He had a certain reputation as a ladies’ man. Excepting of course, as the clumsy riposte went, Quint’s ladies were hardly ladies.
Infrequently, on unpredictable weekends, Master came by train to Bly—“To my country retreat”—with a flushed, sullen look of, indeed, a gentleman in retreat. (From amorous mishaps?—gambling debacles? Not even his valet knew.) He paid scant attention to the quivering Miss Jessel, whom, to her chagrin, he persisted in calling by the wrong name; he paid virtually no attention at all to poor little Flora, beaming with hope like an angel and dressed in her prettiest pink frock. He did make it a point to speak with Peter Quint in private, bringing up the unexpected subject of his little nephew Miles, enrolled at Eton—“I want, you know, Quint, this boy of my poor dear fool of a brother to be a boy; and not, you know,” here he paused, frowning, “—not a boy. D’you see?” Master’s face flushed brick-red with discomfort and a sort of choked anger.
Politic Quint murmured a polite, “Yes, sir. Indeed.”
“These boys’ schools—notorious! All sorts of—” Another pause, a look of distaste. A nervous stroking of his moustache—“Antics. Best not spoken aloud. But you know what I mean.”
Quint, who had not had the privilege of attending any public boys’ school, let alone the distinguished one in which little Miles was enrolled, was not sure that he did know; but could guess. Still, the gentleman’s man hesitated, now stroking his own whiskery chin.
Seeing Quint’s hesitation, and interpreting it as a subtle refinement of his own distaste, Master continued, hurriedly, “Let me phrase it thus, Quint: I require that those for whom I am responsible subscribe to decent standards of Christian behavior, that’s to say normal standards of human behavior. D’you see? That is not much to ask, but it is everything.”
“Certainly, sir.”
“A nephew of mine, blood of my blood, bred to inherit my name, the bearer of a great English lineage—he must, he will, marry, and sire children to continue the line to—” Another pause, and here a rather ghastly slackening of the mouth, as if the very prospect sickened, “—perpetuity. D’you see?”
Quint mumbled a vague assent.
“Degenerates will be the death of England, if we do not stop them in the cradle.”
“In the cradle, sir?”
“For, y’know, Quint, just between us two, man to man: I would rather see the poor little bugger dead, than unmanly.”
At this Quint started, and so forgot himself as to look the Master of Bly searchingly in the face; but the gentleman’s eyes were red-veined, with a flat, opaque cast that yielded little light.
The interview was over, abruptly. Quint bowed to Master, and took his leave. Thinking, My God! the upper classes are more savage than I had guessed.
Yet little Miles, though blood of Master’s blood, and bred to the inheritance not merely of a revered English lineage but a good deal of wealth, was a child starved for affection—a sweet-natured, sometimes a bit mischievous, yet always sunnily charming boy; fair-skinned like his sister, but with honey-brown hair and eyes, and, though small-framed, with an inclination toward heart palpitations and breathlessness, indefatigably high-spirited when others were around. (Alone, Miles was apt to be moody and secretive; no doubt he mourned his parents, whom, unlike Flora, he could recall, if confusedly. He had been five at the time of their deaths.) However quick and intelligent he was, Miles did not like school, or, in any case, his more robust classmates at Eton. Yet he rarely complained, and, in Peter Quint’s presence, as in the presence of any adult male of authority, it seemed resolute in the child that he not complain.
From the start, to Quint’s astonishment, Miles attached himself to him with childish affection, hugging and kissing him, even, if he was able, clambering onto Quint’s lap. Such unguarded demonstrations of feeling both embarrassed the valet, and flattered him. Quint tried to fend off Miles, laughingly, rather red-faced, protesting, “Your uncle would not approve of such behavior, Miles!—indeed, your uncle would call this ‘unmanly.’ ” But Miles persisted; Miles was adamant; Miles wept if pushed forcibly away. It was a habit of his to rush at Quint if he had not seen him in a while and seize him around the hips, burrowing his flushed little face into the elder man as a kitten or puppy might, blindly seeking its mother’s teats. Miles would plead, “But, you know, Quint, Uncle doesn’t love me. I only want to be loved.” Taking pity on the child, Quint would caress him, awkwardly, bend over to kiss the top or his head, then push him away, in a nervous reflex. “Miles, dear chap, this is really not what we want!” he laughed.
