Monday, April 15, 1912
There had been, after all, no steamer approaching the Titanic to pick up survivors. This heartbreaking news spread slowly throughout lifeboat number six, stunning all of them. The lights seen from the ship’s deck had been nothing more than the glow of the northern lights, the aurora borealis. The realization was a serious blow. They had clung desperately to the belief that help was on the way.
No rescue ship? What would happen to them now, adrift on a blank, black canvas of salt water?
The boat’s passengers fell into a depressed silence. There was some subdued weeping, but most were too frozen and too shocked to protest loudly.
Elizabeth felt she couldn’t bear the penetrating cold another second. Her feet in the bottom of the boat were already wet in spite of her boots, her toes aching with cold. The fingers on her left hand were too numb to bend. Yet to complain about such things when people were still on board the Titanic seemed childish and petulant. Surely she was not so pampered and spoiled that she couldn’t deal with this hardship.
She must think of Max. He would want her to be brave, as he had been when he had risked his own life to save those two children. She mustn’t disappoint him.
But in her heart, Elizabeth didn’t really think she could deal with the pain and horror of what was happening. She felt as if, at any moment, her heart would shatter into a thousand pieces, terror at the darkness and the icy cold and the sense of isolation would render her completely helpless, and the sight of what was happening to the ship would numb her mind so that she could no longer think or feel.
Of what use to her mother would she be then?
The Titanic’s lights were still shining brightly. Elizabeth strained her eyes for some sign of Max standing at the rail, but could make out nothing more than shapes.
“If it were really sinking,” a woman sitting near the stern declared, “its lights wouldn’t still be on, would they? I think we came out here for nothing, and now we’re frozen. We’ll probably all die of pneumonia.”
“That’s better than drowning,” another woman said caustically.
One of the newlyweds, a young woman with pale blonde hair, cried out, “I want to go back! Please, I don’t want to be out here! Let me go back to my husband!”
No one answered her, and after a few moments, she fell to silent, heartbroken weeping.
They could still hear music floating faintly out from the Titanic. When, in an effort to elicit a response from her silent mother, Elizabeth asked Nola to identify a waltz, she received in return nothing but silence. Remembering her promise to her father, Elizabeth wondered if he might have been right, after all. Was this terrible night going to shatter her mother forever?
What would save Nola, Elizabeth knew, was the rescue of Martin Farr. She looked again for some sign of a rescue ship, but saw only an empty horizon.
The list of the Titanic was becoming more dramatic by the moment.
Elizabeth, heartsick, groaned softly under her breath. How much time did they have left, those people still on board? Her father, and Max, and hundreds of others?
She couldn’t bear this. How could she? How could anyone?
“We should go back,” she said for a second time. “Closer to the ship. If it really is going down, we should be there to help pick up survivors.”
And although Molly Brown and Margaret Martin nodded in agreement, Quartermaster Hichens launched once again into his tirade on the dangers of being swamped. After his first half-dozen words, Elizabeth stopped listening.
On board the Titanic, Max, along with Martin Farr, left the lounge and went to the warmer gymnasium. There was a sharp tilt to the deck now, and the atmosphere had changed. There was no longer anyone sitting on the mechanical animals. Instead, as the two men entered, a swarm of people moved toward them, heading for the doors. Those who had until now seemed to be patiently waiting for rescue had apparently decided that rescue might not be forthcoming, and now they pushed toward the open deck talking loudly among themselves.
Max watched them go, wondering how they would react when they realized every last lifeboat had gone.
Fighting against his own very real fear of what was coming, Max turned and followed the crowd out onto the deck. He went to join those gathered at the rail. Some men were shouting at the lifeboats to return to the ship, others were demanding to speak to the captain, sounding as if they believed he could solve their problem.
Max could no longer make out Elizabeth in any of the lifeboats and wasn’t sure which one was hers. Turning away from the rail, he strode across the deck. As he passed the entrance to the first-class staircase, a small group of well-dressed men and women emerged. An attractive woman wearing a silver evening gown and a fur stole said nervously as she passed him, “The water is rising quickly inside the ship. We saw it on our way up the stairs. So hard to believe…”
There was panic in her voice, and Max suspected that she was one of the passengers who had remained in blissful denial for far too long. Now that she saw with her own eyes the water rising within the ship itself, the truth had sunk in, and she was terrified.
That feeling would worsen when she arrived on deck and discovered that all of the boats but for two collapsibles had already left the ship.
She had realized the truth too late.
Max went down the stairs to A deck, to see the climbing water for himself. And there it was, lapping at the stairs below him. Not very far below him, either. Staring down at the churning whirlpool, Max swallowed hard. It was coming after him, and he had no place to go to escape it.
Swallowing his own panic, he spent a few moments studying the large map where the ship’s run had been posted each day. Martin Farr had remarked the day before that they were making excellent time, setting records for the journey.
