Voyagers of the Titanic (10 page)

Harry Widener had been born in Philadelphia in 1885. He had a rational, ordered childhood that left him confident and untroubled. “The marvel is that Harry is so entirely unspoiled by his fortune,” a visitor to Lynnewood said. It was at Harvard in 1906 that he began buying Charles Dickens first editions, as well as folio works by Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher. With the help of his mother, in 1907, he bought a first folio Shakespeare for the highest price then known for a folio of its kind. He may have relished the eager exchange of heretical ideas when he was a Harvard boy, but after college his course was conventionally disciplined. An investment manager in his grandfather’s business, he crossed to Europe several times each year and when in London scouted the rare book dealer Bernard Quaritch’s shop or took him to lunch at the Ritz. “So many of your American collectors refer to books in terms of steel rails; with Harry it is a genuine and all-absorbing passion, and he is so entirely devoid of side,” Quaritch said. “Had he lived, he would no doubt have gathered one of the most remarkable libraries in America. He was a most amiable young man & greatly liked by everyone who came into contact with him.”
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Several rare books lately bought by him had already been remitted to America on the
Carpathia,
but he was carrying with him a copy of the rare 1598 edition of Francis Bacon’s essays that he had bought from Quaritch two weeks earlier for £260. Its money value was infinitesimal compared with that of the pearls with which his mother was traveling, which were insured for £150,000.
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French bulldogs, it will be noted, played a part in Troy Belknap’s Atlantic crossings—appropriately, for this muscular, compact, frisky, and bat-eared breed provided fashionable trophies for Americans returning from Paris. French bulldogs were the
Titanic
dogs. A French bulldog, Gamin de Pycombe, belonging to Robert Daniel of Philadelphia, was last seen swimming for its life in the ocean. Moreover, the greatest American force in the world of French bulldogs, Samuel Goldenberg, boarded at Cherbourg with his wife, Nella. In 1902 he had bought in France a dog, Nellcote Gamin, which he imported to his kennels at Riverdale-on-Hudson, where it became the progenitor of most French bulldogs in America. In 1905, having just turned forty, Goldenberg retired from his business as a New York lace importer to live in Paris, where he founded the French Bulldog Club of Paris. He was traveling to New York so that he could judge the French Bulldog Club of America’s show at the Waldorf-Astoria on April 20.

At Cherbourg, Henry Harper, scion of the American publishing family, boarded with his Pekingese, Sun Yat-sen, and handsome Egyptian dragoman, Hammad Hassab; Margaret Hays, Elizabeth Rothschild, and Philadelphia attorney William Dulles each boarded with a Pomeranian; and Helen Bishop had a lapdog, Frou-frou, which she had bought in Florence on her honeymoon. The Astors had their Airedale, and a spinster called Ann Isham, a Chicago lawyer’s daughter who lived in Paris, may have been accompanied by a Newfoundland or Great Dane; William Carter by a King Charles spaniel, and Harry Anderson by a chow.
*

Lapdogs were objectionable to Francis Millet, a sixty-five-year-old American painter, the head of the American Academy in Rome, who was returning from attending a ceremony there honoring a benefaction to the academy by Pierpont Morgan. “Queer lot of people on the ship,” Millet wrote in a letter posted at Queenstown. “Looking over the list I only find three or four people I know but there are . . . a number of obnoxious, ostentatious American women, the scourge of any place they infest, and worse on shipboard than anywhere. Many of them carry tiny dogs, and lead husbands around like pet lambs. I tell you the American woman is a buster. She should be put in a harem and kept there.”
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Millet was an interesting man. Born in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, in 1846, he served as a drummer boy and surgical assistant with Union troops in the Civil War. After a shining career at Harvard, he worked on the
Boston Courier,
but lithography and sketching were his avocations, and he forsook journalism to attend the Royal Academy of Fine Arts at Antwerp, where he was awarded a gold medal. He was a hardy traveler who acted as a war correspondent during the Russo-Turkish conflict of 1877–1878. Millet’s friend Henry James spoke of “his magnificent manly self . . . irradiating
. . .
beautiful genius and gallantry.”
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He published travel reportage, essays, short stories, and a translation of
Sebastopol Sketches,
Tolstoy’s fictionalized account of his Crimean War experiences. Murals at the Baltimore Customs House, Trinity Church in Boston, and other public buildings were painted by him. Photographs of Millet show a quietly handsome, distinguished man with an unwavering look and a calm, determined manner with no fierceness or bravado.

