Circled Heart

Charles Nelson Crittenton

1833—1909

Katherine Harwood Waller Barrett, M.D.

1858—1925

Oh, though oft depressed and lonely,

All my fears are laid aside,

If I but remember only

Such as these have lived and died!

Author’s note: All quoted poems are taken from the collections of American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807—1882))

And the last of all the figures

Was a heart within a circle,

Drawn within a magic circle;

And the image had this meaning:

“Naked lies your heart before me,

To your naked heart I whisper!”

With thy rude ploughshare, Death, turn up the sod,

And spread the furrow for the seed we sow;

This is the field and Acre of our God,

This is the place where human harvests grow.

Chapter One

I never thought, not once, that I would die that April night. Even as I looked over the railing into the churning, black, frigid water, the idea simply never crossed my mind. By the expressions and voices of the people around me, however, I could tell that many of my fellow passengers did not hold the same confident belief. They realized—and had begun to vocalize—our danger. But because I was always confident to a fault —“cocksure” my grandmother called it—and quick to think I had all the answers, I never believed any situation could get the better of me. A flaw in my character so I’d been told on numerous occasions, but a useful flaw for my purposes.

On that particular night it had been too cold to be out on deck and many people retired early, Grandmother included. I, however, was restless and unwilling to seek my bed too soon. Even as a child I’d deliberately resisted sleep, afraid of missing something exciting that might happen during the night hours. My grandmother had had to learn that although I was obedient to a bedtime, she could not bribe or coerce me to sleep until I was ready. That night my peculiar energy may very well have saved our lives, for if I hadn’t stayed up late to finish a letter to a friend I’d left behind in London, I wouldn’t have heard—felt, really—the gentlest of thuds as the great ship collided softly with something equally massive. The thud was followed by a slight shudder. That was all. But, prescient, I immediately put the letter down, pulled the first dress I could find over my head, reached for warm stockings and shoes, wrapped myself in my coat, and went to the connecting door that led to my grandmother’s cabin.

She awoke instantly when I knocked, sat up in her narrow bed, and asked, “What is it, Johanna?”

“I believe something’s happened to the ship, Grandmother. We should go up on deck.” Never one to fuss, my grandmother mimicked my earlier actions, threw on a skirt and a heavy sweater over her nightdress, found shoes and coat, and as an afterthought before leaving her room dug out her wallet filled with cash and thrust it into her pocket. Through all her actions neither of us said a word.

A steward came down the steps as we went up. His face was white as chalk, his eyes wide and hair disheveled. I heard him begin to go from door to door, pounding to wake the inhabitants, calling for everyone to come up on deck immediately, panic just below the surface of every word he spoke.

People already milled about the deck, but the scene was remarkably calm. Except for the crowd the night seemed unremarkable, black and cold and lit by brittle stars. One lifeboat had already been lowered and another was nearly full, but most of the people I had met on the voyage had pulled away from the lifeboats giving the distinct impression they thought their use beneath them. Passengers in first class would not condescend to the indignity of clambering aboard a lifeboat and sharing its space with women and children who didn’t speak English. One of the crew called out for order, but until the sixth lifeboat was lowered, he needn’t have. Until then everyone remained calm and the orchestra still played.

Grandmother had moved a little ahead of me and stopped to speak to Mrs. Astor, both women giving the effect of a leisurely boardwalk promenade, and I moved to the rail to stare out at the black Atlantic. The first lifeboats had disappeared into the distance only half full, but now that people understood from the groaning and listing of the ship that something serious had occurred, now that they realized there were not enough lifeboats for the mass of passengers crowding the deck, the mood on the deck changed.

“Women and children only!” the man by the lifeboats shouted. He waved a revolver in the air and shot twice. The action—not for defense as the papers later reported but to get people’s attention—started a panic. Several people surged past me: a woman with a scarf on her head and a baby in her arms, an elderly man wearing thick glasses, a young couple grasping each other’s hands, tears in her eyes and a terrified bravery in his. My grandmother turned to fix her gaze on me across the press of people and lifted an imperious hand to beckon me to her. Come along, the gesture said, we’re getting in one of the boats. Now. She and I had been apart for two years but even wordless, I still understood her very well.

