ars; it
tells the listener everyone else's business; it speaks to him of the
affairs of other people as well as his own. It is an ever-present
eavesdropper, and tells you what other people are saying to one another
in exactly the same voice in which they speak to you. When it is sending
your messages it shouts, splitting the air with crackling flashes of
forked blue fire; but when it has anything to say to you it whispers in
your ear in whining, insinuating confidence. And you must listen
attentively and with a mind concentrated on your own business if you are
to receive from it what concerns you, and reject what does not; for it
is not always the loudest whisper that is the most important. The
messages come from near and far, now like the rasp of a file in your
ear, and now in a thread of sound as fine as the whine of a mosquito;
and if the mosquito voice is the one that is speaking to you from far
away, you may often be interrupted by the loud and empty buzzing of one
nearer neighbour speaking to another and loudly interrupting the message
which concerns you.

Listening to these voices in the Marconi room of the _Titanic_, and
controlling her articulation and hearing, were two young men, little
more than boys, but boys of a rare quality, children of the golden age
of electricity. Educated in an abstruse and delicate science, and loving
the sea for its largeness and adventure, they had come--Phillips at the
age of twenty-six, and Bride in the ripe maturity of twenty-one--to wield
for the _Titanic_ the electric forces of the ether, and to direct her
utterance and hearing on the ocean. And as they sat there that Friday
and Saturday they must have heard, as was their usual routine, all the
whispers of the ships for two hundred miles round them, their trained
faculties almost automatically rejecting the unessential, receiving and
attending to the essential. They heard talk of many things, talk in
fragments and in the strange rhythmic language that they had come to
know like a mother tongue; talk of cargoes, talk of money and business,
of transactions involving thousands of pounds; trivial talk of the
emotions, greetings and good wishes exchanged on the high seas; endless
figures of latitude and longitude--for a ship is an eternal egoist and
begins all her communications by an announcement of Who she is and Where
she is. Ships are chiefly interested in weather and cargo, and their
wireless talk on their own account is const