T I TA JN VERS TY OF CALIFORNIA. SAN DIEGO 3 1822019668243 sity of California them Regional >rary Facility UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. SAN DIEGO 3 1822019668243 TITANIC BY FILSON YOUNG CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS AND THE NEW WORLD OF HIS DISCOVERY Illustrated. Large Post Svo. js. dd. net. MEMORY HARBOUR ESSAYS CHIEFLY IN DESCRIPTION Crown Svo. $s. net. VENUS AND CUPID AN IMPRESSION IN PROSE AFTER VELASQUEZ IN COLOUR Edition limited to 339 copies With Frontispiece. Crown 4(0. i2j. 6d. net. THE SANDS OF PLEASURE With Frontispiece by R. ]. PANNETT Seventy -fourth Thousand Crown Svo, cloth, 6s. ; sewed, is. net. WHEN THE TIDE TURNS With Frontispiece by W. D ACRES ADAMS Twenty-second Thousand Crown Svo, cloth, 6s. ; sewed, is. net. IRELAND AT THE CROSS ROADS Second Edition. Crown Svo. Cloth, 3*. 6d. net. MASTERSINGERS Fifth Edition. Large Post Svo. Persian yapp, 5$. net. MORE MASTERSINGERS STUDIES IN THE ART OF MUSIC Large Post Svo. Persian yapp, $s. net. THE WAGNER STORIES Seventh Impression. Large Post Svo. Persian yapp, 5.5-. net. OPERA STORIES Large Post Svo. Persian yapp, 5.-. net. THE LOVER'S HOURS A CYCLE OF POEMS Fcp. ^to. 2S. 6d, net 41 16' N; 50 14' W. TITANIC BY FILSON YOUNG LONDON GRANT RICHARDS LTD. 1912 CHISW1CK PRESS : CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO. TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON. I will tiot conceal his parts, nor his power, nor his comely Proportion. His scales are his pride, shut up together as with a close seal. One is so near to another, that no air can come between them. They are joined one to another, they stick together, that they cannot be sundered. Out of his mouth go burning lamps, and sparks of fire leap out. Out of his nostrils goeth smoke, as out of a seething pot or caldron. His breath kindleth coals, and a flame goeth out of his mouth. The flakes of his flesh are joined together ; they are firm in themselves ; they cannot be moved. He maketh the deep to boil like a pot ; he maketh the sea like a pot of ointment. He maketh a path to shine after him ; one would think the deep to be hoary. Upon earth there is not his like, who is made without fear. He beholdeth all high things ; he is a king over all the children of pride. Job, xli. I IF you enter Belfast Harbour early in the morning on the mail steamer from Fleetwood you will see far ahead of you a smudge of smoke. At first it is nothing but the apex of a great triangle formed by the heights on one side, the green wooded shores on the other, and the horizon astern. As you go on the triangle becomes narrower, the blue waters smoother, and the ship glides on in a triangle of her own a triangle of white foam that is parallel to the green tri- angle of the shore. Behind you the Copeland Lighthouse keeps guard over the sunrise and the tumbling surges of the Channel, before you is the cloud of smoke that joins the narrowing shores 7 8 TITANIC like a gray canopy; and there is no sound but the rush of foam past the ship's side. You seem to be making straight for a gray mud flat; but as you approach you see a narrow lane of water opening in the mud and shingle. Two low banks, like the banks of a canal, thrust out their ends into the waters of the lough; and presently, her speed reduced to dead slow, the ship enters between these low mud banks, which are called the Twin Islands. So narrow is the lane that as she enters the water rises on the shingle banks and flows in waves on either side of her like two gray horses with white manes that canter slowly along, a solemn escort, until the channel between the islands is passed. Day and night, winter and summer, these two gray horses are always waiting; no ship ever surprises them asleep; no ship enters but they rise up TITANIC 9 and shake their manes and accompany her with their flowing, cantering motion along the confines of their territory. And when you have passed the gates that they guard you are in Belfast Harbour, in still and muddy water that smells of the land and not of the sea; for you seem already to be far from the things of the sea. As you have entered the narrow channel a new sound, also far different from the liquid sounds of the sea, falls on your ear; at first a low sonorous murmuring like the sound of bees in a giant hive, that rises to a ringing continuous music the multitudinous clamour of thousands of blows of metal on metal. And turning to look whence the sound arises you seem indeed to have left the last of the things of the sea behind you ; for on your left, on the flattest of the mud flats, arises a veritable forest of iron ; a leafless forest, of thousands upon thousands of bare io TITANIC rusty trunks and branches that tower higher than any forest trees in our land, and look like the ruins of some giant grove submerged by the sea in the brown autumn of its life, stripped of its leaves and laid bare again, the dead and rusty remnants of a forest. There is nothing with any broad or continuous surface only thousands and thousands of iron branches with the gray sky and the smoke showing through them everywhere, giant cobwebs hanging between earth and the sky, intricate, meaningless networks of trunks and branches and sticks and twigs of iron. But as you glide nearer still you see that the forest is not lifeless, nor its branches deserted. From the bottom to the topmost boughs it is crowded with a life that at first seems like that of mites in the interstices of some rotting fabric, and then like birds crowding the branches TITANIC ii of the leafless forest, and finally appears as a multitude of pigmy men swarming and toiling amid the skeleton iron struc- tures that are as vast as cathedrals and seem as frail as gossamer. It is from them that the clamour arises, the clamour that seemed so gentle and musical a mile away, and that now, as you come closer, grows strident and deafening. Of all the sounds produced by man's labour in the world this sound of a great shipbuilding yard is the most painful. Only the harshest materials and the harshest ac- tions are engaged in producing it: iron struck upon iron, or steel smitten upon steel, or steel upon iron, or iron upon steel that and nothing else, day in, day out, year in and year out, a million times a minute. It is an endless, continuous birth-agony, that should herald the ap- pearance of some giant soul. And great indeed should be the overture to such an 12 TITANIC agony ; for it is here that of fire and steel, and the sweat and pain of millions of hours of strong men's labour, were born those two giant children that were des- tined by man finally to conquer the sea. In this awful womb the Titanic took shape. For months and months in that monstrous iron enclosure there was no- thing that had the faintest likeness to a ship; only something that might have been the iron scaffolding for the naves of half-a-dozen cathedrals laid end to end. Far away, furnaces were smelting thou- sands and thousands of tons of raw material that finally came to this place in the form of great girders and vast lumps of metal, huge framings, hundreds of miles of stays and rods and straps of steel, thousands of plates, not one of which twenty men could lift unaided ; mil- lions of rivets and bolts all the heaviest and most sinkable things in the world. TITANIC 13 And still nothing in the shape of a ship that could float upon the sea. The seasons followed each other, the sun rose now behind the heights of Carricktergus and now behind the Copeland Islands ; daily the ships came in from fighting with the boisterous seas, and the two gray horses cantered beside them as they slid be- tween the islands; daily the endless up- roar went on, and the tangle of metal beneath the cathedral scaffolding grew denser. A great road of steel, nearly a quarter of a mile long, was laid at last a road so heavy and so enduring that it might have been built for the triumphal progress of some giant railway train. Men said that this roadway was the keel of a ship; but you could not look at it and believe them. The scaffolding grew higher; and as it grew the iron branches multiplied and grew with it, higher and higher towards i 4 TITANIC the sky, until it seemed as though man were rearing a temple which would ex- press all he knew of grandeur and sub- limity, and all he knew of solidity and permanence something that should en- dure there, rooted to the soil of Queen's Island for ever. The uproar and the agony increased. In quiet studios and offices clear brains were busy with draw- ings and calculations and subtle elaborate mathematical processes, sifting and apply- ing the tabulated results of years of ex- perience. The drawings came in time to the place of uproar; were magnified and subdivided and taken into grimy work- shops; and steam-hammers and steam- saws smote and ripped at the brute metal, to shape it in accordance with the shapes on the paper. And still the