And what good did that do us? Max thought bitterly as he turned to go back up the stairs, painfully conscious all the while of the sound of water below him.
On the boat deck, he went straight to the starboard rail again. Some, but not all, of the lifeboats had lights. What must the ship, sinking hard at the bow, look like from out there on the water? Did they believe it now, those people in the boats who had protested leaving the ship? Did they finally understand that the great Titanic, the unsinkable ship, was actually going under? Or were they still telling themselves that it would somehow be saved?
You’re still hoping, a voice inside him said. You can’t imagine yourself dying before your twentieth birthday, and you haven’t accepted the truth, even with the deck like a slantboard beneath your feet and icy black water slurping its way up the stairwell like a thirsty dragon.
The sight of the flat, black water below him, staring up at him as if to say, I’m waiting patiently, filled Max with terror as icy as he knew the ocean itself had to be. Because no one else on deck was panicking visibly, he fought to control it.
It’s just, he told himself silently, calmly, that I would have liked to see my parents once more. He pulled his coat collar up against the cold. We parted on less than pleasant terms. I would have liked the chance to make things right between us. And I wanted to see Elizabeth again.
But of course that wasn’t all it was, and Max knew it. The plain truth was, it maddened him that men were still standing silently around him, though their faces were strained and pale, when to him, it seemed they should all have been screaming, “It isn’t fair, it just isn’t fair! We don’t want to go down with this ship! We want to be saved! Someone save us, please!”
Angry tears stung his eyes and he turned away from the rail. He watched for a few moments as crewmen began wrestling to untie the only boat left that Max could see, a collapsible boat with canvas sides lashed to the top of the officer’s quarters. It came crashing down, and landed upright. While the men were working at attaching it to the falls of the nearest davit, Captain Smith approached with a megaphone, calling out, “Well, boys, do your best for the women and children, and look out for yourselves.”
Suddenly, the bow of the Titanic began to plunge swiftly, sending a tremendous wave of water washing aft from the forward end of the boat deck.
Here it is, Max thought, his heart stopping as the terror took over. Oh, god, here it comes! Though he thought he had been prepared, he was stunned by the sheer bulk of the solid wall of water as it swept over the ship. Screams and shouts for help filled the air around Max. All semblance of calm, dignified acceptance of their fate vanished as those still on deck, completely panicking under this horrendous threat, scrambled to find safety.
There was none.
Fighting despair, Max sprang like a cat for the roof of the officers’ quarters…and made it, clutching at its edges with desperate fingers. Once there, he hung on grimly, his head turned slightly to one side to watch below him.
There was that split second or two when a valiant steward, his eyes on the wall of water coming at him, shouted for someone to cut the forward falls as people scrambled into a collapsible boat. Once seated, several people hastened to obey the steward’s order. But they had barely loosened the falls when the solid wall of water slammed into them, scooping them up and yanking them back out of the boat. The collapsible was picked up and carried, slamming against a davit, then drifting into the forward funnel as the bridge disappeared under water. The last Max saw of the boat, it was floating away with only a few occupants remaining inside. He could do nothing for himself but hold on.
Although Elizabeth’s boat, number six, had pulled well away from the ship, Katie and Paddy’s boat, number four, was still close enough to hear a steadily increasing roar, like the bellow of a wounded animal, coming from the ship.
She tugged on Paddy’s sleeve. “What is that fearful noise?”
“Don’t know,” he answered, but a man sitting next to him said in halting English, “Things falling now. Ship tilting, big things fall, bump into each other. Piano. Chair. Table. Big things. Dishes, too. Lotsa broken things. Lotsa broken glass. One big mess. Lotsa noise.”
Paddy drew in his breath, and Katie knew he was thinking about Brian, still on the ship. He was probably afraid that one of those big, loose objects the man was talking about might have swooped down upon his brother, crushing him, taking away any chance he had of swimming free of the ship.
Though swept by terror herself, she squeezed Paddy’s hand in an attempt to comfort him.
The bow of the Titanic continued to dive. Still clinging to the roof of the officer’s quarters, Max found himself suddenly caught up in an icy cauldron of water. His fingers were torn away by the force of it, and suddenly he realized he was off the ship and into the very sea itself. The water temperature, three degrees below freezing, penetrated instantly, in spite of his heavy coat. He could feel the biting cold in his ears, his nostrils, down his neck and chest. And then he was being pulled down, down, in a swirling whirlpool of water so dark, he might as well have been stricken blind. Sensing that it was hopeless but refusing to allow that to be so…not yet…not yet…Max fought valiantly to swim.
But the tug and pull of the ocean determined to claim him was far stronger than he.
