【有声英语文学名著】螺丝在拧紧（6）

The Turn of the Screw
by Henry James
VI
 
It took of course more than that particular passage to place us together in presence of what we had now to live with as we could — my dreadful liability to impressions of the order so vividly 2 exemplified, and my companion’s knowledge, henceforth — a knowledge half consternation 3 and half compassion 4 — of that liability. There had been, this evening, after the revelation left me, for an hour, so prostrate 5 — there had been, for either of us, no attendance on any service but a little service of tears and vows 6, of prayers and promises, a climax 7 to the series of mutual 8 challenges and pledges that had straightway ensued on our retreating together to the schoolroom and shutting ourselves up there to have everything out. The result of our having everything out was simply to reduce our situation to the last rigor 9 of its elements. She herself had seen nothing, not the shadow of a shadow, and nobody in the house but the governess was in the governess’s plight 10; yet she accepted without directly impugning 12 my sanity 13 the truth as I gave it to her, and ended by showing me, on this ground, an awestricken tenderness, an expression of the sense of my more than questionable 14 privilege, of which the very breath has remained with me as that of the sweetest of human charities.
What was settled between us, accordingly, that night, was that we thought we might bear things together; and I was not even sure that, in spite of her exemption 15, it was she who had the best of the burden. I knew at this hour, I think, as well as I knew later, what I was capable of meeting to shelter my pupils; but it took me some time to be wholly sure of what my honest ally was prepared for to keep terms with so compromising a contract. I was queer company enough — quite as queer as the company I received; but as I trace over what we went through I see how much common ground we must have found in the one idea that, by good fortune, COULD steady us. It was the idea, the second movement, that led me straight out, as I may say, of the inner chamber 16 of my dread 1. I could take the air in the court, at least, and there Mrs. Grose could join me. Perfectly 17 can I recall now the particular way strength came to me before we separated for the night. We had gone over and over every feature of what I had seen.
“He was looking for someone else, you say — someone who was not you?”
“He was looking for little Miles.” A portentous 18 clearness now possessed 19 me. “THAT’S whom he was looking for.”
“But how do you know?”
“I know, I know, I know!” My exaltation grew. “And YOU know, my dear!”
She didn’t deny this, but I required, I felt, not even so much telling as that. She resumed in a moment, at any rate: “What if HE should see him?”
“Little Miles? That’s what he wants!”
She looked immensely scared again. “The child?”
“Heaven forbid! The man. He wants to appear to THEM.” That he might was an awful conception, and yet, somehow, I could keep it at bay; which, moreover, as we lingered there, was what I succeeded in practically proving. I had an absolute certainty that I should see again what I had already seen, but something within me said that by offering myself bravely as the sole subject of such experience, by accepting, by inviting 20, by surmounting 21 it all, I should serve as an expiatory 22 victim and guard the tranquility of my companions. The children, in especial, I should thus fence about and absolutely save. I recall one of the last things I said that night to Mrs. Grose.
“It does strike me that my pupils have never mentioned — ”
She looked at me hard as I musingly 23 pulled up. “His having been here and the time they were with him?”
“The time they were with him, and his name, his presence, his history, in any way.”
“Oh, the little lady doesn’t remember. She never heard or knew.”
“The circumstances of his death?” I thought with some intensity 24. “Perhaps not. But Miles would remember — Miles would know.”
“Ah, don’t try him!” broke from Mrs. Grose.
I returned her the look she had given me. “Don’t be afraid.” I continued to think. “It IS rather odd.”
“That he has never spoken of him?”
“Never by the least allusion 25. And you tell me they were ‘great friends’?”
“Oh, it wasn’t HIM!” Mrs. Grose with emphasis declared. “It was Quint’s own fancy. To play with him, I mean — to spoil him.” She paused a moment; then she added: “Quint was much too free.”
This gave me, straight from my vision of his face — SUCH a face! — a sudden sickness of disgust. “Too free with MY boy?”
“Too free with everyone!”
