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.