r; how one face had a startled, frightened look
that seemed as if it would always be there, another a set and staring
gaze; how one showed an angry, rebellious desperation, and another
seemed merely dazed. Some carried on stretchers, some supported by
nurses, and some handed down by members of the crew, they came, either
to meetings that were agonizing in their joy, or to blank loneliness
that would last until they died. Five or six babies without mothers,
some of them utterly unidentified and unidentifiable, were handed down
with the rest, so strangely preserved, in all their tenderness and
helplessness, through that terrible time of confusion and exposure.

And in the minds of those who looked on at this sad procession there was
one tragic, recurrent thought: that for every one who came down the
gangway, ill perhaps, maimed perhaps, destitute perhaps, but alive and
on solid earth again, there were two either drifting in the slow Arctic
current, or lying in the great submarine valley to which the ship had
gone down. They were a poor remnant indeed of all that composite world
of pride, and strength, and riches; for Death winnows with a strange
fan, and although one would suit his purpose as well as another, he
often chooses the best and the strongest. There were card-sharpers, and
orphaned infants, and destitute consumptives among the saved; and there
were hundreds of heroes and strong men among the drowned. There were
among the saved those to whom death would have been no great enemy, who
had no love for life or ties to bind them to it; and there were those
among the drowned for whom life was at its very best and dearest; lovers
and workers in the very morning of life before whom the years had
stretched forward rich with promise.

And when nearly all had gone and the crowd in the docks was melting
away, one man, who had until then remained secluded in the ship came
quietly out, haggard and stricken with woe: Bruce Ismay, the
representative and figure-head of that pride and power which had given
being to the _Titanic_. In a sense he bore on his own shoulders the
burden of every sufferer's grief and loss; and he bore it, not with
shame, for he had no cause for shame, but with reticence of words and
activity in such alleviating deeds as were possible, and with a dignity
which was proof against even the bitter injustice of which he was the
victim in the days that followed. There was pity enough in New York,
hysterical pit