Title: Titanic
Author: Young, Filson, 1876-1938
Language: English
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TITANIC


_BY FILSON YOUNG_

  CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS AND THE NEW WORLD OF HIS DISCOVERY
  _Illustrated. Large Post 8vo. 7s. 6d. net._

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  MEMORY HARBOUR
  ESSAYS CHIEFLY IN DESCRIPTION
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  VENUS AND CUPID
  AN IMPRESSION IN PROSE AFTER VELASQUEZ IN COLOUR
  Edition limited to 339 copies
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       *       *       *       *       *

  THE SANDS OF PLEASURE
  _With Frontispiece by_ R. J. PANNETT
  _Seventy-fourth Thousand_
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  WHEN THE TIDE TURNS
  _With Frontispiece by_ W. DACRES ADAMS
  _Twenty-second Thousand_
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  IRELAND AT THE CROSS ROADS
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  MASTERSINGERS
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  MORE MASTERSINGERS
  STUDIES IN THE ART OF MUSIC
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  THE WAGNER STORIES
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  OPERA STORIES
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  THE LOVER’S HOURS
  A CYCLE OF POEMS
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[Illustration: 41° 16′ N; 50° 14′ W.]



                            TITANIC

                              BY

                         FILSON YOUNG

                        [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.



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
manœuvred 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.



III


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 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, following the
illuminated electric signs that pointed the way along the numerous
streets and roads of the ship, found his way aft to the Café-Restaurant;
where instead of stewards were French waiters and a _maître d’hotel_
from Paris, and all the perfection of that perfect and expensive 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 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. Afterwards, 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 atmosphere 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 Cherbourg was repeated, with the fair
green shores of Cork Harbour instead of the cliffs of France for its
setting; and then quietly, without fuss, in the early afternoon 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 innumerable; how changing, and yet how unchanged—the road that
leads to Archangel 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; and always with the same certainty that you
will find at the turn or corner of the road, either some new thing or
the renewal of something old.

There is no human experience in which the phenomena of small varieties
within one large monotony are so clearly exemplified 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 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 motionless in
deck-chairs, the morning of brilliant 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 demoralized to the blessed freshness of the upper
air; the tentative formation of groups and experimental alliances, the
rapid disintegration 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 themselves from the mass, to take
on identity, individuality, character, till what was a crowd of
uninteresting, unidentified humanity becomes a collection of individual
persons with whom one’s destinies for the time are strangely and
unaccountably 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 imperceptibly 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 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.



VI


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.



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 shipboard 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 foghorn and the subsequent
patter of feet and appearance from below of all kinds of people whose
existence the passenger had hardly suspected. Stewards, sailors,
firemen, engineers, nurses, bakers, butchers, cooks, florists, barbers,
carpenters, 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 revealed to any observant
passenger the fact that the whole crew of nine hundred would have
occupied all the available accommodation 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 undergo, had thought of boats rather as a superfluity,
dating from the days when ships were vulnerable, when they sprang 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 undisturbed. 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, whispered this time from the
_Californian_—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 cloudless sky spangled with
stars. People remarked 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 concert, 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 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 something 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 of their state-room
doors, or even threw a wrap about them and went out into the corridors
to see what had happened, while others turned over in bed and composed
themselves to sleep, deciding to wait until the morning to hear what
was the cause of the delay.

Lower down in the ship they heard a little more. The sudden harsh clash
of the engine-room telegraph bells would startle those who were near
enough to hear it, especially as it was followed almost immediately
afterwards by the simultaneous ringing all through the lower part of the
ship of the gongs that gave warning of the closing of the water-tight
doors. After the engines stopped there was a moment of stillness; and
then the vibration began again, more insistently this time, with a
certain jumping movement which to the experienced ear meant that the
engines were being sent full speed astern; and then they stopped again,
and again there was stillness.

Here and there in the long corridors amidships a door opened and some
one thrust a head out, asking what was the matter; here and there a man
in pyjamas and a dressing-gown came out of his cabin and climbed up the
deserted staircase to have a look at what was going on; people sitting
in the lighted saloons and smoke-rooms looked at one another and said:
“What was that?” gave or received some explanation, and resumed their
occupations. A man in his dressing-gown came into one of the
smoking-rooms where a party was seated at cards, with a few yawning
bystanders looking on before they turned in. The newcomer wanted to know
what was the matter, whether they had noticed anything? They had felt a
slight jar, they said, and had seen an iceberg going by past the
windows; probably the ship had grazed it, but no damage had been done.
And they resumed their game of bridge. The man in the dressing-gown left
the smoke-room, and never saw any of the players again. So little
excitement was there in this part of the ship that the man in the
dressing-gown (his name was Mr. Beezley, an English schoolmaster, one of
the few who emerges from the crowd with an intact individuality) went
back to his cabin and lay down on his bed with a book, waiting for the
ship to start again. But the unnatural stillness, the uncanny peace even
of this great peaceful ship, must have got a little upon his nerves; and
when he heard people moving about in the corridors, he got up again, and
found that several people whom the stillness had wakened from their
sleep were wandering about inquiring what had happened.

But that was all. The half-hour which followed the stoppage of the ship
was a comparatively quiet half-hour, in which a few people came out of
their cabins indeed, and collected together in the corridors and
staircases gossiping, speculating and asking questions as to what could
have happened; but it was not a time of anxiety, or anything like it.
Nothing could be safer on this quiet Sunday night than the great ship,
warmed and lighted everywhere, with her thick carpets and padded
armchairs and cushioned recesses; and if anything could have added to
the sense of peace and stability, it was that her driving motion had
ceased, and that she lay solid and motionless-like a rock in the sea,
the still water scarcely lapping against her sides. And those of her
people who had thought it worth while to get out of bed stood about in
little knots, and asked foolish questions, and gave foolish answers in
the familiar manner of passengers on shipboard when the slightest
incident occurs to vary the regular and monotonous routine.



VIII


This was one phase of that first half-hour. Up on the high bridge,
isolated from all the indoor life of the passengers, there was another
phase. The watches had been relieved at ten o’clock, when the ship had
settled down for the quietest and least eventful period of the whole
twenty-four hours. The First Officer, Mr. Murdoch, was in command of the
bridge, and with him was Mr. Boxhall, the Fourth Officer, and the usual
look-out staff. The moon had set, and the night was very cold, clear and
starry, except where here and there a slight haze hung on the surface of
the water. Captain Smith, to whom the night of the sea was like day, and
to whom all the invisible tracks and roads of the Atlantic were as
familiar as Fleet Street is to a _Daily Telegraph_ reporter, had been in
the chart room behind the bridge to plot out the course for the night,
and afterwards had gone to his room to lie down. Two pairs of sharp eyes
were peering forward from the crow’s nest, another pair from the nose of
the ship on the fo’c’stle head, and at least three pairs from the bridge
itself, all staring into the dim night, quartering with busy glances the
area of the black sea in front of them where the foremast and its wire
shrouds and stays were swinging almost imperceptibly across the starry
sky.

At twenty minutes to twelve the silence of the night was broken by three
sharp strokes on the gong sounding from the crow’s nest—a signal for
something right ahead; while almost simultaneously came a voice through
the telephone from the look-out announcing the presence of ice. There
was a kind of haze in front of the ship the colour of the sea, but
nothing could be distinguished from the bridge. Mr. Murdoch’s hand was
on the telegraph immediately, and his voice rapped out the order to the
quartermaster to starboard the helm. The wheel spun round, the answering
click came up from the startled engine-room; but before anything else
could happen there was a slight shock, and a splintering sound from the
bows of the ship as she crashed into yielding ice. That was followed by
a rubbing, jarring, grinding sensation along her starboard bilge, and a
peak of dark-coloured ice glided past close alongside.

As the engines stopped in obedience to the telegraph Mr. Murdoch turned
the switches that closed the water-tight doors. Captain Smith came
running out of the chart room. “What is it?” he asked. “We have struck
ice, Sir.” “Close the water-tight doors.” “It is already done, Sir.”
Then the Captain took command. He at once sent a message to the
carpenter to sound the ship and come and report; the quartermaster went
away with the message, and set the carpenter to work. Captain Smith now
gave a glance at the commutator, a dial which shows to what extent the
ship is off the perpendicular, and noticed that she carried a 5° list to
starboard. Coolly following a routine as exact as that which he would
have observed had he been conning the ship into dock, he gave a number
of orders in rapid succession, after first consulting with the Chief
Engineer. Then, having given instructions that the whole of the
available engine-power was to be turned to pumping the ship, he hurried
aft along the boat-deck to the Marconi room. Phillips was sitting at his
key, toiling through routine business; Bride, who had just got up to
relieve him, was sleepily making preparations to take his place. The
Captain put his head in at the door.

“We have struck an iceberg,” he said, “and I am having an inspection
made to tell what it has done for us. Better get ready to send out a
call for assistance, but don’t send it until I tell you.”

He hurried away again; in a few minutes he put his head in at the door
again; “Send that call for assistance,” he said.

“What call shall I send?” asked Phillips.

“The regulation international call for help, just that,” said the
Captain, and was gone again.

But in five minutes he came back into the wireless room, this time
apparently not in such a hurry. “What call are you sending?” he asked;
and when Phillips told him “C.Q.D.,” the highly technical and efficient
Bride suggested, laughingly, that he should send “S.O.S.,” the new
international call for assistance which has superseded the C.Q.D. “It is
the new call,” said Bride, “and it may be your last chance to send it!”
And they all three laughed, and then for a moment chatted about what had
happened, while Phillips tapped out the three longs, three shorts, and
three longs which instantaneously sent a message of appeal flashing out
far and wide into the dark night. The Captain, who did not seem
seriously worried or concerned, told them that the ship had been struck
amidships or a little aft of that.

Whatever may have been happening down below, everything up here was
quiet and matter-of-fact. It was a disaster, of course, but everything
was working well, everything had been done; the electric switches for
operating the bulkhead doors had been used promptly, and had worked
beautifully; the powerful wireless plant was talking to the ocean, and
in a few hours there would be some other ship alongside of them. It was
rough luck, to be sure; they had not thought they would so soon have a
chance of proving that the _Titanic_ was unsinkable.



IX


We must now visit in imagination some other parts of the ship, parts
isolated from the bridge and the spacious temple of luxury amidships,
and try to understand how the events of this half hour appeared to the
denizens of the lower quarters of the ship. The impact that had been
scarcely noticed in the first-class quarters had had much more effect
down below, and especially forward, where some of the third-class
passengers and some of the crew were berthed. A ripping, grinding crash
startled all but the heaviest sleepers here into wakefulness; but it was
over so soon and was succeeded by so peaceful a silence that no doubt
any momentary panic it might have caused was soon allayed. One of the
firemen describing it said: “I was awakened by a noise, and between
sleeping and waking I thought I was dreaming that I was on a train that
had run off the lines, and that I was being jolted about.” He jumped out
and went on deck, where he saw the scattered ice lying about. “Oh, we
have struck an iceberg,” he said, “that’s nothing; I shall go back and
turn in,” and he actually went back to bed and slept for half an hour,
until he was turned out to take his station at the boats.

The steerage passengers, who were berthed right aft, heard nothing and
knew nothing until the news that an accident had happened began slowly
to filter down to them. But there was no one in authority to give them
any official news, and for a time they were left to wonder and speculate
as they chose. Forward, however, it became almost immediately apparent
to certain people that there was something grievously wrong; firemen on
their way through the passage along the ship’s bottom leading between
their quarters and No. 1 stokehold found water coming in, and rapidly
turned back. They were met on their way up the staircase by an officer
who asked them what they were doing. They told him. “There’s water
coming into our place, Sir,” they said; and as he thought they were off
duty he did not turn them back.

Mr. Andrews, a partner in Harland and Wolff’s, and one of the
_Titanic’s_ designers, had gone quietly down by himself to investigate
the damage, and, great as was his belief in the giant he had helped to
create, it must have been shaken when he found the water pouring into
her at the rate of hundreds of tons a minute. Even his confidence in
those mighty steel walls that stretched one behind the other in
succession along the whole length of the ship could not have been proof
against the knowledge that three or four of them had been pierced by the
long rip of the ice-tooth. There was just a chance that she would hold
up long enough to allow of relief to arrive in time; but it is certain
that from that moment Mr. Andrews devoted himself to warning people, and
helping to get them away, so far as he could do so without creating a
panic.

Most of the passengers, remember, were still asleep during this half
hour. One of the most terrible things possible at sea is a panic, and
Captain Smith was particularly anxious that no alarm should be given
before or unless it was absolutely necessary. He heard what Mr. Andrews
had to say, and consulted with the engineer, and soon found that the
whole of the ship’s bottom was being flooded. There were other
circumstances calculated to make the most sanguine ship-master uneasy.
Already, within half an hour, the _Titanic_ was perceptibly down by the
head. She would remain stationary for five minutes and then drop six
inches or a foot; remain stationary again, and drop another foot—a
circumstance ominous to experienced minds, suggesting that some of the
smaller compartments forward were one by one being flooded, and letting
the water farther and farther into her hull.

Therefore at about twenty-five minutes past midnight the Captain gave
orders for the passengers to be called and mustered on the boat deck.
All the ship’s crew had by this time been summoned to their various
stations; and now through all the carpeted corridors, through the
companion-ways and up and down staircases, leading to the steerage
cabins, an army of three hundred stewards was hurrying, knocking loudly
on doors, and shouting up and down the passages, “All passengers on
deck with life-belts on!” The summons came to many in their sleep; and
to some in the curtained firelight luxury of their deck state-rooms it
seemed an order so absurd that they scorned it, and actually went back
to bed again. These, however, were rare exceptions; for most people
there was no mistaking the urgency of the command, even though they were
slow to understand the necessity for it. And hurry is a thing easily
communicated; seeing some passengers hastening out with nothing over
their night clothes but a blanket or a wrapper, others caught the
infection, and hurried too; and struggling with life-belts, clumsily
attempting to adjust them over and under a curious assortment of
garments, the passengers of the _Titanic_ came crowding up on deck, for
the first time fully alarmed.



