TITANIC: A STORY TOLD
Chapter Fifty-Six
Jack pulled on the pipe with all his
strength. It wasn’t budging. He heard a gurgling sound. Water poured under the
door, spreading rapidly across the floor.
"Shit."
He tried to pull one hand out of the cuffs,
working it until the skin was raw...no good.
"Help! Somebody! Can anybody hear
me?" He spoke to himself. "This could be bad."
The corridor outside was deserted. Flooded a
couple of inches deep. Jack’s voice came faintly through the door, but there
was no one to hear it.
*****
Thomas Andrews was opening stateroom doors,
checking that people were out.
"Anyone in here?"
Rose ran up to him, breathless.
"Mr. Andrews, thank God! Where would the
Master-at-Arms take someone under arrest?"
"What? You have to get to a boat right
away!"
"No! I’ll do this with or without your
help, sir. But without will take longer."
Andrews paused, thinking. "Take the
elevator to the very bottom, go left, down the crewman’s passage, then make a
right."
"Bottom, left, right. I have it."
"Hurry, Rose."
*****
Rose ran up as the last elevator operator was
closing up his lift to leave.
"Sorry, Miss, lifts are closed--"
Without thinking, she grabbed him and shoved
him back into the lift.
"I’m through being polite, Goddammit! I
may never be polite the rest of my life! Now take me down!"
The operator fumbled to close the gate and
start the lift.
*****
Molly and the two seamen were rowing, and
they’d made it a hundred feet or so. Enough to see that the ship was angled
down into the water, with the bow rail less than ten feet above the surface.
"Come on, girls, join in. It’ll keep ya
warm. Let’s go, Ruth. Grab an oar!"
Ruth just stared at the spectacle of the
great liner, its rows of lights blazing, slanting down into the sullen black
mirror of the Atlantic.
*****
Through the wrought iron door of the elevator
car Rose could see the decks going past. The lift slowed. Suddenly, ice water
was swirling around her legs. She screamed in surprise. So did the operator.
The car had landed in a foot of freezing
water, shocking the hell out of her. She clawed the door open and splashed out,
hiking up her floor-length skirt so she could move. The lift went back up,
behind her, as she looked around.
"Left, crew passage."
She spotted it and slogged down the flooded
corridor. The place was understandably deserted. She was on her own.
"Right, right...right."
She turned into a cross-corridor, splashing
down the hall. A row of doors on each side.
"Jack? Jack?"
*****
Jack was hopelessly pulling on the pipe
again, straining until he turned red. He collapsed back on the bench, realizing
he was screwed. Then he heard her through the door.
"Rose! In here!"
In the hall Rose heard his voice behind her.
She spun and ran back, locating the right door, then pushed it open, creating a
small wave.
She splashed over to Jack and put her arms
around him.
"Jack, Jack, Jack...I’m sorry, I’m so
sorry."
They were so happy to see each other it was
embarrassing.
"That guy Lovejoy put it in my
pocket."
"I know, I know."
"See if you can find a key for these.
Try those drawers. It’s a little brass one."
She kissed his face and hugged him again,
then started to go through the desk.
"So...how did you find out I didn’t do
it?"
I didn’t." She looked at him. "I
just realized I already knew."
They shared a look, then she went back to
ransacking the room, searching drawers and cupboards. Jack saw movement out the
porthole and looked out. A lifeboat hit the surface of the water, seen from
below.
*****
While the seamen detached the falls, Boat One
rocked next to the hull. Lucille and Sir Cosmo Duff-Gordon sat with ten others
in a boat made for four times that many.
"I despise small boats. I just know I’m
going to be seasick. I always get seasick in small boats. Good heavens, there’s
a man down there."
In a lit porthole beneath the surface she saw
Jack looking up at her...a face in a bubble of light under the water.
*****
Rose stopped trashing the room, and stood
there, breathing hard.
"There’s no key in here."
They looked around at the water, now almost
two feet deep. Jack had pulled his feet up onto the bench.
"You have to go for help."
Rose nodded. "I’ll be right back."
"I’ll wait here."
Rose ran out, looking back at him once from
the doorway, then splashed away. Jack looked down at the swirling water.