ships, big and little, came nosing in from the high seas little dusty colliers from the Tyne, and battered schooners from the coast, TITANIC 15 and timber ships from the Baltic, and trim mail steamers, and giants of the ocean creeping in wounded for succour all solemnly received by the twin gray horses and escorted to their stations in the harbour. But the greatest giant of all that came in, which dwarfed everything else visible to the eye, was itself dwarfed to insignificance by the great cathedral building on the island. The seasons passed ; the creatures who wrought and clambered among the iron branches, and sang their endless song of labour there, felt the steel chill beneath the frosts of winter, and burning hot beneath the sun's rays in summer, until at last the skeleton within the scaffolding began to take a shape, at the sight of which men held their breaths. It was the shape of a ship, a ship so monstrous and unthinkable that it towered high over the buildings and dwarfed the very mountains 16 TITANIC beside the water. It seemed like some impious blasphemy that man should fashion this most monstrous and ponder- able of all his creations into the likeness of a thing that could float upon the yield- ing waters. And still the arms swung and the hammers rang, the thunder and din continued, and the gray horses shook their manes and cantered along beneath the shadow, and led the little ships in from the sea and out again as though no miracle were about to happen. A little more than its own length of water lay between the iron forest and the opposite shore, in which to loose this tremendous structure from its foundations and slide it into the sea. The thought that it should ever be moved from its place, except by an earthquake, was a thought that the mind could not conceive, nor could anyone looking at it accept the possibility that by any method this vast TITANIC 17 tonnage of metal could be borne upon the surface of the waters. Yet, like an evil dream, as it took the shape of a giant ship, all the properties of a ship began to appear and increase in hideous exaggera- tion. A rudder as big as a giant elm tree, bosses and bearings of propellers the size of a windmill everything was on a nightmare scale; and underneath the iron foundations of the cathedral floor men were laying on concrete beds pave- ments of oak and great cradles of timber and iron, and sliding ways of pitch pine to support the bulk of the monster when she was moved, every square inch of the pavement surface bearing a weight of more than two tons. Twenty tons of tallow were spread upon the ways, and hydraulic rams and triggers built and fixed against the bulk of the ship so that, when the moment came, the waters she was to con- quer should thrust her finally from earth. 6 i8 TITANIC And the time did come. The branching forest became clothed and thick with leaves of steel. Within the scaffoldings now towered the walls of the cathedral, and what had been a network of girders and cantilevers and gantries and bridges became a building with floors, a ship with decks. The skeleton ribs became covered with skins of wood, the metal decks clothed with planks smooth as a ball-room floor. What had been a build- ing of iron became a town, with miles of streets and hundreds of separate houses and buildings in it. The streets were laid out; the houses were decorated and fur- nished with luxuries such as no palace ever knew. And then, while men held their breath, the whole thing moved, moved bodily, obedient to the tap of the imprisoned waters in the ram. There was no christen- ing ceremony such as celebrates the TITANIC 19 launching of lesser ships. Only the waters themselves dared to give the impulse that should set this monster afloat. The waters touched the cradle, and the cradle moved on the ways, carrying the ship down to- wards the waters. And when the cradle stopped the ship moved on ; slowly at first, then with a movement that grew quicker until it increased to the speed of a fast- trotting horse, touching the waters, dip- ping into them, cleaving them, forcing them asunder in waves and ripples that fled astonished to the surrounding shores; finally resting and floating upon them, while thousands of the pigmy men who had roosted in the bare iron branches, who had raised the hideous clamour amid which the giant was born, greeted their handiwork, dropped their tools, and raised their hoarse voices in a cheer. The miracle had happened. And the day came when the two gray horses were 20 TITANIC summoned to their greatest task; when, with necks proudly arched and their white manes flung" higher than ever, they es- corted the Titanic between the islands out to sea. II AT noon on Wednesday, loth April 1912, the Titamc started from Southampton on her maiden voyage. Small enough was her experi- ence of the sea before that day. Many hands had handled her; many tugs had fussed about her, pulling and pushing her this way and that as she was manoeuvred in the waters of Belfast Lough and taken out to the entrance to smell the sea. There she had been swung and her compasses adjusted. Three or four hours had suf- ficed for her trial trip, and she had first felt her own power in the Irish Sea, when all her new machinery working together, at first with a certain reserve and diffidence, had tested and tried its 21 22 TITANIC various functions, and she had come down through St. George's Channel and round by the Lizard, and past the Eddystone and up the Solent to Southampton Water, feeling a little hustled and strange, no doubt, but finding this business of plough- ing the seas surprisingly easy after all. And now, on the day of sailing, amid the cheers of a crowd unusually vast even for Southampton Docks, the largest ship in the world slid away from the deep-water jetty to begin her sea life in earnest. In the first few minutes her giant powers made themselves felt. As she was slowly gathering way she passed the liner New York, another ocean monarch, which was lying like a rock moored by seven great hawsers of iron and steel. As the Titanic passed, some mysterious compelling in- fluence of the water displaced by her vast bulk drew the New York towards her; TITANIC 23 snapped one by one the great steel hawsers and pulled the liner from the quayside as though she had been a cork. Not until she was within fifteen feet of the Titanic, when a collision seemed imminent, did the ever-present tugs lay hold of her and haul her back to captivity. Even to the most experienced traveller the first few hours on a new ship are very confusing; in the case of a ship like this, containing the population of a village, they are bewildering. So the eight hours spent by the Titanic in crossing from Southampton to Cherbourg would be spent by most of her passengers in taking their bearings, trying to find their way about and looking into all the wonders of which the voyage made them free. There were luxuries enough in the second class, and comforts enough in the third to make the ship a wonder on that account alone ; but it was the first-class passengers, used 24 TITANIC as they were to all the extravagant luxuries of modern civilized life, on whom the dis- coveries of that first day of sun and wind in the Channel must have come with the greatest surprise. They had heard the ship described as a floating hotel ; but as they began to explore her they must have found that she contained resources of a perfection unattained by any hotel, and luxuries of a kind unknown in palaces. The beauties of French chateaux and of English country-houses of the great period had been dexterously combined with that supreme form of comfort which the modern English and Americans have raised to the dignity of a fine art. Such a palace as a great artist, a great epicure, a great poet and the most spoilt and pampered woman in the world might have conjured up from their imagination in an idle hour was here materialized and set, not in a fixed land- scape of park and woodland, but on the TITANIC 25 dustless road of the sea, with the sunshine of an English April pouring in on every side, and the fresh salt airs of the Channel filling every corner with tonic oxygen. Catalogues of marvels and mere descrip- tions of wonders are tiresome reading, and produce little effect on the mind; yet if we are to realize the full significance of this story of the Titanic, we must begin as her passengers began, with an impres- sion of the lavish luxury and beauty which was the setting of life on board. And we can do no better than follow in imagina- tion the footsteps of one ideal voyager as he must have discovered, piece by piece, the wonders of this floating pleasure house. If he was a wise traveller he would have climbed to the highest point available as the ship passed down the Solent, and that would be the boat-deck, which was afterwards to be the stage of so tragic a 26 TITANIC drama. At the forward end of it was the