“There’s something rather sad,” she said
“In seeing a great big ship going down”
She languidly shook her lovely head
And plucked the edge of the eiderdown.
Her hands were white and her nails were red
Her marble brow wore a pensive frown
“It’s really terribly sad,” she said
“To see a beautiful ship go down.”
The breakfast tray lay across her knee
A dusty beam of sunlight shone
On fruit and silver and China tea
And a crumbled, half-devoured scone.
The thin blue smoke of her cigarette
Wove, above us, a tangled skein,
The end of it, where her lips had met,
Proudly boasted a scarlet stain.
As though appalled by her own surmise
She gave a shudder and then a stretch
And turned her empty, lambent eyes
To have a look at the Daily Sketch.
The front page headlines were large and black
The pictures under them blotched, obscene
A few dark heads in the swirling wrack
“Survivors stories on page sixteen”
She read a little and sipped her tea
“Fifty passengers safe and sound”
Then she brightened perceptibly
“Fourteen hundred and fifty drowned”
She read the glutinous journalese
That smeared the names of the lost and dead
Then, rather neatly, controlled a sneeze
“That was sheer agony,” she said
I looked at the lissom, graceful line
Her body made ’neath the silken sheet
Her heart so far so far from mine
Yet I could almost hear it beat.
I wandered back over hours of sleep
To try to catch at the night gone by
To see if morning would let me keep
At least a fragment of memory.