IV

Wonderful, even for experienced 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 company on 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 explorations, with the advantage,

perhaps, of a special permit from the Captain 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 amidships 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 consisting 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

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 reciprocating engines which drove the twin screws, and the

after one the turbine engine for driving the large centre propeller.

Forward and aft of this centre part of the ship, which in reality

occupied about two-thirds of her whole length, were two smaller

sections, divided (again one speaks roughly) between second-class

accommodation, 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 accommodation 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 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 foundation of all, the fierce and terrible labour of the

stokeholds, where the black slaves are shovelling and shovelling as

though for dear life, endlessly pouring coal into furnaces that devoured

it and yet ever demanded 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 multitude of human employments that

you would have found had you peered into this section of the ship that

we are supposing 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

something that happened in London last night. In one of the sunny

bed-rooms (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 trellis-work 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 satellites, 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 inexhaustible for any population;

for the imagination does not properly take in the meaning of such items

as a hundred thousand 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 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 environment, 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 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 practising 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 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 surrounded 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 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 bulkheads, 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 prevent 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 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

openings 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 water-tight 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 the

bulkhead openings. The operation of the switches caused each magnet to

draw down a heavy weight which instantly released 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 provision made for closing them automatically 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 compartment below the doors, it would

raise the floats, which, in their turn, would release the clutches and

drop the doors. These great bulkheads were no new experiment; they had

been tried and proved. 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 collision 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 boilers, not

only at the sides of the ship, but also across her whole breadth, thus

increasing the solidity of the steel bulkheads; and when it is

remembered that her steam was supplied by twenty-nine boilers, each of

them the size of a large room, and fired by a hundred and fifty-nine

furnaces, 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

passengers and the life of the ship. From a place high up on the

boat-deck our traveller 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 constantly 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 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 binnacles 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 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 Atlantic, 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 longitude, which to a landsman seem mere

mathematical abstractions, represent to seamen thousands and thousands

of definite points which, in their relation to sun and stars and the

measured lapse of time, are each as familiar and as accessible as any

spot on a main road is to a landsman. The officer on the bridge may see

nothing 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 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, narratives; 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 telephone

cap strapped over his ears; a whining, 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 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 is speaking to you from far

away, you may often be interrupted by the loud and empty buzzing of one

nearer neighbour speaking to another and loudly interrupting the message

which concerns you.

Listening to these voices in the Marconi room of the _Titanic_, and

controlling her articulation and hearing, were two young men, little

more than boys, but boys of a rare quality, children of the golden age

of electricity. Educated in an abstruse and delicate science, and loving

the sea for its largeness and adventure, they had come--Phillips at the

age of twenty-six, and Bride in the ripe maturity of twenty-one--to wield

for the _Titanic_ the electric forces of the ether, and to direct her

utterance and hearing on the ocean. And as they sat there that Friday

and Saturday they must have heard, as was their usual routine, all the

whispers of the ships for two hundred miles round them, their trained

faculties almost automatically rejecting the unessential, receiving and

attending to the essential. They heard talk of many things, talk in

fragments and in the strange rhythmic language that they had come to

know like a mother tongue; talk of cargoes, talk of money and business,

of transactions involving thousands of pounds; trivial talk of the

emotions, greetings and good wishes exchanged on the high seas; endless

figures of latitude and longitude--for a ship is an eternal egoist and

begins all her communications by an announcement of Who she is and Where

she is. Ships are chiefly interested in weather and cargo, and their

wireless talk on their own account is 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 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 nothing 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 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

peasant population in food and clothing for the rest of the year; the

April ice, which comes drifting down on the Arctic current from the

glacier slopes of Labrador or the plateau of North Greenland, keeps 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 immense quantity of floating ice in the

neighbourhood of Cape Race. When she 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

_Nicaragua_, which were going westward ahead of the _Titanic_, had both

become entangled in ice, and the _Nicaragua_ had sustained 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 more lovely in

the bright sunshine of day than the sight of one of these giant islands,

with its mountain-peaks sparkling in the sun, and blue waves breaking on

its crystal shores; nothing more impressive 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 produced 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 highwaymen of the sea.