“The result of all these forces was that we were carried parallel to the ship’s side, and directly under boat No. 14, which had filled rapidly with men, and was coming down on us in a way that threatened to submerge our boat.
“‘Stop lowering 14,’ our crew shouted, and the crew of No. 14, now only 20 feet above, cried out the same. The distance to the top, however, was some 70 feet, and the creaking of the pulleys must have deadened all sound to those above, for down she came, 15 feet, 10 feet, 5 feet, and a stoker and I reached up and touched the bottom of the swinging boat above our heads. The next drop would have brought her on our heads. Just before she dropped another stoker sprang to the ropes with his knife open in his hand. ‘One,’ I heard him say, and then ‘Two,’ as the knife cut through the pulley rope.
“‘The next moment the exhaust stream carried us clear, while boat No. 14 dropped into the water, taking the space we had occupied a moment before. Our gunwales were almost touching. We drifted away easily, and when our oars were got out, we headed directly away from the ship.’”
But although there was no sense of danger, there were some painful partings on the deck where the women were embarked; for you must think of this scene as going on for at least an hour amid a confusion of people pressing about, trying to find their friends, asking for information, listening to some new rumour, trying to decide whether they should or should not go in the boats, to a constant accompaniment of shouted orders, the roar of escaping steam, the squeal and whine of the ropes and pulleys, and the gay music of the band, which Captain Smith had ordered to play during the embarkation. Every now and then a woman would be forced away from her husband; every now and then a husband, having got into a boat with his wife, would be made to get out of it again. If it was hard for the wives to go, it was harder for the husbands to see them go to such certain discomfort and in such strange company. Colonel Astor, whose young wife was in a delicate state of health, had got into the boat with her to look after her; and no wonder. But he was ordered out again and came at once, no doubt feeling bitterly, poor soul, that he would have given many of his millions to be able to go honourably with her. But he stepped back without a word of remonstrance and gave her good-bye with a cheery message, promising to meet her in New York. And if that happened to him, we may be sure it was happening over and over again in other boats. There were women who flatly refused to leave their husbands and chose to stay with them and risk whatever fate might be in store for them, although at that time most of the people did not really believe that there was much danger. Yet here and there there were incidents both touching and heroic. When it came to the turn of Mrs. Isidore Straus, the wife of a Jewish millionaire, she took her seat but got back out of the boat when she found her husband was not coming. They were both old people, and on two separate occasions an Englishman who knew her tried to persuade her to get into a boat, but she would not leave her husband. The second time the boat was not full and he went to Mr. Straus and said: “Do go with your wife. Nobody can object to an old gentleman like you going. There is plenty of room in the boat.” The old gentleman thanked him calmly and said: “I won’t go before the other men.” And Mrs. Straus got out and, going up to him, said: “We have been together for forty years and we will not separate now.” And she remained by his side until that happened to them which happened to the rest.
XI
We must now go back to the Marconi room on the upper deck where, ten minutes after the collision, Captain Smith had left the operators with orders to send out a call for assistance. From this Marconi room we get a strange but vivid aspect of the situation; for Bride, the surviving operator, who afterwards told the story so graphically to the New York Times, practically never left the room until he left it to jump into the sea, and his knowledge of what was going on was the vivid, partial knowledge of a man who was closely occupied with his own duties and only knew of other happenings in so far as they affected his own doings. They had been working, you will remember, almost all of that Sunday at locating and replacing a burnt-out terminal, and were both very tired. Phillips was taking the night shift of duty, but he told Bride to go to bed early and get up and relieve him as soon as he had had a little sleep, as Phillips himself was quite worn out with his day’s work. Bride went to sleep in the cabin which opened into the operating-room.
He slept some time, and when he woke he heard Phillips still at work. He could read the rhythmic buzzing sounds as easily as you or I can read print. He could hear that Phillips was talking to Cape Race, sending dull uninteresting traffic matter; and he was about to sink off to sleep again when he remembered how tired Phillips must be, and decided that he would get up and relieve him for a spell. He never felt the shock, or saw anything, or had any other notification of anything unusual except no doubt the ringing of the telegraph bells and cessation of the beat of the engines. It was a few minutes afterwards that, as we have seen, the Captain put his head in at the door and told them to get ready to send a call, returning ten minutes later to tell them to send it.
The two operators were rather amused than otherwise at having to send out the S.O.S.; it was a pleasant change from relaying traffic matter. “We said lots of funny things to each other in the next few minutes,” said Bride. Phillips went stolidly on, firmly hammering out his “S.O.S., S.O.S.,” sometimes varying it with “C.Q.D.” for the benefit of such operators as might not be on the alert for the new call. For several minutes there was no reply; then the whining voice at Phillips’ ear began to answer. Some one had heard. They had picked up the steamer Frankfurt, and they gave her the position and told her that the Titanic had struck an iceberg and needed assistance. There was another pause and, in their minds’ eye, the wireless men could see the Frankfurt’s operator miles and miles away across the dark night going along from his cabin and rousing the Frankfurt’s Captain and giving his message and coming back to the instrument, when again the whining voice began asking for more news.
They were learning facts up here in the Marconi room. They knew that the Titanic was taking in water, and they knew that she was sinking by the head; and what they knew they flashed out into the night for the benefit of all who had ears to hear. They knew that there were many ships in their vicinity; but they knew also that hardly any of them carried more than one operator, and that even Marconi operators earning £4 a month must go to bed and sleep sometimes, and that it was a mere chance if their call was heard. But presently the Cunard liner Carpathia answered and told them her position, from which it appeared that she was about seventy miles away. The Carpathia, which was heading towards the Mediterranean, told them she had altered her course and was heading full steam to their assistance. The Carpathia’s voice was much fainter than the Frankfurt’s, from which Phillips assumed that the Frankfurt was the nearer ship; but there was a certain lack of promptitude on board the Frankfurt which made Phillips impatient. While he was still sending out the call for help, after the Frankfurt had answered it, she interrupted him again, asking what was the matter. They told Captain Smith, who said, “That fellow is a fool,” an opinion which Phillips and Bride not only shared, but which they even found time to communicate to the operator on the Frankfurt. By this time the Olympic had also answered her twin sister’s cry for help, but she was far away, more than three hundred miles; and although she too turned and began to race towards the spot where the Titanic was lying so quietly, it was felt that the honours of salving her passengers would go to the Carpathia. The foolish Frankfurt operator still occasionally interrupted with a question, and he was finally told, with such brusqueness as the wireless is capable of, to keep away from his instrument and not interfere with the serious conversations of the Titanic and Carpathia.
Then Bride took Phillips’s place at the instrument and succeeded in getting a whisper from the Baltic, and gradually, over hundreds of miles of ocean, the invisible ether told the ships that their giant sister was in distress. The time passed quickly with these urgent conversations on which so much might depend, and hour by hour and minute by minute the water was creeping up the steep sides of the ship. Once the Captain looked in and told them that the engine-rooms were taking in water and that the dynamos might not last much longer. That information was also sent to the Carpathia, who by this time could tell them that she had turned towards them with every furnace going at full blast, and was hurrying forward at the rate of eighteen knots instead of her usual fifteen. It now became a question how long the storage plant would continue to supply current. Phillips went out on deck and looked round. “The water was pretty close up to the boat deck. There was a great scramble aft, and how poor Phillips worked through it I don’t know. He was a brave man. I learnt to love him that night, and I suddenly felt for him a great reverence, to see him standing there sticking to his work while everybody else was raging about. While I live I shall never forget the work Phillips did for that last awful fifteen minutes.”