Little Simonne liked the tall woman with the musical toy pig. Russell would continue to be friends with Juliette Laroche and her children in years to come. Laroche and her two girls clearly needed a certain amount of befriending even before they landed in New York, where religious leaders would soon be preaching from the pulpit against the sinners who brought God’s judgment against the Titanic and the makers of mixed-race children. When anyone aboard the Carpathia asked about the racial makeup of the children, Russell would placate and shoo away the inquirers (especially those with the word mulatto on their tongues) by claiming that Laroche and her husband had just adopted two orphaned girls from China.
Passenger Kate Buss wrote from the Carpathia to a friend, “There are two of the finest little Jap[anese] baby girls, about three or four years old, who look like dolls running about.” Buss’s friend was the man to whom she had previously been engaged, and he now seemed a better bet to her than the “very agreeable” doctor who had gone down with the Titanic.
Any laughter Russell and Laroche might have shared while observing the ignorance of interlopers was short-lived. What few family valuables Joseph Laroche had managed to place safely in the pockets of Juliette’s coat were soon stolen, along with the coat.
Long before the Carpathia reached New York, stories about the Titanic’s band, and the music it had played, were becoming the substance of legend. In Colne Cemetery, the marker above violinist Wallace Hartley’s grave would bear the words Propior Deo (“Nearer to God”), a reference to the tune Violet Jessop thought she heard about the time the two V’s went out from the Marconi shack: “Nearer My God to Thee.” Author Helen Churchill Candee heard it, too: “And over [the hundreds that were left aboard] trembled the last strains of the orchestra’s message—‘Autumn,’ first, and then ‘Nearer My God to Thee.’”
In future years, many would consider the story of the song a myth. In some circles of historians and history enthusiasts, what the band played was to be hotly debated. Walter Lord was, for a time, swayed by Colonel Archibald Gracie’s insistence that if “Nearer My God to Thee” had been played, he’d have regarded it as “a tactless warning of immediate death, and more likely to create a panic that our special efforts were directed towards avoiding.”
A letter dated August 1, 1956, would tell Lord a different story, so convincing that a version of the hymn would be reproduced in Bill MacQuitty’s film A Night to Remember.
Complete with sheet music, Roland Hind, an acquaintance of Wallace Hartley’s cousin, a woman named C. Foulds, explained that Foulds was present at Hartley’s funeral and was quite certain that Arthur Sullivan’s 1872 hymn was used: “And,” said Hind, “some people attended the [May 18, 1912] service who had been saved from the Titanic and who said that Sullivan’s tune was the one played on the ship.”
Hind also produced a copy of Elland Moody’s April 1912 statement. He was a cellist who had sailed with Hartley twenty-two times aboard the Mauritania. “I recollect when chatting with him [Hartley] on one occasion,” Moody said, “I asked, ‘What would you do if you were on a ship that was sinking?’” They were on the Mauritania and actually out at sea when Moody asked this question, and Hartley replied, “I don’t think I could do better than play, ‘Oh God, Our Help in Ages Past,’ or ‘Nearer My God to Thee.’”
“When I speak of ‘Nearer My God to Thee,’” Hind wrote, “I mean Sullivan’s setting. That would be what the orchestra played on the sinking Titanic.”
Many of the survivors wanted to forget the music, and everything else about the night—all of it. Five months after giving testimony at the British inquiry, and on the six-month anniversary of the Titanic’s sailing, Annie Robinson, Jessop’s roommate, jumped overboard from a ship in Boston Harbor and drowned.
Lawrence Beesley would become known on Bill MacQuitty’s set as the historical adviser who was constantly (and annoyingly) trying to insert himself into scenes. He confided that he believed that dwelling too much on the memories of “that night” had transformed the mental and physical health of many survivors—many (as MacQuitty believed) for the better, and many (as Beesley believed) for the worse.
Seventeen-year-old Jack Thayer would write one of the most detailed of all survivors’ accounts for his family in 1940, just before his country and Masabumi Hosono’s country went to war. In October 1944 Jack’s son, Second Lieutenant Edward C. Thayer, a fighter pilot, was killed during the invasion of Japan’s fortress islands. Six months later, Jack’s mother died on the thirty-second anniversary of the Titanic’s sinking. Soon after, Jack himself was felled by a nervous breakdown and sudden bouts of amnesia; he drove away in his car, never to return.
Marjorie Collier’s friend, twelve-year-old Bertha Watts, would grow up keeping the Titanic out of her thoughts. Seventy-three years after the sinking, when Robert Ballard’s French-American team found the Titanic and a reporter from the Toronto Sun called for an opinion, Watts replied, “I don’t give a damn.”
24
A Fury Scorned
As the Carpathia left the western edge of the ice field, and the last four casualties of hypothermia were buried at sea, Kate Phillips (“Mrs. Marshall”) must already have known she was pregnant, although her daughter would grow up convinced that she was a couple of weeks too young for her mother to know and must therefore have been conceived aboard the Titanic.
Nineteen-year-old Phillips was already a lost and aimless soul, certain only that she would never see San Francisco and was fated instead for a return to Worcester, England, branded as the destroyer of Henry Morley’s family. Born of an extramarital affair, Phillips’s child would, in the custom of the times, be branded a bastard.
Even as the first night aboard the Carpathia began to fall, Phillips’s mind was racing in a loop, trying to find a way out. She was not the only survivor sailing toward scorn and fury. When Masabumi Hosono tried to sleep among other second-class survivors on the floor of the smoking room, he was shocked to see essentially every man in the room pointing fingers and mocking him. The abuse reached such an extreme that the Japanese efficiency expert walked out onto a damp, fog-shrouded deck and tried to sleep on a bench. In only a week, what had been a little more than a callous rumor until that first night away from the Titanic—that Hosono had entered a lifeboat dressed as a woman and that real women had tried to throw him overboard—would become a public accusation by Ed Buley at the American inquiry.
George Rheims would fare no better in the midst of a lost ship gestating into legend. Like all legends, the Titanic necessitated a search for villains. Even before the disaster, his father-in-law and his mother-in-law had refused to accept him. Their bitterness only intensified after they learned that Joe Loring had died on the Titanic while Rheims had survived.
In April 1987, Mrs. D. H. Patterson-Knight, the daughter of George Rheims, wrote to Walter Lord explaining that her grandfather—Joe Loring’s father—had refused to ever speak with his own daughter again, because Loring would never have been aboard the Titanic in the first place had she not eloped with Rheims, and especially after his daughter had insisted on remaining married to Rheims.