Masters of the Novella

by Delphi Classics

  But, oh, how I felt that at present I must pick my own phrases! I remember that, to gain time, I tried to laugh, and I seemed to see in the beautiful face with which he watched me how ugly and queer I looked. “And always with the same lady?” I returned.

  He neither blanched nor winked. The whole thing was virtually out between us. “Ah, of course, she’s a jolly, ‘perfect’ lady; but, after all, I’m a fellow, don’t you see? that’s — well, getting on.”

  I lingered there with him an instant ever so kindly. “Yes, you’re getting on.” Oh, but I felt helpless!

  I have kept to this day the heartbreaking little idea of how he seemed to know that and to play with it. “And you can’t say I’ve not been awfully good, can you?”

  I laid my hand on his shoulder, for, though I felt how much better it would have been to walk on, I was not yet quite able. “No, I can’t say that, Miles.”

  “Except just that one night, you know — !”

  “That one night?” I couldn’t look as straight as he.

  “Why, when I went down — went out of the house.”

  “Oh, yes. But I forget what you did it for.”

  “You forget?” — he spoke with the sweet extravagance of childish reproach. “Why, it was to show you I could!”

  “Oh, yes, you could.”

  “And I can again.”

  I felt that I might, perhaps, after all, succeed in keeping my wits about me. “Certainly. But you won’t.”

  “No, not THAT again. It was nothing.”

  “It was nothing,” I said. “But we must go on.”

  He resumed our walk with me, passing his hand into my arm. “Then when AM I going back?”

  I wore, in turning it over, my most responsible air. “Were you very happy at school?”

  He just considered. “Oh, I’m happy enough anywhere!”

  “Well, then,” I quavered, “if you’re just as happy here — !”

  “Ah, but that isn’t everything! Of course YOU know a lot—”

  “But you hint that you know almost as much?” I risked as he paused.

  “Not half I want to!” Miles honestly professed. “But it isn’t so much that.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “Well — I want to see more life.”

  “I see; I see.” We had arrived within sight of the church and of various persons, including several of the household of Bly, on their way to it and clustered about the door to see us go in. I quickened our step; I wanted to get there before the question between us opened up much further; I reflected hungrily that, for more than an hour, he would have to be silent; and I thought with envy of the comparative dusk of the pew and of the almost spiritual help of the hassock on which I might bend my knees. I seemed literally to be running a race with some confusion to which he was about to reduce me, but I felt that he had got in first when, before we had even entered the churchyard, he threw out —

  “I want my own sort!”

  It literally made me bound forward. “There are not many of your own sort, Miles!” I laughed. “Unless perhaps dear little Flora!”

  “You really compare me to a baby girl?”

  This found me singularly weak. “Don’t you, then, LOVE our sweet Flora?”

  “If I didn’t — and you, too; if I didn’t — !” he repeated as if retreating for a jump, yet leaving his thought so unfinished that, after we had come into the gate, another stop, which he imposed on me by the pressure of his arm, had become inevitable. Mrs. Grose and Flora had passed into the church, the other worshippers had followed, and we were, for the minute, alone among the old, thick graves. We had paused, on the path from the gate, by a low, oblong, tablelike tomb.

  “Yes, if you didn’t — ?”

  He looked, while I waited, at the graves. “Well, you know what!” But he didn’t move, and he presently produced something that made me drop straight down on the stone slab, as if suddenly to rest. “Does my uncle think what YOU think?”

  I markedly rested. “How do you know what I think?”

  “Ah, well, of course I don’t; for it strikes me you never tell me. But I mean does HE know?”

  “Know what, Miles?”

  “Why, the way I’m going on.”

  I perceived quickly enough that I could make, to this inquiry, no answer that would not involve something of a sacrifice of my employer. Yet it appeared to me that we were all, at Bly, sufficiently sacrificed to make that venial. “I don’t think your uncle much cares.”

  Miles, on this, stood looking at me. “Then don’t you think he can be made to?”

  “In what way?”

  “Why, by his coming down.”

  “But who’ll get him to come down?”

  “I will!” the boy said with extraordinary brightness and emphasis. He gave me another look charged with that expression and then marched off alone into church.

  XV

  The business was practically settled from the moment I never followed him. It was a pitiful surrender to agitation, but my being aware of this had somehow no power to restore me. I only sat there on my tomb and read into what my little friend had said to me the fullness of its meaning; by the time I had grasped the whole of which I had also embraced, for absence, the pretext that I was ashamed to offer my pupils and the rest of the congregation such an example of delay. What I said to myself above all was that Miles had got something out of me and that the proof of it, for him, would be just this awkward collapse. He had got out of me that there was something I was much afraid of and that he should probably be able to make use of my fear to gain, for his own purpose, more freedom. My fear was of having to deal with the intolerable question of the grounds of his dismissal from school, for that was really but the question of the horrors gathered behind. That his uncle should arrive to treat with me of these things was a solution that, strictly speaking, I ought now to have desired to bring on; but I could so little face the ugliness and the pain of it that I simply procrastinated and lived from hand to mouth. The boy, to my deep discomposure, was immensely in the right, was in a position to say to me: “Either you clear up with my guardian the mystery of this interruption of my studies, or you cease to expect me to lead with you a life that’s so unnatural for a boy.” What was so unnatural for the particular boy I was concerned with was this sudden revelation of a consciousness and a plan.

