[Illustration]
LONDON
GRANT RICHARDS LTD.
1912
CHISWICK PRESS: CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.
TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.
_I will not 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 triangle 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 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 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
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 of the leafless forest, and finally appears as a multitude of
pigmy men swarming and toiling amid the skeleton iron structures 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 actions 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 appearance of some giant soul. And
great indeed should be the overture to such an 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
destined 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 nothing 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 thousands 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; millions of rivets and bolts--all the heaviest
and most sinkable things in the world. 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 Carrickfergus 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 between the islands; daily the endless uproar 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 the sky, until it seemed as
though man were rearing a temple which would express all he knew of
grandeur and sublimity, and all he knew of solidity and
permanence--something that should endure 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 drawings and
calculations and subtle elaborate mathematical processes, sifting and
applying the tabulated results of years of experience. The drawings came
in time to the place of uproar; were magnified and subdivided and taken
into grimy workshops; 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, 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 beside
the water. It seemed like some impious blasphemy that man should fashion
this most monstrous and ponderable of all his creations into the
likeness of a thing that could float upon the yielding 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 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 exaggeration. 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
pavements 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 conquer should thrust her
finally from earth.
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
building 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 furnished 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 christening ceremony such as celebrates the 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 towards 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, dipping 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 summoned to their greatest task; when, with necks proudly arched
and their white manes flung higher than ever, they escorted the
_Titanic_ between the islands out to sea.