CHAPTER XXIV

LEFT TO THEIR FATE

COOLNESS AND HEROISM OF THOSE LEFT TO PERISH -- SUICIDE OF MURDOCK -- CAPTAIN SMITH'S END -- THE SHIP'S BAND PLAYS A NOBLE HYMN AS THE VESSEL GOES DOWN

THE general feeling aboard the ship after the boats had left her sides was that she would not survive her wound, but the passengers who remained aboard displayed the utmost heroism.

William T. Stead, the famous English journalist, was so little alarmed that he calmly discussed with one of the passengers the probable height of the iceberg after the Titanic had shot into it.

Confidence in the ability of the Titanic to remain afloat doubtlessly led many of the passengers to death. The theory that the great ship was unsinkable remained with hundreds who had entrusted themselves to the gigantic hulk, long after the officers knew that the vessel could not survive.

The captain and officers behaved with superb gallantry, and there was perfect order and discipline among those who were aboard, even after all hope had been abandoned for the salvation of the ship.

Many women went down, steerage women who were unable to get to the upper decks where the boats were launched, maids who were overlooked in the confusion, cabin passengers who refused to desert their husbands or who reached the decks after the last of the life-boats was gone and the ship was settling for her final plunge to the bottom of the Atlantic.

Narratives of survivors do not bear out the supposition that the final hours upon the vessel's decks were passed in darkness. They say the electric lighting plant held out until the last, and that even as they watched the ship sink, from their places in the floating life-boats, her lights were gleaming in long rows as she plunged under by the head. Just before she sank, some of the refugees say, the ship broke in two abaft the engine room after the bulkhead explosions had occurred.

COLONEL ASTOR'S DEATH

To Colonel Astor's death Philip Mock bears this testimony:

"Many men were hanging on to rafts in the sea. William T. Stead and Colonel Astor were among them. Their feet and hands froze and they had to let go. Both were drowned."

The last man among the survivors to speak to Colonel Astor was K. Whiteman, the ship's barber.

"I shaved Colonel Astor Sunday afternoon," said Whiteman. "He was a pleasant, affable man, and that awful night when I found myself standing beside him on the passenger deck, helping to put the women into the boats, I spoke to him.

"'Where is your life-belt?' I asked him.

"'I didn't think there would be any need of it,' he said.

"'Get one while there is time,' I told him. 'The last boat is gone, and we are done for.'

"'No,' he said, 'I think there are some life-boats to be launched, and we may get on one of them.'

"'There are no life-rafts,' I told him, 'and the ship is going to sink. I am going to jump overboard and take a chance on swimming out and being picked up by one of the boats. Better come along.'

"'No, thank you,' he said, calmly, 'I think I'll have to stick.'

"I asked him if he would mind shaking hands with me. He said, 'With pleasure,' gave me a hearty grip, and then I climbed up on the rail and jumped overboard. I was in the water nearly four hours before one of the boats picked me up."

CAPTAIN WASHED OVERBOARD

Murdock's last orders were to Quartermaster Moody and a few other petty officers who had taken their places in the rigid discipline of the ship and were lowering the boats. Captain Smith came up to him on the bridge several times and then rushed down again. They spoke to one another only in monosyllables.

There were stories that Captain Smith, when he saw the ship actually going down, had committed suicide. There is no basis for such tales. The captain, according to the testimony of those who were near him almost until the last, was admirably cool. He carried a revolver in his hand, ready to use it on anyone who disobeyed orders.

"I want every man to act like a man for manhood's sake," he said, "and if they don't, a bullet awaits the coward."

With the revolver in his hand--a fact that undoubtedly gave rise to the suicide theory--the captain moved up and down the deck. He gave the order for each life-boat to make off and he remained until every boat was gone. Standing on the bridge he finally called out the order: "Each man save himself." At that moment all discipline fled. It was the last call of death. If there had been any hope among those on board before, the hope now had fled.

The bearded admiral of the White Star Line fleet, with every life-saving device launched from the decks, was returning to the deck to perform the sacred office of going down with his ship when a wave dashed over the side and tore him from the ladder.

The Titanic was sinking rapidly by the head, with the twisting sidelong motion that was soon to aim her on her course two miles down. Murdock saw the skipper swept out, but did not move. Captain Smith was but one of a multitude of lost at that moment. Murdock may have known that the last desperate thought of the gray mariner was to get upon his bridge and die in command. That the old man could not have done this may have had something to do with Murdock's suicidal inspiration. Of that no man may say or safely guess.

The wave that swept the skipper out bore him almost to the thwart of a crowded life-boat. Hands reached out, but he wrenched himself away, turned and swam back toward the ship.

Some say that he said, "Good-bye, I'm going back to the ship."

He disappeared for a moment, then reappeared where a rail was slipping under water. Cool and courageous to the end, loyal to his duty under the most difficult circumstances, he showed himself a noble captain, and he died a noble death.

