The Two Magics: The Turn of the Screw, Covering End

XX

The name falls like a pane of glass shattering. Flora’s face receives the blow with a hard, still gravity that is wholly new. She does not flinch toward the direction in which the governess points; instead she fixes the governess with a look of steady, unprecedented reprobation, as though reading and judging her. On the opposite bank Miss Jessel stands exactly as she had stood before, rigid and undimmed. The governess cries out in triumph, in justification, in gratitude, seizing Mrs. Grose and thrusting her toward the sight. But Mrs. Grose sees nothing. She groans in negation, repulsion, and relief at her own exemption, and the governess feels her situation horribly crumble. The ghost seems to press harder on her defeat.

Mrs. Grose turns on her with a flushed protest, breaking into breathless reassurance for the child. Flora, who all this while has stood holding tight to Mrs. Grose’s dress, delivers her verdict in the words of a vulgarly pert street girl. She does not know what the governess means. She sees nobody. She sees nothing. She has never seen anything. She thinks the governess cruel and does not like her. Then she demands to be taken away, buried in Mrs. Grose’s skirts, wailing that she wants to be taken from the governess. The incomparable childish beauty has vanished; the little face has turned hard and common, almost ugly.

The governess sadly shakes her head. “If I had ever doubted, all my doubt would at present have gone,” she says. She has lost Flora. She bids her goodbye and frantically orders Mrs. Grose to take the child back to the house. Left alone, she throws herself on the ground and gives way to a wildness of grief. When she raises her head the day is almost done, and she makes her dreary way back alone.

That evening she sees a great deal of Miles. He appears at about eight o’clock and sits with her in silence by the schoolroom fire. They pass two portentous hours together in absolute stillness, and yet she feels he wants to be with her.

XXI

Before dawn Mrs. Grose comes to the governess’s bedside with worse news. Flora is feverish, and her fears are not of Miss Jessel returning but of the governess herself. Flora is passionately protesting against any re-entrance of her present governess on the scene. She persists in denying she has ever seen anything, and the denial has aged her utterly.

The governess sees it all clearly. Flora resents the imputation on her truthfulness and respectability, and she intends to work this grievance to the end, to make the governess out to her uncle as the lowest creature. The governess has a better idea, however: it is Mrs. Grose who must go, taking Flora straight to her uncle. She will remain alone with Miles. She believes he wants to give her an opening, that he wants to speak. The previous evening by the firelight, she felt it almost coming.

Mrs. Grose is bewildered and frightened. She hesitates, then confesses that she cannot stay. She has heard things from Flora, horrors, appalling language about the governess, that have shocked her deeply. The child’s words are an extraordinary justification of everything the governess has feared.

There remains the matter of the letter. Mrs. Grose reveals that the letter never went. It was not where the governess had placed it. Luke declared he had not touched it. The governess concludes that Miles must have taken it, read it, and destroyed it. And Mrs. Grose, with simple sharpness, gives a disillusioned nod. “He stole.” The governess decides that what Miles had on his mind last evening was the need of confession. If he confesses, he is saved. If he is saved, so is she. Mrs. Grose kisses her and departs that morning with Flora.

XXII

Alone at last with Miles, the governess feels the great pinch arrive. The carriage has barely rolled out of the gates before she perceives that what she has won is a measure of her own isolation. The household stares at the unexplained departure; the maids and men look blank, and she musters all her dignity to bear the crisis. She wanders the house looking ready for any onset.

Miles does not appear until dinner. He has breakfasted with Mrs. Grose and Flora and then gone out for a stroll, a frank expression of his new view of his office. The fiction that she has anything more to teach him has collapsed; their relation has shifted. When at last he joins her in the dining room, the ponderous pomp of the place presses upon her, and she feels again how much her equilibrium depends on the rigid will to shut her eyes to the truth of what she is dealing with.

They eat in nearly total silence. She dismisses the maid, and when she and Miles are alone he stands with his hands in his pockets, looking out the wide window through which she once glimpsed something that pulled her up. At length he turns back to her. “Well—so we’re alone!”