Such talk did not move Theodate. She wrote, “I truly believe there was no one on the ship who valued life as little as I do.”
MARGARET MACKWORTH and her father, D. A. Thomas, were seated at a table in the first-class dining room with an American doctor and his sister-in-law, Dorothy Conner, twenty-five, from Medford, Oregon. Conner was a woman of energy and candor. She was also bored and given to impetuous remarks. At one point, Conner said, “I can’t help hoping that we get some sort of thrill going up the Channel.”
Margaret took note of the curiously high number of children on the passenger list. “We noticed this with much surprise,” she wrote. She attributed this to families moving from Canada to England to be near husbands and fathers fighting in the war.
She took the German Embassy’s warning seriously and told herself that in case of trouble she would have to override her instinct to run immediately to the boat deck and instead go first to her cabin and get her life jacket.
PRESTON PRICHARD, the young medical student heading home from Canada, found himself seated at a long table in the second-class dining hall directly opposite a young woman named Grace French, of Renton, England, who was among those passengers transferred to the ship from the Cameronia. She seemed to take an interest in Prichard or at least found him worth examining in some detail. She saw that he had a narrow tie with a red stripe, and she paid close enough attention to realize that he had only two suits, “one very smart navy blue serge and a green suit; more for knock-about wear.” She also noted his lava-head tie clasp. “About the heads I remember them distinctly because my father once had ones similar and they took my eye, and so far as I can remember he wore it all the time.”
Prichard was kind and funny and full of stories. And very good looking. “He kept us in good spirits relating different experiences he had during his travels and was very nice to everybody,” she wrote. “I appreciated his efforts as I was very sick”—seasick—“during the whole journey, and [he] was especially nice to me.”
She also took note of the lucky young woman, also English, who’d been assigned the seat right next to Prichard. With a whiff of a meow, Miss French described this potential rival as “very short,” with “light brown hair, blue eyes, lots of color in her face, and I think she was visiting in California, at least she talked a great deal about its beauties and advantage.” She added: “They were great friends at the dining table.”
In addition to playing whist, Prichard took part in the mileage betting pools and in various deck sports, including tug-of-war and an improvised obstacle course. “A party of us used to have a game of skipping every day,” one young woman recalled. At a certain point another participant, a young man, tried to use the jump rope to lasso her but failed. Prichard stepped forward and showed the group how to do it. He seemed to be an expert at lassoing and roped many of the players. “I never saw him again after this,” the woman said.
She touched on a peculiar aspect of life aboard such a large ship: you might meet someone who interested you in one way or another, but unless that person happened to be assigned to your table or your room, or occupied the deck chair next to yours, you had little opportunity to build a closer association. The ship was too big. Gertrude Adams, a passenger in second class traveling with her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, wrote later, “There were so many on the ship that it really was like living in a town, one saw fresh people every day & never knew who they were.”
It was a mark of Prichard’s popularity that so many casual acquaintances remembered him at all.
IN THE EVENING, select guests would be invited to sit at a table presided over by Staff Captain Anderson, or at Captain Turner’s table, on those occasions when Turner was willing to suppress his antipathy toward social engagement. As a rule, he preferred to take his meals in his cabin or on the bridge. He was particularly fond of chicken and during one meal drove his first officer nearly mad with his effort to gnaw every last morsel off a chicken leg.
U-20
THE TROUBLE WITH TORPEDOES
EARLY ON MONDAY MORNING U-20 WAS SAILING THROUGH a world of cobalt and cantaloupe. “Very beautiful weather,” Schwieger noted, in a 4:00 A.M. entry in his log. The boat was abreast of Sule Skerry, a small island west of the Orkneys with an 88-foot lighthouse, said to be the most remote and isolated light in the British Isles.