Millet owned a property at East Bridgewater, Massachusetts, but also shared a house in an old-fashioned district of Washington, D.C., with President Taft’s military adviser Archie Butt, who was nineteen years his junior. On March 2 they had left America together for Italy on the Norddeutscher-Lloyd steamship
Berlin
. “If the old ship goes down, you will find my affairs in shipshape condition,” Butt told his sister-in-law on the eve of departure.
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He was the cynosure of every eye on the deck of the
Berlin
—fascinating a deaf-mute sponge merchant from Patras—because of his glorious apparel: bright copper-colored trousers with matching Norfolk jacket, fastened by big ball-shaped buttons of red porcelain, a lavender tie, tall bay-wing collar, derby hat with broad brim, patent leather shoes with white tops, a bunch of lilies in his buttonhole, and a cambric handkerchief tucked in his left sleeve.
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The two men returned to America together (Butt in cabin B-38, Millet in cabin E-38), although Butt boarded at Southampton and Millet some hours later at Cherbourg.

Their affection for each other was undying, as was recognized when the memorial fountain erected, by Joint Resolution of Congress, on Executive Avenue in Washington, D.C., was named the Butt-Millet Fountain. “Millet, my artist friend who lives with me” was Butt’s designation of his companion: their only recorded discord was over Millet’s choice of wallpaper for their shared home. “Both my bedroom and dressing-room are walled with red and pink roses, from buds to full-blown flowers, and even when I shut my eyes I seem to see them tumbling over each other,” Butt had lately complained. It put him in mind of Elagabulus, the Roman emperor who outraged the Praetorian Guard by treating a blond slave charioteer, Hierocles, as his husband. “That artistic if somewhat decadent gentleman,” Butt recalled, “when he wanted to rid himself of certain enemies both male and female, invited them to a feast and, after he had withdrawn, let down a shower of roses from the ceiling. They played with them at first and pelted each other with them, but they continued to fall until they were smothered to death by them.”
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The Butt-Millet household was staffed by Filipino boys. In 1911 “a very delightful person” named Archie Clark-Kerr came to live there, “a sensible youth [who] only wanted to be let alone, not to be discussed every time he batted an eye.”
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Kerr (born in Australia, where his father owned a sheep station, but histrionic about his Scottish ancestry) was a high-spirited, playful attaché at the British embassy who opened Butt’s eyes: “did you know that the kilt is worn without any drawers? I never knew it before Archie Kerr came to live with me.”
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(Thirty-five years later Kerr returned to Washington as British ambassador: he had been created Lord Inverchapel, taking as his heraldic supporters two full-frontally naked Greek athletes, suggestively juxtaposed with a Latin motto that could be rendered “Though shaken, I rise.” As ambassador, Inverchapel alarmed the prudes of the American security services by going to stay in Eagle Grove, Iowa, with a strapping farm boy whom he had met in Washington.) Butt, too, enjoyed masculine vigor: John Tener, the major league baseball player who became governor of Pennsylvania in 1911, he described appreciatively as “a big, stalwart man, handsome as a Greek athlete.”
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Butt had been born in Augusta, Georgia, in 1865, a few months after the surrender of the Confederates in the Civil War, and remained an unrepentant Southerner. He graduated from university in Tennessee and, like Millet, started as a journalist—acting as Washington correspondent for southern newspapers. On the outbreak of the Spanish-American War he joined the army, and later served in the Philippines, where he impressed President Theodore Roosevelt and the secretary of war, William Taft. Butt was recruited to the White House as presidential aide-de-camp, and remained as military aide when Taft succeeded Roosevelt as president in 1909. A strongly built man who looked impressive in his spurs, plumed hat, and elaborate uniform (“dressed in raiment which puts out the eye of Rembrandt,” as Taft said),
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Butt acted as the president’s chief of protocol, secret keeper, and buffer.

