Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World (26 page)

Upon leaving the restaurant, the Harrises decided to stop in the smoking room for an after-dinner cigarette while the Futrelles opted for a walk on deck since Jacques had a slight headache. René was likely the only woman to “infest” the smoking room that night—to use Frank Millet’s term. Frank himself was there, enjoying a round of cards with Clarence Moore. There had been only the two of them at their table in the dining saloon that evening since Archie was dining upstairs. The meal had been the most gala of the voyage so far, with a menu card featuring “Oysters à la Russe,” “Filets Mignons Lili,” “Calvados-Glazed Roast Duckling,” and “Chocolate Painted Eclairs” among its eleven courses. Arrangements of hothouse grapes and other fresh fruits decorated the tables, and two-year-old Loraine Allison had been brought to the table her parents shared with Arthur Peuchen and Harry Molson so she could see how beautiful it was.

Baskets of fruit had adorned the tables in the second-class dining saloon as well, and after dinner a group of about a hundred passengers had taken part in a hymn sing around the piano. In third class the main meal, as usual, had been served at midday followed by a hearty English savory tea in the late afternoon. Afterward, in the spartanly furnished third-class “general room,” an informal party had begun with music provided by the upright piano and the passengers’ own instruments. It’s unlikely there was much dancing, however, given that the room’s large double-backed benches left little open floor space and it was, after all, the Sabbath. At one point a rat was sighted and several young men chased it to squeals from the women. At ten o’clock the stewards turned out the lights in the general room and the “smoke room” next door, and passengers dispersed to their berths in the bow and stern, while a few may have sought dark spaces on the well deck for romantic encounters.

(photo credit 1.66)

(photo credit 1.75)

Clarence Moore (top) and Frank Millet were among those in the first-class smoking room on Sunday night.
(photo credit 1.2)

At this time on the bridge, Second Officer Lightoller was preparing to turn over the watch to First Officer Murdoch. Lightoller recapped for Murdoch his earlier conversation with the captain and also told him that he had sent orders up to the crow’s nest for the lookouts to keep a sharp eye for small pieces of ice and low-lying bergs known as “growlers.” This message had just been passed on to lookouts Fred Fleet and Reginald Lee, who were beginning their two-hour shift. That the crow’s nest binoculars still had not been found did not seem to be of pressing concern. And another ice warning message that came into the Marconi Room at about nine-forty may not have struck operator Jack Phillips as being terribly pressing either. He had already delivered several ice messages to the bridge, and this one from the
Mesaba
, describing “
heavy pack ice and great number large icebergs, also field ice,” likely didn’t seem very different from the others. He may have set it aside, as he had just made contact with the wireless station at Cape Race, Newfoundland, and was busily transmitting passenger messages. Second Officer Lightoller would later claim that
this all-important message, indicating that not just random icebergs but a huge ice field lay directly ahead of the
Titanic
, went undelivered. As Lightoller left the bridge, he mentioned to Murdoch that he estimated they should reach the ice at around eleven o’clock.

Norris Williams and his father had been out walking on deck after dinner, but even in their fur coats they found it too chilly and so went inside to the smoking room. There they joined a group of men that included John B. Thayer and Archie Butt, and very soon the cold weather and the possibility of icebergs ahead came up for discussion. Charles Williams then related the story of how he had been aboard a ship in 1879 called the
Arizona
when it had struck an iceberg. The collision knocked a hole in the
Arizona
’s forward bow but the crew and passengers had taken bales of cotton from the ship’s cargo hold and plugged the leaking bulkhead so that the ship was able make it into St. John’s, Newfoundland, thirty-six hours later.

At around the same time, another shipwreck anecdote was being related at a table in the Palm Room to John and Marian Thayer’s teenaged son, Jack. With his parents dining upstairs at the Wideners’ party, Jack had eaten alone in the dining saloon and then gone into the Palm Room. As he searched for a free table, a young American named Milton Long waved him over. The two struck up a conversation and the twenty-nine-year-old Long, a judge’s son from Springfield, Massachusetts, began regaling Thayer with stories of his travels. One of the most impressive of his adventures had occurred in Alaska, where he was on board a small steamer that ran aground on an offshore reef. As the ship was tipping over, Long managed to jump onto some shoals and then made his way from one rock to another until he reached shore with only wet feet.

