3

A Slight Trepidation

As the clock struck midnight, John Hardy and at least two other second-class stewards ran along a wood-paneled corridor, banging desperately on doors. Madeline Mellinger, the thirteen-year-old girl whose father had disappeared in New Zealand, was jolted awake a second time by an unexpected commotion—and by the deck steward's unusually high-pitched cry of “Get up! Put on warm clothes and hurry on deck with life jackets.” Madeline jumped down from the top bunk and ran to the door, but by then the man had disappeared, and it was too late to ask what he was screaming about.

In later years, Madeline would realize that if she had failed to take the man's order seriously, or if the Colgates had left her behind in boarding school, she would have become motherless as well as fatherless, because her mother was all but completely deaf and did not hear the knock at the door. Obeying the order, Madeline took the life jackets down from the top of the wardrobe closet, shook her mother awake, and grabbed her hymnal (a going-away gift from her school) and a handful of precious letters. The doll she had hugged every night as she went to sleep was too large to carry with the rest of her load, so she tucked it gently into a storage hammock on the cabin wall.

As the Mellingers made their way toward the top deck and toward what was to become the remarkable journey of boat 14, Madeline did not yet believe that they were leaving their room for the last time, so she barely noticed that her mother was wearing only a nightgown and a heavy fur coat but no shoes. For years to come, she would often express feelings of guilt about her mother's frozen feet. She also began to feel bad about leaving the doll behind the moment she heard adults speculating that the water beneath the Titanic was more than two miles deep and that sunlight could never reach the bottom. Even when she was in her seventies, Madeline was haunted by thoughts of her childhood companion: images of her lovely doll sitting among silently deteriorating curtains and wall panels, all alone in the night—forever.

THE EXAMINATION

Among the moments Steward Hardy would keep coming back to, in his seventies, were the odd questions of his American examiners.

“When did you ship with the Titanic?” Senator Duncan Fletcher asked.

“I shipped with her on her last voyage,” Hardy replied.

“In what capacity?”

“As second-class steward.”

“Did anything unusual happen on that voyage?” the senator asked.

That probably depended, Hardy supposed, on whether being awakened by an iceberg and then being roused by Purser Reginald Barker from first class—who normally never came down to second class—counted as anything unusual. No, nothing out of the ordinary happened until about that time, Hardy told the senator.

• • •

The Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackelton had no doubts about what happened to the Titanic and why. He knew that without moonlight over a dark sea on which no successions of waves were breaking at the feet of icebergs, there could be no starlight reflected from white foam and no disturbance of bioluminescent marine animals like comb jellies to reveal an iceberg a mile away. He knew from experience that on excessively calm nights sea ice became “black ice,” and a skipper did not want the eyes of his ship looking down from an angle more then ninety feet high in the crow's nest, but rather from low in the bow of the ship, looking out from a point as near as possible to Krekorian's angle, across the surface of the sea toward the starlit horizon.

Shackelton also knew from experience that on a night with no wind, the sudden drop of air temperatures, which had sent the passengers indoors less than two hours before impact, was a clear indication that the Titanic was approaching an ice field, if the warnings from the Baltic and La Bretange were not already enough. Passenger Emily Ryerson had thought that Bruce Ismay, the Titanic's owner, was rebuffing her after he showed her one of the ice warnings and after she responded with a suggestion that the Titanic should be slowed down, but Shackelton knew that had Ismay or anyone else in his industry listened to his passenger, he might never have been called to explain to Lord Mercey's committee how the Titanic came to be the subject of bio-archaeology for explorers of the future.

“And you think all these liners are wrong,” the examiner asked the explorer, “in following the accepted standard of putting the danger quickly behind by going at top speed in regions where ice is reported?”

The examiner turned incredulous when Shackelton explained that in the vicinity of Antarctic ice he had slowed his research vessel—which had been built specifically to resist ice—to only four knots.

“Then where did that get you to?” the examiner asked.

“We got very near the South Pole, my lord.” He did not have to emphasize that they got there and back alive.

The examiner pressed the question: Whether he was in an icebreaker or in a ship whose floatability had been enhanced by dividing it into a series of watertight containers, would he slow down?

“I would slow down, yes,” Shackelton replied.

“And supposing you were going twenty-one and three quarters to twenty-two knots?”

The explorer summed it up in thirteen words: “You have no right to go at that speed in an ice zone.”

• • •

“I think the damage is serious,” Barker said, and then he brought Hardy forward and showed him a flooded crew compartment stairwell in which the water was rising much faster than it would be in a small bathtub with the faucets opened all the way. At the top of the stairs, a newly installed water fountain for the firemen and the coal trimmers was about to be overtaken by this unnatural indoor tide. Even after Hardy was asked to assist in closing additional watertight doors along F deck, he still had confidence that the Titanic would remain afloat.

