Page:The strange experiences of Tina Malone.djvu/95

Rh and conscious, by the tightening of my right hand on my left wrist and a warm feeling all over me that some friend was present, I found myself trying to get behind the mind of the old lecturer with something of the question:

"What is the old man thinking of it himself? What makes him do it?"

It was the question of the psycho-analyst and I smiled, for I guessed who was present.

The same sort of thing happened and I guessed it was the same presence once more.

I found myself looking at a little passing shop-girl on her way to her work with a flitting thought that interested me.

I looked at her as a packet of a larger being, part and parcel of a great throbbing humanity, a little bundle of healthy flesh and blood—no matter whether she were pretty or well-dressed. Health was there and action and life—above all, life.

I knew then that this thought flitted somehow from the analyst's mind to mine, present in mine because of the analyst.

Sometimes I have had great rushes of tears and those were on the days when news came from abroad of terrible things happening—the tears of a nation, the anxious waiting of foreigners for the turn of events in their beloved country far away.

And sometimes I have felt a great rush of joy and laughter—a happy vitality rushing through my own. That rush of joy came the day Sydney knew that Ireland was free.

I was sitting on the verandah at sunset when suddenly I felt a great rush of happiness, a feeling of joy that brought me to my feet with parted lips and a wondering question:

"Why do I fellfeel [sic] so happy? Why? Why?"

And I looked up to the sky where the sun was setting.

And then the whistles in the harbour all began to blow.

Ireland was free! Out of the Nursery! Grown up at last! And this feeling of joy came straight to me from there.

It was not till the next morning I saw by the papers that this was the cause.

And I thought of the little picture on my wall of Ireland, her cloak flying back in the wind, standing on a cliff, her arms held out to the departing dove with the olive branch in its beak, begging it to return.

And sometimes I have stood looking up at the sky and round at the trees and felt that I see it all as more beautiful than I have ever seen it before.

Is it illumination? Or is it that wonderful blending of the one into the whole, the coming of the real Brotherhood of Man—when we really become one in thought and feeling because we have all fused into one great whole?