Chapter: 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 consciousness on the part
of my pupils. It was not, I am as sure today as I was sure then, my mere
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 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 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 ease--a
state of affairs that led them sometimes without the least pertinence
to break out into sociable reminders. I was invited--with no visible
connection--to 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 portents--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 scene of Flora's by the lake--and
had perplexed her by so saying--that 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 never to
fail--one or the other--of the precious question that had helped us
through many a peril. "When do you think he WILL come? Don't you think
we OUGHT to write?"--there was nothing like that inquiry, we found by
experience, for carrying off an awkwardness. "He" of course was their
uncle in Harley Street; and we lived in much profusion of theory that he
might at any moment arrive to mingle in our circle. It was impossible to
have given less encouragement than he had done to such a doctrine, 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 effect of
my being plied 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, however, if relief
had longer been postponed, 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. It was at least change, and it came with a rush.

 The governess believes that the children are aware that she knows about their relationships with Quint and Miss Jessel. When together, she and the children avoid any subject that nears forbidden territory, and she finds herself repeatedly recalling events in her personal history to fill conversational space. The season changes to autumn. As day after day passes without incident, the governess thinks perhaps her eyes have been sealed and that the children are communicating with unseen visitors in her very presence. Even so, her charges are more likeable each day. Unable to broach the topic of Quint and Miss Jessel with the children, the governess shuts herself up in a room to rehearse. Still, in their company, she cannot find the nerve and instead finds herself chattering more than ever, always until she notices a sudden, strange silence. These perceived stillnesses have become common when she is with her pupils, but all three refuse to acknowledge that they occur. The children begin to ask the governess about their uncle and why he hasn't visited or written. The governess has the children write letters to him with the understanding that such writings are merely educational exercises.

