The Loss of the S.S. Titanic by Lawrence Beesley (readnow .txt) 📖

of anything serious having happened to the

ship, I continued my reading; and still the murmur from the stewards

and from adjoining cabins, and no other sound: no cry in the night; no

alarm given; no one afraid—there was then nothing which could cause

fear to the most timid person. But in a few moments I felt the engines

slow and stop; the dancing motion and the vibration ceased suddenly

after being part of our very existence for four days, and that was the

first hint that anything out of the ordinary had happened. We have all

“heard” a loud-ticking clock stop suddenly in a quiet room, and then

have noticed the clock and the ticking noise, of which we seemed until

then quite unconscious. So in the same way the fact was suddenly

brought home to all in the ship that the engines—that part of the

ship that drove us through the sea—had stopped dead. But the stopping

of the engines gave us no information: we had to make our own

calculations as to why we had stopped. Like a flash it came to me: “We

have dropped a propeller blade: when this happens the engines always

race away until they are controlled, and this accounts for the extra

heave they gave”; not a very logical conclusion when considered now,

for the engines should have continued to heave all the time until we

stopped, but it was at the time a sufficiently tenable hypothesis to

hold. Acting on it, I jumped out of bed, slipped on a dressing-gown

over pyjamas, put on shoes, and went out of my cabin into the hall

near the saloon. Here was a steward leaning against the staircase,

probably waiting until those in the smoke-room above had gone to bed

and he could put out the lights. I said, “Why have we stopped?” “I

don’t know, sir,” he replied, “but I don’t suppose it is anything

much.” “Well,” I said, “I am going on deck to see what it is,” and

started towards the stairs. He smiled indulgently at me as I passed

him, and said, “All right, sir, but it is mighty cold up there.” I am

sure at that time he thought I was rather foolish to go up with so

little reason, and I must confess I felt rather absurd for not

remaining in the cabin: it seemed like making a needless fuss to walk

about the ship in a dressing-gown. But it was my first trip across the

sea; I had enjoyed every minute of it and was keenly alive to note

every new experience; and certainly to stop in the middle of the sea

with a propeller dropped seemed sufficient reason for going on deck.

And yet the steward, with his fatherly smile, and the fact that no one

else was about the passages or going upstairs to reconnoitre, made me

feel guilty in an undefined way of breaking some code of a ship’s

r�gime—an Englishman’s fear of being thought “unusual,” perhaps!

 

I climbed the three flights of stairs, opened the vestibule door

leading to the top deck, and stepped out into an atmosphere that cut

me, clad as I was, like a knife. Walking to the starboard side, I

peered over and saw the sea many feet below, calm and black; forward,

the deserted deck stretching away to the first-class quarters and the

captain’s bridge; and behind, the steerage quarters and the stern

bridge; nothing more: no iceberg on either side or astern as far as we

could see in the darkness. There were two or three men on deck, and

with one—the Scotch engineer who played hymns in the saloon—I

compared notes of our experiences. He had just begun to undress when

the engines stopped and had come up at once, so that he was fairly

well-clad; none of us could see anything, and all being quiet and

still, the Scotchman and I went down to the next deck. Through the

windows of the smoking-room we saw a game of cards going on, with

several onlookers, and went in to enquire if they knew more than we

did. They had apparently felt rather more of the heaving motion, but

so far as I remember, none of them had gone out on deck to make any

enquiries, even when one of them had seen through the windows an

iceberg go by towering above the decks. He had called their attention

to it, and they all watched it disappear, but had then at once resumed

the game. We asked them the height of the berg and some said one

hundred feet, others, sixty feet; one of the onlookers—a motor

engineer travelling to America with a model carburetter (he had filled

in his declaration form near me in the afternoon and had questioned

the library steward how he should declare his patent)—said, “Well, I

am accustomed to estimating distances and I put it at between eighty

and ninety feet.” We accepted his estimate and made guesses as to what

had happened to the Titanic: the general impression was that we had

just scraped the iceberg with a glancing blow on the starboard side,

and they had stopped as a wise precaution, to examine her thoroughly

all over. “I expect the iceberg has scratched off some of her new

paint,” said one, “and the captain doesn’t like to go on until she is

painted up again.” We laughed at his estimate of the captain’s care

for the ship. Poor Captain Smith!—he knew by this time only too well

what had happened.

