by Henry James
It was Morgan who eventually asked if no supper had been ordered for him; sitting with him below, later, at the dim delayed meal, in the presence of a great deal of corded green plush, a plate of ornamental biscuit and an aloofness marked on the part of the waiter. Mrs. Moreen had explained that they had been obliged to secure a room for the visitor out of the house; and Morgan’s consolation—he offered it while Pemberton reflected on the nastiness of lukewarm sauces—proved to be, largely, that his circumstance would facilitate their escape. He talked of their escape—recurring to it often afterwards—as if they were making up a “boy’s book” together. But he likewise expressed his sense that there was something in the air, that the Moreens couldn’t keep it up much longer. In point of fact, as Pemberton was to see, they kept it up for five or six months. All the while, however, Morgan’s contention was designed to cheer him. Mr. Moreen and Ulick, whom he had met the day after his return, accepted that return like perfect men of the world. If Paula and Amy treated it even with less formality an allowance was to be made for them, inasmuch as Mr. Granger hadn’t come to the opera after all. He had only placed his box at their service, with a bouquet for each of the party; there was even one apiece, embittering the thought of his profusion, for Mr. Moreen and Ulick. “They’re all like that,” was Morgan’s comment; “at the very last, just when we think we’ve landed them they’re back in the deep sea!”
Morgan’s comments in these days were more and more free; they even included a large recognition of the extraordinary tenderness with which he had been treated while Pemberton was away. Oh yes, they couldn’t do enough to be nice to him, to show him they had him on their mind and make up for his loss. That was just what made the whole thing so sad and caused him to rejoice after all in Pemberton’s return—he had to keep thinking of their affection less, had less sense of obligation. Pemberton laughed out at this last reason, and Morgan blushed and said: “Well, dash it, you know what I mean.” Pemberton knew perfectly what he meant; but there were a good many things that—dash it too!—it didn’t make any clearer. This episode of his second sojourn in Paris stretched itself out wearily, with their resumed readings and wanderings and maunderings, their potterings on the quays, their hauntings of the museums, their occasional lingerings in the Palais Royal when the first sharp weather came on and there was a comfort in warm emanations, before Chevet’s wonderful succulent window. Morgan wanted to hear all about the opulent youth—he took an immense interest in him. Some of the details of his opulence—Pemberton could spare him none of them—evidently fed the boy’s appreciation of all his friend had given up to come back to him; but in addition to the greater reciprocity established by that heroism he had always his little brooding theory, in which there was a frivolous gaiety too, that their long probation was drawing to a close. Morgan’s conviction that the Moreens couldn’t go on much longer kept pace with the unexpended impetus with which, from month to month, they did go on. Three weeks after Pemberton had rejoined them they went on to another hotel, a dingier one than the first; but Morgan rejoiced that his tutor had at least still not sacrificed the advantage of a room outside. He clung to the romantic utility of this when the day, or rather the night, should arrive for their escape.
For the first time, in this complicated connexion, our friend felt his collar gall him. It was, as he had said to Mrs. Moreen in Venice, trop fort—everything was trop fort. He could neither really throw off his blighting burden nor find in it the benefit of a pacified conscience or of a rewarded affection. He had spent all the money accruing to him in England, and he saw his youth going and that he was getting nothing back for it. It was all very well of Morgan to count it for reparation that he should now settle on him permanently—there was an irritating flaw in such a view. He saw what the boy had in his mind; the conception that as his friend had had the generosity to come back he must show his gratitude by giving him his life. But the poor friend didn’t desire the gift—what could he do with Morgan’s dreadful little life? Of course at the same time that Pemberton was irritated he remembered the reason, which was very honourable to Morgan and which dwelt simply in his making one so forget that he was no more than a patched urchin. If one dealt with him on a different basis one’s misadventures were one’s own fault. So Pemberton waited in a queer confusion of yearning and alarm for the catastrophe which was held to hang over the house of Moreen, of which he certainly at moments felt the symptoms brush his cheek and as to which he wondered much in what form it would find its liveliest effect.
Perhaps it would take the form of sudden dispersal—a frightened sauve qui peut, a scuttling into selfish corners. Certainly they were less elastic than of yore; they were evidently looking for something they didn’t find. The Dorringtons hadn’t re-appeared, the princes had scattered; wasn’t that the beginning of the end? Mrs. Moreen had lost her reckoning of the famous “days”; her social calendar was blurred—it had turned its face to the wall. Pemberton suspected that the great, the cruel discomfiture had been the unspeakable behaviour of Mr. Granger, who seemed not to know what he wanted, or, what was much worse, what they wanted. He kept sending flowers, as if to bestrew the path of his retreat, which was never the path of a return. Flowers were all very well, but—Pemberton could complete the proposition. It was now positively conspicuous that in the long run the Moreens were a social failure; so that the young man was almost grateful the run had not been short. Mr. Moreen indeed was still occasionally able to get away on business and, what was more surprising, was likewise able to get back. Ulick had no club but you couldn’t have discovered it from his appearance, which was as much as ever that of a person looking at life from the window of such an institution; therefore Pemberton was doubly surprised at an answer he once heard him make his mother in the desperate tone of a man familiar with the worst privations. Her question Pemberton had not quite caught; it appeared to be an appeal for a suggestion as to whom they might get to take Amy. “Let the Devil take her!” Ulick snapped; so that Pemberton could see that they had not only lost their amiability but had ceased to believe in themselves. He could also see that if Mrs. Moreen was trying to get people to take her children she might be regarded as closing the hatches for the storm. But Morgan would be the last she would part with.
