Titanic Part 4

XV

From every quarter of the ocean, summoned by the miracle of the wireless voice, many s.h.i.+ps had been racing since midnight to the help of the doomed liner. From midnight onwards captains were being called by messages from the wireless operators of their s.h.i.+ps, telling them that the _t.i.tanic_ was asking for help; courses were being altered and chief engineers called upon to urge their stokehold crews to special efforts; for coal means steam, and steam means speed, and speed may mean life.

Many s.h.i.+ps that could receive the strong electric impulses sent out from the _t.i.tanic_ had not electric strength enough to answer; but they turned and came to that invisible spot represented by a few figures which the faithful wireless indicated. Even as far as five hundred miles away, the _Parisian_ turned in her tracks in obedience to the call and came racing towards the north-west. But there were tragedies even with the wireless. The Leyland liner _Californian_, bound for Boston, was only seventeen miles away from the _t.i.tanic_ when she struck, and could have saved every soul on board; but her wireless apparatus was not working, and she was deaf to the agonized calls that were being sent out from only a few miles away. The _Parisian_, five hundred miles away, could hear and come, though it was useless; the _Californian_ could not hear and so did not come though, if she had, she would probably have saved every life on board. The _Cincinnati_, the _Amerika_, the _Prinz Friedrich Wilhelm_, the _Menominee_, the _La Provence_, the _Prinz Adalbert_, the _Virginian_, the _Olympic_, and the _Baltic_ all heard the news and all turned towards Lat. 41 46' N., Long. 50 14' W. The dread news was being whispered all over the sea, and even ash.o.r.e, just as the dwellers on the North Atlantic seaboard were retiring to rest, the station at Cape Race intercepted the talk of the _t.i.tanic_ 270 miles away, and flashed the message out far and wide; so that Government tugs and s.h.i.+ps with steam up in harbours, and everything afloat in the vicinity which heard the news might hurry to the rescue. Cape Race soon heard that the _Virginian_ was on her way to the _t.i.tanic's_ position, then that the _Olympic_ and _Carpathia_ had altered their courses and were making for the wounded s.h.i.+p, and so on. Throughout the night the rumours in the air were busy, while still the steady calls came out in firm electric waves from the _t.i.tanic_-still calling, still flas.h.i.+ng "C.Q.D." At 1.20 she whispered to the _Olympic_, "Get your boats ready; going down fast by the head." At 1.35 the _Frankfurt_ (after an hour and a half's delay) said, "We are starting for you." Then at 1.41 came a message to the _Olympic_, "C.Q.D., boilers flooded."

"Are there any boats round you already?" asked the _Olympic_, but there was no answer.

Other s.h.i.+ps began to call, giving encouraging messages: "We are coming,"

said the _Birma_, "only fifty miles away"; but still there was no answer.

All over the North Atlantic men in lighted instrument rooms sat listening with the telephones at their ears; they heard each other's questions and waited in the silence, but it was never broken again by the voice from the _t.i.tanic_. "All quiet now," reported the _Birma_ to the _Olympic_, and all quiet it was, except for the thras.h.i.+ng and pounding of a score of propellers, and the hiss of a dozen steel stems as they ripped the smooth waters on courses converging to the spot where the wireless voice had suddenly flickered out into silence.

But of all those who had been listening to the signals Captain Rostron of the _Carpathia_ knew that his s.h.i.+p would most likely be among the first to reach the spot. It was about midnight on Sunday that the pa.s.sengers of the _Carpathia_ first became aware that something unusual was happening. The course had been changed and a certain hurrying about on the decks took the place of the usual midnight quiet. The trembling and vibration increased to a quick jumping movement as pressure of steam was gradually increased and the engines urged to the extreme of their driving capacity. The chief steward summoned his staff and set them to work making sandwiches and preparing hot drinks. All the hot water was cut off from the cabins and bath-rooms, so that every ounce of steam could be utilized for driving the machinery.

