Raging Sea, Searing Sky

by Christopher Nicole

  But he did hate. He would hate, when he could spare the energy. When he could accept the awful fact that Mom and Shirley might have drowned.

  He poked and prodded May, caressed her and squeezed her, moved his hands from her hips to her shoulders and back again. He thought he knew her more intimately than he knew himself, at the end of the hour. And felt no shame. Because her responses were growing more and more feeble, and he himself nodded off once or twice; he had no feeling from the waist down, and he knew he was going to die, quite soon. Like Mom and Shirley. Because if they had been in one of the lifeboats they would have come to find him.

  Then he heard the chatter of an engine. He thought it was, after all, the U-boat, and tried to raise his head to see. A slight breeze had sprung up and water kept slashing into his face. But he could make out several boats, fishing boats, moving slowly through the water, hallooing and calling.

  ‘Over here!’ he yelled. ‘Over here!’

  Someone heard him. One of the boats came closer, men peering over the side. Irish sailors with woollen caps and jumpers.

  ‘Thank God!’ Lew shouted. ‘Oh, thank God. Take the girl.’

  Hands reached down, grasped May’s shoulders, and lifted her from the water. Her sodden gown trailed past his face and one of her boots touched his cheek. Then she was gone, and they were pulling at him. ‘Here’s a big ‘un.’

  He helped them, grasped the rail with his fading strength, and got himself over the gunwale and on to the deck, where he lay, panting, feeling the afternoon sunshine on his freezing flesh, shivering.

  ‘Drink this,’ someone said, and he found a mug of what appeared to be coffee in his hands. His teeth chattered against the rim as he gulped, and gasped; the coffee had been laced with rum and made his head spin.

  Fingers were fumbling at his life jacket, and he gazed across the deck at May. A sailor had taken off her life jacket and was unbuttoning her bodice. Another was pulling off her boots. Her eyes were open and she stared at them, but made no protest as they exposed her white flesh. Lew was embarrassed and looked away. They were undressing him as well, and wrapping them both in blankets, while the alcohol in the coffee began to take effect and the deck seemed to be heaving gently up and down.

  He forced himself to keep awake, looked along the deck, discovered there were other people lying there, wrapped in blankets, several women, and a child. He was the only male, apparently. The women stared vacantly in front of them, too exhausted and horrified to be concerned at being nurse-maided by strange sailors.

  He gazed at May’s clothes, piled in a sodden mess, at her bare feet, peeping out from beneath the blanket, and felt ashamed of himself for wishing he had continued looking at her earlier. She would not look at him, now was sitting propped against the bulwark, still sipping her coffee. The blanket had been gathered under her armpits and tucked in, to form a garment suggestive of pictures he had seen of a Malayan sarong; her golden hair was a sodden, knotted mess. She would be remembering what he had done to her in the water — and hating him for it?

  But he had more important things on his mind than May Gerrard. He was given another mug of the rum-laced coffee. ‘Saw it from the shore,’ said the sailor who had undressed him. ‘Cripes, there’ll be the devil to pay.’

  ‘My mother,’ Lew said. ‘My sister...’

  ‘She’s going to be all right, son. Right as rain once she gets warmed up. And we’ll have you to shore in an hour. There’s nobody else around here,’ he called aft.

  The skipper put his head out of the little wheelhouse. ‘There’s a couple of dead ones over there, Sammy. Better pick them in.’

  The boat chugged towards the corpses, and the sailors had to turn to the grim business of bringing them on board. Lew felt a touch, and then May squeezed his fingers. ‘They think you’re my sister,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, Lew,’ she said. ‘That would be wonderful. But...Mummy and Daddy...’

  ‘They’ll be on one of the other trawlers,’ he told her, as reassuringly as he could. But not Mom and Shirley, he thought. Oh, God, not Mom and Shirley.

  He watched the dead bodies being laid on the deck. Three women, and two men. Their mouths were open as they had gasped for air, and there was green mucous smearing their faces, while water drained away from their hair and their sodden clothes, yet their expressions were remarkably peaceful, as if at the last moment they had accepted the fact of death with equanimity. He wondered if Mom and Shirley would look like that, when they were taken from the water, and discovered that he was crying himself.