Hardy had been advised by Barker to get the passengers on deck with their life jackets—“just as a precaution.” As he ran along a second-class corridor, he personally woke passengers in at least twenty cabins by loudly banging on their doors while shouting, “Everybody on deck with life belts on, at once.” He was most likely the mysterious savior who woke young Madeline Mellinger.

Unlike Madeline and her mother, the entire Laroche family had slept through the impact and were not awakened until a steward banged on the door and ordered them up to the top deck. To Juliette Laroche, the ship had seemed from the very first day to be “a monster,” as she wrote in a letter to her father, posted from Queenstown, Ireland, on April 11, 1912. Although Juliette's nonwhite husband, Joseph, was not permitted to hold a first-class ticket, the prejudicial norms of the Gilded Age had played no role in the inception, from day one, of her belief that something wicked had come into her life, clothed in steel. Her concerns went deeper than the physical surroundings of second-class accommodations—which she found to be wonderful, externally. Indeed, Juliette echoed the consensus view that the arrangements in second class could not have been more comfortable were they traveling first-class on another ship.

“The boat set out [from France] while we were eating, and we could not believe we were moving,” Juliette wrote to her father. She had thus far met only one other couple on the Titanic who could speak French, but this did not seem to matter to the children. Little Simonne had amused her mother by “playing with a young English girl who lent her [a] doll. My Simonne was having a great conversation with her, but the girl did not understand a single word.”

Nevertheless, despite the comforts of the reading room from which Juliette posted her letter—“There is a concert here, near me: one violin, two cellos, one piano”— she wrote that there did indeed appear to be something monstrous about the ship, giving her and Joseph “a slight trepidation.”

And now had come the loud bang at the door and a cry of warning. Joseph, who spoke English fluently, sought out a deck steward, an officer, or anyone else who might possess information. He came back with news that the Titanic had suffered an accident, and his instincts told him that the monster might sink. He bundled the children in warm clothing, gathered Juliette's money and jewels, and led the family toward whatever fate awaited them near boat 10, where Second Officer Charles Lightoller would soon be working under the twin assumptions that the new lifeboats were as frail and risky as older models and could be launched only half full. To him, this meant that what little space remained in the boats was not to be occupied by adult male passengers—and especially not by passengers of the second and third classes.

Another officer in command of the same string of portside lifeboats would soon be arriving on the boat deck to become a double barrier against Joseph Laroche's chances of survival. Fifth Officer Harold G. Lowe was a man very quick to draw his gun against nonwhites approaching the boats. He generally regarded them as dangerous and glaring, like animals.

Juliette had learned only recently, while planning for her family's new life in Haiti, that she was pregnant with their third child, who would now have the peculiar distinction of becoming a Titanic survivor who did not appear on any passenger lists.

Ellen Phillips, like the yet-to-be-named Joseph Laroche Jr., was absent on account of not having been born yet. Her father was Henry Marshall, but his real name was Henry Morley, and he was not married to his traveling companion, “Mrs. Marshall”—who was really his nineteen-year-old shop assistant, Kate Phillips—but to another woman. From the first seconds of impact, Ellen was embarking on one of the legal world's longest episodes of abandonment and delaying tactics. Her paternity and inheritance claims would remain unresolved from the beginning of one century into the beginning of the next. Though yet to be born, the daughter of Henry Morley was already heading into a maelstrom of broken promises, dying dreams, the emerging cruelty of a young mother on the path to insanity, the false hopes of a mad dash aboard the Titanic to a secret life in San Francisco, and a final parting gesture of devotion in the form of a blue sapphire necklace later to be called “Love of the Sea.”

Behind them, in the countryside of Worcestershire, England, the Morley family's first confectionery and ice cream shop had been standing for more than three generations. At the time of his departure, Morley was leaving behind a business that had begun expanding into neighboring towns, and he was also leaving a twelve-year-old daughter—all for the sole purpose of spending the rest of his life with Mrs. Marshall.

Morley had sold his interest in two of the family's shops with the help of his brother. A portion of the proceeds was traveling with him aboard the Titanic, to be used as a down payment on a new life in the western United States. The rest of the money, as arranged with Morley's brother, would provide an income for the twelve-year-old girl he had resolved never to see again. Morley had also arranged, through his brother, for the rest of their family to believe that his trip to America—to the warmer, drier climate of California—was an attempt to find relief from what he had convincingly displayed as the potentially life-threatening health of his lungs.

