COMPARTMENT WALL GIVES WAY.
Water rushed into several of the compartments. The ship listed to starboard. Captain Smith hurried to the bridge. It was thought the ship would float, until a shudder, that vibrated throughout the great frame, told that a compartment wall had given away. Then a definite order was given to man the lifeboats, and stewards were sent to instruct passengers to put on life preservers.
So thoroughly grounded was the belief of the cabin passengers that the Titanic was unsinkable that few of them took the accident seriously. Women in evening dress walked out of the magnificent saloons and joked about the situation. Passengers protested against getting into the lifeboats, although the ship was then sinking by the head.
Mr. and Mrs. H. J. Allison and their little daughter remained on the ship and were lost, after the infant son of the Allison family had been placed in a lifeboat in charge of a nurse.
Isidor Straus and his wife did not appear on deck until an order had been issued that only women and children should be allowed in the lifeboats. Mrs. Straus clung to her husband and refused to leave him. They died in each other’s arms.
Those who escaped in the first lifeboats were disposed to look on their experience as a lark. The sailors manning the oars pulled away from the Titanic. The sound of music floated over the starlit waves. The lights of the Titanic were burning.
Like simultaneous photographs of the same tragedy etched on the brains of 745 persons, survivors of the Titanic tell of their experiences and what they saw in those pitifully few hours between the great ship’s impact on the iceberg and the appalling moment when she disappeared.
As the survivors came, half fainting, half hysterical, down the Carpathia’s gang plank, they began to relate these narratives. Many of these were disjointed, fragmentary—a picture here, a frightful flash of recollection there, some bordered on hallucination, some were more connected as one of those who are now beginning to realize the horror through which they came. A few strangely enough, are calm and lucid. But every one thrills with some part of the awful truth as its narrator saw it.