X


When the people came on deck it was half-past twelve. The first-class
passengers came pouring up the two main staircases and out on to the
boat deck—some of them indignant, many of them curious, some few of them
alarmed. They found there everything as usual except that the long deck
was not quite level; it tilted downwards a little towards the bow, and
there was a slight list towards the starboard side. The stars were
shining in the sky and the sea was perfectly smooth, although dotted
about it here and there were lumps of dark-coloured ice, almost
invisible against the background of smooth water. A long line of
stewards was forming up beside the boats on either side—those solid
white boats, stretching far aft in two long lines, that became suddenly
invested with practical interest. Officers were shouting orders, seamen
were busy clearing up the coils of rope attached to the davit tackles,
fitting the iron handles to the winches by which the davits themselves
were canted over from the inward position over the deck to the outward
position over the ship’s side. Almost at the same time a rush of people
began from the steerage quarters, swarming up stairways and ladders to
reach this high deck hitherto sacred to the first-class passengers. At
first they were held back by a cordon of stewards, but some broke
through and others were allowed through, so that presently a large
proportion of the ship’s company was crowding about the boat deck and
the one immediately below it.

Then the business of clearing, filling, and lowering the boats was
begun—a business quickly described, but occupying a good deal of time in
the transaction. Mr. Murdoch, the Chief Officer, ordered the crews to
the boats; and with some confusion different parties of stewards and
sailors disentangled themselves from the throng and stood in their
positions by each of the sixteen boats. Every member of the crew, when
he signs on for a voyage in a big passenger ship, is given a number
denoting which boat’s crew he belongs to. If there has been boat drill,
every man knows and remembers his number; if, as in the case of the
_Titanic_, there has been no boat drill, some of the men remember their
numbers and some do not, the result being a certain amount of confusion.
But at last a certain number of men were allotted to each boat, and
began the business of hoisting them out.

First of all the covers had to be taken off and the heavy masts and
sails lifted out of them. Ship’s boats appear very small things when one
sees a line of them swinging high up on deck; but, as a matter of fact,
they are extremely heavy, each of them the size of a small sailing
yacht. Everything on the _Titanic_ having been newly painted, everything
was stiff and difficult to move. The lashings of the heavy canvas covers
were like wire, and the covers themselves like great boards; the new
ropes ran stiffly in the new gear. At last a boat was cleared and the
order given, “Women and children first.” The officers had revolvers in
their hands ready to prevent a rush; but there was no rush. There was a
certain amount of laughter. No one wanted to be the first to get into
the boat and leave the ship. “Come on,” cried the officers. There was a
pause, followed by the brief command, “Put them in.”

The crew seized the nearest women and pushed or lifted them over the
rail into the first boat, which was now hanging over the side level with
the deck. But they were very unwilling to go. The boat, which looked big
and solid on the deck, now hung dizzily seventy-five feet over the dark
water; it seemed a far from attractive prospect to get into it and go
out on to the cold sea, especially as everyone was convinced that it was
a merely formal precaution which was being taken, and that the people in
the boats would merely be rowed off a little way and kept shivering on
the cold sea for a time and then brought back to the ship when it was
found that the danger was past. For, walking about the deck, people
remembered all the things that they had been thinking and saying since
first they had seen the _Titanic_; and what was the use of travelling by
an unsinkable ship if, at the first alarm of danger, one had to leave
her and row out on the icy water? Obviously it was only the old habit of
the sea asserting itself, and Captain Smith, who had hitherto been such
a favourite, was beginning to be regarded as something of a nuisance
with his ridiculous precautions.

The boats swung and swayed in the davits; even the calm sea, now that
they looked at it more closely, was seen to be not absolutely like a
millpond, but to have a certain movement on its surface which, although
utterly helpless to move the huge bulk of the _Titanic_, against whose
sides it lapped, as ineffectually as against the walls of a dock, was
enough to impart a swinging movement to the small boats. But at last,
what with coercion and persuasion, a boat was half filled with women.
One of the things they liked least was leaving their husbands; they felt
that they were being sacrificed needlessly to over-elaborate
precautions, and it was hard to leave the men standing comfortably on
the firm deck, sheltered and in a flood of warm yellow light, and in the
safety of the great solid ship that lay as still as a rock, while they
had to go out, half-clad and shivering, on the icy waters.

But the inexorable movements of the crew continued. The pulleys squealed
in the sheaves, the new ropes were paid out; and jerking downwards, a
foot or two at a time, the first boat dropped down towards the water,
past storey after storey of the great structure, past rows and rows of
lighted portholes, until at last, by strange unknown regions of the
ship’s side, where cataracts and waterfalls were rushing into the sea,
it rested on the waves. The blocks were unhooked, the heavy ash oars
were shipped, and the boat headed away into the darkness. And then, and
not till then, those in the boat realized that something was seriously
wrong with the _Titanic_. Instead of the trim level appearance which she
presented on the picture postcards or photographs, she had an ungraceful
slant downwards to the bows—a heavy helpless appearance like some
wounded monster that is being overcome by the waters. And even while
they looked, they could see that the bow was sinking lower.

After the first boat had got away, there was less difficulty about the
others. The order, “Women and children first,” was rigidly enforced by
the officers; but it was necessary to have men in the boats to handle
them, and a number of stewards, and many grimy figures of stokers who
had mysteriously appeared from below were put into them to man them.
Once the tide of people began to set into the boats and away from the
ship, there came a certain anxiety to join them and not to be left
behind. Here and there indeed there was over-anxiety, which had to be
roughly checked. One band of Italians from the steerage, who had good
reason to know that something was wrong, tried to rush one of the boats,
and had to be kept back by force, an officer firing a couple of shots
with his pistol; they desisted, and were hauled back ignominiously by
the legs. In their place some of the crew and the passengers who were
helping lifted in a number of Italian women limp with fright.

And still everyone was walking about and saying that the ship was
unsinkable. There was a certain subdued excitement, natural to those who
feel that they are taking part in a rather thrilling adventure which
will give them importance in the eyes of people at home when they relate
it. There was as yet no call for heroism, because, among the
first-class passengers certainly, the majority believed that the safest
as well as the most comfortable place was the ship. But it was painful
for husbands and wives to be separated, and the wives sent out to brave
the discomforts of the open boats while the husbands remained on the dry
and comfortable ship.

The steerage people knew better and feared more. Life had not taught
them, as it had taught some of those first-class passengers, that the
world was an organization specially designed for their comfort and
security; they had not come to believe that the crude and ugly and
elementary catastrophes of fate would not attack them. On the contrary,
most of them knew destiny as a thing to fear, and made haste to flee
from it. Many of them, moreover, had been sleeping low down in the
forward part of the ship; they had heard strange noises, had seen water
washing about where no water should be, and they were frightened. There
was, however, no discrimination between classes in putting the women
into the boats. The woman with a tattered shawl over her head, the woman
with a sable coat over her nightdress, the woman clasping a baby, and
the woman clutching a packet of trinkets had all an equal chance; side
by side they were handed on to the harsh and uncomfortable thwarts of
the lifeboats; the wife of the millionaire sat cheek by jowl with a
dusty stoker and a Russian emigrant, and the spoiled woman of the world
found some poor foreigner’s baby thrown into her lap as the boat was
lowered.

By this time the women and children had all been mustered on the second
or A deck; the men were supposed to remain up on the boat deck while the
boats were being lowered to the level of the women, where sections of
the rail had been cleared away for them to embark more easily; but this
rule, like all the other rules, was not rigidly observed. The crew was
not trained enough to discipline and coerce the passengers. How could
they be? They were trained to serve them, to be obsequious and obliging;
it would have been too much to expect that they should suddenly take
command and order them about.

There were many minor adventures and even accidents. One woman had both
her legs broken in getting into the boat. The mere business of being
lowered in a boat through seventy feet of darkness was in itself
productive of more than one exciting incident. The falls of the first
boat jammed when she was four feet from the water, and she had to be
dropped into it with a splash. And there was one very curious incident
which happened to the boat in which Mr. Beezley, the English
schoolmaster already referred to, had been allotted a place as a helper.
“As the boat began to descend,” he said, “two ladies were pushed
hurriedly through the crowd on B deck, and a baby ten months old was
passed down after them. Then down we went, the crew shouting out
directions to those lowering us. ‘Level,’ ‘Aft,’ ‘Stern,’ ‘Both
together!’ until we were some ten feet from the water. Here occurred the
only anxious moment we had during the whole of our experience from the
time of our leaving the deck to our reaching the _Carpathia_.

“Immediately below our boat was the exhaust of the condensers, and a
huge stream of water was pouring all the time from the ship’s side just
above the water-line. It was plain that we ought to be smart away from
it if we were to escape swamping when we touched the water. We had no
officers on board, and no petty officer or member of the crew to take
charge, so one of the stokers shouted, ‘Some one find the pin which
releases the boat from the ropes and pull it up!’ No one knew where it
was. We felt as well as we could on the floor, and along the sides, but
found nothing. It was difficult to move among so many people. We had
sixty or seventy on board. Down we went, and presently we floated with
our ropes still holding us, and the stream of water from the exhaust
washing us away from the side of the vessel, while the swell of the sea
urged us back against the side again.

“The result of all these forces was that we were carried parallel to the
ship’s side, and directly under boat No. 14, which had filled rapidly
with men, and was coming down on us in a way that threatened to submerge
our boat.

“‘Stop lowering 14,’ our crew shouted, and the crew of No. 14, now only
20 feet above, cried out the same. The distance to the top, however, was
some 70 feet, and the creaking of the pulleys must have deadened all
sound to those above, for down she came, 15 feet, 10 feet, 5 feet, and a
stoker and I reached up and touched the bottom of the swinging boat
above our heads. The next drop would have brought her on our heads. Just
before she dropped another stoker sprang to the ropes with his knife
open in his hand. ‘One,’ I heard him say, and then ‘Two,’ as the knife
cut through the pulley rope.

“‘The next moment the exhaust stream carried us clear, while boat No. 14
dropped into the water, taking the space we had occupied a moment
before. Our gunwales were almost touching. We drifted away easily, and
when our oars were got out, we headed directly away from the ship.’”

But although there was no sense of danger, there were some painful
partings on the deck where the women were embarked; for you must think
of this scene as going on for at least an hour amid a confusion of
people pressing about, trying to find their friends, asking for
information, listening to some new rumour, trying to decide whether they
should or should not go in the boats, to a constant accompaniment of
shouted orders, the roar of escaping steam, the squeal and whine of the
ropes and pulleys, and the gay music of the band, which Captain Smith
had ordered to play during the embarkation. Every now and then a woman
would be forced away from her husband; every now and then a husband,
having got into a boat with his wife, would be made to get out of it
again. If it was hard for the wives to go, it was harder for the
husbands to see them go to such certain discomfort and in such strange
company. Colonel Astor, whose young wife was in a delicate state of
health, had got into the boat with her to look after her; and no wonder.
But he was ordered out again and came at once, no doubt feeling
bitterly, poor soul, that he would have given many of his millions to be
able to go honourably with her. But he stepped back without a word of
remonstrance and gave her good-bye with a cheery message, promising to
meet her in New York. And if that happened to him, we may be sure it was
happening over and over again in other boats. There were women who
flatly refused to leave their husbands and chose to stay with them and
risk whatever fate might be in store for them, although at that time
most of the people did not really believe that there was much danger.
Yet here and there there were incidents both touching and heroic. When
it came to the turn of Mrs. Isidore Straus, the wife of a Jewish
millionaire, she took her seat but got back out of the boat when she
found her husband was not coming. They were both old people, and on two
separate occasions an Englishman who knew her tried to persuade her to
get into a boat, but she would not leave her husband. The second time
the boat was not full and he went to Mr. Straus and said: “Do go with
your wife. Nobody can object to an old gentleman like you going. There
is plenty of room in the boat.” The old gentleman thanked him calmly and
said: “I won’t go before the other men.” And Mrs. Straus got out and,
going up to him, said: “We have been together for forty years and we
will not separate now.” And she remained by his side until that happened
to them which happened to the rest.



XI


We must now go back to the Marconi room on the upper deck where, ten
minutes after the collision, Captain Smith had left the operators with
orders to send out a call for assistance. From this Marconi room we get
a strange but vivid aspect of the situation; for Bride, the surviving
operator, who afterwards told the story so graphically to the _New York
Times_, practically never left the room until he left it to jump into
the sea, and his knowledge of what was going on was the vivid, partial
knowledge of a man who was closely occupied with his own duties and only
knew of other happenings in so far as they affected his own doings.
They had been working, you will remember, almost all of that Sunday at
locating and replacing a burnt-out terminal, and were both very tired.
Phillips was taking the night shift of duty, but he told Bride to go to
bed early and get up and relieve him as soon as he had had a little
sleep, as Phillips himself was quite worn out with his day’s work. Bride
went to sleep in the cabin which opened into the operating-room.

