The sweetness of it turned the
night alive.
'Come on, old Mother. Our Leader is calling to us. We must work.'
They slid from the blue wind into a current of paler air that happened
to slip swiftly past them, and went towards the forest where Mlle.
Lemaire waited for them. Mother waved her hand to her friend, settled
comfortably upon the flat roof in the village in their rear. 'We'll
come back to lean upon you when we're tired,' she signalled. But she
felt no envy now. In future she would certainly never 'stay put.' Work
beckoned to her--and such endless, glorious work: the whole Universe.
'What life! What a rush of splendour!' she exclaimed as they reached
the great woods and heard them shouting below in the winds. 'I see now
why the forest always comforted me. There's strength here I can take
back into my body with me when I go.'
'The trees, yes, express visibly only a portion of their life,' he
told her. 'There is an overflow we can appropriate.'
Yet their conversation was never audibly uttered. It flashed
instantaneously from one to the other. All they had exchanged since
leaving La Citadelle had taken place at once, it seemed. They were
awake in the region of naked thought and feeling. The dictum of the
materialists that thought and feeling cannot exist apart from matter
did not trouble them.
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