CHAPTER 11 A Thousand Uneasy Sparks of Light

To liken a modern liner to a floating hotel is hackneyed enough. But that is only half the story. The colossal hotel, capable of accommodating two to three thousand guests, with its social gaiety and an acme of luxury, is rushing across half the globe, through the sunshine of day and the darkness of night, through calm and blizzard, relentlessly driven by an enormous energy generated within her.

Gerald Aylmer, R.M.S. Mauretania: The Ship and Her Record (1935)

THE THAYERS HAD BEEN INVITED to a Sunday-evening dinner party in honor of Captain Smith and hosted by their fellow Philadelphians Eleanor and George Widener. At home, they socialized in the same circles, including attending Philadelphia’s annual First Assembly Ball, where in 1911 Marian Thayer’s high-waisted white satin gown “spangled with gold” won an admiring write-up in Women’s Wear Daily.¹ The Wideners had since spent six months in England and France, from which they were returning to arrange their daughter’s wedding. As he was only seventeen, Jack, who arrived back at their suite to change for dinner at about six thirty, had not been asked to join the party, which meant he would be eating alone in the Saloon that evening while all three of his usual companions—his parents and the Captain—joined the Wideners.² Once Marian Thayer had been dressed with the help of her maid, Margaret, the couple went upstairs to the B-Deck Restaurant, managed by a London-based Italian restaurateur with his own hand-selected staff of waiters, who were technically classed as his employees rather than White Star’s. Restaurants that charged a fee independently of one’s ticket price to offer an à la carte service had first been introduced on German transatlantic liners, a fact that at least partially explained the chilly reception they received from several British commentators, who regarded the restaurants as being in poor taste, a temptation to advertise one’s wealth in a vulgar fashion even in relation to other first-class passengers, and an unnecessary erosion of the camaraderie supposedly engendered by eating at the same time as one’s fellow travelers in a saloon.^I Most passengers and travel journals were more enthusiastic about the restaurants’ “great convenience to those whose appetites are not equal to sampling all the courses which constitute a dinner on an ocean liner, who do not like to sit and wait and do nothing until the next course they want arrives.… If a passenger does not want anything between the hors d’oeuvre and the dessert he can skip from one extreme to the other and lose no time in watching other people attend to the numerous intermediate courses.”³ Paneled in walnut with its supporting pillars wrapped in gilt ribbons, the Restaurant’s fawn chairs in the Louis XVI style ringed circular tables on rose-colored carpets. Matching lampshades cast a soft glow on each table, reflected in the circular mirrors lining the walls.⁴ Louis Seize was also one of the more popular styles deployed in decorating the Titanic’s first-class cabins, although at least one of her Edwardian compatriots had voiced patriotic pique complaining that the aesthetic in which “all was done with a light, delicate, and reserved touch… is as wrongfully termed ‘Louis Seize’ as America has been christened after Amerigo Vespucci. We ought, rather, to speak of the ‘Marie-Antoinette style,’ for it is she whom these subtle and charming characteristics recall. They have nothing in common with the stout and massive Louis XVI.”⁵ It might have pleased this Austrian critic to know that a journalist who had been invited to see the Titanic’s accommodation before she left Southampton had informed his readers of the ship’s “Marie Antoinette bedrooms” and restaurant.⁶

A contemporary advertisement showing the Titanic’s Restaurant in use.

A smaller band, a trio, played string music by Puccini and Tchaikovsky from the Restaurant’s foyer as the guests ordered off the menu. Ismay had chosen to eat in the Restaurant that evening as well, reserving a table in the middle of the room and inviting Dr. O’Loughlin as his guest.⁷ The Duff Gordons were also dining, joined by Lady Duff Gordon’s secretary, Laura Francatelli. Leila Meyer, dressed in mourning, took a small table in one of the alcoves to dine with her husband; her father, Andrew Saks, founder of the Manhattan department store that bore his name, had passed away five days earlier, and throughout the journey home for his funeral Leila had preferred to dine in the more intimate Restaurant. A round of applause went up from other diners at the entrance of Irene Harris, a Broadway producer’s wife with her fractured arm nestling in a sling, courtesy of Dr. O’Loughlin’s expertise, after she had slipped on the Grand Staircase that afternoon.⁸ News of her fall had made the rounds, prompting the delivery to the Harrises’ C-Deck stateroom of notes from many well-wishers.⁹ Their companions at table, the novelist Jacques Futrelle and his wife, May, were impressed by the Restaurant’s “brilliant crowd.” May Futrelle continued:

