# The Strange Experiences of Tina Malone/Chapter 13

CHAPTER XIII.
A FIGHT FOR MY INDIVIDUALITY.
I felt I must ask someone about the "Secret Service."
Long ago I had heard of the terrible Secret Service of Russia and felt somehow as if I had some knowledge of something which I ought to make known.
These terrible fears were made more terrible because there always seemed to be one voice which warned me that I must not make these things known.
I sent for Mont Jones and asked him.
He said he thought the Secret Service was long ago out of date. I told him a little of what I was going through but the second voice kept holding me back from saying much and dinning indecent language into my ears. So I could only half voice my fears and still kept the worst part of my trouble locked up within me.
During the afternoon I had been telepathing quite easily with one voice that had a measured and cultured tone—But I had told it of my trouble and my resentment at feeling that people were reading from my mind—snatching from my mind all my past. This voice did not in so many words defy me to disclose what I had been through, but when Mont came I was telling him something of what I had been through—it let some indecent words fly round the room, so that it seemed to me that they were flying about and trying to get into Mont's consciousness and to hinder me from making any disclosure by showing me what they would disclose if the matter were cleared up. Something they had discovered from my past.
Mont asked me some questions and looked thoughtful and begged me to go and see some doctor he named.
He went away thinking.
"Perhaps the place here is haunted," I said.
Wearily I tried to battle with the awful influence. There were two ways it came.
There would be a feeling of stinging warmth all over me, a quickened beating of the heart and a ragging of my nerves till I would sigh and beg for mercy, and felt that I could kill myself or anyone else.
"Who are you?" I would ask.
Patrick, my protector, was always there. He, too, would protest at times but he seemed as little able to cope with them as I was.
"Who are you?" I would repeat.
​"I know who you are but you don't know who I am," the answer would come.
"Yes, but who are you?"
"I can't tell you."
"But you must. Why don't you go away?"
"I can't," would come the reply.
A cad's game.
"I am pushed from behind. I have to come—I can't go."
I would sigh and moan.
It was terribly painful. My chest would swell till I could hardly bear my clothes, and when I walked, my feet would be so heavy I could hardly lift them. These were not spirits, I felt sure.
Whether they heard or not and could really have left me in peace, whether it was true that they were pushed from behind I don't know but it was cruelty itself.
Never was I left to myself—I could not read for I could not get my attention. I felt the second—sometimes third—mind in mine.
That they were various entities who troubled me in this way I felt sure for I felt the different temperaments merging themselves in mine. One there was—and this I am sure was Patrick—who made me feel buoyant and happy. A strong feeling of the joy of life came over me. I always knew when he was there. Others would make me feel hard and spiteful and besides that, there were spiteful voices that jibed at me.
Sometimes "the influence" would overtake me as I walked home and I would feel conscious of a strange being there who would not allow me any privacy, however much I implored. Many a time I sank down into a chair and cried in despair at freeing myself from this terrible molestation.
What could it be? Why did no one know? How could I get help?
There was a little Catholic Church not far away. I went in there one day and knelt and looked at the little red light which had always comforted me before. I watched the people come and go in the quiet of the little church. I let my eyes dwell on the golden light flooding in through the stained-glass windows, and let myself sink into a feeling of calm and prayer that it might go with me always, and that the voices would cease.
But they did not cease.
Not only voices but the feeling of another's consciousness in mine and some by no means friends. They seemed to catch me up or if they accompanied me, they would keep quiet while I and my friends talked but as soon as I was alone again they would go on. Many a time I found my ankle turn while they pushed themselves in this way into my consciousness.
​And again I went away feeling that my rooms perhaps held the influence and that away in the country perhaps I could lose it.
So again I went to Kitty's.
When Sybil, standing at the gate, tried to get at the cause of my trouble, she asked me if the voices followed me when I had gone to my sisters before or whether they were only in my own rooms.
"No," I told her, "they followed me."
And so they did. Yet somehow I felt that when I was with other people I at least thought of them less.
Kitty was always ready for me and it comforted me to have the children near me and to get away from the thought of my rooms. I tried hard to forget and to make myself think they were not there. It was horrible to see the look of compassion on the faces of my relations. I tried to keep my voice even and sensible and not to seem absent-minded.
And then one morning as I sat on my bed as if in a dream as I so often do, and my mind in a still calm, I found myself thinking of my little golden haired cousin that I used to admire so long ago—a beautiful spirited child. I found myself thinking of her standing on the dining-room table as I had stood her one New Year's Eve long ago. The front room had been full of visitors and it had occurred to me to keep the folding doors shut and to dress up the lovely child all flushed with sleep, as the New Year. She stood there like a little angel with long glistening wings, a star on her head and a wand with the figures showing the New Year to usher it in as we heard the clock strike and I opened the folding doors.
What should have made me think of her then I don't know. I was conscious of someone saying:
"I am getting at your sub-conscious mind, dear, at the age of twenty and I see there a little child. Why do you cry whenever I speak of it? Were you sad then? What made you sad? I see you then at twenty and the one you loved most was a little child."
It was some mornings later I found myself with my mind calmed in the same manner and someone saying:
"Sit still dear. I am getting at your sub-conscious mind. It is psycho-analysis and I'm getting at your sub-conscious mind. I've got you now at the night of the 'operation.' Lie back and let me see how your hands went then."
