Lusitania Lost

by Leonard Carpenter

  “Oh yes, C.F. I just saw her in the other room.”

  “Very sorry, Miss Winnie,” Frohman added. “I’d introduce you to her myself, but I have to stay put and take care of my wife.” He held up his bronze-headed cane to show them. “Here she is. We’ve been inseparable ever since I fell head-over-heels in 1912, down my front porch steps.”

  “Don’t worry, you poor dear,” Winnie said, patting the elder man’s hand. “We’ll go by ourselves and find Madame de Page. I so wanted to hear her speak back home!”

  Matt thanked their host, and Alma spoke up, finally breaking her discreet silence. “Yes, thank you, Mr. Frohman,” she told him. “It’s been wonderful meeting you. And you too, Miss Brandell.”

  Ollie again led them off through the fashionable crowd into the suite’s private dining room, paneled in rich dark teak and lit by a gilded chandelier. As a reporter, Matt felt satisfied just to tag along and let this glib Broadway insider do his work for him.

  Two stately ladies stood talking near the punchbowl, and as the little company approached, the smaller, darker-haired one turned to acknowledge their presence.

  “Madame de Page, isn’t it?” Ollie saluted her, leading the way. “Charlie Frohman sends us over. I’m Oliver Bernard, a play writer and designer, heading back to England to enlist. I’m very pleased to make your acquaintance.”

  Accepting the Belgian woman’s hand, he kissed it elegantly and then introduced the others, one by one. “My American friends here also want very much to meet you.”

  “Oh, and one of you at least is a nurse!” the Belgian said. “How delightful, that so many Americans have such a great concern for the sorrows of the world.”

  “Yes, I guess it’s true,” Winnie said. “There are, uh, four of us on board from the United Nursing Service League. Our headmistress is Hildegard Krauss.”

  “Oh yes, I know the name. Tell her and your other friends that I would love to meet them all. You’ve heard about my appeal, as special envoy from my country?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Winnie said. “My parents sent in a donation, but I was dying to see you when you were lecturing in the States. It’s just terrible what those brutish Huns have done to poor little Belgium.”

  “Thank you…but of course, there is suffering on both sides. If you come to Brussels, I would like to show you our clinic.”

  Reaching into her tiny handbag, she gave Winnie a calling card. “My husband, Antoine, is Surgeon General of the Belgian Army. And we have a British nurse there, Edith Cavell, who is doing marvelous things,” she added with a glance to Oliver.

  “Oh, I read about Nurse Cavell too,” Winnie said eagerly, slipping the card into her jacket pocket. “We don’t know yet where we’ll be stationed, but I’d love to come.”

  The taller woman standing beside the envoy came forward and shook Winnie’s hand. “Hello, I’m Lady Margaret Mackworth. It’s fine to see women stepping forth and taking a role internationally. You Americans have been leaders in some ways, but we in England are trying to do our part.”

  Ollie was first to react. “Lady Mackworth, the famous suffragette! Most delighted…”

  He reached forward, but the aristocrat swiftly drew back her hand rather than have it kissed.

  “Most honored to meet you, Milady,” Ollie ended with an impromptu bow. “May I ask if your husband Sir Humphrey is with us on this voyage?”

  “No,” the lady said with dignity. “I am traveling with my father, who has been looking after his coal interests in America. We were advised by friends at the Waldorf to consider taking a neutral ship,” she added, “but David didn’t particularly care to change flags. I personally believe…like you, Miss Dexter…that women shouldn’t shrink from danger in these times. If we are to win acceptance,” she declared, flashing affirmative glances to the other women, “we must be bold.”

  “I, too, believe that women should be accepted in the world of men,” Madame de Page said. “But we also have our special strength, which is nurturing and caring for the weak. That is one way, besides bravery, that we can make our influence felt.”

  “But Marie, my dear,” Lady Margaret protested, “if you are saying, ‘The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world,’ I must disagree with you.”

