At first, as the lifeboats were swung out on their davits, the officers had told Russell that they were lowering the boats merely as a precaution: “Only a matter of rules and regulations. There is no danger whatsoever. You’ll be back aboard before breakfast.”
The idea of leaving a comfortable ship to row around in the cold for a few hours and come back for breakfast seemed inexplicable to Russell. Either the idea was as asinine as it sounded or the crewmen were not being quite so truthful as they seemed.
Russell locked her windows, her bureau drawers, and her trunks in two staterooms as she tidied up. In A-11, she filled her cup near the dressing mirror with whiskey, which she drank while putting her clothes away. She emptied the cup, then filled it again; then, while she was vacillating between denying danger and actually believing she was in danger, something so distracted her that she left the room with her last large shot of nerve-calming whiskey forgotten in its cup holder.
Years later, when various news organizations would write about Russell’s escape from the Titanic, they would invariably mention the item that she did not leave behind in A-11: a little toy pig she had carried with her onto the boat deck.
“As for my saving a musical toy pig,” she wrote in 1956, “there has been so much silly-ass talk about that pig that it’s time somebody tells the world what it’s all about.” The recipient of this letter was Walter Lord, and even though Russell and the historian would later become such close friends that she would actually bequeath the toy pig to him in her will, her initial contact was a harsh criticism of Lord’s book, A Night to Remember, in which the historian had described her escape with the toy.
“It’s just unfortunate that I cannot correct this very unpleasant impression of me,” Russell wrote, “that in a time of such great danger, I would have been so frivolous [that I would] walk around carrying a musical toy pig with me. The pig—which is a mascot [of good luck] in France, was given to me after a motorcar accident in which everyone was killed except me. I promised my mother to keep [the pig] as a mascot with me in time of danger.”
As the Titanic began developing into another of her many encounters with disaster—“always fatal to others”—Russell believed that she had to keep her promise never to leave the pig behind.
The fashion reporter wondered how her life had come to another disaster in the first place. Like Juliette Laroche, Russell had boarded with the impression that there was something monstrous about the ship—like a sleeping kraken waiting to awaken and break its chains. Like Laroche, Russell memorialized her trepidation in a letter on Titanic stationery, posted after the ship left Paris:
My Dear Mr. Shaw—In length [the Titanic] would reach from the corner of the Rue de la Paix to about the Rue de Rivoli. Everything imaginable: swimming pool, Turkish Bath, gymnasium, squash court, cafes, tea gardens, smoking rooms, and bedrooms larger than in an average Paris hotel. It is a monster, and I can’t say I like it.… I am going to take my very much needed rest on this trip, but I cannot get over my feeling of depression and my premonition of trouble. How I wish it were over!
A century later, most people would remember the name of Russell’s “monster,” but few would be able to name its older twin. If all had gone according to expectation, more people would remember the Olympic than the Titanic. The Olympic’s maiden voyage had received all the photographic news coverage, all the movie newsreel attention. A reason that so relatively few pictures existed of the Titanic’s first days arose from the simple fact that it was never good to be the second of anything. Even the grander staterooms, the glass-enclosed promenade deck, and all of the boasts that it was the largest ship in the world were seen as transparent publicity stunts. The Titanic was many tons heavier than the Olympic, but it was longer only on account of a few extra inches of steel added to the prow. By the time the clock touched 12:45 on the morning of Monday, April 15, even calling this ship “almost” unsinkable had deteriorated into a grand and meaningless boast.
Almost directly beneath Russell’s stateroom, down near the keel, a critical limit had been reached. The steel bulkhead separating boiler room number 5 from boiler room number 6 was on the verge of becoming the first falling domino in an unstoppable cascade effect. The bulkhead was designed to withstand a maximum water pressure of 19.6 pounds per square inch. About the time Molly Brown saw water bursting out through an open porthole near E deck, the water pressure at the bottom of the bulkhead—now being exerted by flooding corridors five to ten feet higher than boiler room number 5’s dam—was 22 to 24 pounds per square inch. Across a width of ninety-two feet, this meant that more than 145 tons of water pressure was seeking a weak spot along the lower foot of the bulkhead, trying to bulldoze an opening through it.
In the end, the barrier was functioning beyond its design standards; it might actually have continued to resist the various abuses of the night had the coal fire reported by Fred Barrett not warped and dented and, to one degree or another, diminished the flexibility of the steel at the base of the dam. In addition to this improbable event was the even more improbable circumstance of the iceberg’s final kick to the lower starboard hull, which occurred along the base of the wall to which the embrittled steel barrier was attached, and this opened up holes on either side of it. Surely the final blow compressed the bulkhead itself between the two holes, rendering the last two or three feet of iceberg damage in boiler room number 5 the cruelest wounds of all.
If not for either the warping and stiffening of the barrier by a coal fire or for the final stab from the iceberg reaching barely a human arm’s length past the wall, the Titanic might have floated another hour or two, and perhaps longer.
Shortly after the 11:40 p.m. impact, Barrett had closed the empty coal bunker’s steel door, thus allowing the chamber adjacent to the damaged bulkhead to slowly fill through the single hole caused by one of the iceberg’s final stabs. This prolonged the life of the bulkhead by more or less equalizing the water pressure on both sides, until 12:45 to 12:50 a.m.
In boiler room number 5, Barrett’s attention was drawn suddenly to a knocking noise; then he saw a great wave of green foaming water tearing through a space between the boilers. The whole Titanic immediately began losing buoyancy in this compartment, as though air were being let out of a giant balloon. This was probably the cause of the shift that sent water spilling toward the port side and out an open porthole near Molly Brown and Celiney Yasbeck in boat 6. The volume of air compressed upward by the breach—and especially from the moment that boiler room number 5’s rooftop escape hatch was opened on E deck—was proportional to the amount of water Barrett saw surging into the chamber.
Like the air surge that Hendrickson and Hemming had observed pushing up a tarpaulin and a hatch cover near the front cargo hold, this burst of air possessed the power to displace—a power that, if it had been confined primarily (during the first few seconds) between the floor and the ceiling of E deck, should have contributed to the sloshing movement, from starboard to port, of any water that had been pooling in the corridors nearby. The addition of a jetting effect to the slosh was consistent with the sudden gush from a porthole near boat 6.
Barrett scarcely had time to swim to an escape ladder and pull himself up through one of the roof hatches that the Yasbecks had peered down into nearly an hour before. There was little doubt in Barrett’s mind that he had been witness to the bulkhead itself bursting. The great surge of water probably began with a rupture in the relatively thin steel that enclosed the flooded coal bunker—which the single firehose–like puncture had taken all of an hour to fill to the breaking point, slowly, in the manner of a swimming pool being filled by a garden hose. The coal bunker burst would have taken just three or four seconds to empty the bunker of its water, after which the only source of continued flooding should have remained the hoselike spray from the bunker’s sole opening to the sea—which was not the sort of leak from which Barrett or anyone else would have been forced to flee. What came into boiler room number 5 was much worse.