He slept some time, and when he woke he heard Phillips still at work. He
could read the rhythmic buzzing sounds as easily as you or I can read
print. He could hear that Phillips was talking to Cape Race, sending
dull uninteresting traffic matter; and he was about to sink off to sleep
again when he remembered how tired Phillips must be, and decided that he
would get up and relieve him for a spell. He never felt the shock, or
saw anything, or had any other notification of anything unusual except
no doubt the ringing of the telegraph bells and cessation of the beat of
the engines. It was a few minutes afterwards that, as we have seen, the
Captain put his head in at the door and told them to get ready to send a
call, returning ten minutes later to tell them to send it.

The two operators were rather amused than otherwise at having to send
out the S.O.S.; it was a pleasant change from relaying traffic matter.
“We said lots of funny things to each other in the next few minutes,”
said Bride. Phillips went stolidly on, firmly hammering out his “S.O.S.,
S.O.S.,” sometimes varying it with “C.Q.D.” for the benefit of such
operators as might not be on the alert for the new call. For several
minutes there was no reply; then the whining voice at Phillips’ ear
began to answer. Some one had heard. They had picked up the steamer
_Frankfurt_, and they gave her the position and told her that the
_Titanic_ had struck an iceberg and needed assistance. There was another
pause and, in their minds’ eye, the wireless men could see the
_Frankfurt’s_ operator miles and miles away across the dark night going
along from his cabin and rousing the _Frankfurt’s_ Captain and giving
his message and coming back to the instrument, when again the whining
voice began asking for more news.

They were learning facts up here in the Marconi room. They knew that the
_Titanic_ was taking in water, and they knew that she was sinking by the
head; and what they knew they flashed out into the night for the benefit
of all who had ears to hear. They knew that there were many ships in
their vicinity; but they knew also that hardly any of them carried more
than one operator, and that even Marconi operators earning £4 a month
must go to bed and sleep sometimes, and that it was a mere chance if
their call was heard. But presently the Cunard liner _Carpathia_
answered and told them her position, from which it appeared that she was
about seventy miles away. The _Carpathia_, which was heading towards the
Mediterranean, told them she had altered her course and was heading full
steam to their assistance. The _Carpathia’s_ voice was much fainter than
the _Frankfurt’s_, from which Phillips assumed that the _Frankfurt_ was
the nearer ship; but there was a certain lack of promptitude on board
the _Frankfurt_ which made Phillips impatient. While he was still
sending out the call for help, after the _Frankfurt_ had answered it,
she interrupted him again, asking what was the matter. They told Captain
Smith, who said, “That fellow is a fool,” an opinion which Phillips and
Bride not only shared, but which they even found time to communicate to
the operator on the _Frankfurt_. By this time the _Olympic_ had also
answered her twin sister’s cry for help, but she was far away, more than
three hundred miles; and although she too turned and began to race
towards the spot where the _Titanic_ was lying so quietly, it was felt
that the honours of salving her passengers would go to the _Carpathia_.
The foolish _Frankfurt_ operator still occasionally interrupted with a
question, and he was finally told, with such brusqueness as the wireless
is capable of, to keep away from his instrument and not interfere with
the serious conversations of the _Titanic_ and _Carpathia_.

Then Bride took Phillips’s place at the instrument and succeeded in
getting a whisper from the _Baltic_, and gradually, over hundreds of
miles of ocean, the invisible ether told the ships that their giant
sister was in distress. The time passed quickly with these urgent
conversations on which so much might depend, and hour by hour and minute
by minute the water was creeping up the steep sides of the ship. Once
the Captain looked in and told them that the engine-rooms were taking in
water and that the dynamos might not last much longer. That information
was also sent to the _Carpathia_, who by this time could tell them that
she had turned towards them with every furnace going at full blast, and
was hurrying forward at the rate of eighteen knots instead of her usual
fifteen. It now became a question how long the storage plant would
continue to supply current. Phillips went out on deck and looked round.
“The water was pretty close up to the boat deck. There was a great
scramble aft, and how poor Phillips worked through it I don’t know. He
was a brave man. I learnt to love him that night, and I suddenly felt
for him a great reverence, to see him standing there sticking to his
work while everybody else was raging about. While I live I shall never
forget the work Phillips did for that last awful fifteen minutes.”

Bride felt that it was time to look about and see if there was no chance
of saving himself. He knew that by this time all the boats had gone. He
could see, by looking over the side, that the water was far nearer than
it had yet been, and that the fo’c’s’le decks, which of course were much
lower than the superstructure on which the Marconi cabin was situated,
were already awash. He remembered that there was a lifebelt for every
member of the crew and that his own was under his bunk; and he went and
put it on. And then, thinking how cold the water would be, he went back
and put his boots on, and an extra coat. Phillips was still standing at
the key, talking to the _Olympic_ now and telling her the tragic and
shameful news that her twin sister, the unsinkable, was sinking by the
head and was pretty near her end. While Phillips was sending this
message Bride strapped a lifebelt about him and put on his overcoat.
Then, at Phillips’s suggestion, Bride went out to see if there was
anything left in the shape of a boat by which they could get away. He
saw some men struggling helplessly with a collapsible boat which they
were trying to lower down on to the deck. Bride gave them a hand and
then, although it was the last boat left, he resolutely turned his back
on it and went back to Phillips. At that moment for the last time, the
Captain looked in to give them their release.

“Men, you have done your full duty, you can do no more. Abandon your
cabin now; it is every man for himself; you look out for yourselves. I
release you. That’s the way of it at this kind of time; every man for
himself.”

Then happened one of the strangest incidents of that strange hour. I can
only give it in Bride’s own words:

“Phillips clung on, sending, sending. He clung on for about ten minutes,
or maybe fifteen minutes, after the Captain released him. The water was
then coming into our cabin.

“While he worked something happened I hate to tell about. I was back in
my room getting Phillips’s money for him, and as I looked out of the
door I saw a stoker, or somebody from below decks, leaning over Phillips
from behind. Phillips was too busy to notice what the man was doing, but
he was slipping the lifebelt off Phillips’s back. He was a big man,
too.

“As you can see, I’m very small. I don’t know what it was I got hold of,
but I remembered in a flash the way Phillips had clung on; how I had to
fix that lifebelt in place, because he was too busy to do it.

“I knew that man from below decks had his own lifebelt, and should have
known where to get it. I suddenly felt a passion not to let that man die
a decent sailor’s death. I wished he might have stretched a rope or
walked a plank. I did my duty. I hope I finished him, but I don’t know.

“We left him on the cabin floor of the wireless room, and he wasn’t
moving.”

Phillips left the cabin, running aft, and Bride never saw him alive
again. He himself came out and found the water covering the bridge and
coming aft over the boat deck.



XII


There is one other separate point of view from which we may look at the
ship during this fateful hour before all points of view become merged in
one common experience. Mr. Boxhall, the Fourth Officer, who had been on
the bridge at the moment of the impact, had been busy sending up rockets
and signals in the effort to attract the attention of a ship whose
lights could be seen some ten miles away; a mysterious ship which cannot
be traced, but whose lights appear to have been seen by many independent
witnesses on the _Titanic_. So sure was he of her position that Mr.
Boxhall spent almost all his time on the bridge signalling to her with
rockets and flashes; but no answer was received. He had, however, also
been on a rapid tour of inspection of the ship immediately after she had
struck. He went down to the steerage quarters forward and aft, and he
was also down in the deep forward compartment where the Post Office men
were working with the mails, and he had at that time found nothing
wrong, and his information contributed much to the sense of security
that was spread amongst the passengers.

Mr. Pitman, the Third Officer, was in his bunk at the time of the
collision, having been on duty on the bridge from six to eight, when the
Captain had also been on the bridge. There had been talk of ice among
the officers on Sunday, and they had expected to meet with it just
before midnight, at the very time, in fact, when they had met with it.
But very little ice had been seen, and the speed of the ship had not
been reduced. Mr. Pitman says that when he awoke he heard a sound which
seemed to him to be the sound of the ship coming to anchor. He was not
actually awake then, but he had the sensation of the ship halting, and
heard a sound like that of chains whirling round the windlass and
running through the hawseholes into the water. He lay in bed for three
or four minutes wondering in a sleepy sort of way where they could have
anchored. Then, becoming more awake, he got up, and without dressing
went out on deck; he saw nothing remarkable, but he went back and
dressed, suspecting that something was the matter. While he was dressing
Mr. Boxhall looked in and said: “We have struck an iceberg, old man;
hurry up!”

He also went down below to make an inspection and find out what damage
had been done. He went to the forward well deck, where ice was lying,
and into the fo’c’s’le, but found nothing wrong there. The actual
damage was farther aft, and at that time the water had not come into the
bows of the ship. As he was going back he met a number of firemen coming
up the gangway with their bags of clothing; they told him that water was
coming into their place. They were firemen off duty, who afterwards were
up on the boat deck helping to man the boats. Then Mr. Pitman went down
lower into the ship and looked into No. 1 hatch, where he could plainly
see water. All this took time; and when he came back he found that the
men were beginning to get the boats ready, a task at which he helped
under Mr. Murdoch’s orders. Presently Mr. Murdoch ordered him to take
command of a boat and hang about aft of the gangway. Pitman had very
little relish for leaving the ship at that time, and in spite of the
fact that she was taking in water, every one was convinced that the
_Titanic_ was a much safer place than the open sea. He had about forty
passengers and six of the crew in his boat, and as it was about to be
lowered, Mr. Murdoch leant over to him and shook him heartily by the
hand: “Good-bye, old man, and good luck,” he said, in tones which rather
surprised Pitman, for they seemed to imply that the good-bye might be
for a long time. His boat was lowered down into the water, unhooked, and
shoved off, and joined the gradually increasing fleet of other boats
that were cruising about in the starlight.

There was one man walking about that upper deck whose point of view was
quite different from that of anyone else. Mr. Bruce Ismay, like so many
others, was awakened from sleep by the stopping of the engines; like so
many others, also, he lay still for a few moments, and then got up and
went into the passage-way, where he met a steward and asked him what was
the matter. The steward knew nothing, and Mr. Ismay went back to his
state-room, put on a dressing-gown and slippers, and went up to the
bridge, where he saw the Captain. “What has happened?” he asked. “We
have struck ice,” was the answer. “Is the injury serious?” “I think so,”
said the Captain. Then Mr. Ismay came down in search of the Chief
Engineer, whom he met coming up to the bridge; he asked him the same
question, and he also said he thought the injury serious. He understood
from them that the ship was certainly in danger, but that there was hope
that if the pumps could be kept going there would be no difficulty in
keeping her afloat quite long enough for help to come and for the
passengers to be taken off. Whatever was to be the result, it was a
terrible moment for Mr. Ismay, a terrible blow to the pride and record
of the Company, that this, their greatest and most invulnerable ship,
should be at least disabled, and possibly lost, on her maiden voyage.
But like a sensible man, he did not stand wringing his hands at the
inevitable; he did what he could to reassure the passengers, repeating,
perhaps with a slight quaver of doubt in his voice, the old
word—unsinkable. When the boats began to be launched he went and tried
to help, apparently in his anxiety getting rather in the way. In this
endeavour he encountered the wrath of Mr. Lowe, the Fifth Officer, who
was superintending the launching of boat No. 5. Mr. Lowe did not know
the identity of the nervous, excited figure standing by the davits, nor
recognize the voice which kept saying nervously, “Lower away! lower
away!” and it was therefore with no misgivings that he ordered him away
from the boat, saying brusquely, “If you will kindly get to hell out of
this perhaps I’ll be able to do something!”—a trifling incident, but
evidence that Mr. Ismay made no use of his position for his own personal
ends. He said nothing, and went away to another boat, where he succeeded
in being more useful, and it was not till afterwards that an
awe-stricken steward told the Fifth Officer who it was that he had
chased away with such language. But after that Mr. Ismay was among the
foremost in helping to sort out the women and children and get them
expeditiously packed into the boats, with a burden of misery and
responsibility on his heart that we cannot measure.

One can imagine a great bustle and excitement while the boats were being
sent away; but when they had all gone, and there was nothing more to be
done, those who were left began to look about them and realize their
position. There was no doubt about it, the _Titanic_ was sinking, not
with any plunging or violent movement, but steadily settling down, as a
rock seems to settle into the water when the tide rises about it.

Down in the engine-room and stokeholds, in conditions which can hardly
be imagined by the ordinary landsman, men were still working with a grim
and stoic heroism. The forward stokeholds had been flooded probably an
hour after the collision; but it is practically certain that the
bulkheads forward of No. 5 held until the last. The doors in those aft
of No. 4 had been opened by hand after they had been closed from the
bridge, in order to facilitate the passage of the engineering staff
about their business; and they remained open, and the principal bulkhead
protecting the main engine-room, held until the last. Water thus found
its way into some compartments, and gradually rose; but long after
those in charge had given up all hope of saving the ship, the stokehold
watch were kept hard at work drawing the fires from under the boilers,
so that when the water reached them there should be no steam. The duty
of the engine-room staff was to keep the pumps going as long as possible
and to run the dynamos that supplied the current for the light and the
Marconi installation. This they did, as the black water rose stage by
stage upon them. At least twenty minutes before the ship sank the
machinery must have been flooded, and the current for the lights and the
wireless supplied from the storage plant. No member of the engine-room
staff was ever seen alive again, but, when the water finally flooded the
stokeholds, the watch were released and told to get up and save
themselves if they could.

