Unpacking in my cabin as we moved down the Hudson—the ship rock-steady, our motion smooth as a billiard ball rolling on felt—I’d glimpsed the city, so close, sliding swiftly past my cabin window. And by the time I reached the promenade deck in my spiffy new walking duds, we’d passed the tip of Manhattan, passed the Ambrose Lightship, and the great open sea lay ahead.
The Mauretania, the most loved of them all. Franklin Roosevelt said, “She always fascinated me with her graceful, yachtlike lines, her four enormous black-banded red funnels, and her appearance of power and good breeding . . . if there ever was a ship which possessed the thing called ‘soul,’ the Mauretania did. . . . Every ship has a soul. But the Mauretania had one you could talk to. . . . As Captain Rostron once said to me, she had the manners and deportment of a great lady and behaved herself as such.” In the Smithsonian, if you hunt for it and ask enough questions, you’ll find it: F.D.R.’s own model of the loved Mauretania.
There is nothing to do aboard an ocean liner, nothing you need to do. You’re a child again, everything taken care of by Mommy and Daddy. So you change clothes, several times a day. Go out and walk the promenade deck, around and around, counting the laps, breathing the utterly clean air, feeling new health move through your veins. Then you sit in a deck chair, and a steward brings you hot bouillon, which you never drink anywhere else, but here you like it. You’re a prince but a prisoner, too: you can’t change your mind now. You are here on this ship and will stay here, nothing to be done about that. But this new absence of ability or need to decide is liberating. And you give in to the deliciousness of being taken care of. Spend hours in a deck chair, blanket tucked around you by a deck steward, your smile of thanks almost that of an invalid. The immense book you brought along, or got from the library, may lie unread as you doze or stare at the sea or chat with your neighbor.
Nothing to do, and it keeps you busy. I moved through and lounged in the great rooms I’d seen the night Archie sailed, the splendid arched ceilings of patterned glass now bright with the daylight of the open sea. These majestic rooms belonged to us now, the chosen few, never crowded, ours alone.
You eat; astonishing meals, delicious, and anything you want, anything, the Mauretania boasted, and lived up to it. And on the deck öf this lovely ship, the ocean as you’ve never experienced it before. You’re afloat in it, you’re of it now, it’s the element you live in. I loved it; here I saw that the horizon is a circle, with us always precisely at its center. I watched the distant glints of far-off waves, saw them rolling away beside us, saw a far-off school of porpoises curving in and out of the ocean.
Nothing to do, and all the time in the world to do it. For an hour at a time or longer, I’d stand at the stern of the Mauretania leaning on the rail, watching the wake endlessly line out behind us. Watching it had the hypnotic fascination of staring at the flames in a fireplace, seeing the broad light green road we’d just traveled, lying in sharp contrast to the gray-black of the sea beside it. Those deep, deep propellers, taller than a small building, endlessly thrusting up that green water so powerfully that I never saw the wake behind us subside. Always it lay stretched out further back than I could see, the long road along which we had moved. Now and then as it lined out behind us, a little squiggle would appear at right or left, a little bend in our path over the ocean, reflecting the small turns of the helmsman’s wheel twitching the great rudder into endless tiny corrections of our course.
I talked to people leaning on the rail beside me. Or sitting in the next deck chair. Or barstool. And of course to the people beside and across from me in the great dining room. And I fell very easily in love with the Mauretania.
But for me and everyone else, beginning after breakfast on our last full day at sea, it all changed, life’s demands again reaching out for us. And we talked about arrival times, destinations, and plans, and when the sea turned rough, and we reduced speed, and were told we’d be late, arriving in Liverpool well after dark, we grumbled.
Finally, at anchor in the Mersey just off the Liverpool dock—not deep enough for the draft of this ship, or the tide too low, I never learned which—the passengers for Ireland stood at the railing watching the others go off in ship’s boats.
And at ten-fifteen, our luggage already transferred, we stepped from an open hatchway at just above sea level—lighted by a Mauretania searchlight—onto the deck of T.S.S. (twin-screw steamer) Heroic, a slim handsome little one-stack ferry. At my steward’s advice I’d booked a cabin; the Irish Sea would be rough, and nothing to see in the dark anyway.
It was rough. I slept pretty well, but awakened a lot; we rolled from side to side, and we pitched stem to stern, moving at eighteen knots. And I heard the sea, loud and close. During the night someone passing my cabin said, “Allaman,” as it sounded, and I understood that we must be passing the Isle of Man, but I didn’t care.
Around five-thirty or six, daylight, I went out on deck; our motion much quieter now because we were steaming up the land-sheltered Belfast Lough, the mouth of the River Lagan, an Irish passenger told me. We reached the Dunbar’s Dock a little past six, but berthing took a while, and I stood looking out at what I could see of Belfast: sheds . . . a mountain dominating the skyline . . . chimneys, already smoking . . . a clock tower . . . a city. A real city; four hundred thousand people lived here.
Cabs waiting on the broad dock—I guess you’d say cabs. These were pony-drawn traps, some open, some closed, not an automobile to be seen. And for the Grand Central Hotel, there stood an omnibus—it looked to me like a stretch stagecoach, four windows long—two horses, and a uniformed porter waiting. He loaded my luggage up on top, along with that of two other passengers, one a woman in full mourning including black veil. Ten minutes to the hotel on Royal Street, the best hotel in town, the Mauretania steward had told me. I liked it; lots of polished wood, glass, tile floor, and potted palms in the lobby. A stack of newspapers on the desk as I registered, and I bought one, the Northern Whig. A nice large room then, with a big brass bedstead, long lace curtains, heavy down comforter, washbowl and pitcher on the dresser. No bathroom; that was down the hall.
Back in the lobby, I said to the clerk, “I have business with Harland and Wolff; is it a walking distance?” Yes, if I enjoyed walking, and he brought out a map and showed me the route, easy enough, it looked, always heading toward the River Lagan.
Outside then, but not to Harland and Wolff, not yet; now I just wandered in Belfast, and what I saw was a crowded, noisy, cluttered, purely Victorian city, nothing I saw newly built. This was a city of stone, at least downtown here, mostly low two- and three-story commercial buildings. Streets clanging with traffic, all horse-drawn except for some of the great double-decked red buses, upper decks unroofed. These were trolley buses on electrified streets, but horse-drawn on other streets. On the front of every bus, a sign reading, Marsh’s Biscuits. Besides the buses, every kind of horse-drawn vehicle, and I saw a two-wheeled cart pulled by three boys. Not a single automobile—I saw none. Pedestrians crossed the streets wherever and whenever they chose, and there were advertising signs everywhere: Cerebos, whatever that meant, and Co-Op Bread, and plenty of music hall ads.