A Night to Remember (18 page)

And the press joined in. The
Evening Sun
ran a banner headline:

ALL SAVED FROM TITANIC AFTER COLLISION

The story reported all passengers transferred to the
Parisian
and the
Carpathia,
with the
Titanic
being towed by the
Virginian
to Halifax.

Even business seemed confident. At first the news reinsurance rate on the
Titanic
’s cargo soared to 50 percent, then to 60 percent. But as optimism grew, London rates dropped back to 50 percent, then to 45 … 30 … and finally 25 percent.

Meanwhile Marconi stock skyrocketed. In two days it soared 55 points to 225. Not bad for a stock that brought only two dollars just a year ago. And IMM—the great combine that controlled the White Star Line—was now recovering after a shaky start in the morning.

Yet rumors were beginning to spread. No official word, but wireless men listening in on the Atlantic traffic picked up disturbing messages not meant for their ears, and relayed the contents anyhow. During the afternoon a Cunard official heard from a friend downtown that the
Titanic
was definitely gone. A New York businessman wired a friend in Montreal the same thing. Franklin heard too, but the source seemed unreliable so he decided to keep quiet.

At 6:15 the roof fell in. Word finally arrived from the
Olympic:
the
Titanic
went down at 2:20
A.M.;
the
Carpathia
picked up all the boats and was returning to New York with the 675 survivors. The message had been delayed in transit several hours. Nobody knows why, but there has never been any evidence supporting the
World’s
suggestion that it was the work of Wall Street bears and shippers reinsuring their cargoes.

Franklin was still steeling himself to tell the public when the clock in the White Star office struck seven. An alert reporter smelled the gloom in the air, took a chance, and barged into the manager’s private office. Others followed. “Gentlemen,” Mr. Franklin stammered, “I regret to say that the
Titanic
sank at 2:20 this morning.”

At first that was all he would say, but bit by bit the reporters chipped out admissions. At 8:00 the
Olympic’s
message “neglected to say that all the crew had been saved.” At 8:15: “Probably a number of lives had been lost.” At 8:45: “We very much fear there has been a great loss of life.” By 9:00 he couldn’t keep up the front any longer: it was a “horrible loss of life” … they could replace the ship but “never the human lives.”

At 10:30 Vincent Astor arrived and disappeared into Franklin’s office. In a little while he left weeping. On a hunch a reporter phoned Mrs. John Jacob Astor’s father, W. H. Force. “Oh, my God,” cried the old gentleman, “don’t tell me that! Where did you get that report from? It isn’t true! It can’t be true!”

No one could reach the Strauses’ daughter, Mrs. Alfred Hess. Early that afternoon she had taken the special train chartered by the White Star Line to meet the supposedly crippled
Titanic
at Halifax. By 8:00 the train was lumbering through the Maine countryside, as Mrs. Hess sat in the diner chatting with reporters. She was the only woman on board, and it was rather fun.

She was just starting some grapefruit when the train slowed, stopped, and then began moving backward. It never stopped until Boston. There she learned, “Plans have changed; the
Titanic
’s people are going straight to New York.” So she took the sleeper back and was met at the gate by her brother early the next morning: “Things look pretty bad.”

By now the first survivor list was up, and crowds again stormed the White Star office. Mrs. Frank Farquharson and Mrs. W. H. Marvin came together to learn about their children, who were coming back from their honeymoon. The bride’s mother, Mrs. Farquharson, gave a happy little yelp when she spied the name “Mrs. Daniel Marvin”; then managed to stifle it when she saw no “Mr.” listed beside it.

Mrs. Ben Guggenheim clung to the hope that some lifeboat was missing. “He may be drifting about!” she sobbed.

And he might have been, for all anyone knew. Nobody could get any information out of the
Carpathia
—Rostron was saving his wireless for official traffic and private messages from the survivors—so the newspapers made up their stories. The
Evening World
told of a fog, the
Titanic
’s booming siren, a crash like an earthquake. The
Herald
described how the ship was torn asunder, plunged into darkness, almost capsized at the moment of impact.

