by Joseph Rubas
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The tilted smoking room, dim and warm, the fire still roaring in the hearth, was a study in the surreal. Though nothing seemed terribly out of place, the perspective was off, some of the chairs and end tables had slid from where they had sat and the doors to both the deck and points otherwise hung open, plastered against the walls by gravity. Some small glass trinkets, cups, a clock, an ashtray, lie shattered on the floor. Stumbling in, nearly losing his balance at the near-diagonal angle, Van Helsing found himself imagining this purgatory, where souls were to wait indefinitely for their final judgment.
Art led the way into the still ambient room, past a few other men standing here and there, talking and drinking. The card game had finally broken up; the floor around the table littered with glasses, cigar butts, and playing cards.
At the fireplace, Archibald Butt, John Jacob Astor, and Benjamin Guggenheim were standing around, despondently staring into the licking flames, their usual rigid postures now slackened in the face of the inevitable. They clutched drinks in their hands, but the only one seeming to remember this fact was Astor, who swayed on his feet as if he had had too much to drink.
“Gentlemen,” Art greeted curtly as he, Van Helsing, and Seward joined them. Guggenheim smiled and lowly said something. Butt turned, noticed Van Helsing, and warmly greeted him. Astor seemed lost in thought as he stared on into the fire.
“Are there any drinks left?” Art asked, “Doctor Seward hurt himself and needs a bit of medication.”
“Here,” Guggenheim said, offering a glassful of sparkling amber liquid to Art, “you can have this. I assure you, I didn’t touch it; I seem to have lost my thirst.”
“Thank you, Ben,” he said, taking it and handing it to Seward, who took it and swallowed it.
“I’m not much thirsty anymore myself,” Butt added, looking down into his glass. “Dr. Van Helsing, would you like mine?”
Van Helsing shook his head. “The last thing that I want is to be even the slightest bit drunk right now.”
Butt chuckled. “Sober of mind and body. I take it that you’re doing well, then?”
“I am doing well, Major,” Van Helsing said, and he was; now that Dracula was dead, he felt splendid, “hopefully you are too.”
“As well as can be expected,” Butt said and turned back on the fire. “It’s not every day that a man finds himself in such a tight spot. I’ve had my fair share of scrapes with Death, but this…this is different.” He took a toss of brandy
“I think there is grave doubt that any of the men will get off,” Guggenheim reflected as he too stared into the flames. “I am willing to remain and play the man’s game if there are not enough boats for more than the women and children. I won’t die here like beasts…,” he took a stiff drink from his glass “…tell my wife I played the game out straight and to the end. No woman shall be left aboard this because Ben Guggenheim is a coward!”
“Not all of the men are standing up as well as we are,” Art said, looking at John Astor’s profile; his face was pale, and his eyes were red and puffy as if he’d been crying. Suddenly, he didn’t feel much like a drink anymore. “Some men are selfish and think only of their own wellbeing. If there were enough boats, that wouldn’t be so damn disgusting, but as it is, there aren’t.”
Guggenheim nodded gravely, “I’ve never before understood the need for so many boats to clutter a deck; now I do.” He let out a tortured chuckle.
“I’ve heard of ice, but this is ridiculous,” Astor said finally after finishing his own drink. He turned around and scanned the smoking room behind him; the men at the card table were still there, but the others who had been around the door were gone.
“Steward!” he called, slurring his words only slightly. None came. “Steward!”
“I believe they have all gone,” Butt offered as he tossed his glass into the fireplace.
Art checked his watch: 1:55. He looked left and right, clearly hearing the mass confusion on deck.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “I would love to stay and chat, but I feel that I must make myself useful somehow. Good evening.”
The men muttered farewells amongst themselves, knowing deep in their hearts that they would be forever. Butt shook Van Helsing’s hand and clapped him on the back. Ben squeezed Art’s shoulder and shuffled toward the grand staircase, and John Astor stood stoically before the fire, a lost soul.
None of them are going to make it, Art found himself thinking. He shuddered at the morbidity of it, but somehow he was certain. Their faces had been the faces of the soon dead; white and dark, shriveled and ghostly. Each and every one of the men he had just been drinking with would go down in Titanic tonight.
He looked from Seward to Van Helsing, and shuddered.
They would all go down.
***
On deck, pandemonium had broken out. People screamed and stumbled incoherently this way and that, their eyes wide and terrified. The band was still playing from near aft, a somber rendition of Ode to Joy, lending the desperate madness a bizarre quality.
“There is not much we can do,” Van Helsing said lowly as he surveyed the deck. “I…” he was cut off by the sound of gunfire. Up the deck near one of the davits was clustered a group of clamoring men in lifebelts, jostling and bellowing like wild animals.
“Back!” yelled an officer. One of his arms was wrapped around the davit and the other outstretched, a small pistol grasped tightly in his large fist. “Get back!”
