“The way the band kept playing was a noble thing,” says the wireless operator. “I heard it first while we were working the wireless, when there was a rag-time tune for us, and the last I saw of the band, when I was floating, struggling in the icy water, it was still on deck, playing ‘Autumn.’ How those brave fellows ever did it I cannot imagine.”
Perhaps that music, made in the face of death, would not have satisfied the exacting critical sense. It may be that the chilled fingers faltered on the pistons of the cornet or at the valves of the French horn, that the time was irregular and that by an organ in a church, with a decorous congregation, the hymns they chose would have been better played and sung. But surely that music went up to God from the souls of drowning men, and was not less acceptable than the song of songs no mortal ear may hear, the harps of the seraphs and the choiring cherubim. Under the sea the music-makers lie, still in their fingers clutching the broken and battered means of melody; but over the strident voice of warring winds and the sound of many waters there rises their chant eternally; and though the musicians lie hushed and cold at the sea’s heart, their music is heard forevermore.
CHAPTER XXV
The Call for Help Heard
THE VALUE OF THE WIRELESS—OTHER SHIPS ALTER THEIR COURSE—RESCUERS ON THE WAY
WE have struck an iceberg. Badly damaged. Rush aid.”
Seaward and landward, J. G. Phillips, the Titanic’s wireless man, had hurled the appeal for help. By fits and starts—for the wireless was working unevenly and blurringly—Phillips reached out to the world, crying the Titanic’s peril. A word or two, scattered phrases, now and then a connected sentence, made up the message that sent a thrill of apprehension for a thousand miles east, west and south of the doomed liner.
The early despatches from St. John’s, Cape Race, and Montreal, told graphic tales of the race to reach the Titanic, the wireless appeals for help, the interruption of the calls, then what appeared to be a successful conclusion of the race when the Virginian was reported as having reached the giant liner.
MANY LINERS HEAR THE CALL
Other rushing liners besides the Virginian heard the call and became on the instant something more than cargo carriers and passenger greyhounds. The big Baltic, 200 miles to the eastward and westbound, turned again to save life, as she did when her sister of the White Star fleet, the Republic, was cut down in a fog in January, 1909. The Titanic’s mate, the Olympic, the mightiest of the seagoers save the Titanic herself, turned in her tracks. All along the northern lane the miracle of the wireless worked for the distressed and sinking White Star ship. The Hamburg-American Cincinnati, the Parisian from Glasgow, the North German Lloyd Prinz Friedrich Wilhelm, the Hamburg-American liners Prinz Adelbert and Amerika, all heard the C. Q. D. and the rapid, condensed explanation of what had happened.