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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 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
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