From Time to Time

29

WE LAY BESIDE HER, rocking on the water, men in a portside cargo opening fending us with boat hooks, and I snapped this, Captain Smith himself way up there at the top watching us board. They’d run out a gangplank, and now we moved on up it and into the black cargo opening.

Inside we separated forever, everyone else gestured off to the left by uniformed crew members. I alone, tan ticket in hand, politely gestured toward a staircase. But, my foot on the steel tread, I stood for a moment watching the others walk off, chattering, most of them soon to drown, unless . . . unless what?

Up through the ship I climbed then—didn’t yet know where the elevators were or whether they came down this far—up and up toward my deck. The stairs turned from bare steel to carpeted treads, the staircases widening, stair landings becoming more ornate with each flight up, banisters becoming heavy with carving. A new deck, and now the newel posts of the next flight up bore a pair of bronze figures supporting lamps, and I saw stained glass, framed paintings, and above the staircase a great curved ceiling of stained-glass washing stairs and carved banisters in multicolored light. Each of the great public rooms, lounges, and lobbies through which I ascended seemed more lavish than the last, and I’d begun passing glorious women in fashionable hobble skirts, and their cigar-smoking men in suits, vests, watch chains, stiff white collars, some wearing shipboard caps, a few still actually wearing derbies. Nearly everyone smiling, pleased and excited at new sights and sounds. Moving up through this mighty ship on newly carpeted stairs, I’d become aware of the special smell of the Titanic, different from the Mauretania, both saying that we were at sea, but pervading the air of the Titanic the unique smell of—I recognized it now—newness. Of newly dried paint, newly woven and still untrod carpeting, new wood newly glued, new cloth, new everything, this magnificent luxury liner still unused: we were the first.

To the pleased, excited passengers moving up and down through the ship with me, I think everything said pleasure ahead. I saw it in their faces, smiles, and heard it in their voices, and it affected me. For a forgetful few moments moving up through this ship, I shared the anticipation of a beginning voyage. Then I stepped off the stairs onto the floor of the first-class salon, and saw the shining, possibly never-yet-played grand piano. And remembered the story of an Irish immigrant girl saved in one of the lifeboats—had I glimpsed her on the ferry? The ship slowly sinking, she’d climbed up from steerage into this magnificent salon, along with a group of fellow steerage passengers. She continued on up, heading for the boat deck, but glancing back she saw one of her fellow immigrants stop at the piano in awe. He touched the keys, then began to play, sliding onto the piano bench. Others of the group gathered around him, and they began to sing along, staring around them at the unimaginable luxury of the room they’d found themselves in. And that was the last the girl ascending the stairs ever saw or heard of her friends.

True or not, the memory of that story abruptly separated me from the other passengers on the stairs; these splendid women and the cigar-smoking, pince-nezed men. Who of these would be saved? Most of the women, few of the men. I had to shut off these incapacitating thoughts; I was here on this ship for a powerful reason, and I forced my mind to focus on that.

My cabin was where the White Star deck plan had said it would be, very near the staircase I stepped from onto B deck. This is it, B59 on the Titanic, door ajar, key in lock, steady as a hotel room as I stood in the door taking this picture. Just behind me a steward said, “Boarded at Queenstown, did you, sir?” and I understood that he wanted to see a ticket and turned: he wore a brass-buttoned green jacket, white shirt, black bow tie. Will you be saved? my mind asked as I handed him my ticket. He gave it back, nodding: I was the only first-class boarder at Queenstown, so my luggage should soon be here. I nodded and walked out to explore.

Up one last flight to the boat deck, but just before reaching it, I stopped. Beside each stair, one at each side, a little glassed-in light was set, all unlighted now. Wasn’t this the staircase, I stood wondering, and weren’t these the lights that Second Officer Lightoller saw as he stood loading women and children into the portside lifeboats? Glancing down from time to time to see the green ocean water slowly creeping up the stairs toward him, these lights shining eerily under the ascending water? I thought so; thought I remembered from so much I had read that this was Lightoller’s staircase, waiting now for the midnight just ahead when the ocean would enter to slowly climb higher and higher, stair by stair.

