【有声英语文学名著】螺丝在拧紧（13）

 The Turn of the Screw

by Henry James
XIII
 
It was all very well to join them, but speaking to them proved quite as much as ever an effort beyond my strength — offered, in close quarters, difficulties as insurmountable as before. This situation continued a month, and with new aggravations and particular notes, the note above all, sharper and sharper, of the small ironic 1 consciousness on the part of my pupils. It was not, I am as sure today as I was sure then, my mere 2 infernal imagination: it was absolutely traceable that they were aware of my predicament and that this strange relation made, in a manner, for a long time, the air in which we moved. I don’t mean that they had their tongues in their cheeks or did anything vulgar, for that was not one of their dangers: I do mean, on the other hand, that the element of the unnamed and untouched became, between us, greater than any other, and that so much avoidance could not have been so successfully effected without a great deal of tacit arrangement. It was as if, at moments, we were perpetually coming into sight of subjects before which we must stop short, turning suddenly out of alleys 3 that we perceived to be blind, closing with a little bang that made us look at each other — for, like all bangs, it was something louder than we had intended — the doors we 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 time — but she WON’T!” To “do it” would have been to indulge for instance — and for once in a way — in some direct reference to the lady who had prepared them for my discipline. They had a delightful 4 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 5 about, if one went very fast and knew by instinct when to go round. They pulled with an art of their own the strings 6 of my invention and my memory; and nothing else perhaps, when I thought of such occasions afterward 7, 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 ease — a state of affairs that led them sometimes without the least pertinence 8 to break out into sociable 9 reminders 10. I was invited — with no visible connection — to repeat afresh Goody Gosling’s celebrated 11 mot or to confirm the details already supplied as to the cleverness of the vicarage pony 13.
It was partly at such junctures 14 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 15 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 16 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 17 garlands, its bared spaces and scattered 18 dead leaves, was like a theater after the performance — all strewn with crumpled 19 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 portents 20 — I 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 21 scene of Flora 22’s by the lake — and had perplexed 23 her by so saying — that it would from that moment distress 24 me much more to lose my power than to keep it. I had then expressed what was vividly 25 in my mind: the truth that, whether the children really saw or not — since, that is, it was not yet definitely proved — I 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 26 not to thank God. There was, alas 27, 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 28 today the strange steps of my obsession 29? There were times of our being together when I would have been ready to swear that, literally 30, 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 31 by the very chance that such an injury might prove greater than the injury to be averted 32, my exultation 33 would have broken out. “They’re here, they’re here, you little wretches 34,” I would have cried, “and you can’t deny it now!” The little wretches denied it with all the added volume of their sociability 35 and their tenderness, in just the crystal depths of which — like the flash of a fish in a stream — the 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 36 the boy over whose rest I watched and who had immediately brought in with him — had straightway, there, turned it on me — the lovely upward look with which, from the battlements above me, the hideous 37 apparition 38 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 39. They harassed 40 me so that sometimes, at odd moments, I shut myself up audibly to rehearse — it was at once a fantastic relief and a renewed despair — the 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 41 utterance 42 of names. As they died away on my lips, I said to myself that I should indeed help them to represent something infamous 43, if, by pronouncing them, I should violate as rare a little case of instinctive 44 delicacy 45 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 46 and I covered my face with my hands. After these secret scenes I chattered 47 more than ever, going on volubly enough till one of our prodigious 48, palpable hushes 49 occurred — I can call them nothing else — the 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 MORE— things terrible and unguessable and that sprang from dreadful passages of intercourse 50 in the past. Such things naturally left on the surface, for the time, a chill which we vociferously 51 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 52 with a kind of wild irrelevance 53 and never to fail — one or the other — of the precious question that had helped us through many a peril 54. “When do you think he WILL come? Don’t you think we OUGHT to write?” — there was nothing like that inquiry 55, we found by experience, for carrying off an awkwardness. “He” of course was their uncle in Harley Street; and we lived in much profusion 56 of theory that he might at any moment arrive to mingle 57 in our circle. It was impossible to have given less encouragement than he had done to such a doctrine 58, but if we had not had the doctrine to fall back upon we should have deprived each other of some of our finest exhibitions. He never wrote to them — that may have been selfish, but it was a part of the flattery of his trust of me; for the way in which a man pays his highest tribute to a woman is apt to be but by the more festal celebration of one of the sacred laws of his comfort; and I held that I carried out the spirit of the pledge given not to appeal to him when I let my charges understand that their own letters were but charming literary exercises. They were too beautiful to be posted; I kept them myself; I have them all to this hour. This was a rule indeed which only added to the satiric 59 effect of my being plied 12 with the supposition that he might at any moment be among us. It was exactly as if my charges knew how almost more awkward than anything else that might be for me. There appears to me, moreover, as I look back, no note in all this more extraordinary than the mere fact that, in spite of my tension and of their triumph, I never lost patience with them. Adorable they must in truth have been, I now reflect, that I didn’t in these days hate them! Would exasperation 60, however, if relief had longer been postponed 61, finally have betrayed me? It little matters, for relief arrived. I call it relief, though it was only the relief that a snap brings to a strain or the burst of a thunderstorm to a day of suffocation 62. It was at least change, and it came with a rush.