Titanic - Filson Young (reading in the dark .TXT) 📗

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