Voyagers of the Titanic (15 page)

Few passengers were too queasy to eat their heavy meals. At first, people sat outside, in steamer chairs, wrapped in rugs, the pages of their books and magazines ruffled by the fresh westerly and southwesterly wind. Children like the Navrátil brothers scampered on deck. But going outside after Sunday lunch, as they steamed toward Newfoundland, passengers felt cut by the biting wind. Many retreated to the second-class library on C deck to read or write. Women sat there opening their hearts to novels with salutary moral purposes; men reached to the shelves for formulaic detective stories or books that were heavy with solid, reliable facts.

One of the library occupants was Lawrence Beesley, a Dulwich College science master seeking new chances in America (his small son grew up to marry Dodie Smith, the author of
The 101 Dalmatians
). “The Library was crowded that afternoon, owing to the cold on deck,” Beesley recounted, “but through the windows we could see the clear sky with brilliant sunlight that seemed to augur a fine night, and the prospect of landing in two days, with calm weather all the way to New York, was a matter of general satisfaction amongst us all. I can look back and see every detail of the library that afternoon—the beautifully furnished room, with lounges, armchairs, and small writing or card tables scattered about, writing bureaus round the walls of the room, and the library in glass-faced shelves flanking one side—the whole finished in mahogany relieved with white fluted wooden columns that supported the deck above.” Sitting near him were two young American women dressed in white: one returning from India, the other a schoolteacher “with a distinguished air heightened by a pince-nez.” They chatted with a shipboard acquaintance from Cambridge, Massachusetts, “genial, polished, and with a courtly air toward the two ladies.” As they talked, a child clasping a large doll interrupted their conversation.
19

Elsewhere in the library, a pert young Frenchwoman, Henriette Yrois, sat playing patience under the admiring scrutiny of her middle-aged companion. This was William Harbeck, aged forty-eight, from Toledo, Ohio, who had made his mark filming the aftermath of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. More recently, he had been hired by the Canadian Pacific Railway to make documentary films about the stretch of western Canada that was to be served by Charles Hays’s ill-starred railroad-building project. This had taken him to Paris to consult Léon Gaumont, the famous cineast, about film shooting on location. Harbeck was probably filming a documentary about the maiden voyage, for he recorded the liner’s departure from Southampton, and his luggage included cine cameras with 110,000 feet of film. Henriette Yrois, boarding at Southampton with him, gave her address as 5 Rue des Pyramides, one of the smartest shopping streets in Paris, with arcaded pavements and shining shop fronts that were a famous enticement to rich Americans. As a cynic would have realized, the pair were too acutely aware of each other to be a married couple. Neither survived the calamity, although his body was recovered clutching her purse, which contained his wedding ring. His real wife did not pay for a headstone for his grave.

Charlotte Collyer, the grocer’s wife heading for Idaho, recounted her memories of her Atlantic crossing when they were fresh: “
Titanic
was wonderful, far more splendid and huge than I had dreamed of. The other crafts in the harbour were like cockle-shells beside her, and they, mind you, were the boats of the American and other lines that a few years ago were thought enormous. I remember a friend said to me, ‘Aren’t you afraid to venture on the sea?’, but it was I who was confident. ‘What, on this boat!’, I answered. ‘Even the worst storm could not harm her.’ Before we left the harbour, I saw the accident to the
New York,
the liner that was dragged from her moorings and swept against us in the Channel. It did not frighten anyone, as it only seemed to prove how powerful the
Titanic
was. I don’t remember very much about the first few days of the voyage. I was a bit seasick, and kept to my cabin most of the time. But on Sunday April 14th I was up and about. At dinner time I was in my place in the saloon, and enjoyed the meal, though I thought it too heavy and rich. No effort had been spared to give even the second cabin passengers on that Sunday the best dinner that money could buy. After I had eaten, I listened to the orchestra a little while, then at nine o’clock or half past nine I went to my cabin.”
20

