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

I

At the foot of the staircase, in the central hall of an old English country-house called Covering End, old Chivers waited and listened. He had thought he heard her call to him from the gallery, high aloft but out of view, to which he had allowed her independent access. Droll, charming cries reached him—evident rushes and dashes of delight—and he could not but feel his heart warm at the success of a trust that might, after all, have been rash. “Oh, no, mum, there ain’t no one whatever come yet. It’s quite all right, mum—you can please yourself!” he quavered up. “‘Dear little crooked steps’? Yes, mum; please mind ’em, mum: they be cruel in the dark corners!” Once more she appealed, and once more he gossiped back. “Coming up too? Not if you’ll kindly indulge me, mum—I must be where I can watch the bell.” He dropped to a murmur of great patience as he resumed his round, and the next moment the husky plaint of the signal itself took up the burden, confessing equally to short wind and creaking joints. It moved, however, distinguishably, and its motion made him start much more as if he had been guilty of sleeping at his post. “Mercy, if I didn’t watch——!” He shuffled across the wide stone-paved hall and hastened to admit his new visitor.

The place he had left was high and square, brown and grey, flagged beneath and timbered above; a single survey of it was a perception of long and lucky continuities. It would have been difficult to find elsewhere anything at once so old and so actual, anything that had plainly come so far down without at any moment losing its way. There was such resignation in its long survival and yet such bravery in its high polish. If it had never been spoiled, this was partly because it had been for a century given up; but what it had been given up to was, after all, homely and familiar use. It had much of the chill of fallen fortunes, but there was no concession in its humility and no hypocrisy in its welcome. A dozen dark old portraits held up their heads to assure all comers that a tone or two was all that was missing; the roof was rich and firm, almost with the dignity of the vault of a church. On this Saturday afternoon in August, a hot still day, such of the casements as freely worked in the discoloured glass stood open to a terrace that overlooked a park, and to a wonderful old empty court that communicated with a wonderful old empty garden.

Chivers, considerably shrunken and completely silvered, was the very image of immemorial domesticity; you could not have told his age or named his use. He had been twenty years in the black dress-coat which must once have been the newest thing in the house and into which his years appeared to have declined as a shrunken family moves into a part of its habitation. This was completed by a white necktie he had himself done up this morning in honour of the day. His humility and his oddity were alike brought out by his juxtaposition with the gentleman he had admitted.

To admit Mr. Prodmore was anywhere and at any time an immense admission. He was a personage of great presence and weight, with a large smooth face in which a small sharp meaning was planted like a single pin in the tight red toilet-cushion of a guest-chamber. He wore a blue frock-coat, a stiff white waistcoat, and a high white hat which he kept on his head with a kind of protesting cock, while in his buttonhole nestled a bold prize plant on which he occasionally lowered a proprietary eye. The old portraits took him in with a sterner stare; a visitor more sensitive would have read a consciousness of his remaining in their presence so jauntily, so vulgarly covered. Mr. Prodmore had never a glance for them, and it would have been easy to see that this was an old story. “No one here?” he indignantly demanded from the very threshold. “I’m sorry to say no one has come, sir,” Chivers replied, “but I’ve had a telegram from Captain Yule.” Mr. Prodmore’s apprehension flared. “Not to say he ain’t coming?” “He was to take the 2.20 from Paddington; he certainly should be here!”

“He should have been here this hour or more. And so should my fly-away daughter!” Chivers surrounded this description of Miss Prodmore with the deep discretion of silence, then after a moment reflected that silence might be as rash as speech. “Were they coming—a—together, sir?” He had scarcely mended the matter, for his visitor gave an inconsequent stare. “Together?—for what do you take Miss Prodmore?” The young lady’s parent glared about him as if to alight on something else out of place; but the good intentions expressed in every object might have soothed him. “It is in a sense true that their ‘coming together,’ as you call it, is exactly what I’ve made my plans for today. Attended by her trusty maid, Miss Prodmore, who happens to be on a week’s visit to her grandmother at Bellborough, was to take the 1.40 from that place. I was to drive over—ten miles—from the most convenient of my seats. Captain Yule”——the speaker wound up with the mention of the last touch in a masterpiece of his own sketching—“was finally to shake off for a few hours the peculiar occupations that engage him.”

The old man listened with his head askance. “They must be peculiar, sir, when a gentleman comes into a property like this and goes three months without so much as a nat’ral curiosity!” Mr. Prodmore complacently interrupted. “There have repeatedly been people here!” “As you say, sir—to be shown over. With the master himself never shown!” “He shall be, so that nobody can miss him!” Mr. Prodmore hastened to retort. “It will be a mercy indeed to look on him; but I meant that he has not been taken round.” “That’s what I meant too. I’ll take him—round and round: it’s exactly what I’ve come for!” Mr. Prodmore rang out. “He can’t fail to be affected, though he has been up to his neck in such a different class of thing.”

Chivers expressed a timid hope. “In nothing, I dare say, but what’s right, sir——?” “In everything,” Mr. Prodmore distinctly informed him, “that’s wrong! But here he is!” he added with elation as the doorbell again sounded. Chivers hastened to the front, while Mr. Prodmore, left alone, recovered a degree of cheerfulness. The sound he next heard caused him none the less to articulate a certain drop. “Only Cora?—Well, he shan’t, at any rate, resist her!”