Jewels flashed from the gowns of the women. And oh, the dear women, how fondly they wore their latest Parisian gowns.… The sweet odors of rare flowers pervaded the atmosphere.… It was a buoyant, oh, such a jolly crowd. It was a rare gathering of beautiful women and splendid men. There was that atmosphere of fellowship and delightful sociability which made the Sabbath dinner on board ship such a delightful occasion.… We were all filled with the joy of living.¹⁰

Her sentiments did not extend to a solo diner, identified by the crew as a professional gambler, who booked passage on ships guaranteed to attract a wealthy clientele suitable for fleecing. The stewards had discreetly passed this information on to habitués of the Smoking Room.¹¹

The Thayers most likely dined at a table of eight, possibly of nine. The exact guest list has not survived, and in the years since, reconstructing it has been complicated by others in the Restaurant that evening who subsequently described themselves as “of that party,” or by genuine lapses in memory, such as that of Lady Duff Gordon, who wrote in her memoirs two decades later that Ida Straus, her husband, and the Astors were also guests of the Wideners.¹² The Strauses and the Astors took their Sunday dinner in the Saloon, and it may be that Lady Duff Gordon had seen them in the Restaurant on one of the previous evenings, which, at the distance of twenty years, she conflated with the Sunday-night dinner party.¹³ Harry Anderson, a stockbroker from New York, ate in the Restaurant on Sunday, although accounts vary as to his presence at the Wideners’ table. Whether the Wideners’ son, Harry, was present is likewise unclear. At twenty-seven, he was old enough to merit an invitation, but since Jack Thayer was too young, as was the twelve-year-old son of another couple, it seems that the Wideners had erred on the side of manners in keeping all children, regardless of age, off the guest list.¹⁴ To toast the Captain, the Wideners had sent invitations to a third old money Pennsylvanian, William Carter, and his wife, Lucile, “a beauty of a pronounced type” and descendant of American President James Polk.¹⁵ Conversation at the table flitted between what was happening on Wall Street, the impending US presidential election, the forthcoming nuptials of the Wideners’ eldest daughter, and the Titanic’s speed.

The November election was shaping up to be both vicious and important for the country and specifically for most of the guests at the Wideners’ table. Four candidates were expected to stand, including the incumbent president, William Taft, who would almost certainly secure the Republican nomination, prompting his predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, to make good on his threat to desert the Grand Old Party to run as a Progressive. By April, the Democrats’ contenders had narrowed to a choice between Congressman Champ Clark of Missouri, Speaker of the House of Representatives, and Woodrow Wilson, Governor of New Jersey, who would clinch the nomination at the Democratic National Convention in June. The Socialists had already proffered Eugene Debs, who had scored only 2.8 percent of the popular vote during his previous reach for the White House in 1908. However, he was expected to, and did, poll better in 1912.¹⁶ A series of recessions in the previous decade, mounting inflation after 1909, and a financial crisis in 1907 had hardened many Americans’ attitudes towards the “East Coast elite,” perceived as a selfish class, wholly and willfully out of touch with the American heartlands, themselves categorized with each westward expansion as the center of the country rather than the founding states to the east. The dissatisfied mood in America had drifted left, something capitalized on by the Democrats, who would have Woodrow Wilson running on a platform of increased diplomatic isolationism, the removal of protectionist tariffs, the creation of a national banking system, reform of American industrial practices, and the introduction of legislation to improve the working classes’ access to health care.¹⁷ Wilson’s anti-trust pronouncements like “the flower does not bear the root, but the root the flower” and “the amount of money on Wall Street is no indication of the energy of the American people” struck a chord with millions of voters.¹⁸

