Chapter Text
Part I: The Ship of Dreams
Southampton, England. Mid-day, Wednesday, April 10th, 1912
The Royal Mail Ship Titanic was the largest moving man-made object in history at the time of her creation, with a length of eight hundred eighty-two feet, a height of one hundred seventy-five feet from keel to funnel, and a weight of over forty-six thousand tons, complete with ten decks including the officer's quarters and accommodations for over two thousand passengers. Here, in Southampton, England, the ship rose mountainously from its moorings, the buff-colored funnels standing against the sky like the pillars of a great temple. Crewmen moved across the deck, dwarfed by the awesome scale of the steamer.
Titanic was called "The Ship of Dreams"...not that Rose DeWitt Bukater cared.
Pulling up among a small motorcade of touring cars among the swarming crowd of boarding passengers, families, well-wishers, and Southampton citizens, Rose, aided by a valet, stepped out of her car—a silver-gray Daimler-Benz, which was led by a white Renault. She was a princess among paupers, clad in a beautiful white and purple dress, a hat shading her immaculately styled red hair and smooth, pale skin.
"I don't see what the fuss is about," Rose said as she coolly appraised the enormous ship with icy blue eyes. "It doesn't look any bigger than the Mauretania."
A personal valet opened the door on the other side of the car and her fiancee, Caledon "Cal" Hockley, the thirty year-old heir to the elder Hockley's steel mill fortune, stepped out of the car. He was handsome, arrogant, and rich beyond meaning.
"You can be blaise about some things, Rose, but not about Titanic," Cal chided. "It's over a hundred feet longer than the Mauretania, and far more luxurious."
Cal turned and offered his hand to Rose's mother, Ruth, who descended from the touring car behind them. She was a forty-something society empress, a widow from one of the most prominent Philadelphia families.
"Your daughter is far too hard to impress, Ruth," Cal chuckled.
Ruth gazed up at the massive ship, a bit more impressed with Titanic than Rose was. "So this is the ship they say is unsinkable..."
"It is unsinkable," Cal said proudly. "God himself couldn't sink this ship!"
The entire entourage of the traveling American royalty turned out of the touring cars: Cal's tall and impassive undertaker-like valet, Spicer Lovejoy, and their personal maids: servants to Ruth and Rose.
As they filed out, a White Star Line porter scurried toward them, harried by the last minute loading.
"Sir, you'll have to check your baggage through the main terminal, round that way—"
Cal ignored the porter and nonchalantly handed him five pounds from his wallet.
The porter's eyes widened, excited by the relatively large tip. Cal never tired of the effect of money on the unwashed masses.
"I put my faith in you, my good sir," Cal nodded curtly, and gestured towards Lovejoy. "Now kindly see my man."
"Yes, sir, my pleasure, sir," groveled the porter. "If I can do anything at all.."
Lovejoy directed the overwhelmed porter to the piles of suitcases and luggage that the maids and servants unloaded from the touring cars, including wooden crates and a steel safe. "All the trunks from that car there to the parlor suite, rooms B-fifty-two, fifty-four, fifty-six."
These Americans did not travel light.
Cal breezed on, leaving the minions to scramble. He quickly checked his pocket watch.
"We'd better hurry. This way, ladies," he said indicating the way toward the First Class gangway. They moved into the crowd.
Trudy Bolt, Rose's maid, hustled behind them, laden with bags of her mistress's most recent purchases... things too delicate for the baggage handlers.
Cal led them, weaving between vehicles, handcarts, hurrying passengers—mostly Second Class and Third Class "steerage"— and the well-wishing crowd. Most of the First Class passengers were avoiding the smelly press of the dockside crowd by using an elevated boarding bridge, twenty feet above.
They passed a line of steerage passengers dressed in their coarse wool and tweeds, queued up inside movable barriers like cattle in a chute. A Health Officer examined their heads one by one, checking their scalps and eyelashes for lice.
They passed a well-dressed young man cranking the handle of a wooden Biograph "cinematograph" camera mounted on a tripod.
Daniel Marvin, whose father founded the Biograph Film Studio, was filming his young bride, Mary, in front of the great ship with the device.
The woman in question stood stiffly and smiled self consciously as her fiancee gave her directions in which way to pose for the camera.
"Look up at the ship, darling, that's it," Marvin instructed. "You're amazed! You can't believe how big it is! Like a mountain."
Mary, without an acting fiber in her body, does a bad Clara Bow pantomime of awe, hands raised.
This was enough to please Daniel, who praised her with, "That's great!"
Cal was jostled by two yelling steerage boys who roughly shoved past him. This was enough to annoy him, but he was bumped again a second later by the boys' father.
"Steady!!" snapped Cal.
"Sorry squire!" the Cockney father apologized, pushing on after his kids, shouting.
"Steerage swine," spat Cal. "Apparently missed his annual bath."