bridge that sacred area paved with snow- white gratings and furnished with many brightly-polished instruments. Here were telephones to all the vital parts of the ship, telegraphs to the engine room and to the fo'c'stle head and after-bridge; re- volving switches for closing the water- tight doors in case of emergency; speak- ing-tubes, electric switches for operating the foghorns and sirens all the nerves, in fact, necessary to convey impulses from this brain of the ship to her various mem- bers. Behind the bridge on either side were the doors leading to the officers' quarters; behind them again, the Marconi room a mysterious temple full of glitter- ing machines of brass, vulcanite, glass, and platinum, with straggling wires and rows of switches and fuse boxes, and a high priest, young, clean-shaven, alert and intelligent, sitting with a telephone TITANIC 27 cap over his head, sending out or receiv- ing the whispers of the ether. Behind this opened the grand staircase, an im- posing sweep of decoration in the Early English style, with plain and solid panel- ling relieved here and there with lovely specimens of deep and elaborate carving in the manner of Grinling Gibbons; the work of the two greatest wood-carvers in England. Aft of this again the white pathway of the deck led by the doors and windows of the gymnasium, where the athletes might keep in fine condition; and beyond that the white roof above ended and the rest was deck-space open to the sun and the air, and perhaps also to the smoke and smuts of the four vast funnels that towered in buff and black into the sky each so vast that it would have served as a tunnel for a railway train. But the ship has gathered way, and is sliding along past the Needles, where the 28 TITANIC little white lighthouse looks so paltry beside the towering* cliff. The Channel air is keen, and the bugles are sounding for lunch; and our traveller goes down the staircase, noticing perhaps, as he passes, the great clock with its figures which symbolize Honour and Glory crowning Time. Honour and Glory must have felt just a little restive as, having crowned one o'clock, they looked down from Time upon the throng of people descending the staircase to lunch. There were a few there who had earned, and many who had received, the honour and glory represented by extreme wealth ; but the two figures stooping over the clock may have felt that Success crowning Opportunity would have been a symbol more befitting the first-class passengers of the Titanic. Perhaps they looked more kindly as one white-haired old man passed beneath W. T. Stead, that un- TITANIC 29 tiring old warrior and fierce campaigner in peaceful causes, who in fields where honour and glory were to be found sought always for the true and not the false. There were many kinds of men there not every kind, for it is not every man who can pay from fifty to eight hundred guineas for a four days' journey; but most kinds of men and women who can afford to do that were represented there. Our solitary traveller, going down the winding staircase, does not pause on the first floor, for that leads forward to private apartments, and aft to a writing-room and library ; nor on the second or third, for the entrance-halls there lead to state- rooms; but on the fourth floor down he steps out into a reception room extending to the full width of the ship and of almost as great a length. Nothing of the sea's restrictions or discomforts here! Before him is an Aubusson tapestry, copied from 3 o TITANIC one of the " Chasses de Guise" series of the National Garde-Meuble ; and in this wide apartment there is a sense, not of the cramping necessities of the sea, but of all the leisured and spacious life of the land. Through this luxurious emptiness the imposing dignities of the dining-saloon are reached ; and here indeed all the in- solent splendour of the ship is centred. It was by far the largest room that had ever floated upon the seas, and by far the largest room that had ever moved from one place to another. The seventeenth- century style of Hatfield and Haddon Hall had been translated from the sombre- ness of oak to the lightness of enamelled white. Artist-plasterers had moulded the lovely Jacobean ceiling, artist-stainers had designed and made the great painted windows through which the bright sea- sunlight was filtered; and when the whole company of three hundred was seated at TITANIC 31 the tables it seemed not much more than half full, since more than half as many again could find places there without the least crowding. There, amid the strains of gay music and the hum of conversation and the subdued clatter of silver and china and the low throb of the engines, the gay company takes its first meal on the Titanic. And as our traveller sits there solitary, he remembers that this is not all, that in another great saloon farther off another three hundred passengers of the second-class are also at lunch, and that on the floor below him another seven hundred of the third-class, and in various other places near a thousand of the crew, are also having their meal. All a little oppressive to read about, perhaps, but wonderful to contrive and arrange. It is what everyone is thinking and talking about who sits at those luxurious tables, loaded not with sea-fare, but with dainty 32 TITANIC and perishable provisions for which half the countries of the world have been laid under tribute. The music flows on and the smooth service accomplishes itself; Honour and Glory, high up under the wrought-iron dome of the staircase, are crowning another hour of Time; and our traveller comes up into the fresh air again in order to assure himself that he is really at sea. The elec- tric lift whisks him up four storeys to the deck again; there all around him are the blue-gray waters of the Channel surging in a white commotion past the tow r ering sides of the ship, spurned by the tremend- ous rush and momentum of these fifty thousand tons through the sea. This time our traveller stops short of the boat- deck, and begins to explore the far vaster B-deck which, sheltered throughout its great length by the boat-deck above, and free from all impediments, extends like a TITANIC 33 vast white roadway on either side of the central deck. Here the busy deck stewards are arranging chairs in the places that will be occupied by them throughout the voyage. Here, as on the parade of a fashionable park, people are taking their walks in the afternoon sunshine. From the staircase forward the deck houses are devoted to apartments which are still by force of habit called cabins, but which have nothing in fact to distin- guish them from the most luxurious habi- tations ashore, except that no dust ever enters them and that the air is always fresh from the open spaces of the sea. They are not for the solitary traveller; but our friend perhaps is curious and peeps in through an uncurtained window. There is a complete habitation with bed-rooms, sitting-room, bath-room and service-room complete. They breathe an atmosphere of more than mechanical luxury, more than c 34 TITANIC material pleasures. Twin bedsteads, per- fect examples of Empire or Louis Seize, symbolize the romance to which the most extravagant luxury in the world is but a minister. Instead of ports there are win- dows windows that look straight out on to the blue sea, as might the windows of a castle on a cliff. Instead of stoves or radiators there are open grates, where fires of sea-coal are burning brightly. Every suite is in a different style, and each and all are designed and furnished by artists ; and the love and repose of millionaires can be celebrated in surroundings of Adam or Hepplewhite, or Louis Quatorze or the Empire, according to their tastes. And for the hire of each of these theatres the millionaire must pay some two hundred guineas a day, with the privilege of being quite alone, cut off from the common herd who are only paying perhaps five-and- twenty pounds a day, and with the privi- TITANIC 35 lege, if he chooses, of seeing nothing at all that has to do with a ship, not even the sea. For there is one thing that the de- signers of this sea-palace seem to have forgotten and seem to be a little ashamed of and that is the sea itself. There it lies, an eternal prospect beyond these curtained windows, by far the most lovely and wonderful thing visible; but it seems to be forgotten there. True, there is a smoke-room at the after extremity of the deck below this, whose windows look out into a great verandah sheeted in with glass from which you cannot help looking upon the sea. But in order to counteract as much as possible that austere and lovely reminder of where we are, trellis-work has been raised within the glass, and great rose-trees spread and wander all over it, reminding you by their crimson blossoms of the earth and the land, and the scented 36 TITANIC shelter of gardens that are far from the boisterous stress