【英文读物】Recalled to Life.docx

《【英文读物】Recalled to Life.docx》由会员分享，可在线阅读，更多相关《【英文读物】Recalled to Life.docx（100页珍藏版）》请在淘文阁 - 分享文档赚钱的网站上搜索。

1、【英文读物】Recalled to LifeCHAPTER I. UNA CALLINGHAMS FIRST RECOLLECTIONIt may sound odd to say so, but the very earliest fact that impressed itself on my memory was a scene that took placeso I was toldwhen I was eighteen years old, in my fathers house, The Grange, at Woodbury.My babyhood, my childhood,

2、my girlhood, my school-days were all utterly blotted out by that one strange shock of horror. My past life became exactly as though it had never been. I forgot my own name. I forgot my mother-tongue. I forgot everything I had ever done or known or thought about. Except for the power to walk and stan

3、d and perform simple actions of every-day use, I became a baby in arms again, with a nurse to take care of me. The doctors told me, later, I had fallen into what they were pleased to call “a Second State.” I was examined and reported upon as a Psychological Curiosity. But at the time, I knew nothing

4、 of all this. A thunderbolt, as it were, destroyed at one blow every relic, every trace of my previous existence; and I began life all over again, with that terrible scene of blood as my first birthday and practical starting point.I remember it all even now with horrible distinctness. Each item in i

5、t photographed itself vividly on my minds eye. I saw it as in a picturejust as clearly, just as visually. And the effect, now I look back upon it with a maturer judgment, was precisely like a photograph in another way too. It was wholly unrelated in time and space: it stood alone by itself, lighted

6、up by a single spark, without rational connection before or after it. What led up to it all, I hadnt the very faintest idea. I only knew the Event itself took place; and I, like a statue, stood rooted in the midst of it.And this was the Picture as, for many long months, it presented itself incessant

7、ly to my startled brain, by day and by night, awake or asleep, in colours more distinct than words can possibly paint them.I saw myself standing in a large, square rooma very handsome old room, filled with bookshelves like a library. On one side stood a table, and on the table a box. A flash of ligh

8、t rendered the whole scene visible. But it wasnt light that came in through the window. It was rather like lightning, so quick it was, and clear, and short-lived, and terrible. Half-way to the door, I stood and looked in horror at the sight revealed before my eyes by that sudden flash. A man lay dea

9、d in a little pool of blood that gurgled by short jets from a wound on his left breast. I didnt even know at the moment the man was my father; though slowly, afterward, by the concurrent testimony of others, I learnt to call him so. But his relationship wasnt part of the Picture to me. There, he was

10、 only in my eyes a mana man well past middle age, with a long white beard, now dabbled with the thick blood that kept gurgling so hatefully from the red spot in his waistcoat. He lay on his back, half-curled round toward one arm, exactly as he fell. And the revolver he had been shot with lay on the

11、ground not far from him.But that wasnt all the Picture. The murderer was there as well as the victim. Besides the table, and the box, and the wounded man, and the pistol, I saw another figure behind, getting out of the window. It was the figure of a man, I should say about twenty-five or thirty: he

12、had just raised himself to the ledge, and was poising to leap; for the room, as I afterwards learned, though on the ground floor, stood raised on a basement above the garden behind. I couldnt see the mans face, or any part of him, indeed, except his stooping back, and his feet, and his neck, and his

13、 elbows. But what little I saw was printed indelibly on the very fibre of my nature. I could have recognised that man anywhere if I saw him in the same attitude. I could have sworn to him in any court of justice on the strength of his back alone, so vividly did I picture it.He was tall and thin, but

14、 he stooped like a hunchback.There were other points worth notice in that strange mental photograph. The man was well-dressed, and had the bearing of a gentleman. Looking back upon the scene long after, when I had learned once more what words and things meant, I could feel instinctively this was no

15、common burglar, no vulgar murderer. Whatever might have been the mans object in shooting my father, I was certain from the very first it was not mere robbery. But at the time, Im confident, I never reasoned about his motives or his actions in any way. I merely took in the scene, as it were, passivel

16、y, in a great access of horror, which rendered me incapable of sense or thought or speech or motion. I saw the table, the box, the apparatus by its side, the murdered man on the floor, the pistol lying pointed with its muzzle towards his body, the pool of blood that soaked deep into the Turkey carpe

17、t beneath, the ledge of the window, the young mans rounded back as he paused and hesitated. And I also saw, like an instantaneous flash, one hand pushed behind him, waving me off, I almost thought, with the gesture of one warning.Why didnt I remember the murderers face? That puzzled me long after. I

18、 must have seen him before: I must surely have been there when the crime was committed. I must have known at the moment everything about it. But the blank that came over my memory, came over it with the fatal shot. All that went before, was to me as though it were not. I recollect vaguely, as the fi

19、rst point in my life, that my eyes were shut hard, and darkness came over me. While they were so shut, I heard an explosion. Next moment, I believe, I opened them, and saw this Picture. No sensitive-plate could have photographed it more instantaneously, as by an electric spark, than did my retina th

