William S. Hodges, en route to Europe to take over management of the Paris office of the Baldwin Locomotive Works, was traveling with his wife and two young sons. When a Times reporter on the wharf asked Mrs. Hodges if she was afraid of making the trip, she merely laughed and said, “If we go down, we’ll all go down together.”
There were parents sailing to rejoin their children, and children to rejoin their parents, and wives and fathers hoping to get back to their own families, as was the case with Mrs. Arthur Luck of Worcester, Massachusetts, traveling with her two sons, Kenneth Luck and Elbridge Luck, ages eight and nine, to rejoin her husband, a mining engineer who awaited them in England. Why in the midst of great events there always seems to be a family so misnamed is one of the imponderables of history.
AMONG THE less well-known, but still prominent, passengers who came aboard Saturday morning was a forty-eight-year-old woman from Farmington, Connecticut, by the name of Theodate Pope, Theo to her friends. She was accompanied by her mother, who came to see her off, and by a man twenty years her junior, Edwin Friend, with whom she was traveling to London. Prone to wearing a velvet turban, Theodate was an imposing figure, though she stood only a little over five feet tall. She had blond hair, a blunt chin, and vivid blue eyes. Her gaze was frank and direct, reflecting the independence that she had shown throughout her life and that had caused her to reject the path expected of women raised in high society. Her mother once scolded, “You never act as other girls do”; her contemporaries referred to her by that newly coined descriptive label feminist.
Theodate counted among her friends the painter Mary Cassatt, William James, and his brother, author Henry James, with whom she developed a particularly close friendship, to the point where she named a new puppy after him, Jim-Jam. She was one of America’s few female architects of stature, designer of a revered house in Farmington, which she named Hill-Stead. When Henry James first saw the house, even before he came to know Theodate, he crafted one of the more novel analogies of architectural criticism, likening the joy he felt to “the momentary effect of a large slippery sweet inserted, without a warning, between the compressed lips of half-conscious inanition.” Theodate had a competing passion, however. She was a spiritualist and served from time to time as an investigator of paranormal phenomena. Belief in such things was widespread in America and Britain at the start of the twentieth century, when an Ouija board was a regular fixture in drawing rooms, to be brought out after dinner for impromptu séances. With the advent of war, belief in an afterlife was poised for a resurgence, as Britons sought comfort in the idea that their dead sons might still be present, in some way, somewhere in the ether. It was Theodate’s interest in “psychical” research that explained why she and Edwin Friend were sailing to London.
As the sole child of a wealthy Cleveland couple, she had spent her early life mostly alone. Her father, Alfred, was an iron tycoon; her mother, Ada, a socialite. They lived on the city’s Euclid Avenue, better known as Millionaire’s Row. “I have no memory at all of ever sitting in my mother’s lap,” Theodate wrote. “My father was so occupied with [business] affairs that I was fifteen years old before he realized he was losing his child.” She described her youth “as the extreme of what the lives of only children usually are” but credited this solitary time—punctuated by bouts of crushing boredom and depression—as instilling in her a strong sense of independence. From the age of ten on, she drew plans for houses and sketched their facades, and dreamed of one day building and living in a farmhouse of her own design.