But Miles held tight, laughing too, breathless and defiant, pleading, “Oh, but isn’t it, Quint?—isn’t it?—isn’t it?”
As Miss Jessel and little Flora were inseparable companions, so too were Peter Quint and little Miles, when Miles was home from school. And, as the children were intensely, one might almost say desperately, attached to each other, the shy, plain-pretty governess from Glyngden and the coarser valet from the Midlands were very often in each other’s company.
Damned hard to pride oneself on one’s feral good looks when a man is forced to shave with a dull razor in a cracked looking glass, and when his clothes, regardless of how “smart,” are covered with a patina of grime; when, drifting into a thin, ragged sleep as the moon seems on windy nights to be sailing through a scrim of cloud, he wakes with a start of terror. As if, thinks Quint, I am not even dead yet: and the worst is yet to come.
Poor Jessel!—whom crossing over has humbled yet more egregiously!
In puddles of dirty water the once-chaste young governess with the lustrous “Scots curl” tries repeatedly, compulsively, to cleanse herself. The brackish mud-muck of Flora’s Sea of Azof clings to her underarms, the pit of her belly, the hot dark crevice between her legs with its own brackish odor; a particular sort of spiny iridescent beetle that breeds copiously in the earthy damp of the cellar is attracted to hair, and sticks tight as snarls. Her single good dress, which, out of defiance, she’d worn as she waded into the water, is stiff with filth, and her petticoats, once white, are striated with mud, and not yet fully dry. She rages, she weeps, she claws at her cheeks with her broken nails, she turns against her lover, demanding why, if he’d known she was hysterically inclined, he’d made love to her at all.
Quint protests. Guiltily. A man is a man, a pronged creature destined to impregnate: how, given their attraction to each other, in the romantically sequestered countryside of Bly, could he, lusty Peter Quint, not have made love to her? How could he have known she was “hysterically inclined” and would take her own, dear life, in an excess of shame?
Not that Miss Jessel’s desperate act was solely a consequence of shame: it was pragmatic, practical. Word had come from Harley Street (fed, of course, by tales told by Mrs. Grose and others) that Miss Jessel was dismissed from Bly, commanded at once to vacate her room, disappear.
Where, then, could she have gone?—back to the Glyngden parsonage?
A ruined woman, a despoiled woman, a humiliated woman, a fallen woman, a woman made incontrovertibly a woman.
Jessel says tartly that all virgins of this time and place are “hysterically inclined”—little Presbyterian governesses above all. If, in life, she’d had the luck to have been born a man, she’d have avoided such pathetic creatures like the plague.
Quint laughs irritably. “Yes, but, dear Jessel, you know—I love you.”
The statement hovers in the air, forlorn and accusing.
Here is perversity: in this twilit realm to which crossing over has brought the accursed lovers, Jessel seems, in Quint’s eyes, far more beautiful than she’d been in life; Quint, to Jessel, despite her anger, quite the most attractive man she has ever seen—touching in his vanity even now, in grimy and tattered vests, shirts, and breeches, his rooster’s-crest of brick-red hair threaded with gray, his jaws covered in wiry stubble. The most manly of men!—graced now with sobriety and melancholy. Yearning for each other, moaning in frustration, they grasp each other’s hands, they
slip their arms around each other, they stroke, squeeze, kiss, bite, sighing when their “material beings” turn immaterial as vapor—and Quint’s arms shut around mere air, a shadow, and Jessel paws wildly at him, her fingers in his hair, her mouth pressed against his, except, damnably, Quint too is a shadow: an apparition.
“We are not ‘real,’ then?—any longer?” Jessel asks, panting.
“If we can love, if we can desire—who is more ‘real’ than we?” Quint demands.
But of course, why mince words, Quint’s a man, he’s chagrined at impotence.
Yet, sometimes, they can make love. Of a kind. If they act swiftly, spontaneously. If they don’t articulate, in conscious thought, what they are about to do, they can, almost, with luck, do it.