Convincing people of such things was not difficult in those days. Common colds and even bruised thumbs often turned deadly, and the vow of “till death do us part” usually did not mean for very long. Stewardess Violet Jessop had lost two little brothers and her little sister to what by the last third of the twentieth century would be regarded as easily treatable infections. When Violet was a child, her parents had moved her to the mountains, based on the belief, similar to Morley's, that drier air and regular doses of creosote (a product of oil tar) and red wine would cure her nearly fatal lung infection. Jessop's lungs recovered, but her father died suddenly in 1903 from a simple infection, not quite having reached the age of forty.

According to plan, Morley was to board the Titanic as Henry Marshall and simply disappear.

By five past midnight, Morley and Phillips and the rest of the passengers who were awakened by Hardy and his junior stewards were filing past the second-class dining saloon and the library. Even below the decks, they could hear excess steam being vented from the pipes near the tops of the smokestacks, to prevent damage from the boilers that had been providing full-ahead power to engines that were suddenly standing idle.

Despite the alarming hiss from outside, the empty library was, in its own way, eerily silent. Fellow second-class traveler Lawrence Beesley—a schoolteacher who was headed now toward a destiny in the same lifeboat as Kate and her unborn daughter—would write later that he could look back across the years and recall every beautiful detail of the room, “with lounges, armchairs, and … writing bureaus round the walls of the room, and the [books] in glass-cased shelves flanking one side, the whole finished in mahogany relieved with white fluted wooden columns that supported the deck above.” It seemed incomprehensible to Beesley that a mindless, rudderless mass of ice should be able “to threaten, even in the smallest degree, the lives of [so many] men and women who think and plan and hope and love.”

Masabumi Hosono also passed the deserted library on his way to the boat deck. The Japanese efficiency expert who had streamlined the Manchuria Railway and the Trans-Siberian Express still had several pages of “On Board RMS Titanic” stationery folded into his coat pocket. Letters written earlier in the day and posted in a mailbox outside the library door were now bagged and already underwater in one of the bow section's sorting rooms. The stationery was durable rag-based paper, and the inks used in 1912 were indelible.

Given the right conditions, letters written by Hosono and other passengers during the first and last voyage—or stowed away by Howard Irwin's friend in what was to become an oxygen-starved environment—were about to enter the vault of the ages, allowing the Titanic's people to speak clearly after a hundred years or more. In at least one case, the comparative resilience of the Titanic's paper and ink (compared to the ship's bulkheads) would bring understanding to a family divided and even a measure of vindication mingled with joy and profound sadness.

For all of his efficiency, Hosono climbed toward the boat deck with at least a five-minute handicap behind Beesley, the Mellingers, the Marshalls, and the Laroches. Initially, he had not taken very seriously the sleep-disrupting sensation of the ship riding over a bad stretch of track or bumping up against a pier in the mid-Atlantic. For a while, he wondered why the engines slowed down to a stop, but he did not imagine that anything disastrous could be unfolding underfoot, so the man least likely to ignore the unexpected stowed away his own curiosity and drifted off peacefully to sleep. If Hardy knocked at his door, the efficiency expert only vaguely heard it. Not until a stranger pounded on the door did with near wood-cracking force did Hosono rise and ask impatiently, “What is it?”

He found a steward standing outside, holding a life jacket.

“What—?”

“You need to go up to the boat deck at once,” the steward said, then thrust the life jacket at him and turned away.

“Wait!” Hosono called. “Tell me what has happened.” But the steward did not answer and merely hurried away.

The complacency with which Hosono had greeted the first signals of disaster faded, and the efficiency expert dressed so hastily that he pulled on trousers, a coat, and a life jacket over the coat—but no shirt. When he arrived on the second-class promenade space, he was astonished to see the canvas covers being pulled off lifeboats and scores of passengers running agitatedly to and fro.

One of the boat-deck runners swore, “I'll fight death to the last if it comes.” Another paused to joke that she had put on black stockings “to scare the sharks.” On every one of them was tied a cork and canvas-wrapped life jacket—the white-painted “emblem of death at sea.”

Hosono stopped several of the passengers, asking the same question: “What is the cause of this?” But no one seemed to know what had happened. He now understood that there was not a moment to lose, so when a sailor indicated that the lifeboats were to be cranked down to the lower decks and loaded from nearer the water's surface, he obeyed at once—even though the man's order seemed perplexing: “Listen carefully! Everyone race down to the third-class deck!” No one else seemed to be following Hosono down toward the rear well deck, and when the young railway manager looked up along the port side and saw that the keels of the lifeboats were still stationary above him, on the boat deck, he decided to turn back.

