Yet, to Jessel’s surprise, and extreme disappointment, the governess from Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, does not flee Bly; but seems to be digging in, as for a siege. She is intimidated, surely, but also wary, and alert. She exudes an air of—what? A Puritan’s prim, punitive zeal?—a Christian martyr’s stubborn resolve? The second time Quint appears to her, the two of them, alone, no more than fifteen feet apart, separated by a pane of glass, the young woman draws herself up to her full height (she lacks Jessel’s stature, is no more than five feet two inches tall) and stares unwaveringly at Quint for a long tense moment.
Quint frowns severely. You know who I am! You have been forewarned!
The governess is so frightened that the blood drains from her face, turning it a ghastly waxen color; her fists are clenched, white-knuckled, against her flat bosom. Yet, staring at Quint, she seems to challenge him. Yes, I know who you are. But, no, I will not give in.
When Quint releases her, she does not run to hide in her room, but, again most unexpectedly, bounds out of the house, and rushes around to the terrace, where, if Quint were a flesh-and-blood man, a “real” man, he would have stood to peer through the window. Of course, no one is there. A scattering of bruised forsythia blossoms on the terrace beneath the window lies undisturbed.
The governess, white-faced, yet arrogant, peers about with the nervous intensity of a small terrier. Clearly, she is frightened; yet, it seems, fear alone is not enough to deter her. (Her behavior is the more courageous in that it is Sunday, and most of the household, including the ever-vigilant Mrs. Grose, are at church in the Village of Bly.) Quint has retreated to a hedgerow a short distance away, where, joined by a somber Jessel, he contemplates the governess in her plain, prim, chaste Sunday bonnet and provincial costume: how defiant the gawky little thing is! Jessel gnaws at a thumbnail, murmuring, “How can it be, Quint! A normal woman, thinking she’d seen a ghost—or, indeed, thinking she’d seen, in such circumstances, an actual man—would have run away screaming for help.” Quint says, annoyed, “Maybe, love, I’m not so formidable as we think.” Jessel says, worriedly, “Or she is not a normal woman.”
Afterward, Quint recalls the episode with, beyond annoyance and chagrin, a stir of sexual arousal. It excites him that there is a new, young, willful woman at Bly; homely as a pudding, and with a body flat, bosom and buttocks, as a board. Certainly she lacks Jessel’s passion, as she lacks Jessel’s desperation. Yet she is alive, and poor dear Jessel is dead.
Quint makes himself snake-slender, incorporeal: yet gifted with a prodigious red-skinned erection: an incubus: insinuating himself into the governess’s bedroom, and into her bed, and, despite her faint flailing protests, into her very body.
When he groans aloud, shuddering, Jessel pokes him with a sharp little fist.
“Are you having a nightmare, Quint?” she asks ironically.
And then, an unexpected development: poor little Miles has been expelled from Eton!
Quint and Jessel contrive to overhear the governess and Mrs. Grose as they discuss the subject, and the mystery embedded in it, repeatedly; obsessively. The governess, quite shocked, and puzzled, reads the headmaster’s letter of dismissal to Mrs. Grose; together, the women dissect the chill, blunt, insultingly formal sentences, which present the expulsion as a fait accompli, about which there can be no negotiations. It seems, simply, that Eton “declines” to keep little Miles as a student. That is all.
Jessel, crouched beside Quint, murmurs in a low, sensuous voice, “Delightful for you, Quint, to have your boy back again, eh? The four of us will be reunited soon!—I know it.”
But Quint, who has a notion that he knows why Miles has been expelled, says, gravely, “But, poor Miles! He must go to school, after all; he can’t hang about here like his sister. His uncle will be furious when he learns. The old bugger wants nothing but that Miles grow up to be a ‘manly man’ like himself.”
“Oh, what do we care for him?” Jessel asks. “He is the worst of the enemy, after all.”
A day later, Miles appears. He is much the same as Quint recalls, perhaps an inch or so taller, a few pounds heavier; fair-skinned, clear-eyed, with that slightly feverish flush to his cheeks and that air of startled breathlessness that Quint found so appealing—finds appealing still. A sweet, clever, circumspect lad of ten, but far, far older than his years, Miles wins the heart of the new governess at their first meeting; forestalls, by his very innocence, any awkward questions about Eton; and, that night, when he should have been in bed, slips past the door of the governess’s room (which little Flora shares) and wanders out into the deep, shifting shadows of the park, seeking—who, or what?