  That was what really overcame me, what prevented my going in. I walked round the church, hesitating, hovering; I reflected that I had already, with him, hurt myself beyond repair. Therefore I could patch up nothing, and it was too extreme an effort to squeeze beside him into the pew: he would be so much more sure than ever to pass his arm into mine and make me sit there for an hour in close, silent contact with his commentary on our talk. For the first minute since his arrival I wanted to get away from him. As I paused beneath the high east window and listened to the sounds of worship, I was taken with an impulse that might master me, I felt, completely should I give it the least encouragement. I might easily put an end to my predicament by getting away altogether. Here was my chance; there was no one to stop me; I could give the whole thing up — turn my back and retreat. It was only a question of hurrying again, for a few preparations, to the house which the attendance at church of so many of the servants would practically have left unoccupied. No one, in short, could blame me if I should just drive desperately off. What was it to get away if I got away only till dinner? That would be in a couple of hours, at the end of which — I had the acute prevision — my little pupils would play at innocent wonder about my nonappearance in their train.

  “What DID you do, you naughty, bad thing? Why in the world, to worry us so — and take our thoughts off, too, don’t you know? — did you desert us at the very door?” I couldn’t meet such questions nor, as they asked them, their false little lovely eyes; yet it was all so exactly what I should have to meet that, as the prospect grew sharp to me, I at last let myself go.

  I got, so far as the immediate moment
was concerned, away; I came straight out of the churchyard and, thinking hard, retraced my steps through the park. It seemed to me that by the time I reached the house I had made up my mind I would fly. The Sunday stillness both of the approaches and of the interior, in which I met no one, fairly excited me with a sense of opportunity. Were I to get off quickly, this way, I should get off without a scene, without a word. My quickness would have to be remarkable, however, and the question of a conveyance was the great one to settle. Tormented, in the hall, with difficulties and obstacles, I remember sinking down at the foot of the staircase — suddenly collapsing there on the lowest step and then, with a revulsion, recalling that it was exactly where more than a month before, in the darkness of night and just so bowed with evil things, I had seen the specter of the most horrible of women. At this I was able to straighten myself; I went the rest of the way up; I made, in my bewilderment, for the schoolroom, where there were objects belonging to me that I should have to take. But I opened the door to find again, in a flash, my eyes unsealed. In the presence of what I saw I reeled straight back upon my resistance.

  Seated at my own table in clear noonday light I saw a person whom, without my previous experience, I should have taken at the first blush for some housemaid who might have stayed at home to look after the place and who, availing herself of rare relief from observation and of the schoolroom table and my pens, ink, and paper, had applied herself to the considerable effort of a letter to her sweetheart. There was an effort in the way that, while her arms rested on the table, her hands with evident weariness supported her head; but at the moment I took this in I had already become aware that, in spite of my entrance, her attitude strangely persisted. Then it was — with the very act of its announcing itself — that her identity flared up in a change of posture. She rose, not as if she had heard me, but with an indescribable grand melancholy of indifference and detachment, and, within a dozen feet of me, stood there as my vile predecessor. Dishonored and tragic, she was all before me; but even as I fixed and, for memory, secured it, the awful image passed away. Dark as midnight in her black dress, her haggard beauty and her unutterable woe, she had looked at me long enough to appear to say that her right to sit at my table was as good as mine to sit at hers. While these instants lasted, indeed, I had the extraordinary chill of feeling that it was I who was the intruder. It was as a wild protest against it that, actually addressing her— “You terrible, miserable woman!” — I heard myself break into a sound that, by the open door, rang through the long passage and the empty house. She looked at me as if she heard me, but I had recovered myself and cleared the air. There was nothing in the room the next minute but the sunshine and a sense that I must stay.

  XVI

  I had so perfectly expected that the return of my pupils would be marked by a demonstration that I was freshly upset at having to take into account that they were dumb about my absence. Instead of gaily denouncing and caressing me, they made no allusion to my having failed them, and I was left, for the time, on perceiving that she too said nothing, to study Mrs. Grose’s odd face. I did this to such purpose that I made sure they had in some way bribed her to silence; a silence that, however, I would engage to break down on the first private opportunity. This opportunity came before tea: I secured five minutes with her in the housekeeper’s room, where, in the twilight, amid a smell of lately baked bread, but with the place all swept and garnished, I found her sitting in pained placidity before the fire. So I see her still, so I see her best: facing the flame from her straight chair in the dusky, shining room, a large clean image of the “put away” — of drawers closed and locked and rest without a remedy.

  “Oh, yes, they asked me to say nothing; and to please them — so long as they were there — of course I promised. But what had happened to you?”

  “I only went with you for the walk,” I said. “I had then to come back to meet a friend.”

  She showed her surprise. “A friend — YOU?”

