It was all very well to join them, but speaking to them proved quite as much as ever an effort beyond my strength--offered, in close quarters, difficulties as insurmountable as before.
This situation continued a month, and with new aggravations and particular notes, the note above all, sharper and sharper, of the small ironic consciousness on the part of my pupils.
It was not, I am as sure today as I was sure then, my mere infernal imagination: it was absolutely traceable that they were aware of my predicament and that this strange relation made, in a manner, for a long time, the air in which we moved.
I don't mean that they had their tongues in their cheeks or did anything vulgar, for that was not one of their dangers:
I do mean, on the other hand, that the element of the unnamed and untouched became, between us, greater than any other, and that so much avoidance could not have been so successfully effected without a great deal of tacit arrangement.
It was as if, at moments, we were perpetually coming into sight of subjects before which we must stop short, turning suddenly out of alleys that we perceived to be blind, closing with a little bang that made us look at each other--for, like all bangs, it was something louder than we had intended--the doors we had indiscreetly opened. All roads lead to Rome, and there were times when it might have struck us that almost every branch of study or subject of conversation skirted forbidden ground.
Forbidden ground was the question of the return of the dead in general and of whatever, in especial, might survive, in memory, of the friends little children had lost.
There were days when I could have sworn that one of them had, with a small invisible nudge, said to the other:
"She thinks she'll do it this time--but she WON'T!" To "do it" would have been to indulge for instance--and for once in a way-- in some direct reference to the lady who had prepared them for my discipline. They had a delightful endless appetite for passages in my own history, to which I had again and again treated them; they were in possession of everything that had ever happened to me, had had, with every circumstance the story of my smallest adventures and of those of my brothers and sisters and of the cat and the dog at home, as well as many particulars of the eccentric nature of my father, of the furniture and arrangement of our house, and of the conversation of the old women of our village.
There were things enough, taking one with another, to chatter about, if one went very fast and knew by instinct when to go round.
They pulled with an art of their own the strings of my invention and my memory; and nothing else perhaps, when I thought of such occasions afterward, gave me so the suspicion of being watched from under cover. It was in any case over MY life, MY past, and MY friends alone that we could take anything like our ease--a state of affairs that led them sometimes without the least pertinence to break out into sociable reminders.
I was invited--with no visible connection--to repeat afresh Goody Gosling's celebrated mot or to confirm the details already supplied as to the cleverness of the vicarage pony.
It was partly at such junctures as these and partly at quite different ones that, with the turn my matters had now taken, my predicament, as I have called it, grew most sensible.
The fact that the days passed for me without another encounter ought, it would have appeared, to have done something toward soothing my nerves.
Since the light brush, that second night on the upper landing, of the presence of a woman at the foot of the stair, I had seen nothing, whether in or out of the house, that one had better not have seen.
There was many a corner round which I expected to come upon Quint, and many a situation that, in a merely sinister way, would have favored the appearance of Miss Jessel. The summer had turned, the summer had gone; the autumn had dropped upon Bly and had blown out half our lights.
The place, with its gray sky and withered garlands, its bared spaces and scattered dead leaves, was like a theater after the performance-- all strewn with crumpled playbills. There were exactly states of the air, conditions of sound and of stillness, unspeakable impressions of the KIND of ministering moment, that brought back to me, long enough to catch it, the feeling of the medium in which, that June evening out of doors, I had had my first sight of Quint, and in which, too, at those other instants, I had, after seeing him through the window, looked for him in vain in the circle of shrubbery.
I recognized the signs, the portents--I recognized the moment, the spot.
But they remained unaccompanied and empty, and I continued unmolested; if unmolested one could call a young woman whose sensibility had, in the most extraordinary fashion, not declined but deepened.
I had said in my talk with Mrs. Grose on that horrid scene of Flora's by the lake--and had perplexed her by so saying--that it would from that moment distress me much more to lose my power than to keep it.
I had then expressed what was vividly in my mind: the truth that, whether the children really saw or not--since, that is, it was not yet definitely proved--I greatly preferred, as a safeguard, the fullness of my own exposure. I was ready to know the very worst that was to be known. What I had then had an ugly glimpse of was that my eyes might be sealed just while theirs were most opened.
Well, my eyes WERE sealed, it appeared, at present-- a consummation for which it seemed blasphemous not to thank God.