And up on deck a chilly conviction of doom was slowly but certainly
taking the place of that bland confidence in the unsinkable ship in
which the previous hour had been lightly passed. That confidence had
been dreadfully overdone, so much so that the stewards had found the
greatest difficulty in persuading the passengers to dress themselves and
come up on deck, and some who had done so had returned to their
state-rooms and locked themselves in. The last twenty minutes, however,
must have shown everyone on deck that there was not a chance left. On a
ship as vast and solid as the _Titanic_ there is no sensation of actual
sinking or settling. She still seemed as immovable as ever, but the
water was climbing higher and higher up her black sides. The sensation
was not that of the ship sinking, but of the water rising about her. And
the last picture we have of her, while still visible, still a firm
refuge amid the waters, is of the band still playing and a throng of
people looking out from the lamplit upper decks after the disappearing
boats, bracing themselves as best they might for the terrible plunge and
shock which they knew was coming. Here and there men who were determined
still to make a fight for life climbed over the rail and jumped over; it
was not a seventy foot drop now—perhaps under twenty, but it was a
formidable jump. Some were stunned, and some were drowned at once before
the eyes of those who waited; and the dull splashes they made were
probably the first visible demonstration of the death that was coming.
Duties were still being performed; an old deck steward, who had charge
of the chairs, was busily continuing to work, adapting his duties to the
emergency that had arisen and lashing chairs together. In this he was
helped by Mr. Andrews, who was last seen engaged on this strangely
ironic task of throwing chairs overboard—frail rafts thrown upon the
waters that might or might not avail some struggling soul when the
moment should arrive, and the great ship of his designing float no
longer. Throughout he had been untiring in his efforts to help and
hearten people; but in this the last vision of him, there is something
not far short of the sublime.

The last collapsible boat was being struggled with on the upper deck,
but there were no seamen about who understood its stiff mechanism;
unaccustomed hands fumbled desperately with it, and finally pushed it
over the side in its collapsed condition for use as a raft. Many of the
seamen and stewards had gathered in the bar-room, where the attendant
was serving out glasses of whiskey to any and all who came for it; but
most men had an instinct against being under cover, and preferred to
stand out in the open.

And now those in the boats that had drawn off from the ship could see
that the end was at hand. Her bows had gone under, although the stern
was still fairly high out of the water. She had sunk down at the forward
end of the great superstructure amidships; her decks were just awash,
and the black throng was moving aft. The ship was blazing with light,
and the strains of the band were faintly heard still playing as they had
been commanded to do. But they had ceased to play the jolly rag-time
tunes with which the bustle and labour of getting off the boats had been
accompanied; solemn strains, the strains of a hymn, could be heard
coming over the waters. Many women in the boats, looking back towards
that lighted and subsiding mass, knew that somewhere, invisible among
the throng, was all that they held dearest in the world waiting for
death; and they could do nothing. Some tried to get the crews to turn
back, wringing their hands, beseeching, imploring; but no crew dared
face the neighbourhood of the giant in her death agony. They could only
wait, and shiver, and look.



XIII


The end, when it came, was as gradual as everything else had been since
the first impact. Just as there was no one moment at which everyone in
the ship realized that she had suffered damage; just as there was no one
moment when the whole of her company realized that they must leave her;
just as there was no one moment when all in the ship understood that
their lives were in peril, and no moment when they all knew she must
sink; so there was no one moment at which all those left on board could
have said, “She is gone.” At one moment the floor of the bridge, where
the Captain stood, was awash; the next a wave came along and covered it
with four feet of water, in which the Captain was for a moment washed
away, although he struggled back and stood there again, up to his knees
in water. “Boys, you can do no more,” he shouted, “look out for
yourselves!” Standing near him was a fireman and—strange
juxtaposition—two unclaimed solitary little children, scarce more than
babies. The fireman seized one in his arms, the Captain another; another
wave came and they were afloat in deep water, striking out over the rail
of the bridge away from the ship.

The slope of the deck increased, and the sea came washing up against it
as waves wash against a steep shore. And then that helpless mass of
humanity was stricken at last with the fear of death, and began to
scramble madly aft, away from the chasm of water that kept creeping up
and up the decks. Then a strange thing happened. They who had been
waiting to sink into the sea found themselves rising into the air as the
slope of the decks grew steeper. Up and up, dizzily high out of reach
of the dark waters into which they had dreaded to be plunged, higher and
higher into the air, towards the stars, the stern of the ship rose
slowly right out of the water, and hung there for a time that is
estimated variously between two and five minutes; a terrible eternity to
those who were still clinging. Many, thinking the end had come, jumped;
the water resounded with splash after splash as the bodies, like mice
shaken out of a trap into a bucket, dropped into the water. All who
could do so laid hold of something; ropes, stanchions, deck-houses,
mahogany doors, window frames, anything, and so clung on while the stern
of the giant ship reared itself towards the sky. Many had no hold, or
lost the hold they had, and these slid down the steep smooth decks, as
people slide down a water chute into the sea.

We dare not linger here, even in imagination; dare not speculate; dare
not look closely, even with the mind’s eye, at this poor human agony,
this last pitiful scramble for dear life that the serene stars shone
down upon. We must either turn our faces away, or withdraw to that
surrounding circle where the boats were hovering with their
terror-stricken burdens, and see what they saw. They saw the after part
of the ship, blazing with light, stand up, a suspended prodigy, between
the stars and the waters; they saw the black atoms, each one of which
they knew to be a living man or woman on fire with agony, sliding down
like shot rubbish into the sea; they saw the giant decks bend and crack;
they heard a hollow and tremendous rumbling as the great engines tore
themselves from their steel beds and crashed through the ship; they saw
sparks streaming in a golden rain from one of the funnels; heard the
dull boom of an explosion while the spouting funnel fell over into the
sea with a slap that killed every one beneath it and set the nearest
boat rocking; heard two more dull bursting reports as the steel
bulkheads gave way or decks blew up; saw the lights flicker out, flicker
back again, and then go out for ever, and the ship, like some giant sea
creature forsaking the strife of the upper elements for the peace of the
submarine depths, launched herself with one slow plunge and dive beneath
the waves.

There was no great maelstrom as they had feared, but the sea was
swelling and sinking all about them; and they could see waves and eddies
where rose the imprisoned air, the smoke and steam of vomited-up ashes,
and a bobbing commotion of small dark things where the _Titanic_, in her
pride and her shame, with the clocks ticking and the fires burning in
her luxurious rooms, had plunged down to the icy depths of death.



XIV


As the ship sank and the commotion and swirl of the waves subsided, the
most terrible experience of all began. The seas were not voiceless; the
horrified people in the surrounding boats heard an awful sound from the
dark central area, a collective voice, compound of moans, shrieks, cries
and despairing calls, from those who were struggling in the water. It
was an area of death and of agony towards which those in the boats dared
not venture, even although they knew their own friends were perishing
and crying for help there. They could only wait and listen, hoping that
it might soon be over. But it was not soon over. There was a great deal
of floating wreckage to which hundreds of people clung, some for a
short time, some for a long time; and while they clung on they cried out
to their friends to save them. One boat—that commanded by Mr. Lowe, the
Fifth Officer—did, after transshipping some of its passengers into other
boats, and embarking a crew of oarsmen, venture back into the dark
centre of things. The wreckage and dead bodies showed the sea so thickly
that they could hardly row without touching a dead body; and once, when
they were trying to reach a survivor who was clinging to a piece of
broken staircase, praying and calling for help, it took them nearly half
an hour to cover the fifty feet that separated them from him, so thick
were the bodies. This reads like an exaggeration, but it is well
attested. The water was icy cold, and benumbed many of them, who thus
died quickly; a few held on to life, moaning, wailing, calling—but in
vain.

A few strong men were still making a desperate fight for life. The
collapsible boat, which Bride had seen a group of passengers attempting
to launch a few minutes before the ship sank, was washed off by a wave
in its collapsed condition. Such boats contain air compartments in their
bottom, and thus, even although they are not opened, they float like
rafts, and can carry a considerable weight. Some of those who were swept
off the ship by the same wave that took the boat found themselves near
it and climbed on to it. Mr. Lightoller, the Second Officer, had dived
as the ship dived, and been sucked down the steep submerged wall of the
hull against the grating over the blower for the exhaust steam. Far down
under the water he felt the force of an explosion which blew him up to
the surface, where he breathed for a moment, and was then sucked back
by the water washing into the ship as it sank. This time he landed
against the grating over the pipes that furnished the draught for the
funnels, and stuck there. There was another explosion, and again he came
to the surface not many feet from the ship, and found himself near the
collapsible boat, to which he clung. It was quite near him that the huge
funnel fell over into the water and killed many swimmers before his
eyes. He drifted for a time on the collapsible boat, until he was taken
off into one of the lifeboats.

Bride also found himself strangely involved with this boat, which he had
last seen on the deck of the ship. When he was swept off, he found
himself in the horrible position of being trapped under water beneath
this boat. He struggled out and tried to climb on to it, but it took
him a long time; at last, however, he managed to get up on it, and found
five or six other people there. And now and then some other swimmer,
stronger than most, would come up and be helped on board. Some thus
helped died almost immediately; there were four found dead upon this
boat when at last the survivors were rescued.

There was another boat also not far off, a lifeboat, capsized likewise.
Six men managed to scramble on to the keel of this craft; it was almost
all she could carry. Mr. Caldwell, a second-class passenger, who had
been swimming about in the icy water for nearly an hour, with dead
bodies floating all about him, was beginning to despair when he found
himself near a crate to which another man was clinging. “Will it hold
two?” he asked. And the other man, with a rare heroism, said: “Catch
hold and try; we will live or die together.” And these two, clinging
precariously to the crate, reached the overturned lifeboat and were
hauled up to its keel. Presently another man came swimming along and
asked if they could take him on. But the boat was already dangerously
loaded; the weight of another man would have meant death for all, and
they told him so. “All right,” he cried, “good-bye; God bless you all!”
And he sank before their eyes.

Captain Smith, who had last been seen washed from the bridge as the ship
sank, with a child in his arms, was seen once more before he died. He
was swimming, apparently only in the hope of saving the child that he
held; for in his austere conception of his duty there was no place of
salvation for him while others were drowning and struggling. He swam up
to a boat with the child and gasped out: “Take the child!” A dozen
willing hands were stretched out to take it, and then to help him into
the boat; but he shook them off. Only for a moment he held on, asking:
“What became of Murdoch?” and when they said that he was dead, he let go
his hold, saying: “Let me go”; and the last that they saw of him was
swimming back towards the ship. He had no lifebelt; he had evidently no
wish that there should be any gruesome resurrection of his body from the
sea, and undoubtedly he found his grave where he wished to find it,
somewhere hard by the grave of his ship.

The irony of chance, the merciless and illogical selection which death
makes in a great collective disaster, was exemplified over and over
again in the deaths of people who had escaped safely to a boat, and the
salvation of others who were involved in the very centre of destruction.
The strangest escape of all was probably that of Colonel Gracie of the
United States army, who jumped from the topmost deck of the ship when
she sank and was sucked down with her. He was drawn down for a long
while, and whirled round and round, and would have been drawn down to a
depth from which he could never have come up alive if it had not been
for the explosion which took place after the ship sank. “After sinking
with the ship,” he says, “it appeared to me as if I was propelled by
some great force through the water. This may have been caused by
explosions under the waters, and I remembered fearful stories of people
being boiled to death. Innumerable thoughts of a personal nature, having
relation to mental telepathy, flashed through my brain. I thought of
those at home, as if my spirit might go to them to say good-bye. Again
and again I prayed for deliverance, although I felt sure that the end
had come. I had the greatest difficulty in holding my breath until I
came to the surface. I knew that once I inhaled, the water would
suffocate me. I struck out with all my strength for the surface. I got
to the air again after a time that seemed to me unending. There was
nothing in sight save the ocean strewn with great masses of wreckage,
dying men and women all about me, groaning and crying piteously. I saw
wreckage everywhere, and what came within reach I clung to. I moved from
one piece to another until I reached the collapsible boat. She soon
became so full that it seemed as if she would sink if more came on board
her. We had to refuse to let any others climb on board. This was the
most pathetic and horrible scene of all. The piteous cries of those
around us ring in my ears, and I will remember them to my dying day.
‘Hold on to what you have, old boy,’ we shouted to each man who tried
to get on board. ‘One more of you would sink us all.’ Many of those whom
we refused answered, as they went to their death, ‘Good luck; God bless
you.’ All the time we were buoyed up and sustained by the hope of
rescue. We saw lights in all directions—particularly some green lights
which, as we learned later, were rockets burned by one of the
_Titanic’s_ boats. So we passed the night with the waves washing over
and burying our raft deep in the water.”

It was twenty minutes past two when the _Titanic_ sank, two hours and
forty minutes after she had struck the iceberg; and for two hours after
that the boats drifted all round and about, some of them in bunches of
three or four, others solitary. Almost every kind of suffering was
endured in them, although, after the mental horrors of the preceding
hour, physical sufferings were scarcely felt. Some of the boats had
hardly anyone but women in them; in many the stokers and stewards were
quite useless at the oars. But here and there, in that sorrowful,
horror-stricken company, heroism lifted its head and human nature took
heart again. Women took their turn at the oars in boats where the men
were either too few or incapable of rowing; and one woman notably, the
Countess of Rothes, practically took command of her boat and was at an
oar all the time. Where they were rowing to most of them did not know.
They had seen lights at the time the ship went down, and some of them
made for these; but they soon disappeared, and probably most of the
boats were following each other aimlessly, led by one boat in which some
green flares were found, which acted as a beacon for which the others
made. One man had a pocket electric lamp, which he flashed now and
then, a little ray of hope and guidance shining across those dark and
miserable waters. Not all of the boats had food and water on board. Many
women were only in their night-clothes, some of the men in evening
dress; everyone was bitterly cold, although, fortunately, there was no
wind and no sea.