I shut down on the thought, and stepped out onto the new teak of the boat deck, the very topmost deck out under the pale sky and weak sun. Through the leather of my soles, suddenly, I felt the vibration from many decks below of the ship’s great turbines, and we began to move out to sea. Here hung the lifeboats, here was the deck soon to be crowded with men, women, and children in life jackets. Some of them stone-faced calm, some crying, some terribly frightened, some laughing at what they supposed was a false alarm. Up here the confused, botched lowering of half-empty boats—Cut it out! I turned to walk over to the starboard side of B deck, and the shining white paint of boat number five. There it hung secure in its davits, glittery white, tautly covered with canvas, and I reached out to touch the new paint of its wooden side. Under my fingertip, the painted wood felt smooth, faintly warm from the sun. But above all it felt solid and real. Titanic Boat Five, said the fresh black lettering at its prow, and I touched the T. Then touched the cool solidity of the varnished ship’s rail below Boat Five, and then I was really here. On the new Titanic, its speed steadily increasing, a doomed ship, carrying me and every other soul aboard toward the immense icy mass waiting ahead. And once again I stood bleakly alone, eyes closing against this useless knowledge.

I walked on; beside me, large as a ten-story building, a great beige and black stack marched in line with three more identical monsters back toward the stern. They rose immensely up through the roofs of the various superstructures, their thin wash of black smoke streaming out to merge and dissipate behind us. Huge air scoops sprouted from the deck like giant ear trumpets. I turned to look forward, and just ahead, the enclosed bridge of the ship stretched across the entire forward end of the deck. A door at its side stood ajar, swinging slightly to and fro with our movement, and I walked up to peek in. There they were, four officers, three in blue, the fourth, Captain Smith himself, still in his whites. Not quite shoulder to shoulder, they stood in a line facing forward, staring out through the long square windows. Captain Smith’s arms hung behind him, one hand clasping the other wrist. Behind them, in his own little glassed-in enclosure, was the helmsman, hands on his great wooden wheel, eyes on the compass in the brass binnacle before him. He stood directly opposite me, only a dozen feet or so off, and before he could glance over and see me, I turned away.

For a moment or so longer I stood alone out here, glancing up at the aerial strung between our two masts; it would be the first ever to signal an SOS. Through the web of black guy wires bracing the enormous stacks, the wind of our passage moaned steadily, mournful and lonely, as though it knew and was telling me what was going to happen, and I walked back to my stairs.

Down here on B deck, the sides sheltered from the sea in places by long glass windows, it was warmer, and I walked along on the sun side toward the stern. A boy spinning a top on the steady deck had a little audience, and I joined them long enough to snap this. Will this boy survive? I was sick of the question, unable to prevent it, and walked on toward the stern. At every entrance passengers were turning in to the warmth of the interior, but I kept on toward the stern and the entrance to the Verandah and Palm Court. Near the stern, second-class passengers stood up on their limited deck space watching the privileged first class, and me with my red leather camera as I stood taking them. As I saw this in my tiny little viewfinder, my mind said, Most of you are going to drown Sunday night. I left to walk back along the port side, then wished I hadn’t. Very little sun, no one out, and the rows of empty deck chairs made it seem like a deserted ship. My own solitary steps sounded along the deck as though I were the only passenger, and up there ahead I rounded the turn near the prow. I wound my film, and saw the last of it appear in the little red window. Over the rail I used it for this bleak sight: the Titanic, racing now, on toward the night over this strange deathly calm sea.

I’d had enough, and spent the rest of the day in my cabin; had the steward bring dinner in. I didn’t want to see any more people who might be living their last day or so; or to encounter Archie prematurely, to stutter and stumble and say it all wrong. If there was a way to convince Arch of the unbelievable, I had to find it, and I tried to work it out in my mind, lying on my bed feeling the easy motion, hearing the quiet, regular, almost reassuring creakings of a ship moving through a quiet sea.

I could have learned from the purser in the morning which was Archie’s cabin, but instead I simply wandered in and out of the great public rooms till I found him in the lounge in a big leather chair: gray suit, plain blue tie; smoking a morning cigar.