I forbore, for the moment, to analyze 26 this description further than by the reflection that a part of it applied 27 to several of the members of the household, of the half-dozen maids and men who were still of our small colony. But there was everything, for our apprehension 28, in the lucky fact that no discomfortable legend, no perturbation of scullions, had ever, within anyone’s memory attached to the kind old place. It had neither bad name nor ill fame, and Mrs. Grose, most apparently 29, only desired to cling to me and to quake in silence. I even put her, the very last thing of all, to the test. It was when, at midnight, she had her hand on the schoolroom door to take leave. “I have it from you then — for it’s of great importance — that he was definitely and admittedly bad?”
“Oh, not admittedly. I knew it — but the master didn’t.”
“And you never told him?”
“Well, he didn’t like tale-bearing — he hated complaints. He was terribly short with anything of that kind, and if people were all right to HIM— ”
“He wouldn’t be bothered with more?” This squared well enough with my impressions of him: he was not a trouble-loving gentleman, nor so very particular perhaps about some of the company HE kept. All the same, I pressed my interlocutress. “I promise you I would have told!”
She felt my discrimination. “I daresay I was wrong. But, really, I was afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
“Of things that man could do. Quint was so clever — he was so deep.”
I took this in still more than, probably, I showed. “You weren’t afraid of anything else? Not of his effect —?”
“His effect?” she repeated with a face of anguish 30 and waiting while I faltered 31.
“On innocent little precious lives. They were in your charge.”
“No, they were not in mine!” she roundly and distressfully returned. “The master believed in him and placed him here because he was supposed not to be well and the country air so good for him. So he had everything to say. Yes” — she let me have it — “even about THEM.”
“Them — that creature?” I had to smother 32 a kind of howl. “And you could bear it!”
“No. I couldn’t — and I can’t now!” And the poor woman burst into tears.
A rigid 33 control, from the next day, was, as I have said, to follow them; yet how often and how passionately 34, for a week, we came back together to the subject! Much as we had discussed it that Sunday night, I was, in the immediate 35 later hours in especial — for it may be imagined whether I slept — still haunted with the shadow of something she had not told me. I myself had kept back nothing, but there was a word Mrs. Grose had kept back. I was sure, moreover, by morning, that this was not from a failure of frankness, but because on every side there were fears. It seems to me indeed, in retrospect 36, that by the time the morrow’s sun was high I had restlessly read into the fact before us almost all the meaning they were to receive from subsequent and more cruel occurrences. What they gave me above all was just the sinister 37 figure of the living man — the dead one would keep awhile! — and of the months he had continuously passed at Bly, which, added up, made a formidable stretch. The limit of this evil time had arrived only when, on the dawn of a winter’s morning, Peter Quint was found, by a laborer 38 going to early work, stone dead on the road from the village: a catastrophe 39 explained — superficially at least — by a visible wound to his head; such a wound as might have been produced — and as, on the final evidence, HAD been — by a fatal slip, in the dark and after leaving the public house, on the steepish icy slope, a wrong path altogether, at the bottom of which he lay. The icy slope, the turn mistaken at night and in liquor, accounted for much — practically, in the end and after the inquest and boundless 40 chatter 41, for everything; but there had been matters in his life — strange passages and perils 42, secret disorders 43, vices 44 more than suspected — that would have accounted for a good deal more.
I scarce know how to put my story into words that shall be a credible 45 picture of my state of mind; but I was in these days literally 46 able to find a joy in the extraordinary flight of heroism 47 the occasion demanded of me. I now saw that I had been asked for a service admirable and difficult; and there would be a greatness in letting it be seen — oh, in the right quarter! — that I could succeed where many another girl might have failed. It was an immense help to me — I confess I rather applaud myself as I look back! — that I saw my service so strongly and so simply. I was there to protect and defend the little creatures in the world the most bereaved 48 and the most lovable, the appeal of whose helplessness had suddenly become only too explicit 49, a deep, constant ache of one’s own committed heart. We were cut off, really, together; we were united in our danger. They had nothing but me, and I— well, I had THEM. It was in short a magnificent chance. This chance presented itself to me in an image richly material. I was a screen — I was to stand before them. The more I saw, the less they would. I began to watch them in a stifled 50 suspense 51, a disguised excitement that might well, had it continued too long, have turned to something like madness. What saved me, as I now see, was that it turned to something else altogether. It didn’t last as suspense — it was superseded 52 by horrible proofs. Proofs, I say, yes — from the moment I really took hold.
