Even as the sea reached the racquetball court ceiling between 12:20 and 12:30, it seemed difficult for people to decide whether to joke about canceling a 7:30 a.m. racquetball court reservation (as Colonel Gracie did) or scurry back toward higher ground (as racquetball pro Frederick Wright did) or whether to fret about what to wear on the boat deck (as Jessop did) or remain on the lower decks stoically facing death (as Stan did).
One who had no doubts about how to behave was Maude Slocomb, the head masseuse of the Turkish baths. She, like Jessop, had transferred from the Olympic. Much like Juliette Laroche, Slocomb boarded the ship with trepidation, haunted by dreams of the Titanic plunging down into the cold Atlantic. Unlike Jessop, she expressed not the slightest hesitation about what to wear this night. She had boarded at Southampton carrying a heavy military overcoat with plenty of pockets—which were normally absent in women’s wear but were valued by Slocomb because in an emergency she could carry a cigarette lighter, plenty of food, drinking flasks, and anything else that might become useful in a lifeboat.
Slocomb was not the only person to feel an odd sense of having dreamed of or lived through this night before. Aboard the train to Southampton, she had sat next to racquetball pro Wright—who, in what appeared to be an uncharacteristic moment of self-pity, snuggled up to her and confided his premonition about their approach to something terrible, saying, “I’ve never felt worse about taking a ship.”
Four days into the voyage, Slocomb’s early unease seemed anticlimactic, if not downright silly. The only incidents were more annoying than alarming and should normally have disappeared into history, utterly forgotten. She had found the Turkish baths a shambles. The mahogany trim and decorative tile walls were properly stained, gilded, and grouted but had never been cleaned. The floors were covered with filth. Liquor bottles and half-eaten sandwiches were in every bureau drawer.
Oh, well, Slocomb told herself; the finishers were, after all, Belfast men. But they had cost her much business through the early part of the voyage, during which she and another attendant had cleaned the floors and the couches and polished the wood and the tiles to the perfection in which they were now presented—and which no one from her century was ever to see again. Yet being seen in the next century was never in the plan.
The room and its exotic furnishings were expected to last only about thirty years, the maximum anticipated service life of even a superliner like the Titanic. It was planned obsolescence: by 1942, the ship’s designers had expected the Edwardian, Victorian, and Arabic-Oriental styles to be dismissed as “Grandma’s architecture,” just as they expected newer, larger versions of the automobile engine down in the number one cargo hold to replace coal-fired boilers. According to plan, sometime around 1945 (and probably sooner, but certainly no later), the Titanic’s Turkish baths would be dismantled along with the rest of the ship’s decorative trim and furnishings, to be passed along at fire-sale prices to British hotels and pubs, while the ship’s hull, ribs, and engines would be recycled as scrap iron.
Nature had a different plan. Iron- and sulfur-metabolizing organisms called rusticles would inevitably become a living reef throughout the ship, a nesting place for the actual creation of life, as though Brahma, the creator god of the Hindu triad, were being made manifest in the deep range. The sea that was swallowing and destroying the Titanic (Shiva) was also a paradoxical preserver (Vishnu), as though at least two members of the triad were conspiring to keep the walls of the Turkish baths standing and gleaming far beyond the liner’s 1940s expiration date. Instead of vanishing, the colorful porcelain tiles from Asia were to survive unfaded and unbroken a century later, much as Slocomb had last seen them when she applied her cups of polish.
During the next half hour, as gently as the sea had seeped into the racquetball court, so too would it flow into the Turkish baths. Somehow, the entire room was fated to survive, as though it were in a cocoon, through the approximately forty-mile-per-hour impact with the bed of the Atlantic. Once oxygen-consuming microbes surrendered the room to anaerobic bacteria, woodwork and traces of fabric might last for centuries, or at least as long as the steel decks managed to stand.
Even after the last rib of steel dissolved, the tiles themselves were all but guaranteed to endure beneath a bed of rusticle dust (the residue of a microbial reef). Covered with a silica-based, hard-fired glaze whose tight crystalline structure was as near to indestructible as anything fashioned by human hands, the tiles would continue to resist dissolution long after Mount Vesuvius reburied Pompeii’s mosaics and would probably even outlive Egypt’s pyramids. Deep in the sunless abyss, beneath the detritus and decay products of another fifty million years of bellowing creatures, the Titanic itself was destined to become little more than rusticle-encased fossils sandwiched between layers of siltstone. Even then, the beautifully decorated tiles of the Turkish baths would survive, probably as the final recognizable feature of the Titanic, perhaps preserving in the glaze itself a fingerprint smudge from a man or a woman who painted one of the tiles—or, on a tile surface, in a latent trace of chemical polish, a print from the hand of the last person to touch it: Maude Slocomb.
On that final Sunday night in 1912, during the hours leading up to the impact, mail clerk Iago Smith told Slocomb he was leaving the Titanic after it returned from New York. He had a girlfriend in Plymouth, England, with whom he wanted to spend the rest of his life. Smith explained that he was unhappy that those in charge kept lighting more boilers and pushing the engines up to higher and higher revolutions despite the risks.
“I don’t like it,” Smith said. “Sloky, I smell ice.”
“Don’t be silly,” Slocomb answered. “You can’t smell ice.”
When she felt the crash at 11:40, on a Sunday night—when the line between life and death often depended on decisions made during the first half hour—Slocomb realized that the odor of eroded land probably could be smelled in glacial ice after all and that the nightmare she had experienced back home and had finally shrugged off was becoming quite real. She grabbed her army coat and filled the pockets with her survival gear and went straightaway to the boat deck.
Another who moved quickly toward the top deck was passenger Celiney Yasbeck. She did not have much cause for denial or even hesitation. The impact in her region of the ship almost threw her out of bed. Third-class quarters in the bow were reserved almost entirely for male passengers, except that all of the Lebanese passengers, men and women alike, were also quartered there.
Celiney was the fifteen-year-old bride of Fraza Yasbeck, who had begun building a chain of shoe stores with his brothers in Pennsylvania. During a time in which women often died before the age of fifty, a twenty-year-old unmarried woman was considered a “spinster,” and wealthy British families threw coming-out parties for their sixteen-year-old daughters to announce that they were ready to marry. In 1912, girls typically married between the ages of sixteen and seventeen—and most marriages, whether among the rich or the poor, were arranged between the two families.
Although the Yasbeck marriage was arranged in accordance with custom, Celiney, whose Arabic interpreter for the White Star Line would later recall her as “the poignantly beautiful one,” described her marriage of fifty days as “a love match.”