The Turn of the Screw

by Henry James

If the child gives the effect another turn of the screw, what do you say to TWO children—?”

“The story WON’T tell,” said Douglas; “not in any literal, vulgar way.” “More’s the pity, then. That’s the only way I ever understand.”

There had been a moment when I believed I recognized, faint and far, the cry of a child;

“In answer to the letter?” I had made up my mind. “Nothing.” “And to his uncle?” I was incisive. “Nothing.” “And to the boy himself?” I was wonderful. “Nothing.”

An unknown man in a lonely place is a permitted object of fear to a young woman privately bred;

Was there a “secret” at Bly—a mystery of Udolpho or an insane, an unmentionable relative kept in unsuspected confinement?

he was only too fine and fair for the little horrid, unclean school world, and he had paid a price for it.

Of course I was under the spell, and the wonderful part is that, even at the time, I perfectly knew I was.

his stare into my face, through the glass and across the room, was as deep and hard as then, but it quitted me for a moment during which I could still watch it, see it fix successively several other things. On the spot there came to me the added shock of a certitude that it was not for me he had come there. He had come for someone else.

“Died?” I almost shrieked. She seemed fairly to square herself, plant herself more firmly to utter the wonder of it. “Yes. Mr. Quint is dead.”

The result of our having everything out was simply to reduce our situation to the last rigor of its elements.

It was the idea, the second movement, that led me straight out, as I may say, of the inner chamber of my dread.

This gave me, straight from my vision of his face—SUCH a face!—a sudden sickness of disgust. “Too free with MY boy?” “Too free with everyone!”

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 was a screen—I was to stand before them. The more I saw, the less they would.

“Flora SAW!” Mrs. Grose took it as she might have taken a blow in the stomach. “She has told you?” she panted. “Not a word—that’s the horror. She kept it to herself! The child of eight, THAT child!” Unutterable still, for me, was the stupefaction of it.

“Then ask Flora—SHE’S sure!” But I had no sooner spoken than I caught myself up. “No, for God’s sake, DON’T! She’ll say she isn’t—she’ll lie!”

“Because I’m clear. Flora doesn’t want me to know.”

“The fellow was a hound.” Mrs. Grose considered as if it were perhaps a little a case for a sense of shades. “I’ve never seen one like him. He did what he wished.” “With HER?” “With them all.”

They’re not mine—they’re not ours. They’re his and they’re hers!” “Quint’s and that woman’s?” “Quint’s and that woman’s. They want to get to them.”

Oh, how, at this, poor Mrs. Grose appeared to study them! “But for what?” “For the love of all the evil that, in those dreadful days, the pair put into them. And to ply them with that evil still, to keep up the work of demons, is what brings the others back.”

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.

But all this belonged—I mean their magnificent little surrender—just to the special array of the facts that were most abysmal.

“It came to that. I found her, on my return, in the schoolroom.” “And what did she say?” I can hear the good woman still, and the candor of her stupefaction. “That she suffers the torments—!” It was this, of a truth, that made her, as she filled out my picture, gape. “Do you mean,” she faltered, “—of the lost?” “Of the lost. Of the damned. And that’s why, to share them-” I faltered myself with the horror of it.

“For wickedness. For what else—when he’s so clever and beautiful and perfect? Is he stupid? Is he untidy? Is he infirm? Is he ill-natured? He’s exquisite—so it can be only THAT; and that would open up the whole thing. After all,” I said, “it’s their uncle’s fault. If he left here such people—!”

I could only get on at all by taking “nature” into my confidence and my account, by treating my monstrous ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, but demanding, after all, for a fair front, only another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue.

We continued silent while the maid was with us—as silent, it whimsically occurred to me, as some young couple who, on their wedding journey, at the inn, feel shy in the presence of the waiter.

With the stroke of the loss I was so proud of he uttered the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss, and the grasp with which I recovered him might have been that of catching him in his fall. I caught him, yes, I held him—it may be imagined with what a passion; but at the end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was that I held. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.