Page:The strange experiences of Tina Malone.djvu/58

58 filling my coal-bucket and found myself smiling as if I were very interested and amused. I knew that it was not my smile. Then it was that I was first conscious, I think, of being overlooked by someone who was amused. Then I began to hear "voices." They used my name freely, calling me "Tina Malone," and spoke of me scoffingly and jeeringly, criticising and commenting on all I did. My heart used to beat very hard and I felt very tired and vague.

As I write this and look back and know how my people looked on, worried and distressed, thinking it was all imagination, and telling me to forget all these ideas, I think "How little we know of what is passing in another's mind though they are standing beside us, and how helpless we are when we try to voice our troubles and they will not understand."

Heaven alone knows what my sisters supposed it to be. I told them "Hypnotism," and felt that it was hypnotism. They told me "Don't say such things. Get that idea out of your head," quite angrily they said it.

All alone I had to battle with it, not understanding it, not knowing how to fight nor what weapons to use.

Here is a copy of a letter I wrote to Tony at the time, but suddenly frightened, for some reason or other, of voicing such things, I kept it in my desk and did not send it.

"My heart is beating hard and painfully. I have the 'foreign' breathing as of some other being than my own—a gulping in my throat, as if this being, whoever it is, were gagged, and at the same time I hear names being bandied about and played with, one protesting, the other sometimes pretending to take my part and apologise, etc., and a swelling of my body as if their presence, whatever it is, were expanding my lungs, etc., so that it is painful to me to breathe, and I feel as if I cannot bear the pressure of my clothes. When this goes off—this consciousness of another presence, I get back my usual feeling of freedom. It is on me now, the awful feeling, and a gulping and a sighing "Oh dear!" in someone else's voice—the voice of this odious masked creature. This has only returned since Wednesday night. I was feeling more than well and free from all this terrible trouble. I feel now as if death is the only thing that will free me. What can it be? The awful idea has occurred to me that the person who is causing it has just returned from a holiday and (I suppose without knowing the trouble he or she is causing) is just killing me.

"11.25—The influence has gone now. I heard voices trying to deter me from writing—but the breathing is still here as if someone were sleeping peacefully or relieved. Just before this happened (as if the gag were removed) a feeling of nausea—a sort of coughing as of sickness. Then followed repetition of a faint I had had after I had taken gas some