【有声英语文学名著】螺丝在拧紧（9）

The Turn of the Screw
by Henry James
IX
 
I waited and waited, and the days, as they elapsed, took something from my consternation 2. A very few of them, in fact, passing, in constant sight of my pupils, without a fresh incident, sufficed to give to grievous fancies and even to odious 3 memories a kind of brush of the sponge. I have spoken of the surrender to their extraordinary childish grace as a thing I could actively 5 cultivate, and it may be imagined if I neglected now to address myself to this source for whatever it would yield. Stranger than I can express, certainly, was the effort to struggle against my new lights; it would doubtless have been, however, a greater tension still had it not been so frequently successful. I used to wonder how my little charges could help guessing that I thought strange things about them; and the circumstances that these things only made them more interesting was not by itself a direct aid to keeping them in the dark. I trembled lest they should see that they WERE so immensely more interesting. Putting things at the worst, at all events, as in meditation 6 I so often did, any clouding of their innocence 7 could only be — blameless and foredoomed as they were — a reason the more for taking risks. There were moments when, by an irresistible 8 impulse, I found myself catching 9 them up and pressing them to my heart. As soon as I had done so I used to say to myself: “What will they think of that? Doesn’t it betray too much?” It would have been easy to get into a sad, wild tangle 10 about how much I might betray; but the real account, I feel, of the hours of peace that I could still enjoy was that the immediate 11 charm of my companions was a beguilement 12 still effective even under the shadow of the possibility that it was studied. For if it occurred to me that I might occasionally excite suspicion by the little outbreaks of my sharper passion for them, so too I remember wondering if I mightn’t see a queerness in the traceable increase of their own demonstrations 13.
They were at this period extravagantly 14 and preternaturally fond of me; which, after all, I could reflect, was no more than a graceful 15 response in children perpetually bowed over and hugged. The homage 16 of which they were so lavish 17 succeeded, in truth, for my nerves, quite as well as if I never appeared to myself, as I may say, literally 18 to catch them at a purpose in it. They had never, I think, wanted to do so many things for their poor protectress; I mean — though they got their lessons better and better, which was naturally what would please her most — in the way of diverting, entertaining, surprising her; reading her passages, telling her stories, acting 19 her charades 20, pouncing 21 out at her, in disguises, as animals and historical characters, and above all astonishing her by the “pieces” they had secretly got by heart and could interminably recite. I should never get to the bottom — were I to let myself go even now — of the prodigious 22 private commentary, all under still more private correction, with which, in these days, I overscored their full hours. They had shown me from the first a facility for everything, a general faculty 23 which, taking a fresh start, achieved remarkable 24 flights. They got their little tasks as if they loved them, and indulged, from the mere 25 exuberance 26 of the gift, in the most unimposed little miracles of memory. They not only popped out at me as tigers and as Romans, but as Shakespeareans, astronomers 27, and navigators. This was so singularly the case that it had presumably much to do with the fact as to which, at the present day, I am at a loss for a different explanation: I allude 28 to my unnatural 29 composure on the subject of another school for Miles. What I remember is that I was content not, for the time, to open the question, and that contentment must have sprung from the sense of his perpetually striking show of cleverness. He was too clever for a bad governess, for a parson’s daughter, to spoil; and the strangest if not the brightest thread in the pensive 30 embroidery 31 I just spoke 4 of was the impression I might have got, if I had dared to work it out, that he was under some influence operating in his small intellectual life as a tremendous incitement 32.
If it was easy to reflect, however, that such a boy could postpone 33 school, it was at least as marked that for such a boy to have been “kicked out” by a schoolmaster was a mystification without end. Let me add that in their company now — and I was careful almost never to be out of it — I could follow no scent 34 very far. We lived in a cloud of music and love and success and private theatricals 35. The musical sense in each of the children was of the quickest, but the elder in especial had a marvelous knack 36 of catching and repeating. The schoolroom piano broke into all gruesome fancies; and when that failed there were confabulations in corners, with a sequel of one of them going out in the highest spirits in order to “come in” as something new. I had had brothers myself, and it was no revelation to me that little girls could be slavish idolaters of little boys. What surpassed everything was that there was a little boy in the world who could have for the inferior age, sex, and intelligence so fine a consideration. They were extraordinarily 37 at one, and to say that they never either quarreled or complained is to make the note of praise coarse for their quality of sweetness. Sometimes, indeed, when I dropped into coarseness, I perhaps came across traces of little understandings between them by which one of them should keep me occupied while the other slipped away. There is a naive 38 side, I suppose, in all diplomacy 39; but if my pupils practiced upon me, it was surely with the minimum of grossness. It was all in the other quarter that, after a lull 40, the grossness broke out.
