The great liner began to lurch. Frohman now said to Miss Jolivet:
"You had better hold on the rail and save your strength."
The ship's list became greater; huge waves rolled up, carrying wreckage and bodies on their crest. Then, with all the terror of destruction about him, Frohman said to his associates, with the serene smile still on his face:
"Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure of life."
Instinctively the four people moved closer together, they joined hands by a common impulse, and stood awaiting the end.
The ship gave a sudden lurch; once more a mighty green cliff of water came rushing up, bearing its tide of dead and debris; again Frohman started to say the speech that was to be his valedictory. He had hardly repeated the first three words—"Why fear death?"—when the group was engulfed and all sank beneath the surface of the sea.
No situation of the thousands that he had created in the theater was so vividly or so unaffectedly dramatic as the great manager's own exit from the stage of life. Smilingly he had made his way through innumerable difficulties; smilingly and with the highest heroism he met his fate.
The only survivor of the quartet that stood hand in hand on those death-cluttered decks was Miss Jolivet, and it was she who told the story of those last thrilling minutes.
Charles Frohman's body was recovered the next day and brought to Queenstown. A fortnight later it reached New York. On the casket was the American flag that the dead man had loved so well. Though princes of capital, famous playwrights, and international authorities on law and art went down with him, the loss of Frohman overshadowed all others. In the eyes of the world, the loss of the Lusitania was the loss of Charles Frohman.
His noble and eloquent final words, so rich with courageous philosophy, not only joined the category of the great farewells of all time, but wherever read or uttered will give humanity a fresher faith with which to meet the inevitable. In a supreme moment of the most colossal drama that human passion ever staged, fate literally hurled him into the universal lime-light to enact a part that gave him an undying glory. The shyest of men became the world's observed.