The stars paled in the sky; the darkness became a little lighter; the
gray daylight began to come. Out of the surrounding gloom a wider and
wider area of sea became visible, with here and there a boat discernible
on it, and here and there some fragments of wreckage. By this time the
boats had rowed away from the dreadful region, and but few floating
bodies were visible. The waves rose and fell, smooth as oil, first gray
in colour, and then, as the light increased, the pure dark blue of
mid-ocean. The eastern sky began to grow red under the cloud bank, and
from red to orange, and from orange to gold, the lovely pageantry of an
Atlantic dawn began to unfold itself before the aching eyes that had
been gazing on prodigies and horrors. From out that well of light in the
sky came rays that painted the wave-backs first with rose, and then with
saffron, and then with pure gold. And in the first flush of that blessed
and comforting light the draggled and weary sufferers saw, first a speck
far to the south, then a smudge of cloud, and then the red and black
smoke-stack of a steamer that meant succour and safety for them.



XV


From every quarter of the ocean, summoned by the miracle of the wireless
voice, many ships had been racing since midnight to the help of the
doomed liner. From midnight onwards captains were being called by
messages from the wireless operators of their ships, telling them that
the _Titanic_ was asking for help; courses were being altered and chief
engineers called upon to urge their stokehold crews to special efforts;
for coal means steam, and steam means speed, and speed may mean life.
Many ships that could receive the strong electric impulses sent out from
the _Titanic_ had not electric strength enough to answer; but they
turned and came to that invisible spot represented by a few figures
which the faithful wireless indicated. Even as far as five hundred miles
away, the _Parisian_ turned in her tracks in obedience to the call and
came racing towards the north-west. But there were tragedies even with
the wireless. The Leyland liner _Californian_, bound for Boston, was
only seventeen miles away from the _Titanic_ when she struck, and could
have saved every soul on board; but her wireless apparatus was not
working, and she was deaf to the agonized calls that were being sent out
from only a few miles away. The _Parisian_, five hundred miles away,
could hear and come, though it was useless; the _Californian_ could not
hear and so did not come though, if she had, she would probably have
saved every life on board. The _Cincinnati_, the _Amerika_, the _Prinz
Friedrich Wilhelm_, the _Menominee_, the _La Provence_, the _Prinz
Adalbert_, the _Virginian_, the _Olympic_, and the _Baltic_ all heard
the news and all turned towards Lat. 41° 46′ N., Long. 50° 14′ W. The
dread news was being whispered all over the sea, and even ashore, just
as the dwellers on the North Atlantic seaboard were retiring to rest,
the station at Cape Race intercepted the talk of the _Titanic_ 270 miles
away, and flashed the message out far and wide; so that Government tugs
and ships with steam up in harbours, and everything afloat in the
vicinity which heard the news might hurry to the rescue. Cape Race soon
heard that the _Virginian_ was on her way to the _Titanic’s_ position,
then that the _Olympic_ and _Carpathia_ had altered their courses and
were making for the wounded ship, and so on. Throughout the night the
rumours in the air were busy, while still the steady calls came out in
firm electric waves from the _Titanic_—still calling, still flashing
“C.Q.D.” At 1.20 she whispered to the _Olympic_, “Get your boats ready;
going down fast by the head.” At 1.35 the _Frankfurt_ (after an hour and
a half’s delay) said, “We are starting for you.” Then at 1.41 came a
message to the _Olympic_, “C.Q.D., boilers flooded.”

“Are there any boats round you already?” asked the _Olympic_, but there
was no answer.

Other ships began to call, giving encouraging messages: “We are coming,”
said the _Birma_, “only fifty miles away”; but still there was no
answer.

All over the North Atlantic men in lighted instrument rooms sat
listening with the telephones at their ears; they heard each other’s
questions and waited in the silence, but it was never broken again by
the voice from the _Titanic_. “All quiet now,” reported the _Birma_ to
the _Olympic_, and all quiet it was, except for the thrashing and
pounding of a score of propellers, and the hiss of a dozen steel stems
as they ripped the smooth waters on courses converging to the spot where
the wireless voice had suddenly flickered out into silence.

But of all those who had been listening to the signals Captain Rostron
of the _Carpathia_ knew that his ship would most likely be among the
first to reach the spot. It was about midnight on Sunday that the
passengers of the _Carpathia_ first became aware that something unusual
was happening. The course had been changed and a certain hurrying about
on the decks took the place of the usual midnight quiet. The trembling
and vibration increased to a quick jumping movement as pressure of steam
was gradually increased and the engines urged to the extreme of their
driving capacity. The chief steward summoned his staff and set them to
work making sandwiches and preparing hot drinks. All the hot water was
cut off from the cabins and bath-rooms, so that every ounce of steam
could be utilized for driving the machinery.

The _Carpathia_ was nearly seventy miles from the position of the
_Titanic_ when she changed her course and turned northward; she had been
steaming just over four hours when, in the light of that wonderful dawn,
those on the look-out descried a small boat. As they drew nearer they
saw other boats, and fragments of wreckage, and masses of ice drifting
about the sea. Captain Rostron stopped while he was still a good
distance from the boats, realizing that preparations must be made before
he could take passengers on board. The accommodation gangway was rigged
and also rope ladders lowered over the sides, and canvas slings were
arranged to hoist up those who were too feeble to climb. The passengers
crowded along the rail or looked out of their portholes to see the
reaping of this strange harvest of the sea. The first boat came up
almost filled with women and children—women in evening dress or in fur
coats thrown over nightgowns, in silk stockings and slippers, in rags
and shawls. The babies were crying; some of the women were injured and
some half-fainting; all had horror on their faces. Other boats began to
come up, and the work of embarking the seven hundred survivors went on.
It took a long time, for some of the boats were far away, and it was not
until they had been seven hours afloat that the last of them were taken
on board the _Carpathia_. Some climbed up the ladders, others were put
into the slings and swung on board, stewards standing by with rum and
brandy to revive the fainting; and many willing hands were occupied
with caring for the sufferers, taking them at once to improvised couches
and beds, or conducting those who were not so exhausted to the saloon
where hot drinks and food were ready. But it was a ghastly company. As
boat after boat came up, those who had already been saved eagerly
searched among its occupants to see if their own friends were among
them; and as gradually the tale of boats was completed and it was known
that no more had been saved, and the terrible magnitude of the loss was
realized—then, in the words of one of the _Carpathia’s_ people, “Bedlam
broke loose.” Women who had borne themselves bravely throughout the
hours of waiting and exposure broke into shrieking hysterics, calling
upon the names of their lost. Some went clean out of their minds; one or
two died there in the very moment of rescue. The _Carpathia’s_
passengers gave up their rooms and ransacked their trunks to find
clothing for the more than half-naked survivors; and at last exhaustion,
resignation, and the doctor’s merciful drugs did the rest. The dead were
buried; those who had been snatched too late from the bitter waters were
committed to them again, and eternally, with solemn words; and the
_Carpathia_ was headed for New York.



XVI


The _Californian_ had come up while the _Carpathia_ was taking the
survivors on board, and it was arranged that she should remain and
search the vicinity while the _Carpathia_ made all haste to New York.
And the other ships that had answered the call for help either came up
later in the morning and stayed for a little cruising about in the
forlorn hope of finding more survivors, or else turned back and resumed
their voyages when they heard the _Carpathia’s_ tidings.

In the meantime the shore stations could get no news. Word reached New
York and London in the course of the morning that the _Titanic_ had
struck an iceberg and was badly damaged, but nothing more was known
until a message, the origin of which could not be discovered, came to
say that the _Titanic_ was being towed to Halifax by the _Virginian_,
and that all her passengers were saved. With this news the London
evening papers came out on that Monday, and even on Tuesday the early
editions of the morning papers had the same story, and commented upon
the narrow escape of the huge ship. Even the White Star officials had on
Monday no definite news; and when their offices in New York were
besieged by newspaper men and relatives of the passengers demanding
information, the pathetic belief in the _Titanic’s_ strength was allowed
to overshadow anxieties concerning the greater disaster. Mr. Franklin,
the vice-president of the American Trust to which the White Star Company
belongs, issued the following statement from New York on Monday:

     “We have nothing direct from the _Titanic_, but are perfectly
     satisfied that the vessel is unsinkable. The fact that the
     Marconi messages have ceased means nothing; it may be due to
     atmospheric conditions or the coming up of the ships, or
     something of that sort.

     “We are not worried over the possible loss of the ship, as she
     will not go down, but we are sorry for the inconvenience
     caused to the travelling public. We are absolutely certain
     that the _Titanic_ is able to withstand any damage. She may be
     down by the head, but would float indefinitely in that
     condition.”

Still that same word, “unsinkable,” which had now indeed for the first
time become a true one: for it is only when she lies at the bottom of
the sea that any ship can be called unsinkable. On Tuesday morning when
the dreadful news was first certainly known, those proud words had to be
taken back. Again Mr. Franklin had to face the reporters, and this time
he could only say:

     “I must take upon myself the whole blame for that statement. I
     made it, and I believed it when I made it. The accident to the
     _Olympic_, when she collided with the cruiser _Hawke_,
     convinced me that these ships, the _Olympic_ and _Titanic_,
     were built like battleships, able to resist almost any kind of
     accident, particularly a collision. I made the statement in
     good faith, and upon me must rest the responsibility for
     error, since the fact has proved that it was not a correct
     description of the unfortunate _Titanic_.”

And for three days while the _Carpathia_ was ploughing her way, now
slowly through ice-strewn seas, and now at full speed through open
water, and while England lay under the cloud of an unprecedented
disaster, New York was in a ferment of grief, excitement, and
indignation. Crowds thronged the streets outside the offices of the
White Star Line, while gradually, in lists of thirty or forty at a time,
the names of the survivors began to come through from the _Carpathia_.
And at last, when all the names had been spelled out, and interrogated,
and corrected, the grim total of the figures stood out in appalling
significance—seven hundred and three saved, one thousand five hundred
and three lost.

It is not possible, nor would it be very profitable, to describe the
scenes that took place on these days of waiting, the alternations of
hope and grief, of thankfulness and wild despair, of which the shipping
offices were the scene. They culminated on the Thursday evening when
the _Carpathia_ arrived in New York. The greatest precautions had been
taken to prevent the insatiable thirst for news from turning that solemn
disembarkation into a battlefield. The entrance to the dock was
carefully guarded, and only those were admitted who had business there
or who could prove that they had relations among the rescued passengers.
Similar precautions were taken on the ship; she was not even boarded by
the Custom officials, nor were any reporters allowed on board, although
a fleet of steam launches went out in the cold rainy evening to meet
her, bearing pressmen who were prepared to run any risks to get a
footing on the ship. They failed, however, and the small craft were left
behind in the mist, as the _Carpathia_ came gliding up the Hudson.

Among the waiting crowd were nurses, doctors, and a staff of ambulance
men and women; for all kinds of wild rumours were afloat as to the
condition of those who had been rescued. The women of New York had
devoted the days of waiting to the organization of a powerful relief
committee, and had collected money and clothing on an ample scale to
meet the needs of those, chiefly among the steerage passengers, who
should find themselves destitute when they landed. And there, in the
rain of that gloomy evening, they waited.

At last they saw the _Carpathia_ come creeping up the river and head
towards the White Star pier. The flashlights of photographers were
playing about her, and with this silent salute she came into dock.
Gateways had been erected, shutting off the edge of the pier from the
sheds in which the crowd was waiting, and the first sight they had of
the rescued was when after the gangway had been rigged, and the brief
formalities of the shore complied with, the passengers began slowly to
come down the gangway. A famous English dramatist who was looking on at
the scene has written of it eloquently, describing the strange varieties
of bearing and demeanour; how one face had a startled, frightened look
that seemed as if it would always be there, another a set and staring
gaze; how one showed an angry, rebellious desperation, and another
seemed merely dazed. Some carried on stretchers, some supported by
nurses, and some handed down by members of the crew, they came, either
to meetings that were agonizing in their joy, or to blank loneliness
that would last until they died. Five or six babies without mothers,
some of them utterly unidentified and unidentifiable, were handed down
with the rest, so strangely preserved, in all their tenderness and
helplessness, through that terrible time of confusion and exposure.

And in the minds of those who looked on at this sad procession there was
one tragic, recurrent thought: that for every one who came down the
gangway, ill perhaps, maimed perhaps, destitute perhaps, but alive and
on solid earth again, there were two either drifting in the slow Arctic
current, or lying in the great submarine valley to which the ship had
gone down. They were a poor remnant indeed of all that composite world
of pride, and strength, and riches; for Death winnows with a strange
fan, and although one would suit his purpose as well as another, he
often chooses the best and the strongest. There were card-sharpers, and
orphaned infants, and destitute consumptives among the saved; and there
were hundreds of heroes and strong men among the drowned. There were
among the saved those to whom death would have been no great enemy, who
had no love for life or ties to bind them to it; and there were those
among the drowned for whom life was at its very best and dearest; lovers
and workers in the very morning of life before whom the years had
stretched forward rich with promise.

And when nearly all had gone and the crowd in the docks was melting
away, one man, who had until then remained secluded in the ship came
quietly out, haggard and stricken with woe: Bruce Ismay, the
representative and figure-head of that pride and power which had given
being to the _Titanic_. In a sense he bore on his own shoulders the
burden of every sufferer’s grief and loss; and he bore it, not with
shame, for he had no cause for shame, but with reticence of words and
activity in such alleviating deeds as were possible, and with a dignity
which was proof against even the bitter injustice of which he was the
victim in the days that followed. There was pity enough in New York,
hysterical pity, sentimental pity, real pity, practical pity, for all
the obvious and patent distress of the bereaved and destitute; but there
was no pity for this man who, of all that ragged remnant that walked
back to life down the _Carpathia’s_ gangway, had perhaps the most need
of pity.



