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Neither the foot lights nor the big cluster up over the center of the stage nor any of the side lights could be turned on. A hasty examination of the wiring led to the discovery that the wires which supplied the current had been cut in the room where the switchboard was. The plaster had been broken into in order to reach them. This was the reason that the play was not beginning.
But the poor fellow at the other end of the wire probably had just as touching a story to tell, for unless it had been very important for him to get the number he would hardly have been so persistent. The girl at the switchboard may have had a story of her own, but what it was is one of those things which, as Lord Dundreary used to say, nobody can find out.
He heard a voice below. Noiselessly he crept to the landing, and gazed down into the office. A young man sat at the telephone switchboard; Mr. Magee could see in the dim light of a solitary candle that he was a person of rather hilarious raiment. The candle stood on the top of the safe, and the door of the latter swung open. Sinking down on the steps in the dark, Mr. Magee waited.
Just now they were all anxiously gathered in the pilot house eagerly on the lookout for any possible danger that might be threatening them from out the dense fog being swept inland by the wind. Harry was at the wheel while Jack stood with his hand close to the switchboard that governed the engines pulsating below.
"All right," agreed Ruth, and the blush grew deeper. Alice quickly got the number of the moving picture studio. There was a private branch exchange there, and Alice knew the girl operator. "I want to get Russ Dalwood in a hurry," Alice explained to Miss Miller, who ran the switchboard. "You try the different departments until you find him. I'll be here, holding the wire."
She is also taught the knack of concentration, so that she may carry the switchboard situation in her head, as a chess-player carries in his head the arrangement of the chess-men. And she is much more welcome at this strange school if she is young and has never worked in other trades, where less speed and vigilance are required.
"I’m getting wrong in my head. I can feel it." Carfax turned from the switchboard with a forced laugh: "Thinking of shooting up the camp?" "That or myself," replied Flint in a quiet voice; "ever since that cuckoo called I’ve felt queer."
Just as the wireless receiving station or the telephone switchboard become heroes in the photoplay, so Aaron's rod that confounded the Egyptians, the brazen serpent that Moses up-lifted in the wilderness, the ram's horn that caused the fall of Jericho, the mantle of Elijah descending upon the shoulders of Elisha from the chariot of fire, can take on a physical electrical power and a hundred times spiritual meaning that they could not have in the dead stage properties of the old miracle play or the realism of the Tissot school.
Children are not allowed at the electrical switchboard, nor any unskilled hand. For misuse means possibility of great damage to property and life. And the spirit switchboard does not yield to the unskilled touch. Though sometimes there seems to be much tampering by those with crude fingers, and with selfish desire to turn this current to personal advantage merely. It takes skill here.
Moreover, it had not yet occurred to the man at the switchboard to turn up the house-lights, and the darkness was disconcerting. Portions of the house were taking the thing better than other portions. Up in the gallery a vast activity was going on. The clatter of feet almost drowned the shouting.
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