One winter afternoon—it was a Sunday—he and the boy walked far together in the Bois de Boulogne. The evening was so splendid, the cold lemon-coloured sunset so clear, the stream of carriages and pedestrians so amusing and the fascination of Paris so great, that they stayed out later than usual and became aware that they should have to hurry home to arrive in time for dinner. They hurried accordingly, arm-in-arm, good-humoured and hungry, agreeing that there was nothing like Paris after all and that after everything too that had come and gone they were not yet sated with innocent pleasures. When they reached the hotel they found that, though scandalously late, they were in time for all the dinner they were likely to sit down to. Confusion reigned in the apartments of the Moreens—very shabby ones this time, but the best in the house—and before the interrupted service of the table, with objects displaced almost as if there had been a scuffle and a great wine-stain from an overturned bottle, Pemberton couldn’t blink the fact that there had been a scene of the last proprietary firmness. The storm had come—they were all seeking refuge. The hatches were down, Paula and Amy were invisible—they had never tried the most casual art upon Pemberton, but he felt they had enough of an eye to him not to wish to meet him as young ladies whose frocks had been confiscated—and Ulick appeared to have jumped overboard. The host and his staff, in a word, had ceased to “go on” at the pace of their guests, and the air of embarrassed detention, thanks to a pile of gaping trunks in the passage, was strangely commingled with the air of indignant withdrawal. When Morgan took all this in—and he took it in very quickly—he coloured to the roots of his hair. He had walked from his infancy among difficulties and dangers, but he had never seen a public exposure. Pemberton noticed in a second glance at him that the tears
had rushed into his eyes and that they were tears of a new and untasted bitterness. He wondered an instant, for the boy’s sake, whether he might successfully pretend not to understand. Not successfully, he felt, as Mr. and Mrs. Moreen, dinnerless by their extinguished hearth, rose before him in their little dishonoured salon, casting about with glassy eyes for the nearest port in such a storm. They were not prostrate but were horribly white, and Mrs. Moreen had evidently been crying. Pemberton quickly learned however that her grief was not for the loss of her dinner, much as she usually enjoyed it, but the fruit of a blow that struck even deeper, as she made all haste to explain. He would see for himself, so far as that went, how the great change had come, the dreadful bolt had fallen, and how they would now all have to turn themselves about. Therefore cruel as it was to them to part with their darling she must look to him to carry a little further the influence he had so fortunately acquired with the boy—to induce his young charge to follow him into some modest retreat. They depended on him—that was the fact—to take their delightful child temporarily under his protection; it would leave Mr. Moreen and herself so much more free to give the proper attention (too little, alas! had been given) to the readjustment of their affairs.
“We trust you—we feel we can,” said Mrs. Moreen, slowly rubbing her plump white hands and looking with compunction hard at Morgan, whose chin, not to take liberties, her husband stroked with a paternal forefinger.
“Oh yes—we feel that we can. We trust Mr. Pemberton fully, Morgan,” Mr. Moreen pursued.
Pemberton wondered again if he might pretend not to understand; but everything good gave way to the intensity of Morgan’s understanding. “Do you mean he may take me to live with him for ever and ever?” cried the boy. “May take me away, away, anywhere he likes?”
“For ever and ever? Comme vous-y-allez!” Mr. Moreen laughed indulgently. “For as long as Mr. Pemberton may be so good.”
“We’ve struggled, we’ve suffered,” his wife went on; “but you’ve made him so your own that we’ve already been through the worst of the sacrifice.”
Morgan had turned away from his father—he stood looking at Pemberton with a light in his face. His sense of shame for their common humiliated state had dropped; the case had another side—the thing was to clutch at that. He had a moment of boyish joy, scarcely mitigated by the reflexion that with this unexpected consecration of his hope—too sudden and too violent; the turn taken was away from a good boy’s book—the “escape” was left on their hands. The boyish joy was there an instant, and Pemberton was almost scared at the rush of gratitude and affection that broke through his first abasement. When he stammered “My dear fellow, what do you say to that?” how could one not say something enthusiastic? But there was more need for courage at something else that immediately followed and that made the lad sit down quietly on the nearest chair. He had turned quite livid and had raised his hand to his left side. They were all three looking at him, but Mrs. Moreen suddenly bounded forward. “Ah his darling little heart!” she broke out; and this time, on her knees before him and without respect for the idol, she caught him ardently in her arms. “You walked him too far, you hurried him too fast!” she hurled over her shoulder at Pemberton. Her son made no protest, and the next instant, still holding him, she sprang up with her face convulsed and with the terrified cry “Help, help! he’s going, he’s gone!” Pemberton saw with equal horror, by Morgan’s own stricken face, that he was beyond their wildest recall. He pulled him half out of his mother’s hands, and for a moment, while they held him together, they looked all their dismay into each other’s eyes, “He couldn’t stand it with his weak organ,” said Pemberton—“the shock, the whole scene, the violent emotion.”