  *

  Queenstown was like a disturbed ant’s nest. People scurried to and fro, doctors and nurses, anxious officials with pads and pencils, ghoulish spectators.

  ‘What’s your name, boy? Your name?’ one of the officials asked as the trawler came into the dock and the fishermen began to help their passengers ashore.

  ‘McGann,’ Lewis said. ‘Lewis McGann.’

  ‘McGann,’ the man wrote busily. ‘And the young lady?’

  ‘May,’ he said. ‘May Gerrard.’

  ‘May Gerrard McGann,’ the man wrote.

  ‘No, no,’ Lew said.

  ‘Please, have you seen my father and mother?’ May asked.

  ‘We’ll find them,’ the man promised. ‘Mr and Mrs McGann.’

  Lew wanted to scream. ‘My mother,’ he said, ‘and sister. Mrs Christina McGann, and Miss Shirley McGann...’

  ‘McGann family, five,’ the man wrote. ‘Two accounted for. Come along now.’

  Obviously he was not going to get it straight, and now there were women waiting to take over, clucking their tongues at May’s deshabillé and the constantly slipping blanket, hurrying her away to be decently dressed. ‘Please don’t separate us,’ she begged. ‘Please leave us together.’

  ‘You’ll be together,’ they promised. ‘Just as soon as you’re decent.’

  Lew was taken into some kind of shed and given dry clothes to wear. The rescuers had apparently not realised there was going to be anyone quite so large pulled from the sea, and they had a task finding pants and a shirt which were even two sizes too small. Then he was taken to a church, which had been made into a kind of communal living hall, and there he found May again, wearing, in contrast to him, an absurdly large gingham gown; but at least her hair had been brushed and her face washed.

  ‘Oh, Lew!’ she screamed, and threw herself into his arms. If she did remember what had happened in the water she had most certainly forgiven him.

  They were given hot soup and some kind of stew, and Lew realised that it was only six o’clock. Just four hours ago he and Mom and Shirley had been looking at the hills which rose behind this town, and Mom had said, ‘Your ancestral home.’

  ‘Mr McGann.’ A fairly well dressed man sat beside them at the long table. The table was full, and several of the faces he recognised. But no one wanted to look at him. Everyone had their own terrifying thoughts and fears, their memories and apprehensions, and besides, some of these people would have shouted ‘Go away!’ out there on the water, if not to him, then to some other unfortunate.

  The man, Lew realised, had been talking to each of the survivors in turn, and now he had reached them, with the inevitable pad and pencil. ‘Your mother and father were with you on the ship?’

  ‘No. My mother and sister.’

  ‘But...’ the man looked at his list.

  ‘It was a mistake,’ Lew told him. ‘It was this young lady’s mother and father.’

  ‘You mean you’re not brother and sister?’

  ‘No,’ Lew said.

  ‘Ah.’ The man made a note. ‘Well, Mr McGann...I don’t know how you feel, but we have some bodies...’

  ‘Yes,’ Lew said. ‘I’ll come with you.’ He had to know.

  ‘Where are you going?’ May demanded, anxiously, as he stood up.

  ‘I’ll be back in a moment,’ he promised her.

  He knew he should feel sick at the thought of what might lie ahead of him, but he was more
curious than afraid; he knew Mom and Shirley were dead. He was taken to another warehouse, where the bodies were lying on the floor. A surprising number of them. Just as there were a surprising number of living people as well, hunting around the dead — they reminded him, horribly, of shoppers in a bargain basement.

  ‘This is going to be kind of grim,’ the Irishman warned him.

  ‘Yes,’ Lew said, staring at the faces. There were none he recognised, except, at the end, Mrs Gerrard, looking even more anxious than usual; the fingers of her right hand had turned into claws, and there were bloodstains on them, where she had fought someone or something for her life.

  ‘Your ma?’ the man asked, watching his expression.

  ‘No,’ Lew said. ‘The girl’s.’

  ‘Hell. Nobody else?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Hell,’ the Irishman said again. ‘All right, Mr McGann, do you have any next of kin to be informed?’