"Honestly, Cal," chided Ruth, "if you weren't forever booking everything at the last instant, we could have gone through the terminal instead of running along the dock like some squalid immigrant family."
"All part of my charm, Ruth," chuckled Cal, the immigrant family quickly forgotten. "At any rate, it was my darling fiancee's beauty rituals which made us late."
"You told me to change," replied Rose coolly.
"I couldn't let you wear black on sailing day, sweetpea," said Cal, talking to Rose as one would a child. "It's bad luck."
"I felt like black," she grumbled.
Cal guided them out of the path of a horse-drawn wagon loaded down with two tons of Oxford Marmalade in wooden cases, for Titanic's Victualling Department.
"Here I've pulled every string I could to book us on the grandest ship in history, in her most luxurious suites... and you act as if you're going to your execution," accused Cal.
Rose looked up as the hull of Titanic loomed over them like an iron wall, Bible black and sever. Cal motioned her forward, strutting like a peacock as they entered the gangway to the D-Deck doors, followed closely by Ruth and their entourage of servants and maids hauling dozens of bags and luggage.
Outwardly, Rose appeared to be a well brought up, if not spoiled seventeen year-old girl: demure, of regal bearing. Inside however, she was screaming, filled with an overwhelming sense of dread.
"The Ship of Dreams"... to everyone else, perhaps. To Rose, Titanic was a slave ship, taking her back to America in chains.
***
A screaming blast from the mighty triple steam horned on Titanic's funnels, bellowing their departure warning, echoing across Southampton. From the window view of a pub a few blocks away from the dock, the Titanic towered above the terminal buildings like the skyline of a city.
Locked in a tense card game were a couple of drifters, a handsome young American man by the name of Jack Dawson and his partner, an equally young and handome Italian man by the name of Fabrizio De Rossi, against a pair of Swedish cousins named Sven and Olaf.
In the middle of the table were bills and coins from four countries. Sitting on top of the money were two Third Class tickets for the RMS Titanic.
Fabrizio, who was none too happy, leaned over to his partner. "Jack, you are pazzo! You bet everything we have."
"When you got nothin', you got nothin' to lose," Jack replied, taking the thin, hand-rolled cigarette he was smoking out of his mouth and Fabrizio sat back in his chair, scowling.
Across the table, Olaf was browbeating Sven for much the same thing. Jack didn't know much Swedish, but he did catch the word "moron" in there.
"Moment of truth, boys," Jack said from behind a fan of cards, his intense eyes betraying nothing. "Somebody's life is about to change."
Jack glanced at his partner. Fabrizio put his cards down, as did their Swedish opponents.
"Niente?" Jack asked.
"Niente," Fabrizio confirmed with a scowl.
"Uh oh, two pair..." muttered Jack. "I'm sorry, Fabrizio."
"What sorry?" Fabrizio swore in Italian. "Ma va fa'n culo testa di cazzo! You bet all our money--"
"Sorry, you're not gonna see your mother for a long time..." Jack said as he slapped a full house on the table.
Fabrizio shook his head in confusion.
"Cause yer goin' to America! Full house, boys!" Jack pounded on the table in jubilation.
"Porca Madonna!!" Fabrizio exclaimed gleefully. "YEEAAAAA!!!"
Jack took his winnings in as Fabrizio celebrated, shouting excitedly in Italian as he showed off the newly won tickets.
Olaf suddenly grabbed Jack by his collar, cocking his large fist back as if to punch him out. Jack braced himself for the blow, but Olaf instead turned his intentions towards his cousin Sven, knocking him out and cursing in Swedish at him for losing the tickets to Titanic.
"We go to America!" shouted Fabrizio as two resumed their celebration.
"I'm going home!" added Jack gleefully.
"No mate!" the barkeep shouted, pointing towards a clock behind him. "Titanic go to America in five minutes!"
Jack and Fabrizio looked at each other in panic. "Shit!"
"Come on!" Jack urged, and the two shoved whatever they could in their kit bags. Paper money, coins, cards. "Come on! Here!"
With no time to lose, the pair heaved their kit bags over their shoulders and scrambled out of the pub, tearing down the streets and into the Southampton port as fast as their legs could take them, whooping and celebrating the whole time. Shouts followed them as they jostled slow-moving onlookers. They dodged piles of luggage, and weaved through the crowd of people.
"We're riding in high style now!" Jack yelled excitedly to Fabrizio as they sprinted to the ship. "We're a couple of regular swells. We're practically goddamn royalty!"
"You see, it's my destino!" added Fabrizio. "Like I told you, I go to America to be milionario!"
The pair finally burst out onto the pier and Jack came to a dead stop, staring at the cast wall of the Titanic's hull, towering seven stories above the wharf and over an eighth of a mile long. The Titanic was truly monstrous.