  “Oh, yes, I have a couple!” I laughed. “But did the children give you a reason?”

  “For not alluding to your leaving us? Yes; they said you would like it better. Do you like it better?”

  My face had made her rueful. “No, I like it worse!” But after an instant I added: “Did they say why I should like it better?”

  “No; Master Miles only said, ‘We must do nothing but what she likes!’”

  “I wish indeed he would. And what did Flora say?”

  “Miss Flora was too sweet. She said, ‘Oh, of course, of course!’ — and I said the same.”

  I thought a moment. “You were too sweet, too — I can hear you all. But nonetheless, between Miles and me, it’s now all out.”

  “All out?” My companion stared. “But what, miss?”

  “Everything. It doesn’t matter. I’ve made up my mind. I came home, my dear,” I went on, “for a talk with Miss Jessel.”

  I had by this time formed the habit of having Mrs. Grose literally well in hand in advance of my sounding that note; so that even now, as she bravely blinked under the signal of my word, I could keep her comparatively firm. “A talk! Do you mean she spoke?”

  “It came to that. I found her, on my return, in the schoolroom.”

  “And what did she say?” I can hear the good woman still, and the candor of her stupefaction.

  “That she suffers the torments — !”

  It was this, of a truth, that made her, as she filled out my picture, gape. “Do you mean,” she faltered, “ — of the lost?”

  “Of the lost. Of the damned. And that’s why, to share them-” I faltered myself with the horror of it.

  But my companion, with less imagination, kept me up. “To share them — ?”

  “She wants Flora.” Mrs. Grose might, as I gave it to her, fairly have fallen away from me had I not been prepared. I still held her there, to show I was. “As I’ve told you, however, it doesn’t matter.”

  “Because you’ve made up your mind? But to what?”

  “To everything.”

  “And what do you call ‘everything’?”

  “Why, sending for their uncle.”

  “Oh, miss, in pity do,” my friend broke out. “ah, but I will, I WILL! I see it’s the only way. What’s ‘out,’ as I told you, with Miles is that if he thinks I’m afraid to — and has ideas of what he gains by that — he shall see he’s mistaken. Yes, yes; his uncle shall have it here from me on the spot (and before the boy himself, if necessary) that if I’m to be reproached with having done nothing again about more school—”

  “Yes, miss—” my companion pressed me.

  “Well, there’s that awful reason.”

  There were now clearly so many of these for my poor colleague that she was excusable for being vague. “But — a — which?”

  “Why, the letter from his old place.”

  “You’ll show it to the master?”

  “I ought to have done so on the instant.”

  “Oh, no!” said Mrs. Grose with decision.

  “I’ll put it before him,” I went on inexorably, “that I can’t undertake to work the question on behalf of a child who has been expelled—”

  “For we’ve never in the least known what!” Mrs. Grose declared.

  “For wickedness. For what else — when he’s so clever and beautiful and perfect? Is he stupid? Is he untidy? Is he infirm? Is he ill-natured? He’s exquisite — so it can be only THAT; and that would open up the whole thing. After all,” I said, “it’s their uncle’s fault. If he left here such people — !”

  “He didn’t really in the least know them. The fault’s mine.” She had turned quite pale.

  “Well, you shan’t suffer,” I answered.

  “The children shan’t!” she emphatically returned.

  I was silent awhile; we looked at each other. “Then what am I to tell him?”

  “You needn’t tell him anything. I’ll tell him.”

  I measured this. “Do you mean you’ll write — ?” Re
membering she couldn’t, I caught myself up. “How do you communicate?”

  “I tell the bailiff. HE writes.”

  “And should you like him to write our story?”

  My question had a sarcastic force that I had not fully intended, and it made her, after a moment, inconsequently break down. The tears were again in her eyes. “Ah, miss, YOU write!”

  “Well — tonight,” I at last answered; and on this we separated.

  XVII

  I went so far, in the evening, as to make a beginning. The weather had changed back, a great wind was abroad, and beneath the lamp, in my room, with Flora at peace beside me, I sat for a long time before a blank sheet of paper and listened to the lash of the rain and the batter of the gusts. Finally I went out, taking a candle; I crossed the passage and listened a minute at Miles’s door. What, under my endless obsession, I had been impelled to listen for was some betrayal of his not being at rest, and I presently caught one, but not in the form I had expected. His voice tinkled out. “I say, you there — come in.” It was a gaiety in the gloom!

  I went in with my light and found him, in bed, very wide awake, but very much at his ease. “Well, what are YOU up to?” he asked with a grace of sociability in which it occurred to me that Mrs. Grose, had she been present, might have looked in vain for proof that anything was “out.”

  I stood over him with my candle. “How did you know I was there?”

  “Why, of course I heard you. Did you fancy you made no noise? You’re like a troop of cavalry!” he beautifully laughed.

  “Then you weren’t asleep?”

  “Not much! I lie awake and think.”

  I had put my candle, designedly, a short way off, and then, as he held out his friendly old hand to me, had sat down on the edge of his bed. “What is it,” I asked, “that you think of?”