When imagination ran low, the papers took it out on the silent rescue ship. The
Evening Mail
thundered:

WATCHERS ANGERED BY CARPATHIA’S SILENCE

The
World
pouted:

CARPATHIA LETS NO SECRETS OF THE TITANIC’S LOSS ESCAPE BY WIRELESS

So Tuesday turned to Wednesday … and Wednesday to Thursday … and still there was no news. The weeklies were caught now.
Harper’s Weekly
described the prominent people aboard, featuring Henry Sleeper Harper, a member of the family who owned the magazine. It conjured a fog and a frightful shock; then remarked a little lamely, “As to what happened, all is still surmise.” But
Harper’s
assured its readers that the rule was women and children first, “the order long enforced among all decent men who use the sea.” Next issue, the magazine turned a possible embarrassment into a journalistic scoop when Henry Sleeper Harper turned up complete with Pekingese and personal Egyptian dragoman.
Harper’s
happily announced an exclusive interview.

Thursday night the wait ended. As the
Carpathia
steamed by the Statue of Liberty, 10,000 watched from the Battery. As she edged toward Pier 54, 30,000 more stood in the waterfront rain. To the end Rostron had no truck with newsmen. He wouldn’t let them on the ship at Quarantine, and as the
Carpathia
steamed up the North River, tugs chugged beside her, full of reporters shouting questions through megaphones.

At 8:37 she reached the pier and began unloading the
Titanic
’s lifeboats so she could be warped in. They were rowed off to the White Star pier, where souvenir hunters picked them clean during the night. (The next day men were put to work in each boat, sandpapering off the name
Titanic.)

At 9:35 the
Carpathia
was moored, the gangplank lowered, and the first survivors tumbled off. Later a brown canvas carryall, its two-by-three-inch sides bulging, was taken off and placed under Customs letter G. Customs officials said it was the only luggage saved from the
Titanic.
Owner Samuel Goldenberg denied such foresight. He claimed he bought it on board the
Carpathia.
He said it contained only the clothes he wore off the
Titanic
and a few accessories purchased on the rescue ship—pajamas, coat, trousers, dressing gown, raincoat, slippers, two rugs, shirt, collars, toilet goods, and shoes for his wife and himself.

The
Carpathia
’s arrival made clear who survived, but it didn’t unravel what had happened. The survivors added their own myths and fables to the fiction conjured up on shore. For some the heartbreaking trip back was too much. Others were simply carried away by the excitement. The more expansive found themselves making a good story even better. The more laconic had their experiences improved by reporters. Some were too shocked, some too ashamed.

Newspaper interviews reported that Second Class passenger Emilio Portaluppi rode a cake of ice for hours … Miss Marie Young saw the iceberg an hour before the collision … Seaman Jack Williams and William French watched six men shot down like dogs … Philadelphia banker Robert W. Daniel took over the
Carpathia
’s wireless during the trip back. All the evidence went against such stories, but the public was too excited to care.

The sky was the limit. The April 19v
New York Sun
had First Class passenger George Brayton saying:

“The moon was shining and a number of us who were enjoying the crisp air were promenading about the deck. Captain Smith was on the bridge when the first cry from the lookout came that there was an iceberg ahead. It may have been 300 feet high when I saw it. It was probably 200 yards away and dead ahead. Captain Smith shouted some orders … a number of us promenaders rushed to the bow of the ship. When we saw we could not fail to hit it, we rushed to the stern. Then came a crash, and the passengers were panic-stricken … The accident happened at about 10:30
P.M.
… about midnight, I think, came the first boiler explosion. Then, for the first time, I think, Captain Smith began to get worried …”

Carpathia
Seaman Jonas Briggs’ interview told the story of Rigel, a handsome black Newfoundland dog, who jumped from the deck of the sinking
Titanic
and escorted a lifeboat to the
Carpathia,
his joyous barks signaling Captain Rostron that he was coming.

Personal thoughts weighed heavily on the minds of some. Lookout Reginald Lee—it seemed a century since that dreadful moment when his mate Fleet sighted the berg—told of a haze on the horizon, remembered Fleet saying, “Well, if we can see through that, we’ll be lucky.” Fleet never recalled the conversation.

