Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [124]
Once the voyage was under way, he disappeared into the ship’s wireless cabin, to conduct further experiments and to manage the receipt of news for the onboard newspaper, the Cunard Bulletin.
Left to herself, Beatrice sought to enjoy the ship, one of the most luxurious in Cunard’s fleet. The dining saloon that served first-class passengers had Corinthian columns and ten-foot ceilings. A central shaft rose thirty feet through the decks above to a dome of stained glass at the top of the ship. The crew of 415 included more than one hundred stewards and stewardesses, who sought to satisfy every legal need. The ship served four meals a day, prepared by forty-five chefs and bakers and their helpers. As Beatrice walked the thrumming decks, she delighted in the celebrity accrued to her by the fact of her marriage to Marconi.
The attention given her once again caused Marconi to react with jealous anger. Degna wrote, “When her husband did emerge from the wireless cabin and found her talking to the other passengers, he led her stonily to their stateroom and lectured her about flirting.” Marconi taught her Morse code, though she had little interest in learning. Degna suspected he did so in part to prevent Beatrice from wandering the decks and returning the smiles of the Campania’s other male passengers.
One day Beatrice entered their stateroom to find Marconi consigning his dirty socks to the sea through a porthole. Stunned, she asked him why.
His explanation: It was more efficient to get new ones than wait for them to be laundered.
THEY STOPPED BRIEFLY in New York and traveled to Oyster Bay on Long Island to have lunch with Theodore Roosevelt. They met his daughter Alice, who later reported that they were a handsome couple and seemed very happy with each other. They sailed to Nova Scotia, where snow still lay on the ground and the four towers of the newly completed station stood over the landscape like sentries. They moved into the nearby house, which they were to share with Richard and Jane Vyvyan and their daughter. The child was nearly one and a half years old, not the easiest age to manage, especially in close quarters. And these quarters were close. Beatrice had grown up in a castle with rooms seemingly beyond number. This house had a living room, a dining room, two bedrooms, and a single small bathroom. Marconi left Beatrice with Jane and her daughter and immediately joined Vyvyan at Marconi Towers, where they began adjusting and tuning the apparatus.
The new station encompassed two square miles. The four towers stood at its center. Next came a ring of twenty-four masts, each 180 feet tall, and beyond them another ring, consisting of forty-eight poles, each fifty feet tall. Over it all was draped an umbrella of wire with a diameter of 2,900 feet, comprising fifty-four miles of wire. Another fifty-four lay in ditches below.
Every day Marconi walked down the “corduroy” road of felled trees to the station compound and remained there for most of each day, while back at the house Beatrice confronted a situation wholly new to her experience. She possessed only limited domestic skills but nonetheless tried to help around the house, only to have Mrs. Vyvyan refuse her offers of assistance in a manner as cold as the weather outside. At first Beatrice kept her unhappiness from Marconi, but after days of enduring such behavior, she broke down and, weeping, told Marconi about all that had happened.
The news made Marconi furious. He was ready to charge out to the living room to confront the Vyvyans, but Beatrice stopped him. She knew how much Marconi depended on Vyvyan. She resolved to confront Mrs. Vyvyan herself.
Now it was Jane Vyvyan who burst into tears. She confessed that she had feared that Beatrice, as the daughter of