The three women appeared to be in a very nervous state. Their hair was more or less dishevelled. They were apparently fully dressed save for their hats. Clothing had been supplied them in their need and everything had been done to make them comfortable. One of the party said that the collision occurred at 9.45.
Following closely the Cornell party was H. J. Allison of Montreal, who came to meet his family. One of the party, who was weeping bitterly as he left the pier, explained that the only one of the family that was rescued was the young brother.
In a few minutes young Mrs. Astor with her maid appeared. She came down the gangplank unassisted. She was wearing a white sweater. Vincent Astor and William Dobbyn, Colonel Astor’s secretary, greeted her and hurried her to a waiting limousine which contained clothing and other necessaries of which it was thought she might be in need. The young woman was white-faced and silent. Nobody cared to intrude upon her thoughts. Her stepson said little to her. He did not feel like questioning her at such a time, he said.
Walter M. Clark, a nephew of the senator, said that he had seen Colonel Astor put his wife in a boat, after assuring her that he would soon follow her in another. Mr. Clark and others said that Colonel and Mrs. Astor were in their suite when the crash came, and that they appeared quietly on deck a few minutes afterward.
Here and there among the passengers of the Carpathia and from the survivors of the Titanic the story was gleaned of the rescue. Nothing in life will ever approach the joy felt by the hundreds who were waiting in little boats on the spot where the Titanic foundered when the lights of the Carpathia were first distinguished. That was at 4 o’clock on Monday morning.
Efforts were made to learn from Dr. Henry Franenthal{sic} something about the details of how he was rescued. Just then, or as he was leaving the pier, beaming with evident delight, he was surrounded by a big crowd of his friends.
“There’s Harry! There he is!” they yelled and made a rush for him.
All the doctor’s face that wasn’t covered with red beard was aglow with smiles as his friends hugged him and slapped him on the back. They rushed him off bodily through the crowd and he too was whirled home.
How others followed—how heartrending stories of partings and of thrilling rescues were poured out in an amazing stream—this has all been told over and over again in the news that for days amazed, saddened and angered the entire world. It is the story of a disaster that nations, it is hoped, will make impossible in the years to come.
In the stream of survivors were a peer of the realm, Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon, and his secretary, side by side with plain Jack Jones, of Birmingham, able seaman, millionaires and paupers, women with bags of jewels and others with nightgowns their only property.
More than seventy widows were in the weeping company. The only large family that was saved in its entirety was that of the Carters, of Philadelphia. Contrasting with this remarkable salvage of wealthy Pennsylvanians was the sleeping eleven-months-old baby of the Allisons, whose father, mother and sister went down to death after it and its nurse had been placed in a life-boat.
Millionaire and pauper, titled grandee and weeping immigrant, Ismay, the head of the White Star Company, and Jack Jones from the stoke hole were surrounded instantly. Some would gladly have escaped observation. Every man among the survivors acted as though it were first necessary to explain how he came to be in a life-boat. Some of the stories smacked of Munchausen. Others were as plain and unvarnished as a pike staff. Those that were most sincere and trustworthy had to be fairly pulled from those who gave their sad testimony.
Far into the night the recitals were made. They were told in the rooms of hotels, in the wards of hospitals and upon trains that sped toward saddened homes. It was a symposium of horror and heroism, the like of which has not been known in the civilized world since man established his dominion over the sea.
The two hundred and more steerage passengers did not leave the ship until 11 o’clock. They were in a sad condition. The women were without wraps and the few men there were wore very little clothing. A poor Syrian woman who said she was Mrs. Habush, bound for Youngstown, Ohio, carried in her arms a six-year-old baby girl. This woman had lost her husband and three brothers. “I lost four of my men folks,” she cried.
Among the survivors who elicited a large measure of sympathy were two little French boys who were dropped, almost naked, from the deck of the sinking Titanic into a life-boat. From what place in France did they come and to what place in the New World were they bound? There was not one iota of information to be had as to the identity of the waifs of the deep, the orphans of the Titanic.
The two baby boys, two and four years old, respectively, were in charge of Miss Margaret Hays, who is a fluent speaker of French, and she had tried vainly to get from the lisping lips of the two little ones some information that would lead to the finding of their relatives.
Miss Hays, also a survivor of the Titanic, took charge of the almost naked waifs on the Carpathia. She became warmly attached to the two boys, who unconcernedly played about, not understanding the great tragedy that had come into their lives.
The two little curly-heads did not understand it all. Had not their pretty nineteen-year-old foster mother provided them with pretty suits and little white shoes and playthings a-plenty? Then, too, Miss Hays had a Pom dog that she brought with her from Paris and which she carried in her arms when she left the Titanic and held to her bosom through the long night in the life-boat, and to which the children became warmly attached. All three became aliens on an alien shore.
Miss Hays, unable to learn the names of the little fellows, had dubbed the older Louis and the younger “Lump.” “Lump” was all that his name implies, for he weighed almost as much as his brother. They were dark-eyed and brown curly-haired children, who knew how to smile as only French children can.
On the fateful night of the Titanic disaster and just as the last boats were pulling away with their human freight, a man rushed to the rail holding the babes under his arms. He cried to the passengers in one of the boats and held the children aloft. Three or four sailors and passengers held up their arms. The father dropped the older boy. He was safely caught. Then he dropped the little fellow and saw him folded in the arms of a sailor. Then the boat pulled away.
The last seen of the father, whose last living act was to save his babes, he was waving his hand in a final parting. Then the Titanic plunged to the ocean’s bed.
Still more pitiable in one way was the lot of the baby survivor, eleven-months-old Travers Allison, the only member of a family of four to survive the wreck. His father, H. J. Allison, and mother and Lorraine, a child of three, were victims of the catastrophe. Baby Travers, in the excitement following the crash, was separated from the rest of the family just before the Titanic went down. With the party were two nurses and a maid.
Major Arthur Peuchen, of Montreal, one of the survivors, standing near the little fellow, who, swathed in blankets, lay blinking at his nurse, described the death of Mrs. Allison. She had gone to the deck without her husband, and, frantically seeking him, was directed by an officer to the other side of the ship.