The Midnight Watch

by David Dyer

  ‘Because Mr Groves —’

  ‘Forget about Mr Groves,’ the captain interrupted. ‘You know that I saw her myself, Mr Stone? You remember we stood at the rail together, looking at her? She was too dark, much too dark, to be a passenger steamer, let alone the largest steamer in the world. You can never mistake a ship like that, Mr Stone. Never.’ The captain’s tone was peculiar. Stone did not know whether he was commanding him or pleading with him. The tiny yellow flame of the oil lamp flickered and faltered, as if a ghost had passed. The pipe smoke hung heavy and still.

  ‘Now, you said something about a rocket?’

  ‘Eight rockets,’ Stone said. ‘I counted them. The apprentice saw some of them too.’

  ‘Never mind about the apprentice.’

  Stone stared at the floor. ‘Then we saw two or three more later on – at the end of our watch – low, and faint, and further along the horizon, towards the southwest.’

  ‘Further along, you say,’ said the captain. ‘That means her bearing changed. She was steaming along, then.’ He tapped the ash from his pipe into a small china dish. ‘You said these … rockets were low and faint?’

  ‘The later ones were.’

  ‘Did you hear any explosions?’

  Stone shook his head.

  ‘Then they couldn’t really have been distress rockets, could they?’

  ‘I don’t know. The early ones – the eight – were just white rockets and the later ones were sort of lower.’

  ‘And faint, you said. Low and faint. So they might have been hand flares. Or company signals. Or burning oil rags. Or fishing lights. Or anything.’

  Stone was silent. He rubbed his stinging eyes in gentle circles with the palms of his hands.

  ‘Then we are agreed,’ the captain said, still tapping ash from his pipe. ‘There is nothing whatsoever to worry about. We have a small steamer, close to us, showing flares or company signals, or some such thing, and then steaming away. That is what we have.’

  He stopped tapping. Still Stone said nothing.

  ‘Mr Stone?’ the captain pressed, holding his pipe perfectly steady. ‘Do you agree? That is what we have?’

  Stone hesitated. He had another reason in his mind why the ship he saw during the midnight watch looked the way she did. Charlie Groves had suggested it: as she tried to avoid her iceberg, she’d turned towards the north and shown them her dark bow. So Stone had seen only her masthead light, not her blazing deck lights, and that was why she looked like a small steamer. And she had disappeared halfway through his watch not because she’d steamed away, but because she’d sunk. And the rockets he saw later in the watch were low and faint and in a different position because they came from another ship altogether, the distant Carpathia, steaming up from the southeast and firing rockets to guide lifeboats to her.

  ‘But Mr Groves,’ Stone said, ‘thinks they were the Titanic’s distress rockets —’

  He did not finish his sentence because the captain, in one swift and surprising movement, had thrown his pipe against the back of the cabin door. There was a loud crack as it bounced off and fell to the floor. The captain leaned close. ‘As I told you, never mind what Mr Groves thinks.’ There was a strange, cold calm to his voice; a deepening, hardening tone. Stone watched the badge of his cap, which he wore even in this private dark room, flicker gold in the frail light of the oil lamp. ‘You must try to do yourself justice,’ the captain continued. ‘You are the second officer. You were in charge of the watch. Now, if you thought you saw distress rockets, would you not have come down and got me out yourself? You would not have stood by and done nothing? Is that what you want me to understand? That you saw distress rockets and stayed on the bridge and did nothing?’

  Stone felt his cheeks flush with blood, but he met his captain’s gaze as steadily as he could. ‘But I did do something,’ he said. ‘I told you.’

  ‘Oh God give me patience,’ the captain said. ‘We are back where we started.’

  * * *

  In his own cabin, Stone sat at his desk and tried to steady his breathing. Captain Lord would write to the company about him; he would certainly lose his berth and he might never get another. He imagined himself standing before his wife, humiliated, telling her they would have to give up their home and move back to her mother’s house. He saw his father, too, scoffing and snorting and spitting at the ground, saying, ‘You should have become a schoolmistress after all.’