Still, he managed to fight his way to the surface. He had barely gulped in several huge swallows of air when he realized with fresh, numbing despair that his arms and legs were now too frozen to move, to swim, to be of any use to him at all. “Oh, god, no,” he groaned as the icy water closed over his head a second time. It dragged him beneath the surface again, his body so limp it might have been a log.
Max Whittaker did not want to die. He did not want to die in a black, graveyard-cold ocean. He meant to fight. He wanted to fight. Hadn’t that been the reason he had never given up hope on board the ship, because all along he was convinced that he could somehow save himself?
The frigid water of the Atlantic Ocean was a far greater foe than he had expected.
As it dragged his limp, frozen body ever downward, he said a silent good-bye to Elizabeth, wondering as he did so how close her boat might be, and if she could somehow sense that he was near.
He wished she could know that his last thought was of her.
Nola Farr, watching with wide, horrified eyes as the stern of the ailing ship continued to climb higher into the air as if it meant to point out the starry sky to observers, suddenly began sobbing. The sound was heartbreaking, and was quickly joined by other similar sounds, some softer, some more agonized and louder. As for Elizabeth, she was at least relieved to see some show of emotion from her mother. But how horrible, that it had taken this fresh new shock—the sight of the great ship tilting ever higher at one end—to pull Nola out of her near-catatonic state.
Then there came from the Titanic a horrendous, crashing sound, as if everything inside the ship had broken free of its moorings and was careening wildly into the sinking bow.
It is happening now, Elizabeth thought numbly. The thing that everyone said could never happen, the thing that no one believed was possible even when we were forced to leave in lifeboats, it is happening now. The Titanic is going under before our very eyes.
And her father, and Max, were still on board.
Katie and Paddy watched in horror as the forward funnel of the ship, with the painful sound of ripping metal, suddenly toppled toward the bow. It crashed down into the water, sending out a cloud of sparks and soot. At the same time, it created a huge wave that washed free all of the passengers on a canvas boat in the water, and sent the boat itself sailing off another twenty feet, away from the ship.
Katie, watching aghast, could see people on the Titanic clinging desperately to anything solid to prevent being washed overboard. In vain. The deck lay at such a steep angle now, they were beginning to slide off into the water. Terrified screams mixed with the continuing sounds of crashing objects inside the ship. People fell alone; they fell in groups; they fell in pairs, holding hands.
The ship’s lights, shining all this time, went out suddenly. Passengers in the lifeboats, startled by the sudden absence of light, cried out.
The utter darkness changed everything. As long as the ship’s lights had been on, a small spark of hope had remained that it might somehow survive. That spark died with the lights.
Still, no one was prepared for the sudden splitting of the ship between two of the giant funnels. The separation was accompanied by a terrible cracking sound that sent Katie’s hands up to cover her ears.
As the Titanic broke into two sections, the bow slid below the surface, while the stern section seemed to settle back for a moment, almost on an even keel.
The settling back seemed to last a long time. Katie wondered if there were anyone left on board, who might have held on and could now float along on the level section until help arrived. Perhaps Brian?
But then that section, too, began to slide beneath the surface, the split end sinking down, the aft section rising higher and higher until it was almost perpendicular in the water.
Those in the closer lifeboats anticipated the complete disappearance of the ship. But instead of sinking, the stern remained upright for a minute or two, and someone in Katie’s boat said, “There, it’s stopped! Didn’t I tell you it couldn’t sink?”
The words were barely out of the man’s mouth before the ship began to plunge again, faster now. As the stern disappeared beneath the water, Katie heard four sharp cracks that sounded as if someone had decided to mark the dark occasion with fireworks.
Then the Titanic was gone, leaving in its aftermath only a slight bubbling sound, like that of a warm kettle on the stove.
One of the crewman cried, “Pull for your lives or you’ll be sucked under!” Several of the women, and Paddy, grabbed oars and began to row.
As they rowed, the sea around them filled with the desperate shouts and screams of more than one thousand men, women, and children.
There were bloodcurdling sounds no one in the lifeboats would ever forget. To Katie, every other horror of the night paled in comparison to being surrounded by a sea of screams.
Then those horrifying sounds were joined by the agonized cries of women in the lifeboats whose husbands, fathers, and sons had been left behind and were at that moment fighting to survive the sea.
Just when Katie thought she would lose her mind from helplessness, Quartermaster Perkis ordered that they row back to the scene to look for survivors. Theirs was the only boat to do so immediately.
When the cries finally ended, after what seemed like hours, there was nothing. The lifeboats were surrounded now by darkness and silence. Both seemed to intensify the bitter cold.
Elizabeth wept for her father and for Max.
Nola Farr hid her face in her hands and moaned, “Martin, oh, Martin!” Other women wept for their own.
Now, when they rowed, there was nothing to break the flat stillness of the water but twenty scattered lifeboats. The giant Titanic, brilliantly lit, shiny and new, sitting atop the sea like a floating castle, was gone.
They were alone.