Shipwrecks -- North Atlantic Ocean -- History; Titanic (Steamship)
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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