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CHAPTER XIII
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 *** 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 afterward, 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 favored 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 gray sky and withered garlands, its bared spaces and scattered
dead leaves, was like a theater 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 recognized the signs, the portents--I recognized 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 fullness 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.