II

At noon on Wednesday, 10th April 1912, the _Titanic_ started from

Southampton on her maiden voyage. Small enough was her experience 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 sufficed 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 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 ploughing 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

influence of the water displaced by her vast bulk drew the _New York_

towards her; 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 as they were to all

the extravagant luxuries of modern civilized life, on whom the

discoveries 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 landscape of park and woodland, but on the 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 descriptions 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 impression of the lavish luxury and beauty

which was the setting of life on board. And we can do no better than

follow in imagination 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 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; revolving switches for closing the water-tight doors in

case of emergency; speaking-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 members. 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

glittering 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

cap over his head, sending out or receiving the whispers of the ether.

Behind this opened the grand staircase, an imposing sweep of decoration

in the Early English style, with plain and solid panelling 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 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 untiring 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

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 insolent 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 sombreness 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 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 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

electric 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 towering sides of the ship, spurned by the tremendous

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 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 distinguish them from the most luxurious habitations 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 material

pleasures. Twin bedsteads, perfect 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 windows--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 privilege, 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 designers 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

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.