TITANIC: A STORY TOLD
Chapter Sixty-Six
The faces of the saved were solemn as they
sat in the lifeboats in the pre-dawn darkness, the open sea lapping quietly
around them. In one boat after another, the survivors sat quietly, waiting.
Ismay was in a trance, just staring and
trembling. Cal sipped from a hip flask offered to him by a black-faced stoker.
Ruth hugged herself, rocking gently.
In Boat Fourteen, Rose lay swaddled. Only her
face was visible, white as the moon. The man next to her jumped up, pointing
and yelling. Soon everyone was looking and shouting excitedly. To Rose,
everything was silent, in slow motion.
Lowe lit a green flare and waved it as
everyone shouted and cheered. Rose didn’t react. She floated beyond all human
emotion.
Golden light washed across the white boats,
which floated in a calm sea reflecting the rosy sky. All around them, like a
flotilla of sailing ships, were icebergs. The Carpathia sat nearby, as boats
rowed toward her.
Images dissolved into one another: a ship’s
hull looming, with the letters Carpathia visible on the bow...Rose watching,
rocked by the sea, her face blank...seamen helping survivors up the rope ladder
to the Carpathia’s gangway doors...two women crying and hugging each other
inside the ship. All was silent, all in slow motion, to Rose’s point of view.
There was just music somewhere, so gentle and sad, part elegy, part hymn, part
aching song of love lost forever.
The images and music continued...Rose,
outside of time, outside of herself, coming into Carpathia, barely able to
stand...Rose being draped with warm blankets and given hot tea...Bruce Ismay
climbing aboard. He had the face and eyes of a damned soul.
As Ismay walked along the hall, guided by a
crewman toward the doctor’s cabin, he passed rows of seated and standing
widows. He had to run the gauntlet of their accusing gazes. It was the longest
walk of his life.