SAW BOTH OFFICERS PERISH

Quartermaster Moody saw all this, watched the skipper scramble aboard again onto the submerged decks, and then vanish altogether in a great billow.

As Moody's eye lost sight of the skipper in this confusion of waters it again shifted to the bridge, and just in time to see Murdock take his life. The man's face was turned toward him, Moody said, and he could not mistake it. There were still many gleaming lights on the ship, flickering out like little groups of vanishing stars, and with the clear starshine on the waters there was nothing to cloud or break the quartermaster's vision.

"I saw Murdock die by his own hand," said Moody, "saw the flash from his gun, heard the crack that followed the flash and then saw him plunge over on his face."

Others report hearing several pistol shots on the decks below the bridge, but amid the groans and shrieks and cries, shouted orders and all that vast orchestra of sounds that broke upon the air they must have been faint periods of punctuation.

BAND PLAYED ITS OWN DIRGE

The band had broken out in the strains of "Nearer, My God, to Thee," some minutes before Murdock lifted the revolver to his head, fired and toppled over on his face. Moody saw all this in a vision that filled his brain, while his ears drank in the tragic strain of the beautiful hymn that the band played as their own dirge, even to the moment when the waters sucked them down.

Wherever Murdock's eye swept the water in that instant, before he drew his revolver, it looked upon veritable seas of drowning men and women. From the decks there came to him the shrieks and groans of the caged and drowning, for whom all hope of escape was utterly vanished. He evidently never gave a thought to the possibility of saving himself, his mind freezing with the horrors he beheld and having room for just one central idea--swift extinction.

The strains of the hymn and the frantic cries of the dying blended in a symphony of sorrow.

Led by the green light, under the light of stars, the boats drew away, and the bow, then the quarter, then the stacks and last the stern of the marvel ship of a few days before passed beneath the waters. The great force of the ship's sinking was unaided by any violence of the elements, and the suction, not so great as had been feared, rocked but mildly the group of boats now a quarter of a mile distant from it.

Just before the Titanic disappeared from view men and women leaped from the stern. More than a hundred men, according to Colonel Gracie, jumped at the last. Gracie was among the number and he and the second officer were of the very few who were saved.

As the vessel disappeared, the waves drowned the majestic hymn which the musicians played as they went to their watery grave. The most authentic accounts agree that this hymn was not "Nearer, My God, to Thee," which it seems had been played shortly before, but "Autumn," which is found in the Episcopal hymnal and which fits appropriately the situation on the Titanic in the last moments of pain and darkness there. One line, "Hold me up in mighty waters," particularly may have suggested the hymn to some minister aboard the doomed vessel, who, it has been thought, thereupon asked the remaining passengers to join in singing the hymn, in a last service aboard the sinking ship, soon to be ended by death itself.

Following is the hymn:

God of mercy and compassion! Look with pity on my pain: Hear a mournful, broken spirit Prostrate at Thy feet complain; Many are my foes, and mighty; Strength to conquer I have none; Nothing can uphold my goings But Thy blessed Self alone.

Saviour, look on Thy beloved; Triumph over all my foes; Turn to heavenly joy my mourning, Turn to gladness all my woes; Live or die, or work or suffer, Let my weary soul abide, In all changes whatsoever Sure and steadfast by Thy side.

When temptations fierce assault me, When my enemies I find, Sin and guilt, and death and Satan, All against my soul combined, Hold me up in mighty waters, Keep my eyes on things above, Righteousness, divine Atonement, Peace, and everlasting Love.

It was a little lame schoolmaster, Tyrtaeus, who aroused the Spartans by his poetry and led them to victory against the foe.

It was the musicians of the band of the Titanic--poor men, paid a few dollars a week--who played the music to keep up the courage of the souls aboard the sinking ship.

"The way the band kept playing was a noble thing," says the wireless operator. "I heard it first while we were working the wireless, when there was a rag-time tune for us, and the last I saw of the band, when I was floating, struggling in the icy water, it was still on deck, playing 'Autumn.' How those brave fellows ever did it I cannot imagine."

Perhaps that music, made in the face of death, would not have satisfied the exacting critical sense. It may be that the chilled fingers faltered on the pistons of the cornet or at the valves of the French horn, that the time was irregular and that by an organ in a church, with a decorous congregation, the hymns they chose would have been better played and sung. But surely that music went up to God from the souls of drowning men, and was not less acceptable than the song of songs no mortal ear may hear, the harps of the seraphs and the choiring cherubim. Under the sea the music-makers lie, still in their fingers clutching the broken and battered means of melody; but over the strident voice of warring winds and the sound of many waters there rises their chant eternally; and though the musicians lie hushed and cold at the sea's heart, their music is heard forevermore.