Jayden's hand closed possessively over Mia's arm. He escorted her up the gangway and the black hull of Titanic swallowed them. Mia went through it as if she was on auto pilot.
"Outwardly I was everything a well brought up girl should be. Inside, I was screaming."
There was a screaming blast from the mighty triple steam horns on Titanic's funnels, bellowing their departure warning.
Out on the Southampton docks, the Titanic towered above the terminal buildings like the skyline of a city. The steamer's whistle echoed across Southampton.
From a window was the smoky inside of a pub. It was crowded with dockworkers and ship's crew. A poker game was in progress. Four men, in working class clothes, played a very serious hand.
Kevin Douglas and Mike Fernandez, both about 20, exchanged a glance as the other two players argued. Kevin was American, an African American. He was also unshaven, and his clothes were rumpled from sleeping in them. He was an artist, and had adopted the Bohemian style of art scenes in Paris. He was also very self-possessed and sure-footed for 20, having lived on his own since 15.
The two guys continue their sullen argument.
" 'You stupid fishhead. I can't believe you bet our tickets,' " Jake muttered.
" 'You lost our money. I'm just trying to get it back. Now shut up and take a card,' " Troy told him.
"Hit me again, Jake," Kevin said jauntily. He took the card and slipped it into his five-fingered hand. His hazel eyes betrayed nothing.
Mike, who is a Hispanic guy himself, licked his lips nervously as he refuses a card. There was a stack in the middle of the table. Bills and coins from four countries. This had been going on for a while. Sitting on top of the money were two 3rd class tickets for RMS Titanic.
The Titanic's whistle blew again. Final warning.
"The moment of truth boys. Somebody's life is about to change," Kevin told them.
Mike put his cards down. So did the guys. Kevin held his close.
"Let's see...Mike's got niente. Jake, you've got squat. Troy, uh oh...two pair...mmm," he turned to his friend. "Sorry Mike."
"What da ya mean, sorry? What you got? You lost my money?! Ma va fa'n culo testa di cazzo-"
"Sorry, you're not gonna see your mama again for a long time..." He slapped a full house on the table, grinning. "Because you're goin' to America! Full house boys!"
"Porca Madonna YEEAAAAAA!" Mike cheered.
The table exploded into shouting of several languages. Kevin racked in the money and the tickets. "Sorry boys. Three of a kind and a pair. I'm high and you're dry and..."
"...We're going to-" Mike continued.
"L'AMERICA!" The two shouted in joy. Jake balled up one huge farmer's fist. It looked like he was going to clobber Kevin, but he swung round and punched Troy, who flopped backward onto the floor and sat there, looking depressed. Jake forgot about Kevin and Mike, who were dancing around, and going into a rapid harangue of his stupid cousin. Kevin kissed the tickets, then jumped on Mike's back, riding him around the pub. It was like they won the lottery.
"Going home...to the land o' the free and the home of the real hot-dogs! On the TITANIC! We're ridin' in high style now! We're practically god damned royalty, ragazzo mio!" Leo shouted happily.
"Ya see? It's my destiny! Like I told you. I'm goin' to America. To be a millionaire!" Mike turned to the pubkeeper. "Capito? I'm goin' to America!"
"No, mate. Titanic go to America. In five minutes."
Their eyes widened. "Shit! Come on, Mike!" Kevin grabbed their stuff. "Come on!" He turned to the people, grinning. "It's been grand."
They ran for the door.
" 'Course I'm sure if they knew it was you lot comin', they'd be pleased to wait!"
Kevin and Mike, carrying everything they owned in the world in the kit bags on their shoulders, sprinted toward the pier. They teared through milling crowds next to the terminal. Shouts went up behind them as they jostled slow-moving gentlemen. They dodged piles of luggage, and weave through groups of people. They burst out onto the pier and Kevin came to a dead stop...staring at the cast wall of the ship's hull, towering seven stories above the wharf and over an eighth of a mile long. The Titanic was monstrous.
Mike ran back and grabbed Kevin, and they sprinted towards the third class gangway aft at E deck. They reached the bottom of the ramp just as Sixth Officer Jim (aka a police officer from the show) detached it at the top. It started to swing down from the gangway doors.
