I had paid £13 for my second-class passage. This was money I had saved for three years, doing alterations at a dress shop in Southampton, and it was more money than I had ever held at one time. The ticket was stiff paper with the White Star Line crest at the top. I folded it carefully and kept it in the inside pocket of my coat the entire crossing, which I thought then was superstition and which I later understood was something else.
The ship was very large. I had known it would be large — everyone said so, the newspapers had been saying so for weeks — but knowledge and experience are different things. Walking the second-class promenade on the first morning, looking up at the funnels, at the superstructure receding in layers above me, I had the feeling of being inside a building that was also a city that was also a machine, and the machine was moving, and the moving was pleasant and smooth and entirely unlike anything I had known.
We had been at sea for four days. I had made friends with a woman named Ellen who was traveling to her sister in New Jersey. We ate together at dinner and walked the promenade in the afternoons. On the Sunday evening, we went to bed early. The crossing had been cold and calm.
The Jar
The impact was less than I expected. I had been awake — not from any premonition, only because I was not tired yet, lying in my berth reading a letter from my sister that I had already read twice. There was a sound like ice being dragged along the hull, persistent, lasting perhaps ten seconds, and then a long vibration through the ship's structure, and then the engines stopped.
The silence of the stopped engines was more alarming than the sound had been. A ship does not stop at sea for good reasons.
I put on my coat — the one with the ticket in the pocket, which I cannot explain, it was not rational — and went into the corridor. Other passengers were there, in various states of dress. No one was panicking. We asked each other what had happened and no one knew. A steward came by and said there had been a slight difficulty and we should return to our cabins and not be concerned.
I went back to my cabin. I lay down. I listened.
The ship was not moving. This was the important fact. The ship had stopped and not restarted, and after thirty minutes of not restarting I dressed fully, woke Ellen, and said I thought we should go up.
On Deck
The first lifeboat was already being prepared when we reached the boat deck. The deck was bright — the night was clear and cold and the stars were extraordinary, the kind of stars you only see at sea — and there were perhaps forty or fifty people gathered near the boats, mostly in evening dress, some in coats thrown over nightclothes. A few were smiling. The general attitude was inconvenience, not fear.
I looked at the water.
The Titanic rode very high. You could see this only by looking at the waterline against the hull, and when I looked at the waterline against the hull I could see that it was changing. Not quickly. Not dramatically. But changing.
An officer was loading women and children into the first lifeboat. It held sixty-five people. There were perhaps twenty in it when they lowered it. I did not understand this then — I understand it now: the men loading the boat did not believe the ship was going to sink, and so they were not filling the boats because filling the boats seemed excessive, like preparing for something that wasn't actually going to happen. By the time they understood it was going to happen, the boats that had been launched were gone.
Ellen and I got into a boat near the stern. We waited while it was loaded, and then it was lowered, and then we were in the water and the men at the oars were pulling us away from the ship, and I was looking back at the Titanic, which was lit from stem to stern, every porthole glowing, the music of the band faintly audible across the water.
From the Boat
It is difficult to describe the sinking because what I remember is not the sinking itself but a series of separate images with gaps between them, which is how extreme experiences seem to organize themselves in memory.
The lights were on until almost the end. This struck me as significant — the competence implied by the continuing electrical power, the insistence of normal function up to the edge of abnormal. And then the lights went out, and for a moment the ship was a large dark shape against the stars, and then it was not horizontal anymore, and then it was gone.
The sounds afterward were terrible. The sounds from the water, from the people in the water. They were very loud and then they were less loud and then after some time they stopped, and the stopping was the worst part, because the stopping meant not that the people had been rescued but that the cold had finished what the water began.
We sat in the lifeboat and did not speak. Ellen had a rosary and was moving it through her fingers without appearing to pray, simply moving it, as if the physical action were the prayer itself. I kept my hand in my coat pocket, around the ticket, which was wet now and softening. I held it anyway.
The Carpathia came before dawn. I climbed a rope ladder up its side and someone wrapped a blanket around me and gave me hot tea and I sat down on the deck and did not move for a very long time.
I still have the ticket. The ink is mostly gone but you can still read, faintly, the words White Star Line, and the date, and the class, and the price.
Thirteen pounds. For that, I crossed the Atlantic and I came home alive, and I have thought about those two things — the crossing and the coming home — and the distance between them, almost every day since.
Narrator's note: Margaret Holt is a fictional figure. The sinking sequence, lifeboat loading procedures, water conditions, and the arrival of the Carpathia are drawn from survivor testimonies recorded at the British Board of Trade inquiry (1912), the U.S. Senate inquiry (1912), and Walter Lord's A Night to Remember (1955), which drew on 63 survivor interviews. The water temperature that night was between -2°C and 0°C.