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