Titanic: The Long Night (26 page)

She didn’t even have any privacy in which to tell him a proper good-bye.

They managed only a hasty embrace and a quick, unsatisfactory kiss before Katie, trembling so violently with fright that she stumbled twice and nearly fell, was directed through the window and into the boat. Her legs like water, she sank down onto a seat beside the old woman who spoke no English. She looked as fear-stricken as Katie felt, and Katie had no choice but to rouse herself enough to reach out and hold the woman’s wrinkled hand in her own. Both hands shook.

Her tears spilled over as lifeboat number four began to lower in a series of unsteady, bone-jarring jerks. Katie was shocked to see the C-deck portholes disappearing beneath the surface. Some of the portholes were open, water gushing through them as if from a giant faucet and into the ship. It saddened her to picture the beautiful furnishings inside lost to a torrent of salt water and seaweed, but more than that, the sight of the rushing water swallowing up the great
Titanic
like a hungry giant made her heart tremble with fear for Brian and Paddy.

When the boat landed, one of the crew shouted up to Second Officer Lightoller on deck that there were not enough seamen to man the boat properly.

“I’m sending Quartermaster Perkis,” Lightoller called down, and moments later, the seaman scrambled down the falls. The ship had sunk so low, there was not that great a distance from the promenade to the lifeboat. A moment later, three more men dropped into the boat to help man it.

One of those men was Paddy Kelleher. He landed on his back only afoot from where Katie sat, crying quietly.

When she saw him, she shrieked with joy and scrambled over to throw her arms around his neck. “They told me to come,” he mumbled, though he hugged her back before sitting up. “Didn’t even ask if I had sea experience, just told me to jump down here and help. So I did.”

Katie was weak with relief and joy. If only Brian could have come with Paddy…

Perkis told the crewmen to row toward the
Titanic’s
stern, toward an open gangway. The water their oars dipped into was littered with deck chairs being tossed overboard. Katie wondered if the chairs were meant to be used as floats, or if someone inside hoped to lighten the weight of the great ship. She thought sadly that deck chairs would not do the job.

From inside, they could hear cracking sounds. “ ’Tis the water sending the furniture smashing about,” a woman announced grimly. “That lovely walnut table in our stateroom, with the mother-of-pearl engravings… ruined. Such a shame!” Another woman mourned the loss of a grand piano, while still another mentioned being quite taken with the china pattern in the à la carte restaurant and regretted the smashing of it.

And while Katie found it distressing that they were mourning the loss of objects rather than people, she understood that they were in shock. She also understood that their remarks meant they had accepted, as well, the loss of the
Titanic.
They no longer expected it to right itself and be saved. They couldn’t bear to think about the people still on board, so they distracted themselves by thinking of objects instead. She didn’t blame them.

She thought again, her heart breaking so sharply it seemed she could hear the sound it made,
Brian.

When they were directly below the stern boat deck, a group of firemen waiting on board either worked their way down the falls and dropped into the lifeboat, or fell into the water. Those who landed in the sea were quickly hauled aboard by the women. The rescued men were shaking violently from exposure to the icy water. Katie thought they looked half dead lying there gray in color and motionless.

As they gave up on the gangway they couldn’t locate and pulled away from the tilting, brilliantly lit
Titanic
, Katie said a quiet prayer of thanks that Paddy was safely beside her, then another of mourning for his brother.

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.”