Since the breaking of dawn on the 10th of April 1912, people of all shapes and sizes, young and old, first-class and second and third, began to flood the dock at the Port of Southampton until it felt as though one could not move an inch without bumping into another.
Cadillacs and Rolls-Royces of black and gold and burgundy, glinting like diamonds in the early morning light, carried the aristocrats, the elites and the well-to-dos to the RMS Titanic while those of the third class watched on in amazement as they stood in line, waiting for depressors to be shoved down their throats and combs yanked through their hair in search of lice.
It was one of these automobiles, one of startling ivory and black and adorned with gold, from which a white leathered hand was presented to the chauffeur at the opened door; a hand that moved slowly, evenly, lacking any sort of excitement at the destination or eagerness, one that simply moved as if it were a machine and it was its sole duty, much like the crank on the car in which such a hand sat ensconced. And from this machine-like hand appeared a lady, adorned in a white pinstriped suit, plum-colored wide-brimmed hat cantilevered over a face far older than that of her mere seventeen years.
She was unimpressed by the enthusiasm surrounding her—both the untamed, wild, jumping and hooting of that of the steerage passengers and the sober, straight-backed, turgid praise of that of the higher classes—and even with a look upon the magnificent ship, the fastest, largest and most luxurious of her kind, her expression and opinions remained the same and steadfast, as fiery and stubborn as the hair piled upon her head.
Her fiancé, a sober, imposing man, brimming with a simmering temper hidden just beneath his skin, bedecked in a grey suit and hat, stepped forth from the automobile and smiled up at the liner, a rare form of amazement in his eyes that she was always shocked to see, for Caledon Hockley usually took every advancement of man and machine no matter how great or pivotal as if it were a birthright for him to witness. And because of this, the spirited lady before him could not bear to let the opportunity to provoke him pass her by.
"I don't see what all the fuss is about," she said, pointing her chin up and turning to Cal, straightening her back and looking into his eyes. "It doesn't look any bigger than the Mauretania."
The man rolled his eyes, his happiness unaffected, and thus she burned within. "You can be blasé about some things, Rose, but not about Titanic!" he pointed at the ship before them in question with his walking stick. "It's over a hundred feet longer than Mauretania and far more luxurious."
He turned to the car where his fiancee's mother, pale and redheaded as her daughter, was stepping into the chilly April morning, and said, "Your daughter's far too difficult to impress, Ruth," to which the woman only laughed with a poorly-concealed annoyance.
Rose rolled her shining blue-green eyes and walked from the man, closer to the bow of the magnificent Titanic. In truth, her artistic heart burned at the sight of her in all her glory, steam flowing from her smokestacks with pride, so happy to take on passengers she figured she could almost see Titanic beaming. Rose was fascinated by the ocean liner, she wanted to know everything about it; everything down to the tiny iron rivets holding her together, but she pushed this feeling down as women in first class were supposed to push down all feelings, for anything by which Caledon Hockley was impressed was something Rose DeWitt Bukater wished to hate.
"So this is the ship they say is unsinkable," Ruth mused, sashaying in the perfect example of an upper-class woman, hands folded daintily within her fur muff.
"It is unsinkable!" Cal chimed from behind. "God Himself could not sink this ship!"
Rose turned her hatted head, hearing lowly the bribing of the White Star Line employee by Cal, who shoved a handful of bills in his face in exchange for the workload to be taken off him, spoiled brat that he was, and onto others he deemed more worthy of such duties. She felt bad for the man being forced beyond his job, but she felt no sympathy for Lovejoy, Cal's right-hand man, his servant and thug and spy, slimy and brash as the man himself, and she secretly rejoiced at the frustration he would endure with their luggage.
Oh, the small joys in her monotonous life.
A golden pocket watch was opened in the black-adorned, brutish hands of Cal. "Ladies," he said, "We've got to hurry."
