The Turn of the Screw | Page 5

that the narrative he had promised to read us really required
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 curiosity, 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 pleasant, 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 residence 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 immensely 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 stairs only--an excellent woman, Mrs.
Grose, whom he was sure his visitor would like and who had formerly
been maid to his mother. She was now housekeeper and was also acting
for the time as superintendent to the little girl, of whom, without
children of her own, she was, by good luck, extremely fond. There
were plenty of people to help, but of course the young lady who should
go down as governess would be in supreme authority. She would also
have, in holidays, to look after the small boy, who had been for a term
at school--young as he was to be sent, but what else could be
done?--and who, as the holidays were about to begin, would be back
from one day to the other. There had been for the two children at first a
young lady whom they had had the misfortune to lose. She had done
for them quite beautifully--she was a most