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The Turn of the Screw-Part1_HENRY JAMES(1843-1916)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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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.



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,






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