of the sea. No spray ever drifts in at these heights, no froth or spume can ever in the wildest storms beat upon this verandah. Here, too, as almost everywhere else on the ship, you can, if you will, forget the sea. Ill THE first afternoon at sea seems long: every face is strange, and it seems as though in so vast a crowd none will ever become familiar, although one of the miracles of sea-life is the way in which the blurred crowd resolves itself into individual units, each of which has its character and significance. And if we are really to know and understand and not merely to hear with our ears the tale of what happened to the greatest ship in the world, we must first prepare and soak our minds in her atmosphere, and take in imagination that very voyage which began so happily on this April day. At the end of the afternoon came the coast of France, and Cherbourg a sunset memory of a 37 38 TITANIC long" breakwater, a distant cliff crowned with a white building, a fussing of tugs and hasty transference of passengers and mails; and finally the lighthouse showing a golden star against the sunset, when the great ship's head was turned to the red west, and the muffled and murmuring song of the engines was taken up again. Perhaps our traveller, bent upon more discoveries, dined that night not in the saloon, but in the restaurant, and, fol- lowing the illuminated electric signs that pointed the way along the numerous streets and roads of the ship, found his way aft to the Cafe-Restaurant; where instead of stewards were French waiters and a mattre d'hotel from Paris, and all the perfection of that perfect and expens- ive service which condescends to give you a meal for something under a five-pound note ; where, surrounded by Louis Seize panelling of fawn-coloured walnut, you TITANIC 39 may on this April evening eat your plovers' eggs and strawberries, and drink your 1900 Clicquot, and that in perfect oblivion of the surrounding sea. After- wards, perhaps, a stroll on the deck amid groups of people, not swathed in pea- jackets or oilskins, but attired as though for the opera; and all the time, in an at- mosphere golden with light, and musical with low-talking voices and the yearning strains of a waltz, driving five-and-twenty miles an hour westward, with the black night and the sea all about us. And then to bed, not in a bunk in a cabin but in a bedstead in a quiet room with a telephone through which to speak to any one of two thousand people, and a message handed in before you go to sleep that someone wrote in New York since you rose from the dinner-table. The next morning the scene at Cher- bourg was repeated, with the fair green 40 TITANIC shores of Cork Harbour instead of the cliffs of France for its setting; and then quietly, without fuss, in the early after- noon of Thursday, out round the green point, beyond the headland, and the great ship has steadied on her course and on the long sea-road at last. How worn it is ! How seamed and furrowed and printed with the track-lines of journeys innumer- able; how changing, and yet how un- changed the road that leads to Arch- angel or Sicily, to Ceylon or to the frozen Pole; the old road that leads to the ruined gateways of Phoenicia, of Venice, of Tyre ; the new road that leads to new lives and new lands; the dustless road, the long road that all must travel who in body or in spirit would really discover a new world. And travel on it as you may for tens of thousands of miles, you come back to it always with the same sense of expectation, never wholly disappointed ; TITANIC 41 and always with the same certainty that you will find at the turn or corner of the road, either some new thing" or the re- newal of something old. There is no human experience in which the phenomena of small varieties within one large monotony are so clearly exem- plified as in a sea-voyage. The dreary beginnings of docks, of baggage, and soiled harbour water; the quite hopeless confusion of strange faces faces entirely collective, comprising a mere crowd ; the busy highway of the Channel, sunlit or dim with mist or rain, or lighted and bright at night like the main street of a city; the last outpost, the Lizard, with its high gray cliffs, green-roofed, with tiny homesteads perched on the ridge; or Ushant, that tall monitory tower upstanding on the melancholy misty flats; or the solitary Fastnet, lonely, ultimate and watching these form 42 TITANIC the familiar overture to the subsequent isolation and vacancy of the long road itself. There are the same day and night of disturbance, the vacant places at table, the prone figures, swathed and motion- less in deck-chairs, the morning of bril- liant sunshine, when the light that streams into the cabins has a vernal strangeness and wonder for town-dimmed eyes; the gradual emergence of new faces and doubtful staggering back of the demoral- ized to the blessed freshness of the upper air; the tentative formation of groups and experimental alliances, the rapid dis- integration of these and re-formation on entirely new lines; and then that miracle of unending interest and wonder, that the faces that were only the blurred material of a crowd begin one by one to emerge from the background and detach them- selves from the mass, to take on identity, individuality, character, till what was a TITANIC 43 crowd of uninteresting, unidentified hu- manity becomes a collection of indi- vidual persons with whom one's destinies for the time are strangely and unaccount- ably bound up; among whom one may have acquaintances, friends, or perhaps enemies; who for the inside of a week are all one's world of men and women. There are few alterative agents so powerful and sure in their working as latitude and longitude; and as we slide across new degrees, habit, association, custom, and ideas slip one by one im- perceptibly away from us ; we come really into a new world, and if we had no hearts and no memories we should soon become different people. But the heart lives its own life, spinning gossamer threads that float away astern across time and space, joining us invisibly to that which made and fashioned us, and to which we hope to return. IV WONDERFUL, even for ex- perienced travellers, is that first waking" to a day on which there shall be no sight of the shore, and the first of several days of isolation in the world of a ship. There is a quality in the morning sunshine at sea as it streams into the ship and is reflected in the white paint and sparkling" water of the bath- rooms, and in the breeze that blows cool and pure along the corridors, that is like nothing else. The companyon the Titanic woke up on Friday morning to begin in earnest their four days of isolated life. Our traveller, who has found out so many things about the ship, has not found out everything" yet; and he continues his 44 TITANIC 45 explorations, with the advantage, per- haps, of a special permit from the Cap- tain or Chief Engineer to explore other quarters of the floating city besides that in which he lives. Let us, with him, try to form some general conception of the internal arrangements of the ship. The great superstructure of decks amid- ships which catches the eye so prominently in a picture or photograph, was but, in reality, a small part, although the most luxurious part, of the vessel. Speaking roughly, one might describe it as con- sisting of three decks, five hundred feet long, devoted almost exclusively to the accommodation of first-class passengers, with the exception of the officers' quarters (situated immediately aft of the bridge on the top deck of all), and the second-class smoking-room and library, at the after end of the superstructure on the third and fourth decks. With these exceptions, in 46 TITANIC this great four-storied building were situated all the most magnificent and palatial accommodations of the ship. Immediately beneath it, amidships, in the steadiest part of the vessel where any movement would be least felt, was the first-class dining saloon, with the pantries and kitchens immediately aft of it. Two decks below it were the third-class dining saloons and kitchens; below them again, separated by a heavy steel deck, were the boiler-rooms and coal bunkers, resting on the cellular double bottom of the ship. Immediately aft of the boiler-rooms came the two engine-rooms; the forward and larger one of the two contained the re- ciprocating engines which drove the twin screws, and the after one the turbine engine for driving the large centre pro- peller. Forward and aft of this centre part of the ship, which in reality occupied about TITANIC 47 two-thirds of her whole length, were two smaller sections, divided (again one speaks roughly) between second-class accommo- dation, stores and cargo in the stern section, and third-class berths, crew's quarters and cargo in the bow section. But although the first-class accommoda- tion was all amidships, and the second- class all aft, that