the turn of the screw-第18章
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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 timebut she WON'T!〃 To 〃do it〃
would have been to indulge for instanceand 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 easea state of affairs that led them sometimes without
the least pertinence to break out into sociable reminders。
I was invitedwith no visible connectionto 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 portentsI 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 lakeand had perplexed her by so sayingthat 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 notsince; that is; it was
not yet definitely provedI 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 streamthe 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 methe 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 rehearseit was at once a fantastic relief and a
renewed despairthe 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 elsethe 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 MOREthings 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