TENSION
NEWS OF THE SINKING OF THE CANDIDATE TOOK TIME to reach the Admiralty. A trawler, the Lord Allendale, stumbled across the ship’s three lifeboats at about three o’clock Thursday afternoon. The men had been adrift in the fog for five hours. The trawler was not equipped with wireless and so could not report the sinking or the rescue until it returned to its base at Milford Haven, on the English coast, far from where the Candidate had sunk. The commander of naval forces at Milford Haven notified the Admiralty of the attack in a telegram sent shortly after midnight.
A telegram from the Queenstown Naval Center came in that day as well, with another report of a submarine sighted off Daunt Rock, this one at 9:45 that morning. The U-boat had remained “in sight for five minutes” before submerging. This was relayed to Director of Intelligence Hall as well as to First Sea Lord Fisher. A copy also was circulated to Churchill’s office, though he was still in France.
The HMS Orion continued on its way north, zigzagging in open sea 150 miles west of Ireland.
IN WASHINGTON, President Wilson struggled anew with depression. Edith Galt’s rejection had cast him into a state akin to grief, to the extent that he found it difficult to concentrate on world events, though these continued to press. The Gulflight was still major news. An inquest by an English coroner had confirmed that the ship’s captain, Alfred Gunter, had died of “heart failure, accelerated by shock, caused by the torpedoing of the ship.” The Gulflight’s second officer testified that the submarine captain had to have realized the ship was American, for the day had been clear and the tanker was flying a large American flag. There was also news of fresh U-boat predations. The Washington Times reported on Wednesday evening that a German submarine, “running amok,” had sunk eleven unarmed fishing trawlers in the North Sea, off England.
That night, however, Wilson’s attention was focused solely on Edith. He resolved that despite his new grief he would not—could not—let her exit his life. He composed a long letter, really a prose poem of despair, in which he, the man so many Americans thought of as distant and professorial, wrote, “There are some things I must try to say before the still watches come again in which the things unsaid hurt so and cry out in the heart to be uttered.”
He was willing to accept friendship, he told her—for now. “If you cannot give me all that I want—what my heart finds it hard now to breathe without—it is because I am not worthy. I know instinctively you could give it if I were—and if you understood,—understood the boy’s heart that is in me and the simplicity of my need, which you could fill so that all my days would be radiant.”
He made it clear that she would come to love him. “Do not misunderstand,” he added, in one of three impassioned postscripts. “What I have now at your generous hands is infinitely precious to me. It would kill me to part with it,—I could not and I hope you could not. And I will be patient, patient without end, to see what, if anything, the future may have [in] store for me.”
Not so patient, as it happened, for the next morning, Thursday, May 6, before sending off this letter, he added a codicil that was five pages long.
He had read her letter again, he told her, and now appraised it in a more hopeful light. “I can hardly see to write for the tears as I lift my eyes from it,—the tears of joy and sweet yearning.”
For the time being, he chose to position himself as her knight. “I seem to have been put into the world to serve, not to take, and serve I will to the utmost, and demand nothing in return.”