Shock, and then resentment, concerning the amount of money possessed by the plutocracy had been building since the actions during the Panic of 1907 of the Titanic’s owner, J. P. Morgan, who was missing the ship’s maiden voyage as his health had fatally collapsed during his holiday to Europe.¹⁹ Known variably as the 1907 Bankers’ Crisis or the Knickerbocker Crisis, after the trust whose collapse triggered a panic on Wall Street that spread through the country, bouncing dozens of smaller banks and trusts into declaring bankruptcy, it had been the most serious financial fright in American history thus far. Over the course of three purgatorial weeks in October, there was a real fear that the crisis would tear down the American economy, wiping out the savings and future prospects of millions of families, until Morgan gathered a coalition of bankers who stepped into the breach to stabilize and then end the panic. After the danger had passed, conspiracy theories evolved from whisper to shout that Morgan had engineered the whole debacle solely to enrich himself. That was incorrect, unfounded, and wholly disengaged with the main point unintentionally highlighted by Morgan’s intervention. Even many who applauded Morgan’s patriotism and indefatigability in working to halt the crash were appalled at what his intervention revealed about the clout of big business in America. A cabal of private citizens had sufficient funds to decide the future of a country’s economy; by 1907, Morgan and his partners disposed of 40 percent of the liquid industrial, commercial, and financial capital of the United States, by far the largest single pool of money in the world.²⁰ In the case of Morgan in 1907, they had utilized this for the national good. There was nothing to prevent them one day doing the opposite, a point vigorously stressed by the Democrats and the Socialists in their 1908 presidential campaigns. Although the contest was won by the Republicans, on July 12, 1909, Congress approved a resolution to add a sixteenth amendment to the Constitution allowing for the federal government to “lay and collect taxes on income, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.”²¹

Due to be enacted in February 1913, the Sixteenth Amendment would do to people like John Thayer what the House of Lords Act had done to Lord Rothes. It dealt a blow, if not quite a fatal one, that would irrevocably alter the existence of their class. No federal income tax had been leveled in the United States since 1872, when a policy enacted to help pay for the Civil War had been rescinded. The astronomical wealth gathered by the plutocracy in the succeeding Gilded Age had, at least in part, been rendered possible by the fact that they did not have to pay income tax, or death duties, which were not imposed until 1916. The Democrats were harnessing the momentum generated by the impending implementation of the Sixteenth Amendment, along with wider concerns about the perceived injustices and instability of the American economy, to make the abolition of protectionist tariffs a vote-winning plank of their campaign. Critics of the tariffs pointed out that the United Kingdom did not impose them, having remained since 1865 “perhaps history’s purest example of a free-trade nation,” refusing to levy them even against imports in competition with those from its vast empire.²² American protectionism in 1912 favored the wealthy and industry over agriculture, making the Democratic stump against it, and for income tax, hugely popular with Southern, Midwestern, and Californian voters, particularly after tariffs had been repeatedly identified by various newspapers as a contributory cause of recent inflation. All of the presidential candidates, bar President Taft, had committed themselves to supporting the implementation of the new amendment in February, and even in Taft’s own party various Republican congressmen and senators, and former President Roosevelt, had been won over, seeing the future revenue generated by the new tax as necessary to fund a significant, sustained expansion of the US military. Fortunes like the Thayers’, the Wideners’, the Astors’, and the Guggenheims’ would be created in the American future, but it would not be until the arrival of the internet billionaires of the early twenty-first century that they would reach comparable heights, and never again have they been accumulated with so few restrictions.

Eleanor Widener’s placement on Sunday evening had put Major Archibald Butt, an early casualty of the 1912 presidential campaign, next to Marian Thayer. Butt, forty-six years old, tall, urbane, and a talented writer with a wide circle of friends, had been an adviser first to Theodore Roosevelt and, after he left office, to his successor, Taft. Their feud over the 1912 Republican nomination had caught Butt in its crosshairs, compounding the fatigue building as President Taft’s reliance on him evolved into dependence. By the new year, Butt had been hovering close to a nervous breakdown, but such was his respect, bordering on veneration, for the office of the president that he refused to mention his deteriorating health to Taft.^II Taft was only made aware of his confidant’s misery through the intervention of Butt’s companion, the architect and art historian Francis “Frank” Millet, who begged the President to authorize a leave of absence, permitting Butt to spend ten weeks recuperating in Rome with Millet, who had been tasked with early designs and recommendations for the Lincoln Memorial and during his winter abroad planned to visit for research the Italian capital’s Il Vittoriano monument to King Victor Emmanuel II.²³ Millet promised to have Butt back in good time to accompany the President to the Republican National Convention in Chicago in the third week of June.