Suspicious, he sat watching me approach, making my way around and between tables and big lounge chairs. And didn’t smile: whoever I was or whatever I might be up to, he knew from my very presence aboard that I must be more than the casual New York acquaintance he’d supposed. I thought he wasn’t even going to stand, and possibly he thought so too. But at the last moment instinct brought him to his feet, and when I said, “Hello, Archie,” and put out a hand, he took it and replied politely, watching me with sharp, inquisitive eyes.

He said, “Sit down,” nodding at a chair facing him.

I sat down, leaned toward him, and said it the way I’d worked it out. “Archie, I know about your mission. I’m not your enemy: I want it to succeed. But let me tell you something you can’t possibly believe. Just hear me out. And then, Arch . . . wait. And when you actually see the proof . . . you will know then that I’ve spoken the truth.” I saw the flick of impatience and got down to it.

“I know something that is impossible to know, and yet I know it. This is Friday. On Sunday night, around eleven-thirty, this ship will strike an iceberg. Two hours later it will sink.” He sat watching me, waiting. “A good many people will be saved in lifeboats in those two hours. But many of the boats will be lowered only partly filled. And fifteen hundred people will drown. Do I really know this? Sunday night will tell, won’t it. It will happen, and when it does, I want to take you to boat number five, which will be lowered with only a few people. Some women in first, then with no others around, the men standing by will be allowed in. You and I can be there—”

“Si. I’ve seen a few inexplicable things; I know they happen. And possibly somehow you know what you say you do. Maybe so. Maybe somehow you really know. But you don’t seem to know me. If you did, you could not possibly think that with women and children left behind to drown, Archibald Butt would be standing beside a lifeboat scheming to climb into it!” He sat there looking at me, then smiled a little. “I would be where every other gentleman aboard would be: waiting quietly somewhere out of the way for whatever fate intends. Very likely here in this lounge, accepting God’s will. Along with a glass of brandy. Not cowering beside a lifeboat while women drown. I believe it’s where you’d be too, Si. When you’d thought about it. I’m sure you would.”

“But what about your papers, Arch? Shouldn’t they be saved at least?”

He looked contemptuously at the crackpot. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Leaning forward in his chair, he looked past me at a quietly ticking grandfather clock across the room. “And now if you’ll excuse me.” And he stood, smiled but only just barely, walked out, and I understood as though he had said it that I was not to trouble him again.

And so, finally, I’d failed. Archie would drown, the Great War would happen. But I’d never quite been able to make myself believe that something I could do, anything I could do, would actually prevent that enormous war. Yet watching Archie walk away and out of the lounge, my eyes stung.

Willy, what about Willy! Well . . . decades lay between him and the December 2, 1917, date followed by KIA that Rube Prien had shown me. Someday I’d have to tell son Willy who I was, and where I’d come from. Well, I’d simply warn him about that date too. Forewarned is forearmed, and he could protect himself: report sick that morning, turn left instead of right, do something, anything, that would slightly alter the events of the next few hours. I could give Willy the means of saving himself.

Strange, sitting here in this quiet, nearly empty lounge, thinking my thoughts, knowing what I knew—that this was the Titanic’s maiden voyage and her last. That Sunday night she would sink into an ocean so astonishingly calm survivors would remember forever the light of the stars shining on the face of the nearly motionless sea. And strange that this great disaster would be a matter of almost inches: if she’d passed the huge berg only slightly more to one side, I sat remembering, she’d have sailed right on by the deadly spur of underwater ice that opened her plates to the sea. And steamed triumphantly into New York harbor, pennants flying, tugs spouting.

But now? I took myself to my cabin, and—meals brought in by the steward—spent the day there, confused, baffled. I knew what was coming, knew; but what to do? Just wait till time to step into a lifeboat I already knew would be lowered nearly empty, leaving half the ship to drown?

