23

Laying the Music to Rest

On the bridge of the rescue ship Carpathia, Captain Arthur Rostron held out some small hope that he might find the Titanic still afloat. What all but dashed his hope was a series of messages received between 1:30 and 1:35 a.m. Titanic time, warning ominously that an “engine room” was being flooded; then, about 1:45 a.m., came a weak Morse code cry, “Full up to boilers.” The only possible interpretation was that by 1:45, water was actively threatening all six boiler rooms. The sea could not have been reaching the engines and the boilers unless something inside the Titanic had gone terribly wrong with the watertight bulkheads as well as the hull and the ship was in position for its final plunge.

At about 2:10 a.m., the Titanic's wireless shack had radioed out two V's in Morse code, each V consisting of three dots and a dash.

The Olympic had called out for a status update from its twin just minutes before the two V's. The Titanic seemed to be acknowledging the call but provided no further information, although the Olympic, the Baltic, and the Frankfurt continued calling the Titanic. One after another, the ships' wireless logs began recording, “All quiet now.”

About 3 a.m., the Carpathia called out to the Titanic, advising it to stay alert for the Carpathia's own rocket signals “if you are there.” The logs of all the ships listening in recorded, “No reply.”

• • •

As the first faint glimmers of dawn came over the horizon, a stiff wind came with them. The Carpathia's prow was nosing around the side of an iceberg about the time that Fifth Officer Harold Lowe raised a sail and set off in search of lifeboats that were damaged and in need of help. He did not have to sail very far before he came upon boat A, with approximately twenty men and one woman still alive.

Headed in the same direction, Celiney Yasbeck's boat came upon the staircase. In the same lifeboat, Marjorie Newell observed decorative wood trim floating everywhere—“and what looked like an entire story of the grand staircase sticking out of the water, ten or twelve feet high.”

The stairway on the ocean appeared to be surrounded by cakes of ice, which made sense to Marjorie, given that sunrise was plainly revealing several icebergs drifting nearby. What did not make sense to Marjorie, when she looked closer, was why it should be that the cakes of ice were all the same size. “Oh, no . . .”

Then she understood. The identical cakes of ice were really life jackets, scores and scores of lifejackets, enclosing the dead.

There was one more thing that did not make sense. The staircase was bigger than a lifeboat, yet there were dead people all around it. Had they all drifted to the wooden island after they died? How many had perished without ever noticing the island? Or had they all found it and scrambled for safety, sinking and tipping it repeatedly with their weight? There was a story behind the stairway and the bodies, but it would never be known.

• • •

Boat B appeared to have been left behind. Atop its overturned hull, Charles Lightoller and Albert Moss understood that they were all being kept above water only by the bubble of air beneath the keel. With increasing wind and the gradual development of ocean swells, the boat began to show threatening signs of tipping too far to one side or the other. All that was necessary to spill all of boat B's survivors into the sea again (including the recently arrived Charles Joughin), was for the tilt-and-burp effect to reduce, only fractionally, the volume of air underfoot.

Two more people, including the man Lightoller believed to be senior Marconi operator Jack Phillips, died and were lowered over the side. Lightoller commanded the rest to remain standing to follow his instructions for handling the swells: “Lean to the right. . . . Now, hold the middle. . . . Lean to the left . . .” Lightoller knew that inevitably they would weaken and miscoordinate their rocking motions with the sea, at which point they would all be sunk to their knees or spilled over the side, and the sea would probably finish them off in all of five minutes. Although it appeared that the time had come for even the most resilient soul to give up, Lightoller helped the survivors to keep a grip on their courage and to endure his precarious balancing act as long as a single drop of warm blood pulsed within them.

Their one chance at rescue almost backed away. Boat 12 was rowing toward the Carpathia with boat 4 in tow when the crewman in charge saw, in the distance, what he at first believed to be one of the Titanic's funnels still afloat and decided that they should row away from it, especially after he heard what sounded like voices shouting. “Apparitions,” he thought. “Ghosts of the Titanic.” One of the boat B survivors, Jack Thayer, had no way of knowing that his mother was aboard a lifeboat that approached and then mysteriously began to withdraw.

