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The Turn of the Screw
The Turn of the Screw
James, Henry
Published: 1898
Type(s): Novels, Ghost Stories
Source: http://en.wikisource.org
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About James:
Henry James, son of theologian Henry James Sr. and brother of the philosopher and psy-
chologist William James and diarist Alice James, was an American-born author and literary
critic of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He spent much of his life in Europe and be-
came a British subject shortly before his death. He is primarily known for novels, novellas
and short stories based on themes of consciousness and morality.
James significantly contributed to the criticism of fiction, particularly in his insistence
that writers be allowed the greatest freedom possible in presenting their view of the world.
His imaginative use of point of view, interior monologue and possibly unreliable narrators
in his own novels and tales brought a new depth and interest to narrative fiction. An ex-
traordinarily productive writer, he published substantive books of travel writing, biography,
autobiography and visual arts criticism.
Source: Wikipedia
Also available on Feedbooks for James:
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• Daisy Miller (1879)
• The Bostonians (1886)
• Wings of the Dove (1902)
• The Golden Bowl (1904)
• The Ambassadors (1903)
• Washington Square (1881)
Copyright: This work is available for countries where copyright is Life+70.
Cette oeuvre est disponible pour les pays où le droit d'auteur est de 70 ans après mort de
l'auteur.
Note: This book is brought to you by Feedbooks.
Strictly for personal use, do not use this file for commercial purposes.
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Introduction
The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious re-
mark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should es-
sentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to say that it was the
only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child. The case, I may men-
tion, was that of an apparition in just such an old house as had gathered us for the occa-
sion—an appearance, of a dreadful kind, to a little boy sleeping in the room with his mother
and waking her up in the terror of it; waking her not to dissipate his dread and soothe him
to sleep again, but to encounter also, herself, before she had succeeded in doing so, the same
sight that had shaken him. It was this observation that drew from Douglas—not immedi-
ately, but later in the evening—a reply that had the interesting consequence to which I call
attention. Someone else told a story not particularly effective, which I saw he was not fol-
lowing. This I took for a sign that he had himself something to produce and that we should
only have to wait. We waited in fact till two nights later; but that same evening, before we
scattered, he brought out what was in his mind.
"I quite agree—in regard to Griffin's ghost, or whatever it was—that its appearing first to
the little boy, at so tender an age, adds a particular touch. But it's not the first occurrence of
its charming kind that I know to have involved a child. If the child gives the effect another
turn of the screw, what do you say to two children—?"
"We say, of course," somebody exclaimed, "that they give two turns! Also that we want to
hear about them."
I can see Douglas there before the fire, to which he had got up to present his back, looking
down at his interlocutor with his hands in his pockets. "Nobody but me, till now, has ever
heard. It's quite too horrible." This, naturally, was declared by several voices to give the
thing the utmost price, and our friend, with quiet art, prepared his triumph by turning his
eyes over the rest of us and going on: "It's beyond everything. Nothing at all that I know
touches it."
"For sheer terror?" I remember asking.
He seemed to say it was not so simple as that; to be really at a loss how to qualify it. He
passed his hand over his eyes, made a little wincing grimace. "For dreadful—dreadfulness!"
"Oh, how delicious!" cried one of the women.
He took no notice of her; he looked at me, but as if, instead of me, he saw what he spoke
of. "For general uncanny ugliness and horror and pain."
"Well then," I said, "just sit right down and begin."
He turned round to the fire, gave a kick to a log, watched it an instant. Then as he faced
us again: "I can't begin. I shall have to send to town." There was a unanimous groan at this,
and much reproach; after which, in his preoccupied way, he explained. "The story's written.
It's in a locked drawer—it has not been out for years. I could write to my man and enclose
the key; he could send down the packet as he finds it." It was to me in particular that he ap-
peared to propound this—appeared almost to appeal for aid not to hesitate. He had broken a
thickness of ice, the formation of many a winter; had had his reasons for a long silence. The
others resented postponement, but it was just his scruples that charmed me. I adjured him
to write by the first post and to agree with us for an early hearing; then I asked him if the
experience in question had been his own. To this his answer was prompt. "Oh, thank God,
no!"
"And is the record yours? You took the thing down?"
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"Nothing but the impression. I took that here"—he tapped his heart. "I've never lost it."
"Then your manuscript—?"
"Is in old, faded ink, and in the most beautiful hand." He hung fire again. "A woman's.
She has been dead these twenty years. She sent me the pages in question before she died."
They were all listening now, and of course there was somebody to be arch, or at any rate to
draw the inference. But if he put the inference by without a smile it was also without irrita-
tion. "She was a most charming person, but she was ten years older than I. She was my
sister's governess," he quietly said. "She was the most agreeable woman I've ever known in
her position; she would have been worthy of any whatever. It was long ago, and this episode
was long before. I was at Trinity, and I found her at home on my coming down the second
summer. I was much there that year—it was a beautiful one; and we had, in her off-hours,
some strolls and talks in the garden—talks in which she struck me as awfully clever and
nice. Oh yes; don't grin: I liked her extremely and am glad to this day to think she liked me,
too. If she hadn't she wouldn't have told me. She had never told anyone. It wasn't simply
that she said so, but that I knew she hadn't. I was sure; I could see. You'll easily judge why
when you hear."
