Her confusion cleared; the sailor brought her tea. With somewhat less chivalry, he told her, “We left you up here to begin with as we thought you were dead, and it did not seem worth while cumbering up the cabin with you.”
The sailor and two others helped her below decks, where she found an unexpected giddiness. “The warmth below was delicious,” she wrote; “it seemed to make one almost delirious.” Everyone around her seemed “a little drunk with the heat and the light and the joy of knowing ourselves to be alive. We were talking at the tops of our voices and laughing a great deal.”
She recognized the strangeness of the moment, how it juxtaposed joy and tragedy. Here she was, giddy with delight, and yet she had no idea whether her father was alive or not. Another survivor in the cabin believed her own husband to be dead. “It seemed that his loss probably meant the breaking up of her whole life,” Mackworth wrote, “yet at that moment she was full of cheerfulness and laughter.”
Captain Turner did not share in the gaiety. He sat quietly by himself, in his sodden uniform.
As Mackworth watched, a woman approached Turner and began telling him about the loss of her child. Her voice was low, almost a monotone. She had placed the boy on a raft, she said. The raft then capsized, and her son was gone. In the same dispassionate manner, she told Turner that her son’s death had been unnecessary—that it was caused by the lack of organization and discipline among the crew.
THE RESCUE SHIPS reached Queenstown long after dark. The Flying Fish with Charles Lauriat aboard arrived at 9:15, the Bluebell at 11:00. The wharf was lit by gas torches that turned the evening mist a pale amber. Soldiers, sailors, and townspeople formed two lines that extended from the gangway into town. They applauded as survivors came ashore. Other soldiers waited in groups of four, with stretchers. Charles Lauriat carried one man on his back—the man with the broken leg, to whom he had spoken so rudely. The man proved to be Leonard McMurray, and this was his second shipwreck. He had survived the 1909 sinking of the White Star Line’s Republic, after a collision in fog with another liner.
Lauriat’s Thackeray drawings and the Dickens Christmas Carol were somewhere deep in the Irish Sea. He sent his wife a telegram. “I saved the baby’s pictures,” he wrote. “They were my mascot.”
He closed: “I regret your hours of suspense.”
Margaret Mackworth learned upon docking that her father was alive. She was dressed only in a blanket and asked the Bluebell’s captain for safety pins, but the idea of pins aboard a ship like his made him laugh out loud. A soldier gave her his coat, a “British Warm”; the captain gave her his slippers. She tucked the blanket around her waist to form a makeshift skirt.
She found her father waiting at the end of the gangplank. The relief and joy she felt reminded her of that time a month earlier when she had arrived in New York and seen him on the dock. As one of the first survivors to reach Queenstown, he had waited for hours as boat after boat came in, none carrying his daughter. With each successive arrival, the number of dead on board seemed to increase relative to the number of living souls. A friend said later that for a long time after this the father’s face had seemed like that of an elderly man.
Dorothy Conner, the spunky young American who had sat at Mackworth’s table and had wanted a “thrill,” came to see her the next morning, Saturday. Conner seemed unruffled, Mackworth recalled. “She was still dressed in the neat fawn tweed coat and skirt which she had had on when I saw her step off the deck the day before, and it looked as smart and well tailored as if it had just come out of the shop.”
Dwight Harris landed with his engagement ring and other jewelry still hung around his neck, and his money in his pocket. That night he found a shop that had stayed open for survivors and bought an undershirt, socks, slippers, and pajamas. He found a room in a hotel, which he shared with six other men, “and took a huge dose of whiskey before going to bed.” On Saturday morning he bought himself a suit, shirt, collar, raincoat, and cap. While doing so he happened to notice a boy of about eighteen who was asking the shopkeeper if he could have some clothes, even though he had no money to pay for them. The boy looked bereft. Harris volunteered to pay. He learned that the boy had lost his mother. “Poor fellow!” Harris wrote to his own mother. “I thank God you weren’t with me!!!”