The Turn of the Screw

by Henry James

“I quite agree—in regard to Griffin’s ghost, or whatever it was—that its appearing first to the little boy, at so tender an age, adds a particular touch.

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

“A woman’s. She has been dead these twenty years. She sent me the pages in question before she died.” They were all listening now, and of course there was somebody to be arch, or at any rate to draw the inference.

Hmm

“What is your title?” “I haven’t one.” “Oh, I have!” I said. But Douglas, without heeding me, had begun to read with a fine clearness that was like a rendering to the ear of the beauty of his author’s hand.

“You like them with the spirit to be naughty?” Then, keeping pace with her answer, “So do I!” I eagerly brought out. “But not to the degree to contaminate—” “To contaminate?”—my big word left her at a loss. I explained it. “To corrupt.” She stared, taking my meaning in; but it produced in her an odd laugh. “Are you afraid he’ll corrupt you?”

It may be, of course, above all, that what suddenly broke into this gives the previous time a charm of stillness—that hush in which something gathers or crouches. The change was actually like the spring of a beast.

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

mystery of Udolpho

??? The castle of udolpho?

deep obscurity continued to cover the region of the boy’s conduct at school.

Hmmmm

Of course I was under the spell, and the wonderful part is that, even at the time, I perfectly knew I was. But I gave myself up to it; it was an antidote to any pain, and I had more pains than one.

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.

True or everything ins her imagination

I wondered why she should be scared.

“God knows where! He died.” “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.”

Ouch

Nothing was more natural than that these things should be the other things that they absolutely were not.

I remember that the book I had in my hand was Fielding’s Amelia; also that I was wholly awake.

?????

“Oh, I arranged that with Flora.” His answers rang out with a readiness! “She was to get up and look out.” “Which is what she did do.” It was I who fell into the trap!

He’s not reading to her,” I declared; “they’re talking of them—they’re talking horrors! I go on, I know, as if I were crazy; and it’s a wonder I’m not. What I’ve seen would have made you so; but it has only made me more lucid, made me get hold of still other things.”

“They haven’t been good—they’ve only been absent. It has been easy to live with them, because they’re simply leading a life of their own. They’re not mine—they’re not ours. They’re his and they’re hers!”

She had been scanning the distance, but she now dropped on me a foolish face. “You, miss.” “By writing to him that his house is poisoned and his little nephew and niece mad?” “But if they are, miss?” “And if I am myself, you mean? That’s charming news to be sent him by a governess whose prime undertaking was to give him no worry.”

He is trying to catch the owner

“But you hint that you know almost as much?” I risked as he paused. “Not half I want to!” Miles honestly professed. “But it isn’t so much that.” “What is it, then?” “Well—I want to see more life.”

Precocious

“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—!”

Thats why he is expelled

I measured this. “Do you mean you’ll write—?” Remembering she couldn’t, I caught myself up. “How do you communicate?”

Que plomo esta Sra

candle; I crossed the passage and listened a minute at Miles’s door. What, under my endless obsession, I had been impelled to listen for was some betrayal of his not being at rest, and I presently caught one, but not in the form I had expected.

Geting paranoid

“Oh, I don’t want to go back!” he broke in. “I want a new field.” He said it with admirable serenity, with positive unimpeachable gaiety; and doubtless it was that very note that most evoked for me the poignancy, the unnatural childish tragedy, of his probable reappearance at the end of three months with all this bravado and still more dishonor.

The boy gave a loud, high shriek, which, lost in the rest of the shock of sound, might have seemed, indistinctly, though I was so close to him, a note either of jubilation or of terror. I jumped to my feet again and was conscious of darkness. So for a moment we remained, while I stared about me and saw that the drawn curtains were unstirred and the window tight. “Why, the candle’s out!” I then cried. “It was I who blew it, dear!” said Miles.

Creepy

We sat there in absolute stillness; yet he wanted, I felt, to be with me.

Hmmm

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.