Then happened one of the strangest incidents of that strange hour. I can
only give it in Bride's own words:

"Phillips clung on, sending, sending. He clung on for about ten minutes,
or maybe fifteen minutes, after the Captain released him. The water was
then coming into our cabin.

"While he worked something happened I hate to tell about. I was back in
my room getting Phillips's money for him, and as I looked out of the
door I saw a stoker, or somebody from below decks, leaning over Phillips
from behind. Phillips was too busy to notice what the man was doing, but
he was slipping the lifebelt off Phillips's back. He was a big man,
too.

"As you can see, I'm very small. I don't know what it was I got hold of,
but I remembered in a flash the way Phillips had clung on; how I had to
fix that lifebelt in place, because he was too busy to do it.

"I knew that man from below decks had his own lifebelt, and should have
known where to get it. I suddenly felt a passion not to let that man die
a decent sailor's death. I wished he might have stretched a rope or
walked a plank. I did my duty. I hope I finished him, but I don't know.

"We left him on the cabin floor of the wireless room, and he wasn't
moving."

Phillips left the cabin, running aft, and Bride never saw him alive
again. He himself came out and found the water covering the bridge and
coming aft over the boat deck.

XII

There is one other separate point of view from which we may look at the
ship during this fateful hour before all points of view become merged in
one common experience. Mr. Boxhall, the Fourth Officer, who had been on
the bridge at the moment of the impact, had been busy sending up rockets
and signals in the effort to attract the attention of a ship whose
lights could be seen some ten miles away; a mysterious ship which cannot
be traced, but whose lights appear to have been seen by many independent
witnesses on the _Titanic_. So sure was he of her position that Mr.
Boxhall spent almost all his time on the bridge signalling to her with
rockets and flashes; but no answer was received. He had, however, also
been on a rapid tour of inspection of the ship immediately after she had
struck. He went down to the steerage quarters forward and aft, and he
was also down in the deep forward compartment where the Post Office men
were working with the mails, and he had at that time found nothing
wrong, and his information contributed much to the sense