of the third-class was scattered about in such blank spaces as could be found for it. Thus most of the berths were forward, immediately behind the fo'c'stle, some were right aft; the dining-room was amidships, and the smoke-room in the extreme stern, over the rudder; and to enjoy a smoke or game of cards a third-class passenger who was berthed forward would have to walk the whole length of the ship and back again, a walk not far short of half a mile. This gives one an idea of how much more the ship resembled a town 48 TITANIC than a house. A third-class passenger did not walk from his bedroom to his parlour ; he walked from the house where he lived in the forward part of the ship to the club a quarter of a mile away where he was to meet his friends. If, thinking" of the Titanic storming along westward across the Atlantic, you could imagine her to be split in half from bow to stern so that you could look, as one looks at the section of a hive, upon all her manifold life thus suddenly laid bare, you would find in her a microcosm of civilized society. Up on the top are the rulers, surrounded by the rich and the luxurious, enjoying the best of everything; a little way below them their servants and parasites, ministering not so much to their necessities as to their luxuries; lower down still, at the very base and founda- tion of all, the fierce and terrible labour of the stokeholds, where the black slaves TITANIC 49 are shovelling and shovelling as though for dear life, endlessly pouring coal into furnaces that devoured it and yet ever de- manded a new supply horrible labour, joyless life; and yet the labour that gives life and movement to the whole ship. Up above are all the beautiful things, the pleasant things; down below are the terrible and necessary things. Up above are the people who rest and enjoy ; down below the people who sweat and suffer. Consider too the whirl of life and multi- tude of human employments that you would have found had you peered into this section of the ship that we are sup- posing to have been laid bare. Honour and Glory, let us say, have just crowned ten o'clock in the morning beneath the great dome of glass and iron that covers the central staircase. Someone has just come down and posted a notice on the board a piece of wireless news of some- D 50 TITANIC thing that happened in London last night. In one of the sunny bedrooms (for our section lays everything bare) someone is turning over in bed again and telling a maid to shut out the sun. Eighty feet below her the black slaves are working in a fiery pit; ten feet below them is the green sea. A business-like-looking group have just settled down to bridge in the first-class smoking-room. The sea does not exist for them, nor the ship; the roses that bloom upon the trelliswork by the verandah interest them no more than the pageant of white clouds which they could see if they looked out of the wide windows. Down below the chief steward, attended by his satellities, is visiting the stores and getting from the store-keeper the necessaries for his day's catering. He has plenty to draw from. In those cold chambers behind the engine-room are gathered provisions which seem almost TITANIC 51 inexhaustible for any population ; for the imagination does not properly take in the meaning of such items as a hundred thou- sand pounds of beef, thirty thousand fresh eggs, fifty tons of potatoes, a thousand pounds of tea, twelve hundred quarts of cream. In charge of the chief steward also, to be checked by him at the end of each voyage, are the china and glass, the cutlery and plate of the ship, amounting in all to some ninety thousand pieces. But there he is, quietly at work with the store-keeper; and not far from him, in another room or series of rooms, another official dealing with the thousands upon thousands of pieces of linen for bed and table with which the town is supplied. Everything is on a monstrous scale. The centre anchor, which it took a team of sixteen great horses to drag on a wooden trolley, weighs over fifteen tons ; its cable will hold a dead weight of three hundred 52 TITANIC tons. The very rudder, that mere slender and almost invisible appendage under the counter, is eighty feet high and weighs a hundred tons. The men on the look-out do not climb up the shrouds and ratlines in the old sea fashion ; the mast is hollow and contains a stairway; there is a door in it from which they come out to take their place in the crow's nest. Are you weary of such statistics? They were among the things on which men thought with pride on those sunny April days in the Atlantic. Man can seldom think of himself apart from his environ- ment, and the house and place in which he lives are ever a preoccupation with all men. From the clerk in his little jerry- built villa to the king in his castle, what the house is, what it is built of, how it is equipped and adorned, are matters of vital interest. And if that is true of land, where all the webs of life are connected TITANIC 53 and intercrossed, how much more must it be true when a man sets his house afloat upon the sea; detaches it from all other houses and from the world, and literally commits himself to it. This was the greatest sea town that had ever been built; these were the first inhabitants of it; theirs were the first lives that were lived in these lovely rooms; this was one of the greatest companies that had ever been afloat together within the walls of one ship. No wonder they were proud; no wonder they were preoccupied with the source of their pride. But things stranger still to the life of the sea are happening in some of the hundreds of cells which our giant section- knife has laid bare. An orchestra is prac- tising in one of them; in another, some one is catching live trout from a pond ; Post Office sorters are busy in another with letters for every quarter of the 54 TITANIC western world ; in a garage, mechanicians are cleaning half a dozen motor-cars; the rippling tones of a piano sound from a drawing-room where people are quietly reading in deep velvet armchairs sur- rounded by books and hothouse flowers; in another division people are diving and swimming in a great bath in water deep enough to drown a tall man ; in another an energetic game of squash racquets is in progress; and in great open spaces, on which it is only surprising that turf is not laid, people by hundreds are sunning themselves and breathing the fresh air, utterly unconscious of all these other activities on which we have been looking. For even here, as elsewhere, half of the world does not know and does not care how the other half lives. All this magnitude had been designed and adapted for the realization of two chief ends comfort and stability. We TITANIC 55 have perhaps heard enough about the arrangements for comfort; but the more vital matter had received no less anxious attention. Practically all of the space below the water-line was occupied by the heaviest things in the ship the boilers, the engines, the coal bunkers and the cargo. And the arrangement of her bulk- heads, those tough steel walls that divide a ship's hull into separate compartments, was such that her designers believed that no possible accident short of an explosion in her boilers could sink her. If she rammed any obstruction head on, her bows might crumple up, but the steel walls stretching across her hull and there were fifteen of them would pre- vent the damage spreading far enough aft to sink her. If her broadside was rammed by another ship, and one or even two of these compartments pierced, even then the rest would be sufficient to hold 56 TITANIC her up at least for a day or two. These bulkheads were constructed of heavy sheet steel, and extended from the very bottom of the ship to a point well above the water-line. Necessarily there were open- ings in them in order to make possible communication between the different parts of the ship. These openings were the size of an ordinary doorway and fitted with heavy steel doors not hinged doors, but panels, sliding closely in watertight grooves on either side of the opening. There were several ways of closing them; but once closed they offered a resistance as solid as that of the bulkheads. The method of opening and closing them was one of the many marvels of modern engineering. The heavy steel doors were held up above the openings by a series of friction clutches. Up on the bridge were switches connected with powerful electro-magnets at the side of TITANIC 57 the bulkhead openings. The operation of the switches caused each magnet to draw down a heavy weight which instantly re- leased the friction clutches, so that the doors would slide down in a second or two into their places, a gong ringing at the same time to warn anyone who might be passing through to get out of the way. The clutches could also be released by hand. But if for any reason the electric machinery should fail, there was a pro- vision made for closing them automatic- ally in case the ship should be flooded with water. Down in the double bottom of the ship were arranged a series of floats connected with each set of bulkhead doors. In the event of water reaching the com- partment below the doors, it would raise the floats, which, in their turn, would re- lease the clutches and drop the doors. These great bulkheads were no new ex- periment; they had been tried and proved. 