They walked through the throng of people, the classes mixing, all perched on the edge of the dock waving to the passengers sixty feet up on the majestic decks of Titanic, and Rose frowned as she was forced to hold onto the crook of her fiancé's arm as they walked up the ramp. She shivered, feeling as if her gloves were being tainted with eternal grime just by touching him, and she reminded herself that Titanic was not to be lauded and praised. No, it was a slave ship veneered as a luxury, explicitly designed to fool the first-class airheads of which she was doomed to become, dragging her back to America in chains to resign herself to a life of misery and a loveless marriage to a man who was not afraid to shout at the slightest provocation nor strike her when he so often deemed it necessary. They entered, the glamour of the hall ineffective and unimpressive towards her warring mind, and the "Hello, ma'am. Welcome to Titanic," from the steward at the edge of the ramp seemed to be a sentencing for her execution. She screamed from within, unheard.
Their stateroom was the stuff of dreams, embellished in deep rich mahoganies and shining golds, but Rose eschewed the amazement her heart wanted to feel, poisoned by Cal and his entitlement as he handled crystal glasses like children's toys and spoke to the staff as if they were dirt at the bottom of his shoe. She turned her attention to her art as it was unpacked, already planning on where to hang it in the room, placing it in the air before different walls.
"Would you like all of them out, miss?" The kindly, timid maid, Trudy, asked her.
"Yes," she replied. "We need a little color in this room."
More than the room, she thought. She needed color in her life, adventure, change, a challenge to the convention of it all; and yet, doomed to a life with Cal, she was also doomed to a life displayed in perpetual black and white.
"Put it in there, in the wardrobe," Lovejoy instructed, dismissively, his shrill voice like knives upon the young girl's ears. Her blood boiled at the dastardly man stretching his legs into her territory, the only territory she was afforded over Cal's dominance over just about everything else, and nearly had the mind to make a spectacle, reminding him that he was also staff and had no right to do such a thing before his employer walked back in with a careless and unaffected saunter.
"God," he groaned. "Not those finger paintings again. They certainly were a waste of money."
She heard the plop of his shoulder to the doorframe and she wept internally for the poor room to feel the weight of such greed and arrogance. If she knew anything from being forced around the man, she knew it was a weight which was unbearable; clouded and suffocating and dense.
She smirked slightly, not engaging, staring at another painting. Anger had blossomed to boldness. "The difference between Cal's taste in art and mine is that I have some." She placed the canvas carefully to the loveseat, stepping back and admiring it in its strange and unreadable glory. "They're fascinating, like being inside a dream or something. There's truth but no logic."
"What's the artist's name?" The maid asked, and Rose smiled at the interest, feeling the sense of achievement at Cal's ignorant opinion being dismissed.
"Something Picasso."
"'Something Picasso?'" The man scoffed with another sip of champagne, pointing his glass at her. "He won't amount to a thing. He won't. Trust me."
Rose walked forth, undeterred in her opinions and task, and left him to say to Lovejoy as the only one who would listen, "At least they were cheap."
11 April 1912
By the next morning, the previous evening quiet and slow, they were sailing west off the coast of Ireland after a stop for more passengers in Cherbourg, and thus the voyage was truly underway. The open ocean was like a planet of its own, unending, carrying them as softly as a mother's arms to their destination. Rose figured she should have felt free and alive, yet she only felt trapped and suffocated, like a cardinal in a cage, knowing on the other side was her fate to which she was so unwillingly condemned. She sat in one of the wicker chairs of the Veranda Café and Palm Court, forced into one of the many formal luncheons she figured she would have to experience every day for the rest of her natural life, and stared out the floor-to-ceiling windows to the aft promenade toward the Atlantic, seeing it only as a pathway that by the second was growing shorter as she moved along it against her will.
On either side of her were Cal and her mother, the two most commandeering people in her life, like guards who forbid her from entering a secret and mysterious door even though she held the very key in her palm. She was disentitled to her own decisions and her own life in their eyes, and for such the flame of resentment burned brightly in her soul for each of them and their every word was a new match to the wick.
Also at the table was Margaret Brown, better known to her friends (who included just about everyone who accepted her good company in earnest) as Maggie or Molly, a rotund woman, bright of cheeks and blazing of personality, who took the idea of wealth and its the world with which it came as a fine joke.
Rose instantly loved the woman, with her midwestern accent that felt like a home she never knew and her mocking of the life her riches had brought unto her. Rose's mother and her peers disliked her; they included her in their social circle for which a fortune was the only undeniable ticket, but they never put their hearts into her membership, as the aristocracy as a whole did not take kindly to the crude and crass nouveau riche. She loved Molly Brown all the more just for that.