W. T. Stead was in storytelling mode that evening as well, and his table companion, Frederic Seward, recalled how over cigars in the smoking room Stead told the tale “
of a mummy case in the British Museum which, he said, had had amazing adventures, but which punished with great calamities any person who wrote its story. He told of one person after another who … had come to grief after writing the story, and added that, although he knew it, he would never write it. He did not say whether ill-luck attached to the mere telling of it.” This tale later became attached to the
Titanic
story, and the notion that a mummy with a curse on it was traveling on board her became one of the many enduring myths about the sinking. Stead had also predicted a sea disaster remarkably similar to the one he was about to experience, in an 1886 article entitled “How the Mail Steamer Went Down in Mid-Atlantic,” which concluded with the statement “
This is exactly what
might
take place and what
will
take place if the liners are sent to sea short of boats.”

Sometime after ten o’clock, Walter and Mahala Douglas rose from their table in the now almost-empty restaurant. On the way down to their stateroom on C deck they noticed a strong vibration on the staircase and remarked to each other that the ship was going faster than it ever had. As he sat reading on the bunk in his second-class D-deck cabin, Lawrence Beesley noticed that the “
dancing motion” in his mattress caused by vibrations from the engines was more pronounced than usual. The indomitable René Harris had by then persuaded Harry to move on from the smoking room to the first-class lounge, where they, too, sat down with Edgar and Leila Meyer. The Duff Gordons by then had gone—Cosmo had retired to bed in his cabin, while Lucile and her assistant, Franks, sat chatting in front of the electric heater in her room across the hall. An electric fire was also burning in the fireplace of the lounge but it was not providing enough heat to dispel a chill in the room and Harry was soon urging René to go to their stateroom. “
I must have looked pretty fagged—I felt it,” she recalled, “so at about ten thirty we turned in.” In the Café Parisien, Mrs. Candee, too, was feeling the cold, and soon retired to her cabin, possibly escorted by the gentlemanly Edward Kent. The Irish engineer Edward Colley also called it a night while the four other men stayed at the table, finishing what Woolner called their “
hot grog.”

By eleven, the lounge was mostly empty except for a foursome absorbed in a lively game of bridge. One of the players was William Sloper, the young Connecticut banker who had been persuaded to take the
Titanic
by Alice Fortune. He had spent considerable time with Alice during the first four days of the voyage but had not seen her at all that day. After dinner, he had been writing thank-you letters to his London friends at a desk in the lounge when what he described as “a
very pretty young woman” approached and asked him if he would join her group to make a fourth for bridge. Although Sloper was not very proficient at bridge, he wasn’t about to turn down an invitation from Dorothy Gibson, the prettiest girl on board. Dorothy’s distinctive beauty had also caught the attention of the illustrator Harrison Fisher, who had put her face on the covers of
Cosmopolitan
and the
Saturday Evening Post
, as well as on countless picture postcards. This had led to some appearances in motion pictures, and in July of 1911 Dorothy was hired as the first leading lady for the American branch of Éclair, a French cinema company making films in Fort Lee, New Jersey. By March of 1912 she had completed a string of silent one-reelers and, in need of a rest, decided to take a holiday in Europe with her mother. After only a few weeks abroad, however, she had been called back to Fort Lee by the head of Éclair to start work on two new films.

When Sloper joined Dorothy, she and her mother were sitting with W. T. Stead’s tablemate, Frederic Seward, whom Dorothy knew because they attended the same church in New York. Seward asked the library steward to set up a bridge table for them in the center of the room near the fireplace. After a few hours, the four were so involved in their game that they were oblivious to the nearly empty room and to the pacing library steward, who was eager to turn out the lights. Edith Rosenbaum, who had been writing letters at one of the desks in the lounge, realized it was time to go and gave the steward some envelopes to post for her and took two books from the bookcase. Finally at eleven-thirty, the steward asked the bridge players to finish the game so he could close the room. As the group walked toward the grand staircase, Dorothy Gibson announced to William Sloper that she wanted to take a walk around the deck before bedtime. He suggested they both go below and put on warmer clothes and meet on the A-deck staircase landing. He quickly went down one flight to his cabin, put on a Shetland wool V-necked sweater under his suit, donned his winter-weight overcoat, and went up the staircase to wait for Dorothy. A map of the north Atlantic was on the wall nearby, so he began to study it while he waited.