  ‘My father,’ Lew said. ‘Captain Joseph McGann, United States Navy. He’s at the Embassy in London.’

  ‘Well, thank the good Lord for that. What about the girl?’

  ‘I’ll have to ask her.’

  ‘You want me to tell her about her mummy?’ Lew shook his head. ‘I’ll do it.’

  But when he got back to the church, May had been taken away by some of the women, and he did not see her again until the next day; he was too exhausted to care, and slept like a dead man himself, on a hastily erected cot-one of fifty odd — in the warehouse where the male survivors were being housed.

  ‘They made me go with them,’ May wailed when they were assembled in the church hall for breakfast, having thankfully had their own clothes restored to them. ‘When they knew you weren’t my brother, they made me go with them. Oh, Lewis...they’re saying Mummy and Daddy are dead.’

  ‘I guess that’s likely,’ he said. ‘And Mom and Shirley.’

  ‘Oh, Lewis...’ she clung to his arms, while the woman she was with sniffed and glared at him.

  ‘My father is coming across,’ Lew told her. ‘He’ll take care of you. Is there anyone...’

  ‘Uncle Clive,’ she said. ‘Oh, Uncle Clive.’ She shuddered. ‘Lewis...’ she glanced at the woman. ‘Do you think we could be alone for a minute?’

  ‘Are you betrothed?’ the woman asked. ‘Well, of course not, but...’

  ‘Then it would be most improper. Come along now, Miss Gerrard.’

  ‘But he saved my life.’

  ‘I’m sure Mr McGann behaved like a perfect gentleman,’ the woman acknowledged, grasping May’s arm most firmly.

  ‘Lewis!’ she wailed.

  ‘When Father comes,’ he promised her. ‘When Father comes.’

  *

  He didn’t know what to think, what he wanted to think. He knew that for the moment he was suspended in time, in a strange little seaport surrounded by even stranger people, and in a totally strange atmosphere. The atmosphere was compounded of grief, and bewilderment, and horror, and uncertainty, and anger. It was unbelievable that such a thing could have happened to innocent men and women, to such a magnificent ship, that so many lives, happy and carefree, filled with a good lunch and with land actually in sight, could just have been snuffed out like that. Someone told him that the Lusitania had actually disappeared twenty minutes after the explosion. Twenty minutes! He could remember every one of them, and each one seemed like an hour.

  The guilt arose that he should have survived, where Mom and Shirley had not. Mom and Shirley, together at the end. As he should have been with them. And there was no way of knowing what had happened to them. Their bodies were not brought in during the three days the fishermen scoured the sea off the Old Head of Kinsale. Neither was Mr Vanderbilt’s nor Mr Gerrard’s. That was worse than seeing them. Lew knew they were dead. Seeing them, he might have been able to know how they had died, taking some comfort from the apparent peacefulness of death by drowning. Not knowing was terrible.

  That afternoon the first reporters arrived. ‘Your name McGann?’ they asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘You’re American?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There’s a girl, a Miss Gerrard, says you saved her life.’

  ‘We were together.’

  They wrote busily, and now one of them produced an elaborate machine and took his photograph. ‘You travelled alone, Mr McGann?’

  ‘No. My mother and sister were with me.’

  ‘Are they in Queenstown, Mr McGann?’

  ‘No,’ Lew said. ‘They’re dead.’

  Once again the pencils moved hurriedly. ‘Where were you when the ship was hit, Mr McGann?’

  ‘At the forward end of the promenade deck.’

  ‘Did you get into a lifeboat?’

  ‘No. I jumped.’

  ‘Did you find Miss Gerrard in the water?’

  ‘No. She jumped with me.’

  Scratch scratch went the pencils. ‘Let me ask you this, Mr McGann, some people are saying there were two torpedoes.’

  ‘Had to be,’ Lew said.

  ‘You saw them?’

  Lew tried to remember. ‘No, I only saw one.’

  ‘Then what makes you say there were two?’

  ‘There were two explosions.’

  ‘You positive about that?’

  ‘Yes. The second one was so much louder than the first.’ He was realising that he wanted to talk about it.

  ‘Why do you think the ship went down so fast, Mr McGann? When the Titanic was holed she took a couple of hours to sink. Do you think the explosions tore the bottom out of her?’