58 TITANIC When the White Star liner Suevic was wrecked a few years ago off the Lizard, it was decided to divide the part of her which was floating from the part which was embedded in the rocks; and she was cut in two just forward of the main col- lision bulkhead, and the larger half of her towed into port with no other protection from the sea than this vast steel wall which, nevertheless, easily kept her afloat. And numberless other ships have owed their lives to the resisting power of these steel bulkheads and the quick operation of the sliding doors. As for the enormous weight that made for the Titanic 's stability, it was, as I have said, contained chiefly in the boilers, machinery and coal. The coal bunkers were like a lining running round the boil- ers, not only at the sides of the ship, but also across her whole breadth, thus in- creasing the solidity of the steel bulk- TITANIC 59 heads ; and when it is remembered that her steam was supplied by twenty-nine boil- ers, each of them the size of a large room, and fired by a hundred and fifty-nine fur- naces, the enormous weight of this part of the ship may be dimly realized. There are two lives lived side by side on such a voyage, the life of the pas- sengers and the life of the ship. From a place high up on the boat-deck our tra- veller can watch the progress of these two lives. The passengers play games or walk about, or sit idling drowsily in deck chairs, with their eyes straying con- stantly from the unheeded book to the long horizon, or noting the trivial doings of other idlers. The chatter of their voices, the sound of their games, the faint tinkle of music floating up from the music-room are eloquent of one of these double lives; there on the bridge is an expression of the other the bridge in all 60 TITANIC its spick-and-span sanctities, with the officers of the watch in their trim uniform, the stolid quartermaster at the wheel, and his equally stolid companion of the watch who dreams his four hours away on the starboard side of the bridge almost as motionless as the bright brass bin- nacles and standards, and the telegraphs that point unchangeably down to Full Ahead. . . . The Officer of the watch has a sextant at his eye. One by one the Captain, the Chief, the Second and the Fourth, all come silently up and direct their sextants to the horizon. The quartermaster comes and touches his cap: "Twelve o'clock, Sir." There is silence a deep sunny silence, broken only by the low tones of the Captain to the Chief: " What have you got?" says the Captain. " Thirty," says the Chief, "Twenty-nine," says the Third. There is another space of sunny TITANIC 61 silent seconds; the Captain takes down his sextant. " Make it eight bells," he says. Four double strokes resound from the bridge and are echoed from the fo'- c'stle head ; and the great moment of the day, the moment that means so much, is over. The officers retire with pencils and papers and tables of logarithms ; the clock on the staircase is put back, and the day's run posted; from the deck float up the sounds of a waltz and laughing voices; Time and the world flow on with us again. V FOR anything that the eye could see the Titanic, in all her strength and splendour, was solitary on the ocean. From the highest of her decks nothing could be seen but sea and sky, a vast circle of floor and dome of which, for all her speed of five-and-twenty miles an hour, she remained always the centre. But it was only to the sense of sight that she seemed thus solitary. The North Atlan- tic, waste of waters though it appears, is really a country crossed and divided by countless tracks as familiar to the seaman as though they were roads marked by trees and milestones. Latitude and longi- tude, which to a landsman seem mere mathematical abstractions, represent to 62 TITANIC 63 seamen thousands and thousands of de- finite points which, in their relation to sun and stars and the measured lapse of time, are each as familiar and as access- ible as any spot on a main road is to a landsman. The officer on the bridge may see nothing 1 through his glasses but clouds and waves, yet in his mind's eye he sees not only his own position on the map, which he could fix accurately within a quarter of a mile, but the movements of dozens of other ships coming or going along the great highways. Each ship takes its own road, but it is a road that passes through a certain known territory; the great liners all know each other's movements and where or when they are likely to meet. Many of such meetings are invisible; it is called a meeting at sea if ships pass twenty or thirty miles away from each other and far out of sight. For there are other senses besides that 64 TITANIC of sight which now pierce the darkness and span the waste distances of the ocean. It is no voiceless solitude through which the Titanic goes on her way. It is full of whispers, summonses, questions, narra- tives ; full of information to the listening ear. High up on the boat deck the little white house to which the wires straggle down from the looped threads between the mastheads is full of the voices of invisible ships that are coming and going beyond the horizon. The wireless impulse is too delicate to be used to actuate a needle like that of the ordinary telegraph; a little voice is given to it, and with this it speaks to the operator who sits with the tele- phone cap strapped over his ears ; a whin- ing, buzzing voice, speaking not in words but in rhythms, corresponding to the dots and dashes made on paper, out of which a whole alphabet has been evolved. And the wireless is the greatest gossip in the TITANIC 65 world. It repeats everything it hears ; 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 E 66 TITANIC is speaking to you from far away, you may often be interrupted by the loud and empty buzzing 1 of one nearer neighbour speaking to another and loudly interrupt- ing 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 ele6tricity. 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 utter- ance 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 TITANIC 67 trained faculties almost automatically re- jecting the unessential, receiving and at- tending 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 busi- ness, of transactions involving thousands of pounds; trivial talk of the emotions, greetings and good wishes exchanged oi> 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 constantly of these things; but most often of the weather. One ship may be pursuing her way under a calm sky and in smooth waters, while two hundred miles away a neighbour may be in the middle of a 68 TITANIC storm ; and so the ships talk to one another of the weather, and combine their forces against it, and, by altering course a little, or rushing ahead, or hanging back, cheat and dodge those malignant forces which are ever pursuing them. But in these April days there was no- thing much to be said about the weather. The winds and the storms were quiet here; they were busy perhaps up in Labrador or furiously raging about Cape Horn, but they had deserted for the time the North Atlantic, and all the ships ploughed steadily on in sunshine and smooth seas. Here and there, however, a whisper came to Phillips or Bride about something which, though not exactly weather, was as deeply interesting to the journeying ships ice. Just a whisper, nothing more, listened to up there in the sunny Marconi room, recorded, dealt with, and forgotten. " I have just come TITANIC 69 through bad field-ice," whispers one ship; " April ice very far south," says another; and Phillips taps out his " O. K., O.M.," which is a kind of cockney Marconi for "All right, old man." And many other messages come and go, of money and cargoes, and crops and the making of laws; but just now and then a pin-prick of reminder between all these other topics comes the word ICE. April ice and April weed are two of the most lovely products of the North Atlantic, but they are strangely opposite in their bearings on human destiny. The lovely golden April weed that is gathered all round the west coast of Ireland, and is burnt for indigo, keeps a whole peas- ant population in food and clothing for the rest of the year; the April ice, which comes drifting down on the Arctic cur- rent from the glacier slopes of Labrador or the plateau of North Greenland, keeps 70 TITANIC the seafaring population of the North Atlantic in doubt and anxiety throughout the spring and summer. Lovely