  “No, Margaret, I only mean that there is some further skill and sensitivity that we can bring to the struggle.…”

  With that, the two women were back in their earnest conversation, and the others soon moved on. Ollie observed with relish, “Apparently Lady Mackworth is quite decent to talk to, when she’s not stuffing firebombs into letterboxes.”

  “Oh, I heard about that,” Winnie said. “To burn up the mail in England, as a protest to win women the vote! Is she really the one?” she added with a speculative look in her eye. “And she was released after only five days?”

  “Yes, after staging a hunger strike in the jail.”

  “Now, Win, don’t be picking up too many foreign ideas.” Flash placed a protective arm around his sweetheart. “I don’t want to have to print your brand new biography piece on the crime pages.”

  Both reporters in the party had been fairly silent during the introductions, testing the waters, watching and listening. But the levity of the group, and the champagne dispensed from trays by roving waiters, were having an effect. Now the four agreed to split up and mingle separately. Flash was content to stick with Winnie, and Alma with Ollie. After a moment’s uncertainty, Matt decided to trust them and struck out on his own.

  He soon recognized a face from the news wire, standing bearded and distinguished under a dark blue sea captain’s hat. It was Commander J. Foster Stackhouse, the British polar explorer who’d been lecturing in America to raise money for an Antarctic expedition. Matt joined him in conversation with two others, including Staff Captain Anderson, white-clad in his immaculate Cunard uniform. The fourth man in their group was diminutive and Continental-looking, with a glossy black bowler topping off his dinner suit. He turned out to be an American, the novelist and playwright Justus Miles Forman.

  “Do you think we’ll be seeing Captain Turner at this affair?” Matt asked after introducing himself.

  “The real captain, you mean?” Captain Anderson good-naturedly said. “No, he keeps himself busy with petty details like running the ship. But he leaves these important social functions to me.”

  “I don’t blame him for laying low,” Stackhouse said. “With the war on, and with all these worries about enemy action, it must be hard dealing with passengers’ fears–not like the old days, when all we thought about was racing across the Atlantic and winning the Blue Riband prize for best speed.”

  “And with the speed came all this luxury, don’t forget.” Captain Anderson nodded at the splendor around them. “The Germans and Anglo-Americans have always tried to best each another in grandeur and comfort.”

  Matt asked, “Who holds the Blue Riband now, by the way, Captain? I suppose the Titanic would have, but did she ever officially make the list?”

  “No,” the staff captain said. “She was White Star Lines’ one effort to beat Cunard, but she tripped coming out of the gate. The record holder is, or was, our sister ship Mauretania…at least until the war came, and she was drafted into the Royal Navy. Before that it was Lusitania, and before her, the Deutschland and Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse…oh, and Kronprinz Wilhelm too, in 1909.”

  “Another war draftee,” the writer Forman observed. “His ships are on the front lines, even if Der Kaiser himself isn’t. How many British merchant ships did the Crown Prince Willie catch and scuttle, anyway, steaming around the Atlantic as an armed commerce raider? We were reading about two or three a month going down for a while there.”

  “Fourteen,” Captain Anderson said, “until she was interned last month in Chesapeake Bay. But our Lusi here—” he thumped his heel against the polished parquet deck beneath them—“she could do much better
than that if she were just given the chance.” He winked at Matt to show that his wistful tone was in jest.

  The remark caused Matt to reflect. Here he was with the international set, the globetrotters. These three men were all influential, all newsworthy. Yet could any of them affect destiny, war, or even the course of this ship? They spoke like bettors at a horse race, but who were the fixers? Where were the decisions really made, the clashes and alliances? Was it by great financiers, the Morgans, Rockefellers and Rothschilds? Or was it in some circle even higher?

  “The shipbuilding contest,” Justus Miles Forman was saying, “was about more than luxury and speed. While the ocean liners raced, British and German shipyards have been working overtime to build heavier-armed battleships, dreadnoughts, the new submarine-destroyers too, and now battlecruisers. This fight has been a long time in the making.”

  “It was the Kaiser’s love of big ships that did it,” Anderson said.

  “And his healthy German appetite for colonies and warm-water ports,” Commander Stackhouse added.