 

One of the players, pointing to his glass of whiskey standing at his

elbow, and turning to an onlooker, said, “Just run along the deck and

see if any ice has come aboard: I would like some for this.” Amid the

general laughter at what we thought was his imagination,—only too

realistic, alas! for when he spoke the forward deck was covered with

ice that had tumbled over,—and seeing that no more information was

forthcoming, I left the smoking-room and went down to my cabin, where

I sat for some time reading again. I am filled with sorrow to think I

never saw any of the occupants of that smoking-room again: nearly all

young men full of hope for their prospects in a new world; mostly

unmarried; keen, alert, with the makings of good citizens. Presently,

hearing people walking about the corridors, I looked out and saw

several standing in the hall talking to a steward—most of them ladies

in dressing-gowns; other people were going upstairs, and I decided to

go on deck again, but as it was too cold to do so in a dressing-gown,

I dressed in a Norfolk jacket and trousers and walked up. There were

now more people looking over the side and walking about, questioning

each other as to why we had stopped, but without obtaining any

definite information. I stayed on deck some minutes, walking about

vigorously to keep warm and occasionally looking downwards to the sea

as if something there would indicate the reason for delay. The ship

had now resumed her course, moving very slowly through the water with

a little white line of foam on each side. I think we were all glad to

see this: it seemed better than standing still. I soon decided to go

down again, and as I crossed from the starboard to the port side to go

down by the vestibule door, I saw an officer climb on the last

lifeboat on the port side—number 16—and begin to throw off the

cover, but I do not remember that any one paid any particular

attention to him. Certainly no one thought they were preparing to man

the lifeboats and embark from the ship. All this time there was no

apprehension of any danger in the minds of passengers, and no one was

in any condition of panic or hysteria; after all, it would have been

strange if they had been, without any definite evidence of danger.

 

As I passed to the door to go down, I looked forward again and saw to

my surprise an undoubted tilt downwards from the stern to the bows:

only a slight slope, which I don’t think any one had noticed,—at any

rate, they had not remarked on it. As I went downstairs a confirmation

of this tilting forward came in something unusual about the stairs, a

curious sense of something out of balance and of not being able to put

one’s feet down in the right place: naturally, being tilted forward,

the stairs would slope downwards at an angle and tend to throw one

forward. I could not see any visible slope of the stairway: it was

perceptible only by the sense of balance at this time.

 

On D deck were three ladies—I think they were all saved, and it is a

good thing at least to be able to chronicle meeting some one who was

saved after so much record of those who were not—standing in the

passage near the cabin. “Oh! why have we stopped?” they said. “We did

stop,” I replied, “but we are now going on again.”. “Oh, no,” one

replied; “I cannot feel the engines as I usually do, or hear them.

Listen!” We listened, and there was no throb audible. Having noticed

that the vibration of the engines is most noticeable lying in a bath,

where the throb comes straight from the floor through its metal

sides—too much so ordinarily for one to put one’s head back with

comfort on the bath,—I took them along the corridor to a bathroom and

made them put their hands on the side of the bath: they were much

reassured to feel the engines throbbing down below and to know we were

making some headway. I left them and on the way to my cabin passed

some stewards standing unconcernedly against the walls of the saloon:

one of them, the library steward again, was leaning over a table,

writing. It is no exaggeration to say that they had neither any

knowledge of the accident nor any feeling of alarm that we had stopped

and had not yet gone on again full speed: their whole attitude

expressed perfect confidence in the ship and officers.

 

Turning into my gangway (my cabin being the first in the gangway), I

saw a man standing at the other end of it fastening his tie. “Anything

fresh?” he said. “Not much,” I replied; “we are going ahead slowly and

she is down a little at the bows, but I don’t think it is anything

serious.” “Come in and look at this man,” he laughed; “he won’t get

up.” I looked in, and in the top bunk lay a man with his back to me,

closely wrapped in his bed-clothes and only the back of his head

visible. “Why won’t he get up? Is he asleep?” I said. “No,” laughed

the man dressing, “he says—” But before he could finish the sentence

the man above grunted: “You don’t catch me leaving a warm bed to go up

on that cold deck at midnight. I know better than that.” We both told

him laughingly why he had better get up, but he was certain he was

just as safe there and all this dressing was quite unnecessary; so I

left them and went again to my cabin. I put on some underclothing, sat

on the sofa, and read for some ten minutes, when I heard through the

open door, above, the noise of people passing up and down, and a loud

shout from above: “All passengers on deck with lifebelts on.”

 

I placed the two books I was reading in the side pockets of my Norfolk

jacket, picked up my lifebelt (curiously enough, I had taken it down

for the first time that night from the wardrobe when I first retired

to my cabin) and my dressing-gown, and walked upstairs tying