Marian Thayer.

Marian Thayer had a gift for friendship, a talent for making her partners in conversation feel fascinating, and she was delighted with Major Butt, whom she had not met, despite having several friends in common, until they were both guests of the Wideners. As she told President Taft in a letter a week later, “From the moment we met we never moved from each other for the rest of the evening. Never before have I come in such close contact immediately with anyone. He felt the same & we both marvelled at the time of the strangeness of such a thing for we both realised it while actually opening our innermost thoughts to each other. He told me much about his mother and their letters, his sister-in-law, you, and someone else he loved but that I do not,” an oblique reference to Theodore Roosevelt, whose support for income and inheritance taxes had rendered him persona non grata to Marian.²⁴

Butt’s stay in Italy had been devoted to recuperation, except for a sightseeing trip to the Quirinal Palace, where he had witnessed the attempted assassination of King Victor Emmanuel III and his wife, Elena of Montenegro, by an anarchist who fired several shots as the royals were driven to a memorial Mass for the King’s late father. A crowd attempted to lynch the young gunman before he was rescued through arrest by the police.²⁵ Butt, still suffering from nervous exhaustion, had dutifully telephoned the US embassy to inform them of the news and then joined the procession of 350,000 well-wishers who marched to the Palace, where the King, the Queen, and their four children appeared on the balcony to acknowledge the cheers.²⁶ Particular admiration was reserved for Queen Elena, who, when she heard the first shot, had thrown herself in front of her husband.²⁷ Armed with a letter of introduction from Taft, Butt had seen the King of Italy in happier and more relaxed circumstances two weeks later when, accompanied by the American Ambassador, he was granted an audience at the Quirinal to convey President Taft’s good wishes following the King’s narrow escape from the assassin.²⁸

The failed regicide in Rome summoned up ghosts of the recent past—the royal couple had been on their way to mark the anniversary of the birth of the King’s late father, who had himself been assassinated by a gun-wielding anarchist twelve years earlier.²⁹ Umberto I’s murder had been cited by the American anarchist Leon Czolgosz as inspiration for his own assassination of President William McKinley a year later. In the same week that the King and Queen of Italy had dodged the near murder witnessed by Butt, the Governor-Prince of the Ottoman province of Samos was killed by a nationalist gunman.³⁰ A list of the politically motivated assassinations of high-ranking individuals in the twenty years before the Titanic set sail makes for sobering reading. With the benefit of hindsight, it is hard not to see them as the first splutters of a death rattle, although they might more accurately serve as examples of unheeded warnings of avoidable danger. On holiday in Switzerland in the autumn of 1898, the Empress of Austria had been stabbed through the heart by an anarchist whose diary recorded that he “wanted to kill someone famous enough to get in the newspapers.” At his subsequent trial, he turned the jury decisively against him by declaring that “human suffering was the motive for my attack.”³¹ Along with the Empress, King Umberto I, and President McKinley, assassins had also wiped out the King and Queen of Serbia; a Russian grand duke; prime ministers of Russia, Bulgaria, Greece, and Spain; two Russian ministers of the interior; a president of France; the Governor-General of Finland; and two kings of Portugal.³² The King and Queen of Spain had arrived at their wedding breakfast with rubble and blood on their outfits after a republican bomb bounced off their carriage.³³ There had been diplomatic disasters concerning French and German interventions in Morocco, and, as a moribund Ottoman Empire crumbled, wars had almost broken out over Austria-Hungary’s annexation of the former Ottoman provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina and then over the Italian conquest of Libya. The Tsar of Russia and the Ottoman Sultan had been forced to accept seismic political change after popular protest shook their empires from within, and in 1910 centuries of Braganza rule collapsed as Portugal declared itself a republic for the first time in its history.