Someone stepped forward, and the officer fired. The man spun and fell to the deck, dead. “You’ve killed him!” someone cried indignantly. A sound of outrage rippled through the crowd.
The officer shouted something, swung his arm to the side, and fired again. “Back! Back, damn it!”
The crowd, seeming to have learned its lesson, fell back a slight step, but Art could tell from their tightly tensed postures that they were waiting to strike once more. Another officer pushed his way through the crowd and spoke into the other’s ear. The first officer nodded, and then climbed into the boat. A pair of men in fairly decent clothes began working the pulley system, and the boat, overfull, started to descend.
Several of the men on deck made a rush for it, but the officer shot them in rapid succession.
“Things are getting worse than I ever could have imagined,” Van Helsing said. Seward, slack jawed, nodded. Art went to speak, but a passerby accidently elbowed him in the back, and his words came out as a muffled Humph.
“John...” Van Helsing started, but was again cut off, this time by an officer, a small, winded man in blue who materialized from the ether.
“Do any of you have any experience at sea?” he ejaculated.
“Yes,” Art said, “John and I have done plenty of sailing.”
“Thank God. Come with me.”
Art and the others obediently followed him forward, through the masses. Disoriented, like men emerging from a forest after several days of being lost, they finally shambled into a clearing before a boat. A young officer, looking scared, and an older one looking dour, stood before a ring of unhappy men, most of them muscular and dressed in the clothes of stokers. The older one, his hat cocked to one side like a cowboy, held a pistol at his hip; the younger’s was at his side, forgotten.
“These men have experience,” the small officer said.
The older glanced at Art and the others. “I only need two of them.”
“That would be John and I,” Art said before the small officer could reply.
“Both of you, get in the boat.”
John and Art looked at each other.
“We won’t do that, sir,” Art said, “not while there are still women and children aboard.”
The older officer’s face darkened. “There ar
e fifty women in this boat,” he flashed, “and if we wait much longer they’ll sink with the ship!”
He was right, but they both knew that even if all of the women were safe in boats, they could never abandon each other.
“We won’t leave,” Art retorted.
“I have experience, and I’m a White Star employee!” someone shouted bitterly from the crowd.
The older officer, gritting his teeth, looked from one of his companions to the other. “Alright. Lowe, Pittman, you go.”
The young, frightened officer jerked round to face his superior. “Go?”
“Yes, damn it, that’s an order!”
He nodded emphatically, and then climbed in. Pittman followed, stopping to squeeze the older man’s shoulder. “Take care, Lightoller.”
Lightoller nodded.
Once the two officers were situated in the boat, Lightoller gestured to Art and John. “You two, come here. One of you will help me with the pulley and the other’re guard them” – he hooked a thumb at the crowd.
“Alright,” Art said, and then nudged Seward in the ribs. “You get the honor,” he smiled wearily, “don’t go off thinking you’re Jesse James now.”
Lightoller handed Seward the gun and proceeded to explain to Art how the lever-and-pulley system worked; he could barely hear him over the noise on deck; hundreds upon hundreds of voices babbling at once, a phantom chorus.
Speaking of phantoms, the men amassed before him put him uncomfortably in mind of the dead, their faces dark yet pale, blurry and indistinct, their eyes black and hollow, gaunt, starved, desperate.
Seward licked his sandpaper lips and held the gun shakily before him.
“Why don’t you let us in, eh?” one of them, a tall, burly man with a thick moustache cried, “you can’t just let us drown like dogs! We’re people!” His comrades voiced their vigorous agreement.
“W-women and children first,” Seward stuttered.
“There aren’t anymore!” another man, tall and red-headed, screamed. “That’s the last of ‘em there!”
“Yeah!”
“Plenty of room for us!”
Other hisses, catcalls, and howls rose into the night. Seward swallowed hard and waved the gun from side-to-side. “Calm down, gentlemen! Women and children first! Be English!”
“This ain’t English!” someone shirked, “this is murder!”
The crowd, growing more restless by the second, erupted into screams and bellows. One daring soul moved threateningly forward, and Seward jabbed the gun at him; he fell back, pure hatred writ across his craggy face.
“Stand back! Be manly, for God’s sake!”
“Put down that gun and see how manly we are!” somebody challenged.
If this kept up, Seward thought as he scanned the men’s faces, he would be forced to
shoot someone.
“Please, be reasonable!”
Before those words had even escaped his lips, a man leapt from the crowd and caught him with a swift right hook, knocking him back.
The world flashed bright red. Reflexively, Seward pulled the trigger thrice. The first two shots found their mark; the third went wild and smashed into a window.
Dizzied, disoriented, Seward swayed on his feet, the world graying around him. Loud screams and more shots rang out. Opening his eyes, Seward saw the men desperately clawing at Art and Lightoller, the latter firing into them and the former beating them back with his fists. Someone punched the officer in the jaw, and he stumbled back, bumping into Seward and upsetting his balance. Flailing his arms, he fought to stay on his feet...
...But fell over the edge instead.