“No, you don't!” a crewman shouted, blocking his way. “The boat deck is for first- and second-class passengers only.”

Suddenly, Hosono became acutely aware that he was shirtless and disheveled—and clearly a foreigner, probably even what the crewman considered to be a member of the “lower” races.

“But I hold a second-class ticket!” Hosono said sternly. He had put the ticket in his wallet, and he had left the wallet in his stateroom. At 12:15 a.m., Hosono realized that his troubles this night had only just begun.

• • •

Approximately three hundred paces forward, in the bow of the ship, Violet Jessop was no longer fighting a compulsion toward laughter. Here the manifestations of danger varied greatly, depending on which side of a watertight bulkhead one happened to be standing. At a quarter past midnight, the steam room and cooling rooms of F deck's Turkish baths were still quite dry; and just in front of the baths, although water in the swimming pool room was beginning to shift with the tilt of the deck, the exercise clock would continue keeping time for at least another half hour, along with the clock in the cooling room. Further forward, on the far side of the steel dam beneath the first smokestack, the lowermost portholes on F deck were already becoming submarine windows on whatever sea life was being attracted to the lights.

Jessop had firmly resolved not to express what had by now become an ever-present fear—a fear “wrapped” in her heart. The report from her roommate, Annie Robinson, was definitely not good. The water in the mail room was only six steps from overflowing onto the floors of E deck. Robinson had found the ship's carpenter looking down forlornly into the pond of floating mailbags. She asked him how serious the situation might be, but he seemed not to hear her at all.

The Titanic's chief architect, Thomas Andrews, was more direct. “Tommy said we should put our life jackets on and let the passengers see us wearing them,” Robinson explained. She added that she had told Andrews that such a display would appear rather mean—it would be excessively frightening to the passengers—and he had replied, “Well, if you value your life, put the jacket on.”

Jessop had known Andrews aboard the Titanic's older, almost identical twin sister ship, the Olympic. The news that the incident aboard the Titanic this night was developing into serious business—killing business—seemed every bit as unbelievable to Jessop as it was heartbreaking, “that this super-perfect creation was to do anything so futile as sink.”

Her efforts to quash the fear in her heart and escape into disbelief were aided, at least to some degree, by a real foundation in history. Although she never mentioned it to her roommate and would never speak or write of it in future years, Jessop had been aboard the Olympic seven months earlier when it was rammed by HMS Hawke. The hole in the Olympic's side was wider than a church door and more than two stories tall—a total surface area of damage far greater than the twelve square feet now pulling the Titanic down by the head—but the Hawke had pierced only two of the Olympic's watertight compartments, and most of the damage was inflicted well above the water, at the level of the E- and F-deck portholes. A result of this accident was that the watertight bulkhead design seemed indeed to have rendered every Olympic-class vessel into a lifeboat in its own right. When Captain Smith transferred his command from the Olympic to the Titanic, a deadly complacency must already have slithered into him.

Despite her desire to disbelieve Robinson's report that their ship was indeed dying, Jessop's first concern was her duty to make sure that the passengers were comfortable and safe, no matter what chaos might (or might not) be coming their way. In a letter dated July 27, 1958, relating to a friend how her primary concern was always for the care of her passengers, she would write, “The unfortunate passengers of today get scant service in comparison.” By the time she retired from the sea, the next generation of stewards and stewardesses had come to regard her as “quite out of date,” Jessop explained, “because I regarded my passengers' comfort and well-being on board as greatly my responsibility.”

Jessop and Robinson went from room to room along E deck and C deck, helping the passengers to select warm clothing to be worn beneath their life jackets, reiterating, in spite of Robinson's fear and in spite of the gradually increasing slant of the deck, that all of this late-night activity was merely a precautionary measure. Reassured, the passengers from first class began, only haltingly, their exodus up the grand stairway, quite unhurried and even joking about the great show of British adherence to unnecessary pomp and protocol.

Jessop noticed that several officers were peering down from the carved wooden railings near the crystal dome. Their faces looked exceedingly anxious about the lumbering parade, and it would occur to Jessop much later that they must have been loath to shout down to the people anything to indicate what they really knew was happening and perhaps to cause a stampede, but the officers undoubtedly wished that the parade would quicken its pace.

Passenger Helen Candee was among the few from first class who expressed a true foreboding about an approaching horror as she watched the parade ascending toward the crystal dome; she watched men and women dressed in fur coats and their finest hats, each clutching his or her life jacket of canvas and cork. It was, to Candee, the first trump—the very first dance in what was to become “a fancy-dress ball in Dante's Hell.”