I found myself uttering little weak cries as I did that night and my heart seemed to stop. Then a beautiful calm come over me as if the hypnotic strain had loosened, and someone said:
"I'm with you, dear, in spirit, and I can be with you ​now always in spirit. It is some wonderful thing I have discovered. My sub-conscious mind has found its way to yours."
Then as I went outside on to the verandah I found myself taking the attitude of a figure in one of my pictures—the figure of one of the disciples listening to Christ—and while my eyes looked far away to the mountains in the distance—all hazy in the morning mist—I heard the same voice saying:
"It's some great discovery—the whole world will soon be telepathic. Tina Malone, I see you standing there against the wall and you and I can always be together in spirit now, dear, and not only you and I but all the world together."
Out of the distance that voice—faint and far away.
Whose was it?
I stood there and a beautiful feeling of wonder came over me.
Was it true then? Was the Brotherhood of Man really coming? Were we all to be linked together in a chain one to another all the world over?
This threw over me a feeling of gentleness and love.
No one knew.
All alone I stood there while this wonderful secret of the occult world came over me.
All alone I stood and the anger at that inner life of mine—that life which I had always known as my own precious kingdom—the anger I had felt at its being so ruthlessly and cruelly rifled and torn from me in the last few months—left me to the peace of this wonder.
But not for long.
Again came the worrying taunting voices. Again came the consciousness pressed hard into mine. Again came my agonised cry to them to have pity on me and to leave me.
Again came my letters to Tony telling him of my trouble. By this time my memory became so bad that I had to take copies of every letter I wrote, not remembering from one day to the next what I had said. Then came voices saying: "This is to put down psycho-analysis! It is since psycho-analysis has come in that these indecencies have come about."
No use to run away from them. They followed me wherever I went.
So I went home again.
I was still under this hateful influence—incessant voices telling me to do first this, then that, dinning advice and comments into my ears till my own brain was muddled and confused, my nerves were racked—this influence which, for the past months had cost me so much—the sympathy and understanding of my own people, unprepared meals, inability ​to shop or get my things in order, sleepless nights with the voice incessantly speaking.
There was one night when the most indecent language I have ever heard was kept up without ceasing—there were other times when my name, coupled with cruel and unkind personal remarks as being this and that, was incessantly repeated. There were times when scandalous things were said of me, coupling my name with another, quite innocent, person's.
I felt I had been hypnotised or mesmerised into ideas which forced me to do most outrageous and ridiculous things at the same time giving me a feeling of terror that if such things were not done I should be endangering not only myself, but others I cared for, and my country.
I was always wondering and guessing at the source of the trouble.
First one church, then another, I blamed.
Was it likely that I could feel that the greatest peace the world could have—the Brotherhood of Man—should come through my Church? Rather it made me long for freedom, to mentally open my soul to the God I had learned to love—the freedom of Ibsen, Walt Whitman, Tagore—the belief in ideals and the unattainable.
But why this troubling of the voices? To what end? And why me?
Was it for good or evil?
Sometimes I felt there was someone directing me for my good—pointing out first one thing, then another to be done—I felt rested and calm and as if I had begun the sorting out and tidying up I felt I must go through before I could rise out of the mud of the past months and get back my old self and the ways I had so long lost.
But still it was direction—I wanted to be free.
Had it been for good? or evil?
To what end—These, my Invisible Helpers?
Day after day I used to struggle against the different influences.
There was one I called the "Baleful Influence."
It would descend on me, pushing itself into my consciousness with a hard metallic feeling and its jibing, jeering voices—And then would follow another which seemed to break through and scatter the first, and this I called the "Beneficent Influence." When this came I felt calm and in harmony with the world, and the voice of my Helper would direct me in gentle little simple ways, calling me "dear."
How they managed it I did not then know but I seemed to be watched all time and by any but friends. They commented on all I did and criticised all I did.
​At last, one day, I vowed I would go right away to the country.
Never for one moment in all these months had I known the "Voice of the Silence." Never for one moment had I been left without the sound of at least one voice in my ears.
All kinds of ideas came to me. This then was the Secret Service of long ago. This then was the way secrets could travel from one end of the world to the other without the help of letter, telephone or cable.
Like Pandora I opened the lid of the box entrusted to my care and let the secrets fly—Right and left I told them—angry at their entrusting them to me. This and that—this and that as the ideas came into my head from the minds of those behind.
And then I vowed to send the Rosary back. Determined to part with everything that might have been the cause of my trouble and, knowing that the Rosary had been given to me not long before I heard the voices, I sent it back. It broke my heart to do it and I held it up and looked at it long before I could bear to place it in its little box and send it back.
But I thought of the story the little nun had told me of the power of the priests to cast out devils—and of how the devil had appeared once at a lodge banquet and the priest having been invited there for the cause, had raised his cross and the devil, who sat at the head of the table, had vanished before the eyes of all the lodge members.
I looked at that little rosary as it lay in my hand, and thought of how, during these months I had tried to gain power from it. How I had held it in my hands when I was made to feel the presence of some terrible evil spirit—how I, terrified, had run for it and finding the inefficiency of its power as I crushed it in my hand for help, and made in the air the sign of the cross, had at last, in terror, called to my mother's spirit for help.
That had helped me.
Terrified and gasping I held up the little cross on my rosary to the thing I imagined in the corner of the room and made with it the sign of the cross. But not till I called to my mother did I feel that the awful thing which seemed to shiver at the knowledge of the rosary, crouched and shivered and vanished through the window.
There was another day when I slipped it inside my blouse and wore it, hoping that it would bring me peace—But no peace came.
And so the Rosary had to go.