At other times, by some mysterious law of decomposition, though unpredictably, the molecules that constitute their “bodies” shift in density, and become porous. But not inevitably at the same time: so that Jessel, reaching out to touch Quint with a “real” hand, might recoil in horror as her “real” hand passes through his insubstantial body.... How the lovers yearn for those days, not so very long ago, when they inhabited wholly ordinary “human bodies” they had not understood were miracles of molecular harmony!
Flesh of our flesh, blood of our blood. Dear Flora, dear Miles.
How to leave Bly?—Jessel and Quint cannot give up their little charges, who have no one but them. Their days and nights are passed in drifting, brooding . . . how, next, to make contact with the children? Time passes strangely in these catacombs, as a night of intermittent dreams passes for the living, during which hours are pleated, or protracted, or reduced to mere seconds. Sometimes, in a paroxysm of despair, Jessel believes that time, for the dead who are linked to the world by desire, thus insufficiently dead, cannot pass. Suffering is infinite and will never diminish. “Quint, the horror of it is: we’re frozen forever at a single point of time, the ghastly point of our crossing over,” Jessel says, her eyes dilated, all pupil, “—and nothing will, nothing can, change for us,” and Quint says quickly, “Dear girl, time does pass. Of course it does! You went first, remember, and I followed; there were our funerals (swiftly and a bit cursorily performed, indeed); we hear them, upstairs, speak of us less and less frequently, where once the damned prigs spoke of nothing else. Miles has been away at school and will, I think, shortly be home again for Easter recess. Flora’s eighth birthday was last week . . .”
“And we dared not be with her, but had to watch through the window, like lepers,” Jessel says hotly.
“And there is this new governess expected tomorrow, I’ve heard—your replacement.”
Jessel laughs. Harsh, scratchy-throated, brief laughter, without mirth. “My replacement! Never.”
“Dun-colored, and so plain! Skin the color of curdled milk! And the eyes so squinty and small!—the forehead so bony!”
Jessel is incensed. Jessel is quivering with rage. Quint would admonish her, but that would only make things worse.
From the summit of the square tower to the east, that overlooks the drive, the accursed lovers regard the newly hired governess as she steps down, not very gracefully, with a scared smile, from the carriage. Mrs. Grose has little Flora by the hand, urging the child forward to be introduced. How eager she is, fattish Grose!—who’d once been Miss Jessel’s friend, and had then so cruelly rejected her. The new governess (as Quint overheard, from Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire—a rural village as obscure and provincial as Glyngden) is a skinny broomstick of a girl, in a gray bonnet that does not flatter her, and a badly wrinkled gray traveling cloak; her small, pale, homely face is lit from within by a hope, a prayer, of “succeeding”—Jessel recoils, recalling such, in herself. Jessel mutters, half-sobbing, “Quint, how could he! Another! To take my place with Flora! How dare he!”
Quint assures her, “No one will take your place with Flora, dear girl. You know that.”
As the new governess stoops over Flora, all smiles and delight, Jessel sees, with a trip of her heart, how the child glances over her shoulder, stealthily, to ascertain that Miss Jessel is somewhere near.
Yes, dear Flora. Your Jessel is always somewhere near.
So it begins, the bitter contest.
The struggle for little Flora, and little Miles.
“That woman is one of them,” Jessel says, her fist jammed against her mouth, “—the very worst of them.” Quint, who would like to stay clear of his mistress’s fanatic plots, that turn, and turn, and turn upon the hope, to his skeptical mind not very likely, of reuniting the four of them someday, says, with a frown, “The very worst of—?” Jessel replies, her eyes brimming with tears, “A vicious little—Christian! A Puritan! You know the sort: one who hates and fears life in others. Hates and fears joy, passion, love. All that we’ve had.”
There is a moment’s silence. Quint is thinking of certain slumberous summer afternoons, heat lightning flashing in the sweetly bruised sky, a weeping Miss Jessel cradled in his arms, the smell of tall grasses and the calls of rooks and little Flora and little Miles approaching through the grove of acacia trees calling softly, slyly, happily, Oh, Miss Jessel ! Oh, Mr. Quint! Where are you hiding? May we see?
Quint shivers, recalling. He understands that Jessel, too, is thinking of those lovely lost afternoons.