  He took Moby-Dick from the shelf and leafed through its pages. As a boy he had not understood all of the novel’s strange symbolic prose, but the illustrations had always whispered magical things to him. Now he looked at them again. They were fantastical drawings in black ink. Lines crisscrossed to make light and shade, and images of celestial luminescence emerged from zones of blackness as if drawn in starlight. There was the Pequod, her sails full and translucent, all alone on a dark, dark sea; there was shiny black Queequeg hanging from the iron links of an anchor chain; and there was the white whale, bursting forth from the sea into the pure element of air in a great fountain of light, as if the tonnage of its body were born aloft by the light itself. This last picture was called ‘The Whale Transcendent’. And there, at the end of the book, was a picture of that same whale with harpoons deep in its flesh, blood pouring out in a torrent of black ink, dragging the captain downwards by a harpoon line caught around his neck like an inverted noose, his mouth and eyes – three black circles – wide open in surprise at death.

  But there was one image that caught Stone’s imagination most of all. It was a picture of Starbuck, the captain’s chief officer and unfailing ally, standing before the mainmast with his head hanging low, his face buried in one hand. His other arm was outstretched, palm forwards, fingers splayed, like Jesus’ hand being readied for the cross. Behind him was the great thick spar of the mainmast, half in shadow, half in light, and etched from the black ink of the sky were delicate white streaks, converging upwards, meeting at a point above the frame of the image. Stone had never known whether these glowing white lines were the rigging of the ship or the paths of stars streaking heavenwards. To him it was the most tragic illustration in the book: Starbuck weeping in despair. Stone had always thought he was weeping for Captain Ahab, whom he loved and for whom he would soon give his life. But now, when Stone looked again, he realised that for all these years he had been wrong. Starbuck was not weeping for the captain, he was weeping for the whale itself. He felt sorry for that whale – the innocent whale, ‘The Whale Transcendent’.

  And yet even though Starbuck cried for the whale, and knew that it was one of the great wronged creatures of the earth, hunted mercilessly by a demonic and vengeful captain, still he lowered his longboat into the sea; still he followed his monomaniacal captain into death. ‘Oh what quality of loyalty is that!’ Stone whispered to himself.

  His thoughts were interrupted by a sharp knock at his cabin door. The chief officer stepped in, holding a cap in his hand. ‘This is yours,’ Stewart said, placing it on Stone’s desk. ‘You left it in the captain’s cabin.’ Stone thanked him, but the chief lingered. He was a small man, with narrow cheeks and a great iron bar of a moustache. He said very little but every word he uttered had a leaden weight. Stone knew he’d once saved the life of a giggling steward by pulling him clear of an untethered derrick block that had come flying through the air like a cannonball. The chief had said only one word, ‘Lucky,’ and then walked away. He was a man of solid strength and sturdy seamanship and the captain, Stone knew, trusted him absolutely.

  ‘Captain Lord has told me,’ the chief said, ‘about the small steamer that came up during your watch and showed a flare.’

  ‘Yes,’ Stone said. ‘The small steamer. A flare.’

  Stewart picked up Stone’s cap again, turning it slowly in his hands, as if examining a mysterious object. ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘But whatever it was you saw, let me say this: no one knows about it, other than we officers and the wireless boy.’

  Stone waited.
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  ‘Unless you have told anyone?’ the chief asked.

  ‘I have not.’

  ‘Then there is nothing at all to worry about.’ The chief used his own shirtsleeve to polish the glossy black visor of Stone’s cap and the golden leaves of its emblem. Stone sat still as the chief reached out and placed the cap gently on his head, pulling it snugly down. ‘You see? It fits just perfectly,’ the chief said. ‘You’re a good officer, really, loyal and true.’

  CHAPTER 7

  ‘You’d better be damned sure there are bodies on that boat.’

  I had never liked Krupp. The Boston American’s city editor had tufts of reddish hair sprouting from his nose and ears, and his face was as narrow as a rat’s. His reporters hated him but he didn’t care. Sent up from New York, he was Hearst’s man and he was doing Hearst’s work here in Boston. He had doubled the paper’s circulation in a year or two; on some days it exceeded two hundred thousand. When I once begged a deferral of a deadline so I could be sure of the truth, he told me I was old-fashioned. Journalism wasn’t about truth, he said, it was about money: ‘Look to where your treasure is; there shall be your heart also.’ When I protested that even over at the outrageously yellow Journal the men followed Pulitzer’s three golden words – ‘accuracy, accuracy, accuracy!’ – Krupp said I should apply for a job there. I could be accurate and poor. The only three words he cared about, he added, red-faced, not bothering to suppress his flatulence, were cir-cu-lation.

  ‘There are bodies,’ I said, trying not to look at him, tired of the battles we had every time we spoke these days. ‘I know there are.’

  ‘How do you know?’ he asked.

  ‘Franklin told me.’

