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

imposing, and so unlike anything he had ever seen on a ship, that it gave him, in his words, “a very distinct start.” Edith Rosenbaum had an even stronger reaction. On setting foot inside the Titanic she immediately decided that she wanted to go back to Cherbourg. She asked Nicholas Martin, the White Star agent who had come out on the tender with the passengers, about the possibility of locating her luggage. “All right, take another boat,” she recalled Martin saying, “but your baggage must remain.” When Edith inquired about insurance for it, he replied, “Ridiculous, this ship is unsinkable.” Edith thought of the expensive gowns she was taking to New York and concluded, “My luggage is worth more to me than I am, so I better remain with it,” and decided to stay.
    Arriving on the Titanic was also unforgettable for Ella White. A wealthy widow from New York, the short, stout, and rather pug-faced Mrs. White suffered from leg trouble and had fallen and twisted her ankle on the swaying gangway. The ship’s doctor was quickly summoned to the reception room, and Mrs. White was then helped by her chauffeur and maid to a C-deck cabin, where she would spend the rest of the voyage. From there, she would occasionally dispatch her younger, slimmer companion, Marie Young, to check on the two prized French roosters and two hens that they had purchased for the farm at her Westchester estate. The poultry were housed near the Titanic ’s galleys, and several passengers would report the curious sound of roosters crowing on the ship.
    Inside the richly carpeted reception room, uniformed stewards awaited to guide the Cherbourg passengers to their rooms. “At the entrance there were like 50 butlers,” an Argentinian businessman noted in a letter sent the next day. The Titanic ’s first-class reception room was actually a large, U-shaped hallway that encompassed the curved balustrades of the grand staircase landing and the entrance to the first-class dining saloon. But it was also one of the most popular public rooms on the ship, where passengers gathered before dinner and met for coffee afterward while the orchestra played. It was known as the Palm Room due to its cozy groupings of wicker chairs and tables set amid potted plants in fashionable Palm Court style. White-paneled walls with arched leaded windows and a ceiling with Jacobean-styled plasterwork helped complete the theme, as did a string and piano quintet that regularly played tunes reminiscent of a Palm Court orchestra.
    On stepping into this convivial scene, the weary Cherbourg passengers may have felt like latecomers to a party. For the grieving Ryersons it must have seemed incongruous. White Star chairman J. Bruce Ismay greeted Arthur Ryerson and his family and insisted on providing them with an extra stateroom to the two they had already booked and arranging for the services of a personal steward. Ismay no doubt chose also to greet John Jacob Astor and his party upon their arrival. Astor and Ismay make an interesting pairing since they were curiously similar men. Both were tall, dark, late fortyish, and generously mustached; both were scions of prominent families and had inherited their positions in life; each is remembered as having an aloof and sometimes brusque manner, a likely cover for shyness. Did Astor pull out his gold watch to remind Ismay of the late hour of their boarding? One can imagine Ismay casually responding that the Titanic had been held up by another liner swinging into her path while leaving Southampton—all regrettable but quite unavoidable.
    In reality, the incident in Southampton harbor earlier that day could have been rather more serious. Just after noon, as the tugs had begun to move the Titanic away from Ocean Dock and down the narrow channel, they approached two smaller steamers, the Oceanic and the New York , moored together farther down the pier. Due to water displacement caused by the passing of the huge new liner, the New York ’s