in. It was thrown in as well, from the first moment, that Ishould get on with Mrs. Grose in a relation over which, on my way,in the coach, I fear I had rather brooded. The only thing indeedthat in this early outlook might have made me shrink again was theclear circumstance of her being so gladto see me. I perceivedwithin half an hour that she was so glad—stout, simple,plain, clean, wholesome woman—as to be positively on herguard against showing it too much. I wondered even then a littlewhy she should wish not to show it, and that, with reflection, withsuspicion, might of course have made me uneasy.

But it was a comfort that there could be no uneasiness in aconnection with anything so beatific as the radiant image of mylittle girl, the vision of whose angelic beauty had probably morethananything else to do with the restlessness that, before morning,made me several times rise and wander about my room to take in thewhole picture and prospect; to watch, from my open window, thefaint summer dawn, to look at such portions of the rest of thehouse as I could catch, and to listen, while, in the fading dusk,the first birds began to twitter, for the possible recurrence of asound or two, less natural and not without, but within, that I hadfancied I heard. There had been a moment when I believed Irecognized, faint and far, the cry of a child; there had beenanother when I found myself just consciously starting as at thepassage, before my door, of a light footstep. But these fancieswere not marked enough not to be thrown off, and it is only in thelight, or the gloom, I should rather say, of other and subsequentmatters that they now come back to me. To watch, teach,“form” little Flora would too evidently be the makingof a happy and useful life. It had been agreed between usdownstairs thatafter this first occasion I should have her as amatter of course at night, her small white bed being alreadyarranged, to that end, in my room. What I had undertaken was thewhole care of her, and she had remained, just this last time, withMrs. Grose only as an effect of our consideration for my inevitablestrangeness and her natural timidity. In spite of thistimidity—which the child herself, in the oddest way in theworld, had been perfectly frank and brave about, allowing it,without a sign of uncomfortable consciousness, with the deep, sweetserenity indeed of one of Raphael’s holy infants, to bediscussed, to be imputed to her, and to determine us—I feelquite sure she would presently like me. It was part of what Ialready liked Mrs. Grose herself for, the pleasure I could see herfeel in my admiration and wonder as I sat at supper with four tallcandles and with my pupil, in a high chair and a bib, brightlyfacing me, between them, over bread and milk. There were naturallythings that in Flora’s presence could pass between us only asprodigious and gratified looks, obscure and roundaboutallusions.

“And the little boy—does he look like her? Is he tooso very remarkable?”

One wouldn’t flatter a child. “Oh, miss, MOSTremarkable. If you think well of this one!”—and shestood there with a plate in her hand, beaming at our companion, wholooked from one of us to the other with placid heavenly eyes thatcontained nothing to check us.

“Yes; if I do—?”

“You WILL be carried away by the littlegentleman!”

“Well,that, I think, is what I came for—to becarried away. I’m afraid, however,” I remember feelingthe impulse to add, “I’m rather easily carried away. Iwas carried away in London!”

I can still see Mrs. Grose’s broad face as she took thisin. “In Harley Street?”

“In Harley Street.”

“Well, miss, you’re not the first—and youwon’t be the last.”

“Oh, I’ve no pretension,” I could laugh,“to being the only one. My other pupil, at any rate, as Iunderstand, comes back tomorrow?”

“Not tomorrow—Friday, miss. He arrives, as you did,by the coach, under care of the guard, and is to be met by the samecarriage.”

I forthwith expressed that the proper as well as the pleasantand friendly thing would be therefore that on the arrival of thepublic conveyance I should be inwaiting for him with his littlesister; an idea in which Mrs. Grose concurred so heartily that Isomehow took her manner as a kind of comforting pledge—neverfalsified, thank heaven!—that we should on every question bequite at one. Oh, she was glad I wasthere!

What I felt the next day was, I suppose, nothing that could befairly called a reaction from the cheer of my arrival; it wasprobably at the most only a slight oppression produced by a fullermeasure of the scale, as I walked round them, gazed up atthem, tookthem in, of my new circumstances. They had, as it were, an extentand mass for which I had not been prepared and in the presence ofwhich I found myself, freshly, a little scared as well as a littleproud. Lessons, in this agitation, certainlysuffered some delay; Ireflected that my first duty was, by the gentlest arts I couldcontrive, to win the child into the sense of knowing me. I spentthe day with her out-of-doors; I arranged with her, to her greatsatisfaction, that it should be she, sheonly, who might show me theplace. She showed it step by step and room by room and secret bysecret, with droll, delightful, childish talk about it and with theresult, in half an hour, of our becoming immense friends. Young asshe was, I was struck, throughout our little tour, with herconfidence and courage with the way, in empty chambers and dullcorridors, on crooked staircases that made me pause and even on thesummit of an old machicolated square tower that made me dizzy, hermorning music, her disposition to tell me so many more things thanshe asked, rang out and led me on. I have not seen Bly since theday I left it, and I daresay that to my older and more informedeyes it would now appear sufficiently contracted. But as my littleconductress, withher hair of gold and her frock of blue, dancedbefore me round corners and pattered down passages, I had the viewof a castle of romance inhabited by a rosy sprite, such a place aswould somehow, for diversion of the young idea, take all color outof storybooks and fairytales. Wasn’t it just a storybook overwhich I had fallen adoze and adream? No; it was a big, ugly,antique, but convenient house, embodying a few features of abuilding still older, half-replaced and half-utilized, in which Ihad the fancyof our being almost as lost as a handful of passengersin a great drifting ship. Well, I was, strangely, at the helm!