I turned to make my way through the crowd toward where she stood when a man reached out and grasped me firmly by the arm. I tried to shake him off at first, but he was insistent so that I had to turn to face him. Douglas Gallagher, I thought, who would pick the night the ship was sinking to seek out my company. I had noticed him early in the voyage, a man hard to miss, dark, polished and handsome, urbane and sophisticated, always perfectly dressed. I’d seen him once before this voyage, recognizing him from a very fine society ball in Chicago we had both attended two years earlier. He’d been dressed in black then, too, and dancing with a tall, slender woman whose hair had the sheen of liquid honey. Their striking appearance had left a lasting impression, and I recalled admiring him then as an attractive man. He remained attractive two years later, even standing on the shifting deck of a sinking ship. I had to look up at him, not as tall as the woman with honey-colored hair, and found him staring at me intently. Despite the sound of more gunshots behind us and the escalating roar of fear and panic from the crowd on deck, Gallagher maintained a casual posture, poised and sleek and slightly disdainful.

“You’re from Chicago,” he began without preamble.

“Yes.”

“You should get to a lifeboat.”

“I intend to.”

He grabbed my hand and turned it palm up as he spoke. “My name is Douglas Gallagher and my brother is Andrew Gallagher, both of us from Chicago. Will you see that Drew gets these?” He dropped a ring and another small piece of jewelry into my hand, then folded my fingers over them. I didn’t pretend to misunderstand.

“Yes. I promise. Is there anything you want me to tell him?” He shook his head, a bitter, odd twist to his mouth that I didn’t think was caused by the situation at hand.

“No. What’s your name?”

How humbling that I had been on this voyage with him for several days and he had not noticed me enough to inquire my name. Then I was ashamed of the brief and petty thought. He faced death in these terrible, frigid, dark waters, and I was put out that he didn’t know my name!

“Johanna Swan.”

“Thank you, Miss Swan.” He turned me by the shoulders and pushed me away from him into the people surging toward the lifeboats. I stuffed the jewelry he’d given me deep into my coat pocket, then looked back briefly to see him take up his stance by the tilting railing. He actually lit a cigarette and his hands did not shake.

My grandmother, waiting for me impatiently, reached out, and pulled me over to her side. “Number sixteen is ours,” she told me, “and it’s time to get a seat.”

Two young women with the look of sisters were in lifeboat number sixteen with us, both huddled together with their arms around each other, as well as an older woman with three grown daughters wordlessly pressed close to her side, and several women with young children. I heard a baby cry fretfully as we pulled away, the young steward in charge of the oars struggling to move us as quickly as he could. It was slow going, though, because cold and fear and inexperience made the poor boy fumble-fingered. All of us in the lifeboat were mesmerized by the sight of the big ship, unable to pull our eyes away even if we’d wanted to. We gasped in unison as we saw its prow slowly lift skyward and figures plummet from the decks into the ocean. The woman with the three daughters moaned, then put her hand up against her mouth to hold back any further display of grief and horror.

She has left someone behind on the deck, I thought, and knows he is lost. My heart went out to her. The young steward quit rowing altogether and sat watching the terrible sight, gaping at the spectacle before us. When the ship finally broke in two, a cracking sound echoed across the water.

“Pull farther away,” I directed the crewman sternly. “We’re too close. When it goes down, we could be dragged under with it.” He ignored me, sitting immobile, staring at the great vessel that had been terribly miscalled and falsely publicized as “unsinkable.” I moved closer to him and nudged him sharply. “Keep rowing. It’s premature to stop.” Still the steward sat there until I plopped myself next to him on the seat with enough force that the lifeboat swayed and one of the sisters gave a muted shriek. “Move aside, then. You’re endangering the safety of all of us in this boat.” He turned a dumb, wretched gaze on me, and I realized he had left friends behind on the ship, too, that he was as afraid and numb as the rest of us. Why should it be any different for a man, after all?

One woman handed her baby over to her neighbor and situated herself on the seat to take hold of the other oar, squeezing the steward between us.

Ready when you are,” she muttered, and at my count of three we began pulling our boat away from the doomed liner, straining against the water, at first unsynchronized and clumsy but eventually finding our rhythm and rowing with all our might.

