The Midnight Watch

by David Dyer

  A man’s own soul can be the very worst sort of prison, I supposed.

  At least, that was how I read the face in the framed photograph above my table as I drank my beer, waited for my train and thought about things. I am good at reading faces. ‘Show me a face and I’ll give you a story’ was my promise, and I almost always got it right. Often I could sum one up in a single word. For Harry Houdini, the handcuff king: trapped. For my wife, all those years ago in Venezuela: empty. For my daughter, who waited for me in Boston: life.

  But what word for Philip Albright Small Franklin, Vice President of the International Mercantile Marine? I drank a straight bourbon chaser, closed my eyes and conjured his face as I’d seen it in the freight office. I saw one thing very clearly: pride. Pride in his company, in his staff, in his ships, and especially in the Titanic. Or even more than pride – love, perhaps. But there was something else, too. His face began to appear before me in the finest detail, and I could see now the slight tightening of the lips, the almost imperceptible pulsing of the eyelids, the strange quiver of the tongue, the sweat that showed itself as a smooth sheen rather than collecting in drops. Shapes emerged, colours clarified, and I knew what I was seeing. I had another word for Philip Franklin: fear.

  Philip Franklin, that great empire of a man, the tycoon of American shipping, was afraid.

  ‘Waiting for a hooker?’

  Dan Byrne slid into the chair next to mine. He wore the same stale overcoat he’d been wearing when I was in New York a year ago. He was smoking a cigarette and he exhaled the smoke directly into my face.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve just had one.’

  Byrne smiled. ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Your mother was in fine form, as always.’

  Byrne gave a violent, snorting laugh and dropped his cigarette. He picked it up, snubbed it out, and lit another. ‘I’ve come to get you,’ he said. ‘You’re leaving too soon. Everybody’s rushing down to number 9. Franklin’s about to say something big.’

  I finished off my bourbon. ‘Something big?’

  ‘That’s the rumour,’ Byrne said.

  I stood up and breathed deeply, trying to sharpen my thinking. Byrne helped me steady myself as we left the station saloon and wandered south. Broadway was clogged with automobiles. Women, I could see, had come straight from the opera to White Star in black and silver furs. Police lurched perilously on horseback and a gasoline dynamo had been placed in the middle of Bowling Green Park to electrify a temporary instalment of large light globes. Police standing guard made announcements through megaphones: there was no access to the White Star offices at the current time; information was available at Times Square on the New York Times bulletin boards.

  ‘I’ve heard,’ Byrne said in my ear, ‘that there are more than four thousand people up there.’

  This, I thought, was turning out to be quite a story.

  Byrne’s maxim was ‘Lie to police whenever there is chaos’, so we told the policemen at the great revolving door that we were Mr Burlingham and Mr Underwood – Mr Franklin’s lawyers, no less – whom he had called upon urgently. No, we did not have our cards because we had come direct from our restaurant. The police seemed not to believe us, but they let us in anyway. Perhaps they had their own maxim: ‘Whenever there is chaos, let in the press.’

  The passenger and general offices of the International Mercantile Marine were even more crowded than they had been in the afternoon. The radiator cocks were fully open and the rooms were stuffy and hot. Women standing in queues fanned themselves with theatre programs. A rack of hooks had come free of a hallway wall and coats lay in a heap like a giant dead animal. In the freight office reporters jostled for space. They had become dishevelled, unruly and impatient. Deadlines for the next morning’s editions loomed but nobody could file – not if ‘something big’ was in the wind.

  ‘Follow me,’ I said to Byrne as I walked past the freight office to the elevators at the end of the hallway. I pushed on an adjacent door and we slipped into a stairwell. In a moment we were in the second-floor general offices. It was after seven o’clock but there were people everywhere: telephonists, stenographers, bookkeepers, clerks. We walked straight to Philip Franklin’s office, a large room separated from the general offices by frosted glass. Two cable boys stood waiting outside the door, fiddling with their caps. We knocked and a voice from inside invited us to enter.