*****
Rose splashed down the hall to a stairwell
going up to the next deck. She climbed the stairs, her long coat leaving a
trail like a giant snail. The weight of it was really slowing her down. She
ripped at the buttons and shimmied quickly out of the thing. She bounded up the
stairs in her dress and high-heeled shoes, to find herself in a long
corridor...part of the labyrinth of steerage hallways forward. She was alone
there. A long groan of stressed metal echoed along the hall as the ship
continued to settle. She ran down the hall, unimpeded now.
"Hello? Somebody!"
She turned a corner and ran along another
corridor in a daze. The hall sloped down into water, which shimmered,
reflecting the lights. The margin of the water crept toward her. A young man
appeared, running through the water, sending up geysers of spray. He pelted
past her without slowing, his eyes crazed.
"Help me! We need help!"
He didn’t look back. It was like a bad dream.
The hull gonged with terrifying sounds.
The lights flickered and went out, leaving
utter darkness. A moment passed. Then they came back on. She found herself
hyperventilating. That one moment of blackness was the most terrifying of her
life.
A steward ran around the nearest corner, his
arms full of lifebelts. He was upset to see someone still in his section. He
grabbed her forcefully by the arm, pulling her with him like a wayward child.
"Come on, then, let’s get you topside,
Miss, that’s right."
"Wait. Wait! I need your help!
There’s--"
"No need for panic, Miss. Come
along!"
"No, let me go! You’re going the wrong
way!"
He wasn’t listening. And he wouldn’t let her
go.
She shouted in his ear, and when he turned,
she punched him squarely in the nose. Shocked, he let her go, and staggered
back.
"To hell with you!"
"See you there, buster!"
The steward ran off, holding his bloody nose.
She spat after him. Just the way Jack taught her.
She turned around, saw a glass case with a
fire ax in it. She broke the glass with a battered suitcase, which was lying
discarded nearby, and seized the ax, running back the way she came.
At the stairwell she looked down and gasped.
The water had flooded the bottom five steps. She went down and had to crouch to
look along the corridor to the room where Jack was trapped.
Rose plunged into the water, which was up to
her waist...and powered forward, holding the ax above her head in two hands.
She grimaced at the pain from the literally freezing water.
*****
Jack had climbed up on the bench, and was
hugging the water pipe. Rose waded in, holding the ax above her head.
"Will this work?"
"We’ll find out."
They were both terrified, but trying to keep
panic at bay. He positioned the chain connecting the two cuffs, stretching it
taut across the steel pipe. The chain was, of course, very short, and his
exposed wrists were on either side of it.
"Try a couple practice swings."
Rose hefted the ax and thunked it into a
wooden cabinet.
"Now try to hit the same mark
again."
She swung hard, and the blade thunked in four
inches from the mark.
"Okay, that’s enough practice."
He winced, bracing himself as she raised the ax.
She had to hit a target about an inch wide with all the force she could muster,
with his hands on either side.
Jack spoke to her, trying to sound calm.
"You can do it, Rose. Hit it as hard as you can. I trust you."
Jack closed his eyes. So did she.
The ax came down. K-WHANG! Rose gingerly
opened her eyes and looked...Jack was grinning with two separated cuffs.
Rose dropped the ax, all the strength going
out of her.
"Nice work, there, Paul Bunyan."
He climbed down into the water next to her.
He couldn’t breathe for a second.
"Shit! Excuse my French. Ow, ow, ow,
that is cold! Come on, let’s go."
They waded out into the hall. Rose started
toward the stairs going up, but Jack stopped her. There was only about a foot
of the stairwell opening visible.
"Too deep. We gotta find another way
out."
*****
The letters Titanic were painted two feet
high on the bow of the doomed steamer. Once fifty feet above the waterline,
they now were quietly slipping below the surface. The passengers saw them, gold
on black, rippling and dimming to a pale green as they went deeper.
In Boat Six, Ruth looked back at the Titanic,
transfixed by the sight of the dying liner. The bowsprit was now barely above
the waterline. Another of Boxhall’s rockets exploded overhead. K-BOOM! It lit
up the whole area, revealing the half a dozen boats in the water, spreading out
from the ship.
"Now there’s something you don’t see
every day."