indeed are some of these icebergs that glitter in the sun like fairy islands or the pinnacles of Valhalla; and dreamy and gentle is their drifting movement as they come down on the current by Newfoundland and round Cape Race, where, meeting the east-going Gulf Stream, they are gradually melted and lost in the waters of the Atlantic. Northward in the drift are often field-ice and vast floes; the great detached bergs sail farther south into the steamship tracks, and are what are most carefully looked for. This April there was abundance of evidence that the field- ice had come farther south than usual. The Empress of Britain, which passed the Titanic on Friday, reported an im- mense quantity of floating ice in the neighbourhood of Cape Race. When she TITANIC 71 arrived in Liverpool it transpired that, when three days out from Halifax, Nova Scotia, she encountered an ice-field, a hundred miles in extent, with enormous bergs which appeared to be joined to the ice-field, forming an immense white line, broken with peaks and pinnacles on the horizon. The Carmania and the Nicar- agua, which were going westward ahead of the Titanic, had both become entan- gled in ice, and the Nicaragua had sus- tained considerable damage. And day by day, almost hour by hour, news was coming in from other ships commenting on the unusual extent southward of the ice-field, and on the unusual number of icebergs which they had encountered. No doubt many of the passengers on the Titanic were hoping that they would meet with some; it is one of the chief interests of the North Atlantic voyage in the spring and summer; and nothing is 72 TITANIC more lovely in the bright sunshine of day than the sight of one of these giant islands, with its mountain-peaks spark- ling in the sun, and blue waves breaking on its crystal shores; nothing more im- pressive than the thought, as one looks at it, that high as its glittering towers and pinnacles may soar towards heaven there is eight times as great a depth of ice extending downwards into the dark sea. It is only at night, or when the waters are covered with a thick fog pro- duced by the contact of the ice with the warmer water, that navigating officers, peering forward into the mist, know how dreadful may be the presence of one of these sheeted monsters, the ghostly high- waymen of the sea. VI INFORMATION like this, however, only concerned the little group of executive officers who took their turns in tramping up and down the white grat- ings of the bridge. It was all part of their routine; it was what they expected to hear at this time of the year and in this part of the ocean; there was nothing specially interesting to them in the gossip of the wireless voices. Whatever they heard, we may be sure they did not talk about it to the passengers. For there is one paramount rule observed by the officers of passenger liners and that is to make everything as pleasant as pos- sible for the passengers. If there is any danger, they are the last to hear of it; if 73 74 TITANIC anything unpleasant happens on board, such as an accident or a death, knowledge of it is kept from as many of them as possible. Whatever may be happening, short of an apparent and obvious extrem- ity, it is the duty of the ship's company to help the passenger to believe that he lives and moves and has his being in a kind of Paradise, at the doors of which there are no lurking dangers and in which happiness and pleasure are the first duties of every inhabitant. And who were the people who composed the population of this journeying town? Subsequent events made their names known to us vast lists of names filling columns of the newspapers; but to the majority they are names and nothing else. Hardly anyone living knew more than a dozen of them personally; and try as we may it is very hard to see them, as their fellow voyagers must have seen them, as TITANIC 75 individual human beings with recognizable faces and characters of their own. Of the three hundred odd first-class passengers the majority were Americans rich and prosperous people, engaged for the most part in the simple occupation of buying things as cheaply as possible, selling them as dearly as possible, and trying to find some agreeable way of spending the differ- ence on themselves. Of the three hundred odd second-class passengers probably the majority were English, many of them of the minor professional classes and many going either to visit friends or to take up situations in the western world. But the thousand odd steerage passengers repre- sented a kind of Babel of nationalities, all the world in little, united by nothing ex- cept poverty and the fact that they were in a transition stage of their existence, leaving behind them for the most part a life of failure and hopelessness, and 76 TITANIC looking forward to a new life of success and hope: Jews, Christians, and Mo- hammedans, missionaries and heathen, Russians, Poles, Greeks, Roumanians, Germans, Italians, Chinese, Finns, Spaniards, English, and French with a strong contingent of Irish, the inevitable link in that melancholy chain of emigra- tion that has united Ireland and America since the Famine. But there were other differences, besides those of their condi- tion and geographical distribution on the ship, that divided its inhabitants. For the first-class passengers the world was a very small place, about which many of them were accustomed to hurry in an important way in the process of spending and getting their money, taking an Atlantic liner as humbler people take a tramcar, without giving much thought to it or laying elaborate plans, running backwards and forwards across the Atlantic and its dan- TITANIC 77 gers as children run across the road in front of a motor car. They were going to America this week; they would probably come back next week or the week after. They were the people for whom the Titanic had specially been designed ; it was for them that all the luxuries had been contrived, so that in their runnings backwards and forwards they should not find the long days tedious or themselves divorced from the kind of accompaniments to life which they had come to regard as necessities. But for the people in the steerage this was no hurrying trip between one busi- ness office and another; no hasty holiday arranged to sandwich ten thousand miles of ozone as a refresher between two busi- ness engagements. This westward pro- gress was for them part of the drift of their lives, loosening them from their native soil to scatter and distribute them 78 TITANIC over the New World, in the hope that in fresher soil and less crowded conditions they would strike new roots and begin a new life. The road they travelled was for most of them a road to be travelled once only, a road they knew they would never retrace. For them almost exclusively was reserved that strange sense of looking down over the stern of the ship into the boiling commotion of the churned-up waters, the maelstrom of snow under the counter merging into the pale green high- way that lay straight behind them to the horizon, and of knowing that it was a road that divided them from home, a road that grew a mile longer with every three minutes of their storming progress. Other ships would follow on the road; other ships would turn and come again, and drive their way straight back over the white foam to where, with a sudden plunging and turning of screws in the TITANIC 79 green harbour water of home, the road had begun. But they who looked back from the steerage quarters of the Titanic would not return; and they, alone of all the passengers on the ship, knew it. And that is all we can know or imagine about them; but it is probably more than most of the fortunate ones on the snowy upper decks cared to know or imagine. Up there also there were distinctions; some of the travellers there, for example, were so rich that they were conspicuous for riches, even in a population like this and I imagine that the standard of wealth is higher in the first-class population of an Atlantic liner than in any other group of people in the world. There were four men there who represented between them the possession of some seventy millions of money John Jacob Astor, Isidore Straus, George D. Widener, and Benjamin Gug- genheim their names; and it was said 8o TITANIC that there were twenty who represented a fortune of a hundred millions between them an interesting, though not an im- portant, fact. But there were people there conspicuous for other things than their wealth. There was William T. Stead who, without any wealth at all, had in some respects changed the thought and social destinies of England; there was Francis Millet, a painter who had attained to eminence in America and who had recently been head of the American Academy in Rome; there was an eminent motorist, an eminent master of hounds, an eminent baseball player, an eminent poloist; and there was Major Archibald Butt, the