XVII


The symbols of Honour and Glory and Time that looked so handsome in the
flooding sunlight of the _Titanic’s_ stairway lie crushed into
unrecognizable shapes and splinters beneath the tonnage of two thousand
fathoms of ocean water. Time is no more for the fifteen hundred souls
who perished with them; but Honour and Glory, by strange ways and
unlooked-for events, have come into their own. It was not Time, nor the
creatures and things of Time, that received their final crown there; but
things that have nothing to do with Time, qualities that, in their power
of rising beyond all human limitations, we must needs call divine.

The _Titanic_ was in more senses than one a fool’s paradise. There is
nothing that man can build that nature cannot destroy, and far as he may
advance in might and knowledge and cunning, her blind strength will
always be more than his match. But men easily forget this; they wish to
forget it; and the beautiful and comfortable and agreeable equipment of
this ship helped them to forget it. You may cover the walls of a ship
with rare woods and upholster them with tapestries and brocades, but it
is the bare steel walls behind them on which you depend to keep out the
water; it is the strength of those walls, relatively to the strength of
such natural forces as may be arrayed against them, on which the safety
of the ship depends. If they are weaker than something which assails
them, the water must come in and the ship must sink. It was assumed too
readily that, in the case of the _Titanic_, these things could not
happen; it was assumed too readily that if in the extreme event they did
happen, the manifold appliances for saving life would be amply
sufficient for the security of the passengers. Thus they lived in a
serene confidence such as no ship’s company ever enjoyed before, or will
enjoy again for a long time to come. And there were gathered about them
almost all those accessories of material life which are necessary to the
paradise of fools, and are extremely agreeable to wiser men.

It was this perfect serenity of their condition which made so poignant
the tragedy of their sudden meeting with death—that pale angel whom
every man knows that he must some day encounter, but whom most of us
hope to find at the end of some road a very long way off waiting for us
with comforting and soothing hands. We do not expect to meet him
suddenly turning the corner of the street, or in an environment of
refined and elegant conviviality, or in the midst of our noonday
activities, or at midnight on the high seas when we are dreaming on
feather pillows. But it was thus that those on the _Titanic_ encountered
him, waiting there in the ice and the starlight, arresting the ship’s
progress with his out-stretched arm, and standing by, waiting, while the
sense of his cold presence gradually sank like a frost into their
hearts.

To say that all the men who died on the _Titanic_ were heroes would be
as absurd as to say that all who were saved were cowards. There were
heroes among both groups and cowards among both groups, as there must be
among any large number of men. It is the collective behaviour and the
general attitude towards disaster that is important at such a time; and
in this respect there is ample evidence that death scored no advantage
in the encounter, and that, though he took a spoil of bodies that had
been destined for him since the moment of their birth, he left the
hearts unconquered. In that last half-hour before the end, when every
one on the ship was under sentence of death, modern civilization went
through a severe test. By their bearing in that moment those fated men
and women had to determine whether, through the long years of peace and
increase of material comfort and withdrawal from contact with the cruder
elements of life, their race had deteriorated in courage and morale. It
is only by such great tests that we can determine how we stand in these
matters, and, as they periodically recur, measure our advance or
decline. And the human material there made the test a very severe one;
for there were people on the _Titanic_ who had so entrenched themselves
behind ramparts of wealth and influence as to have wellnigh forgotten
that, equally with the waif and the pauper, they were exposed to the
caprice of destiny; and who might have been forgiven if, in that awful
moment of realization, they had shown the white feather and given
themselves over to panic. But there is ample evidence that these men
stood the test equally as well as those whose occupation and training
made them familiar with the risks of the sea, to which they were
continually exposed, and through which they might reasonably expect to
come to just such an end. There was no theatrical heroism, no striking
of attitudes, or attempt to escape from the dread reality in any form of
spiritual hypnosis; they simply stood about the decks, smoking
cigarettes, talking to one another, and waiting for their hour to
strike. There is nothing so hard, nothing so entirely dignified, as to
be silent and quiet in the face of an approaching horror.

That was one form of heroism, which will make the influence of this
thing deathless long after the memory of it has faded as completely from
the minds of men as sight or sign of it has faded from that area of
ocean where, two miles above the sunken ship, the rolling blue furrows
have smoothed away all trace of the struggles and agonies that
embittered it. But there was another heroism which must be regarded as
the final crown and glory of this catastrophe—not because it is
exceptional, for happily it is not, but because it continued and
confirmed a tradition of English sea life that should be a tingling
inspiration to everyone who has knowledge of it. The men who did the
work of the ship were no composite, highly drilled body like the men in
the navy who, isolated for months at a time and austerely disciplined,
are educated into an _esprit de corps_ and sense of responsibility that
make them willing, in moments of emergency, to sacrifice individual
safety to the honour of the ship and of the Service to which they
belong. These stokers, stewards, and seamen were the ordinary scratch
crew, signed on at Southampton for one round trip to New York and back;
most of them had never seen each other or their officers before; they
had none of the training or the securities afforded by a great national
service; they were simply—especially in the case of the stokers—men so
low in the community that they were able to live no pleasanter life than
that afforded by the stokehold of a ship—an inferno of darkness and
noise and commotion and insufferable heat—men whose experience of the
good things of life was half an hour’s breathing of the open sea air
between their spells of labour at the furnaces, or a drunken spree
ashore whence, after being poisoned by cheap drink and robbed by joyless
women of the fruits of their spell of labour, they are obliged to return
to it again to find the means for another debauch. Not the stuff out of
which one would expect an austere heroism to be evolved. Yet such are
the traditions of the sea, such is the power of those traditions and the
spirit of those who interpret them, that some of these men—not all, but
some—remained down in the _Titanic’s_ stokeholds long after she had
struck, and long after the water, pouring like a cataract through the
rent in her bottom and rising like a tide round the black holes where
they worked, had warned them that her doom, and probably theirs, was
sealed.

In the engine-room were another group of heroes, men of a far higher
type, with fine intelligences, trained in all the subtleties and craft
of modern ships, men with education and imagination who could see in
their mind’s eye all the variations of horror that might await them.
These men also continued at their routine tasks in the engine room,
knowing perfectly well that no power on earth could save them, choosing
to stay there while there was work to be done for the common good, their
best hope being presently to be drowned instead of being boiled or
scalded to death. All through the ship, though in less awful
circumstances, the same spirit was being observed; men who had duties to
do went on doing them because they were the kind of men to whom in such
an hour it came more easily to perform than to shirk their duties. The
three ship’s boys spent the whole of that hour carrying provisions from
the store-room to the deck; the post-office employés worked in the
flooded mail-room below to save the mail-bags and carry them up to where
they might be taken off if there should be a chance; the purser and his
men brought up the ship’s books and money, against all possibility of
its being any use to do so, but because it was their duty at such a time
to do so; the stewards were busy to the end with their domestic, and the
officers with their executive, duties. In all this we have an example of
spontaneous discipline—for they had never been drilled in doing these
things, they only knew that they had to do them—such as no barrack-room
discipline in the world could match. In such moments all artificial
bonds are useless. It is what men are in themselves that determines
their conduct; and discipline and conduct like this are proofs, not of
the superiority of one race over another, but that in the core of human
nature itself there is an abiding sweetness and soundness that fear
cannot embitter nor death corrupt.

       *       *       *       *       *

The twin gray horses are still at their work in Belfast Lough, and on
any summer morning you may see their white manes shining like gold as
they escort you in from the sunrise and the open sea to where the smoke
rises and the din resounds.

For the iron forest has branched again, and its dreadful groves are
echoing anew to the clamour of the hammers and the drills. Another ship,
greater and stronger even than the lost one, is rising within the
cathedral scaffoldings; and the men who build her, companions of those
whom the _Titanic_ spilled into the sea, speak among themselves and say,
“this time we shall prevail.”

_May 1912._



A TABLE

SHOWING THE LOSS OF LIFE ON THE _TITANIC_


                  FIRST CLASS
                                         Per cent.
                Carried.  Saved.  Lost.     saved.

  Men              173       58    115         34
  Women            144      139      5         97
  Children           5        5      0        100
                   ---      ---    ---        ---
    Total          322      202    120         63


                  SECOND CLASS
                                         Per cent.
                Carried.  Saved.  Lost.     saved.

  Men              160      13     147          8
  Women             93      78      15         84
  Children          24      24       0        100
                   ---     ---     ---        ---
    Total          277     115     162         42


                  THIRD CLASS
                                         Per cent.
                Carried.  Saved.  Lost.     saved.

  Men            454      55     399          12
  Women          179      98      81          55
  Children        76      23      53          30
                 ---     ---     ---         ---
    Total        709     176     533          25

                  TOTAL PASSENGERS
                                         Per cent.
                Carried.  Saved.  Lost.     saved.

  Men              787     126    661        16
  Women            416     315    101        76
  Children         105      52     53        49
                  ----     ---    ---       ---
    Total         1308     493    815        38


                      CREW

                                         Per cent.
                Carried.  Saved.  Lost.     saved.

  Men              875     189    686        22
  Women             23      21      2        91
                   ---     ---    ---       ---
    Total          898     210    688        23


              TOTAL PASSENGERS AND CREW
                                         Per cent.
                Carried.   Saved. Lost.     saved.

  Men              1662     315   1347        19
  Women             439     336    103        77
  Children          105      52     53        49
                   ----     ---   ----       ---
    Total          2206     703   1503        32



  CHISWICK PRESS: PRINTED BY CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.
  TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.



BY THE SAME AUTHOR

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS AND THE NEW WORLD OF HIS DISCOVERY.

With Frontispiece in colour by Norman Wilkinson. Portrait, Maps,
Illustrations, Appendices and a Note on the Navigation of Columbus’s
First Voyage by the Earl of Dunraven, K.P. Large Post 8vo, cloth, gilt.
7_s._ 6_d._ net. (Third Edition.)

Mr. Henry Vignaud, late Secretary of the American Embassy and
distinguished historian of Columbus, says:

“_In this book the hero who discovered the New World is shown for the
first time as a living man.... A more true and lively picture of the
great discoverer than is contained in any other work._”

“Mr. Filson Young has done nothing better ... there is not a dull page
in the seven hundred. His descriptions of visible things, of streets and
hills, and seas and men, are vivid in his accustomed manner. His
narrative is rich and marching, yet sufficiently precise.... For the
modern taste there is really nothing about Columbus to compare with Mr.
Young’s for matter and style.”—_The Morning Post._

“If these volumes do not bring the figure of Columbus into closer
relation with the mind of the present generation, it must be because
people simply do not care to learn about anything that lies a few yards
beyond their own thresholds. Our hope, however, is better; and we
imagine that there will be a wide public for a narrative so fresh and
spirited.

“Mr. Filson Young tells his story, without turning to the right hand or
to the left, in a free and fluent fashion.... Very vigorous too are the
passages dealing with his voyages, for Mr. Filson Young has drunk deep
of the spirit of the sea and nowhere writes so well as in his account of
the seafarer’s business in great waters.... The book abounds in
interludes of suggestive thought and clear, vigorous expression. But,
the book must be commended for the keen, eager spirit of its narrative
and the abounding interest of its romances. If all gleaners in the field
of history were as skilful as Mr. Young, we should not hear so much
about the dry-as-dust dullness of what ought to be always one of the
most fascinating forms of literary art.”

Mr. W. L. Courtney in _The Daily Telegraph_.

“Mr. Young has given us an estimate of the man which is attractive and
poetical. His account of the four voyages to the Indies is a romance of
the sea.... His book is a book of colour and the spirit of adventure. We
delight in that vision of his which shows to others the world and the
sea and the strange ‘Indias’ very much as Columbus saw them, with his
keen eyes, four centuries ago.”—_The Manchester Guardian._

“History clothed with a gracious humanity ... history that has reality
and life ... not a mere record of his acts, but a reconstruction of the
man who died four centuries ago, so that at the end of the book we feel
that we have known and spoken with Columbus.... Breathes interest from
every page.”—_The Daily Chronicle._

“He writes with charm, with colour, and with humour ... very readable
and eloquent.... We can give but a little quotation to show Mr. Young’s
eloquence, but we can assure the reader that he has many passages that
set one longing for the sea.”—Mr. John Masefield in _The Tribune._

“It is almost impossible to do justice to the splendour and romance of
these two finely produced volumes.... ‘Charity, truth, and justice,’
that is the meed Columbus has from Mr. Filson Young, whose book—austere,
dignified, stately—forms by far the most striking and vivid portrait of
the hero in our language.”—_The Morning Leader._

“To write a new book on Columbus seems a daring project; so many folios
have already been dedicated to his life. Mr. Young has justified
himself; so many books on the Genoese sailor have been either
unexpectedly dull or painfully inaccurate. Mr. Young is neither; in a
style pleasant and lucid he has set before us with vigour the period and
the setting of these famous voyages. In his pages we can enter into the
feelings and aspirations of those Western seamen.”—_The Pall Mall
Gazette._

GRANT RICHARDS, LTD. 7, CARLTON ST. LONDON, S.W.



                   THE GRANT RICHARDS BOOKS
                  BEING A COMPLETE CATALOGUE
                   OF THE BOOKS PUBLISHED BY
                     GRANT RICHARDS, LTD.
                       7 CARLTON STREET
                         LONDON, S.W.
                             1912


7 Carlton Street, London, S.W.

=Ade, George.=

— In Pastures New. Illustrated. 6s.

=Androutsos, Chrestos.=

— The Validity of English Ordinations. Translated and Edited by F. W.
Groves Campbell, LL.D. Crown 8vo. cloth, 3s. 6d. net.

