CHARTER COMMUNES WITH THE WYNDAM WOMAN, AND CONFESSES THE GREAT TROUBLE OF HIS HEART TO FATHER FONTANEL "Do you know what I discovered this morning?" Peter Stock asked, after the three had found a table together. "M. Mondet is trying to keep the people in town for political reasons. It appears that there is to be an election in a few days. All my efforts, and, by non-parishioners, the efforts of Father Fontanel, are regarded as a political counter-stroke—to rush a certain element of the out of the town.... This is certainly Ash-Wednesday, isn't it?"
 
Charter laughed. "My theory that the Guerin disaster might relieve the and give surcease to Saint Pierre—doesn't seem to work out. The air is getting thicker, even."
 
"It isn't really ash, you know," explained Mr. Stock, "but rock, ground fine as neat in the hell-mills under the mountain and shot out by steam through Pelée's valves——"
 
"Intensely ," said Paula.
 
"It has been rather a graphic morning," Charter remarked. "Friend Stock is from his activities with Father Fontanel."
 
"Well, I didn't make a with the mountain—as you did this morning in the wine-shop. You should have seen him, Miss Wyndam, staring away at the volcano and, muttering, 'Hang on, old chap, hang on!....' My dear young woman, doesn't a ride on the ocean sound good for this afternoon? You can sit on deck and hold the little black babies. The Saragossa takes another load to Fort de France in two or three hours."
 
She shook her head. "Not just yet. You don't realize how wonderful the drama is to me—you and Father Fontanel, playing Cassandra down in the city—the mountain, and the pity of it all. I confess a little inconvenience of the weather isn't enough to drive me out. It isn't very often given to a woman to watch the operations of a destiny so big as this."
 
The capitalist turned to Charter. "You know Empress Josephine was born in Martinique and has become a sort of patron saint for the Island. A beautiful statue of her stands in the square at Fort de France where our refugees are encamped. I was only thinking that the map of Europe and the history of France might have been altered greatly if our beloved Josephine had been gifted with a will like this—of Miss Wyndam's."
 
Her pale, searching face regarded Charter for a second, and his eyes said plainly as words, "Don't you think you'd better consider this more seriously?"
 
"Maybe you'll like the idea better for the evening, when the Saragossa is back in the roadstead again, comparatively empty," Peter Stock added presently. "Father Fontanel and I have a lot to do in the meantime. Can you imagine our first parents occupying themselves when the first was down—our dear initial mother, surpassingly wind-blown, driving the geese to shelter, up the , getting out the rain-barrels, and tent-pins?"
 
"Vividly," said Paula.
 
"That's just how busy we are—Father Fontanel and I."
 
It was to be expected that a pointlessness should characterize the sayings of the two in the midst of Peter Stock's masculinity and the thrilling magnitude of the each was to the other.... They were left together presently, and the search for treasure began at once:
 
"... The present is a time of readjustment between men and women," he was saying. "It seems to me that the great mistake people make—men and women alike—is that each sex tries to raise itself by lowering the other. It hardly could be any other way just now, and at first—with woman filled with the of emerging from ages of oppression—fighting back the old and fitting to the new. But in man and woman—not in either alone—lies completion. If the two do not quite complete each other, a Third often springs from them with an increased spiritual development."
 
"Yes," she answered, leaning forward, her chin fitted to her palms. "The I-am and the You-are-not will soon be put away. I like to think of it—that man and woman are together in the complete human. There is a glorious, an arch-feminine ideal in the nature of the Christ——"
 
"Even in the courage," he added softly. "That is woman's—the finer courage that never loses its tenderness.... His Figure sometimes, as now, becomes an intimate passion to me——"
 
"As if He were near?"
 
"As if He were near—still loving, still mediating—all earth's struggle and passing through Him and becoming with His pity and tenderness—before it reaches the eyes of the Father.... There is no other way. Man and woman must be One in Two—before Two in One. They must not war upon each other. Woman is receptive; man the origin. Woman is a planet cooled to support life; man, still an sun, generates the life."
 
"That is clear and inspiring," she said. "I have always wanted it said just like that—that one is as important as the other in the evolution of the Individual——"
 
"And for that Individual are swung the solar systems.... Look at Job—denuded of all but the Spirit. There is an Individual, and his story is the history of an .... We are coming to a time when Mind will operate in man and woman conscious of the Soul. When that time comes true, how the progress to God will be cleared and speeded! It will be a flight——"
 
"Instead of a crawl," she finished.
 
They were alone in the big dining-room. Their voices could not have reached the nearest empty table. It was like a communion—their first communion.
 
"I have felt it," she went on in a strange, low tone, "and heard the New Voices—Preparers of the Way. Sometimes it came to me in New York—the stirring of a great, new spiritual life. I have felt the hunger—that awful hollowness in the breasts of men and women, who turn to each other in mute agony, who turn to a thousand foolish sensations—because they do not realize what they hunger for. Their breasts cry out to be filled——"
 
"And the Spirit cries out to flood in."
 
"Yes, and the Spirit asks only for Earth-people to listen to their inner voices and love one another," she completed. "It demands no macerations, no , no fearful austerities—only fineness and loving kindness."
 
"How wonderfully they have come to me, too—those radiant moments—as I sat by my study window, facing the East," he whispered, not knowing what the last words meant to her. "How clear it is that all great and good things come with this soul-age—this soul-consciousness. I have seen in those lovely moments that Mother Earth is but one of many of God's gardens; that human life is but a day in a glorious culture-scheme which involve............