In the morning, sick of the question and of my cabin and view—through a curtained window, not a porthole—of the endless flat monotonous gray sea and unbroken horizon, I showered, dressed, and began roaming. Heard the ship’s bugler blow breakfast call, hesitated, then skipped it, too agitated to eat. Walking the boat deck, enclosed but unheated, I’d get chilled, then inside again through the revolving doors. A pair of electric heaters glowing orange stood just inside, and I liked that. The days’ runs were posted on the smoking room bulletin board, and I went in and read yesterday’s: Thursday noon to Friday, the Titanic had steamed 386 miles. Another passenger there turned to ask a passing steward if we’d do better today, and he replied that he thought we’d post over 500 miles. I said, “Excuse me, steward, but—how can I speak to Captain Smith? It’s quite important.”

“Well, sir, at half after ten, and it’s nearly that now, he should be coming along the deck just outside with his morning inspection party. I should think that might be a good time, sir.”

So out on the deck again, I sat in a wooden deck chair watching the almost imperceptible roll of the ship, the horizontal top deck rail dropping slowly, slowly below the distant horizon encircling us, then holding there, holding . . . before it began to slowly rise again. Soothing to watch, it calmed me, and when I heard and saw the inspection party down the deck moving toward me, I knew I could stand and say what I had to.

Here they came, five ship’s officers led by the captain himself, all in full-dress blues with medals, all wearing wing collars. One of the party making notes, the captain’s big white-bearded head turned steadily side to side, looking, watching, commenting, nodding and smiling at passengers but moving briskly along, conversation not encouraged now, and I made myself stand, stepped out before the little group, and made my mouth speak.

“May I have a word with you, Captain? It is truly important.”

He stood looking at me carefully. “Yes?”

“Sir. Captain Smith.” How could I make sense? “I happen to have some . . . special knowledge.” Didn’t sound right! How to say this? Oh hell, just say it! “On Sunday night, if you maintain this course and speed, sir, we are going to strike an iceberg. We will! I—” I stopped, amazed; he was grinning at me.

“Oh, don’t worry, don’t you worry, sir!” He clapped a reassuring hand lightly on my shoulder. “We know all about the icebergs; this is the iceberg season, and we’ve had plenty of warnings, isn’t that so, Jack,” glancing at one of his officers.

“Yes, sir, from Empress of Britain and Touraine so far. They report field ice, some growlers, some bergs between forty-one fifty north latitude and forty-nine fifty west. Bound to hear more reports as we approach, sir.”

And this impressive, neatly bearded, likable captain smiled at me pleasantly. “So we’re well warned, sir,” Captain Smith said, “but I do thank you”—he touched me lightly on the shoulder again. “Not to worry.” And they moved on.

So . . . yes. What else could he have thought or said? And now? Now there was simply nothing else I could do. Except wait. And because I knew what I knew, I was no longer able to talk to or even look at other passengers. At my assigned dining room table I’d been seated with a not-quite-elderly man and his wife, he newly retired; and another, forty-year-old man, all English. And I was not able to continue making light conversation with them, all of us laughing a lot, with me wondering all the time: What will happen to you tomorrow night?

I had to find a refuge from the sight and sound of living people whose shoes—I’d compulsively glance at them—were going to lie alone on the ocean floor through decades to come, their clothes and entire bodies dissolving to nothing. And Sunday afternoon, restlessly wandering, I found my refuge at the very stern, overhanging the sea, protruding further back than even the great rudder. This was a separate little poop deck reached by a short flight of stairs from the main Deck B. And in this desolate, deserted little place crowded with ship’s machinery—winches, cranes, capstans—I stood, here at the very stern, forearms on the rail, trying to isolate my helpless self from the horror of what was going to happen. And I resumed my old game of watching the greeny-white wake peel endlessly out behind us.

It empties the mind to stare down at the ever-changing sameness of a ship’s wake. There behind us it lay on the quiet gray sea, handsomely green, squirming with bubbles, a wide watery road over which we’d just come. Arms on the stern rail, hands clasped over the sea, I stood watching the great propeller bubbles blossom up from the deep; watching the helmsman’s occasional small corrections appear as a squiggle in the wake, slightly bending the long green road to left or right. Watched a bird appear here far out in the ocean. A tern, was that what they were called? He’d follow us, wings spread motionless, getting a free ride on the invisible tunnel of warmed air lining out behind us. Then he’d move, he’d tilt; it looked like fun. Presently he lowered to the surface and, wings tucking, bobbed away behind us on our flat green wake. They slept on the sea, I thought I knew.