Candee's friend, Colonel Archibald Gracie, was a writer of history books who had not quite grasped the possibility that history was unfolding before his eyes and would soon envelop him.

As the nightly migration of krill, cephalopods, and strange fish that no one had yet named came up from seven-tenths of a mile and swarmed outside the still-shining bedroom lights of F deck's foremost portholes, Colonel Gracie found Frederick Wright at the top of the stairs and let out a laugh. Wright was the Titanic's racquetball champion. Gracie had reserved the two-story ball court for a game at 7:30 a.m., and now he joked, “Hadn't we better cancel that appointment?”

Wright answered a very emotionally flat yes and hurried away toward the rear of the ship, as though he intended to get as far away as possible from the front deck spaces. The Titanic's primary decks were lettered A through G, from the top deck down. The base of the racquetball chamber was located on G deck, five decks beneath the beds of the front cargo cranes. At 12:15, the water was already flowing across the ball court's floor, knee-deep on G deck. In another fifteen minutes, it would be up to the court's ceiling at the top of F deck.

Wright evidently knew what was happening to his ball court; Jessop did not. If she had known, she would certainly have ventured back at once, seeking out her friend Jim and his cat, Jenny. Jenny had lived through the Hawke incident, was another transfer from the Olympic, and had just presented the Titanic with her litter of kittens. Jenny and her kittens would ordinarily have become the official good-luck charms for the ship, in addition to serving as the galley's mousers.

“She laid her family near Jim, the scullion, whose approval she always sought and who always gave her warm devotion,” Jessop later wrote. “This big, patient, overworked fellow, whose eyes did not match and whose good humor was contagious—often irritatingly so when you were not in the mood—seemed always to need something to be kind to.

“But Jim was quieter than usual and somewhat distracted [during] that trip. He had left behind a wife, generally as cheerful as himself but on this occasion annoyingly anxious that he should not join the new ship's crew. There was a reason, of course: The first and most important baby in the world was due to arrive soon. He did so much want to give in to her wish, for she demanded so little of him; but there was the one-room home to keep going, so Jim sailed on the Titanic, with a promise to bring a beautiful baby set from New York.”

From everything Jessop knew of Jim, if he had been able to get near a lifeboat, his last act of kindness would have been to pass Jenny and her kittens along in a basket to a woman or a child, asking nothing for himself. The ship was officially in a state of being abandoned, and by now only chief baker Charles Joughin and a handful of others among Jim's bosses knew that twenty-two hundred human beings were about to be filtered through a peculiar Board of Trade mathematics that had allowed lifeboat space for only half of them.

Joughin set an example by refusing to take a seat in a lifeboat, even though as a man with sailing skills (and each of the lifeboats was equipped for conversion from a rowboat to a sailboat) he was assigned to take command of boat 10. Whatever warnings he had received about the ship's condition, and notwithstanding the grim arithmetic of the night, Joughin and his team refused to surrender. Instead, they made certain that there was food and water in the boats, and Joughin assembled a small crew of volunteers to follow him during repeated trips down to third class, seeking out women and children to fill the boats.

No one would know for certain whether Jim was among Joughin's crew of rescuers. If, after the work of warning and rescue was through, he eventually retired like Joughin to the pantry and galley area and prepared, as ship's surgeon Will O'Loughlin had suggested, to meet a quick death indoors when the liner finally plunged down, Jim would have been located between the third and fourth smokestacks. This was also the area where Jenny had presented Jim with her family; should he have been unable to give the mother and her kittens over to a lifeboat (an unusual and even heartwarming event that would surely have been recalled by survivors had it occurred), the safe and familiar kitchen area is the likeliest of places Jim would have retreated to, in the end, with the ship's cats.

Nearly a century later, maps of the Titanic's debris would mark a quarter-mile-long swath strewn with cast-iron stoves, cooking utensils, and pantry goods. Deep-ocean archaeologists would name the region Hell's Kitchen. The galley and pantry debris could be traced backward to a point about two and a half miles away, where—in a moment that was nearly two hours away after Jessop had begun her journey toward the top deck and Hosono had found himself trapped on the well deck—the ship would split in two.

If Jim ultimately retreated to the pantry area, trying to give comfort to his helpless companions in the familiar surroundings of their home, then familiarity was only an illusion, doomed to evaporate during the very instant in which chasms yawned open in the floor and pulled apart the walls and drew Jim and his cats into the ocean with the tumult of dishes, wine crates, crockery, cheeses, ovens, knives, electric dishwashers, and all of the tools of an apprentice chef's trade billowing down with him in a remorseless gush.