This too, as some forgotten, lost ideal, she knew was also true.
Her mind, her heart, her experience, her deepest womanly nature, these, she realized in a glowing instant of extraordinary divination, were at variance in her. She trembled; she knew not what to do or say or think. And again, it came to her, that the visible shape before her was but the insignificant fraction of a being whose true life spread actively and unconfined through infinite space.
She then did something that was prompted, though she did not know it thus, by her singleness of heart, her purity of soul and body, her unique and natural instinct to be of use, of service, to others—the accumulated practice and effort of her entire life provided the action along a natural line of least resistance: she bent down and put her arm and hand round his great shoulder. She lowered her face. She kissed him most tenderly, with a mother's love, a woman's secret passion perhaps, but yet with something else as well she could not name—an unearthly yearning for a greater Ideal than anything she had yet known on earth among humanity.... It was the invisible she kissed.
And LeVallon, she realized with immense relief, justified her action, for he did not return the kiss. At the same time she had known quite well it would be thus. That kiss trembled, echoed, in her own greater unrealized self as well.
"What is it," she whispered, a mysterious passion surging up in her as she raised him to his feet, "that you remember and wish to recover—for us all? Can you tell me? What is this great, happy, deathless service that we have forgotten?" Her voice trembled a little. An immense sense of joy, of liberty, shook out its sunlit wings.
His expression, as he rose, was something between that of a child and a faithful yearning animal, but of a "divine animal," though she did not know the phrase. Its purity, its sweetness, its power—it was the power she noticed chiefly—were superb.
"I cannot tell, I cannot remember," his voice said softly, for all its resonant, virile depth. "It is some state we all have come from—into this. We are strangers here. This brain and intellect, this coarse, thick feeling, this selfishness, this want of harmony and working together—all this is new and strange to us. It is of blind and clumsy children. This love of one single person for one other single person—it is so pitiful. We three have come into this for a time, a little time. It is pain and misery. It is prison. Each one works only for himself. There is no joy. They know nothing of our great Service. We cannot show them. Let us go back——"
Another pause fell between them, another of those singular hollows she had felt before. But this time the hollow was not empty. It was brimmed with surging life. The gulf between her earthly state and another that was nameless, a gulf usually unbridgeable, the fixed gulf, as an old book has it, which may not be crossed without danger to the Race, for whose protection it exists—this childhood simile occurred to her. And a sense of awe stirred in her being. It was the realization that this gulf or hollow now brimmed with life, that it could be crossed, that she might step over into another place—the sense of awe rose thence, yet came certainly neither from the woman nor the mother in her.
"I am of another place," LeVallon went on, plucking the thought naked from her inmost being. "For I am come here recently, and the purpose of my coming is hidden from me, and memory is dark. But it is not entirely dark. Sometimes I half remember. Stars, flowers, fire, wind, women—here and there—bring light into the darkness. Oh," he cried suddenly, "how wonderful they are—how wonderful you are—on that account to me!"
The voice held a strange, evoking power perhaps. A thousand yearnings she had all her life suppressed because they interfered with her duty—as she conceived it—here and now, fluttered like rising flames within her as she listened. His voice now increased in volume and rhythm, though still quiet and low-pitched; it was as if a great wind poured behind it with tremendous vibrations, through it, lifting her out of a limited, cramped, everyday self. A delicious warmth of happy comfort, of acceptance, of enthusiasm glowed in her. And LeVallon's face, she saw, had become radiant, almost as though it emanated light. This light entered her being and brought joy again.