Page:The elephant man and other reminiscences.djvu/87

Rh the ground that my mind needed change and that a cheerful play would "take me out of myself." My worst terrors have come upon me when I have chanced to sit in the centre of the stalls with people packed in all around me. I have then felt as if I was imprisoned and have been filled by one intense overwhelming desire—the passion to get out. I have passed through all the horrors of suffocation, have felt that I must stand up, must lift up my arms and gasp. I have looked at the door only to feel that escape was as impossible as it would be to an entrapped miner about whom the walls of a shaft had fallen.

It is useless for my husband to nudge me and tell me not to make a fool of myself. If I did want to make a fool of myself I should select some more agreeable way of doing it. It is useless, moreover, to argue. No argument can dispel the ever-present sense of panic, of being buried alive, or relieve the hopeless feeling of inability to escape. I have sat out a play undergoing tortures beyond expression, until I have become collapsed and until my lip had been almost bitten through in the effort not to scream. No one would believe that I—a healthy-looking woman in a new Paris dress, sitting among a company of smiling folk—could be enduring as much agony as if I were