The night was very still. There were people moving about, somewhat distractedly, but I paid them no attention. I stepped to the railing and the sea was vast and smooth in the moonlight. There were shapes out there, like water buffalo sleeping in the fields in the dark nights outside Madras. I would drive back to my bungalow in a trap, my head still cluttered with the talk and the music from the little dance band and the whirling around of the dancers, and I would think how the social rites of my own class sometimes felt as foreign to me as those of the people we were governing here. These pretenses the men and women made in order to touch, often someone else’s spouse. I am not unobservant. But I would go to these events, nevertheless. Even if I kept to myself.
I looked out at these sleeping shapes in the water. A woman’s voice was suddenly nearby.
“We’re doomed now,” she said in the flat inflection of an American.
It took a moment to realize that she was addressing me. She said no more. But I think I heard her breathing. I turned and she was less than an arm’s length from me along the railing. In the brightness of the moon I could see her face quite clearly. She seemed rather young, though less than two hours later I would revise that somewhat. The first impression, however, was that she was young, and that was all. Perhaps rather pretty, too, but I don’t think I noticed that at the time. There were certain things that I suppose were beyond my powers of observation. When I realized to whom she was speaking, her words finally registered on me.
“Not at all.” I spoke from whatever ignorance I had learned all my life. “Nothing that can’t be handled. This is a fine ship.”
“I’m not in a panic,” she said. “You can hear that in my voice, can’t you?”
“Of course.”
“I just know this terrible thing to be true.”
I leaned on the rail and looked at these sleeping cattle. I knew what they were. I understood what this woman had concluded. “It’s the ice you fear,” I said.
“The deed is done, don’t you think?” she said.
Her breath puffed out, white in the moonlight, and I felt suddenly responsible for her. There was nothing personal in it. But this was a lady in some peril, I realized. At least in peril from her own fears. I felt a familiar stiffening in me, and I was glad of it. Dissipated now were the effects of the cigar smoke and the comfort of a chair in a place where men gathered in their complacent ease. But I still felt I only needed to dispel some groundless fears of a woman too much given to her intuition.
“What deed might that be?” I asked her, trying to gentle my voice.
“We’ve struck an iceberg.”
I was surprised to find that this seemed entirely plausible. “And suppose we have,” I said. “This ship is the very most modern afloat. The watertight compartments make it quite unsinkable. We would, perhaps, at worst, be delayed.”
She turned her face to me, though she did not respond.
“Are you traveling alone?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Perhaps that accounts for your anxiety.”
“No. It was the deep and distant sound of the collision. And the vibration I felt in my feet. And the speed with which we were hurtling among these things.” She nodded to the shapes in the dark. I looked and felt a chill from the night air. “And the dead stop we instantly made,” she said. “And it’s a thing in the air. I can smell it. A thing that I smelled once before, when I was a little girl. A coal mine collapsed in my hometown. Many men were trapped and would die within a few hours. I smell that again. . These are the things that account for my anxiety.”
“You shouldn’t be traveling alone,” I said. “If I might say so.”
“No, you might not say so,” she said, and she turned her face sharply to the sea.
“I’m sorry,” I said. Though I felt I was right. A woman alone could be subject to torments of the sensibility such as this and have no one to comfort her. I wanted to comfort this woman beside me.
Is this an eddy through what once was my mind? A stirring of the water in which I’m held? I ripple and suddenly I see this clearly: my wish to comfort her came from an impulse stronger than duty would strictly require. I see this now, dissolved as I have been for countless years in the thing that frightened her that night. But standing with her at the rail, I simply wished for a companion to comfort her on a troubling night, a father or a brother perhaps.
“You no doubt mean well,” she said.
“Yes. Of course.”
“I believe a woman should vote too,” she said.
“Quite,” I said. This was a notion I’d heard before and normally it seemed, in the voice of a woman, a hard and angry thing. But now this woman’s voice was very small. She was arguing her right to travel alone and vote when, in fact, she feared she would soon die in the North Atlantic Ocean. I understood this much and her words did not seem provocative to me. Only sad.
“I’m certain you’ll have a chance to express that view for many decades to come,” I said.
“The change is nearer than you think,” she said with some vigor now in her voice, even irritation. I was glad to hear it.
“I didn’t mean to take up the political point,” I said. “I simply meant you will survive this night and live a long time.”
She lowered her face.
“That’s your immediate concern, isn’t it?” I asked, trying to speak very gently.
Before she could answer, a man I knew from the smoking lounge approached along the promenade, coming from the direction of the bow of the ship. He had gone out of the lounge some time earlier.
“Look here,” he said, and he showed me his drink. It was full of chipped ice. “It’s from the forward well deck,” he said. “It’s all over the place.”
I felt the woman ease around my shoulder and look into the glass. The man was clearly drunk and shouldn’t have been running about causing alarm.
“From the iceberg,” he said.
I heard her exhale sharply.
“I never take ice in my scotch and soda,” I said.
The man drew himself up. “I do,” he said. And he moved away unsteadily, confirming my criticism of him.
She stood very still for a long moment.
All I could think to say was something along the lines of “Here, here. There’s nothing to worry about.” But she was not the type of woman to take comfort from that. I knew that much about her already. I felt no resentment at the fact. Indeed, I felt sorry for her. If she wanted to be the sort to travel alone and vote and not be consoled by the platitudes of a stiff old bachelor from the Civil Service in India, then it was sad for her to have these intense and daunting intuitions of disaster and death, as well.
So I kept quiet, and she eventually turned her face to me. The moon fell upon her. At the time, I did not clearly see her beauty. I can see it now, however. I have always been able to see in this incorporeal state. Quite vividly. Though not at the moment. There’s only darkness. The activity above me has no shape. But in the sea, as I drifted inexorably to the surface, I began to see the fish and eventually the ceiling of light above me. And then there was the first time I rose — quite remarkable — lifting from the vastness of an ocean delicately wrinkled and athrash with the sunlight. I went up into a sky I knew I was a part of, spinning myself into the gossamer of a rain cloud, hiding from the sea, traced as a tiny wisp into a great gray mountain of vapor. And I wondered if there were others like me there. I listened for them. I tried to call to them, though I had no voice. Not even words. Not like these that now shape in me. If I’d had these words then, perhaps I could have called out to the others who had gone down with the Titanic, and they would have heard me. If, in fact, they were there. But as far as I knew — as far as I know now — I am a solitary traveler.