Titanic, Filson Young [books to read for self improvement .TXT] 📗

“I must take upon myself the whole blame for that statement. I made it, and I believed it when I made it. The accident to the Olympic, when she collided with the cruiser Hawke, convinced me that these ships, the Olympic and Titanic, were built like battleships, able to resist almost any kind of accident, particularly a collision. I made the statement in good faith, and upon me must rest the responsibility for error, since the fact has proved that it was not a correct description of the unfortunate Titanic.”

And for three days while the Carpathia was ploughing her way, now slowly through ice-strewn seas, and now at full speed through open water, and while England lay under the cloud of an unprecedented disaster, New York was in a ferment of grief, excitement, and indignation. Crowds thronged the streets outside the offices of the White Star Line, while gradually, in lists of thirty or forty at a time, the names of the survivors began to come through from the Carpathia. And at last, when all the names had been spelled out, and interrogated, and corrected, the grim total of the figures stood out in appalling significance—seven hundred and three saved, one thousand five hundred and three lost.

It is not possible, nor would it be very profitable, to describe the scenes that took place on these days of waiting, the alternations of hope and grief, of thankfulness and wild despair, of which the shipping offices were the scene. They culminated on the Thursday evening when the Carpathia arrived in New York. The greatest precautions had been taken to prevent the insatiable thirst for news from turning that solemn disembarkation into a battlefield. The entrance to the dock was carefully guarded, and only those were admitted who had business there or who could prove that they had relations among the rescued passengers. Similar precautions were taken on the ship; she was not even boarded by the Custom officials, nor were any reporters allowed on board, although a fleet of steam launches went out in the cold rainy evening to meet her, bearing pressmen who were prepared to run any risks to get a footing on the ship. They failed, however, and the small craft were left behind in the mist, as the Carpathia came gliding up the Hudson.

Among the waiting crowd were nurses, doctors, and a staff of ambulance men and women; for all kinds of wild rumours were afloat as to the condition of those who had been rescued. The women of New York had devoted the days of waiting to the organization of a powerful relief committee, and had collected money and clothing on an ample scale to meet the needs of those, chiefly among the steerage passengers, who should find themselves destitute when they landed. And there, in the rain of that gloomy evening, they waited.

At last they saw the Carpathia come creeping up the river and head towards the White Star pier. The flashlights of photographers were playing about her, and with this silent salute she came into dock. Gateways had been erected, shutting off the edge of the pier from the sheds in which the crowd was waiting, and the first sight they had of the rescued was when after the gangway had been rigged, and the brief formalities of the shore complied with, the passengers began slowly to come down the gangway. A famous English dramatist who was looking on at the scene has written of it eloquently, describing the strange varieties of bearing and demeanour; how one face had a startled, frightened look that seemed as if it would always be there, another a set and staring gaze; how one showed an angry, rebellious desperation, and another seemed merely dazed. Some carried on stretchers, some supported by nurses, and some handed down by members of the crew, they came, either to meetings that were agonizing in their joy, or to blank loneliness that would last until they died. Five or six babies without mothers, some of them utterly unidentified and unidentifiable, were handed down with the rest, so strangely preserved, in all their tenderness and helplessness, through that terrible time of confusion and exposure.

And in the minds of those who looked on at this sad procession there was one tragic, recurrent thought: that for every one who came down the gangway, ill perhaps, maimed perhaps, destitute perhaps, but alive and on solid earth again, there were two either drifting in the slow Arctic current, or lying in the great submarine valley to which the ship had gone down. They were a poor remnant indeed of all that composite world of pride, and strength, and riches; for Death winnows with a strange fan, and although one would suit his purpose as well as another, he often chooses the best and the strongest. There were card-sharpers, and orphaned infants, and destitute consumptives among the saved; and there were hundreds of heroes and strong men among the drowned. There were among the saved those to whom death would have been no great enemy, who had no love for life or ties to bind them to it; and there were those among the drowned for whom life was at its very best and dearest; lovers and workers in the very morning of life before whom the years had stretched forward rich with promise.

And when nearly all had gone and the crowd in the docks was melting away, one man, who had until then remained secluded in the ship came quietly out, haggard and stricken with woe: Bruce Ismay, the representative and figure-head of that pride and power which had given being to the Titanic. In a sense he bore on his own shoulders the burden of every sufferer’s grief and loss; and he bore it, not with shame, for he had no cause for shame, but with reticence of words and activity in such alleviating deeds as were possible, and with a dignity which was proof against even the bitter injustice of which he was the victim in the days that followed. There was pity enough in New York, hysterical pity, sentimental pity, real pity, practical pity, for all the obvious and patent distress of the bereaved and destitute; but there was no pity for this man who, of all that ragged remnant that walked back to life down the Carpathia’s gangway, had perhaps the most need of pity.

The symbols of Honour and Glory and Time that looked so handsome in the flooding sunlight of the Titanic’s stairway lie crushed into unrecognizable shapes and splinters beneath the tonnage of two thousand fathoms of ocean water. Time is no more for the fifteen hundred souls who perished with them; but Honour and Glory, by strange ways and unlooked-for events, have come