Statistical Probability

A Nouveau riche American, whose face Herbert knew, but whose name escaped recollection, leaned up against the listing rail. A Bostonian, no doubt, based on the distinctive slur of his vowels. The brash boom of the man's voice and the choice of his words both hearty in expression and opinion, and as bitter as a German Lager.

"What are the odds? Hundreds of miles of ocean. Near perfect weather. Record speed. Forty-six thousand tons of the best in human engineering, and you'd think this floating palace was cobbled together with sixpenny nails and biscuit tins instead of plates of riveted steel. The Titanic, sunk by a hunk of ice. About as preposterous as Atlantis rising up and out of the water and ascending into Heaven before our very eyes."

Herbert palmed his father's watch.

Two hours ago he'd been drowsy and relaxed, contemplating the inevitable confrontation with his matchmaking mother, catching up on correspondence, and enjoying a nightcap in his room.

The vibration had quivered the floorboards beneath his slippered feet. The constant, almost soothing, whir of the Titanic's colossal, steam powered, single turbine and twin reciprocating engines strained by a series of faint, light taps and gentle bumps grinded along her hull.

Herbert had paused, the moistened flap of an envelope rested on his tongue. His spoon had rattled on its saucer. A wispy-warm, amber-tinted mix of brandy and Earl Grey tremored into tiny ripples inside his teacup.

He'd lain the envelope on the desk, fumbled for his fob, and watched thirty seconds tick off the clock before the shimmying sensation and scraping sound seemed to slide backward and fade away altogether.

If his father’s Wall Street gains and losses had taught him anything it was that fortunes were banked, and squandered, in less time than it’d taken for the shuddering to cease and the engines to ease back into the normal rythm of their audible throb. Half a minute out of the ordinary was a lifetime for a ship.

Herbert had tugged his trousers over his silk pajama bottoms. The day had been sunny and cool, but the evening air bone chilling and brisk, bolstered by an incoming cold front. He'd opted for an extra pair of socks and the heavier of his two woolen coats.

Dressed, certainly not to impress, but suitably unscandalous, he'd made a quick dash into the hall and out onto the main deck to satisfy his curiosity and dismiss any lingering, unsettling notions before he retired to bed.

The Atlantic was flat, its countenance was calm. The sea's smooth, glassy surface polished with a glistened sheen and dotted with pinpoints of light that twinkled brighter than the stars scattered across the black velvet of the moonless sky.

A small group of men had already assembled on the starboard side of the ship, stalwart members of the night owl crowd. These gentlemen were still attired in their dinner best, brandy and cigars in hand, and were engaged in a discussion over the height of an object they had seen that had drawn them from the smoking lounge.

“I'm telling you it was at least ninety feet tall."

"First it's fifty, then it's seventy-five, now it's ninety. Make up your collective minds, or I shall be inclined to disregard your estimations as a load of bull-scented falsies."

“I didn't see anything.”

“Neither did the lookouts, else we wouldn’t have hit it.”

For several moments there'd been a rather jovial debate about who among them had a grandmother with a keener sense of visual accuity than the men deployed in the crow's nest under contract to the White Star Line.

But, that the vessel had run across a glacial mass was a point on which each man, Herbert included, wholeheartedly agreed. The evidence of just such a collision was strewn across the planks in fist-sized chunks of fractured ice that had fallen onto the deck to mark the object's passing.

A rolling rumble echoed deep within the bowels of the ship.

Herbert coiled the fob around a belt loop and secured it with a double knot.

The Bostonian was right. An iceberg. What were the odds?