Of course, it has also irked Quint that Master has hired a new governess for little Flora, yet, to be reasonable, would there not have to be a new governess, soon? So far as the world knows, Miss Jessel is dead, and has departed to where all the dead go. Master would have hired a new governess within twenty-four hours of the death of the old, had decorum not forbade it.
Yes, and there is a new valet, too: but this gentleman’s man, Quint has heard, will live in Harley Street, and will never meet little Miles.
Quint has wondered, Did Master know?—not just of Jessel and me, but of the children, too?
Quint asks Jessel, “You see all that, darling? In the poor pinched thing’s face?”
“Of course! Can’t you?”
Jessel’s mad beautiful eyes, her skin gleaming with the ferocity of moonlight. Her mouth is a wound. To gaze upon it, Quint thinks, succumbing, is to be aroused.
Quint appears to the new governess first. He must confess, there is something in the young woman’s very bearing, the thin, stiff little body inside the clothes, the nervously high-held head, the quick-darting steely gray eyes, that both repels and attracts him. Unlike Flora, who is capable of staring in a trance of mystic contentment at her Miss Jessel (who will appear to Flora, for instance, across the pond, as the new governess, her back to the pond, chatters to her little charge in complete ignorance), and occasionally at Peter Quint as well (for Quint sometimes appears with Jessel, arms entwined), the new governess reacts with a shock, an astonishment, a naked terror, that is immensely gratifying to a man.
A man of still-youthful vigor and lusts, deprived by this damnable crossing over of his manhood.
Quint ascends the square tower to the west, dashing up the spiral stairs to the crenelated top, bodiless, thus weightless, and feeling quite good. The “battlements” of the House of Bly are architectural fancies not unlike manufactured fossils, for they were added to the house in a short-lived romantic-medieval revival of a decade or so ago, touchingly quaint, yet, who can deny it?—wonderfully atmospheric. Quint sees that the governess is approaching below on the path, she is alone, meditative, exciting in her maiden vulnerability, he preens his feathers glancing down the lean length of himself liking what he sees, he is a damned fine figure of a man. The vagrant late-afternoon wind dies down; the rooks cease their fretful, ubiquitous cries; there is an unnatural “hush”—and Quint feels with a shudder of delight the governess’s shock as she lifts her eyes to the top of the tower, to the machicolated ledge, to him. Ah, bliss!
For some dramatic seconds, protracted as minutes, Quint and the governess stare at each other: Quint coolly and severely, with his “piercing” eyes (which few women, inexperienced young vir
gins or no, would be likely to forget); the governess with an expression of alarm, incredulity, terror. The poor thing takes an involuntary step backward. She presses a tremulous hand to her throat. Quint gives her the full, full impact of his gaze—he holds her fast there below on the path, he wills her to stand as if paralyzed. For this performance, Quint has pieced together an attractive costume that does not altogether embarrass him. Trousers still holding their crease, a white silk shirt kept in readiness for just such an occasion, that elegant coat of Master’s, and the checked vest—another’s things, but put to superior use on Quint’s manly body. His beard is freshly trimmed, which gives him a sinister-romantic dash; he’s hatless, of course—that virile-red rooster’s crest of hair must be displayed.
“The Devil,” as Quint remarked to Jessel, “—who is, you know, as you women prefer it, also a Dandy.”
So indeed the governess stands rooted to the spot, her small pale face disguising nothing of the turbulent emotions she feels. With the studied nonchalance of a professional actor, though such a “visitation,” so calibrated, is entirely new to him, Quint walks slowly along the ledge, continuing to stare at the governess: You do not know me, my dear girl, but you can guess who I am. You have been forewarned.
Cunning Quint, as the governess stares up at him like a transfixed child, strolls to the farther curve of the tower, disappears.
Thinking afterward, in the golden-erotic glow of a wholly satisfactory experience, How otherwise to know what power we wield, except to see it in another’s eyes?
Excitedly, extravagantly, Jessel predicts that her “replacement” will flee Bly immediately—“I should do so, under such circumstances!”
“Seeing a ghost, do you mean?” Quint asks, bemused, “—or seeing me?”
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