AN AGONIZING SEPARATION.
“Let him come! There is room!” cried Mrs. Emil Taussig as the men of the White Star Line motioned to her husband to leave her. It was with difficulty that he released her hold to permit her to be led to her place.
George D. Widener, who had been in Captain Smith’s company a few moments after the crash, was another whose wife was parted from him and lowered a moment later to the surface of the calm sea.
Of Major Archie Butt, a favorite with his fellow tourists; of Charles M. Hayes, president of the Grand Trunk; of Benjamin Guggenheim and of William T. Stead, no one seems to know whether they tarried too long in their staterooms or whether they forebore to approach the fast filling boats, none of them was in the throng which, weary hours afterward, reached the Carpathia.
Simultaneously on all the upper decks of the ship the ropes creaked with the lowering of the boats. As they reached the water, those in the boats saw what those on the decks could not see—that the Titanic was listing rapidly to starboard, and that her stern was rising at a portentous angle. A rush of steerage men toward the boats was checked by officers with revolvers in hand.
Some of the boats, crowded too full to give rowers a chance, drifted for a time. None had provisions or water; there was lack of covering from the icy air, and the only lights were the still undimmed arcs and incandescents of the settling ship, save for one of the first boats. There a steward, who explained to the passengers that he had been shipwrecked twice before, appeared carrying three oranges and a green light.
That green light, many of the survivors say, was to the shipwrecked hundreds as the pillar of fire by night. Long after the ship had disappeared, and while confusing false lights danced about the boats, the green lantern kept them together on the course which led them to the Carpathia.