  The office was enormous. Franklin sat at a great mahogany desk, flanked on either side by two men I recognised as Frederick Ridgeway, Head of Steamships, and Frederick Toppin, Assistant to the Vice President. Toppin saw at once that we were press and demanded we leave. He walked towards us, placing himself between us and Franklin’s desk, as if he thought we might try to lunge at the man. But Franklin called him back. ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Just wait.’ His face was drawn, his eyes red. ‘Let them stay. In fact, go down and get the others – tell them that I will see them here, in this office.’

  Toppin set off on his errand, and as we waited for him to return I thought about all that I had read of Franklin – of his beginnings as an eager office boy in Baltimore, his rapid rise to become the ‘ablest shipping executive on the Atlantic seaboard’, his ‘positive genius in the handling of difficult situations’, his unwavering loyalty to John Pierpont Morgan in that man’s battle against Cunard and quest to dominate the North Atlantic. On the wall behind Franklin were hung perhaps twenty photographs of IMM ships, in neat rows in gilded frames, each with a small brass name plaque – Atlantic Line ships, Leyland Line ships, Dominion Line ships, and others. To the far right were the White Star ships: the Baltic, the Cedric, the Majestic, the Olympic. As I looked at Franklin sitting at his desk, framed by these photographs, I knew what the ‘something big’ was. I knew it absolutely. I was staggered by its immensity and took a step backwards. Byrne propped me up.

  I knew, too, why Franklin wanted the press to come to his office for the announcement. When he said what he had to say he wanted to be backed by his precious ships, like a man surrounded by his family.

  I noticed for the first time that he was holding in his hand a Marconigram. He stretched it tight between his hands, perhaps to keep it steady, perhaps to help him focus when the time came to read it. I could see a pattern of tiny printed words in blue ink. The fragile yellow paper seemed about to tear.

  ‘Mr Steadman, isn’t it?’ Franklin said softly, looking up at me with tired eyes as we waited for his assistant to return.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You were here for the Cedric?’

  ‘Yes. And the Republic.’

  ‘And the Triangle fire, too?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It affected us all, you know. The fire. All those girls. What you wrote.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘What you found out, I mean.’ Franklin looked away, as if troubled by his memories. ‘It affected us – here. We take great care…’ He gave a gentle nod of his head towards the office outside, to the office girls, the clerks. But I knew he meant more than that: he meant his ships. He took great care with his ships. He was telling me he was no Max Blanck.

  There was noise and bustle. Toppin reappeared and ushered in the reporters, yelling orders, trying to control them. There were men from Associated Press, Reuters, The New York Times, the New York Tribune, The Evening Sun, and others. There must have been at least twenty men in the room. One knocked over an Egyptian statuette that cluttered to the floor and broke into two pieces, and another slipped on a pile of papers. Many tapped the ash from their cigarettes directly onto the carpet. The reporters were excited; they smelled of body odour and damp wool.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ Franklin said in a low voice without getting up. ‘With the greatest sadness, I am going to read to you a message I have from Captain Haddock of the Olympic, the Titanic’s sister ship. It is, you understand, a confirmed message.’ There was instant silence. The reporters in the room lifted their pencils to their notebooks.

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p; Franklin began to read in a flat, clear voice. ‘“Six-thirty a.m. Carpathia reached Titanic’s position at daybreak. Found boats and wreckage only. Titanic had foundered about 2.20 a.m. —’ He did not have a chance to finish. Five or six men rushed from the room. That the Titanic had sunk was enough for them. Franklin waited, and then began again. ‘“The Titanic had foundered about 2.20 a.m. in 41 degrees 46 minutes north, 50 degrees 14 minutes west. All her boats accounted for. About 675 souls saved, crew and passengers, latter nearly all women and children. Leyland Line SS Californian remaining and searching position of disaster. Carpathia returning to New York with survivors. Please inform Cunard. Signed, Captain Haddock, Olympic.”’

  Franklin looked up. ‘That is the message. I do not have a list of those who have been saved. I am trying to get that just as soon as possible.’ He gave a quick nod to invite questions.