The _Carpathia_ was nearly seventy miles from the position of the _t.i.tanic_ when she changed her course and turned northward; she had been steaming just over four hours when, in the light of that wonderful dawn, those on the look-out descried a small boat. As they drew nearer they saw other boats, and fragments of wreckage, and ma.s.ses of ice drifting about the sea. Captain Rostron stopped while he was still a good distance from the boats, realizing that preparations must be made before he could take pa.s.sengers on board. The accommodation gangway was rigged and also rope ladders lowered over the sides, and canvas slings were arranged to hoist up those who were too feeble to climb. The pa.s.sengers crowded along the rail or looked out of their portholes to see the reaping of this strange harvest of the sea. The first boat came up almost filled with women and children-women in evening dress or in fur coats thrown over nightgowns, in silk stockings and slippers, in rags and shawls. The babies were crying; some of the women were injured and some half-fainting; all had horror on their faces. Other boats began to come up, and the work of embarking the seven hundred survivors went on.

It took a long time, for some of the boats were far away, and it was not until they had been seven hours afloat that the last of them were taken on board the _Carpathia_. Some climbed up the ladders, others were put into the slings and swung on board, stewards standing by with rum and brandy to revive the fainting; and many willing hands were occupied with caring for the sufferers, taking them at once to improvised couches and beds, or conducting those who were not so exhausted to the saloon where hot drinks and food were ready. But it was a ghastly company. As boat after boat came up, those who had already been saved eagerly searched among its occupants to see if their own friends were among them; and as gradually the tale of boats was completed and it was known that no more had been saved, and the terrible magnitude of the loss was realized-then, in the words of one of the _Carpathia's_ people, "Bedlam broke loose." Women who had borne themselves bravely throughout the hours of waiting and exposure broke into shrieking hysterics, calling upon the names of their lost. Some went clean out of their minds; one or two died there in the very moment of rescue. The _Carpathia's_ pa.s.sengers gave up their rooms and ransacked their trunks to find clothing for the more than half-naked survivors; and at last exhaustion, resignation, and the doctor's merciful drugs did the rest. The dead were buried; those who had been s.n.a.t.c.hed too late from the bitter waters were committed to them again, and eternally, with solemn words; and the _Carpathia_ was headed for New York.

XVI

The _Californian_ had come up while the _Carpathia_ was taking the survivors on board, and it was arranged that she should remain and search the vicinity while the _Carpathia_ made all haste to New York.

And the other s.h.i.+ps that had answered the call for help either came up later in the morning and stayed for a little cruising about in the forlorn hope of finding more survivors, or else turned back and resumed their voyages when they heard the _Carpathia's_ tidings.

In the meantime the sh.o.r.e stations could get no news. Word reached New York and London in the course of the morning that the _t.i.tanic_ had struck an iceberg and was badly damaged, but nothing more was known until a message, the origin of which could not be discovered, came to say that the _t.i.tanic_ was being towed to Halifax by the _Virginian_, and that all her pa.s.sengers were saved. With this news the London evening papers came out on that Monday, and even on Tuesday the early editions of the morning papers had the same story, and commented upon the narrow escape of the huge s.h.i.+p. Even the White Star officials had on Monday no definite news; and when their offices in New York were besieged by newspaper men and relatives of the pa.s.sengers demanding information, the pathetic belief in the _t.i.tanic's_ strength was allowed to overshadow anxieties concerning the greater disaster. Mr. Franklin, the vice-president of the American Trust to which the White Star Company belongs, issued the following statement from New York on Monday:

"We have nothing direct from the _t.i.tanic_, but are perfectly satisfied that the vessel is unsinkable. The fact that the Marconi messages have ceased means nothing; it may be due to atmospheric conditions or the coming up of the s.h.i.+ps, or something of that sort.

"We are not worried over the possible loss of the s.h.i.+p, as she will not go down, but we are sorry for the inconvenience caused to the travelling public. We are absolutely certain that the _t.i.tanic_ is able to withstand any damage. She may be down by the head, but would float indefinitely in that condition."

Still that same word, "unsinkable," which had now indeed for the first time become a true one: for it is only when she lies at the bottom of the sea that any s.h.i.+p can be called unsinkable. On Tuesday morning when the dreadful news was first certainly known, those proud words had to be taken back. Again Mr. Franklin had to face the reporters, and this time he could only say:

"I must take upon myself the whole blame for that statement. I made it, and I believed it when I made it. The accident to the _Olympic_, when she collided with the cruiser _Hawke_, convinced me that these s.h.i.+ps, the _Olympic_ and _t.i.tanic_, were built like battles.h.i.+ps, able to resist almost any kind of accident, particularly a collision. I made the statement in good faith, and upon me must rest the responsibility for error, since the fact has proved that it was not a correct description of the unfortunate _t.i.tanic_."