And out here, bent over the roadlike wake, I escaped. The deck under my feet, the rail under my forearms were solid, the people inside the warmth of this ship truly alive. But for me, only for me but nevertheless, all this finally became the distant past. My own reality lay far away, and what was going to happen tonight out here in the Atlantic was an old, old story from a long-ago time about which I could do nothing at all.

But I couldn’t hang on to that truth. From behind me on the deck of the ship whose fate and people I’d tried to turn from, I heard approaching footsteps, then the mumble-grumble of a man’s voice, a woman’s reply, everything turning again to real and now, and I stood frantic with helplessness.

Someone materialized beside me, sleeved forearms sliding into vision on the railing beside mine, hands clasping, and I knew whose they were, and could not possibly have prevented the wild rush of happiness. And, no way to stop this, none, I turned, my arms reaching, and grabbed the Jotta Girl to me, kissing her hard, kissing her long, and just did not want to stop. But did; Julia, I did. And now out here on the gray Atlantic, we stood grinning at each other. I said, “Dr. D just never quits, does he.”

“He had to be certain. So I sat in the lounge watching you and Archie from an armchair behind a pillar till I knew. It’s over now, Si; Archie won’t change his mind.”

“I know. Jot, what will you do when it happens?”

“Dr. D says go to Boat Eighteen. It was lowered with plenty of room left. You?”

“Boat Five. There were only a few women in it, no others around, just a few men. So the men were ordered in too.”

Side by side then, forearms again on the stern rail, we stood watching the long green wake endlessly come into being, straight as a road for a while, then the little squiggle to one side or the other of the helmsman’s small correction. Occasionally people walked by on the deck behind us; we’d hear their wooden footsteps approach, hear the murmur of their talk. We heard a man, a woman, and a small girl; then the child spotted us, and scampered up our stairs just enough so that, turning at the sound, we saw her little face and red knitted cap appear. She stared at us for a moment, her eyes bright with mischief, then called, “Hello!” delighted with her own daring. The Jotta Girl smiled, calling an answer, but when she looked back to me her eyes glittered wet. “Oh Christ, Si, what can we do?”

I shook my head. “There’s no warning them,” and I told her what had happened when I spoke to Captain Smith. And we turned back to stare down at our wake again.

But not for long. She turned from our rail to the little flight of stairs down to the main deck, and I followed. A few steps across the deck below, then up the outside stairs to the boat deck, I almost trotting along behind her, wondering. Forward along the deck, glancing at her as I caught up. But her face was set, purposeful, not a glance at me, and no explanation.

On past the lifeboats in their davits—big, big, seeing them this close. And now the Jot pulled the scarf from her neck, a thin gauzy thing patterned in lavender, and carried it hanging loosely between her hands. We walked fast, the length of the port side, the steady wind of the ship’s passage mournful in the guy wires spidered out from the huge beige stacks rimmed in black.

At the very end of this deck, as far forward as we could go, she stopped beside the ship’s bridge, a long narrow enclosed space lying across the entire width of the ship. A door here stood open, and inside the bridge, as always day and night, stood a line of four ship’s officers, among them the captain, hands behind his back, one hand clasping the other wrist. The front of the bridge was a line of tall glassed windows, giving them a clear view of the sea ahead. They stood silent, staring. They couldn’t see us, here beside the door at the rear, but the helmsman could. He stood several feet behind the officers, his outspread arms gripping the great wooden wheel, eyes on the face of the big lighted compass floating in the waist-high binnacle before him. He glanced at us standing there in the open doorway, but only for a moment, used to the occasional curious passenger. But he’d seen the Jotta Girl’s smile, her very best smile, which was very, very good; and, watching his compass again, he was slightly smiling, couldn’t help it.