Lightoller had concluded that the strange behavior of boat 12 simply meant that he and his crew were now so weakened by their ordeal that they were past the point of making their shouts heard. The thought of their shouts putting a superstitious dread into boat 12's commander did not occur to him as he reached into an ice-crusted pocket and withdrew his whistle.

“The piercing sound carried,” Lightoller would survive to write, “and likewise [it] carried the information (for what it was worth) that it was an officer making the call.”

As boat 12 pulled up alongside the wreck of boat B, Madeline Mellinger and her mother cleared a space for Lightoller. Thirteen-year-old Madeline was shocked at how frozen he appeared to be, clothed in nothing more substantial than a light navy suit with a seaman's sweater underneath. Two hours earlier, after he had taken charge of boat B, the clothing was soaking wet; now it was stiffened and crackling with ice.

Elizabeth Mellinger removed her cape and put it on Lightoller's shoulders, then rubbed his hands and arms and tried to restore circulation in his limbs. He seemed to recover his strength quickly. Though still appearing quite stiff, the officer stood up and took command of boat 12.

The usual command position in a lifeboat was at the tiller on the stern, but Lightoller gave his instructions from the bow to the superstitious seaman at the tiller. In this manner, they reached the Carpathia, where Madeline was lifted aboard on a sling, ahead of her mother. Lightoller saw that Elizabeth and everyone else went up to the warmth of the rescue ship ahead of him. Madeline watched him come up last, and then she discovered that she could not find her mother. While Joughin went to the ship's galley to have the chill removed from him in a warm oven, Elizabeth, who had left the Titanic in her bare feet, was taken to the Carpathia's infirmary for treatment of frostbite and for a level of hypothermia that had finally rendered her unconscious.

Madeline became the little girl mentioned in the newspapers, wandering from one deck to another crying out for her missing mother. Later in the day, the two were reunited. When Lightoller found them, he was so thankful to Madeline's frostbitten mother for putting her coat over his back and keeping him alive that he wanted to give her a sincere token of his appreciation.

“But I have nothing to give except this little tin whistle,” he explained—the very same whistle with which he had summoned her lifeboat to his side.

Elizabeth cherished it till her death in 1962 at the age of ninety-one. In that year, sixty-three-year-old Madeline, in accordance with her mother's wishes, delivered the whistle to Walter Lord, the historian her family believed should inherit it for keeping the memory of that incredible night alive. The bond between the families was not to last, however.

“The whistle has a curious pitch,” Lord told Madeline during a phone conversation, mentioning this only in passing.

“What do you mean?” Madeline asked.

“It's not the sort of sound I would have expected it to make,” Lord replied. Sensing, then, that something was wrong on the other end of the line, he tried to explain further just how pleased he was to have Lightoller's whistle. “And, of course,” he added, “the first thing I did was to blow it.”

“Oh, no,” Madeline said. “We had never blown the whistle, Mother or I—and in fact no one has—in all the years we owned it. And always, always, we believed Lightoller should have been the last one to do so.”

“I did not know this,” Walter tried to explain. Madeline did not speak to him for seven years.

• • •

Aboard the Carpathia, the arrival of seven hundred additional passengers put immediate and considerable stress on the food supplies. Linens were also suddenly scarce, and Juliette Laroche desperately needed towels to fashion into diapers for her two baby girls.

One of the earliest actions of the Carpathia's crew was to start resegregating the passengers into their original, Titanic-based classes. A stewardess informed second-class passenger Laroche that there were no spare linens for her, so she devised and implemented her own covert plan to collect table linens during meals, sit on them, and leave with them when no one was looking.

Two women from first class soon heard about Laroche's plight and visited her, bearing gifts of extra clothing and linens. They were Madeline Astor and Edith Russell, both of whom had traveled with the Laroche family aboard the tender at Cherbourg.

Little Simonne liked the tall woman with the musical toy pig. Russell would continue to be friends with Juliette Laroche and her children in years to come. Laroche and her two girls clearly needed a certain amount of befriending even before they landed in New York, where religious leaders would soon be preaching from the pulpit against the sinners who brought God's judgment against the Titanic and the makers of mixed-race children. When anyone aboard the Carpathia asked about the racial makeup of the children, Russell would placate and shoo away the inquirers (especially those with the word mulatto on their tongues) by claiming that Laroche and her husband had just adopted two orphaned girls from China.