  “Why, yes,” Forman mischievously put in, “colliding with jolly old England’s divine right to control the seven seas and her manifest destiny to rule a global empire.”

  In spite of his small size, the writer’s Continental manner and self-assured speech gave him an air of equality to the two distinguished, uniformed sea-captains. His pert black bowler seemed more than a match for their glossy visored uniform caps.

  Turning to the novelist, Matt said, “You wrote a play that dealt with the issue of war neutrality…The Hyphen, wasn’t it called? Charlie Frohman produced it on Broadway.”

  “Yes,” the author said. “An utter failure, alas! It dealt with divided loyalties and the dilemma of the hyphenated Americans…German-Americans, Irish-Americans, the ones who aren’t quite accepted. Unfortunately, the just-plain-Americans didn’t pay much attention.”

  Captain Stackhouse asked, “Do you carry around a hyphen of your own?”

  “Far too many, I’m afraid,” Miles admitted with a smile. “After crossing over so often on your fine ship, I love France, I love England, I even love Germany. I simply adore Denmark and Belgium, Spain and Austria, all the cozy little corners of Europe. I love America too, my homeland. So I’ve signed on to be a foreign correspondent, to warn my Yankee kinsmen, our naïve, native innocents abroad, about the perils of our modern world. But I dread seeing what this war has done to Europe.”

  “Do you have an assignment to cover the front?” Matt asked.

  “Yes, from the New York Times. Exclusive, of course, but I do share stories.”

  “We’ll be brothers-in-arms, then, Miles.” Matt slapped the smaller man on the back, taking care to do it lightly. “I’m going over for the Daily Inquisitor.”

  “Sounds to me like you two will be competitors,” Stackhouse said. “Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to work, vying to get all the news in print?”

  “Well then, Commander,” Matt responded, “how about a scoop for us both? Are the plans final yet for your seven-year Antarctic voyage? Or is the war going to postpone it? Has your ship the Discovery been drafted by the Royal Navy?”

  “No, not as yet,” Stackhouse said. “This war has definitely raised difficulties, though. It was the main reason for my fundraising trip to your country, with money so scarce in Europe. And my crew has suffered sad casualties…losing our chief surveyor Lord Congleton, late of the Grenadier Guards, was a dreadful blow.

  “But we’ll find someone to fill his berth, and our other volunteers may soon be released from military duty for this vital mission.

  “It’s quite an undertaking,” the visionary seafarer went on, “and not merely a voyage of Antarctic exploration. Most of our time will be spent charting sea routes and maritime hazards off South America and in the South Pacific, as well as studying land forms and native peoples. We can leave our anthropologists on some of those remote islands for months at a time, and then return to pick them up, along with their findings. And our round-the-world trip will take us into the Atlantic, to finally chart the Azores and other sea zones, even to the site of the Titanic sinking.”

  “Really, Commander?” Captain Anderson asked, while Matt scribbled busily in the notebook he’d produced from his cummerbund. “Is it true that you believe the Titanic may have struck a rock in mid-Atlantic?”

  “Not a rock, no,” Stackhouse explained, “but an iceberg grounded upon a rock. An undersea mountain, perhaps.” He stroked his gray beard and nodded significantly. “If such a recurrent hazard to navigation exists, rest assured that we’ll find and chart it.”

  * * *

  While the men mingled, Alma found herself in one of the groups in the dining room. Here she was without Matt or her close friends, but in lively company. And in Ollie’s ebullient and somewhat drunken presence, she didn’t feel like the target of strange men. Yet there was plenty of distraction. The Roycrofter commune leader Elbert Hubbard, invited or not, had appeared in his full Quaker regalia and been accepted, floppy hat and all, among the fashionable set.

  “I still say we should join up and end this thing right away,” Hubbard was saying of the European War. “Teddy and his Rough Riders could thump those goose-stepping Krauts in a week. The Brits and Franks can use a kick in the pants too, a good example of Yankee know-how.”

