Maria Peñasco screamed for her husband. The Countess handed the tiller to Gladys, then slipped down beside Maria and held her. Poor woman, she thought, her sobs are unspeakable in their sadness.
Then came other screams, the horrifying screams of more than a thousand women and men, struggling and adrift in the subfreezing water, frantically seeking to steady themselves on floating crates, tabletops, deck chairs, or someone else’s back. Their despairing cries carried across the still-calm water: “Save one soul!” … “Help, please, help!” … “Oh my God, oh my God…”
The Countess held Maria tighter as she tried in vain to keep her from hearing those agonized cries.
How long did the pleas and moaning and shouting last? Some said ten minutes, others said an hour. All agreed that they faded slowly, inexorably, as lives ebbed away, one after another. Most of the dead did not drown. They froze to death, their cork-filled life belts keeping them afloat as the sea became studded with corpses that looked like broken dolls. Finally, the last of the cries were replaced by a deathly accusatory silence.
The quiet is more terrible, thought Roberta, than the sounds that went before.
In its wake, the Countess was overwhelmed by a feeling she could identify only as “indescribable loneliness.”
“Let us row back!” Gladys Cherry implored the other passengers in Lifeboat No. 8, “and see if there is not some chance of rescuing anyone who has possibly survived.”
Mrs. Swift agreed. So did the Countess and Able Seaman Jones. But the others were adamant that no good could come from steering a boat that held sixty-five people into a disaster field where hundreds upon hundreds were dead or dying.
“You have no right to risk our lives,” one woman insisted, “on the bare chance of finding anyone alive.”
“The Captain’s own orders were to ‘row for those ship lights over there,’ ” said another. “You have no business interfering with his orders.”
Reluctantly, the four who wished to return to the site of the sinking yielded to the majority, against their will, their faith, and their better judgment. The ghastliness of our feelings, thought the Countess, never can be told.
“Ladies,” said Seaman Jones, “if any of us are saved, remember: I wanted to go back. I would rather drown with them than leave them.”
Then everyone fell silent. Mrs. White looked around at the flat, glassy sea, the star-laden sky. Somehow, it is more dreadful, she thought, for all this to have happened on so beautiful a night.
XIV
The women in Lifeboat No. 8 took up the oars and rowed on, encouraged by the masthead lights of a ship that was now in the near distance, no more, it seemed, than three miles away. The cold made them miserable, for even the heaviest fur coat was little protection, and many of the women were thinly dressed at best. Dr. Leader wore a blue serge suit and a steamer hat, another woman was clad in an evening gown and white satin slippers.
But the light was their hope, their beacon, so they steeled themselves and rowed toward it. With Gladys still at the tiller, the Countess rowed while comforting Maria Peñasco, who sat sobbing beside her, the young bride’s face twisted in such raw anguish that the others could not bear to look at her. Mrs. Bucknell took up an oar, proud to be rowing beside a genuine countess and stopping only when her hands became too blistered to continue.
Margaret Swift, a hardy forty-six-year-old churchgoing lady, took an oar and never put it down. She was placid, as if she had been in a circumstance as dire as this many times before. Watching her, the Countess thought, She is magnificent, not only in her attitude but in the whole way in which she works.
Marie Grice Young rowed, too, though she had to stop now and again to throw up over the side of the boat as Mrs. White tended to her.
Roberta was so shaken that she was convinced she saw something that she could not possibly have seen: “that dreadful iceberg,” as she put it, “towering above us, like some grim monster about to devour its prey.”
Still she rowed, and beside her rowed Albina Bazzani, Mrs. Bucknell’s personal maid. Roberta’s long blond hair kept getting caught between the oars and her bare hands, but she kept up her strokes even as her hair was tugged and pulled until it was torn to tatters.
They pulled steadily, still in pursuit of the two masthead lights that shone ever more brightly in the darkness. Mrs. Smith suggested that they keep their spirits up by singing; they started out with “Pull for the Shore.”
For three long hours the passengers in Lifeboat No. 8 rowed until they could finally see the glow of the ship’s red port light moving toward them. Then suddenly the light vanished and the masthead lights grew dimmer and dimmer until they, too, were gone. The singing stopped. For the first time all night, the Countess despaired. The pitiful sadness of our rowing, she thought, rowing toward the lights of a ship that disappeared.
Now it seemed they were lost in the boundless dark in a boat that had been set to sea without drinking water or a compass. Having chased the phantom lights for so long, they had rowed far from the other lifeboats, and, as the wind kicked up, bringing with it white-capped waves, the boat heaved and tossed in the choppy water. We are a handful of people in an open boat, thought Roberta Maioni, faced with a worse fate than drowning.
They had been provided a small oil lamp that could be used to signal other boats, but it lacked kerosene and went out as quickly as they could ignite it. The only available light was the small electric bulb in Mrs. White’s cane. So while some women rowed and others wept, Ella White waved her cane over her head, back and forth, over and over again, silently praying that someone would see it.
They rowed and they sang. One of their songs was a hymn the Countess especially favored, and her voice could be heard above all the others.
In the far distance, Able Seaman Jones detected a bright, moving object. He could not tell what it was, but it seemed to be headed directly toward them. He called out to the Countess, asking if she could see it. At first she couldn’t, but then she discerned a glowing light. As it drew nearer, they saw that it was a searchlight on the prow of a liner. The ship was the Carpathia, and she was steaming toward them from the southeast, firing rockets to signal her presence.
Ella White waved her cane joyously. The other women looked up to the heavens, clasped their hands, and offered a prayer of thanks for this unexpected deliverance.
It took them another hour to row to the Carpathia, and in that time came the dawn, a heart-moving sight that filled the canvas of the cloudless sky with giant brushstrokes of pink and gold and tangerine. With all the lifeboats headed in the same direction, the passengers in No. 8 heard the jubilant shouts and cries of fellow travelers who had endured the long and fateful night.
XV
They left Lifeboat No. 8 by climbing, one by one, onto a wooden seat two feet long and a foot wide that was suspended on vertical ropes that raised them to the deck. It must have seemed appropriate to them that seamen called this device a Jacob’s Ladder, named for the stairway to heaven described in the Book of Genesis. On the deck of the Carpathia, stewards wrapped them in blankets and offered tumblers of hot brandy, holding the glass to the lips of the many whose hands shook too much to grip it.