Moonlight cascades over the slated roofs of the great ugly House of Bly. The cries of nocturnal birds sound in a rhythmic, staccato pulse.
Quint observes dear little Miles, in pajamas, barefoot, making his way across the slope of the lawn, and back beyond the stables, to one of their old trysting places: there the child throws himself, with an air of abandon, on the dewy grass, as if to declare I am here, where are you? When Quint died, little Miles was said to have been “stonycold”—not a tear shed. So Quint overheard the servants talking. When Miss Jessel drowned, little Flora was said to have been “heartbroken”—inconsolable for days. Quint approves of Miles’s stoicism.
Hidden close by the restive child (Miles is looking impatiently about, pulling at blades of grass), Quint observes him with fond, guilty eyes. In life, Quint’s passion was for women; his affection for little Miles was in reaction to little Miles’s affection for him, thus not a true passion, perhaps. Quint wonders is it fair to the child, the secret bond between them?—the attachment, of such tender, wordless intimacy, even Quint’s abrupt crossing over seems not to have weakened it?
In the moonlit silence the child’s voice is low, fearful, quavering with hope. “Quint? Damn you, Quint, are you here?”
Quint, choked with emotion suddenly, does not reply. He sees the child’s beautiful eyes, glittering as with a fever. What a tragedy, to be orphaned at the age of five!—no wonder the child grasped Quint’s knee as a drowning person a lifeboat.
It had been Miles’s habit, charming, and touching, perhaps a bit pitiful, to seek out the lovers Quint and Miss Jessel in just such trysting places, if he could find them; then, silky hair disheveled and eyes dilated as with an opiate, he would hug, burrow, twist, groan with yearning and delight—who could resist him, who could send him away? And little Flora, too.
“Quint?” Miles whispers, glancing nervously about, his rapt, eager face luminous as a lily, “—I know you’re here, you couldn’t, could you, not be here! It has been so damnably long.”
Those happiest of times. Because most unexpected, uncalculated of times.
And what a dreamy infinity of time, at Bly: the Bly of lush rural England: unimaginable, indeed, in the bustle of London and the stern verticality of Harley Street.
Miles continues, more desperate, and demanding, “Quint, damn you! I know you’re here—somewhere.” Indeed, the boy is staring, with a frown that creases his perfect little forehead like crumpled paper, at Quint—without seeming to see him. “Not ‘dead’—” Miles’s perfect mouth twists in distaste, “—not you. She has seen you, eh?—the new, the supremely awful governess? ‘St. Ottery,’ I call her—aren’t I clever? Quint? Has she seen you? She doesn’t let on, of course, she’s far too cunning, but Flora has guessed. There’s been such a tedious prattle of the ‘purity’ of childhood, and the need to ‘be good, starting with clean hands.’” Miles laughs shrilly.
“Quint? They’ve sacked me, you know—sent me down—as you’d worried—warned. I’m to blame, I suppose—what a fool!—telling only two or three boys about it—boys I liked, oh! ever so much—and who liked me, I know—they vowed never to tell, and yet—somehow—it all came out—there was a nasty hue and cry—Quint, how I hate them all!—they are the enemy, and they are so many! Quint? I love only you.”
And I love only you, dear Miles.
/> Quint appears before Miles, a tall, glimmering shape, taller than he had been in life. Miles gapes up at him, astonished; then, on hands and knees he crawls to Quint, now weeping, “Quint! Quint!” groaning in a delirium of joy as he tries to hug the phantom flesh—legs, thighs. The porousness of Quint’s being does not deter him, perhaps in his excitement he does not comprehend. “I knew! I knew! I knew!—you would not abandon me, Quint!”
Never, dear boy: you have my word.
Then, horribly, there comes an abrupt call, nasal, reedy, scolding—“Miles? You naughty boy, where are you?”
It is the governess from Ottery St. Mary: a diminutive, stubborn figure, just rounding the corner of the stable some thirty feet away, holding aloft a lighted candle: groping, yet persistent, bravely undaunted by the night and by the feeble, flickering radius of the candle-flame: her!
“—Miles? Miles—?”