"Because the thing had been such a scare?"
He continued to fix me. "You'll easily judge," he repeated: "You will."
I fixed him, too. "I see. She was in love."
He laughed for the first time. "You are acute. Yes, she was in love. That is, she had been.
That came out—she couldn't tell her story without its coming out. I saw it, and she saw I
saw it; but neither of us spoke of it. I remember the time and the place—the corner of the
lawn, the shade of the great beeches and the long, hot summer afternoon. It wasn't a scene
for a shudder; but oh—!" He quitted the fire and dropped back into his chair.
"You'll receive the packet Thursday morning?" I inquired.
"Probably not till the second post."
"Well then; after dinner—"
"You'll all meet me here?" He looked us round again. "Isn't anybody going?" It was almost
the tone of hope.
"Everybody will stay!"
"I will" —and "I will!" cried the ladies whose departure had been fixed. Mrs. Griffin,
however, expressed the need for a little more light. "Who was it she was in love with?"
"The story will tell," I took upon myself to reply.
"Oh, I can't wait for the story!"
"The story won't tell," said Douglas; "not in any literal, vulgar way."
"More's the pity, then. That's the only way I ever understand."
"Won't you tell, Douglas?" somebody else inquired.
He sprang to his feet again. "Yes—tomorrow. Now I must go to bed. Good night." And
quickly catching up a candlestick, he left us slightly bewildered. From our end of the great
brown hall we heard his step on the stair; whereupon Mrs. Griffin spoke. "Well, if I don't
know who she was in love with, I know who he was."
"She was ten years older," said her husband.
"Raison de plus—at that age! But it's rather nice, his long reticence."
"Forty years!" Griffin put in.
"With this outbreak at last."
"The outbreak," I returned, "will make a tremendous occasion of Thursday night;" and
everyone so agreed with me that, in the light of it, we lost all attention for everything else.
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The last story, however incomplete and like the mere opening of a serial, had been told; we
handshook and "candlestuck," as somebody said, and went to bed.
I knew the next day that a letter containing the key had, by the first post, gone off to his
London apartments; but in spite of—or perhaps just on account of—the eventual diffusion of
this knowledge we quite let him alone till after dinner, till such an hour of the evening, in
fact, as might best accord with the kind of emotion on which our hopes were fixed. Then he
became as communicative as we could desire and indeed gave us his best reason for being
so. We had it from him again before the fire in the hall, as we had had our mild wonders of
the previous night. It appeared that the narrative he had promised to read us really re-
quired for a proper intelligence a few words of prologue. Let me say here distinctly, to have
done with it, that this narrative, from an exact transcript of my own made much later, is
what I shall presently give. Poor Douglas, before his death—when it was in
sight—committed to me the manuscript that reached him on the third of these days and
that, on the same spot, with immense effect, he began to read to our hushed little circle on
the night of the fourth. The departing ladies who had said they would stay didn't, of course,
thank heaven, stay: they departed, in consequence of arrangements made, in a rage of curi-
osity, as they professed, produced by the touches with which he had already worked us up.
But that only made his little final auditory more compact and select, kept it, round the
hearth, subject to a common thrill.
The first of these touches conveyed that the written statement took up the tale at a point
after it had, in a manner, begun. The fact to be in possession of was therefore that his old
friend, the youngest of several daughters of a poor country parson, had, at the age of twenty,
on taking service for the first time in the schoolroom, come up to London, in trepidation, to
answer in person an advertisement that had already placed her in brief correspondence
with the advertiser. This person proved, on her presenting herself, for judgment, at a house
in Harley Street, that impressed her as vast and imposing—this prospective patron proved
a gentleman, a bachelor in the prime of life, such a figure as had never risen, save in a
dream or an old novel, before a fluttered, anxious girl out of a Hampshire vicarage. One
could easily fix his type; it never, happily, dies out. He was handsome and bold and pleas-
ant, offhand and gay and kind. He struck her, inevitably, as gallant and splendid, but what
took her most of all and gave her the courage she afterward showed was that he put the
whole thing to her as a kind of favor, an obligation he should gratefully incur. She conceived
him as rich, but as fearfully extravagant—saw him all in a glow of high fashion, of good
looks, of expensive habits, of charming ways with women. He had for his own town resid-
ence a big house filled with the spoils of travel and the trophies of the chase; but it was to
his country home, an old family place in Essex, that he wished her immediately to proceed.
He had been left, by the death of their parents in India, guardian to a small nephew and a
small niece, children of a younger, a military brother, whom he had lost two years before.
These children were, by the strangest of chances for a man in his position—a lone man
without the right sort of experience or a grain of patience—very heavily on his hands. It had
all been a great worry and, on his own part doubtless, a series of blunders, but he im-
mensely pitied the poor chicks and had done all he could; had in particular sent them down
to his other house, the proper place for them being of course the country, and kept them
there, from the first, with the best people he could find to look after them, parting even with
his own servants to wait on them and going down himself, whenever he might, to see how
they were doing. The awkward thing was that they had practically no other relations and
that his own affairs took up all his time. He had put them in possession of Bly, which was
healthy and secure, and had placed at the head of their little establishment—but below
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