Passenger Kate Buss wrote from the Carpathia to a friend, “There are two of the finest little Jap[anese] baby girls, about three or four years old, who look like dolls running about.” Buss's friend was the man to whom she had previously been engaged, and he now seemed a better bet to her than the “very agreeable” doctor who had gone down with the Titanic.

Any laughter Russell and Laroche might have shared while observing the ignorance of interlopers was short-lived. What few family valuables Joseph Laroche had managed to place safely in the pockets of Juliette's coat were soon stolen, along with the coat.

• • •

Long before the Carpathia reached New York, stories about the Titanic's band, and the music it had played, were becoming the substance of legend. In Colne Cemetery, the marker above violinist Wallace Hartley's grave would bear the words Propior Deo (“Nearer to God”), a reference to the tune Violet Jessop thought she heard about the time the two V's went out from the Marconi shack: “Nearer My God to Thee.” Author Helen Churchill Candee heard it, too: “And over [the hundreds that were left aboard] trembled the last strains of the orchestra's message—‘Autumn,' first, and then ‘Nearer My God to Thee.'”

In future years, many would consider the story of the song a myth. In some circles of historians and history enthusiasts, what the band played was to be hotly debated. Walter Lord was, for a time, swayed by Colonel Archibald Gracie's insistence that if “Nearer My God to Thee” had been played, he'd have regarded it as “a tactless warning of immediate death, and more likely to create a panic that our special efforts were directed towards avoiding.”

A letter dated August 1, 1956, would tell Lord a different story, so convincing that a version of the hymn would be reproduced in Bill MacQuitty's film A Night to Remember.

Complete with sheet music, Roland Hind, an acquaintance of Wallace Hartley's cousin, a woman named C. Foulds, explained that Foulds was present at Hartley's funeral and was quite certain that Arthur Sullivan's 1872 hymn was used: “And,” said Hind, “some people attended the [May 18, 1912] service who had been saved from the Titanic and who said that Sullivan's tune was the one played on the ship.”

Hind also produced a copy of Elland Moody's April 1912 statement. He was a cellist who had sailed with Hartley twenty-two times aboard the Mauritania. “I recollect when chatting with him [Hartley] on one occasion,” Moody said, “I asked, ‘What would you do if you were on a ship that was sinking?'” They were on the Mauritania and actually out at sea when Moody asked this question, and Hartley replied, “I don't think I could do better than play, ‘Oh God, Our Help in Ages Past,' or ‘Nearer My God to Thee.'”

“When I speak of ‘Nearer My God to Thee,'” Hind wrote, “I mean Sullivan's setting. That would be what the orchestra played on the sinking Titanic.”

• • •

Many of the survivors wanted to forget the music, and everything else about the night—all of it. Five months after giving testimony at the British inquiry, and on the six-month anniversary of the Titanic's sailing, Annie Robinson, Jessop's roommate, jumped overboard from a ship in Boston Harbor and drowned.

Lawrence Beesley would become known on Bill MacQuitty's set as the historical adviser who was constantly (and annoyingly) trying to insert himself into scenes. He confided that he believed that dwelling too much on the memories of “that night” had transformed the mental and physical health of many survivors—many (as MacQuitty believed) for the better, and many (as Beesley believed) for the worse.

Seventeen-year-old Jack Thayer would write one of the most detailed of all survivors' accounts for his family in 1940, just before his country and Masabumi Hosono's country went to war. In October 1944 Jack's son, Second Lieutenant Edward C. Thayer, a fighter pilot, was killed during the invasion of Japan's fortress islands. Six months later, Jack's mother died on the thirty-second anniversary of the Titanic's sinking. Soon after, Jack himself was felled by a nervous breakdown and sudden bouts of amnesia; he drove away in his car, never to return.

Marjorie Collier's friend, twelve-year-old Bertha Watts, would grow up keeping the Titanic out of her thoughts. Seventy-three years after the sinking, when Robert Ballard's French-American team found the Titanic and a reporter from the Toronto Sun called for an opinion, Watts replied, “I don't give a damn.”