  ‘Has Mr Astor been saved?’

  ‘I do not have a list of those who have been saved,’ repeated Franklin.

  ‘Mr Guggenheim?’

  ‘I do not have a list —’

  ‘What of Major Butt? Have you spoken to the President?’

  ‘I have not spoken to the President.’

  ‘But what about Mr Ismay?’

  ‘I have not heard from Mr Ismay.’

  The questioning continued. Franklin seemed distant and disconnected. One reporter asked whether he might see the Olympic Marconigram for himself. It was then I noticed that Franklin had not let it go. It was still taut between his hands, perfectly steady.

  Franklin refused. It was the only copy he had; he would keep it, but he would read it again if the reporter liked. The reporter, with his pencil poised, said that he would be grateful.

  Franklin began to read again but as he did so his voice cracked, then broke. His eyes watered, so that drops fell onto the yellow paper of the Marconigram and spread in little lily pads of blue ink. When he reached the words ‘latter nearly all women and children’, he could not go on. He wept freely and openly, as if some force, suppressed for too long, had finally broken free. Great heaving sobs shook his frame and there was an immensity about him, as if he were crying not just for the many hundreds of people who had died on his ship, but for all America, and all Great Britain.

  No one in the room spoke. I watched Franklin’s face, transfixed. I saw something reborn, something washed clean, something breathtakingly honest. In one word, I saw courage: the courage to face the world anew, courage to stare down the truth. ‘The Titanic,’ he said at last, his sobs subsiding, ‘has gone.’

  The remaining reporters, their own eyes wet, straggled away. Byrne whispered to me that it was time for us to leave, too. But before we did I had a question.

  ‘Mr Franklin,’ I asked, ‘the cablegram you read says the Leyland ship Californian is searching the position of the disaster. Does that mean that there might yet be other survivors?’

  Franklin stared at me: such deep blue eyes. ‘No,’ he said. ‘The only survivors are on the Carpathia. This we know.’

  ‘So the Californian is searching for the dead?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where is she bound?’

  Franklin looked to Ridgeway, Head of Steamships, standing to his right.

  ‘Boston,’ said Ridgeway.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  Byrne and I left the room, and the IMM offices, and walked out once more into the cold Manhattan evening. I held Byrne by the shoulders and thanked him. When I told him I was going to the train station he was puzzled: why not stay in Manhattan to get the survivors’ stories when they arrived?

  ‘I will leave the survivors to you,’ I said. ‘I’m going home to the bodies.’ I turned and began my slow walk north along Broadway.

  CHAPTER 6

  ‘To Lord: I am taking the survivors to New York. Please stay in the vicinity and pick up any bodies. Rostron.’

  Cyril Evans held the message tight in his small, dirty hands. Pick up bodies? This was an important message – direct from the captain of the Carpathia to the captain of his own ship – but he did not rush it to the bridge. It was not what he had expected. For a moment he sat at his desk and thought.

  It had been the morning of his life. These hours and minutes had been the reason he’d studied so hard at the Marconi school. The Californian had been closest to the scene of the rescue, and in the cacophony of crisscrossing signals, all on the same frequency, operators were obliged to listen to him first. ‘We are at the Carpathia now,’ he tapped out to the world the moment his ship arrived at the scene. ‘I can see her taking up the boats. She is only a mile away. Titanic foundered about two a.m.’ Evans had wound the magnetic detector as tight as it would go; he had tapped at his Morse key with frantic energy. Inspector Balfour on the nearby Baltic asked him again to keep quiet and keep out, but this time Evans kept going. He had precedence. He took scribbled notes of what has happening, hoping that when the Californian arrived in Boston the newspapers would ask him all about it. This was his chance to become a hero, just like Jack Binns.

