had caused a small fire in one of the ship’s public rooms by chewingaway the insulation on electric wires running through a wall, thereby allowing two bare wires to touch.
The boys waited with delight. The rats soon emerged and began following their usual routes through the chamber, unaware of the wires in their paths. “They got electrocuted of course,” Clark said, “that was our pastime. That was Friday night.” In later life, Clark would become Reverend Clark.
Whether out of professional pique or some instinct of fear, the ship’s mascot—a cat named Dowie, after Captain Turner’s predecessor—fled the ship that night, for points unknown.
C APTAIN T URNER also left the ship that evening.He made his way to Broadway, to the Harris Theater on Forty-second Street, and there caught a play,
The Lie
, in which his niece, a rising actress named Mercedes Desmore, had a starring role.
Turner also indulged his passion for German food.He went to Lüchow’s at 110 East Fourteenth Street, an easy walk from the Cunard docks, and dined in its Nibelungen Room, where an eight-piece orchestra played a brisk accompaniment of Viennese waltzes.
T HAT EVENING , back at his sister’s apartment, Charles Lauriat showed her and her husband the Dickens book and the Thackeray drawings and explained why he was bringing the drawings to England.
When he bought them in 1914, from Thackeray’s daughter and granddaughter, Lady Ritchie and Hester Ritchie, of London, he paid a bargain price of $4,500, fully aware that he could sell them in America for five or six times as much. To get the best price, however, he had come to realize that he would need to present the drawings in a more appealing manner. At the moment they were pasted into the two scrapbooks, one drawing per page. He planned to have most of the drawings mounted individually and framed, but some he wanted to bind in combinations of three or four, in books with full Levant bindings. His main reason for bringingthem back to England was so that Lady Ritchie could see them one more time and write a small note about each, thereby providing authentication and an extra element of interest.
He felt no guilt about paying Lady Ritchie so little for the drawings. That was the way the art business worked, especially if a seller wanted discretion, as the Ritchies did. They insisted that he keep the sale of the drawings as quiet as possible and barred him from attempting to sell them in Britain. He could offer them only in America, and even then he had to do so quietly, without advertising. Lady Ritchie was still smarting from the unexpected sequelae of a previous sale of drawings through a London dealer who had marketed them in a manner that the family found offensive and that had drawn unpleasant publicity and comment.
Lauriat’s sister and her husband inspected the drawings “with a great deal of interest and admiration,” Lauriat recalled. The husband, George, confessed to liking in particular a drawing entitled
The Caricature of Thackeray Himself Stretched Out on a Sofa in the Old Garrick Club
, and a series of six sketches “of negroes and their children” on the porch of a small house, which Thackeray had drawn while visiting the American South in the 1850s.
Afterward, Lauriat packed the book and drawings back into his extension suitcase and locked it.
E LSEWHERE in the city, a scheduled passenger named Alta Piper struggled through a restless night in her hotel room. She was the daughter of Leonora Piper, the famed spirit medium known universally as “Mrs. Piper,” the only medium that William James, the pioneering Harvard psychologist and sometime psychic investigator, believed to be authentic.
Alta seemed to share her mother’s gift, for throughout that Friday night, as she claimed later, she heard a voice telling her, “If you get into your berth, you’ll never get out.”
ROOM 40
“THE MYSTERY”
T HE DEPARTURE OF W ALTHER S CHWIEGER ’ S U-20 WAS watched
The boys waited with delight. The rats soon emerged and began following their usual routes through the chamber, unaware of the wires in their paths. “They got electrocuted of course,” Clark said, “that was our pastime. That was Friday night.” In later life, Clark would become Reverend Clark.
Whether out of professional pique or some instinct of fear, the ship’s mascot—a cat named Dowie, after Captain Turner’s predecessor—fled the ship that night, for points unknown.
C APTAIN T URNER also left the ship that evening.He made his way to Broadway, to the Harris Theater on Forty-second Street, and there caught a play,
The Lie
, in which his niece, a rising actress named Mercedes Desmore, had a starring role.
Turner also indulged his passion for German food.He went to Lüchow’s at 110 East Fourteenth Street, an easy walk from the Cunard docks, and dined in its Nibelungen Room, where an eight-piece orchestra played a brisk accompaniment of Viennese waltzes.
T HAT EVENING , back at his sister’s apartment, Charles Lauriat showed her and her husband the Dickens book and the Thackeray drawings and explained why he was bringing the drawings to England.
When he bought them in 1914, from Thackeray’s daughter and granddaughter, Lady Ritchie and Hester Ritchie, of London, he paid a bargain price of $4,500, fully aware that he could sell them in America for five or six times as much. To get the best price, however, he had come to realize that he would need to present the drawings in a more appealing manner. At the moment they were pasted into the two scrapbooks, one drawing per page. He planned to have most of the drawings mounted individually and framed, but some he wanted to bind in combinations of three or four, in books with full Levant bindings. His main reason for bringingthem back to England was so that Lady Ritchie could see them one more time and write a small note about each, thereby providing authentication and an extra element of interest.
He felt no guilt about paying Lady Ritchie so little for the drawings. That was the way the art business worked, especially if a seller wanted discretion, as the Ritchies did. They insisted that he keep the sale of the drawings as quiet as possible and barred him from attempting to sell them in Britain. He could offer them only in America, and even then he had to do so quietly, without advertising. Lady Ritchie was still smarting from the unexpected sequelae of a previous sale of drawings through a London dealer who had marketed them in a manner that the family found offensive and that had drawn unpleasant publicity and comment.
Lauriat’s sister and her husband inspected the drawings “with a great deal of interest and admiration,” Lauriat recalled. The husband, George, confessed to liking in particular a drawing entitled
The Caricature of Thackeray Himself Stretched Out on a Sofa in the Old Garrick Club
, and a series of six sketches “of negroes and their children” on the porch of a small house, which Thackeray had drawn while visiting the American South in the 1850s.
Afterward, Lauriat packed the book and drawings back into his extension suitcase and locked it.
E LSEWHERE in the city, a scheduled passenger named Alta Piper struggled through a restless night in her hotel room. She was the daughter of Leonora Piper, the famed spirit medium known universally as “Mrs. Piper,” the only medium that William James, the pioneering Harvard psychologist and sometime psychic investigator, believed to be authentic.
Alta seemed to share her mother’s gift, for throughout that Friday night, as she claimed later, she heard a voice telling her, “If you get into your berth, you’ll never get out.”
ROOM 40
“THE MYSTERY”
T HE DEPARTURE OF W ALTHER S CHWIEGER ’ S U-20 WAS watched
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