Bring Me To Your Stars

Will You Go or I?

"I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be."

― Charles Dickens, (1861, from Great Expectations

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April 15th, 1912

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"Will you go away with this boat, or I?"

Had Harold Lowe not been standing near the 6th Officer when he asked it, he might've missed that damning question so quietly spoken over the steam of Titanic's roaring funnels behind them.

But something in the calm of James Moody's voice was stranger to Lowe, making him pause at securing the falls to the davits at Lifeboat 14.

Turning his head toward his fellow junior officer, only a rank shy of his own, Lowe saw a different man than the sunny young lad he'd first met in Belfast.

When James Moody walked out of his adolescence and grew into a sailor, it must've been at that moment at Lifeboat 14. His soulful forget-me-not-blue gaze that had always reminded Harold of a doleful puppy dog, now looked weary but undefeated as he stared undauntedly into the Atlantic. Taking on a resolved creed of honor and duty that made him a tableau of the old captains long gone. The seadogs who answered the war cry of the hurricane, though it should cut down their ship right from under them.

But the courage that drove James Moody's actions that night was not the same gung-ho warfare that sent Lowe head-to-head about the deck, with gut and pistol keeping the passengers from sabotaging the davit falls.

James's concerns were quieter. More observant and circumspect about the passengers he'd just trusted into the lifeboats. Ever mindful that in the interest of being safe and sound, being sound mattered as much as being saved.

And so, James looked after the little particulars his fellow officers might've missed, as they made every effort to superintend the escalating mayhem.

Watching the lifeboats row away from the ship into the cold dark unknown, James explained to Lowe, "I've put 58 into this boat, but I saw five boats go away without an officer. The women must be terrified. Even after leaving their men behind, the nightmares carry on. Someone ought to go with this one and look after them."

"It's not our duty to make the passengers comfortable, but to save the life of them. There aren't enough boatmen to put to the job of rowing here, and there's no time for hunting a man down. They will make do for themselves, Mr. Moody," Lowe informed him, his breath foggy with each firm word as he trembled from the cold. "What have you for the time? We should keep note of it faithfully for the ship's log."

"My watch reads a quarter pass one," James reported to the 5th officer, as he dropped the brass open-faced Elgin back into his officer's coat pocket. "All the horrors seem to happen at night, Godfrey...don't they?"

And with Titanic having yet to play her swan song, James Moody felt he would never again know a horror like this one.

Since that haunting moment he'd picked up the phone in the wheelhouse, 20 minutes before the end of his watch, and asked Fredrick Fleet in the crow's nest, "Yes, what do you see?", Moody suspected that worrying about what he should report in the scrap log was just spitting into the wind now.

Now unable to shake that gut-sinking instinct that he'd never again be returning to the bridge to write anything down.

Tensions on deck had swelled from lightly fascinated confusion to sobering desperation.