Page:The strange experiences of Tina Malone.djvu/85

Rh As I prepared them in the kitchen I used to hear the voices through the wall as if people were interested and happy at watching me—as if I were a vision, and they, perhaps patients in a hospital, were watching me with a happy interest that was almost childish.

They worried me sometimes but not like the others. They used to talk to me like friends.

"Who are you expecting to-day?" they asked.

"David—just David," I said.

"We know who David is," they said.

"No you don't."

"Yes, we do."

Then would come a spiteful angry voice: "You old hen! As if anyone wants to talk to you. You give back that Rosary."

But the other voices would say:

"Is David very wonderful?"

"Yes," I said, "he can give you strength. He always makes me feel stronger when I am near him."

"We want to know David, Bunty Blue," they said. "Do you think he would help us?"

"He helps everybody," I said.

"Is he your Miracle man?"

"He's one of them," I said.

Why they spoke of the Miracle Man was this:

I had a habit, whenever I felt miserable or lonely or depressed, of going to a picture-show. I always loved them. It was always there that you saw life as it was at that moment—a picture of to-day.

One day I went to one called "The Miracle Man." It was the most beautiful picture I had ever seen—the story of a hermit, old, dumb, almost blind and deaf, but able to read the souls of those with whom he came in contact, those who came to him with their troubles. And as they stood near him, he would call forth all that was best in them and make them ashamed of all that was bad. He could heal them if they came to him with the faith and trust of a little child.

As I sat in the theatre and watched it I thought all the time of Tony and the power he had in him to give strength to me and to call into life the old self and the old ideals that had been so long lost and buried. Just one other person had had that power before. It was a Frenchman, an artist who had taught me drawing when I was a little girl, who had called up all that was best in my nature and taught me never to be untrue to my ideals. Then the everyday commonplaces of life, the feeling that there was no one to understand, made me cover them up and bury them so deep that no one but I knew they were there. But when I met Tony he seemed to dig round the roots and let in the