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get done to-morrow."
Nevertheless, it proved to be a very human world, a world in which the
personal equation counted. I remember that while some four hundred in
one long hall were applauding "Home, Sweet Home," very badly
fiddled by a gay man on a stool ("Home, Sweet Home"--and half of
them Scandinavians!), and another four hundred or so were sitting
expectant on those multifarious convenient staircases or wandering in
and out of the maze of cubicles that contained fifteen hundred separate
berths, and a third four hundred or so in another long hall were
consuming a huge tea offered to them by a cohort of stewards in
white--I remember that while all this was going forward and the
complex mechanism of the kitchen was in full strain a little, untidy
woman, with an infant dragging at one hand and a mug in the other,
strolled nonchalantly into the breathless kitchen, and said to a hot cook,
"Please will you give me a drop o' milk for this child?" And under the
military gaze of the high officer, too! Something awful should have

happened. The engines ought to have stopped. The woman ought to
have been ordered out to instant execution. The engines did seem to
falter for a moment. But the high officer grimly smiled, and they went
on again. "Give me yer mug, mother," said the cook. And the untidy
woman went off with her booty.
"Now I'll show you the first-class kitchens," the high officer said, and
guided me through uncharted territories to chambers where spits were
revolving in front of intense heat, and where a confectionery business
proceeded, night and day, and dough was mixed by electricity, and
potatoes peeled by the same, and where a piece of clockwork lifted an
egg out of boiling water after it had lain therein the number of seconds
prescribed by you. And there, pinned to a board, was the order I had
given for a special dinner that night. And there, too, more impressive
even than that order, was a list of the several hundred stewards,
together with a designation of the post of each in case of casualty. I
noticed that thirty or forty of them were told off "to control
passengers." After all, we were in the midst of the Atlantic, and in a
crisis the elevator-boys themselves would have more authority than any
passenger, however gorgeous. A thought salutary for gorgeous
passengers--that they were in the final resort mere fool bodies to be
controlled! After I had seen the countless store-rooms, in the recesses
of each of which was hidden a clerk with a pen behind his ear and a
nervous and taciturn air, and passed on to the world of the second cabin,
which was a surprisingly brilliant imitation of the great world of the
saloon, I found that I held a much-diminished opinion of the great
world of the saloon, which I now perceived to be naught but a thin
crust or artificial gewgaw stuck over the truly thrilling parts of the ship.
It was not, however, till the next day that I realized what the most
thrilling part of the ship was. Under the protection of another high
officer I had climbed to the bridge--seventy-five feet above the level of
the sea--which bridge had been very seriously disestablished by an
ambitious wave a couple of years before--and had there inspected the
devices for detecting and extinguishing fires in distant holds by merely
turning a handle, and the charts and the telephones and the telegraphs,
and the under-water signaling, and the sounding-tubes, and the officers'

piano; and I had descended by way of the capstan-gear (which, being
capable of snapping a chain that would hold two hundred and sixty tons
in suspension, was suitably imprisoned in a cage, like a fierce wild
animal) right through the length of the vessel to the wheel-house aft. It
was comforting to know that if six alternative steering-wheels were
smashed, one after another, there remained a seventh gear to be worked,
chiefly by direct force of human arm. And, after descending several
more stories, I had seen the actual steering--the tremendous affair
moving to and fro, majestic and apparently capricious, in obedience to
the light touch of a sailor six hundred feet distant. And then I had seen
the four shafts, revolving lazily one hundred and eighty-four to the
minute; and got myself involved in dangerous forests of greasy
machinery, whizzing all deserted in a very high temperature under
electric bulbs. Only at rare intervals did I come across a man in brown
doing nothing in particular--as often as not gazing at a dial; there were
dials everywhere, showing pressures and speeds. And then I had come
to the dynamo-room, where the revolutions were twelve hundred to the
minute, and