And for three days while the _Carpathia_ was ploughing her way, now slowly through ice-strewn seas, and now at full speed through open water, and while England lay under the cloud of an unprecedented disaster, New York was in a ferment of grief, excitement, and indignation. Crowds thronged the streets outside the offices of the White Star Line, while gradually, in lists of thirty or forty at a time, the names of the survivors began to come through from the _Carpathia_.

And at last, when all the names had been spelled out, and interrogated, and corrected, the grim total of the figures stood out in appalling significance-seven hundred and three saved, one thousand five hundred and three lost.

It is not possible, nor would it be very profitable, to describe the scenes that took place on these days of waiting, the alternations of hope and grief, of thankfulness and wild despair, of which the s.h.i.+pping offices were the scene. They culminated on the Thursday evening when the _Carpathia_ arrived in New York. The greatest precautions had been taken to prevent the insatiable thirst for news from turning that solemn disembarkation into a battlefield. The entrance to the dock was carefully guarded, and only those were admitted who had business there or who could prove that they had relations among the rescued pa.s.sengers.

Similar precautions were taken on the s.h.i.+p; she was not even boarded by the Custom officials, nor were any reporters allowed on board, although a fleet of steam launches went out in the cold rainy evening to meet her, bearing pressmen who were prepared to run any risks to get a footing on the s.h.i.+p. They failed, however, and the small craft were left behind in the mist, as the _Carpathia_ came gliding up the Hudson.

Among the waiting crowd were nurses, doctors, and a staff of ambulance men and women; for all kinds of wild rumours were afloat as to the condition of those who had been rescued. The women of New York had devoted the days of waiting to the organization of a powerful relief committee, and had collected money and clothing on an ample scale to meet the needs of those, chiefly among the steerage pa.s.sengers, who should find themselves dest.i.tute when they landed. And there, in the rain of that gloomy evening, they waited.

At last they saw the _Carpathia_ come creeping up the river and head towards the White Star pier. The flashlights of photographers were playing about her, and with this silent salute she came into dock.

Gateways had been erected, shutting off the edge of the pier from the sheds in which the crowd was waiting, and the first sight they had of the rescued was when after the gangway had been rigged, and the brief formalities of the sh.o.r.e complied with, the pa.s.sengers began slowly to come down the gangway. A famous English dramatist who was looking on at the scene has written of it eloquently, describing the strange varieties of bearing and demeanour; how one face had a startled, frightened look that seemed as if it would always be there, another a set and staring gaze; how one showed an angry, rebellious desperation, and another seemed merely dazed. Some carried on stretchers, some supported by nurses, and some handed down by members of the crew, they came, either to meetings that were agonizing in their joy, or to blank loneliness that would last until they died. Five or six babies without mothers, some of them utterly unidentified and unidentifiable, were handed down with the rest, so strangely preserved, in all their tenderness and helplessness, through that terrible time of confusion and exposure.

And in the minds of those who looked on at this sad procession there was one tragic, recurrent thought: that for every one who came down the gangway, ill perhaps, maimed perhaps, dest.i.tute perhaps, but alive and on solid earth again, there were two either drifting in the slow Arctic current, or lying in the great submarine valley to which the s.h.i.+p had gone down. They were a poor remnant indeed of all that composite world of pride, and strength, and riches; for Death winnows with a strange fan, and although one would suit his purpose as well as another, he often chooses the best and the strongest. There were card-sharpers, and orphaned infants, and dest.i.tute consumptives among the saved; and there were hundreds of heroes and strong men among the drowned. There were among the saved those to whom death would have been no great enemy, who had no love for life or ties to bind them to it; and there were those among the drowned for whom life was at its very best and dearest; lovers and workers in the very morning of life before whom the years had stretched forward rich with promise.

And when nearly all had gone and the crowd in the docks was melting away, one man, who had until then remained secluded in the s.h.i.+p came quietly out, haggard and stricken with woe: Bruce Ismay, the representative and figure-head of that pride and power which had given being to the _t.i.tanic_. In a sense he bore on his own shoulders the burden of every sufferer's grief and loss; and he bore it, not with shame, for he had no cause for shame, but with reticence of words and activity in such alleviating deeds as were possible, and with a dignity which was proof against even the bitter injustice of which he was the victim in the days that followed. There was pity enough in New York, hysterical pity, sentimental pity, real pity, practical pity, for all the obvious and patent distress of the bereaved and dest.i.tute; but there was no pity for this man who, of all that ragged remnant that walked back to life down the _Carpathia's_ gangway, had perhaps the most need of pity.