Fabrizio ran back and grabbed Jack, and they sprinted toward the third class gangway aft, at E- Deck. They reached the bottom of the ramp just as Sixth Officer Moody detached it at the top. The ramp started to swing down from the gangway doors.
"Wait!! We're passengers!" Jack panted as he climbed up the ramp, waving the tickets.
"Have you been through the inspection queue?" Moody questioned, barring them from further entry.
"Of course! Anyway, we don't have lice, we're Americans," Jack lied cheerfully, glancing at Fabrizio. "Both of us."
Moody was testy, but nonetheless let them on. "Right, come aboard."
"We're the luckiest sons of bitches in the world, you know that?!" cackled Jack to Fabrizio once they were inside.
The two cheered with victory and jubilation as they ran down the white-painted corridor all the way to the aft well deck. They ran across the deck and up the steel stairs to the poop deck. They got to the rail, joining the rest of Titanic's passengers as they yelled and waved to the crowd of cheering well-wishers on the dock.
"Good-bye!" called Jack to the ecstatic throng below them.
"You know somebody?" asked Fabrizio, surprised.
"Of course not," chuckled Jack. "That's not the point."
He waved to another stranger. "Good-bye! I'll miss you!"
Fabrizio grinned and joined in. "Good-bye! I'm going to never forget you!"
Titanic gathered speed, and pulled away from the Southampton harbor toward the English Channel, slicing through the water like a giant knife, its enormous bronze propeller blades chopping through the water, hurling the steamer forward, churning up a vortex of foam that trailed behind the juggernaut ship like a meteor tail.
Black smoke spewed from its four tower-like smoke stacks, fed by the tons of coal shoveled into the roaring furnaces by the firemen and stokers deep in the boiler room, powering the enormous, four-story tall twin reciprocating engines that moved the floating city forward to her maiden voyage.
***
Jack and Fabrizio walked down the narrow corridor of the Third Class compartments with doors lining both sides, passing through a scene of total confusion as the Third Class passengers argued over luggage in several languages, or wandered through the labyrinth of corridors. They passed emigrants studying the signs over the doors and looking up the words in phrase books.
Soon, the pair found their berth: a modest cubicle, painted enamel white, with four bunks, and exposed pipes on the low overhead ceiling.
Jack threw his kit on the bottom bunk, turning to their roommates: another pair of Swedes who introduced themselves as brothers Bjorn and Olaus Gunderson— likely kin to Sven and Olaf— and introduced himself in turn.
They accepted his handshake, but then looked at each other in shock— wondering where Sven and Olaf were, and who these guys were taking their place.
"Where’s Sven?"
***
In contrast to Jack and Fabrizio's modest Third Class accommodations, the so-called "Millionaire Suite" of Cal Hockley and the DeWitt Bukater's was in the Empire style, and was comprised of two bedrooms, a bath, wardrobe room, a large sitting room, and even a fifty foot private promenade deck outside.
A room service waiter handed Rose a glass of champagne as she was looking through through new paintings she was unpacking, including a Monet of water lilies, a Degas of dancers, and a few other abstract works.
"Those finger paintings were certainly a waste of money," Cal said lazily, coming out of the promenade deck to lean against the wall of the suite, sipping champagne of his own.
"The difference between Cal's taste in art and mine is that I have some," Rose replied, not allowing Cal to degrade one of her interests yet again.
Cal rolled his eyes and took another sip of champagne.
"They're fascinating. Like in a dream... there's truth without logic," Rose mused, appraising a painting she held up in front of herself.
Cal snorted derisively.
"What's his name again... ?" Rose muttered, reading off the canvas of the painting. "Something Picasso."
"Something Picasso," Cal repeated, coming into the sitting room. "He'll never amount to a thing, trust me."
Rose ignored him as she continued to hang up the paintings, setting down the barely touched champagne.
"At least they were cheap," Cal muttered, taking another sip of champagne as a porter wheeled Cal's private safe into the room on a handtruck, which Cal instructed was to be placed in the wardrobe.
Rose entered the bedroom with the large Degas of the dancers. She set the painting on the dresser, near the canopy bed. Trudy was already in the stateroom, hanging up some of Rose's clothes in the wardrobe.
"It smells so brand new!" Trudy exclaimed in wonder. "Like they built it all just for us. I mean... just to think that tonight, when I crawl between the sheets, I'll be the first—"
Cal appeared suddenly in the doorway of the bedroom, still nursing his champagne.
Cal stared at Rose from under his brows, his lips at the rim of the glass. "And when I crawl between the sheets tonight, I'll still be the first."
Trudy's eyes widened and she blushed at the innuendo. She hastily excused herself, leaving the two alone.
Cal then came up behind Rose and put his hands on her shoulders: an act of possession, not intimacy. Rose shivered at his touch.
"The first and only," Cal murmured to an increasingly uncomfortable Rose. "Forever."