Titanic - Filson Young (reading in the dark .TXT) 📗

wire, and the covers themselves like great boards; the new ropes ran stiffly in the new gear. At last a boat was cleared and the order given, “Women and children first.” The officers had revolvers in their hands ready to prevent a rush; but there was no rush. There was a certain amount of laughter. No one wanted to be the first to get into the boat and leave the ship. “Come on,” cried the officers. There was a pause, followed by the brief command, “Put them in.”

The crew seized the nearest women and pushed or lifted them over the rail into the first boat, which was now hanging over the side level with the deck. But they were very unwilling to go. The boat, which looked big and solid on the deck, now hung dizzily seventy-five feet over the dark water; it seemed a far from attractive prospect to get into it and go out on to the cold sea, especially as everyone was convinced that it was a merely formal precaution which was being taken, and that the people in the boats would merely be rowed off a little way and kept shivering on the cold sea for a time and then brought back to the ship when it was found that the danger was past. For, walking about the deck, people remembered all the things that they had been thinking and saying since first they had seen the Titanic; and what was the use of travelling by an unsinkable ship if, at the first alarm of danger, one had to leave her and row out on the icy water? Obviously it was only the old habit of the sea asserting itself, and Captain Smith, who had hitherto been such a favourite, was beginning to be regarded as something of a nuisance with his ridiculous precautions.

The boats swung and swayed in the davits; even the calm sea, now that they looked at it more closely, was seen to be not absolutely like a millpond, but to have a certain movement on its surface which, although utterly helpless to move the huge bulk of the Titanic, against whose sides it lapped, as ineffectually as against the walls of a dock, was enough to impart a swinging movement to the small boats. But at last, what with coercion and persuasion, a boat was half filled with women. One of the things they liked least was leaving their husbands; they felt that they were being sacrificed needlessly to over-elaborate precautions, and it was hard to leave the men standing comfortably on the firm deck, sheltered and in a flood of warm yellow light, and in the safety of the great solid ship that lay as still as a rock, while they had to go out, half-clad and shivering, on the icy waters.

But the inexorable movements of the crew continued. The pulleys squealed in the sheaves, the new ropes were paid out; and jerking downwards, a foot or two at a time, the first boat dropped down towards the water, past storey after storey of the great structure, past rows and rows of lighted portholes, until at last, by strange unknown regions of the ship’s side, where cataracts and waterfalls were rushing into the sea, it rested on the waves. The blocks were unhooked, the heavy ash oars were shipped, and the boat headed away into the darkness. And then, and not till then, those in the boat realized that something was seriously wrong with the Titanic. Instead of the trim level appearance which she presented on the picture postcards or photographs, she had an ungraceful slant downwards to the bows—a heavy helpless appearance like some wounded monster that is being overcome by the waters. And even while they looked, they could see that the bow was sinking lower.

After the first boat had got away, there was less difficulty about the others. The order, “Women and children first,” was rigidly enforced by the officers; but it was necessary to have men in the boats to handle them, and a number of stewards, and many grimy figures of stokers who had mysteriously appeared from below were put into them to man them. Once the tide of people began to set into the boats and away from the ship, there came a certain anxiety to join them and not to be left behind. Here and there indeed there was over-anxiety, which had to be roughly checked. One band of Italians from the steerage, who had good reason to know that something was wrong, tried to rush one of the boats, and had to be kept back by force, an officer firing a couple of shots with his pistol; they desisted, and were hauled back ignominiously by the legs. In their place some of the crew and the passengers who were helping lifted in a number of Italian women limp with fright.

And still everyone was walking about and saying that the ship was unsinkable. There was a certain subdued excitement, natural to those who feel that they are taking part in a rather thrilling adventure which will give them importance in the eyes of people at home when they relate it. There was as yet no call for heroism, because, among the first-class passengers certainly, the majority believed that the safest as well as the most comfortable place was the ship. But it was painful for husbands and wives to be separated, and the wives sent out to brave the discomforts of the open boats while the husbands remained on the dry and comfortable ship.

