Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World Read Online Free PDF

Paris branch of Lucile Ltd., Lady Duff Gordon’s fashion house, the year before. The idea of an English couturiere establishing an outpost in the capital of haute couture had raised some Gallic design noses skyward, but fashionable French women had soon flocked to Lucile’s showroom on the rue de Penthièvre. It was from there that Lady Duff Gordon and her husband, Sir Cosmo, had left that morning to take the train to Cherbourg. Seeing the famous designer sitting calmly on the Nomadic in her sable coat and pearl earrings and holding a bouquet of lily of the valley likely helped to calm Edith’s fears. She had covered the fashion shows at Lucile’s salon but had never actually met the famous couturiere in person, though the lounge of the tender did not seem quite the right place to approach her. Introducing oneself, she had learned, was not the done thing on this side of the Atlantic.
    His Swiss-educated manners, similarly, may have inhibited Norris Williams from approaching Karl Behr on the Nomadic . The American tennis star, in any case, was no doubt preoccupied by thoughts of the girl he would soon see on the Titanic . Nineteen-year-old Helen Newsom was a friend of Karl’s younger sister, and a romance had recently blossomed between them despite some objections from Helen’s mother and stepfather, Sallie and Richard Beckwith. It wasn’t that Karl was unsuitable—he was from a prosperous New York family, after all, and was a Yale graduate and a lawyer, as well as a tennis champion, and had good looks and charm to spare. But at nineteen Helen still seemed a little young for serious courtship. In a bid to cool things down, the Beckwiths had decided to take her on an eight-week tour of Europe in February. On boarding the Cedric , however, they had discovered that Karl Behr was a passenger as well, traveling to Europe on a business trip, or so he claimed. During the crossing the Beckwiths’ attitude had softened toward Karl and he was able to spend some quiet time with Helen, something he looked forward to repeating on the crossing home.

     

     
    Helen Newsom and Karl Behr (photo credit 1.15)
    Norris Williams was out on deck when the Titanic was finally sighted.Shortly before 7 p.m. her funnels were seen beyond the breakwater and the word quickly spread to the passengers in the lounge. Norris noted how majestically the great liner steamed toward them. To Edith Rosenbaum it looked like a six-story house; to Margaret Brown it was “the master palace of the sea.” Mrs. Brown recalled the Nomadic then putting on steam and steering out into the waves of the outer harbor. She also remembered that when the Nomadic reached the choppy seas beyond the breakwater, some of the passengers became “actively ill.”
    In Edith Rosenbaum’s highly colored recollection, however, the rocking of the tender was caused entirely by the wake of the huge Titanic , since the sea until then had been calm. As the Nomadic drew alongside, she described how “the tender [began] pounding against her sides with such force that I feared she would break in half.” According to Edith, it took ten men to hold down the gangway “as it shook and swayed in every direction.” Edith also claimed to be the last person to leave the tender since the “uncanny upheaval” of the Titanic ’s wake had stirred her fears anew.
    Yet never in her most tremulous imaginings could Edith Rosenbaum have predicted that 50 of the 172 travelers who sat with her aboard the Nomadic were embarking on the final voyage of their lives.

     
    (photo credit 1.61)

     
    On stepping into the Titanic ’s first-class reception room, Edith Rosenbaum instantly felt uneasy. (photo credit 1.70)

 
    N orris Williams would never forget his first view inside the Titanic , He remembered stepping into a white-paneled vestibule with a black-and-white-patterned floor that appeared at first to be solid marble, though he soon realized it wasn’t. Yet he found the entrance foyer to be so