I find that I really hang back; but I must take my plunge 41. In going on with the record of what was hideous 42 at Bly, I not only challenge the most liberal faith — for which I little care; but — and this is another matter — I renew what I myself suffered, I again push my way through it to the end. There came suddenly an hour after which, as I look back, the affair seems to me to have been all pure suffering; but I have at least reached the heart of it, and the straightest road out is doubtless to advance. One evening — with nothing to lead up or to prepare it — I felt the cold touch of the impression that had breathed on me the night of my arrival and which, much lighter 43 then, as I have mentioned, I should probably have made little of in memory had my subsequent sojourn 44 been less agitated 45. I had not gone to bed; I sat reading by a couple of candles. There was a roomful of old books at Bly — last-century fiction, some of it, which, to the extent of a distinctly deprecated renown 46, but never to so much as that of a stray specimen 47, had reached the sequestered 48 home and appealed to the unavowed curiosity of my youth. I remember that the book I had in my hand was Fielding’s Amelia; also that I was wholly awake. I recall further both a general conviction that it was horribly late and a particular objection to looking at my watch. I figure, finally, that the white curtain draping, in the fashion of those days, the head of Flora’s little bed, shrouded 49, as I had assured myself long before, the perfection of childish rest. I recollect 50 in short that, though I was deeply interested in my author, I found myself, at the turn of a page and with his spell all scattered 51, looking straight up from him and hard at the door of my room. There was a moment during which I listened, reminded of the faint sense I had had, the first night, of there being something undefinably astir in the house, and noted 52 the soft breath of the open casement 53 just move the half-drawn blind. Then, with all the marks of a deliberation that must have seemed magnificent had there been anyone to admire it, I laid down my book, rose to my feet, and, taking a candle, went straight out of the room and, from the passage, on which my light made little impression, noiselessly closed and locked the door.
I can say now neither what determined 54 nor what guided me, but I went straight along the lobby, holding my candle high, till I came within sight of the tall window that presided over the great turn of the staircase. At this point I precipitately 55 found myself aware of three things. They were practically simultaneous, yet they had flashes of succession. My candle, under a bold flourish, went out, and I perceived, by the uncovered window, that the yielding dusk of earliest morning rendered it unnecessary. Without it, the next instant, I saw that there was someone on the stair. I speak of sequences, but I required no lapse 1 of seconds to stiffen 56 myself for a third encounter with Quint. The apparition 57 had reached the landing halfway 58 up and was therefore on the spot nearest the window, where at sight of me, it stopped short and fixed 59 me exactly as it had fixed me from the tower and from the garden. He knew me as well as I knew him; and so, in the cold, faint twilight 60, with a glimmer 61 in the high glass and another on the polish of the oak stair below, we faced each other in our common intensity 62. He was absolutely, on this occasion, a living, detestable, dangerous presence. But that was not the wonder of wonders; I reserve this distinction for quite another circumstance: the circumstance that dread 63 had unmistakably quitted me and that there was nothing in me there that didn’t meet and measure him.
I had plenty of anguish 64 after that extraordinary moment, but I had, thank God, no terror. And he knew I had not — I found myself at the end of an instant magnificently aware of this. I felt, in a fierce rigor 65 of confidence, that if I stood my ground a minute I should cease — for the time, at least — to have him to reckon with; and during the minute, accordingly, the thing was as human and hideous as a real interview: hideous just because it WAS human, as human as to have met alone, in the small hours, in a sleeping house, some enemy, some adventurer, some criminal. It was the dead silence of our long gaze at such close quarters that gave the whole horror, huge as it was, its only note of the unnatural. If I had met a murderer in such a place and at such an hour, we still at least would have spoken. Something would have passed, in life, between us; if nothing had passed, one of us would have moved. The moment was so prolonged that it would have taken but little more to make me doubt if even I were in life. I can’t express what followed it save by saying that the silence itself — which was indeed in a manner an attestation 66 of my strength — became the element into which I saw the figure disappear; in which I definitely saw it turn as I might have seen the low wretch 67 to which it had once belonged turn on receipt of an order, and pass, with my eyes on the villainous back that no hunch 68 could have more disfigured, straight down the staircase and into the darkness in which the next bend was lost.