Butt, in service to a non-isolationist presidency and a sympathizer with European culture, watched these near misses with laconic unhappiness, continuing to advise President Taft while worrying sincerely about the future. During his visit to Rome, he was also accorded audiences first with the Vatican Secretary of State, whom Butt described as “one of the handsomest men I have ever seen,” and, two days afterwards, with Pope Pius X, an unusual honor for a Protestant dignitary and one which excited the prejudices and pens of the anti-Catholic sections of the American press.³⁴ After Rome, Butt made quick trips to the same spots as the Thayers, missing his future friend by a few days in each place, first in Switzerland and then as a guest of the American Ambassador in Berlin. He visited his niece in Paris, and they crossed the Channel together to spend Easter in Chester with his brother, followed by a weekend in London.³⁵ His cousin and hostess in London, Baroness Rebecca Rosenkrantz, thought that Butt seemed “in a distressed and sad state of mind,” something perceived almost immediately by Marian Thayer over dinner and confirmed when Butt told her “he was very nervous & did not know how he was going to stand the rushing life he was returning to.”³⁶ She offered to teach him some of the techniques her husband had learned at the Swiss clinic to tackle his depression.

He made an engagement for the next afternoon as I was going to teach him a method of control of the nerves through which I had just been with a noted Swiss doctor knowing it would be a wonderful thing for him if he could get a hold of it.… We were going to work so hard over it the rest of the time on board. He said I was just like his mother and opened his heart to me & it was as though we had known each other well for years. It was the strangest sensation and felt as tho’ a veil was blown aside for those few hours eliminating distance between two who had known each other always well long, long before and had just found each other again—I believe it.³⁷

Marian Thayer’s interest in spiritualism and homeopathy, as well as the strident tone she adopted in her letters and affidavits in the months after the Titanic’s sinking, have earned her an unjustified reputation as a loquacious eccentric, but many of her contemporaries, including Archibald Butt, shared her views and he agreed that it felt as if he and Marian “had just found each other again.”³⁸

Marian’s dinner party companion, Major Archibald Butt (RIGHT), walking with President Taft (CENTER) in 1911.

Their immediate intimacy does not seem to have riled Thayer any more than Bruce Ismay’s ungainly infatuation had earlier that afternoon. Archibald Butt had been timidly heterosexual for most of his adult life, professing unrequited passion for a series of Society women who were, for a variety of reasons, unquestionably beyond his romantic reach. George Behe in his moving recent account of Butt’s career in 1911 and 1912 has described Butt’s relationship with the architect Frank Millet as that of close friends who had shared a house and living expenses, which may explain their shared residency of a townhouse in Washington, DC.³⁹ There is, however, much to support the suggestions of Richard Davenport-Hines and Hugh Brewster in their respective studies of the Titanic’s passengers that Millet and Butt may have been romantically involved with one another and perhaps had been for years.⁴⁰ Millet, the father of three and amiably married since 1879 to a woman who shared both his artistic interests and his wit, but who spent most of her time living in a refurbished manor house in England, was bisexual, and passionate letters survive between him and American author Charles Warren Stoddard, with whom he shared a home in Venice in the five years preceding his marriage.⁴¹ Mark Twain had stood as best man at Millet’s wedding, and he so admired Millet’s geniality that he coined the phrase “a Millet” to mean “a warm and likeable fellow”; Butt was even more struck by Millet’s virtues when the two met in Washington in the 1890s.⁴² First Lady Nellie Taft seems to have believed that Millet and Butt were a couple, while her husband tacitly ignored the evidence in front of him, something made easier by Butt’s necessary discretion as “too canny an individual for that, too conscious of the risk in military and political ranks, where such an idea would have put a quick end to any hopes of advancement.”⁴³ Millet’s protective concern for Butt and his intercession with President Taft as Butt’s weight plummeted due to stress could, of course, be platonic, as could, perhaps at more of a stretch, their living together in Washington, recuperating in the same Italian villa, and traveling home on the same ship. Against that, there is a letter Millet wrote on the first morning of the Titanic’s voyage and posted at Queenstown. Sent in reply to his friend the British artist Alfred Parsons, its description of Millet’s cabin is perhaps the most relevant to a discussion of the relationship between Millet and Archibald Butt:

Dear Alfred,

I got yours this morning and was glad to hear from you. I thought I told you my ship was the Titanic. She has everything but taxicabs and theatres. Table d’hôte, restaurant à la carte, gymnasium, Turkish bath, squash court, palm gardens, smoking rooms for “ladies and gents,”^III intended I fancy to keep the women out of the men’s smoking room which they infest in the German and French steamers. The fittings are in the order of Haddon Hall and are exceedingly agreeable in design and colour. As for the rooms they are larger than the ordinary hotel room and much more luxurious with wooden bedsteads, dressing tables, hot and cold water, etc. etc., electric fans, electric heater and all. The suites with their damask hangings and mahogany oak furniture are really sumptuous and tasteful. I have the best room I ever had in a ship and it isn’t one of the best either, a great long corridor in which to hang my clothes and a square window as big as the one in the studio alongside the large light. No end of furniture cupboards, wardrobe, dressing table, couch etc. etc. Not a bit like going to sea. You can have no idea of the spaciousness of this ship and the extent and size of the decks.…

Yours always,

Frank⁴⁴

Millet was booked into cabin E-38, on the same corridor as Dorothy Gibson in one of the cheapest parts of First Class. Admittedly, he does identify his accommodation as “not one of the best” on board, yet it is hard to square his description of “suites with their damask hangings… and a great long corridor in which to hang my clothes” with surviving photographs or deck plans of any of the E-Deck bedrooms, and impossible to do so when it comes to the mention of “a square window as big as the one in the studio.”⁴⁵ The only staterooms on the Titanic to have windows were outside cabins on A- and B-Deck; any located below that had circular portholes. Archibald Butt had reserved B-38, which had all the features mentioned in Millet’s letter—a large bed, tables, large wardrobe, a couch, a dressing table, and a rectangular window.⁴⁶ While the exact extent of the men’s involvement with one another is unknowable, the logical solution to the inconsistencies between Butt’s cabin, Millet’s ticket, and his letter is that for propriety’s sake they had booked two separate cabins, three decks apart, picked the cheapest cabin possible for the one least used, and spent most of their time in Butt’s stateroom, from where Millet penned his reply to Alfred Parsons on the morning of the 11th.

Apart from her burgeoning friendship with Butt, the only other details Marian recalled of that dinner were how quickly their food arrived and that Captain Smith “refused to drink” any alcohol. The latter claim is backed up by other survivors who dined with Marian that evening, with one deviating testimony that Smith “sipped once” at a glass of port to halt the jovial hectoring of a friend. In light of subsequent newspaper claims that Smith had been drunk as a result of the Wideners’ hospitality, surviving guests were willing to go on record, either before the Senate inquiry or in newspaper interviews, that Smith had not imbibed anything stronger than one sip of port. In this, they are corroborated by statements from other passengers in the Restaurant who, since they had not been in that party, had no discernible reason to exculpate themselves from the charge of having plied a captain with wine.⁴⁷ Where Marian may have been overzealous in her defense of Captain Smith was in her insistence that their plates had been cleared and coffee served by about 8:25 p.m., which means ordering, preparation, serving, eating, and clearing was managed in about fifty minutes, leaving Smith time to make it back to the Bridge to talk with one of his officers by 8:45. The probability of this timeline is undercut further by a statement made to the Senate inquiry into the events of that night. Daisy Minahan, who ate with her family at a table nearby on Sunday the 14th, swore that “Capt. Smith was continuously with his party from the time we entered [about 7:15] until between 9:25 and 9:45, when he bid the women good night and left. I know this time positively, for at 9:25 my brother suggested my going to bed. We waited for one more piece of the orchestra, and it was between 9:25 and 9:45 (the time we departed), that Capt. Smith left.… I had read testimony before your committee stating that Capt. Smith had talked to an officer on the bridge from 8:45 to 9:25. This is positively untrue, as he was having coffee with these people during this time. I was seated so close to them that I could hear bits of their conversation.”⁴⁸ A fully sober Smith talked later in the evening with two of his officers, and Marian Thayer’s recollection of an unfeasibly swift dinner was either a mistake or a well-intentioned lie to exonerate a man she had sincerely liked from charges she felt to be unwarranted.