Butt was loyal, disinterested, affectionate, and sympathetic. He liked to be useful, popular, and amusing: though a modest man, he had a swelling sense of accomplishment when his arrangements, introductions, and discreet advice went off perfectly, as they usually did. Butt misplayed shots in order to revive the golf-mad president when he was disheartened, sat up late playing bridge with him, laughed at his dull legal jokes, mitigated his boredom during official lunches for Sunday School teachers, ate the horrible meals that the obese president liked (broiled chicken, hominy, and melon for breakfast; fish chowder, mustard pickles, baked beans, and brown bread for lunch), salved the dignity of visiting politicos who did not know how to eat artichokes or cucumbers, mollified the president when saucy brats yelled “Hello, Fatty” at him. Butt’s hospitality was delightful. “People come early to my house and always stay late and seem merry while they are here,” he wrote. At his New Year’s Eve party—attended by Taft, cabinet members, ambassadors, generals, Supreme Court judges, and “the young fashionable crowd”—he served nothing more elaborate than eleven gallons of eggnog, whipped by his Filipino boys, with hot buttered biscuits and ham served by his black washerwoman.
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Butt and Millet, both ex-journalists, would have noticed that W. T. Stead, England’s most notorious newsman, was on board with them. Working alone in his cabin during the day, but dominating his table at mealtimes, Stead was indefatigable, unstoppable, and impossible to ignore. For thirty years he had been a public performer—all sonority, phrase making, and frontage. Appointed in 1883 as editor of a London evening newspaper, where he promoted a raucous, jarring tone, he had the journalist’s knack of transmuting shoddy secondhand ideas into high-colored first-class emotions. A press stunt by him in 1883–1884 resulted in the calamitous decision to send General Gordon, with his messianic death wish, to Khartoum. Next he started a press agitation about naval supremacy that resulted in the British government’s resolving in 1889 to maintain enough battleships to equal the combined strength of the two next-largest navies in the world—then the French and the Russian—at the cost of tens of millions. Germany retaliated with a vast naval building program, the European arms race began, and by 1921 debt-ridden Britain was conceding naval supremacy to the United States. Another of Stead’s stunts, titled “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,” exposing the prostitution of young girls, provoked the passing of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. This raised the age of consent for girls from thirteen to sixteen years, while another provision tightened the criminal laws against homosexuality, enabled the prosecution of Oscar Wilde, and exercized a baneful influence until long after its repeal in 1967.

There was no restraining Stead’s inquisitive energy, his prurience, and his rush to judgment. He lived in a flurry of telegrams. Everything and everyone was his business and, once he had reported it, everyone else’s business, too. He had high enthusiasms, intense sympathies, found so many activities to denounce and so many people to decry. Like most columnists, he was never happier, because it was never easier work, than pouring contumely on his fellow citizens, especially if he could claim a finer conscience than them, or use their sexual impulses to have them degraded or outlawed. He claimed to be maintaining a vigilant public opinion by his press stunts, but he was too excitable to have a sense of proportion, and indeed he would have been a less successful editor if he had been calm or proportionate. Stead testified to the Royal Commission on Divorce in 1910 that he was “a puritan, and proud to bear the name.” This impelled him to humiliate people whom he thought immoral: indeed, in his view personal privacy tended to immorality. “The simple faith of our forefathers in the All-Seeing Eye of God has departed from the man-in-the-street. Our only modern substitute for him is the press. Gag the press under whatever pretexts of prudish propriety you please, and you destroy the last remaining pillory by which it is possible to impose some restraint upon the lawless lust of man.”
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Stead’s blaring publicity made him the darling of journalists in the newspaper offices, compositors in the print rooms, messenger boys in the corridors, and newsboys on the streets. “His strength was in a flaming certainty, which one only weakens by calling sincerity,” G. K. Chesterton wrote of Stead. “His excess, we may say with real respect, was in the direction of megalomania; a childlike belief in big empires, big newspapers, big alliances—big ships.”
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