It was all very well to join them, but speaking to them proved quite as
much as ever an effort beyond my strength--offered, in close quarters,
difficulties as insurmountable as before. This situation continued a
month, and with new aggravations and particular notes, the note above
all, sharper and sharper, of the small ironic consciousness on the
part of my pupils. It was not, I am as sure today as I was sure then,
my mere infernal imagination: it was absolutely traceable that they
were aware of my predicament and that this strange relation made, in
a manner, for a long time, the air in which we moved. I don’t mean
that they had their tongues in their cheeks or did anything vulgar, for
that was not one of their dangers: I do mean, on the other hand, that
the element of the unnamed and untouched became, between us, greater
than any other, and that so much avoidance could not have been so
successfully effected without a great deal of tacit arrangement. It was
as if, at moments, we were perpetually coming into sight of subjects
before which we must stop short, turning suddenly out of alleys that
we perceived to be blind, closing with a little bang that made us look
at each other--for, like all bangs, it was something louder than we
had intended--the doors we had indiscreetly opened. All roads lead to
Rome, and there were times when it might have struck us that almost
every branch of study or subject of conversation skirted forbidden
ground. Forbidden ground was the question of the return of the dead in
general and of whatever, in especial, might survive, in memory, of the
friends little children had lost. There were days when I could have
sworn that one of them had, with a small invisible nudge, said to the
other: “She thinks she’ll do it this time--but she _won’t_!” To
“do it” would have been to indulge for instance--and for once in a
way--in some direct reference to the lady who had prepared them for my
discipline. They had a delightful endless appetite for passages in my
own history, to which I had again and again treated them; they were
in possession of everything that had ever happened to me, had had,
with every circumstance the story of my smallest adventures and of
those of my brothers and sisters and of the cat and the dog at home,
as well as many particulars of the eccentric nature of my father, of
the furniture and arrangement of our house, and of the conversation
of the old women of our village. There were things enough, taking
one with another, to chatter about, if one went very fast and knew
by instinct when to go round. They pulled with an art of their own
the strings of my invention and my memory; and nothing else perhaps,
when I thought of such occasions afterwards, gave me so the suspicion
of being watched from under cover. It was in any case over _my_ life,
_my_ past, and _my_ friends alone that we could take anything like
our ease--a state of affairs that led them sometimes without the least
pertinence to break out into sociable reminders. I was invited--with no
visible connection--to repeat afresh Goody Gosling’s celebrated _mot_
or to confirm the details already supplied as to the cleverness of the
vicarage pony.
It was partly at such junctures as these and partly at quite different
ones that, with the turn my matters had now taken, my predicament,
as I have called it, grew most sensible. The fact that the days passed
for me without another encounter ought, it would have appeared, to have
done something toward soothing my nerves. Since the light brush, that
second night on the upper landing, of the presence of a woman at the
foot of the stair, I had seen nothing, whether in or out of the house,
that one had better not have seen. There was many a corner round which
I expected to come upon Quint, and many a situation that, in a merely
sinister way, would have favoured the appearance of Miss Jessel. The
summer had turned, the summer had gone; the autumn had dropped upon
Bly and had blown out half our lights. The place, with its grey sky
and withered garlands, its bared spaces and scattered dead leaves,
was like a theatre after the performance--all strewn with crumpled
playbills. There were exactly states of the air, conditions of sound
and of stillness, unspeakable impressions of the _kind_ of ministering
moment, that brought back to me, long enough to catch it, the feeling
of the medium in which, that June evening out-of-doors, I had had my
first sight of Quint, and in which, too, at those other instants, I
had, after seeing him through the window, looked for him in vain in the
circle of shrubbery. I recognised the signs, the portents--I recognised
the moment, the spot. But they remained unaccompanied and empty, and I
continued unmolested; if unmolested one could call a young woman whose
sensibility had, in the most extraordinary fashion, not declined but
deepened. I had said in my talk with Mrs. Grose on that horrid scene
of Flora’s by the lake--and had perplexed her by so saying--that it
would from that moment distress me much more to lose my power than
to keep it. I had then expressed what was vividly in my mind: the
truth that, whether the children really saw or not--since, that is,
it was not yet definitely proved--I greatly preferred, as a safeguard,
the fulness of my own exposure. I was ready to know the very worst
that was to be known. What I had then had an ugly glimpse of was that
my eyes might be sealed just while theirs were most opened. Well, my
eyes _were_ sealed, it appeared, at present--a consummation for which
it seemed blasphemous not to thank God. There was, alas, a difficulty
about that: I would have thanked him with all my soul had I not had in
a proportionate measure this conviction of the secret of my pupils.
