Page 59 - Titanic: Forbidden Stories Hollywood Forgot

Titanic! 45

At 11:40, half our table looked up. The other half kept
laughing, talking animatedly above the lustrous eight-
man or chestra directed by bandmaster Hartley.
“What was that?” Molly asked.
“It sounded,” Madame Ouspenskaya intoned, “as if a
fin ger were drawn against the side of the ship.”
The look on her face made my temperature drop faster
than the evening air. At 21 knots, Ti tanic sped through
the water at 300 feet in less than 10 seconds. “It has to
be nothing,” I said. “Look. Nothing has changed. The
dancers. The music. The ballroom.”
Molly agreed. “You fellas and gals should feel the
earth quakes in Colorado.”
In the Grand Ballroom there was absolutely no sense
of shock. Below decks, deep inside the ship, in Boiler
Room 6, on the star board side, the Stoker heard the
impact’s crunching, and then a sound like thunder roll-
ing toward him. A line of water was pouring through a
thin gash in the ship’s side two feet above the stokehole
floor. He ordered his coal gang fast up the boiler room’s
emergen cy ladder.
Edward, pounding his pud, locked solitary two decks
above in the brig cell, felt nothing but the shuddering of
his own passion.
Below decks, watertight doors slammed closed amid
the raucous shrill of the alarm bells activated by First
Officer William Murdock on the bridge.
In the postal sorting room on G Deck, the clerks be-
gan their hasty removal of mail to the high er decks. The
elevators were not working, but the lights remained on
without a flicker.
“Assess the damage,” Captain Edward Smith

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