She came to speak to us from a platform for the purpose of conveying her idea and a little of her soul, unaware that a valiant soul is a visible soul. The only means we have of showing our souls, sharing them and giving them freedom, are the ordinary means—our actions, the bare flesh of our lips, the sincere tears of our eyes, our bodies which encase our souls, our smiles which beautify our souls, and our voices.
This woman's soul is a strained voice, but how marvellous. The rows in the audience remain stationary, each head staying fixed in the position it held at the first word she uttered.
The women's horrid cares, their marketing, their husbands, their children, their dishwashing, their difficulty in making ends meet, all the everyday trifles that weigh on women and enslave them, are driven far away. The pale blonde with faded eyes beside Eva probably made the same O of her mouth when she spelled out her letters as a child. The old woman nodding "Yes, yes"—the two plumes in her bonnet respond "Yes, yes"—has forgotten her stupid drudgery.
They are all stamped with a sort of pathetic imprint; love is their element, their strength, their medium. They listen with love and understand through love. Love gives them this serious, fixed attentiveness.
The woman with the burning insignia of her stove on her fiery cheeks has lost all traces of worry except for the scolding expression of the mother whom you imagine with a horde of children jumping round her like little rabbits. And the thin girl with the dusky gaze—we've all seen her kneeling in the shadow of a confessional mumbling her sins with her mouth glued to a wooden grating from the other side of which comes the warm breath of a man without a face—what ardor she, too, is capable of!
Instead of the voice of the speaker on the platform it is the women's outcries that I hear.
These women have been imprisoned by themselves, hampered by their own lives, and what lives! what a miserable heap of desires and troubles in the face of the immense thing which gathers all beings together and makes them resemble one another, the thing unanimous and intangible that I hardly see. I don't even know its name. Before it I am like a blind man who has never seen the sun, but suddenly feels it shining on his forehead and exclaims: "There is light!" It is this thing that has made all these women come here to-night and bestow their childish presence, their somewhat uncouth attention, their tragic lips which would kiss everything. Do they feel the great current rising from them which seeks to be caught and held fast, a current altogether new in the human atmosphere?... Not yet. Not yet.
How subdued Eva looks; her gaze seems clipped short; she's frowning. Her expression makes me uncomfortable.
Hands flutter like white leaves; a bow from the platform; the meeting is over.
The auditors stretch themselves a little, then rise to the accompaniment of clattering benches, gossamer sighs, and the sound of two hundred bodies moving and coming back to themselves. A faint cackling, then a full chorus of barnyard noises mounting and spreading.