There was also J. Bruce Ismay, the chairman of the White Star Line. Rose had hardly known him a half-hour and had already deemed him a hubristic and ridiculous man whose personality did not extend beyond Titanic and the achievement of his ownership of her.
Though, in her mind, she figured ownership belonged in the hands of those that designed her and built her and not who funded her with the flick of the wrist, and the very man who she figured deserved possession of her the most was seated just across from her: Thomas Andrews, chief naval architect of the RMS Titanic.
He was the man about whom Rose knew the least. He seemed a kind man; soft-spoken, modest about his achievement of designing and overseeing the construction of the grandest ship on earth, much in contrast with his self-important higher-up. He was a handsome man, no older than forty if she had to guess, with dark hair and gentle eyes. He was Irish, judging by the smooth accent that flowed from his pert pink lips which always seemed to be slightly tilted in a contented smile. Rose figured no amount of modesty could save a man from the pure joy only gained when one palpably sat within one's very own brainchild.
"She's the largest moving object ever made by the hand of man in all of history. And our master shipbuilder, Mr. Andrews, here, designed her from the keel plates up," Ismay said, hands comfortably folded at the head of the table.
"Well, I may have knocked her together but the idea was Mr. Ismay's," Mr. Andrews replied, brushing off the ovation like a speck of dust from his shirtsleeve, unimportant. "He envisioned a steamer so grand in scale and so luxurious in its appointments that supremacy would never be challenged. And here she is," a double knock upon their table as emphasis, "willed into solid reality."
Rose did not want to be impressed. She did not want to show any sort of commendation or awe at Mr. Andrews or Titanic, not when it represented her forever imprisonment. No, she decided just then that she hated both of them, the ship and her god, and she set her jaw like a defiant child. She placed her cigarette holder into her mouth, lighting it so for a few precious moments the face of the man before her, handsome and kind and oh, so difficult to hate as she was trying to do was hidden by the dance of the smoke. She felt her mother's venomous stare right at the nape of her neck.
Ruth Dewitt Bukater leaned forward ever so slightly, raising her voice so what could so clearly be heard by others could be mistaken as a rudely overheard tête-à-tête. She could never spare her daughter a public reprehension, could not resist any temptation of making her out to be a child. "You know I don't like that, Rose."
Her daughter turned to her, lips slightly parted in nonchalant defiance, eyes dull and unfeeling yet lit with a low flame of rebellion, and she blew the smoke straight into her mother's face.
"She knows," Cal butt in, taking the cigarette and mashing it to the table, and Rose mourned her short-lived victory.
Just then the waiter appeared at her fiancé's side. "We'll both have the lamb, rare, with very little mint sauce. You like lamb, don't you, Sweetpea?"
She turned and smiled at him, chin raised, eyelashes batting, a look that unmistakably said, No, I don't, and you know I don't, but you don't care either way, bastard that you are.
"You gonna cut her meat for her, too, there, Cal?" Molly Brown drawled with a laugh and both Rose and Mr. Andrews smiled, though Rose did not notice.
"Hey, uh, who thought of the name Titanic?" Molly asked, looking from Andrews to Ismay, goofy grin stretching across her playful lips. "Was it you, Bruce?"
Ismay jumped and squirmed at the chance to laud himself again.
"Well, yes, actually," he hummed, poorly feigning the nobility that flowed from Andrews like water. "I wanted to convey sheer size, and size means stability, luxury, and above all, strength."
She fumed and was shocked her internalized fire did not set the poor wicker chair on fire beneath her. He must think we're all right fools, mere planets orbiting his sun, and all because a piece of paper says he owns Titanic! Oh, the pomposity of it! It's just like Cal!
"Do you know of Dr. Freud, Mr. Ismay?" Rose was shocked at her ladylike serenity, even in the face of J. Bruce Ismay looking on her from under conceited, hooded eyelids sitting atop a smirking lip as if she were privileged as a mere lady to be speaking to a man of his eminence. "His ideas about the male preoccupation with size might be of particular interest to you."
She stole a glance around the table and was thrilled to see the scandalized and embarrassed faces of her mother and husband-to-be, and felt extra proud when she saw Molly nod with her comment as if commending her for speaking her thoughts, and the near choking of Thomas Andrews as he struggled not to laugh through his chewing, his enthralled eyes sparkling right upon her.