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— The Agamemnon of Æschylus. Translated by Arthur Platt, M.A. Fcap. 8vo.
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=Æsop.=

— Æsop’s Fables. With many illustrations in colour and in black and
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=Aflalo F. G.=

— The Call of the Sea: A Prose Anthology. With End-papers in colour by
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=Aix.=

— The Adventures of a Nice Young Man. 6s.

=Allen, Grant.=

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— The Woman Who Did. New edition. With frontispiece by Frank Haviland.
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=Anon.=

— A Babe Unborn. 6s.

=Anonymous.=

— The Future Prime Minister. 2s. 6d. net.

=Applin, Arthur.=

— The Children of the Gutter. 6s.

— The Butcher of Bruton Street. With frontispiece in colour by Frank
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=Aristophanes.=—_See under_ Richards, Herbert, M.A.

=Atkey, Bertram.=

— Easy Money. With 36 Illustrations by G. L. Stampa. 6s.

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— _See also under_ Cain, Georges, and Masters of Art Series.

=Lawton, Lancelot.=

— Empires of the Far East: A Study of Japan and its Possessions, of
China, Manchuria, and Korea, and of the Political Questions of Eastern
Asia and the Pacific. Two volumes. Demy 8vo. cloth gilt, with Maps.
24_s._ net. [_In preparation._

— The Japanese Spy. With frontispiece in colour by Frank Haviland. 6s.

=Leblanc, Maurice.=

— Arsène Lupin versus Holmlock Shears. Translated by A. Teixeira de
Mattos. 6_s._

=Lee, Gerald Stanley.=

— Inspired Millionaires: A Story of the Professional Point of View in
Business. Crown 8vo. Cloth. 3s. 6d. net.

=Lee, Vernon.=—_See under_ Omar Series, The.

=Lefèvre, Félicité.=

— The Cock, the Mouse, and the Little Red Hen. With 24 full-page
pictures in colour by Tony Sarg. Large post 8vo. Cloth. 1s. 6d. net.
[_Out of print._

=Le Gallienne, Richard.=

— Omar Repentant. Fcap. 8vo. oblong. 2s. net.

=Level, Maurice.=

— The Grip of Fear. 6s.

=Leverson, Ada.=

— The Limit. With frontispiece in colour. 6s. [_Second Edition._

— Love’s Shadow. With frontispiece in Colour. 6s.

— The Twelfth Hour. With Frontispiece in colour by Frank Haviland. 6s.
[_Second Edition._

=Longfellow.=

— The Courtship of Miles Standish. Illustrated in colours by H. C.
Christy. Fcap. 4to. Cloth gilt. 7s. 6d. net. [_Out of print._

— Evangeline. Illustrated in colours by H. C. Christy. Fcap. 4to. Cloth
gilt. 7s. 6d. net. [_Out of print._

— Hiawatha. With sixty-eight pictures in colour and in black-and-white
by Harrison Fisher. Fcap. 4to. Cloth gilt. 7s. 6d. net.

=McCormick, Frederick.=

— The Tragedy of Russia in Pacific Asia. With reproductions of drawings
by the author, photographs, and maps. Two volumes. Royal 8vo. Cloth
gilt. 21s. net.

=McCutcheon, G. B.=

— Jane Cable. Illustrated. 6s. [_Out of print._

— Nedra. 6s. [_Out of print._

=Macfall, Haldane.=

— Ibsen: His Life, Art, and Significance. Illustrated by Joseph Simpson.
Imperial 16mo. 5s. net.

=Machen, Arthur.=

— The Hill of Dreams. With frontispiece by S. H. Sime. 6s.

— The House of Souls. With frontispiece by S. H. Sime. 6s.

=McLaren, Lady.=

— The Women’s Charter of Rights and Liberties. Crown 8vo. Paper covers.
6d. net.

=Malcolm, Ian.=

— Indian Pictures and Problems. Illustrated. Demy 8vo. Cloth gilt. 10s.
6d. net. [_Out of print._

=Masefield, John.=

— Multitude and Solitude. 6s.

— Captain Margaret. 6s.

— A Tarpaulin Muster. 3s. 6d. [_Out of print._

— The Tragedy of Nan, &c. Large post 8vo. Paper boards. 3s. 6d. net.
Cheap Edition. Fcap. 8vo. sewed, 1s. 6d. net. [_Second Edition._

— _See also under_ Dampier, Captain William.

=Mauzens, Frederic.=

— The Living Strong Box. Illustrated. 6s.

=Mason, Stuart.= _See under_ Wilde, Oscar.

=Maxwell, Gerald.=

— The Miracle Worker. With frontispiece in colour by Frank Haviland. 6s.
[_Out of print._

=Meredith, George.= _See under_ Hammerton, J. A.

=Moore, R. Hudson.=

— Children of Other Days. Illustrated. Crown 4to. Cloth. 4s. 6d. net.
[_Out of print._

=Murray, Kate.=

— The Blue Star. 6s.

=MASTERS OF ART SERIES.= Illustrated. Pott 8vo. Persian yapp, 3_s._ 6_d._
net. Lambskin gilt, each 3s. net. Cloth gilt, 2s. net.
        I. G. F. Watts: A Biography and an Estimate. By J. E. Phythian.
          [_Third Edition._
       II. Rodin. By Fredk. Lawton.
      III. Burne-Jones. By J. E. Phythian.
       IV. Rossetti. By Frank Rutter.
        V. Turner. By J. E. Phythian.
       VI. Whistler. By Frank Rutter.

=Montaigne, Michael Lord of.= _See under_ Elizabethan Classics,
The.

=Napoleon.=

— The Corsican: A Diary of Napoleon’s Life in his own Words. Large post
8vo. Cloth gilt. 7s. 6d. net.

=Oldmeadow, Ernest.=

— Portugal. With 32 illustrations. Demy 8vo. Cloth gilt. 10s. 6d. net.
[_In preparation._

— Day. With frontispiece in colour. 6s.

— Antonio. With frontispiece in colour by Frank Haviland. 6s.

— Aunt Maud. With frontispiece in colour by Frank Haviland. 6s.

— The Scoundrel. With frontispiece in colour by Frank Haviland. 6s.

— Susan. With frontispiece in colour by Frank Haviland. 6s.—Cheap
Edition. Crown 8vo. sewed, 1s. net. [_Fourth Edition._

— The North Sea Bubble: A Fantasia. Illustrated. 6s. [_Out of print._

— _See also under_ Temple of Fame, The.

=Olmsted, Millicent.=

— The Land of Never Was. With 12 illustrations in colour. Fcap. 4to.
Cloth. 3s. 6d. net.

=OMAR SERIES, THE.=—Royal 32mo. persian yapp gilt, each 1s. 6d. net;
leather gilt, 1s. net; cloth gilt, 6d. net.

— The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.

— A Shropshire Lad. By A. E. Housman.

— Early Poems of D. G. Rossetti.

— The Song of Songs.

— Sister Benvenuta and the Christ Child. By Vernon Lee.

— English Nature Poems: An Anthology.

— In Memoriam. By Alfred Lord Tennyson.

— Love Poems of Herrick: A Selection.

— Everyman. A Morality Play. [_In preparation._

=Phythian, J. E.=

— Fifty Years of Modern Painting: Corot to Sargent. Illustrated. Crown
8vo. Cloth gilt. 3s. 6d. net.

— _See also under_ Masters of Art Series.

=Purdie, Mrs.=

— Letters from a Grandmother. Illustrated. Crown 8vo. Cloth gilt. 2s.
6d.

=Ravenhill, Alice, and Catherine J. Schiff.=

— Household Administration: its Place in the Higher Education of Women.
Crown 8vo. Cloth gilt. 5s. net.

=‘Rector and the Rubrics, The.’= By the Author of ‘When it was Light.’
Crown 8vo. Cloth. 1s. 6d. net. Sewed, 1s. net.

=Richards, Herbert, M.A.=

— Platonica. Crown 8vo. Cloth. 7s. net.

— Aristophanes and Others. Crown 8vo. Cloth. 7s. net.

— Notes on Xenophon and Others. Crown 8vo. Cloth. 6s. net.

=Richardson, Frank.=

— Love, and Extras. 6s.

=Russell, Charles Edward.=

— Thomas Chatterton: The Story of a Strange Life, 1752-1770.
Illustrated. Demy 8vo. Cloth gilt. 7s. 6d. net.

=Russell, G. W. E.=

— A Pocketful of Sixpences: A Collection of Essays and Reminiscences.
Large post 8vo. Cloth gilt. 7s. 6d. net. [_Out of print._

— Seeing and Hearing. Large post 8vo. Cloth gilt. 7s. 6d. net. [_Out of
print._

— Some Threepenny Bits. Crown 8vo. Cloth gilt. 3s. 6d. net. [_Out of
print._

=Rutter, Frank.=

— _See under_ Masters of Art Series.

=Saleeby, C. W., M.D.=

— Health, Strength and Happiness: a Book of Practical Advice. Crown 8vo.
Cloth. 6s. net.

=Scarfoglio, Antonio.=

— Round the World in a Motor-car. With over 70 illustrations. Demy 8vo.
Cloth gilt 15s. net.

=Schiff, Catherine J.= _See under_ Ravenhill, Alice.

=Scott, A. MacCallum.=

— Through Finland to St. Petersburg. Illustrated. Crown 8vo. Cloth. 2s.
6d. net.

=Scott, John Reed.=

— Beatrix of Clare. Illustrated. 6s.

— The Colonel of the Red Huzzars. Illustrated. 6s. [_Out of print._

=Scott, Sir Walter.=

— Sir Walter Scott. Letters Written by Members of his Family to an Old
Governess. With an Introduction and Notes by the Warden of Wadham
College. Crown 8vo. Cloth. 5s. net. [_Out of print._

=Seccombe, Thomas.=

— _See under_ Elizabethan Classics, The.

=Sedgwick, S. N.=

— The Last Persecution. 6s.

=Shaw, Bernard.= _See under_ Jackson, Holbrook.

=Shelley, H. C.=

— Literary By-paths of Old England. Illustrated. Royal 8vo. Cloth gilt.
12s. 6d. net. [_Out of print._

=Smith, Miriam.=

— Poems. Fcap. 8vo. Cloth. 2s. 6d. net.

=Sickert, Robert.=

— The Bird in Song. With Frontispiece. Pott 8vo. Persian yapp, 3s. 6d.
net. Lambskin, gilt, 3s. 6d. net. Cloth gilt, 2s. net.

=Smith, Wellen.=

— Psyche and Soma: A Drama. Fcap. 8vo. Cloth. 3s. 6d. net.

=Sowerby, Githa and Millicent.=

— _See under_ Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

=Sterling, Mary B.=

— The Story of Sir Galahad. With 7 illustrations in colour by W. E.
Chapman. Pott 4to. Cloth. 5s. net.

=Stone, John.=

— Great Kleopatra: A Tragedy in Three Acts. Large post 8vo. Cloth. 3s.
6d. net.

=Stonham, Charles, C.M.G., F.R.C.S.=

— The Birds of the British Islands. With over 300 Photogravures by L. M.
Medland, F.Z.S. Complete in twenty parts. Royal 4to. 7s. 6d. net each.
Five volumes: Buckram gilt, 36s. net each. Half vellum, gilt, 42s. net
each. Half seal, gilt, 45s. net each.

=Swan, Mark E.=

— Top o’ the World. With 6 illustrations in colour and many in black and
white by Hy. Mayer. Pott 4to. Cloth. 3s. 6d. net.

=TEMPLE OF FAME, THE.= Illustrated. Crown 8vo. Cloth gilt. Each 3s. 6d.
net.
        I. Great Musicians. By Ernest Oldmeadow.
       II. Great English Poets. By Julian Hill.
      III. Great English Novelists. By Holbrook Jackson.
       IV. Great English Painters. By Francis Downman.
        V. Great Soldiers. By George Henry Hart.

=Thomas, Edward.=

— The Pocket Book of Poems and Songs for the Open Air. With End-papers
in Colour by William Hyde. Fcap. 8vo. Cloth gilt, 4s. net. Persian yapp,
in box, 5s. net.

=Thomas, Rose Haig.=

— The Doll’s Diary. With 24 illustrations by John Hassall. Crown 4to.
5s. net. [_Out of print._

=Thorburn, A.=

— _See under_ Grant Richards’s Nursery Library.

=Thorne, Guy.= _See under_ Duncan, Stanley.

=Troly-Curtin, Marthé.=

— Phrynette and London. 6s. [_Third Edition._

=Troubetskoy, Prince Pierre.=

— The Passer-By. 6s.

=Tweedale, Rev. C. L.=

— Man’s Survival after Death. Crown 8vo. Cloth. 6s. net.

=Tyler, Royall.=

— Spain: A Study of her Life and Arts. With 130 Illustrations in
half-tone. Demy 8vo. Cloth gilt. 12s. 6d. net [_Out of print._

=Trafford-Taunton, Winefride.=

— Igdrasil 6s. [_Out of print._

=Turner, Edgar, and Reginald Hodder.=

— The Armada Gold. 6s.

=Vance, Louis J.=

— The Bronze Bell. 6s.

— The Black Bag. Illustrated. 6s.

— The Brass Bowl. Illustrated. 6s.

— The Private War. Illustrated. 6s.

— Terence O’Rourke. 6s. [_Out of print._

— The Pool of Flame. 6s.

— Marrying Money. 6s.