At one point, Dr. O’Loughlin allegedly stood at his table in the center of the Restaurant and proposed a toast with his glass of champagne—“Let us drink to the mighty Titanic”—which was returned along with some applause and cheers.⁴⁹ Two decks below, Lady Rothes, Tommy Andrews, Ida Straus, Dorothy Gibson, and Jack Thayer dined in the Saloon. The stewardess Mary Sloan saw Andrews arrive and thought he looked “splendid,” in far better spirits than when she had spoken to him on the Friday.⁵⁰ Two of Andrews’s dining companions, Dr. O’Loughlin and the stockbroker Harry Anderson, were in the Restaurant that evening, but everyone else was present in the Saloon, including two Canadian newlyweds, the Purser Hugh McElroy, William Stead, an American lawyer called Frederic Seward, and a thirty-six-year-old New Yorker, Eleanor Cassebeer, who was sailing home to initiate divorce proceedings after years of living apart from her husband in Paris. It was down to the Purser that Mrs. Cassebeer was at their table. After boarding, she had gone to his office to make sure she got a good table in the Saloon. While standing in the queue, she had been irritated by the delay caused by the requests of a man she decided must be Jewish and turned to the gentleman behind her to explain, “I hope I don’t get put next to that Jew.” The man to whom she made the comment, Benjamin Foreman, was a thirty-year-old Jewish embroidery merchant from upstate New York, who perhaps showed more magnanimity than Mrs. Cassebeer deserved when she saw him two days later and asked if he would like to join her for a walk on the Promenade Deck. “You don’t want to walk with me,” he laughed. “You said you didn’t like Jews and I’m one too.”⁵¹ He joined her for coffee in the Lounge, where he apparently managed to undo most of her prejudices. She had also been the subject of some teasing from her companions for her refusal to change out of her afternoon suits for dinner. On Sunday, as the hors d’oeuvres and oysters made way for a consommé Olga or a cream of barley, Cassebeer arrived at table in a white lace gown, with an ermine stole and jewels, inspiring Tommy Andrews to joke as she took her seat, “Now that’s the way a lady should look!”⁵² Andrews did not apparently talk shop too much at meals since, although the newlyweds heard him refer to the ship affectionately as “his baby,” after five days and fourteen meals together Eleanor Cassebeer understood him as “someone who it was said had something to do with building the Titanic.”⁵³ Instead, “upon every occasion, and especially at dinner on Sunday evening, he talked almost constantly about his wife, little girl, mother and family, as well as of his home.”⁵⁴ During dinner, a young couple from Montreal brought their daughter Loraine, who at two years old was the same age as Andrews’s child Elizabeth, into the Saloon to introduce her to some fellow Canadians at their table.⁵⁵

At the Countess of Rothes’s table, poached salmon in a mousseline sauce for the fish course was cleared away for a choice between filet mignon, chicken Lyonnaise, and a marrow farci, before steward Ewart Burr moved around behind the Countess and her companions with offerings of green peas, creamed carrots, boiled rice, and two types of potatoes—Parmentier, flavored with rosemary, and new—as possible complements to the lamb, duck, or sirloin. A punch romaine palate cleanser served as interlude before pigeon accompanied by cress, followed by an asparagus vinaigrette salad, then pâté de foie gras and dessert options of peaches in chartreuse jelly, chocolate and vanilla éclairs, and French ice cream. There was also a Waldorf pudding on the menu, for which no precise recipe survives. A vanilla pudding containing diced apples, sultanas, and a dash of nutmeg was offered on the Olympic in 1914 and it may be that it was a company recipe.⁵⁶

On the Sabbath, there were performances by the band but traditionally no dancing on board British liners, so Lady Rothes and Gladys Cherry listened to music in the Reception Room after dessert. The steward bringing them their coffee told the two ladies that icebergs were responsible for it having become “very, very cold” on deck, which did not seem to lessen how “very gay we felt that night.”⁵⁷ The last tune they stayed to hear was the Barcarolle from Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann, after which they returned to their stateroom, where they were in bed for about ten o’clock.⁵⁸ Tommy Andrews went to thank one of the ship’s bakers, another Ulsterman, who had as a favor to Andrews baked a speciality bread, almost certainly either potato or soda bread.⁵⁹ Andrews had planned to take coffee in the Café Parisian or the Reception Room with two of his dinner companions, but they lingered so long over dessert that Andrews retired to his cabin “full of charts… making calculations and drawings for future use.”⁶⁰ Dorothy Gibson and her mother went to the Lounge in search of some bridge partners, which they found in the New York–based lawyer Frederic Seward and a twenty-eight-year-old stockbroker from New Britain, Connecticut, William Sloper.⁶¹ Also in the Lounge, two middle-aged sisters, Martha Stephenson and Elizabeth Eustis, were looking at photographs of icebergs in Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Heart of the Antarctic. They returned the book to the Lounge’s lending library and walked down to their shared cabin on D-Deck. On their way, the sisters paused to say hello to John and Marian Thayer. They were neighbors in Haverford, Pennsylvania, and a quick greeting turned into a forty-five-minute conversation about the voyage thus far. Martha and Elizabeth were enjoying their time so much that they joked about their mild distress at news of the ship’s speed, since they wanted to spend as much time as possible at sea.⁶²