“But I thought he wanted to go to you!” wailed Mrs. Moreen.
“I told you he didn’t, my dear,” her husband made answer. Mr. Moreen was trembling all over and was in his way as deeply affected as his wife. But after the very first he took his bereavement as a man of the world.
The Turn of the Screw
The Turn of the Screw
FOR SHEER measureless evil and horror there are very few tales in world literature that can compare with The Turn of the Screw. Its plot was suggested to James by a story he had heard about a couple of small children in a remote place, to whom the “spirits of certain ‘bad’ servants, dead in the employ of the house, were believed to have appeared with the design of ‘getting hold’ of them.” In his characteristic way he felt that more details would be superfluous, as he had heard quite enough to make the “vividest little note for sinister romance” he had ever jotted down.
In writing his bogey-tale James succeeded so well in conveying a sense of dreadful and unguessable things that upon its publication (1898) he found himself answering questions that apparently he preferred not to answer. Some readers determined to satisfy their curiosity by applying directly to the author, and to judge by the vagueness and coyness of his replies, James was deliberately trying to choke off the discussion. Thus he wrote to F. W. H. Myers (December 19, 1898) that The Turn of the Screw was a “very mechanical matter . . . an inferior, a merely pictorial subject and rather a shameless potboiler.” But this dismissal of the story jibes not at all with its inclusion in the collected edition and the long and serious examination of it in the preface. One suspects that knowing as he did the prudishness of his Anglo-American public and its signal capacity to consider itself outraged, he was at first disposed to pass off his “designed horror” as a piece of mystification pure and simple. But so to read the story is to do it an injustice. Mystification in art is of the same order as naïveté, of which James once said that it is “like a zero in a number: its importance depends on the figure it is united with.” And it is not difficult to see that in The Turn of the Screw the element of mystification is united with an element of morbid sexuality. It is the sexuality expressed through the machinery of the supernatural that makes for the overwhelming effect.
That the “badness” of the prowling demonic spirits is of an erotic nature is shown by everything we are allowed to learn about them. Mrs. Grose, the housekeeper, tells the governess that Peter Quint “did what he wished” not only with Miss Jessel but also with the children. He “played” with them, and altogether he was “much too free . . . there had been matters in his life—strange passages and perils, secret disorders, vices more than suspected . . .” Thus to interpret the story, that is in terms of the reality of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel’s “badness,” enables us to take it as given and at the same time to take it as a study in abnormal psychology.
Attempts to explain away the ghosts are but a fallacy of rationalism. There is the theory, for example, propounded by Edna Kenton and Edmund Wilson, which places the governess in the center of the plot as a case of sex-repression; in this manner the ghosts are immediately accounted for as hallucinations, the products of her neurosis. For one thing, there is not quite enough evidence to support this theory; it glosses over the fact that Mrs. Grose confirms the governess’s minute description of Peter Quint; for another, the Freudian insight which this theory puts into operation is so elementary as to make the story less rather than more interesting. It lets off, so to speak, too many of the agents—the servants and the children. Of course, there is no doubt that the story may be read that way, but that is by no means the same as saying that such a reading conforms with the author’s intention.
So far as intention goes, we should keep in mind that in James we are always justified in assuming the maximum; and the trouble with the governess theory is that it reduces the intention to a minimum. In The Turn of the Screw James strove above all to expand the limits of suggestion. “What, in the last analysis,” he remarks in the preface, “had I to give the sense of? Of their being, the haunting pair, capable, as the phrase is, of everything—that is of exerting, in respect to the children, the very worst action small victims so conditioned might be conceived as subject to. . . . Only make the reader’s general vision intense, I said
to myself . . . and his own experience, his own imagination . . . will supply him quite sufficiently with all the particulars. Make him think the evil, make him think it for himself. . . .”
THE STORY had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to say that it was the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child. The case, I may mention, was that of an apparition in just such an old house as had gathered us for the occasion—an appearance, of a dreadful kind, to a little boy sleeping in the room with his mother and waking her up in the terror of it; waking her not to dissipate his dread and soothe him to sleep again, but to encounter also, herself, before she had succeeded in doing so, the same sight that had shaken him. It was this observation that drew from Douglas—not immediately, but later in the evening—a reply that had the interesting consequence to which I call attention. Someone else told a story not particularly effective, which I saw he was not following. This I took for a sign that he had himself something to produce and that we should only have to wait. We waited in fact till two nights later; but that same evening, before we scattered, he brought out what was in his mind.