So the tryst ends, rudely interrupted. Quint, swearing, retreats. Miles in his pajamas, so charmingly barefoot, rises, rueful, brushing at himself, composing a face, a child’s angelic face, untwisting his mouth, with no recourse but to say, “Here I am.”
But who is guiding us, Quint, if not ourselves?—is there Another whose face we cannot see and whose voice we cannot hear, except as it echoes in our own thoughts?
Jessel fairly spits the words, her lovely mouth turned ugly—“I despise her! She is the ghoul. If only we could destroy her outright!”
As rarely in the past she’d done, coaxed by the child’s urgent need, Jessel appears to little Flora in emboldened daylight, daring to “materialize” on the farther shore of the placid Sea of Azof. A cloudless afternoon in early summer, a vertigo of honeysuckle in the air, and, so suddenly, out of nowhere, there appears, on the grassy bank, a somber yet beautiful figure, hair shockingly undone, darkly lustrous, falling past her shoulders, her face alabaster pale: an heraldic figure, one might think, out of an ancient legend, or a curse. And the child’s doll-like figure in the foreground, blond curls, an angel’s profile, pinafore brightly yellow as the buttercups that grow in happy profusion in the surrounding grass—is not little Flora in her innocence, as in her need, necessary to the vision?
And, on a stone bench close by the child, busily knitting, yet keeping a watchful and jealous eye on her—“St. Ottery,” as Miles has wittily dubbed her.
So like a Fate, indeed!
A common jailer.
Eyes like ditch-water, scanty fair lashes, brows; the small brave chin, sparrow body, skin stretched tight as the skin of a drum. The narrow face is too small for the head, and the head is too small for the body, the body too small for such long, angular feet. The shoulder blades are painfully prominent beneath the dark cotton of her governess’s dress, like folded wings.
Flora is playing, quite absorbedly it seems, on the bank of the pond, humming a nonsensical little tune as she cradles her newest doll in her arms, and an exquisitely beautiful, life-like doll it is, from France, Flora’s guardian-uncle’s gift to her on the occasion of her eighth birthday (which, to Uncle’s regret, he could not attend), her head is lowered, yet she is gazing, staring fixedly, through her eyelashes, at beloved Miss Jessel on the other bank. How the child’s heart beats, in yearning! Take me with you, Miss Jessel, oh please! I am so lonely here, the child mutely begs. I am so unhappy, dear Miss Jessel, since you went away! and Jessel’s heart too beats in yearning, in love, for Flora is her own little girl, the babe cruelly drowned in her womb, hers and Quint’s, in this very pond.
Jessel fixes her gaze upon Flora, across the pond: Jessel would comfort the child, as a hypnotist might. Dear Flora, dear child, you know I love you: you know we will be together soon, and never again apart. My darling—
But, then, the rude interruption, in a most shrill, reedy voice: “Flora, is something wrong?—what is it?”
The terrier “St. Ottery” leaps to her feet and hurries to Flora, glancing level, myopic eyes narrowed, to the opposite bank—seeing the figure of her predecessor, whom perhaps she recognizes; an apparition of the most sorrowful beauty; yet more frightful, in its very solemnity, than the other, the man. (For the man, in his sexually aggressive, self-conscious posture, might have been interpreted as, simply, a man; this creature, “St. Ottery” shrewdly sees, can be nothing but a ghoul.)
The governess grips little Flora by the arm, with unconscious force, crying, appalled, “My God, what a—horror! Hide your eyes, child! Shield yourself!”
Flora protests, in tears. Dazed and blinking as if slapped, insists she sees nothing, there is nothing. Even as Jessel stares in impotent rage, the governess swiftly, indeed rather brutally, leads the whimpering child away, pulling her by both arms, murmuring words of reproachful comfort: “Don’t look at her, Flora! The horrid, obscene thing! You’re safe now.”
Horrid, obscene thing. When, in life, she’d been so sweetly modest a girl, impeccably groomed in ways spiritual no less than material; yes, and a Christian, of course; and a virgin—of course.
That ticklish scuttling in her hair?—a hard-shelled beetle falls to the ground.
