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.