Second class on the
Titanic
was replete with neat, sprightly, sententious vicars, priests, ministers, and missionaries. In the library on that Sunday afternoon Beesley, who was a disciple of Mary Baker Eddy’s
Science and Health
and had become a Christian Science practitioner, watched two Catholic priests. One was reading quietly. He was Father Thomas Byles, who was traveling to New York to officiate at his brother’s wedding and had transferred to the
Titanic
because of the coal strike. Byles came from a family of Bradford radicals and reformers. A gifted mathematician, he went to Balliol, Oxford, to prepare for the Anglican ministry, but converted to Catholicism. He studied at Rome, took charge of the Catholic mission at Kelvedon, Essex, in 1903, proved a pious, upright man, and was made incumbent of St. Helen’s, Ongar, in 1905. “The Rev. Father was very popular and highly esteemed by the members of the community in his district,” the
Epping Gazette
stated during the murky week when Byles had been reported missing but was not yet confirmed as dead. “He is devoted to his flock, and there has been a largely increased attendance at the services since he came to Ongar.”
21
The other Catholic priest espied by Beesley was Joseph Peruschitz, aged forty, dark and bearded under a broad-brimmed hat. He had been ordained at Munich and, having spent Holy Week at the Benedictine cloister near Ramsgate, was traveling to Minnesota where he was to be principal of a Benedictine school.

The busiest clergyman was the Reverend Ernest Carter. Born in 1858, Carter was a graduate of St. John’s College, Oxford, who had taught at the Godolphin School, Hammersmith, before taking holy orders. In 1890 he married Lillian Hughes, daughter of Thomas Hughes, author of
Tom Brown’s Schooldays,
and a woman who perpetuated her father’s zeal for social reform. Carter was vicar of St. Jude’s Church, Commercial Street, the teeming, crime-ridden thoroughfare linking Spitalfields to Whitechapel High Street. “In this Whitechapel Ghetto the English visitor almost feels himself one of a subject race in the presence of dominant and overwhelming invaders,” a commentator noted shortly before Carter took over the parish in 1898. Whitechapel’s side streets were as wretched as those of a shtetl
,
“the poorest and densest population of the British Isles, packed together in a state of inhuman, solid and sodden poverty.”
22

Carter was undaunted by the fact that his choir sometimes outnumbered his congregation. “Not specially gifted intellectually, he took a Pass degree here,” an Oxford man recalled of Carter, “and could not be called an exceptional preacher. None the less, he had made his mark in the East End of London; as vicar of St. Jude’s, Whitechapel, he had a most difficult and disheartening task to face, for his parishioners belonged mainly to the Jewish colony which crowds that quarter of London.”
23
A member of the diocese described Carter as “a man of moderate attainments, of which the most striking was his sincere modesty about the rest,” but admired the variety of his good works. “To all these he brought a merry enthusiasm which made it impossible for any gloom to settle down on any cause, however desperate, with which he was associated.” He and his wife regarded Christianity as an instrument of social progress, and every week at their vicarage, they gathered an earnest little discussion group of reformers. After someone had read a discussion paper, the questions for consideration were formulated by Lillian Carter, “the keen-eyed, beaming lady, who was the very soul of the class and the light of their being.”
24

The Carters boarded the
Titanic
together with tickets costing £26. After supper on the Sunday evening of April 14, Carter held a hymn service for some hundred passengers in the second-class dining saloon—an oak-paneled room, with mahogany furniture, crimson leather upholstery, linoleum flooring, and a handy piano near the sideboard. Carter asked the assembled company which hymns they wished to hear, and preceded each hymn with a history of its author and composition. Douglas Norman, a twenty-eight-year-old electrical engineer from Glasgow who was joining his brother on a fruit farm in the foothills of the Rockies, played the piano. Marion Wright, en route to her farmer fiancé in Oregon, sang solo “Lead Kindly Light” and “There Is a Green Hill Far Away.” There were renditions of “Eternal Father, Strong to Save” (also known as “For Those in Peril on the Sea”) among others; the final hymn was “Now the Day Is Over.” At about ten, as stewards laid out coffee and biscuits, Carter drew the proceedings to a close by thanking the purser for the use of the saloon and added that the ship was unusually steady and how everyone was looking forward to their arrival in New York.