This moment dated from an afternoon hour that I happened to spend in the grounds with the younger of my pupils alone. We had left Miles indoors, on the red cushion of a deep window seat; he had wished to finish a book, and I had been glad to encourage a purpose so laudable in a young man whose only defect was an occasional excess of the restless. His sister, on the contrary, had been alert to come out, and I strolled with her half an hour, seeking the shade, for the sun was still high and the day exceptionally warm. I was aware afresh, with her, as we went, of how, like her brother, she contrived 53 — it was the charming thing in both children — to let me alone without appearing to drop me and to accompany me without appearing to surround. They were never importunate 54 and yet never listless. My attention to them all really went to seeing them amuse themselves immensely without me: this was a spectacle they seemed actively 55 to prepare and that engaged me as an active admirer. I walked in a world of their invention — they had no occasion whatever to draw upon mine; so that my time was taken only with being, for them, some remarkable 56 person or thing that the game of the moment required and that was merely, thanks to my superior, my exalted 57 stamp, a happy and highly distinguished 58 sinecure 59. I forget what I was on the present occasion; I only remember that I was something very important and very quiet and that Flora 60 was playing very hard. We were on the edge of the lake, and, as we had lately begun geography, the lake was the Sea of Azof.
Suddenly, in these circumstances, I became aware that, on the other side of the Sea of Azof, we had an interested spectator. The way this knowledge gathered in me was the strangest thing in the world — the strangest, that is, except the very much stranger in which it quickly merged 61 itself. I had sat down with a piece of work — for I was something or other that could sit — on the old stone bench which overlooked the pond; and in this position I began to take in with certitude, and yet without direct vision, the presence, at a distance, of a third person. The old trees, the thick shrubbery, made a great and pleasant shade, but it was all suffused 62 with the brightness of the hot, still hour. There was no ambiguity 63 in anything; none whatever, at least, in the conviction I from one moment to another found myself forming as to what I should see straight before me and across the lake as a consequence of raising my eyes. They were attached at this juncture 64 to the stitching in which I was engaged, and I can feel once more the spasm 65 of my effort not to move them till I should so have steadied myself as to be able to make up my mind what to do. There was an alien object in view — a figure whose right of presence I instantly, passionately questioned. I recollect 66 counting over perfectly the possibilities, reminding myself that nothing was more natural, for instance, then the appearance of one of the men about the place, or even of a messenger, a postman, or a tradesman’s boy, from the village. That reminder 67 had as little effect on my practical certitude as I was conscious — still even without looking — of its having upon the character and attitude of our visitor. Nothing was more natural than that these things should be the other things that they absolutely were not.
Of the positive identity of the apparition 68 I would assure myself as soon as the small clock of my courage should have ticked out the right second; meanwhile, with an effort that was already sharp enough, I transferred my eyes straight to little Flora, who, at the moment, was about ten yards away. My heart had stood still for an instant with the wonder and terror of the question whether she too would see; and I held my breath while I waited for what a cry from her, what some sudden innocent sign either of interest or of alarm, would tell me. I waited, but nothing came; then, in the first place — and there is something more dire 11 in this, I feel, than in anything I have to relate — I was determined 69 by a sense that, within a minute, all sounds from her had previously 70 dropped; and, in the second, by the circumstance that, also within the minute, she had, in her play, turned her back to the water. This was her attitude when I at last looked at her — looked with the confirmed conviction that we were still, together, under direct personal notice. She had picked up a small flat piece of wood, which happened to have in it a little hole that had evidently suggested to her the idea of sticking in another fragment that might figure as a mast and make the thing a boat. This second morsel 71, as I watched her, she was very markedly and intently attempting to tighten 72 in its place. My apprehension of what she was doing sustained me so that after some seconds I felt I was ready for more. Then I again shifted my eyes — I faced what I had to face.