How can I retrace today the strange steps of my obsession? There were
times of our being together when I would have been ready to swear that,
literally, in my presence, but with my direct sense of it closed,
they had visitors who were known and were welcome. Then it was that,
had I not been deterred by the very chance that such an injury might
prove greater than the injury to be averted, my exultation would have
broken out. “They’re here, they’re here, you little wretches,”
I would have cried, “and you can’t deny it now!” The little
wretches denied it with all the added volume of their sociability
and their tenderness, in just the crystal depths of which--like the
flash of a fish in a stream--the mockery of their advantage peeped
up. The shock, in truth, had sunk into me still deeper than I knew on
the night when, looking out to see either Quint or Miss Jessel under
the stars, I had beheld the boy over whose rest I watched and who had
immediately brought in with him--had straightway, there, turned it on
me--the lovely upward look with which, from the battlements above me,
the hideous apparition of Quint had played. If it was a question of a
scare, my discovery on this occasion had scared me more than any other,
and it was in the condition of nerves produced by it that I made my
actual inductions. They harassed me so that sometimes, at odd moments,
I shut myself up audibly to rehearse--it was at once a fantastic relief
and a renewed despair--the manner in which I might come to the point. I
approached it from one side and the other while, in my room, I flung
myself about, 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. When I said to myself:
“_They_ have the manners to be silent, and you, trusted as you are,
the baseness to speak!” I felt myself crimson and I covered my face
with my hands. After these secret scenes I chattered more than ever,
going on volubly enough till 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, that
had nothing to do with the more or less noise that at the moment we
might be engaged in making and that I could hear through any deepened
exhilaration or quickened recitation or louder strum of the piano. Then
it was that the others, the outsiders, were there. Though they were not
angels, they “passed,” as the French, say, causing me, while they
stayed, to tremble with the fear of their addressing to their younger
victims some yet more infernal message or more vivid image than they
had thought good enough for myself.
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. Such things naturally left on the surface, for the time,
a chill which we vociferously denied that we felt; and we had, all
three, with repetition, got into such splendid training that we went,
each time, almost automatically, to mark the close of the incident,
through the very same movements. It was striking of the children, at
all events, to kiss me inveterately with a kind of wild irrelevance
and never to fail--one or the other--of the precious question that
had helped us through many a peril. “When do you think he _will_
come? Don’t you think we _ought_ to write?”--there was nothing
like that inquiry, we found by experience, for carrying off an
awkwardness. “He” of course was their uncle in Harley Street;
and we lived in much profusion of theory that he might at any moment
arrive to mingle in our circle. It was impossible to have given less
encouragement than he had done to such a doctrine, but if we had not
had the doctrine to fall back upon we should have deprived each other
of some of our finest exhibitions. He never wrote to them--that may
have been selfish, but it was a part of the flattery of his trust of
me; for the way in which a man pays his highest tribute to a woman
is apt to be but by the more festal celebration of one of the sacred
laws of his comfort; and I held that I carried out the spirit of the
pledge given not to appeal to him when I let my charges understand that
their own letters were but charming literary exercises. They were too
beautiful to be posted; I kept them myself; I have them all to this
hour. This was a rule indeed which only added to the satiric effect
of my being plied with the supposition that he might at any moment be
among us. It was exactly as if my charges knew how almost more awkward
than anything else that might be for me. There appears to me, moreover,
as I look back, no note in all this more extraordinary than the mere
fact that, in spite of my tension and of their triumph, I never lost
patience with them. Adorable they must in truth have been, I now
reflect, that I didn’t in these days hate them! Would exasperation,
however, if relief had longer been postponed, finally have betrayed
me? It little matters, for relief arrived. I call it relief, though 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.