The steerage people knew better and feared more. Life had not taught them, as it had taught some of those first-class passengers, that the world was an organization specially designed for their comfort and security; they had not come to believe that the crude and ugly and elementary catastrophes of fate would not attack them. On the contrary, most of them knew destiny as a thing to fear, and made haste to flee from it. Many of them, moreover, had been sleeping low down in the forward part of the ship; they had heard strange noises, had seen water washing about where no water should be, and they were frightened. There was, however, no discrimination between classes in putting the women into the boats. The woman with a tattered shawl over her head, the woman with a sable coat over her nightdress, the woman clasping a baby, and the woman clutching a packet of trinkets had all an equal chance; side by side they were handed on to the harsh and uncomfortable thwarts of the lifeboats; the wife of the millionaire sat cheek by jowl with a dusty stoker and a Russian emigrant, and the spoiled woman of the world found some poor foreigner’s baby thrown into her lap as the boat was lowered.

By this time the women and children had all been mustered on the second or A deck; the men were supposed to remain up on the boat deck while the boats were being lowered to the level of the women, where sections of the rail had been cleared away for them to embark more easily; but this rule, like all the other rules, was not rigidly observed. The crew was not trained enough to discipline and coerce the passengers. How could they be? They were trained to serve them, to be obsequious and obliging; it would have been too much to expect that they should suddenly take command and order them about.

There were many minor adventures and even accidents. One woman had both her legs broken in getting into the boat. The mere business of being lowered in a boat through seventy feet of darkness was in itself productive of more than one exciting incident. The falls of the first boat jammed when she was four feet from the water, and she had to be dropped into it with a splash. And there was one very curious incident which happened to the boat in which Mr. Beezley, the English schoolmaster already referred to, had been allotted a place as a helper. “As the boat began to descend,” he said, “two ladies were pushed hurriedly through the crowd on B deck, and a baby ten months old was passed down after them. Then down we went, the crew shouting out directions to those lowering us. ‘Level,’ ‘Aft,’ ‘Stern,’ ‘Both together!’ until we were some ten feet from the water. Here occurred the only anxious moment we had during the whole of our experience from the time of our leaving the deck to our reaching the Carpathia.

“Immediately below our boat was the exhaust of the condensers, and a huge stream of water was pouring all the time from the ship’s side just above the water-line. It was plain that we ought to be smart away from it if we were to escape swamping when we touched the water. We had no officers on board, and no petty officer or member of the crew to take charge, so one of the stokers shouted, ‘Some one find the pin which releases the boat from the ropes and pull it up!’ No one knew where it was. We felt as well as we could on the floor, and along the sides, but found nothing. It was difficult to move among so many people. We had sixty or seventy on board. Down we went, and presently we floated with our ropes still holding us, and the stream of water from the exhaust washing us away from the side of the vessel, while the swell of the sea urged us back against the side again.

“The result of all these forces was that we were carried parallel to the ship’s side, and directly under boat No. 14, which had filled rapidly with men, and was coming down on us in a way that threatened to submerge our boat.

“‘Stop lowering 14,’ our crew shouted, and the crew of No. 14, now only 20 feet above, cried out the same. The distance to the top, however, was some 70 feet, and the creaking of the pulleys must have deadened all sound to those above, for down she came, 15 feet, 10 feet, 5 feet, and a stoker and I reached up and touched the bottom of the swinging boat above our heads. The next drop would have brought her on our heads. Just before she dropped another stoker sprang to the ropes with his knife open in his hand. ‘One,’ I heard him say, and then ‘Two,’ as the knife cut through the pulley rope.

“‘The next moment the exhaust stream carried us clear, while boat No. 14 dropped into the water, taking the space we had occupied a moment before. Our gunwales were almost touching. We drifted away easily, and when our oars were got out, we headed directly away from the ship.’”

But although there was no sense of danger, there were some painful partings on the deck where the women were embarked; for you must think of this scene as going on for at least an hour amid a confusion of people pressing about, trying to find their friends, asking for information, listening to some new rumour, trying to decide whether they should or should not go in the boats, to a constant accompaniment of shouted orders, the roar of escaping steam, the squeal and whine of the ropes and pulleys, and the gay music of the band, which Captain Smith had ordered to play during the embarkation. Every now and then a woman would be forced away from her husband; every now and then a husband, having got into a boat with his wife, would be made to get out of it again. If it was hard for the wives