satellite and right-hand man of Presidents, who had had a typical American career as newspaper correspondent, secretary, soldier, diplomatist, aide-de-camp, and novelist. There was Mr. Ismay, the most important man on the ship, for as head TITANIC 81 of the White Star Line he was practically her owner. He was accompanying* her on her maiden voyage with no other object than to find out wherein she was defective, so that her younger sister might excel her. He may be said to have accomplished his purpose; and of all the people who took this voyage he is probably the only one who succeeded in what he set out to do. There was Mr. Andrews, one of the designers of the Titanic, who had come to enjoy the triumph of his giant child ; and there were several others also, denizens of that great forest of iron in Belfast Lough, who had seen her and known her when she was a cathedral building within a scaffolding, the most solid and immov- able thing in their world. These, the friends and companions of her infancy, ^ had come too, we may suppose, to admire her in her moment of success, as the nurses and humble attendants of some F 82 TITANIC beautiful girl will watch in a body her departure for the triumphs of her first ball. Of all this throng- 1 had personal know- ledge of only two ; and yet the two hap- pened to be extremely typical. I knew John Jacob Astor a few years ago in New York, when he sometimes seemed like a polite skeleton in his own gay house; an able but superficially unprepossessing man, so rich that it was almost impossible to know accurately anything about him a man, I should say, to whom money had been nothing but a handicap from his earliest days. He was typical of this company because he was so conspicuous and so unknown; for when a man has thirty millions of money the world hears about his doings and possessions end- lessly, but knows little of the man himself. It is enough to say that there were good things and bad things credited to his TITANIC 83 account, of which the good were much more unlikely and surprising than the bad. The other man and how different! was Christopher Head. He was typical too, typical of that almost anonymous world that keeps the name of England liked and respected everywhere. I said that he was typical because these few conspicuous names that I have mentioned represent only one narrow class of man- kind; among the unnamed and the un- known you may be sure, if you have any wide experience of collective humanity, that virtues and qualities far more striking and far more admirable were included. Christopher Head was mild and unas- suming, and one of the most attractive of men, for wherever he went he left a sense of serenity and security; and he walked through life with a keen, observant intelligence. Outside Lloyd's, of which great corporation he was a member, his 84 TITANIC interests were chiefly artistic, and he used his interest and knowledge in the best possible way for the public good when he was Mayor of Chelsea, and made his in- fluence felt by imparting some quite new and much-needed ideals into that civic office. , . . But two known faces do not make a crowd familiar; and nothing will bring most of us any nearer to the know- ledge of these voyagers than will the knowledge of what happened to them. One thing we do know a small thing and yet illuminating to our picture. There were many young people on board, many newly married, and some, we may be sure, for whom the voyage represented the gate- way to romance ; for no Atlantic liner ever sailed with a full complement and set down all its passengers in the emotional state in which it took them up. The sea is a great match-maker; and in those long mono- tonous hours of solitude many flowers of TITANIC 85 the heart blossom and many minds and characters strike out towards each other in new and undreamed-of sympathy. Of this we may be as sure as of the existence of the ship: that there were on board the Titanic people watching the slip of moon setting 1 early on those April nights for whom time and the world were quite arrested in their course, and for whom the whole ship and her teeming activities were but frame and setting for the perfect moment of their lives; for whom the thronging multitudes of their fellow passengers were but a blurred back- ground against which the colour of their joy stood sharp and clear. The fields of foam-flecked blue, sunlit or cloud-shad- owed by day ; the starlight on the waters ; the slow and scarcely perceptible swinging of the ship's rail against the violet and spangled sky ; the low murmur of voices, the liquid notes of violins, the trampling 86 TITANIC tune of the engines to how many others have not these been the properties of a magic world; for how many others, as long as men continue to go in ships upon the sea, will they not be the symbols of a joy that is as old as time, and that is found to be new by every generation ! For this also is one of the gifts of the sea, and one of the territories through which the long road passes. VII SUNDAY came, with nothing to mark it except the morning service in the saloon a function that by reason of its novelty, attracts some people at sea who do not associate it with the shore. One thing, however, fire or boat muster, which usually marks Sunday at sea, and gives it a little variety, did not for some reason take place. It is one of the few variants of the monotony of ship- board life, where anything in the nature of a spectacle is welcomed; and most travellers are familiar with the stir caused by the sudden hoarse blast of the fog- horn and the subsequent patter of feet and appearance from below of all kinds of people whose existence the passenger 87 88 TITANIC had hardly suspected. Stewards, sail- ors, firemen, engineers, nurses, bakers, butchers, cooks, florists, barbers, car- penters, and stewardesses, ranged in two immense lines along the boat deck, answer to their names and are told off, according to their numbers, to take charge of certain boats. This muster did not take place on the Titanic; if it had it would have re- vealed to any observant passenger the fact that the whole crew of nine hundred would have occupied all the available ac- commodation in the boats hanging on the davits and left no room for any passengers. For the men who designed and built the Titanic, who knew the tremendous strength of the girders and cantilevers and bulkheads which took the thrust and pull of every strain that she might un- dergo, had thought of boats rather as a superfluity, dating from the days when ships were vulnerable, when they sprang TITANIC 89 leaks and might sink in the high seas. In their pride they had said " the Titanic cannot spring a leak." So there was no boat muster, and the routine occupations of Sunday went on unvaried and undis- turbed. Only in the Marconi room was the monotony varied, for something had gone wrong with the delicate electrical apparatus, and the wireless voice was silent; and throughout the morning and afternoon, for seven hours, Phillips and Bride were hard at work testing and searching for the little fault that had cut them off from the world of voices. And at last they found it, and the whining and buzzing began again. But it told them nothing new; only the same story, whis- pered this time from the California* the story of ice. The day wore on, the dusk fell, lights one by one sprang up and shone within the ship; the young moon rose in a cloud- go TITANIC less sky spangled with stars. People re- marked on the loveliness of the night as they went to dress for dinner, but they remarked also on its coldness. There was an unusual chill in the air, and lightly clad people were glad to draw in to the big fireplaces in smoke-room or drawing- room or library, and to keep within the comfort of the warm and lamplit rooms. The cold was easily accounted for; it was the ice season, and the airs that were blowing down from the north-west carried with them a breath from the ice-fields. It was so cold that the decks were pretty well deserted, and the usual evening con- cert, instead of being held on the open deck, was held in the warmth, under cover. And gradually people drifted away to bed, leaving only a few late birds sitting up reading in the library, or playing cards in the smoking-rooms, or following a restaurant dinner-party by TITANIC 91 quiet conversation in the flower-decked lounge. The ship had settled down for the night; half of her company were peacefully asleep in bed, and many lying down waiting for sleep to come, when some- thing happened. What that something was depended upon what part of the ship you were in. ^ The first thing to attract the attention of most of the first-class passengers was a negative thing the cessation of that trembling, continuous rhythm which had been the undercurrent of all their waking sensations since the ship left Queenstown. The engines stopped. Some wondered, and put their heads out