The Turn of the Screw

by Henry James

The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be,

If the child gives the effect another turn of the screw, what do you say to TWO children—?" "We say, of course," somebody exclaimed, "that they give two turns! Also that we want to hear about them."

"For dreadful—dreadfulness!" "Oh, how delicious!" cried one of the women.

"For general uncanny ugliness and horror and pain."

we handshook and "candlestuck," as somebody said, and went to bed.

One could easily fix his type; it never, happily, dies out.

light faded—or rather, I should say, the day lingered

while I waited I thought of more things than one. But there's only one I take space to mention. I wondered why SHE should be scared.

She stood there in so much of her candor and so little of her nightgown,

she never blanched as she smiled out that at me.

The place, with its gray sky and withered garlands, its bared spaces and scattered dead leaves, was like a theater after the performance—all strewn with crumpled playbills.

and I continued unmolested; if unmolested one could call a young woman whose sensibility had, in the most extraordinary fashion, not declined but deepened.

What I had then had an ugly glimpse of was that my eyes might be sealed just while theirs were most opened.

but I always broke down in the monstrous utterance of names. As they died away on my lips, I said to myself that I should indeed help them to represent something infamous, if, by pronouncing them, I should violate as rare a little case of instinctive delicacy as any schoolroom, probably, had ever known.

one of our prodigious, palpable hushes occurred—I can call them nothing else—the strange, dizzy lift or swim (I try for terms!) into a stillness, a pause of all life,

What it was most impossible to get rid of was the cruel idea that, whatever I had seen, Miles and Flora saw MORE—things terrible and unguessable and that sprang from dreadful passages of intercourse in the past.

They were too beautiful to be posted; I kept them myself; I have them all to this hour.

it was only the relief that a snap brings to a strain or the burst of a thunderstorm to a day of suffocation. It was at least change, and it came with a rush.

It was a crisp, clear day, the first of its order for some time; the night had brought a touch of frost, and the autumn air, bright and sharp, made the church bells almost gay.

I had all but pinned the boy to my shawl

because I now see how, with the word he spoke, the curtain rose on the last act of my dreadful drama, and the catastrophe was precipitated. "Look here, my dear, you know," he charmingly said, "when in the world, please, am I going back to school?"

he threw off intonations as if he were tossing roses. There was something in them that always made one "catch," and I caught, at any rate, now so effectually that I stopped as short as if one of the trees of the park had fallen across the road.

"Ah, but that isn't everything! Of course YOU know a lot—" "But you hint that you know almost as much?" I risked as he paused. "Not half I want to!" Miles honestly professed.

I reflected hungrily that, for more than an hour, he would have to be silent; and I thought with envy of the comparative dusk of the pew and of the almost spiritual help of the hassock on which I might bend my knees. I seemed literally to be running a race with some confusion to which he was about to reduce me,

I heard myself break into a sound that, by the open door, rang through the long passage and the empty house.

"And should you like him to write our story?"

It was a gaiety in the gloom!

with a grace of sociability in which it occurred to me that Mrs. Grose, had she been present, might have looked in vain for proof that anything was "out."

I could say nothing for a minute, though I felt, as I held his hand and our eyes continued to meet, that my silence had all the air of admitting his charge and that nothing in the whole world of reality was perhaps at that moment so fabulous as our actual relation.

His clear, listening face, framed in its smooth whiteness, made him for the minute as appealing as some wistful patient in a children's hospital; and I would have given, as the resemblance came to me, all I possessed on earth really to be the nurse or the sister of charity who might have helped to cure him.

so unutterably touching was it to see his little brain puzzled and his little resources taxed to play, under the spell laid on him, a part of innocence and consistency.

his secret precocity (or whatever I might call the poison of an influence that I dared but half to phrase)

It struck me that at this he just faintly colored. He gave, at any rate, like a convalescent slightly fatigued, a languid shake of his head.

an extraordinary blast and chill, a gust of frozen air, and a shake of the room as great as if, in the wild wind, the casement had crashed in. The boy gave a loud, high shriek, which, lost in the rest of the shock of sound,

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;

by the dark prodigy I knew, the imagination of all evil HAD been opened up to him: all the justice within me ached for the proof that it could ever have flowered into an act.

He sat down at the old piano and played as he had never played; and if there are those who think he had better have been kicking a football I can only say that I wholly agree with them.

"'Divine'?" Mrs. Grose bewilderedly echoed. "Infernal, then!" I almost cheerfully rejoined.

"All alone—that child?" "She's not alone, and at such times she's not a child: she's an old, old woman."

smiled as if her performance was now complete. The next thing she did, however, was to stoop straight down and pluck—quite as if it were all she was there for—a big, ugly spray of withered fern.

the jostle of the cup that my hand, for weeks and weeks, had held high and full to the brim 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.

there was not, in all the long reach of her desire, an inch of her evil that fell short.

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.

I got up and looked a moment, through the twilight, at the gray pool and its blank, haunted edge, and then I took, back to the house, my dreary and difficult course.

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.

I was conscious of a mortal coldness and felt as if I should never again be warm.

It has made her, every inch of her, quite old."

"And him who thinks so well of you!" "He has an odd way—it comes over me now," I laughed,"—of proving it!

"Then, in spite of yesterday, you BELIEVE—" "In such doings?" Her simple description of them required, in the light of her expression, to be carried no further, and she gave me the whole thing as she had never done. "I believe."