  But then this message about picking up bodies. It gave him pause. He did not know what notes to make. No one would want to hear about bodies. As he smoothed the yellow Marconi paper, smudging its pencilled letters, he began to imagine them coming aboard, hauled up at the end of a hook by the ship’s derricks, wet and bloated, to be laid out on the foredeck hatches. Would the captain then bury them at sea? No, he thought, it would be pointless to pull them up only to send them back again. But how would they be stored? Would the rich, perhaps, be laid out in the empty passenger cabins, amid the satinwood and teak and woollen quilts? And the poor lie on ice on the rough wooden pallets of the ’tween decks? Jack Binns had never spoken of cargo hooks or refrigeration, or faces twisted in death.

  Evans wanted to screw up the Marconigram and throw it into the sea. But he knew he must not. He put on his coat and took it up to the bridge.

  * * *

  Herbert Stone knew something of what it was like to drown – or at least to gasp for air and to suffocate. Once, as a young boy, he had tried to please his father by taking hay to their cattle. But he was forgetful and left a gate open, so that a calf escaped and drowned in a bog. As punishment, his father took him into his workroom, a small space cluttered with splintered wood and tools and animal skins, and struck him hard across the face. Blood rose hot in Herbert’s cheeks and tears burned his eyes. When he could not stop his sobs, his father stuffed his mouth with a turpentine-soaked rag, whispering in his ear as he did so, ‘What are you? A girl?’ Mucus bubbled and blocked his nose; he was not able to breathe. He struggled and tried to cry out, but his father held the rag even tighter in his mouth so that he ‘would know how the drowned calf felt’. Herbert punched and struck with his arms but he could not break free and he thought he must die. But at last he made himself still and quiet, and, desperate for air, locked his wide unblinking eyes onto his father’s. In his mind he begged his father to stop. He imagined the word ‘sorry’ passing from him to his father. He concentrated; he willed the word through. And at last the rag was removed. As he gulped in air – cool, soothing, wonderful air – his father enfolded him in his arms and rocked him gently. ‘My dear, dear son,’ his father said. ‘See? You’re a good boy, really.’

  Years later, as a junior apprentice, he had been forced to share a cabin with a senior boy who was fierce and cruel. Between them they were assigned only one bucket of wash water per day. The senior boy would use it first then pass it on to Herbert. One day, before passing on the bucket, the older boy urinated in it. Herbert refused to take it. In an instant his arms were pinned behind his back and his head forced deep into the filthy water. He writhed and panicked, but the more he struggled, the more tightly his head was held down. His chest tried to draw in air, but he fought it, keeping his mouth firmly shut. And then, just as he had in his father’s workroom, he willed himself to be still. He waited, with his head in the bucket, perfectly still, until at last he was pulled free.
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br />   When Stone told these things to the third officer, standing with him at the rail as their ship searched for the dead, Groves said, ‘But you know, none of the people from the Titanic will have drowned.’

  Stone turned to him. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘On P&O ships there were always enough lifejackets for everyone, and if there was any sort of emergency, the first thing they said was “Put on your lifejackets!” And you can’t drown with a lifejacket on so they will have died of the cold.’ Stone wished Groves would stop talking, but the young man went on. ‘Hypothermia,’ he said, ‘is what they call it. I learned all about it. Did you know, water sucks heat from your body thirty times faster than air? But they say it’s not such a bad way to die. After a while you just feel a bit tired, then you stop shivering, and by the end you feel quite warm. Then you fall asleep.’

  Stone stared at him. The third officer, he realised, was trying to comfort him, to offer some small twig of consolation. Don’t worry about the fifteen hundred who died, he was saying, because they did not gasp desperately for air, but quietly fell asleep. Stone wondered whether the third officer knew just how tiny and withered that twig was.

  But either way, frozen or drowned, where were the bodies?

  In the water around him, Stone could see none. He could see the pretty Carpathia, less than a mile away, her white accommodation glittering and flashing in the sun, and her passengers lining the rails and waving at him as if they were daytrippers on a picnic steamer. He could see, in the vibrantly blue water between the rescue ship and his own, some debris: a piece of rope, an oar, a lifejacket, a woman’s shawl spreading silently on the water. Closer inboard was a small lifeboat whose canvas sides had collapsed so that the frigid water lapped freely over a sodden suitcase jammed between the thwarts. So little wreckage, he thought, for such a large ship.