An interview with one of the men in First Class gave this careful explanation of his presence in No. 7, the first boat to leave:

“On one point all the women were firm. They would not enter a lifeboat until all the men were in it first. They feared to trust themselves to the seas in them. It required courage to step into the frail craft as they swung from the creaking davits. Few men were willing to take the chance. An officer rushed behind me and shouted, ‘You’re big enough to pull an oar. Jump into this boat or we’ll never get the women off.’ I was forced to do so, though I admit the ship looked a great deal safer to me than any small boat.”

Gradually the full story emerged, but many of the engaging tales born these first few days have lingered ever since—the lady who refused to leave her Great Dane … the band playing, “Nearer My God to Thee” … Captain Smith and First Officer Murdoch committing suicide … Mrs. Brown running No. 6 with a revolver.

But legends are part of great events, and if they help keep alive the memory of gallant self-sacrifice, they serve their purpose. At the time, however, no legends were needed to drive home the story. People were overwhelmed by the tragedy. Flags everywhere flew half-mast. Macy’s and the Harris theaters were closed. The French line called off a reception on the new
SS France.
In Southampton, where so many of the crew lived, grief was staggering—20 families on one street bereaved. Montreal called off a military review. King George and President Taft exchanged condolences—and the Kaiser got into the act. J. S. Bache & Co. canceled its annual dinner. J. P. Morgan called off the inauguration of a new sanitarium he was building at Aix-les-Bains.

Even the Social Register was shaken. In these days the ship that people traveled on was an important yardstick in measuring their standing, and the Register dutifully kept track. The tragedy posed an unexpected problem. To say that listed families crossed on the
Titanic
gave them their social due, but it wasn’t true. To say they arrived on the plodding
Carpathia
was true, but socially misleading. How to handle this dilemma? In the case of those lost, the Register dodged the problem—after their names it simply noted the words, “died at sea, April 15, 1912.” In the case of the living, the Register carefully ran the phrase, “Arrived
Titan-Carpath,
April 18, 1912.” The hyphen represented history’s greatest sea disaster.

What troubled people especially was not just the tragedy—or even its needlessness—but the element of fate in it all. If the
Titanic
had heeded any of the six ice messages on Sunday … if ice conditions had been normal … if the night had been rough or moonlit … if she had seen the berg 15 seconds sooner—or 15 seconds later … if she had hit the ice any other way … if her watertight bulkheads had been one deck higher … if she had carried enough boats … if the
Californian
had only come. Had any one of these “ifs” turned out right, every life might have been saved. But they all went against her—a classic Greek tragedy.

These thoughts were yet to come to the
Carpathia
turned toward New York in the bright morning sunshine of April 15. At this point the survivors still slumped exhausted in deck chairs or sipped coffee in the dining saloon or absently wondered what they would wear.

The
Carpathia
’s passengers pitched in gallantly—digging out extra toothbrushes, lending clothes, sewing smocks for the children out of steamer blankets brought along in the lifeboats. A Macy’s wine buyer bound for Portugal became a sort of guardian angel for the three rescued Gimbel’s buyers. Mrs. Louis Ogden took cups of coffee to two women in gay coats and scarfs sitting alone in a corner. “Go away,” they said, “we have just seen our husbands drown.”

For some of the survivors life began again—Lawrence Beesley busily scribbled off a wireless message that he was safe. For others it took longer. Colonel Gracie lay under a pile of blankets on a sofa in the dining saloon while his clothes dried in the bake oven. Bruce Ismay sat trembling in the Surgeon’s cabin, shot full of opiates. Harold Bride came to, lying in somebody’s stateroom; a woman was bending over him, and he felt her hand brushing back his hair and rubbing his face.

Jack Thayer was in another cabin nearby. A kindly man had lent him pajamas and a bunk. Now Thayer was getting into bed, just as he had started to do ten hours before. He climbed between the cool sheets, and it occurred to him that a cup of brandy he just swallowed was his first drink of hard liquor. He must indeed be growing up.

Far below, the
Carpathia
’s engines hummed with a swift, soothing rhythm. Far above, the wind whistled through the rigging. Ahead lay New York, and home in Philadelphia. Behind, the sun caught the bright red-and-white stripes of the pole from the
Titanic
’s barber shop, as it bobbed in the empty sea. But Jack Thayer no longer knew or cared. The brandy had done its work. He was fast asleep.