Page:The strange experiences of Tina Malone.djvu/83

Rh Just as in those days I found a use for the bad fairy so now I found the comforting thought that I could be of vital help to others.

Someone I had known to have been suffering from nervous breakdown and to have been under treatment for many years, lent me her note-book to read some of her notes on a great project she wanted to carry out.

"It's very precious," she said. "There's a lot in it you won't understand because I put all kinds of things in it, but that doesn't matter—All the first part you'll be able to read."

This was all said to me in a mysterious whisper—she was always mysterious. She told me all kinds of queer things about "voices of scouts down the harbour," and this kind of thing.

But when, left alone with the note-book, I turned the leaves, something struck me that I thought of often afterwards. They were all her own notes, but in disconnected jerks—both in the matter of thoughts and handwriting—the handwriting changed with each thought and the mode of expression, the phrasing, the language.

I thought it peculiar then, and afterwards, many times, the cruelty of it came back to me. Here then was the same suffering that I was going through which she had tried in vain to make others understand—the many minds in hers—the confusion through which her own poor, helpless mind must struggle to free itself and claim its individuality.

For how long had she suffered in this way, misunderstood, unlistened to, save by careless, indifferent people?

Minds thrown into hers, she powerless to prevent it, being treated for "nerves" and being given all these extra minds to carry.

Was it psycho-analysis? And if so, how cruel! How pitiless!

And was mine the same? And who was daring to do this thing, to take this liberty, unasked, with a woman, in a free country?

How many people were suffering in this way with no one to understand them?

There seemed to be voices coming to me then through the wall, saying:

"Don't forget us little Bunty Blue! Don't forget us."

All the voices called me "Bunty Blue" now.

I pictured them as patients in mental hospitals, lying there quietly till the doctors had time to spend the thought that each one needed.

The voices never left me, cruel, incessant, taunting. What could it all mean?

Tony did not know.

But there was someone there who was like Tony. I