Page:The elephant man and other reminiscences.djvu/136

124 are the cheeks of a pretty girl encircled by white bandages and the visage of a toothless old man with only one ear. I can recollect nothing but their looks. They belong to people I have known, somewhere and somehow, in the consulting room or the ward. Here a light falls upon "that knee," "that curious skull," "that puzzling growth." Here is a much distorted back, bare and pitiable, surmounted by coils of beautiful brown hair. If the lady turned round I should probably not recognize her face; but I remember the back and the coils of hair.

This is a gathering, indeed, not of people, but of "cases" recalled by portions of their bodies. The collection is not unlike a medley of fragments of stained glass with isolated pieces of the human figure painted upon them, or it may be comparable to a faded fresco in a cloister, where the portions that survive, although complete in themselves, fail to recall the story they once have told.

It is curious, when so much is indefinite, how vividly certain trivial items stand forth as the sole remains of a once complete personality. All I can recall of one lady—elderly but sane—was the fact that she always received me, during a long illness, sitting up in bed with a large hat on her head trimmed with red poppies. She also wore