Later, stories circulated, one originating in the New York World and the other in the New York Telegraph, that Ida Straus and Dorothy Gibson took separate strolls on the deck that night, with Dorothy walking out of the Lounge at about 11:50 onto a deck lit by the moon “shining brilliantly.”⁶³ There was no moon that night, and Dorothy and her companions had been gently ushered from the Lounge by the stewards at its 11:30 closing time; Ida’s maid had helped her prepare for bed after dinner.⁶⁴ Jack Thayer did walk on deck late that evening. After his dinner, he had gone to enjoy a cup of coffee and listen to the live music in the Reception Room. Seeing him alone, a twenty-nine-year-old man with light brown hair, gray-blue eyes, and a prominent nose approached and asked if he would like some company.⁶⁵ Milton Long was a legal clerk and judge’s son from Massachusetts, traveling alone and profoundly bored. They chatted over coffee for an hour or so, before Long called it a night to head to his cabin on the same deck and Thayer popped up to his to grab an overcoat for “a few turns around the deck.”⁶⁶

This suite on the Olympic was almost identical to the one occupied by John and Marian Thayer on the Titanic, with the door leading through to Jack’s cabin.

On the Boat Deck, with its white-painted and covered lifeboats, Jack thought it was “deserted and lonely. The wind whistled through the stays, and blackish smoke poured out of the three forward funnels.”⁶⁷ The natural breeze from earlier had died and the wind around Jack Thayer was generated solely by the Titanic’s forward motion. It was darker on deck, since First Officer William Murdoch, then on duty on the Bridge, had ordered several hatches closed to reduce the light from belowdecks and facilitate the spotting of the icebergs they had been warned about.⁶⁸ Jack noticed that

it had become very much colder. It was a brilliant, starry night. There was no moon and I have never seen the stars shine brighter; they appeared to stand right out of the sky, sparkling like cut diamonds. A very light haze, hardly noticeable, hung low over the water. I have spent much time on the ocean, yet I have never seen the sea smoother than it was that night; it was like a mill-pond, and just as innocent looking, as the great ship rippled through it.⁶⁹

At about eleven, he returned indoors and chatted with his parents in their suite.⁷⁰ He then went into his bedroom and about ten or fifteen minutes later called “Good night” through the closed door, which was answered by his mother since his father had already dozed off.⁷¹ The electric heaters in the Thayers’ bedrooms were temperamental and, despite the frigid weather, Jack decided to prop open his porthole slightly, before changing for bed. His mother evidently had the same idea but, assuming her son was asleep, and reluctant to wake her husband, rang for a steward to help her with the window. Next door, Jack was awake but “sleepy” and standing next to his bed, adjusting his wristwatch to keep in line with the ship’s clocks, when the Titanic grazed an iceberg in trying to swerve to avoid it. He swayed slightly on his feet and felt the “ship had veered to port as though she had been gently pushed. If I had had a brimful glass of water in my hand not a drop would have spilled, the shock was so slight.”⁷²

I. Several of the Titanic’s passengers referred to the Restaurant as “the Ritz Restaurant,” a confusion that likely originated with the subcontracting of the first restaurants on Hamburg-Amerika liners to the Ritz hotels.

II. During several visits to the Midwest, Major Butt had been deeply distressed to hear groups of children mocking the presidential embonpoint with the nicknames “Tum-Tum” and “Taft the Tubby,” shouted at the presidential train as it pulled into the station.

III. A possible confusion of the Writing Room as a Smoking Room “for ladies.”