XVII

The symbols of Honour and Glory and Time that looked so handsome in the flooding sunlight of the _t.i.tanic's_ stairway lie crushed into unrecognizable shapes and splinters beneath the tonnage of two thousand fathoms of ocean water. Time is no more for the fifteen hundred souls who perished with them; but Honour and Glory, by strange ways and unlooked-for events, have come into their own. It was not Time, nor the creatures and things of Time, that received their final crown there; but things that have nothing to do with Time, qualities that, in their power of rising beyond all human limitations, we must needs call divine.

The _t.i.tanic_ was in more senses than one a fool's paradise. There is nothing that man can build that nature cannot destroy, and far as he may advance in might and knowledge and cunning, her blind strength will always be more than his match. But men easily forget this; they wish to forget it; and the beautiful and comfortable and agreeable equipment of this s.h.i.+p helped them to forget it. You may cover the walls of a s.h.i.+p with rare woods and upholster them with tapestries and brocades, but it is the bare steel walls behind them on which you depend to keep out the water; it is the strength of those walls, relatively to the strength of such natural forces as may be arrayed against them, on which the safety of the s.h.i.+p depends. If they are weaker than something which a.s.sails them, the water must come in and the s.h.i.+p must sink. It was a.s.sumed too readily that, in the case of the _t.i.tanic_, these things could not happen; it was a.s.sumed too readily that if in the extreme event they did happen, the manifold appliances for saving life would be amply sufficient for the security of the pa.s.sengers. Thus they lived in a serene confidence such as no s.h.i.+p's company ever enjoyed before, or will enjoy again for a long time to come. And there were gathered about them almost all those accessories of material life which are necessary to the paradise of fools, and are extremely agreeable to wiser men.

It was this perfect serenity of their condition which made so poignant the tragedy of their sudden meeting with death-that pale angel whom every man knows that he must some day encounter, but whom most of us hope to find at the end of some road a very long way off waiting for us with comforting and soothing hands. We do not expect to meet him suddenly turning the corner of the street, or in an environment of refined and elegant conviviality, or in the midst of our noonday activities, or at midnight on the high seas when we are dreaming on feather pillows. But it was thus that those on the _t.i.tanic_ encountered him, waiting there in the ice and the starlight, arresting the s.h.i.+p's progress with his out-stretched arm, and standing by, waiting, while the sense of his cold presence gradually sank like a frost into their hearts.

To say that all the men who died on the _t.i.tanic_ were heroes would be as absurd as to say that all who were saved were cowards. There were heroes among both groups and cowards among both groups, as there must be among any large number of men. It is the collective behaviour and the general att.i.tude towards disaster that is important at such a time; and in this respect there is ample evidence that death scored no advantage in the encounter, and that, though he took a spoil of bodies that had been destined for him since the moment of their birth, he left the hearts unconquered. In that last half-hour before the end, when every one on the s.h.i.+p was under sentence of death, modern civilization went through a severe test. By their bearing in that moment those fated men and women had to determine whether, through the long years of peace and increase of material comfort and withdrawal from contact with the cruder elements of life, their race had deteriorated in courage and morale. It is only by such great tests that we can determine how we stand in these matters, and, as they periodically recur, measure our advance or decline. And the human material there made the test a very severe one; for there were people on the _t.i.tanic_ who had so entrenched themselves behind ramparts of wealth and influence as to have wellnigh forgotten that, equally with the waif and the pauper, they were exposed to the caprice of destiny; and who might have been forgiven if, in that awful moment of realization, they had shown the white feather and given themselves over to panic. But there is ample evidence that these men stood the test equally as well as those whose occupation and training made them familiar with the risks of the sea, to which they were continually exposed, and through which they might reasonably expect to come to just such an end. There was no theatrical heroism, no striking of att.i.tudes, or attempt to escape from the dread reality in any form of spiritual hypnosis; they simply stood about the decks, smoking cigarettes, talking to one another, and waiting for their hour to strike. There is nothing so hard, nothing so entirely dignified, as to be silent and quiet in the face of an approaching horror.

