Recalled to Life | Page 3

tell you here. I saw the corpse,
the blood, the box on the table, the wires by the side, the bottles and
baths and plates of an amateur photographer's kit, without knowing
what they all meant. I saw even the books not as books but as visible

points of colour. It had something the effect on me that it might have
upon anyone else to be dropped suddenly on the stage of a theatre at the
very moment when a hideous crime was being committed, and to
believe it real, or rather, to know it by some vague sense as hateful and
actual.
Here my history began. I date from that Picture. My second babyhood
was passed in the shadow of the abiding Horror.

CHAPTER II.
BEGINNING LIFE AGAIN

Wha happened after is far more vague to me. Compared with the
vividness of that one initial Picture, the events of the next few months
have only the blurred indistinctness of all childish memories. For I was
a child once more, in all save stature, and had to learn to remember
things just like other children.
I will try to tell the whole tale over again exactly as it then struck me.
After the Picture, I told you, I shut my eyes in alarm for a second.
When I opened them once more there was a noise, a very great noise,
and my recollection is that people had burst wildly into the room, and
were lifting the dead body, and bending over it in astonishment, and
speaking loud to me, and staring at me. I believe they broke the door
open, though that's rather inference than memory; I learnt it afterwards.
Soon some of them rushed to the open window and looked out into the
garden. Then, suddenly, a man gave a shout, and leaping on to the sill,
jumped down in pursuit, as I thought, of the murderer. As time went on,
more people flocked in; and some of them looked at the body and the
pool of blood; and some of them turned round and spoke to me. But
what they said or what they meant I hadn't the slightest idea. The noise
of the pistol-shot still rang loud in my ears: the ineffable Horror still
drowned all my senses.
After a while, another man came in, with an air of authority, and felt
my pulse and my brow, and lifted me on to a sofa. But I didn't even
remember there was such a thing as a doctor. I lay there for a while,

quite dazed; and the man, who was kindly-looking and close-shaven
and fatherly, gave me something in a glass: after which he turned round
and examined the body. He looked hard at the revolver, too, and
chalked its place on the ground. Then I saw no more, for two women
lifted me in their arms and took me up to bed; and with that, the first
scene of my childhood seemed to end entirely.
I lay in bed for a day or two, during which time I was dimly aware of
much commotion going on here and there in the house; and the doctor
came night and morning, and tended me carefully. I suppose I may call
him the doctor now, though at the time I didn't call him so--I knew him
merely as a visible figure. I don't believe I THOUGHT at all during
those earliest days, or gave things names in any known language. They
rather passed before me dreamily in long procession, like a vague
panorama. When people spoke to me, it was like the sound of a foreign
tongue. I attached no more importance to anything they said than to the
cawing of the rooks in the trees by the rectory.
At the end of five days, the doctor came once more, and watched me a
great deal, and spoke in a low voice with a woman in a white cap and a
clean white apron who waited on me daily. As soon as he was gone, my
nurse, as I learned afterwards to call her,--it's so hard not to drop into
the language of everyday life when one has to describe things to other
people,--my nurse got me up, with much ado and solemnity, and
dressed me in a new black frock, very dismal and ugly, and put on me a
black hat, with a dreary-looking veil; and took me downstairs, with the
aid of a man who wore a suit of blue clothes and a queer kind of helmet.
The man was of the sort I now call a policeman. These pictures are far
less definite in my mind than the one that begins my second life; but
still, in a vague kind of way, I pretty well remember