  “Do you really think the Americans would wish to join a war?” the French actress Rita Jolivet asked. “President Wilson and your Secretary of State, M’sieur William Jennings Bryan, are peace advocates. They have kept America out of the war.”

  “Bryan’s just an old sissy,” Hubbard said, “and Wilson’s a college professor. Do you know what the problem is with college professors? They all have two hands—” he held up his big craftsman’s paws—“so they’re always saying, ‘on the one hand this, but on the other hand, that.’ They can never decide.” After waiting out the flurry of laughs, he added, “As for the American people, they know what to do better than any politician.”

  Oliver Bernard said, “Moving a great country like America to war, though…that will take time, and a lot of production.”

  “What, you mean war production?” Hubbard asked. “America’s output of armaments and provisions can more than match any European country.”

  “I don’t doubt that,” the stage designer said. “You’re already producing plenty for the Allies. But I mean theatrical productions, grand openings! Big, lavish affairs, with songs and dance numbers that sway the public and get them marching.” The scrawny Englishman raised his arms half-drunkenly. “Pretty girls with guns, in brief costumes, dancing on the deck of a battleship! That will get your young men charged up to enlist! If you want to have a war, especially in a democracy like yours, you’ve got to first get the public behind it…get some war spirit going, strike up the band!” His ending bow drew applause from the onlookers.

  Only momentarily upstaged, Hubbard replied, “Nonsense! America is ready to fight right now. If you want to know more about it, read my essay on Der Kaiser.” He drew a handful of booklets from his wide-lapelled coat and handed some out. “Here, listen to this.” He read from one: “If you will examine the present war situation carefully, you will find it stamped and stenciled, ‘Made in Germany.’” He closed the book. “The war is theirs. America’s job is to help end it.”

  “Well, Elbert, if it takes you some time, don’t worry,” Ollie blandly assured him. “This war is firmly established, and it isn’t going anywhere. It’ll still be there when you Yanks finally arrive.”

  Drawn in by the commotion, Flash and Winnie rejoined the group. Alma, who as yet had spoken little, edged over to them to discuss something that had been bothering her.

  “I’m trying to watch and listen, and not be conspicuous,” she said. “But there’s a man here who’s been looking at me. I don’t know if he thinks he recognizes me, but I can’t place him. Don’t look now, he�
�s right over there.”

  She indicated a slight, distinguished man in a Van Dyke beard.

  After a leisurely survey, Flash laughed softly. “No worries about him, I’d say. That’s the Irish art connoisseur, Hugh Lane, who’s been in the papers lately. He’s been in the States buying back old Rembrandt and Rubens masterpieces to take home, cheap…it seems they’re too highbrow or racy for our provincial American tastes. He’s probably just enjoying the scenery,” he added with a wink to the ladies.

  “Oh, Sir Hugh Lane!” Winnie gasped, suddenly excited. “Alma, my dear, haven’t you read about him?” She moved closer to speak in her friend’s ear, the champagne sweet on her breath.

  “To help support the Red Cross, he’s offered to pay ten thousand pounds for a painting to be done by the famous American artist, John Singer Sargent. It’s to be a portrait, a female, but he hasn’t yet chosen the right woman to pose for it.” She self-consciously reset her nurse cap on her head.

  “Alma,” she went on, “he’s probably considering you! You should go over and talk to him. See there, he’s looking our way again!”

  “Oh no, that’s not what I need right now!” Alma turned her back on the keen-eyed Irishman. “I’m supposed to be in hiding, remember? What if Jim should see a painting of me? He’d probably buy it for top dollar and then shoot it full of holes!” She shivered. “What am I even doing at a party? Let’s get out of this room.”

  “Nonsense,” Winnie said with a wink to Flash. “All you need is a little more to drink…here,” she added, grabbing two flutes of champagne from the tray of a passing waiter.

  The three of them edged away from Ollie and Elbert, who were still playing off one another like expert vaudevillians. They found Matt in the parlor of the lavish suite. He was standing by Frohman, who had settled into a plush chair to give his cane a rest. As they approached, their host smiled up at them.

  “Well, my young friends, are you enjoying our little salon?”