Her voice thrilled as she whispered, “Thyrsis! It moved!”
“Moved?” he echoed.
“I felt the child move!” she cried.
And so he came and put his hands upon her body, and together they stood waiting, breathless, as if listening for a far-off sound.
“There! There!” she cried. “Did you feel it?”
Yes, he had felt it. And in all his life had he ever felt anything stranger? The first sign of the new life that was to be—the first hail out of the darkness of nonentity! And truly, to hear that hail was to be rapt into regions of wonder unspeakable!
It was to be a new human soul; a creature like themselves, with a mind of its own, and a sense of responsibility—It would be a man or a woman, independent, self-creating, and knowing naught about this strange inception. And yet, it would be their life also; they had caused it—but for them it would never have been! Blindly, unwittingly, following the guidance of some power greater than themselves, they had called it into being. And in some mysterious and incredible way it would share their qualities; it would be a blending of their natures, a symbol of their union, of the strange fire that had blazed up in them and fused them together. Truly, had they not come here to the essence of love, that great blind force which had ruled and guided all things from Time’s beginning?
They had come to the very making of life, it seemed. And yet, they wondered—were they really there? This new soul that was to be—had they in truth created it? Or had it existed before this? And whence did it come? If it was really the dignified and divine thing that it would someday imagine itself to be, was it not uncanny that it should have come thus—a nameless, half-human, half-animal thing, kicking inside the body of a woman?
It was Being, in all its ineffable mystery, its monstrous and unendurable strangeness. They lived face to face with it, they saw a thousand aspects of it. Sometimes Corydon would be obsessed with the sense of the sheer weight she carried; a burden fastened upon her and not to be got rid of—an imposition and torment to her. Then again, she would see herself in grotesque and even comical lights—as akin to all the animals, a cousin of the patient cow. And then would come a moment of sudden wonder, when she would be transfigured, a being divine, conferring the boon of life upon another.
It was in this last way that Thyrsis thought of her. There was about her a sense of brooding mystery, as of one who walks in the midst of supernatural presences. She would sit for hours gazing before her, like Joan of Arc listening to her voices; and he would be touched with awe, and would kiss her tenderly and with reverence.