The Lusitania Murders by Max Allan Collins Page A

description-defying dining room (about which more later), these included a reception room and various lounges, as well as music, reading-and-writing and smoking rooms. In addition, the ship offered a barbershop, a lending library, a photographer’s dark room, a clothes pressing service, a separate dining saloon for valets and maids, and even a switchboard for its innovative room-to-room telephone system.
    I don’t consider myself easily impressed, but I felt as wide-eyed as a schoolgirl, strolling acres of deep carpetthrough first-class lounges extravagantly appointed with plush armchairs, marble fireplaces, grand pianos, rich drapes and expensive (if dull) oil paintings. A man of impeccable taste such as myself, marooned for months in cheap flats and ghastly garrets, could only wonder at this oasis of late-Georgian elegance, this world of silk waistcoats, gold watch chains, double-staffed settees, mahogany paneling, carved maple-topped tables and wrought-iron skylights.
    Since I was travelling first class, Anderson did not bother showing me a sample of the sumptuous cabins. But I quickly became as impressed with the size of the ship as I had been with the luxury of Saloon class—the damned thing seemed to go on forever, interminable corridors with their polished linoleum floors and a dizzying profusion of white, red and blue lights marking exits, fire extinguishers, washrooms, pantries and other shipboard appurtenances, all within a maze of decks and companionways, towering masts and funnels and, of course, self-important people, some of them passengers, others stewards or crew members, the officers with their gold braids and medal ribbons seeming to wear perpetual expressions of faint disapproval.
    Anderson was a pleasant exception to the latter, and I felt his genial nature was not due merely to my status as a member of the press. We passed between first, second and third class with no change in his attitude of friendliness toward passengers—a young man in ill-fitting clothing in steerage, seeking a new life in America, got the same nod and hello from Anderson as a Vanderbilt or Kessler.
    Now and then, however, the staff captain would showa sterner side, if he encountered a crewman whose dress or bearing was not up to snuff. We paused for three or four of these dressing-downs.
    Moving along from one of them, Anderson sighed and said, “It’s a problem, it is.”
    “What’s that?”
    He arched an eyebrow. “Off the record, sir?”
    “Certainly. My goal here is to build up, not to tear down.”
    “We are rather desperately understaffed,” * he admitted. “And some of the staff we have is, frankly, not up to snuff.”
    “That doesn’t sound like Cunard’s style.”
    “It isn’t. But the Royal Navy has scooped up many of our best crew, for the war effort. Finding able-bodied seamen for this trip was a chore, I must admit.”
    “You don’t seem entirely satisfied with the result.”
    “I’m not. There are crew members aboard who’ve never sailed other than as a passenger.”
    This was the staff captain’s only negative remark of the tour, and I must say the meticulous craftsmanship of the ship’s construction carried over into the second and third classes. The public rooms of second class—from dining saloon to smoking room—could have been taken for those of the first class of almost any other ship sailing the North Atlantic. Plainer in style (white remained, gold did not), the public rooms were large and well-appointed; the example of a stateroom—a four-berth—that Anderson saw fit to show me was only a small step down from my own.

    If the Second Cabin staircase may not have been as grand as the one in Saloon, the structure could only be deemed impressively handsome, on its own terms.
    Third Class was no dark, cramped hold stuffed with human bilge, rather a functional if austere succession of bare-bones public rooms—the dining room was like a gymnasium with tables—that made no attempt to