Another clergyman of interest was Charles Kirkland. He had been born in 1841 in the Miramichi lumber district of New Brunswick abutting the icy Gulf of Saint Lawrence. As a young man he was a master carpenter and cabinetmaker in the little fishing seaport of Richibucto. About 1870 he crossed the Canadian-U.S. border to live in the settlement at Baring, Maine. Maine was no gentler than New Brunswick: a damp state where the short summers were followed by cold northeasterly storms. The soil was meager, as the result of glaciations, and though there was some good potato growing, with fat barns and comfortable farmhouses, Kirkland’s segment of the state was covered by poor bushy fields and straggling woods of white pines, black spruce, pointed firs, swamp maples, and alders. The stony uplands grazed by sheep were described by Sarah Orne Jewett, a Maine contemporary of Kirkland’s, as “the wildest, most Titanic sort of pasture country.”
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Kirkland converted to the Free Will Baptist faith and needed no training in a theological college before setting up as a pastor in this sect. He held revivalist meetings in Maine communities and served as a Baptist pastor for Penobscot and Hancock Counties. Penobscot, on the zigzagging Maine coastline, had a protected natural harbor: Maine people were the great navigators of the nineteenth-century United States, crossing the globe in fragile craft. “They shame the easy voyager of the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean; they have rounded the Cape of Good Hope and braved the angry seas of Cape Horn in small wooden ships,” wrote Jewett. “The sea captains and the captains’ wives of Maine knew something of the wide world, and never mistook their native parishes for the whole instead of a part thereof; they knew not only Thomaston and Castine and Portland, but London and Bristol and Bordeaux, and the strange-mannered harbors of the China Sea.”
26

Mortality dogged Kirkland: while pastor of Mattawamkeag in Maine, he lost three children in an influenza epidemic; while pastor at Danforth, on the Maine–New Brunswick border, his wife died; and he outlived other children. Lonely and disheartened, he married a Danforth divorcée over twenty-five years his junior in 1898. The marriage soon failed, and he became an itinerant preacher, living partly with a married daughter in the township of Bradford, Maine, but traveling about proclaiming his Christian message. During 1911 he preached at Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, before proceeding to Glasgow at the end of the year. This seems to have been his first crossing of the Atlantic, at the age of seventy—prompted by a belief that he was entitled to money from an uncle’s estate. Even for a man acclimatized to Maine, Scotland seemed dismal. He wrote a sprawling, ill-punctuated letter from Scotland to his daughter early in 1912: “I could not live here. This is the worst country I ever struck. Everything is tied up on account of the coal strike.” But he left Glasgow, crossed Ireland, and embarked on the
Titanic
at Queenstown—wearing an obvious toupee.
27

Aside from Kirkland, two Englishmen in second class were Baptist ministers: the Reverend Robert Bateman was engaged in missionary work in Jacksonville, Florida, and was accompanying his widowed sister-in-law, Ada Ball, who was to help him there; and the Reverend John Harper, traveling with his small daughter, on his way to address revival meetings at the Moody Church in West Chicago. Charles Louch, a fifty-year-old saddler from Weston-super-Mare and prominent Wesleyan preacher in his district, was going out with his wife to visit his brother in California.

The non-English clergy included William Lahtinen, from Viitasaari, Finland, aged about thirty. He and his wife, Anna, who had been brought up in the United States by Finnish parents, were heading for Minneapolis. There was, too, a priest entering enforced exile. Juozas Montvila, aged twenty-seven, originally from Marijampolë in Lithuania, had attended the seminary in a great white-stone turreted monastery at Sejny (Seinai), a town that had been stripped of its ancient privileges because of its complicity with opponents of the imperial Russian government. Montvila was ordained in 1908 but subsequently forbidden to undertake pastoral work by the Russian authorities because of his objectionable political sympathies. He was therefore emigrating to lead a Lithuanian parish in America. Reports that he was an eloquent writer and sensitive artist seem convincing: a surviving photograph shows a keen-faced, dedicated-looking ascetic. Byles, Peruschitz, and Montvila celebrated Mass every morning on board.