20、at evening, as for months after I saw it all. In another moment, I shut my lids again, and all was over. There was darkness once more, and I was alone with my Horror.In years then to come, I puzzled my head much as to the meaning of the Picture. Gradually, step by step, I worked some of it out, with

21、 the aid of my friends, and of the evidence tendered at the coroners inquest. But for the moment I knew nothing of all that. I was a newborn baby again. Only with this important difference. They say our minds at birth are like a sheet of white paper, ready to take whatever impressions may fall upon

22、them. Mine was like a sheet all covered and obscured by one hateful picture. It was weeks, I fancy, before I knew or was conscious of anything else but that. The Picture and a great Horror divided my life between them.Recollect, I didnt even remember the murdered man was my father. I didnt recognise

23、 the room as one in our own old house at Woodbury. I didnt know anything at all except what I 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 photographers kit, without knowing what they all meant. I saw even the

24、 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 a

25、s 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 AGAINWhat happened after is far more vague to me. Compared with the vividness of that one initial Picture, the events of the next few mon

26、ths 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

27、 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 o

28、pen, though thats 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 floc

29、ked 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 hadnt 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,

30、 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 didnt 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 gla

31、ss: 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 d

32、ay 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 didnt call him soI knew him merely as a visible figure. I dont believe

33、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 th

34、e 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 he

35、r,its 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

36、 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 them.On the ground floor, n

37、urse made me walk; and I walked out to the door, where a cab was in waiting, drawn slowly by a pair of horses. People were looking on, on either side, between the door and the cabgreat crowds of people, peering eagerly forward; and two more men in blue suits were holding them off by main force from

38、surging against me and incommoding me. I dont think they wanted to hurt me: it was rather curiosity than anger I saw in their faces. But I was afraid, and shrank back. They were eager to see me, however, and pressed forward with loud cries, so that the men in blue suits had hard work to prevent them

39、.I know now there were two reasons why they wanted to see me. I was the murdered mans daughter, and I was a Psychological Phenomenon.We drove away, through green lanes, in the cab, nurse and I; and in spite of the Horror, which surrounded me always, and the Picture, which recurred every time I shut

40、my eyes to think, I enjoyed that drive very much, with all the fresh vividness of childish pleasure. Though I learnt later I was eighteen years old at least, I was in my inner self just like a baby of ten months, going ta-ta. At the end of the drive, we drew up sharp at a house, where some more men

41、stood about, with red bands on their caps, and took boxes from the cab and put them into a van, while nurse and I got into a different carriage, drawn quickly by a thing that went puff-puff, puff-puff. I didnt know it was a railway, and yet in a way I did. I half forgot, half remembered it. Things t

42、hat Id seen in my previous state seemed to come back to me, in fact, as soon as I saw them; or at least to be more familiar to me than things Id never seen before. Especially afterwards. But while things were remembered, persons, I found by-and-by, were completely forgotten. Or rather, while I remem

43、bered after a while generalities, such as houses and men, recognising them in the abstract as a house, or a man, or a horse, or a baby, I forgot entirely particulars, such as the names of people and the places I had lived in. Words soon came back to me: names and facts were lost: I knew the world as

44、 a whole, not my own old part in it.Well, not to make my story too long in these early childish stages, we went on the train, as it seemed to me, a long way across fields to Aunt Emmas. I didnt know she was Aunt Emma then for, indeed, I had never seen her before; but I remember arriving there at her

45、 pretty little cottage, and seeing a sweet old ladybarely sixty, I should say, but with smooth white hair,who stood on the steps of the house and cried like a child, and held out her hands to me, and hugged me and kissed me. And it was there that I learned my first word. A great many times over, she

46、 spoke about “Una.” She said it so often, I caught vaguely at the sound. And nurse, when she answered her, said “Una” also. Then, when Aunt Emma called me, she always said “Una.” So it came to me dimly that Una meant ME. But I didnt exactly recollect it had been my name before, though I learned in d

47、ue time afterwards that Id always been called so. However, just at first, I picked up the word as a child might pick it up; and when, some months later, I began to talk easily, I spoke of myself always in the third person as Una. I can remember with a smile now how I went one day to Aunt EmmaI, a gr

48、eat girl of eighteenand held up my skirt, that Id muddied in the street, and said to her, with great gravity:“Una naughty girl: Una got her frock wet. Aunt Emma going to scold poor Una for being so naughty!”Not that I often smiled, in those days; for, in spite of Aunt Emmas kindness, my second girlh

49、ood, like my first, was a very unhappy one. The Horror and the Picture pursued me too close. It was months and months before I could get rid for a moment of that persistent nightmare. And yet I had everything else on earth to make me happy. Aunt Emma lived in a pretty east-coast town, with high bracken-clad downs, and breezy common beyond; while in front stretched great sands, where I loved to race about and to play cricket and tennis. It