That was one form of heroism, which will make the influence of this thing deathless long after the memory of it has faded as completely from the minds of men as sight or sign of it has faded from that area of ocean where, two miles above the sunken s.h.i.+p, the rolling blue furrows have smoothed away all trace of the struggles and agonies that embittered it. But there was another heroism which must be regarded as the final crown and glory of this catastrophe-not because it is exceptional, for happily it is not, but because it continued and confirmed a tradition of English sea life that should be a tingling inspiration to everyone who has knowledge of it. The men who did the work of the s.h.i.+p were no composite, highly drilled body like the men in the navy who, isolated for months at a time and austerely disciplined, are educated into an _esprit de corps_ and sense of responsibility that make them willing, in moments of emergency, to sacrifice individual safety to the honour of the s.h.i.+p and of the Service to which they belong. These stokers, stewards, and seamen were the ordinary scratch crew, signed on at Southampton for one round trip to New York and back; most of them had never seen each other or their officers before; they had none of the training or the securities afforded by a great national service; they were simply-especially in the case of the stokers-men so low in the community that they were able to live no pleasanter life than that afforded by the stokehold of a s.h.i.+p-an inferno of darkness and noise and commotion and insufferable heat-men whose experience of the good things of life was half an hour's breathing of the open sea air between their spells of labour at the furnaces, or a drunken spree ash.o.r.e whence, after being poisoned by cheap drink and robbed by joyless women of the fruits of their spell of labour, they are obliged to return to it again to find the means for another debauch. Not the stuff out of which one would expect an austere heroism to be evolved. Yet such are the traditions of the sea, such is the power of those traditions and the spirit of those who interpret them, that some of these men-not all, but some-remained down in the _t.i.tanic's_ stokeholds long after she had struck, and long after the water, pouring like a cataract through the rent in her bottom and rising like a tide round the black holes where they worked, had warned them that her doom, and probably theirs, was sealed.

In the engine-room were another group of heroes, men of a far higher type, with fine intelligences, trained in all the subtleties and craft of modern s.h.i.+ps, men with education and imagination who could see in their mind's eye all the variations of horror that might await them.

These men also continued at their routine tasks in the engine room, knowing perfectly well that no power on earth could save them, choosing to stay there while there was work to be done for the common good, their best hope being presently to be drowned instead of being boiled or scalded to death. All through the s.h.i.+p, though in less awful circ.u.mstances, the same spirit was being observed; men who had duties to do went on doing them because they were the kind of men to whom in such an hour it came more easily to perform than to s.h.i.+rk their duties. The three s.h.i.+p's boys spent the whole of that hour carrying provisions from the store-room to the deck; the post-office employes worked in the flooded mail-room below to save the mail-bags and carry them up to where they might be taken off if there should be a chance; the purser and his men brought up the s.h.i.+p's books and money, against all possibility of its being any use to do so, but because it was their duty at such a time to do so; the stewards were busy to the end with their domestic, and the officers with their executive, duties. In all this we have an example of spontaneous discipline-for they had never been drilled in doing these things, they only knew that they had to do them-such as no barrack-room discipline in the world could match. In such moments all artificial bonds are useless. It is what men are in themselves that determines their conduct; and discipline and conduct like this are proofs, not of the superiority of one race over another, but that in the core of human nature itself there is an abiding sweetness and soundness that fear cannot embitter nor death corrupt.

The twin gray horses are still at their work in Belfast Lough, and on any summer morning you may see their white manes s.h.i.+ning like gold as they escort you in from the sunrise and the open sea to where the smoke rises and the din resounds.

For the iron forest has branched again, and its dreadful groves are echoing anew to the clamour of the hammers and the drills. Another s.h.i.+p, greater and stronger even than the lost one, is rising within the cathedral scaffoldings; and the men who build her, companions of those whom the _t.i.tanic_ spilled into the sea, speak among themselves and say, "this time we shall prevail."

_May 1912._

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS AND THE NEW WORLD OF HIS DISCOVERY.

With Frontispiece in colour by Norman Wilkinson. Portrait, Maps, Ill.u.s.trations, Appendices and a Note on the Navigation of Columbus's First Voyage by the Earl of Dunraven, K.P. Large Post 8vo, cloth, gilt.

7_s._ 6_d._ net. (Third Edition.)

Mr. Henry Vignaud, late Secretary of the American Emba.s.sy and distinguished historian of Columbus, says:

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