Chapter 2

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