Chapter 9 - Our Little City at Sea
By April 12, Titanic no longer felt unfamiliar.
That surprised me most.
Only two days earlier I had been unable to find my cabin.
Now I had routines.
I woke early.
Washed.
Dressed.
Walked the same corridor.
Took the same staircase.
Ate breakfast.
Went outside.
Wrote until my fingers became cold.
Returned for coffee.
Visited whatever part of the ship interested me that day.
Somewhere along the way, Titanic had stopped being a wonder I was touring and become the place where I lived.
Not home.
But temporarily ours.
A little city at sea.
I began recognizing people.
The man who walked the promenade every morning at exactly the same brisk pace.
The woman with the small white dog.
A boy who hated wearing his hat.
The steward who always carried too many towels at once.
A waiter who remembered I preferred coffee without sugar.
Ordinary familiarity was growing inside an extraordinary place.
Henry Palmer met me that afternoon during one of my permitted visits to the Second Class promenade.
He was reading.
“You’re supposed to be admiring the ocean,” I said.
“I did that yesterday.”
“It changed.”
“Still water?”
“Mostly.”
He closed his book.
We walked.
Second Class was quieter than First in some respects.
Less performance.
Fewer servants.
More people traveling for practical reasons.
Teachers.
Clergymen.
Merchants.
Middle-class families.
Passengers comfortable enough to travel well but not interested—or able—to spend fortunes doing it.
Henry pointed toward the horizon.
“What do you think is out there?”
“New York.”
“No, right there.”
“Water.”
“Excellent journalism.”
We laughed.
Later, he asked what I planned to write about.
“Everything.”
“That’s not an article.”
“I’m discovering that.”
“What’s the story?”
I looked around.
Children walked with parents.
A couple stood by the rail.
The Atlantic flashed silver beneath broken sunlight.
“I thought the story was the ship.”
“And now?”
“I think it may be what people do inside it.”
Henry nodded.
“That sounds more expensive.”
“For my editor?”
“For your notebook.”
That evening I watched the sunset from the aft end.
The wake turned gold.
Smoke stretched eastward.
A group nearby sang quietly.
Someone had brought a concertina.
I recognized none of the songs.
It did not matter.
The sea was calm.
Titanic moved with such little noticeable motion that I had to watch the wake to remind myself we were traveling nearly twenty knots.
Later I descended toward my cabin.
Passing the machinery spaces was impossible for passengers, of course, but sometimes the ship let you hear what lived underneath the carpets.
A vibration through a wall.
A distant metallic rhythm.
The low thunder of power transmitted through steel.
I asked Samuel how many men worked below.
“Enough that you should be grateful to every one of them.”
“Hot down there?”
He gave me a look.
“Very.”
While we ate well and complained about cold wind, firemen and trimmers worked in intense heat feeding coal to Titanic’s boilers.
That image stayed with me.
The ship possessed two climates.
Cold Atlantic above.
Furnace heat below.
And between them, passengers drank tea.
At night I returned outside.
The stars were clearer now.
I had never seen so many.
Without city lights, the sky looked deeper.
The ocean beneath it looked darker.
It became difficult to tell where one ended and the other began.
A strange thought occurred to me.
Titanic seemed enormous during the day.
At night, beneath that sky, she seemed very small.
I did not write that down immediately.
Instead, I listened.
Wind.
Water.
Engines.
Footsteps behind me.
Then a door opened and warm yellow light spilled across the deck.
Someone laughed inside.
The moment passed.
I went in.
May you like
We still had several days before New York.
There was no reason to spend too much time thinking about darkness.
