For all of his efficiency, Hosono climbed toward the boat deck with at least a five-minute handicap behind Beesley, the Mellingers, the Marshalls, and the Laroches. Initially, he had not taken very seriously the sleep-disrupting sensation of the ship riding over a bad stretch of track or bumping up against a pier in the mid-Atlantic. For a while, he wondered why the engines slowed down to a stop, but he did not imagine that anything disastrous could be unfolding underfoot, so the man least likely to ignore the unexpected stowed away his own curiosity and drifted off peacefully to sleep. If Hardy knocked at his door, the efficiency expert only vaguely heard it. Not until a stranger pounded on the door did with near wood-cracking force did Hosono rise and ask impatiently, “What is it?”
He found a steward standing outside, holding a life jacket.
“What—?”
“You need to go up to the boat deck at once,” the steward said, then thrust the life jacket at him and turned away.
“Wait!” Hosono called. “Tell me what has happened.” But the steward did not answer and merely hurried away.
The complacency with which Hosono had greeted the first signals of disaster faded, and the efficiency expert dressed so hastily that he pulled on trousers, a coat, and a life jacket over the coat—but no shirt. When he arrived on the second-class promenade space, he was astonished to see the canvas covers being pulled off lifeboats and scores of passengers running agitatedly to and fro.
One of the boat-deck runners swore, “I’ll fight death to the last if it comes.” Another paused to joke that she had put on black stockings “to scare the sharks.” On every one of them was tied a cork and canvas-wrapped life jacket—the white-painted “emblem of death at sea.”
Hosono stopped several of the passengers, asking the same question: “What is the cause of this?” But no one seemed to know what had happened. He now understood that there was not a moment to lose, so when a sailor indicated that the lifeboats were to be cranked down to the lower decks and loaded from nearer the water’s surface, he obeyed at once—even though the man’s order seemed perplexing: “Listen carefully! Everyone race down to the third-class deck!” No one else seemed to be following Hosono down toward the rear well deck, and when the young railway manager looked up along the port side and saw that the keels of the lifeboats were still stationary above him, on the boat deck, he decided to turn back.
“No, you don’t!” a crewman shouted, blocking his way. “The boat deck is for first- and second-class passengers only.”
Suddenly, Hosono became acutely aware that he was shirtless and disheveled—and clearly a foreigner, probably even what the crewman considered to be a member of the “lower” races.
“But I hold a second-class ticket!” Hosono said sternly. He had put the ticket in his wallet, and he had left the wallet in his stateroom. At 12:15 a.m., Hosono realized that his troubles this night had only just begun.
Approximately three hundred paces forward, in the bow of the ship, Violet Jessop was no longer fighting a compulsion toward laughter. Here the manifestations of danger varied greatly, depending on which side of a watertight bulkhead one happened to be standing. At a quarter past midnight, the steam room and cooling rooms of F deck’s Turkish baths were still quite dry; and just in front of the baths, although water in the swimming pool room was beginning to shift with the tilt of the deck, the exercise clock would continue keeping time for at least another half hour, along with the clock in the cooling room. Further forward, on the far side of the steel dam beneath the first smokestack, the lowermost portholes on F deck were already becoming submarine windows on whatever sea life was being attracted to the lights.
Jessop had firmly resolved not to express what had by now become an ever-present fear—a fear “wrapped” in her heart. The report from her roommate, Annie Robinson, was definitely not good. The water in the mail room was only six steps from overflowing onto the floors of E deck. Robinson had found the ship’s carpenter looking down forlornly into the pond of floating mailbags. She asked him how serious the situation might be, but he seemed not to hear her at all.
The Titanic’s chief architect, Thomas Andrews, was more direct. “Tommy said we should put our life jackets on and let the passengers see us wearing them,” Robinson explained. She added that she had told Andrews that such a display would appear rather mean—it would be excessively frightening to the passengers—and he had replied, “Well, if you value your life, put the jacket on.”
Jessop had known Andrews aboard the Titanic’s older, almost identical twin sister ship, the Olympic. The news that the incident aboard the Titanic this night was developing into serious business—killing business—seemed every bit as unbelievable to Jessop as it was heartbreaking, “that this super-perfect creation was to do anything so futile as sink.”
Her efforts to quash the fear in her heart and escape into disbelief were aided, at least to some degree, by a real foundation in history. Although she never mentioned it to her roommate and would never speak or write of it in future years, Jessop had been aboard the Olympic seven months earlier when it was rammed by HMS Hawke. The hole in the Olympic’s side was wider than a church door and more than two stories tall—a total surface area of damage far greater than the twelve square feet now pulling the Titanic down by the head—but the Hawke had pierced only two of the Olympic’s watertight compartments, and most of the damage was inflicted well above the water, at the level of the E- and F-deck portholes. A result of this accident was that the watertight bulkhead design seemed indeed to have rendered every Olympic-class vessel into a lifeboat in its own right. When Captain Smith transferred his command from the Olympic to the Titanic, a deadly complacency must already have slithered into him.
Despite her desire to disbelieve Robinson’s report that their ship was indeed dying, Jessop’s first concern was her duty to make sure that the passengers were comfortable and safe, no matter what chaos might (or might not) be coming their way. In a letter dated July 27, 1958, relating to a friend how her primary concern was always for the care of her passengers, she would write, “The unfortunate passengers of today get scant service in comparison.” By the time she retired from the sea, the next generation of stewards and stewardesses had come to regard her as “quite out of date,” Jessop explained, “because I regarded my passengers’ comfort and well-being on board as greatly my responsibility.”
Jessop and Robinson went from room to room along E deck and C deck, helping the passengers to select warm clothing to be worn beneath their life jackets, reiterating, in spite of Robinson’s fear and in spite of the gradually increasing slant of the deck, that all of this late-night activity was merely a precautionary measure. Reassured, the passengers from first class began, only haltingly, their exodus up the grand stairway, quite unhurried and even joking about the great show of British adherence to unnecessary pomp and protocol.
Jessop noticed that several officers were peering down from the carved wooden railings near the crystal dome. Their faces looked exceedingly anxious about the lumbering parade, and it would occur to Jessop much later that they must have been loath to shout down to the people anything to indicate what they really knew was happening and perhaps to cause a stampede, but the officers undoubtedly wished that the parade would quicken its pace.