"Wait! We're passengers!" Kevin yelled. Flushed and panting, he waved the tickets.
"Have you been through the inspection queue?" The officer asked.
Kevin lied cheerfully, "Of course! Anyway, we don't have lice, we're Americans." He glanced at Mike. "Both of us."
"Right," the officer replied testily, "Come abroad."
Jim had Quartermaster Bill (aka another police officer) reattach the gangway. Kevin and Mike came abroad. Jim glanced at the tickets, then passed Kevin and Mike through to Bill. Bill looked at the names on the tickets to enter them through in the passenger list.
"Burrow. And..." He read Mike's, "Burrow."
He handed the tickets back, eyeing Mike's Mexican American looks suspiciously. While people like them weren't uncommon, they were usually third class passengers. Kevin grabbed Mike's arm. "Come on, Troy."
Kevin and Mike whooped with victory as they ran down the white-painted corridor...grinning from ear to ear.
"We are the luckiest sons of bitches in the world!" Leo cheered.
The mooring lines, as big around as a man's arm, were dropped into the water. A cheer went up on the pier as seven tugs pulled the Titanic away from the quay. Kevin and Mike burst through a door onto the aft well deck. They ran across the deck and up the steel stairs to the poop deck. They got to the rail and Kevin started to yell and wave to the crowd on the dock.
"You know somebody?" Mike questioned.
"Of course not. That's not the point," Kevin told him, turning to the crowd, ""Goodbye! Goodbye! I'll miss you!"
Grinning, Mike joined in, adding his voice to the swell of voices, feeling the exhilaration of the moment. "Goodbye! I will never forget you!"
The crowd of cheering well-wishers waved heartily as a black wall of metal moved past them. Impossibly tiny figures waved back from the ship's rails. Titanic gathered speed.
The prow of Titanic filled behind the lead tug, which was dwarfed. The bow wave spread before the mighty plow of the liner's hull as it moved down the river test toward the English Channel.
Kevin and Mike walked down a narrow corridor with doors lining both sides like a college dorm. Total confusion as people argued over luggage in several languages, or wandered in confusion in the labyrinth. They passed emigrants studying the signs over the doors, and looking up the words in phrase books.
They found their berth. It was a modest cubicle, painted enamel white, with four bunks. Exposed pipes overhead. The other two men were already there. Orion and Jake Holling.
Kevin threw his kit on one open bunk, while Mike took the other.
" 'Where is Troy?' " Jake asked.
By contrast, the so-called 'Millionaire Suite' is in the Empire style, and comprised of two bedrooms, a bath, WC, wardrobe room, and a large sitting room. In addition, there was a private 50 feet promenade deck outside.
A room service waiter poured champagne into a tulip glass of orange juice and handed the Buzz Fizz to Mia. She was looking through her new paintings. There was a Monet of water lilies, a Degas of dancers, and a few abstract works. They were all unknown paintings...lost works. Jayden had purchased them for Mia when they were a gallery auction. None of them could see why Mia was so taken by these drawings, but it pleased her nonetheless.
Jayden was out on the covered deck, which had potted trees and vines on trellises, talking through the doorway to Mia in the sitting room.
"Those mud puddles were certainly a waste of money."
Mia looked at a cubist portrait. "You're wrong. They're fascinating. Like in a dream...there's truth without logic. What's his name again...?" She read something off the canvas. "Picasso."
Jayden came into the sitting room. "He'll never amount to a thing, trust me. At least they were cheap."
A porter wheeled Jayden's private safe into the room on a handtruck. "Put that in the wardrobe," Jayden demanded.
In the bedroom, Mia entered with the large Degas of the dancers. She set it on a dresser, near the canopy bed. Ann was already in there, hanging up some of Mia's clothes. "It smells so brand new. 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-"
Jayden appeared in the doorway of the bedroom, looking at Mia. "And when I crawl between the sheets, I'll still be the first."
Ann blushed at that innuendo. "S'cuse me, Miss." She edged around Jayden and made a quick exit. Jayden came up behind Mia and placed his hands on her shoulders. An act of possession, not intimacy.
