The Portable Henry James

  Oh, yes, after this Dencombe was certainly very ill. Miss Vernham had upset him with her rough, fierce news; it was the sharpest shock to him to discover what was at stake for a penniless young man of fine parts. He sat trembling on his bench, staring at the waste of waters, feeling sick with the directness of the blow. He was indeed too weak, too unsteady, too alarmed; but he would make the effort to get away, for he couldn’t accept the guilt of interference, and his honour was really involved. He would hobble home, at any rate, and then he would think what was to be done. He made his way back to the hotel and, as he went, had a characteristic vision of Miss Vernham’s great motive. The Countess hated women, of course; Dencombe was lucid about that; so the hungry pianist had no personal hopes and could only console herself with the bold conception of helping Doctor Hugh in order either to marry him after he should get his money or to induce him to recognise her title to compensation and buy her off. If she had befriended him at a fruitful crisis he would really, as a man of delicacy, and she knew what to think of that point, have to reckon with her.

  At the hotel Dencombe’s servant insisted on his going back to bed. The invalid had talked about catching a train and had begun with orders to pack; after which his humming nerves had yielded to a sense of sickness. He consented to see his physician, who immediately was sent for, but he wished it to be understood that his door was irrevocably closed to Doctor Hugh. He had his plan, which was so fine that he rejoiced in it after getting back to bed. Doctor Hugh, suddenly finding himself snubbed without mercy, would, in natural disgust and to the joy of Miss Vernham, renew his allegiance to the Countess. When his physician arrived Dencombe learned that he was feverish and that this was very wrong: he was to cultivate calmness and try, if possible, not to think. For the rest of the day he wooed stupidity; but there was an ache that kept him sentient, the probable sacrifice of his “extension,” the limit of his course. His medical adviser was anything but pleased; his successive relapses were ominous. He charged this personage to put out a strong hand and take Doctor Hugh off his mind—it would contribute so much to his being quiet. The agitating name, in his room, was not mentioned again, but his security was a smothered fear, and it was not confirmed by the receipt, at ten o’clock that evening, of a telegram which his servant opened and read for him and to which, with an address in London, the signature of Miss Vernham was attached. “Beseech you to use all influence to make our friend join us here in the morning. Countess much the worse for dreadful journey, but everything may still be saved.” The two ladies had gathered themselves up and had been capable in the afternoon of a spiteful revolution. They had started for the capital, and if the elder one, as Miss Vernham had announced, was very ill, she had wished to make it clear that she was proportionately reckless. Poor Dencombe, who was not reckless and who only desired that everything should indeed be “saved,” sent this missive straight off to the young man’s lodging and had on the morrow the pleasure of knowing that he had quitted Bournemouth by an early train.

  Two days later he pressed in with a copy of a literary journal in his hand. He had returned because he was anxious and for the pleasure of flourishing the great review of “The Middle Years.” Here at least was something adequate—it rose to the occasion; it was an acclamation, a reparation, a critical attempt to place the author in the niche he had fairly won. Dencombe accepted and submitted; he made neither objection nor inquiry, for old complications had returned and he had had two atrocious days. He was convinced not only that he should never again leave his bed, so that his young friend might pardonably remain, but that the demand he should make on the patience of beholders would be very moderate indeed. Doctor Hugh had been to town, and he tried to find in his eyes some confession that the Countess was pacified and his legacy clinched; but all he could see there was the light of his juvenile joy in two or three of the phrases of the newspaper. Dencombe couldn’t read them, but when his visitor had insisted on repeating them more than once he was able to shake an unintoxicated head. “Ah, no; but they would have been true of what I could have done!”

  “What people ‘could have done’ is mainly what they’ve in fact done,” Doctor Hugh contended.

  “Mainly, yes; but I’ve been an idiot!” said Dencombe.

  Doctor Hugh did remain; the end was coming fast. Two days later Dencombe observed to him, by way of the feeblest of jokes, that there would now be no question whatever of a second chance. At this the young man stared; then he exclaimed: “Why, it has come to pass—it has come to pass! The second chance has been the public’s—the chance to find the point of view, to pick up the pearl!”

  “Oh, the pearl!” poor Dencombe uneasily sighed. A smile as cold as a winter sunset flickered on his drawn lips as he added: “The pearl is the unwritten—the pearl is the unalloyed, the rest, the lost!”