Because of my focused activity, I didn’t see the great ship up-end and slip decorously into the ocean’s depths. Grandmother told me later it disappeared seamlessly under the waves like a warm knife sliding through butter. In the end it seemed the ocean liner had never been there at all. The other woman and I continued to row, oblivious to the muted sounds of weeping among the women in our boat, ignoring the whimpers of the baby, truly rowing for all our lives.

Finally Grandmother pointed out practically, “Johanna, I believe the danger of undertow is past,” and I looked up and around. The night was black, bitterly cold, and still. Except for the few other rowboats we could barely see bobbing on the water, we might have been the only people in the world. My rowing partner and I stopped our efforts at exactly the same time and looked at each other across the drooping steward. Then she reached for her child and pulled him against her chest, burying her face in the babe’s neck.

She has left husband and father behind in this watery graveyard, I thought. Poor baby, never to know his papa.

Perhaps something of their loss showed on my own face for Grandmother, never one to indulge in sentimentality, held out her hand and commanded, “Come and sit next to me, Johanna. There’s no use both of us taking a chill when we can keep each other warm.”

Until the Carpathia arrived and began to retrieve the survivors, we remained numb and quiet. None of us spoke more than a few quiet words to any but our own immediate circle. We were in shock, I suppose. Once on board the rescue ship, bundled in blankets and sipping hot tea, a Carpathia passenger offered Grandmother and me his stateroom for privacy.

“I’m afraid it won’t offer much warmth,” he apologized. “The captain shut off all heat to the rooms in order to make speed for the rescue, but it’s still warmer than the deck and you could rest on the bed there.”

“We couldn’t possibly take your room,” my grandmother responded, ever polite but fully intending to take him up on his offer. He insisted, the courteous and requisite response to my grandmother’s proper reluctance, and led Grandmother and me to his room. She lay down almost immediately.

“Come and sleep a while, Johanna. You’ll accomplish nothing with all that pacing.” I wandered around the room, unable to stop moving, not feeling tired at all but energized by a nervous force that I could not contain.

“I’m not tired, Grandmother.”

As I spoke, I thrust my hands hard into my coat pockets for warmth and touched cold, unyielding metal there. The past hours had so consumed me that at first I had no memory of what was in my pocket. I fished out the items and stared at them as they lay in my palm, a man’s ring heavy with platinum, onyx, and diamonds and a more delicate gold stickpin in the shape of the letter G. The pin, twinkling in the recognizable manner of expensive diamonds, was handsome and elegant, a reflection of the man who had given it to me for safekeeping and delivery. He was certainly dead now, slipping from the deck to tumble over the railing, stunned by the icy temperature of the ocean, hands reaching out in desperation, mouth open gasping for air and finding only water and then sinking, sinking— certainly dead.

I raised my eyes from the items in my hand, feeling suddenly deflated, my energy gone and replaced by dismay and grief at the loss of a man I had admired from a distance and now would never know.

My face, always transparent and incapable of subterfuge, caused Grandmother to say again, more gently and with less imperative, “But I am tired, Johanna, even if you’re not, and your restless activity will not let me sleep. Come lie down beside me for a while.”

I dropped the ring and stickpin back into my pocket and crawled in next to her, both of us, despite our layers of dresses and coats, still shaking from the hours in the cold. She slept first, I could tell from her breathing, and then, finally, I slept too.

Uncle Hal waited for us on the dock in New York when the Carpathia pulled into port. He stood among a large but restrained crowd that wordlessly searched the faces of the people standing at the ship’s railing for their own loved ones. No one waved or called a greeting but instead maintained a somber mix of welcome and mourning. When Grandmother and I finally descended the gangplank, Uncle Hal came forward quickly and embraced his mother, a rare gesture that surprised them both.

“Thank God, you’re safe, Mother.” Then he turned and hugged me, too, saying, “I planned a better homecoming for you, Johanna.”

“I can’t find fault, Uncle Hal. At least I’m alive.”

“The papers are full of nothing but the Titanic. Until you responded to our telegram, Kitty and Jennie feared the worst and didn’t sleep a wink. Peter even came home from school until we had the good word that you were safe.”

Grandmother asked, “Did you bring any of the family to New York with you?”

“No. Peter’s back in school and I left Kitty and Jen at home, but they’re anxious to see you.”

“Not like this, I trust.” Grandmother spoke briskly and fluffed out her worn skirts. “We could use a hot bath and a change of clothes, Harry, and sooner rather than later.”