"What's gotten into you?" Ruth disgustedly hissed in her ear, finally affording her a volume at which no one else could hear her grievances against her daughter.
Her mother was ignored. "Excuse me," she said, placing her napkin on the table in a final show of ladylikeness, and pushed back and walked towards the sliding doors as the women looked on in varying states of emotion and the men, all except for Cal, stood from their seats in true gentlemanly fashion at a lady leaving the table. She tried not to notice that Mr. Andrews was the only man who fully erected himself, knees straight and hands free from the arms of the chair, while Ismay simply stood halfheartedly, hunched in full preparation of sitting again, his heart hardly in the task. Well, she could not blame him.
After all, he had just been humiliated by a woman.
"I do apologize," Ruth stammered, trying to smile, hiding her pallidness behind her glass.
"She's a pistol, Cal," Molly remarked, smiling in satisfaction, amused as could be. "Hope you can handle her!"
"Well, I may have to start minding what she reads from now on, won't I, Mrs. Brown?"
The man's annoyance and humiliation, possibly more than Ismay's, could not be hidden, and Thomas Andrews could not deny how much sheer joy that brought him, even at the expense of a man he had not known an hour.
"Freud, who is he?" Ismay asked, tail tucked between his legs, with a snarl. "I-Is he a passenger?"
The metaphorical pathway brought Rose no solace, and she wished the engines of Titanic would stop and they may sit and live in the middle of the sprawling ocean until she died, free from a life out of her hands, and then they may set on their merry way, wherever Titanic's passengers would like to go. She closed her eyes and tried to breathe, listening to the happy hoots and hollers of the steerage passengers just below her, evidence of a joy she had never truly known reaching her ears like a bittersweet birdsong. How she wished she could be one of them, dirt poor, the blemish on the face of society in the eyes of those that seemed to matter, yet happy, joyous, free, in charge of her own life. How she longed for it!
The very figurehead of her subjection yanked her arm so hard it brought pain to her shoulder, whipping her to face him, to feel the heat of his anger. "What the hell has gotten into you?"
She tried to drag herself away but he held fast until she heard a seam at the top of her sleeve snap, and she used all of her strength and pulled until she was free, as free as she could be. "Let me alone, Cal."
Rose walked with no destination in mind, walking and walking until she found a patch of the deck with no people around. She could not bear the sight of other people, knowing that the rest of the world existed when her own was in such turmoil and was about to not be her world at all.
"Miss DeWitt Bukater!" a voice called to her, getting closer with each syllable. Irish. "Well, that was a right fine joke you told back in there."
"Oh, don't even tease me, Mr. Andrews. I'm in no mood for it," she snapped, not moving from her position over the rail.
His ebullience did not falter and to her unjustified, red hot annoyance, his smile remained. "I do not tease you, Young Rose. It's been quite a spell since I've heard anyone stun Bruce into silence, if ever I truly have. You are a fiery one, if I may say so."
"Oh, so a woman has to be fiery to stand up to a man? I say, Mr. Andrews, you have some nerve!"
"I-I'm sorry. Forgive me, but I meant it as a compliment. You do not see women display your type of wit in any first-class lounges very often."
"No, nor will you, if anyone has anything to say about it."
"I'm sorry? What does that—?"
"Forgive me, but don't you have somewhere you should be, Mr. Andrews? I'm sure the Master Shipbuilder of Titanic has somewhere better to be than speaking to a woman he doesn't know."
Thomas Andrews was lost for words and stood opening and closing his mouth for a good many seconds before he raised his hat to the lady before him who had not looked at him once. "I bid you a good day, Miss DeWitt Bukater." And with no other words, he walked off, and Rose listened to the clamber of his boots against the wooden deck.
She deflated with only the iron rails holding her up, feeling the weight of regret upon her. How rude she had been to so unsuspecting and undeserving a man, and the man who designed the very ship which was affording her such luxury, no less! Oh, she was no better than Cal! If she had had the energy within her, she would have run after him like a damsel, begging for forgiveness, as she knew it to be the right thing to do. Though even so early in the day she had not, and so she shook her head and begged God to forgive her of her sins. It was all she could do for now and she hoped it was enough.