  ‘No,’ Lew said. ‘I think she drove herself under.’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘She was going at full speed until she hit the bottom,’ Lew explained.

  ‘Why was that?’

  Lew shrugged. ‘I don’t know, for sure. I think either everyone on the bridge was knocked out, or the controls were jammed.’

  ‘You don’t think there was panic? How come so few lifeboats got away?’

  ‘I didn’t see any panic, at least amongst the crew,’ Lew told him. ‘There wasn’t enough time for panic. Most of the lifeboats didn’t get away for the same reason that the ship went down so quickly...she was going too fast.’

  ‘Mr McGann, they’re saying more than a hundred American citizens were drowned. Do you think President Wilson should declare war on Germany?’

  ‘Yes,’ Lew said. ‘Oh, yes.’

  *

  He saw May again that evening, and she smiled at him, but they hardly had a chance to exchange a word. He gathered they were deliberately being kept apart by the women who had taken charge of the female survivors. He was glad of that. Talking about it to the reporters had brought it back so vividly, and May was too closely related to his memory; besides, he was more and more embarrassed every time he thought of it by what he had done to her to keep her awake...she had to remember that, even if she had not yet mentioned it. But if she had told one of the women he would probably find himself arrested.

  So after the meal he returned to the warehouse and sat on his cot. Most of the men similarly kept to themselves; those few who tried to be jocularly brave about the whole thing were soon snubbed into silence by the others; there was hardly a man who had not lost someone, or something, precious. It was then that the hate began to build, as he regained his strength. But it was all still too much of a nightmare for him to know who, or what, he hated, and what to do about it.

  Life began again when Father arrived, next day. Six feet four inches tall, immaculate in his dark blue uniform. Joseph McGann held his son close for a moment. ‘Are we going to do something about it, Father?’ Lew asked.

  ‘You are damned right,’ Joe McGann said. ‘I have a notion the President isn’t going to take this lying down.’

  ‘Father...Mom...and Shirley...’

  ‘Try not to think about it, son. When something like that happens, it’s a lottery who survives.’ Lew remembered that his fa
ther had been on board the USS Maine when it had blown up in Havana Harbour in 1898 — no one still knew what had caused the explosion, except maybe Father, and he would never discuss it — and had found himself swimming in the harbour with most of his comrades dead. Father had experienced almost everything. But he had never experienced the loss of his wife and daughter before, and Lew could tell, from the set of his jaw and the remote look in his eyes that Father was as close to tears as himself, and that Father was as angry as himself, too.

  Because Father’s coming turned the hate into a shared anger. It was composed of so many things. Self-guilt, of course, and for both of them; if Lew knew he should have stayed at his mother’s side, Joseph McGann knew it had been his decision that it would be safe for his family to cross, certainly by the Lusitania. Then there was irritation, at the way the survivors were being treated, almost as freaks. The good people of Queenstown, of the larger town of Cork further inland, of all of Ireland, could not have been kinder or more sympathetic, yet they had to react according to their characteristics, and, as Lew well knew, being of Irish descent himself, there was nothing like a genuine sensation, and this was the most genuine seagoing sensation since the loss of the Titanic, three years before.

  Then there were the reporters, more and more of them accumulating in the little port from every newspaper in the world, because the sensation was not just confined to Ireland. There had only been the Titanic disaster to compare in magnitude and loss of life with the sinking of the Lusitania, and the Titanic had been either an act of God or of supreme human folly. The sinking of the Lusitania had been a deliberate act of human aggression. No man in all previous history had ever been able to press a single button and say, ‘I have destroyed more than a thousand lives’. That one second in time, which had led to those twenty minutes of eternity, had surely marked a permanent stage in mankind’s descent into the pit.

  Thoughts like those swirled around Lew’s mind, and he knew they were affecting Father as well. Father was in a hurry to leave, once he was sure that neither Christina nor Shirley would ever be brought ashore. Perhaps he was glad of that. Lew remained sorrowful that he would never see them again. Or Mr Vanderbilt. But for Mr Vanderbilt’s lifebelt he would not have survived himself. The thought of that made him angry all over again.