"The first and only. Forever."
Mia's expression showed how bleak a prospect this was for her, now.
Titanic stood silhouetted against a purple post-sunset sky at Cherbourg Harbor, France. She was lit up like a floating palace, and her thousand portholes reflected in the calm harbor waters. The 150 feet tender Nomadic lied to alongside, looking like a rowboat. The lights of a Cherbourg harbor completed the postcard image.
Entering the First Class Reception from the tender were a number of prominent passengers. A broad-shouldered woman in an enormous feathered hat came up the gangway, carrying a suitcase in her hand, a spindly porter running to catch up with her to take the bags.
"Well, I wasn't about to wait all day for you, sonny," the woman said loudly. "Take 'em the rest of the way if you think you can manage."
"At Cherbourg a woman came abroad named Dana Grayson. History would call her the Unsinkable Irma Brown. Her husband had struck gold someplace out west, and she was what her mother called 'new money.' "
At 45, Dana Grayson was a tough talking straight shooter who dressed in the finery of her genteel peers but would never be one of them. Whilst she was certainly dressed like the rest of the people in first class, there was something different about her.
"By the next afternoon we had made our final stop and we were streaming west from the coast of Ireland, with nothing ahead of us but ocean..."
The ship glowed with the warm creamy light of late afternoon. Kevin and Mike stood right at the bow gripping the curving railing so familiar from images of the wreck. Leo leaned over, looking down fifty feet to where the prow cut the surface like a knife, sending up two glassy sheets of water.
On the bridge, Captain Mitchell turned from the binnacle to First Officer Leo. "Take her to sea, Mister Leo. Let us stretch her legs."
Leo moved the engine telegraph level to all ahead full.
Now began a kind of musical/visual set piece...an ode to the great ship. The music was rhythmic, surging forward, with a soaring melody that addressed the majesty and optimism of the ship of dreams. In the engine room, the telegraph clanged and moved to all ahead full.
"All ahead full!" The chief engineer bell shouted.
On the catwalk, Slash Andrews, the shipbuilder guy, watched carefully as the engineers and greasers scramble to adjust valves. Towering above them were the twin reciprocating engines, four stories tall, their ten-foot-long connecting rods surging up and down with the turning of the massive crankshafts. The engines thundered like the footfalls of marching giants.
In the boiler room, the stokers chanted a song as they hurled coal into the roaring furnaces. The 'black gang' were covered with sweat and coal dust, their muscles working like part of the machinery as they toiled in the hellish glow.
Underwater, the enormous bronze screws chopped through the water, hurling the steamer forward and churning up a vortex of foam that lingered for miles behind the juggernaut ship. Smoke poured from the funnels as-
The riven water flared higher at the bow as the ship's speed built. Up the prow, Kevin's face was streamed from the wind and-
Captain Mitchell stepped out of the enclosed bridge onto the wing. He stood with his hands on the rail, looking every bit the storybook picture of a Captain...a great patriarch of the sea.
"Twenty one knots, sir!" First Officer Chad shouted.
"She has a bone in her teeth now, eh, Chad."
Captain Mitchell accepted a cup of tea from Fifth Officer Chad. He contentedly watched the white V of water hurled outward from the bows like an expression of his own personal power. They were invulnerable, towering over the sea.
At the bow, Kevin and Mike leaned far over, looking down.
In the glassy bow-wave two dolphins appeared, under the water, running fast just in front of the steel blade of the prow. They did it for the sheer joy and exultation of motion. Kevin watched the dolphins and grinned. They breached, jumping clear of the water and then dived back, crisscrossing in front of the bow, dancing ahead of the juggernaut.
Mike looked forward across the Atlantic, staring into the subsparkles. "I can see the Statue of Liberty already," he grinned at Kevin. "Very small...of course."
Over the bridge wing, along the boat deck until her funnels come and march past like the pillars of heaven, people strolled down the decks. They stood at the rail until they became ants.
And still, the great lady is seen whole in a gorgeous aerial portrait, black and severe in her majesty.
"She is the largest moving object ever made by the hand of man in all history..."