# The Strange Experiences of Tina Malone/Chapter 19

CHAPTER XIX.
QUESTION.
I am still wondering what it all means.
The other day I asked Tony again. His answer was:
"Some astral force set in motion quite mechanically and affecting all those who are mediumistically inclined."
Dr. Marshall said, when I said I had heard voices:
"Ideas. Something that has happened to you and been lodged in your mind."
And when I said—
"Ideas! Yes, ideas. You all say 'ideas.' But I could not have imagined all these things. They are things that I have not read or been through or imagined."
"No," he said, when I told him I thought it was due to hypnotism or mesmerism. "It is that they are either ideas that have lodged in your own mind—"
"If you believe in re-incarnation it might be my submerged self," I broke in, "but they have never happened to me before and I have never read or imagined such things. If you think it is my subconscious mind how did they get there?"
"Either from your mind or another's," he said, smiling gently. He was the doctor who spoke fearlessly for lunacy reform. "And they have been entangled or knotted there."
All through these experiences, the latter part of them, since Dr. Weston came in, I have felt my mind becoming clearer and clearer. There are many voices now, though far away, and they speak in such natural and earthly tones that I am sure they belong to people.
But here I sit and behind me I imagine underground passages—a kind of maze in which I have been caught. Personalities float past, are pushed into mine, and have to disentangle themselves—with a laugh sometimes—before they can get away.
Sometimes they stay, and then my mind takes on something of their individuality. I get something of their outlook—I feel towards things a little as they do.
Generally they have been humanitarians, warm and kind. Most of them have been gentle and patient in their speech—how gentle it has surprised me, for I have raged and stormed sometimes at the intrusion, and, furious at the feeling that my thoughts and feeling travel through and are read against my will, have in terror tried to shut my mind off and pull the thoughts, critical and unkind, back again.
And once as I sat at a lunch-time meeting in the vestibule of the Town Hall, listening to a lecture against Spiritualism, ​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 fell 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?
​Is it that I catch people's conditions, for I seem to hear each one speak to me as they are with me or leave me, I seem somehow to catch their thoughts. Have I become mediumistic? Just I alone or is it a world-wide telepathy where each mind speaks to another no matter how far away.
Is prayer, then, really answered?
There was the time when I stood by a pillar-box, a letter in my hand, and thought of an episode that was closed by death.
I sent up a prayer to Heaven to send me something to make life worth living and soon afterwards I was led to Theosophy and Tony.
Afterwards when I was alone and very lonely, I sent up the same cry and then came this in answer. Then it is true, and when, at our most despairing moment, we send forth that cry, help comes from above and the answer comes.
I sit here now and look up at the sky, beyond the trees with the quiet rustling of their leaves, and listen to the voices, question and answer there, as if they were spirits meeting somewhere in the blue. And the thought comes to me that we should never say: "It cannot be," for we do not know when we may have to change it to, "I believe it may be," and then to, "I know it is."
Voice meeting voice, no matter how far away at the other side of the world. And I wonder where and who is the Miracle Man, that little voice so full of pathos on that wonderful Sunday night?
"Oh, Tina Malone, don't you know yet who it is?"
And then I think—
   "No one is so accursed by fate No one so utterly desolate But some heart, though unknown, Responds unto his own: Responds, as if with unseen wings An angel touched its quivering strings And whispers in its song, 'Where hast thou stayed so long?'"
THE END.
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