=VENETIAN SERIES, THE.= Crown 16mo. Bound in cloth or in Venetian paper.
6d. net each.
        I. A Cypress Grove. By William Drummond of Hawthornden.
       II. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. By William Blake.
      III. The Ancient Mariner. By Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

=Verne, Jules.=

— The Chase of the Golden Meteor. Fully Illustrated. Crown 8vo. Cloth.
5s.

=Waistcoat Pocket Guides, The= With Plans. Royal 64mo. Limp Cloth. 1s. 6d.
net.

I. Paris. By Leonard Williams.

=Waters, W. G.=

— Traveller’s Joy: An Anthology. With End-papers in colour by William
Hyde. Cloth gilt, 4s. net. Persian yapp, in box, 5s. net. [_Second
Edition._

=Webb, Wilfred Mark.=

— The Heritage of Dress: Being Notes on the History and Evolution of
Clothes. With over 150 Illustrations by W. J. Webb. Medium 8vo. Cloth
gilt. 15s. net. [_Out of print._

=Weitenkampf, Frank.=

— How to Appreciate Prints. Illustrated. Large post 8vo. Cloth. 7s. 6d.
net. [_Out of print._

=Williamson, G. C.= _See under_ Allen, Grant, Historical
Guides.

=Withers, Percy, M.B., B.S.=

— Egypt of Yesterday and To-day. With 32 Reproductions from Photographs.
Crown 8vo. Cloth. 6s. net.

— A Garland of Childhood. Fcap. 8vo. Cloth gilt, 4s. net. Persian yapp,
in box, 5s. net.

=White, W. Holt.=

— The Earthquake: A Romance of London. 6s. Cheap Edition, crown 8vo.
sewed, 1s. net.

=Whitelock, W. Wallace.=

— When Kings go Forth to Battle. Illustrated. 6s.

=Williams, E. Baumer.=

— England’s Story for Children. With Illustrations in Colour and
Black-and-White by Norman Ault. Crown 8vo. Cloth. 3s. 6d. net.

=Williams, Leonard.= _See under_ Waistcoat Pocket Guides.

=Wilson, W. Lawler.=

— The Menace of Socialism. With Maps. Crown 8vo. 6s. net.

=Wood, Montagu.=

— A Tangled I. 6s.

=Wright, W. P.=

— The Garden Week by Week throughout the Year. With 100 practical
illustrations, and many others in colour and in black and white. Large
post 8vo. Cloth gilt. 6s. net. [_Second Edition._

— The Perfect Garden: How to Keep it Beautiful and Fruitful, with
Practical Hints on Economical Management and the Culture of all the
Principal Flowers, Fruits and Vegetables. With six illustrations in
Colour and many in black and white. Large post 8vo. 6s. net [_Third
Edition._

— Popular Garden Flowers. With six illustrations in Colour and many in
black and white. Large post 8vo. Cloth gilt. 6s. net.

=Wyndham, Horace.=

— Roses and Rue. 6s.

— The Flare of the Footlights. Cheap edition, 1s. net.

— Audrey the Actress. With frontispiece. 6s. [_Out of print._

=Xenophon.= _See under_ Richards, Herbert, M.A.

=Young, Filson.=

— Christopher Columbus and the New World of his Discovery. Illustrated.
With a Chapter by the Earl of Dunraven. Two vols. Demy 8vo. Buckram
gilt. 25s. net. [_Out of print._

— Venus and Cupid: An Impression in Prose after Velasquez in Colour.
Edition limited to 339 copies for sale in Great Britain; printed on
Arnold Hand-made paper, with a Photogravure Reproduction of the Rokeby
Venus. Crown 4to. 12s. 6d. net. Also 11 copies on Japanese vellum at £2
2s. net (of which 3 remain).

— The Sands of Pleasure. With frontispiece in colour by R. J. Pannett.
6s. Cheap edition, crown 8vo. sewed, with cover design by R. J. Pannett,
1s. net. [_Seventy-fifth Thousand._

— When the Tide Turns. 6s. [_Second Edition._

— The Wagner Stories. Large post 8vo. Persian yapp or cloth gilt. 5s.
net. [_Fourth Edition._

— Mastersingers. New Edition. Revised and Enlarged. With portrait. Large
post 8vo. Persian yapp or cloth gilt. 5s. net.

— More Mastersingers. With frontispiece. Large post 8vo. Persian yapp or
cloth gilt. 5s. net.

— Memory Harbour: Essays chiefly in Description. Imperial 16mo. Buckram
gilt. 5s. net.

— Ireland at the Cross Roads. New Edition. Crown 8vo. Cloth gilt. 3s.
6d. net.

— The Happy Motorist: An Introduction to the Use and Enjoyment of the
Motor Car. Crown 8vo. Cloth 3s. 6d. net.

— The Lover’s Hours. Fcap. 4to. 2s. 6d. net.

=Young, Rev. William.= _See under_ Baxter, Richard.



INDEX OF PRICES


=£11 5s. net.=
  The Birds of the British Islands (Five Vols.) Half seal gilt.


=£10 10s. net.=
  The Birds of the British Islands (Five Vols.). Half vellum gilt.


=£9 net.=
  The Birds of the British Islands (Five Vols.). Buckram gilt.


=£7 10s. net.=
  The Birds of the British Islands (in Twenty Parts).


=£2 2s. net.=
  Oxford, its Buildings and Gardens.
  Venus and Cupid. Jap. Vellum.


=£1 11s. 6d. net.=
  The Essays of Michael Lord of Montaigne. (Three Vols.)


=£1 5s. net.=
  Christopher Columbus (Two Vols.)
  Voyages of Captain William Dampier (Two Vols.).


=£1 4s. net.=
  Empires of the Far East. (Two Vols.)


=£1 1s. net.=
  Oxford, its Buildings and Gardens.
  The Tragedy of Russia in Pacific Asia. (Two Vols.)


=16s. net.=
  The Great Pacific Coast.
  Pekin to Paris.


=15s. net.=
  Round the World in a Motor Car.
  The Complete Wild-fowler.
  Queens of Old Spain.


=12s. 6d. net.=
  Mediterranean Moods.
  Manet and the French Impressionists.
  The Third French Republic.
  Balzac.
  Venus and Cupid.
  Ten Years of Motors and Motor Racing.


=10s. 6d. net.=
  Evolution in Italian Art.
  Shamrock Land.
  Portugal.
  The Romance of Steel.


=7s. 6d. net.=
  More Rutland Barrington.
  The Corsican.
  My Restless Life.
  A Shropshire Lad (yapp).
  Thomas Chatterton.
  Hiawatha.
  The Saints’ Everlasting Rest.
  Submarine Warfare.


=7s. net.=
  Aristophanes and Others.
  Platonica.


=6s. net.=
  The Menace of Socialism.
  Egypt of Yesterday and To-day.
  Health, Strength, and Happiness.
  A Shropshire Lad (buckram).
  Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
  Garden Week by Week.
  The Book of Georgian Verse.
  Finn the Wolfhound.
  Man’s Survival after Death.
  Notes on Xenophon and Others.
  The Perfect Garden.
  Popular Garden Flowers.


=6s.=
  Ingram.
  Day.
  Love, and Extras.
  Phrynette and London.
  Marrying Money.
  The Doctor’s Lass.
  Adventures of a Nice Young Man.
  The Children of the Gutter.
  Easy Money.
  The Man from the Moon.
  A Babe Unborn.
  Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford.
  Renée.
  The Upper Hand.
  The Boys’ Book of Airships.
  The Boys’ Book of Railways.
  The Boys’ Book of Steamships.
  The Boy’s Book of Locomotives.
  The Boys’ Book of Warships.
  The Crimson Conquest.
  Arsène Lupin versus Holmlock Shears.
  The Grip of Fear.
  The Limit.
  The Living Strong Box.
  Multitude and Solitude.
  Antonio.
  The Last Persecution.
  The Passer-By.
  The Bronze Bell.
  The Cliff End.
  The Heart Line.
  The Dual Heritage.
  The Individualist.
  The Japanese Spy.
  Love’s Shadow.
  Captain Margaret.
  Aunt Maud.
  Beatrix of Clare.
  The Armada Gold.
  The Black Bag.
  When Kings go forth to Battle.
  Roses and Rue.
  When the Tide Turns.
  The Scoundrel.
  The Unpardonable Sin.
  The Genteel A. B.
  The Brass Bowl.
  The Sands of Pleasure.
  Susan.
  The Message.
  The Twelfth Hour.
  The Hill of Dreams.
  The House of Souls.
  The Blue Star.
  The Miracle Worker.
  The Private War.
  The Broken Law.
  The Earthquake.
  Parson Brand.
  The Same Clay.
  The Pool of Flame.
  The Black Motor Car.
  A Tangled I.
  In Pastures New.
  The Butcher of Bruton Street.
  A Comedy of Mammon.


=5s. net.=
  More Mastersingers.
  The Last Episode of the French Revolution.
  The Theory of the Theatre.
  Household Administration.
  A Garland of Childhood.
  Æsop’s Fables.
  The Riddle of Personality.
  Cawein’s New Poems.
  Fleet Street and other Poems.
  Materials and Methods of Fiction.
  The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
  The Story of Sir Galahad.
  Memory Harbour.
  The Call of the Sea (persian yapp).
  Bernard Shaw.
  The Wagner Stories (leather and cloth).
  Mastersingers (leather and cloth).
  The Pocket Book of Poems and Songs for the Open Air (persian yapp).
  Traveller’s Joy (persian yapp.)
  Mammon and his Message.
  The Triumph of Mammon.
  The Theatrocrat.
  Essays in Socialism.
  Ibsen.
  The Gourmet’s Guide to Europe.


=5s.=
  The Sunken Submarine.
  The Chase of the Golden Meteor.


=4s. 6d. net.=
  D. Junii Juvenalis Saturæ.
  M. Manilii Astronomicon I.


=4s. net.=
  The Book of Camping and Woodcraft.
  The Call of the Sea (cloth).
  The Pocket Book of Poems and Songs for the Open Air (cloth).
  Traveller’s Joy (cloth).


=3s. 6d. net.=
  Great Kleopatra.
  Romance and Reality.
  An Imperial Commonwealth.
  Inspired Millionaires.
  Fifty Years of Modern Painting.
  Apollonius of Tyana.
  The Validity of English Ordinations.
  Jack the Giant Killer, Junior.
  Testament of John Davidson.
  Favourite Fish and Fishing.
  The Tragedy of Nan.
  The Land of Never Was.
  Top o’ the World.
  England’s Story for Children.
  Great Musicians.
  Great English Poets.
  Great English Novelists.
  Great English Painters.
  Great Soldiers.
  Her Brother’s Letters.
  Ireland at the Cross Roads.
  Grant Allen’s Historical Guides.
  Holiday and Other Poems.
  The Happy Motorist.
  The Canker at the Heart.
  Psyche and Soma.
  A Night of Wonders.
  The Bird in Song (leather).


=3s. 6d.=
  A Commentary.
  The Woman Who Did.


=3s. net.=
  Burne-Jones (leather).
  Rodin (leather).
  G. F. Watts (leather).
  Rossetti (leather).
  Turner (leather).
  Whistler (leather).
  Religio Medici (leather).


=2s. 6d. net.=
  The Nation and the Army.
  The Agamemnon of Æschylus.
  Mister Sharptooth.
  Consule Planco.
  Poems by Miriam Smith.
  Through Finland.
  The Lover’s Hours.
  The Chapbooks (leather).
  Through Portugal.
  The Defenceless Islands.
  Confessions of an Anarchist.
  A Shropshire Lad (hand-made paper).
  The Future Prime Minister.
  Chats about Wine.


=2s. 6d.=
  Letters from a Grandmother.


=2s. net.=
  Powder and Jam.
  Omar Repentant.
  Burne-Jones (cloth).
  Rodin (cloth).
  G. F. Watts (cloth).
  Rossetti (cloth).
  Turner (cloth).
  Whistler (cloth).
  The Bird in Song (cloth).
  The Christmas Book (leather).
  Religio Medici (cloth).


=1s. 6d. net.=
  The Tragedy of Nan (sewed).
  Waistcoat Pocket Guides.
  The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (Persian yapp).
  Early Poems of D. G. Rossetti (Persian yapp).
  The Song of Songs (persian yapp).
  Sister Benvenuta (persian yapp).
  A Shropshire Lad (persian yapp).
  English Nature Poems (persian yapp).
  In Memoriam (persian yapp).
  Love Poems of Herrick (persian yapp).
  Everyman (persian yapp).


=1s. net.=
  The Unpardonable Sin.
  Confessions of an Anarchist.
  Susan (sewed).
  Flare of the Footlights (sewed).
  The Sands of Pleasure (sewed).
  The Same Clay (sewed).
  Business Success (cloth).
  The Message (sewed).
  Bernard Shaw (sewed).
  The Rector and the Rubrics.
  The Earthquake (sewed).
  Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (leather).
  Early Poems of D. G. Rossetti (leather).
  The Song of Songs (leather).
  Sister Benvenuta (leather).
  A Shropshire Lad (leather).
  English Nature Poems (leather).
  In Memoriam (leather).
  Love Poems of Herrick (leather).
  Everyman (leather).
  The Christmas Book (cloth).


=6d. net.=
  Business Success (sewed).
  Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (cloth).
  The Song of Songs (cloth).
  The Early Poems of D. G. Rossetti (cloth).
  Sister Benvenuta (cloth).
  A Shropshire Lad (cloth).
  English Nature Poems (cloth).
  In Memoriam (cloth).
  Love Poems of Herrick (cloth).
  Everyman (cloth).
  The Venetian Series.
  The Woman’s Charter of Rights and Liberties.


=6d.=
  Essays in Socialism.


_London: Strangeways, Printers._





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