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

XV

The governess sat down on the tomb and read into his words their full meaning. He had got something out of her—proof, for him, that she was afraid, that he could use her fear to gain more freedom. The real horror was that his uncle’s arrival would mean confronting the question of why Miles had been expelled from school. She could not face the ugliness of it. She simply procrastinated, and lived from hand to mouth. Yet she could not bring herself to follow him into the church, to squeeze into the pew beside him and sit an hour under his commentary. For the first time since his arrival, she wanted to get away from him entirely.

The temptation took her, and she gave it the least encouragement. She could give the whole thing up—turn her back, retreat, drive off while the household was at worship. But when she reached the house and sank down, bewildered, on the lowest step of the staircase, she recalled with a revulsion that it was exactly there, more than a month before in the darkness, that she had seen the spectre of the most horrible of women. She straightened herself and went on up. In the schoolroom, however, her eyes were unsealed. There, at her own table, in clear noonday light, sat a figure she would have taken for some housemaid writing a letter to her sweetheart—her arms resting on the table, her hands supporting her head. Then the figure rose, with an indescribable grand melancholy of indifference, and stood there within a dozen feet of her as her vile predecessor. Dishonoured and tragic, dark as midnight, the apparition of Miss Jessel looked at her long enough to seem to say that her right to sit at that table was as good as the governess’s. There swept over the governess the extraordinary chill of a feeling that it was she who was the intruder. As a wild protest she cried aloud—“You terrible, miserable woman!”—and the sound rang through the empty house. The image passed. There was nothing in the room but the sunshine, and a sense that she must stay.

XVI

She had expected the children to denounce her for her absence from church, but they said nothing, and she was left to study Mrs. Grose’s odd face. She made sure the children had bribed the housekeeper to silence, and she resolved to break that silence at the first opportunity. It came before tea, in the housekeeper’s room, where the smell of lately-baked bread still lingered and the place was all swept and garnished. Mrs. Grose sat before the fire in pained placidity, a large clean image of the “put away.” The children had asked her, she confessed, to say nothing—they said the governess would like it better. Miles had said: “We must do nothing but what she likes!” and Flora had chimed in: “Oh, of course, of course!”

The governess told her, then, that between Miles and herself it was all out. Mrs. Grose stared. All out? Everything. She had come home, the governess said, for a talk with Miss Jessel. She had formed the habit of preparing Mrs. Grose in advance of such shocks, but the good woman could not help blinking. Miss Jessel had spoken? She had been found, on the governess’s return, in the schoolroom. What did she say? “That she suffers the torments—” The governess faltered herself with the horror of it. Of the lost, Mrs. Grose faltered. Of the damned. And that is why, to share them—she wants Flora.

She had made up her mind, the governess went on. She would send for the uncle. He must have it from her on the spot, that if she was to be reproached for having done nothing about more school—because there was that awful reason—the letter from the old place. She would put it before him that she could not work the question on behalf of a child who had been expelled. For wickedness. For what else, when he was so clever, so beautiful, so perfect? Mrs. Grose turned quite pale. The fault was hers, she said, not the uncle’s—he had not really known the people. “The children shan’t suffer,” she added. The governess asked what she was to tell the uncle, then. “You needn’t tell him anything—I’ll tell him.” “Do you mean you’ll write?” “I tell the bailiff. He writes.” “And should you like him to write our story?” The question was more sarcastic than the governess had intended, and the tears came into Mrs. Grose’s eyes. “Ah, Miss, you write!” On this they separated.