  From that moment he was less and less present, heedless to all appearance of what went on around him. His disease was definitely mortal, of an action as relentless, after the short arrest that had enabled him to fall in with Doctor Hugh, as a leak in a great ship. Sinking steadily, though this visitor, a man of rare resources, now cordially approved by his physician, showed endless art in guarding him from pain, poor Dencombe kept no reckoning of favour or neglect, betrayed no symptom of regret or speculation. Yet toward the last he gave a sign of having noticed that for two days Doctor Hugh had not been in his room, a sign that consisted of his suddenly opening his eyes to ask of him if he had spent the interval with the Countess.

  “The Countess is dead,” said Doctor Hugh. “I knew that in a particular contingency she wouldn’t resist. I went to her grave.”

  Dencombe’s eyes opened wider. “She left you ‘something handsome’?”

  The young man gave a laugh almost too light for a chamber of woe. “Never a penny. She roundly cursed me.”

  “Cursed you?” Dencombe murmured.

  “For giving her up. I gave her up for you. I had to choose,” his companion explained.

  “You chose to let a fortune go?”

  “I chose to accept, whatever they might be, the consequences of my infatuation,” smiled Doctor Hugh. Then, as a larger pleasantry: “A fortune be hanged! It’s your own fault if I can’t get your things out of my head.”

  The immediate tribute to his humour was a long, bewildered moan; after which, for many hours, many days, Dencombe lay motionless and absent. A response so absolute, such a glimpse of a definite result and such a sense of credit worked together in his mind and, producing a strange commotion, slowly altered and transfigured his despair. The sense of cold submersion left him—he seemed to float without an effort. The incident was extraordinary as evidence, and it shed an intenser light. At the last he signed to Doctor Hugh to listen, and, when he was down on his knees by the pillow, brought him very near.

  “You’ve made me think it all a delusion.”

  “Not your glory, my friend,” stammered the young man.

  “Not my glory—what there is of it! It is glory—to have been tested, to have had our little quality and cast our little spell. The thing is to have made somebody care. You happen to be crazy, of course, but that doesn’t affect the law.”

  “You’re a great success!” said Doctor Hugh, putting into his young voice the ring of a marriage-bell.

  Dencombe lay taking this in; then he gathered strength to speak once more. “A second chance—that’s the delusion. There never was to be but one. We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

  “If you’ve doubted, if you’ve despaired, you’ve always ‘done’ it,” his visitor subtly argued.

  “We’ve done something or other,” Dencombe conceded.

  “Something or other is everything. It’s the feasible. It’s you!”

  “Comforter!” poor Dencombe ironically sighed.

  “But it’s true,” insisted his friend.

  “It’s true. It’s frustratio
n that doesn’t count.”

  “Frustration’s only life,” said Doctor Hugh.

  “Yes, it’s what passes.” Poor Dencombe was barely audible, but he had marked with the words the virtual end of his first and only chance.

  The Turn of the Screw

  Collier’s Weekly, January 27-April 16, 1898. Oscar Wilde judged this work “a most wonderful, lurid, poisonous little tale, like an Elizabethan tragedy.” Although it remains one of the most discussed works by Henry James, James himself soon dismissed it as “an inferior, a merely pictorial, subject and rather a shameless potboiler.” But the 1908 New York Edition preface renewed interest when it called it “an amusette to catch those not easily caught (the ‘fun’ of the capture of the merely witless being ever but small), the jaded, the disillusioned, the fastidious.” It took some years before, at least in print, anyone posited what its author might have meant. The suggestion finally came that perhaps the ghosts did not really exist, but were figments of a young woman’s imagination. In 1924, when Edna Kenton published an article questioning the governess’s perceptions, she noted “the irrepressible unconscious light she casts upon herself” (“Henry James to the Ruminant Reader: The Turn of the Screw,” The Arts, November 1924, 245-255). In 1934 Edmund Wilson invoked the magic name Freud, as he recommended to the reader, “Observe, also, from the Freudian point of view, the significance of the governess’ interest in the little girl’s pieces of wood and of the fact that the male apparition first takes shape on a tower and the female apparition on a lake” (“The Ambiguity of Henry James,” Hound & Horn, 1934, 385-406). Criticism would thereafter become more alert to questions of sexual repression. The Turn of the Screw has been the subject of at least fifteen film or television adaptations (see Griffin, ed., Henry James Goes to the Movies), and in 1945 it was made into a distinguished opera by Benjamin Britten.

  The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially 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 mention, was that of an apparition in just such an old house as had gathered us for the occasion—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 immediately, 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 following. 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 appeared 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?”

  “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 irritation. “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 un
derstand.”

  “Won’t you tell, Douglas?” somebody else inquired.

  He sprang to his feet again. “Yes—to-morrow. 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. 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 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.