ONE YEAR LATER--AN EPILOGUE
Frances waited for her husband, walking slowly up and down under the row
of pallid city maples. She preferred the open light of the Square to the
gloom of the street that cut like a canyon between the towering
office-buildings on either side of it. There was a touch of autumn in
the air, and a black frost of the night before had left the sidewalks
carpeted with the mottled roans and yellows and russets of the fallen
leaves.
Summer was over and gone. And all life, in some way, seemed to have aged
with the ageing of the year. There was something mournful, to the ears
of the waiting woman, in the very rustle of the dry leaves under her
feet, as she paced the Square. The sight of the half-stripped
tree-branches, here and there, depressed her idle mind with the thought
of skeletons. The smell of the dying leaves made her heart heavy. They
seemed to be whispering of Death, crying out to her at the mutability of
all things that lived and breathed. And she had so wanted always to live
and exult in living; she had so trembled at the thought of these creeping
changes and the insidious passing away of youth and all it meant to her!
"I hate autumn, most awfully," she had confessed to her husband that
morning, dolefully.
She went on, passing from under the shadow of the trees, grateful for the
reassuring thin sunshine of the late afternoon, that touched the roofs
and the tree-tops with gilt, and bathed the more towering
office-buildings in a brazen glory of light, and left the street-dust
swimming in a vapor of pale gold. The city noises seemed muffled and
quiescent. A sense of fulfillment, of pensive maturity, of tranquillity
after tumult, lay over even the urban world before her. She scarcely
knew why or how it was, but it left her melancholy, lonely, homesick for
things she could not name.
The waiting woman looked up, and saw her husband. Suddenly, with one
deep breath, all the emptiness of life was a thing, if not of the past,
at least of the background of consciousness.
He was quite close to her by this time, and as she stood there, waiting,
she swept him with her quick and searching gaze. He appeared before her,
in that fleeting moment of impersonal vision, strangely objective, as
completely and acutely visualized as though she had looked upon him for
the first time.
Something in his face wrung her heart, foolishly, something in the
wordless, Rembrandt-like poignancy with which it stood out, through the
cold autumn sunlight of the late afternoon, in its mortal isolation of
soul, its sense of being detached and denied the companionship of its
kind. He looked old and tired. He, too, was voyaging towards some
melancholy autumnal maturity, some sorrowful denudation of youth, that
left him pitiful to her impotently aching heart. He, too, stood in want
of some greater love than even she could ever bring to him, as surely as
she still cried out for the solace of some companionship, not closer than
his, but of a different fiber. She had found herself, of late, vaguely
hungering for some influence less autumnal, less vesper-like, to hold and
wall her back from those grayer hours of retrospection which crept into
her life. Yet this was a secret she had kept always locked in her own
holy of holies. For even in the face of that indeterminate feeling, it
still stabbed her like a knife to think of any thought or life coming
between her and her husband.
She hurried to him, with her habitual little throaty cry, and caught his
arm in hers. The gesture was almost a passionate one.
"Jim, you're working too hard!" she said, as they went on again, arm in
arm.
He studied her upturned face. The pale oval under the great heavy crown
of glinting chestnut seemed paler than usual, the violet eyes seemed more
shadowy. There clung to her a puzzling and unfamiliar sense of fragility.
"What is it?" he asked, coming to a stop.
"I'm worried about _you_!" she cried. "This is the fourth, almost the
fifth month, you've shut yourself up with that transmitter!"
"But it's _work_!" he answered, unmoved.
"Yes, I know, but work without a holiday, without rest----"
"But think what it's going to be to us! All I've got to do now is to get
my selenium cell simplified enough for commercial purposes! And another
month will do it!"
"But eight months ago you said that!"
"There's nothing left to stick us _now_. Once I get this cell the way I
want it, we'll start manufacturing, for all we're worth. In less than
six months we'll be filling contracts here in America. Two months later
we'll be introducing into seven different countries in Europe a fully
protected and patented transmitting camera as far ahead of the
old-fashioned photophone as a Bell telephone is ahead of a tin
speaking-tube."
"I know, Jim; but you must be more careful! You must, in some way, stop
working so hard!"
"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 space 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 God!--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
assented. "So you're right, in a way--their god 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 passion of gratitude, 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 sex 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"