【有声英语文学名著】螺丝在拧紧（11）

The Turn of the Screw
by Henry James
XI
 
It was not till late next day that I spoke 1 to Mrs. Grose; the rigor 2 with which I kept my pupils in sight making it often difficult to meet her privately 3, and the more as we each felt the importance of not provoking — on the part of the servants quite as much as on that of the children — any suspicion of a secret flurry or that of a discussion of mysteries. I drew a great security in this particular from her mere 4 smooth aspect. There was nothing in her fresh face to pass on to others my horrible confidences. She believed me, I was sure, absolutely: if she hadn’t I don’t know what would have become of me, for I couldn’t have borne the business alone. But she was a magnificent monument to the blessing 5 of a want of imagination, and if she could see in our little charges nothing but their beauty and amiability 6, their happiness and cleverness, she had no direct communication with the sources of my trouble. If they had been at all visibly blighted 8 or battered 9, she would doubtless have grown, on tracing it back, haggard enough to match them; as matters stood, however, I could feel her, when she surveyed them, with her large white arms folded and the habit of serenity 10 in all her look, thank the Lord’s mercy that if they were ruined the pieces would still serve. Flights of fancy gave place, in her mind, to a steady fireside glow, and I had already begun to perceive how, with the development of the conviction that — as time went on without a public accident — our young things could, after all, look out for themselves, she addressed her greatest solicitude 11 to the sad case presented by their instructress. That, for myself, was a sound simplification: I could engage that, to the world, my face should tell no tales, but it would have been, in the conditions, an immense added strain to find myself anxious about hers.
At the hour I now speak of she had joined me, under pressure, on the terrace, where, with the lapse 12 of the season, the afternoon sun was now agreeable; and we sat there together while, before us, at a distance, but within call if we wished, the children strolled to and fro in one of their most manageable moods. They moved slowly, in unison 13, below us, over the lawn, the boy, as they went, reading aloud from a storybook and passing his arm round his sister to keep her quite in touch. Mrs. Grose watched them with positive placidity 14; then I caught the suppressed intellectual creak with which she conscientiously 15 turned to take from me a view of the back of the tapestry 16. I had made her a receptacle of lurid 17 things, but there was an odd recognition of my superiority — my accomplishments 18 and my function — in her patience under my pain. She offered her mind to my disclosures as, had I wished to mix a witch’s broth 19 and proposed it with assurance, she would have held out a large clean saucepan. This had become thoroughly 20 her attitude by the time that, in my recital 21 of the events of the night, I reached the point of what Miles had said to me when, after seeing him, at such a monstrous 22 hour, almost on the very spot where he happened now to be, I had gone down to bring him in; choosing then, at the window, with a concentrated need of not alarming the house, rather that method than a signal more resonant 23. I had left her meanwhile in little doubt of my small hope of representing with success even to her actual sympathy my sense of the real splendor 24 of the little inspiration with which, after I had got him into the house, the boy met my final articulate challenge. As soon as I appeared in the moonlight on the terrace, he had come to me as straight as possible; on which I had taken his hand without a word and led him, through the dark spaces, up the staircase where Quint had so hungrily hovered 25 for him, along the lobby where I had listened and trembled, and so to his forsaken 26 room.
Not a sound, on the way, had passed between us, and I had wondered — oh, HOW I had wondered! — if he were groping about in his little mind for something plausible 27 and not too grotesque 28. It would tax his invention, certainly, and I felt, this time, over his real embarrassment 29, a curious thrill of triumph. It was a sharp trap for the inscrutable! He couldn’t play any longer at innocence 30; so how the deuce would he get out of it? There beat in me indeed, with the passionate 31 throb 32 of this question an equal dumb appeal as to how the deuce I should. I was confronted at last, as never yet, with all the risk attached even now to sounding my own horrid 33 note. I remember in fact that as we pushed into his little chamber 34, where the bed had not been slept in at all and the window, uncovered to the moonlight, made the place so clear that there was no need of striking a match — I remember how I suddenly dropped, sank upon the edge of the bed from the force of the idea that he must know how he really, as they say, “had” me. He could do what he liked, with all his cleverness to help him, so long as I should continue to defer 35 to the old tradition of the criminality of those caretakers of the young who minister to superstitions 36 and fears. He “had” me indeed, and in a cleft 37 stick; for who would ever absolve 38 me, who would consent that I should go unhung, if, by the faintest tremor 39 of an overture 40, I were the first to introduce into our perfect intercourse 41 an element so dire 7? No, no: it was useless to attempt to convey to Mrs. Grose, just as it is scarcely less so to attempt to suggest here, how, in our short, stiff brush in the dark, he fairly shook me with admiration 42. I was of course thoroughly kind and merciful; never, never yet had I placed on his little shoulders hands of such tenderness as those with which, while I rested against the bed, I held him there well under fire. I had no alternative but, in form at least, to put it to him.
“You must tell me now — and all the truth. What did you go out for? What were you doing there?”
I can still see his wonderful smile, the whites of his beautiful eyes, and the uncovering of his little teeth shine to me in the dusk. “If I tell you why, will you understand?” My heart, at this, leaped into my mouth. WOULD he tell me why? I found no sound on my lips to press it, and I was aware of replying only with a vague, repeated, grimacing 43 nod. He was gentleness itself, and while I wagged my head at him he stood there more than ever a little fairy prince. It was his brightness indeed that gave me a respite 44. Would it be so great if he were really going to tell me? “Well,” he said at last, “just exactly in order that you should do this.”
“Do what?”
“Think me — for a change — BAD!” I shall never forget the sweetness and gaiety with which he brought out the word, nor how, on top of it, he bent 45 forward and kissed me. It was practically the end of everything. I met his kiss and I had to make, while I folded him for a minute in my arms, the most stupendous effort not to cry. He had given exactly the account of himself that permitted least of my going behind it, and it was only with the effect of confirming my acceptance of it that, as I presently glanced about the room, I could say —
“Then you didn’t undress at all?”
He fairly glittered in the gloom. “Not at all. I sat up and read.”
“And when did you go down?”
“At midnight. When I’m bad I AM bad!”
“I see, I see — it’s charming. But how could you be sure I would know it?”
“Oh, I arranged that with Flora 46.” His answers rang out with a readiness! “She was to get up and look out.”
“Which is what she did do.” It was I who fell into the trap!
“So she disturbed you, and, to see what she was looking at, you also looked — you saw.”
“While you,” I concurred 47, “caught your death in the night air!”
He literally 48 bloomed so from this exploit that he could afford radiantly to assent 49. “How otherwise should I have been bad enough?” he asked. Then, after another embrace, the incident and our interview closed on my recognition of all the reserves of goodness that, for his joke, he had been able to draw upon.