Fanatic Jessel, stung to the core of her being, begins to lose control. Ever more carelessly by day she prowls the House of Bly seeking her darling girl alone, if only for a few snatched moments. “It seems I am haunted,” Jessel laughs despairingly, “but what’s to be done? Flora is my soul.” Yet the jealous and vindictive “St. Ottery” hovers over the child every waking hour; she has pulled Flora’s pretty little bed up snug beside her own, for safekeeping at night. (Since the upset on the bank of the pond, neither the governess nor her agitated, feverish charge is capable of sleeping for more than a few minutes at a time.)
Flora pleads: Miss Jessel, help me! Come to me! Hurry!
And Jessel: Flora, my darling, I will come. Soon.
But the vigilant young woman from Ottery St. Mary refuses to allow the shutters in her and Flora’s room to be opened! Nor the shutters in the adjoining nursery. In Miss Jessel’s reign, when she and the red-bearded Quint were lovers, how these rooms were flooded with sunshine!—yes, and with moonlight, too! The very air pulsed with their love, humid and languorous; the baroque silver sconces on the walls trembled with their love-cries. Now the air is stale and sour, fresh linen laid upon the beds turns soiled within minutes.
Pushing her authority, as there is no one here at Bly to oppose it, “St. Ottery” tries to insist that the windows in poor Miles’s bedroom be permanently shuttered as well; but, being a boy, and a most willful boy, whose angelic face belies his precocious soul, little Miles resists. “What are windows for, pray, you silly old thing—” for so Miles has affected a gay, jocose, just slightly taunting flirtatious tone with the terrible woman, “—if not, you know, to look out of?”
To which the reply is a grim-j awed, “Miles, I will put that question to you.”
As if shutters, of mere wood, can keep at bay love’s most violent yearnings.
Poor damned soul: by now, all of the household staff has seen her.
Drifting through the house, now upstairs, now down, now at the French windows opened upon a profusion of sticky-petaled glaring-white clematis . . . that wailing sound is hers, a sigh torn from her . . . woman sighing for her lost child, or her own soul as it nears extinction. How is it “St. Ottery” is always between her and Flora—always! Most recently, the New Testament in her hand.
This morning, Jessel finds herself exhausted at her old desk in the schoolroom. A soft moan escapes her. Her arms slumped on the desk and head heavy with sorrow resting on her arms, her face hidden, eyes brimming hot with tears of hurt, bewilderment, rage, How am I, who is love, evil? and a footfall behind her, a sharp intake of breath, rouse her to wakefulness, and she stands, swaying, and turns, to see her enemy confronting her hardly six feet away: “St. Ottery” bent at the waist like a crippled woman, her arms upraised as if to ward off the devil, but the colorless eyes narrowed in loathing, and the certitude of that loathing, the pale, prominent forehead, the thin lips—“Go a
way, out of here! This is no place for you!—vile, unspeakable horror!”
Where once Jessel would have stood her ground, now, seeing the revulsion in the other’s eyes, she is sickened, defenseless. She cannot protest, she feels herself dissolving, surrendering the field to her enemy, who calls after her, in ecstatic triumph, a shrill reedy voice wholly without pity—“And never return! Never, never dare return!”
Now, with more concentrated zeal, the fierce “St. Ottery” interrogates poor Flora, mercilessly. “Flora, dear, is there something you would like to tell me?” and, “Flora, dear, you can tell me, you know: I’ve seen the dreadful thing, I’m aware.” And, most cruelly: “My child, you may as well confess ! I’ve spoken with your ‘Miss Jessel,’ and she has told me.”
Jessel is a witness, albeit an invisible and powerless witness, when a bubble bursts at last in Flora’s brain. Her sobs might be those of countless children, reverberating horribly in the catacombs beneath the great ugly House of Bly. Flora screams, “No no no no! I didn’t! I don’t! I don’t know what you mean! I hate you!”
Jessel is powerless to interfere even as she sees the hysterical child caught up in Mrs. Grose’s arms.
What more bitter irony, that Jessel should find herself grateful for, of all people, her old enemy Mrs. Grose.
I will be extinct by daylight: it’s time. I have been only a memory of night.
The old house rings, down to the very catacombs, with the mad child’s howls, her guttural little barks of profanity, obscenity. Mrs. Grose and another woman servant, accompanying Flora on the journey to London, where she will be put under the supervision of a noted child physician, are obliged numerous times to clap their hands over their ears, for shame.
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