The Turn of the Screw | Chapter XIV
Chapter XIV
WALKING TO CHURCH a certain Sunday morning, I had little Miles at my side and his sister, in advance of us and at Mrs. Grose’s, well in sight. 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. It was an odd accident of thought that I should have happened at such a moment to be particularly and very gratefully struck with the obedience of my little charges. Why did they never resent my inexorable, my perpetual society? Something or other had brought nearer home to me that I had all but pinned the boy to my shawl, and that in the way our companions were marshalled before me I might have appeared to provide against some danger of rebellion. I was like a gaoler with an eye to possible surprises and escapes. But all this belonged—I mean their magnificent little surrender—just to the special array of the facts that were most abysmal. Turned out for Sunday by his uncle’s tailor, who had had a free hand and a notion of pretty waistcoats and of his grand little air, Miles’s whole title to independence, the rights of his sex and situation, were so stamped upon him that if he had suddenly struck for freedom I should have had nothing to say. I was by the strangest of chances wondering how I should meet him when the revolution unmistakably occurred. I call it a revolution 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?”
Transcribed here the speech sounds harmless enough, particularly as uttered in the sweet, high, casual pipe with which, at all interlocutors, but above all at his eternal governess, 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. There was something new, on the spot, between us, and he was perfectly aware I recognised it, though to enable me to do so he had no need to look a whit less candid and charming than usual. I could feel in him how he already, from my at first finding nothing to reply, perceived the advantage he had gained. I was so slow to find anything that he had plenty of time, after a minute, to continue with his suggestive but inconclusive smile: “You know, my dear, that for a fellow to be with a lady always—!” His “my dear” was constantly on his lips for me, and nothing could have expressed more the exact shade of the sentiment with which I desired to inspire my pupils than its fond familiarity. It was so respectfully easy.
But oh how I felt that at present I must pick my own phrases! I remember that, to gain time, I tried to laugh, and I seemed to see in the beautiful face with which he watched me how ugly and queer I looked. “And always with the same lady?” I returned.
He neither blanched nor winked. The whole thing was virtually out between us. “Ah of course she’s a jolly, ‘perfect’ lady; but after all I’m a fellow, don’t you see? who’s—well, getting on.”
I lingered there with him an instant ever so kindly. “Yes, you’re getting on.” Oh, but I felt helpless!
I have kept to this day the heartbreaking little idea of how he seemed to know that and to play with it. “And you can’t say I’ve not been awfully good, can you?”
I laid my hand on his shoulder, for though I felt how much better it would have been to walk on I was not yet quite able. “No, I can’t say that, Miles.”
“Except just that one night, you know—!”
“That one night?” I couldn’t look as straight as he.
“Why when I went down—went out of the house.”
“Oh, yes. But I forget what you did it for.”
“You forget?”—he spoke with the sweet extravagance of childish reproach. “Why it was just to show you I could!”
“Oh yes—you could.”
“And I can again.”
I felt I might perhaps after all succeed in keeping my wits about me. “Certainly. But you won’t.”
“No, not that again. It was nothing.”
“It was nothing,” I said. “But we must go on.”
He resumed our walk with me, passing his hand into my arm. “Then when am I going back?”
I wore, in turning it over, my most responsible air. “Were you very happy at school?”
He just considered. “Oh I’m happy enough anywhere!”
“Well then,” I quavered, “if you’re just as happy here—!”
“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. “But it isn’t so much that.”
“What is it then?”
“Well—I want to see more life.”
“I see; I see.” We had arrived within sight of the church and of various persons, including several of the household of Bly, on their way to it and clustered about the door to see us go in. I quickened our step; I wanted to get there before the question between us opened up much further; I reflected hungrily that he would have for more than an hour 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, but I felt he had got in first when, before we had entered the churchyard, he threw out—
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