Information like this, however, only concerned the little group of
executive officers who took their turns in tramping up and down the
white gratings 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 possible for the passengers. If there is any
danger, they are the last to hear of it; if 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 extremity, 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 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 difference 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
represented a kind of Babel of nationalities, all the world in little,
united by nothing except 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 looking forward to a new
life of success and hope: Jews, Christians, and Mohammedans,
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
emigration that has united Ireland and America since the Famine. But
there were other differences, besides those of their condition 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 dangers 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
business office and another; no hasty holiday arranged to sandwich ten
thousand miles of ozone as a refresher between two business engagements.
This westward progress was for them part of the drift of their lives,
loosening them from their native soil to scatter and distribute them
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 highway 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 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 Guggenheim their names; and it was said that
there were twenty who represented a fortune of a hundred millions
between them--an interesting, though not an important, 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 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 immovable 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 beautiful girl
will watch in a body her departure for the triumphs of her first ball.
Of all this throng I had personal knowledge of only two; and yet the two
happened 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 endlessly, but knows
little of the man himself. It is enough to say that there were good
things and bad things credited to his 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 mankind; among the unnamed and the unknown 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 unassuming, 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 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 influence 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 knowledge 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 gateway 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 monotonous hours of solitude
many flowers of 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
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 background against which the colour of their joy stood
sharp and clear. The fields of foam-flecked blue, sunlit or
cloud-shadowed 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 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.