pier.
By this time the rails were lined with men and women. They were very silent. There were a few requests for news from those on board and a few answers to questions shouted from the tugs.
The liner began to slacken her speed, and the tugboat soon was alongside. Up above the inky blackness of the hull figures could be made out, leaning over the port railing, as though peering eagerly at the little craft which was bearing down on the Carpathia.
Some of them, perhaps, had passed through that inferno of the deep sea which sprang up to destroy the mightiest steamship afloat.
“Carpathia, ahoy!” was shouted through a megaphone.
There was an interval of a few seconds, and then, “Aye, aye,” came the reply.
“Is there any assistance that can be rendered?” was the next question.
“Thank you, no,” was the answer in a tone that carried emotion with it. Meantime the tugboat was getting nearer and nearer to the Carpathia, and soon the faces of those leaning over the railing could be distinguished.
More faces appeared, and still more.
A woman who called to a man on the tugboat was asked? “Are you one the Titanic survivors?”
“Yes,” said the voice, hesitatingly.
“Do you need help?”
“No,” after a pause.
“If there is anything you want done it will be attended to.”
“Thank you. I have been informed that my relatives will meet me at the pier.”
“Is it true that some of the life-boats sank with the Titanic?”
“Yes. There was some trouble in manning them. They were not far enough away from her.”
All of this questioning and receiving replies was carried on with the greatest difficulty. The pounding of the liner’s engines, the washing of the sea, the tugboat’s engines, made it hard to understand the woman’s replies.
“Were the women properly cared for after the crash?” she was asked.
“Oh, yes,” came the shrill reply. “The men were brave—very brave.” Here her voice broke and she turned and left the railing, to reappear a few moments later and cry:
“Please report me as saved.”
“What name?” was asked. She shouted a name that could not be understood, and, apparently believing that it had been, turned away again and disappeared.
“Nearly all of us are very ill,” cried another woman. Here several other tugboats appeared, and those standing at the railing were besieged with questions.
“Did the crash come without warning?” a voice on one of the smaller boats megaphoned.
“Yes,” a woman answered. “Most of us had retired. We saved a few of our belongings.”
“How long did it take the boat to sink?” asked the voice.
“Not long,” came the reply? “The crew and the men were very brave. Oh, it is dreadful—dreadful to think of!”
“Is Mr. John Jacob Astor on board?”
“No.”
“Did he remain on the Titanic after the collision?”
“I do not know.”
Questions of this kind were showered at the few survivors who stood at the railing, but they seemed too confused to answer them intelligibly, and after replying evasively to some they would disappear.
“Are you going to anchor for the night?” Captain Rostron was asked by megaphone as his boat approached Ambrose Light. It was then raining heavily.
“No,” came the reply. “I am going into port. There are sick people on board.”
“We tried to learn when she would dock,” said Dr. Walter Kennedy, head of the big ambulance corps on the mist-shrouded pier, “and we were told it would not be before midnight and that most probably it would not be before dawn to-morrow. The childish deception that has been practiced for days by the people who are responsible for the Titanic has been carried up to the very moment of the landing of the survivors.”
She proceeded past the Cunard pier, where 2000 persons were waiting her, and steamed to a spot opposite the White Star piers at Twenty-first Street.
The ports in the big inclosed pier of the Cunard Line were opened, and through them the waiting hundreds, almost frantic with anxiety over what the Carpathia might reveal, watched her as with nerve-destroying leisure she swung about in the river, dropping over the life-boats of the Titanic that they might be taken to the piers of the White Star Line.
It was dark in the river, but the lowering away of the life-boats could be seen from the Carpathia’s pier, and a deep sigh arose from the multitude there as they caught this first glance of anything associated with the Titanic.
Then the Carpathia started for her own pier. As she approached it the ports on the north side of pier 54 were closed that the Carpathia might land there, but through the two left open to accommodate the forward and after gangplanks of the big liner the watchers could see her looming larger and larger in the darkness till finally she was directly alongside the pier.
As the boats were towed away the picture taking and shouting of questions began again. John Badenoch, a buyer for Macy & Co., called down to a representative of the firm that neither Mr. nor Mrs. Isidor Straus were among the rescued on board the Carpathia. An officer of the Carpathia called down that 710 of the Titanic’s passengers were on board, but refused to reply to other questions.
The heavy hawsers were made fast without the customary shouting of ship’s officers and pier hands. From the crowd on the pier came a long, shuddering murmur. In it were blended sighs and hundreds of whispers. The burden of it all was: “Here they come.”
About each gangplank a portable fence had been put in place, marking off some fifty feet of the pier, within which stood one hundred or more customs officials. Next to the fence, crowded close against it, were anxious men and women, their gaze strained for a glance of the first from the ship, their mouths opened to draw their breaths in spasmodic, quivering gasps, their very bodies shaking with suppressed excitement, excitement which only the suspense itself was keeping in subjection.
These were the husbands and wives, children, parents, sweethearts and friends of those who had sailed upon the Titanic on its maiden voyage.
They pressed to the head of the pier, marking the boats of the wrecked ship as they dangled at the side of the Carpathia and were revealed in the sudden flashes of the photographers upon the tugs. They spoke in whispers, each group intent upon its own sad business. Newspaper writers, with pier passes showing in their hat bands, were everywhere.
A sailor hurried outside the fence and disappeared, apparently on a mission for his company. There was a deep-drawn sigh as he walked away, shaking his head toward those who peered eagerly at him. Then came a man and woman of the Carpathia’s own passengers, as their orderly dress showed them to be.
Again a sigh like a sob swept over the crowd, and again they turned back to the canopied gangplank.
Several minutes passed and then out of the first cabin gangway; tunneled by a somber awning, streamed the first survivors. A young woman, hatless, her light brown hair disordered and the leaden weight of crushing sorrow heavy upon eyes and sensitive mouth, was in the van. She stopped, perplexed, almost ready to drop with terror and exhaustion, and was caught by a customs official.
“A survivor?” he questioned rapidly, and a nod of the head answering him, he demanded:
“Your name.”
