Phantom Wires Part 34

"Who could help it, at this sort of work?" he protested, contentedly.

She felt that he, too, had stumbled upon that timeless and mysterious paradox of existence, that incongruous law which ordains that as one surrenders and relinquishes and gives, so one shall live the richer and deeper.

"I tell you, Frank," her husband was saying, "the more I know of electricity the more I bow down before it, in wonder, the prouder I am to be mixed up in its mysteries! Just think of what it's come to be, this thing we call Electricity, since the day primitive man first rubbed a piece of amber and beheld the puny miracle of magnetic attraction! Why, today it harnesses tides and waterfalls, and tames and orders force, and leaves power docile and patient, swinging meek and ready from a bit of metal thread! It lightens cities, at a turn of the wrist; it hurls your voice half way round the world, it guides sailors and measures and weighs the stars; it threads empires together with its humming wires; it's the shuttle that's woven all civilization into one compact fabric! It's the light of our night-time, and the civilizer of our world. It explodes mines, and heals sickness. It creeps as silent as death through a thousand miles of sea, and yet it's the very tongue of our world! It prints and carves and beautifies; it rises to the most stupendous tasks, and then it stoops to the most delicate work!"

"And it lets me ring you up, my beloved own, and hear your voice, your living voice!" Even beyond her laughter he could catch the rapt note as she spoke. He responded to that note by catching at her gloved hand, and keeping it in his gratefully.

"Yes, but it does even more than annihilate s.p.a.ce and turn wheels and despatch trains. Think what it's doing with wireless alone! And _that_ is only the beginning! Why, the whole world is alive and athrob with energy, with stored-up power aching to be used--and some day it will be electricity that will teach all nature how to work and toil for man! As yet we don't even know what it is! It's formless, to us, bodiless, invisible, imponderable! It's still unknown--as unknown as G.o.d!--and almost as mysterious!"

"Oh!" she reproved.

"I've sometimes wondered if those lightning flashes and those terrifying things that used to fill the temples in the Eleusinian Mysteries didn't simply mean that those old priests of Apollo knew more about electric currents than we imagine."

"And even Jove's bolts were only electricity, weren't they?" she a.s.sented. "So you're right, in a way--their G.o.d and their power _were_ electricity! Perhaps it was electricity Prometheus stole!"

"No, it's older than Prometheus, it's older than Adam, it's mixed up in some way with the very origin of life itself! It's the most mysterious thing in the world--and the most beautiful!" he concluded, with solemn conviction.

They walked on in silence for a moment or two. A dead leaf fell and drifted between them. The afternoon deepened into twilight.

"O, Jim, not the most beautiful!" said Frank, suddenly, thrilled and shaken with some wayward pa.s.sion of grat.i.tude, as acute as it was unheralded.

He looked down at her, puzzled.

"Oh, I'm glad, Jim; glad!" she cried, irrelevantly.

"Glad for what?"

"For this--for you--for everything!"

His face clouded a little, for a moment, with the shadow of the past that could and would not be altogether past.

"I thought we'd decided to let that--stay closed?" he said. There was a note of reproof in his voice.

"Do you know what _I_ think is the most beautiful thing in all the world, Jim?" she went on, as irrelevantly as before, but holding his arm still more tightly entangled in hers. "I think it's Redemption!"

"Redemption?"

"Yes--I think there's nothing ever done, or made, or written of, or sung of by poets, more beautiful than a soul, a poor, unhappy human soul, coming into its own once more! Oh, I don't believe I can ever make you feel it as I feel it--but I don't believe there's an adventure or a movement in all life more beautiful than the rehabilitation--that's the only word I can use!--of a man's heart, or a woman's! Think of it, Jim!--what can be lovelier than the restoration of sanity and beauty and meaning to a suffering and tortured life? Health after sickness is lovely, and so is healing after disease, and quietness after unrest, and peace after struggle. But that, Jim, is only for the body. It's only for something of a day or two, or a year or two. When a soul is redeemed, it's something that leaves you face to face with--with Eternity!"

Again he studied her rapt and mournful eyes, at sea, wondering to what new turn the sacrificial instinct of her s.e.x was leading her.

"What has made you think of all this?" he demanded of her, a little unhappily, a little afraid of the old wounds that were healing so slowly.

"Why should you remind me of how hard it is, and how little I've been able to do?"

She was silent for several minutes again, as they walked on, slowly, under the spectral autumn trees, with the rustling dead leaves at their feet. She found it hard to answer him.

"'The saints are only the sinners who kept on trying!'" she quoted to him, for the second time in their lives. Then she came to a full stop.

"Oh, Jim, I need you so much, now!" she cried out, at last, pitifully, and still again he could not bridge the abyss that lay between one thought and another.

"Need me?"

"Yes, need you!"

Again a dead leaf fluttered and drifted between them.

"What is it?" he asked, more gently.

She put her hand on his shoulder, and when she spoke her voice was little more than a whisper.

And he, the man who had spoken of trivial mysteries, bowed before that supremest mystery which broods and centres in the thought of motherhood.

"We'll have to be good now--terribly good!" she wailed. And she tried to laugh up at him, with a touch of her old bravery, in a futile effort to make light of her tears.

"30"