Now the Jotta Girl smiled even more, a dazzling supersmile, and walked in toward the helmsman, lifting her hands as though to show him the scarf hanging loose between them. She stopped beside him, raised her hands, and gently laid her scarf across the helmsman’s face, pulling it taut, then tossing the ends up onto the flat top of his British seaman’s white cap. The scarf clung to his face, a hand rising to pluck it off, but he couldn’t quite pinch up the thin material, and had to lift both hands to get hold of and drag it off. I’d seen his wheel make a quarter-turn, and—scarf off—he grabbed it, glancing quickly down at his binnacle, and corrected his course. Then—we stood back outside the door again—he turned to us, glaring, but the Jot stood beautifully smiling at her little prank, blew him a kiss, and he had to grin, shaking his head.

We walked a step or two away, then ran—racing back along the port side, past the lifeboats again, clattering down the little staircase, across the bit of open deck, then up to our little poop deck perch at the stern. And there it lay, written on the water, already well behind us but clear and plain—the graphlike squiggle on the long greeny wake which told us that the Jotta Girl had just slightly altered the course of the Titanic.

Not much but very little was needed, just the tiny bit—a few inches enough—to make the enormous difference between riding over the underwater ice spur that would buckle her plates and kill her . . . or sailing unknowingly just past it. The Jotta Girl had made that difference, and—I couldn’t help it, didn’t want to help it—I grabbed and kissed her in a little ecstasy of joy and relief.

We celebrated—had drinks in the Cafe Parisian, sitting beside each other, grinning nonstop, clicking our glasses in toast or salute or whatever; to each other, the helmsman, Dr. D, Rube Prien, Captain Smith, this splendid new ship. People at nearby tables were smiling at us, and we raised our glasses to them, feeling just fine. To tease the Jot I said, “Never interfere with the past. Never, never, never, never! Ever!”

“Oh, shut up.”

“Broke the sacred rule, didn’t you? What would Dr. D say?”

“That I did exactly right.”

“Oh no he wouldn’t. But I will. You did just right, you did great.”

We were careful not to drink too much, and at dinner not even wine. And at 11:15 we sat waiting in the lounge at a table for two beside a starboard window: the great iceberg would pass close, and we wanted to see it. We talked, I don’t know about what, glancing often at a big round wall clock across the room. It worked by air pressure, a steward had told me, the big hand advancing a full minute at a time. And when it jumped from 11:19 to 11:20, we stopped trying to talk, and sat waiting.

Outside, I knew, up in a crow’s nest on the forward mast, a seaman bulky with heavy clothes sat staring out at the black sea and starlit sky. At any moment now, he should lean forward, eyes narrowing, making sure . . . then reach swiftly for the lanyard of his warning bell. A dozen seconds . . . several more, the clock hands across the room still at 11:20. Then we heard what we alone had known we’d hear, the fast triple sound, clang, clang, clang, of the warning bell, faint and distant through the window glass. A long pause, the lookout on his phone to the bridge, we knew. Then, grinning at each other, we felt it, the slow-motion swing of the great vessel as the rudder swung hard. And then, abruptly, astoundingly, here it was sliding past just outside our window, a great ice-white cliff filling the window glass bottom to top, side to side—we could have touched it except for the glass. And then, on her new course . . . on her new course . . . on the very slightly altered course the Jotta Girl had sent us into . . . the Titanic just barely touched the enormous mass she would otherwise just barely have missed.

And we heard—not at all loudly, feeling it through our shoe soles as much as hearing it—the long slow tearing sound, the prolonged ripping, as the ice spur deep under the sea in precisely the right place raked along the ship’s riveted bottom to let in the first rush of the unstoppable sea that in two hours would sink her. The Jot’s eyes widening, widening, as she listened, the color emptying from her face, she whispered, “Never . . .” Her eyes glittered with sudden tears. “Never alter . . .” She stood up swiftly, and as I pushed back my chair she said, “No!” Then, almost ferociously, “No, don’t come after me! Don’t!” And swung around to walk away very fast.

Outside my window a ship’s officer walked by, in no hurry that I could see. The berg was gone now, far off in the dark behind us. I looked around the room for, and found, Archibald Butt, sitting with several other men at the table where, I knew, he would remain. And I sat back—there were two long, long hours to get through, no rush—and picked up my drink.