Women and Children First Read Online Free PDF

kept an eye on the saloon door watching for the girl from the boat deck to arrive. He was curious to find out whether she was travelling with a husband or, if she was unmarried, who was chaperoning her. They certainly weren’t doing a very good job. Women like her would never travel alone. It simply wasn’t done.
    First class was full of beautiful women. Some had looks that owed a substantial debt to artifice, but others were natural stunners. Even at breakfast, they wore fancy gowns in expensive velvets and silks with lace trimmings, and they all had hats with feathers and bows pinned to their heads. Every lady in first class wore a hat for breakfast and lunch and some kind of headdress for dinner. It was a regular fashion parade. Florence would have enjoyed looking at the clothes, he thought. She liked nice clothes. He’d gone with her a few times to browse through the rails in Tyrrell & Green’s department store, although she could seldom afford to buy more than a new pair of gloves or a length of lace to trim a petticoat.
    Breakfast service ended at 10.30 and there had been no sign of the girl from the boat deck. Maybe she was having a lie-in, or perhaps she had chosen to dine at one of the ship’s cafés or the à la carte restaurant. He cleared the last plates from his tables and set them for luncheon, then caught his friend John’s eye and motioned with two fingers to his lips that he would meet him down in the mess for a fag. John nodded, but he had a table who were being slow to finish their meal, so Reg went on ahead.
    He stopped in at the dorm to pick up his fags and wrinkled his nose at the vegetable smell of farts and feet and armpits; the twenty-seven men who slept there wouldn’t have a bath till they reached New York so it was sure to get worse each day. There were only two baths for the eight-hundred-plus crew members, and a separate one for the officers. Reg opened a couple of portholes and jammed them ajar with iron shoots from the store cupboard. That should help. Then he took the fags and matches and made his way to the stewards’ mess, where he sat down and waited for John to arrive so they could light up at the same time.
    Reg wasn’t a big smoker. Some stewards were always nipping off for a fag and getting antsy when they were forced to go too long without one, but for Reg it was just a punctuation mark in the day, a chance to put his feet up and socialise. He collected the cigarette cards for his little brothers, and they’d never forgive him if he gave up, but generally he could take it or leave it.
    ‘You’ll never guess what I saw last night!’ Reg told John after they’d both exhaled the first drag. ‘One of my passengers, Mr Grayling, fooling around on the boat deck with a girl less than half his age while his wife is in their suite just a couple of decks below.’
    John was unsurprised. ‘Goes on all the time with these people. They have different rules to you and me. It’s not just the men either. The women do it as well.’
    ‘Get away with you.’ Reg frowned.
    ‘Colonel Astor’s first wife had an affair and the whole of New York knew about it. They say his daughter isn’t really his. Now he’s got divorced and married again and they’re all pointing the finger and saying he shouldn’t have remarried, but if you ask me his wife was the one that started it.’
    Reg had heard something of the kind before but hadn’t paid much attention. ‘They sit in your section, don’t they? What do you think of the new wife?’
    John wrinkled his nose and gave it some thought. ‘Bit of a mousy thing. She’ll let him be the boss, though. She won’t be running off with fancy men, not like the last one.’
    ‘She’s only young. Eighteen, I heard, and he’s nearly fifty. I don’t know why a girl would want to do that.’
    John rolled his eyes comically. ‘Hundred million dollars in the bank? I’d marry him for that!’
    ‘I don’t think you’re his type somehow.’ John