  He gave a quick snort. ‘The same Franklin who told you his ship was steaming in glory to Halifax?’

  ‘I’ll double-check. I’ll confirm it today.’

  ‘You’d better.’

  In fact, I had already confirmed it: that very morning I’d heard from the local office of the United Press that the Californian was on the scene searching for bodies, and would bring them to Boston. My information, I was confident, was good.

  ‘You know,’ Krupp continued, ‘I don’t know why you didn’t stay in New York. It would have been easier.’

  ‘You sent Bumpton.’

  ‘This is a big enough story for two.’

  ‘The bodies are coming here. And they, after all, are why this story matters.’

  ‘You and your bodies! It was fine at first, but now … I don’t think anyone wants to read about them any more.’

  ‘They will.’

  ‘It’s ghoulish.’

  I expected nothing more from a man who understood only money. I was never disrespectful to the dead: how could I be, having once gazed on the lifeless body of my own baby son? Krupp seemed to have forgotten my work on the Shirtwaist girls. I gave those girls a voice and returned them to world of the living. Dead bodies are gone too soon in this country. People never look long enough upon a corpse, and whenever they do look they see only a blank nothingness, or otherwise a fearful vision of their own future. I don’t see these things – I see a very great richness in the present. It takes courage to look upon the dead. It’s not ghoulish.

  ‘And John,’ Krupp added, rising behind his desk to let me know I was dismissed, ‘try to get some big names this time. Enough of your ordinary-people stories.’

  I was about to protest but he held up his hand. ‘Just get me a story. A big story. This is it for you, John. This is it.’

  Minutes later I was on the long-distance telephone to Dan Byrne in Manhattan. His voice was crackly, rising and falling in volume because of some problem with the voltage, but I could hear his excitement. The Titanic was definitely on the bottom; Franklin’s luxury train to Halifax had been cancelled; there were no survivors other than the seven hundred or so on the Carpathia, which was due in New York some time late Thursday. The loss of life was appalling: at least fifteen hundred were dead. The whole city was on edge. Everybody was blaming the British. It was a British ship with a British captain and a British head of the line who had somehow found his way into a lifeboat. There was to be an immediate inquiry into the whole affair by a United States Senate committee. Everyone would be subpoenaed. The President was inconsolable because his dear friend Archie Butt was not on the list of the saved.

  ‘He’s sent out two Navy boats,’ Byrne said.

  ‘Out where?’

  ‘Out! Out into the Atlantic – to intercept the Carpathia, to go to the wreck site if she has to. Anything to find Archie.’

  Other famous men were not on the list: John Astor, Ben Guggenheim, Isidor Straus, William Stead, Jack Thayer. It was difficult to believe that such men were dead – on ice in the hold of a nothing steamer tramping its way to my home city. I was right to come to Boston. My editor would get his big names.

  But I had to get to them first. I had to stake out the territory of my story before others got to it. I needed the Californian to reach Boston before the Carpathia berthed in New York, and I needed to be first into her icy holds.

  I left my office and wandered north along Washington Street. In this part of the city the streets are narrow and crooked, a maze of old cow paths and Indian trails, and the tall granite buildings press in dark and close. But on this Tuesday afternoon in mid-April there seemed to be a certain opening up of spaces around corners that I had forgotten, and new dashes of colour where magnolia and lilac blossoms lay in steamy drains. Spring had come to Boston. The marathon was only days away, swan boats paddled in the Public Garden ponds, and people strolled the streets without their greatcoats.

  As I turned down State Street and neared the monolithic India Building of the International Mercantile Marine I saw that, as in New York, a crowd had gathered – men’s black bowlers and women’s feathered hats bobbed in nervous clumps; pressmen stood together silently smoking cigarettes. Temporary newsstands had been erected on the sidewalks and young boys adjusted cover sheets displaying sombre headlines. TITANIC SINKS, 1500 DIE, said The Boston Daily Globe. The Boston Evening Transcript had scooped the other papers by publishing a tentative list of the saved, which was being scrutinised by hundreds of the gathered. A FEW MASSACHUSETTS PEOPLE ACCOUNTED FOR was the headline. Boston was bracing itself for its share of the dead.

  My own paper was simplest of all: NO HOPE LEFT.

  There were no mounted police here to keep control, as there had been in New York. Boston’s grief was of the quiet kind. The stoicism of the puritan pilgrims seemed still to hover in these streets.

  I pushed my way through the silent crowds to the IMM reception desk. A moment later Jack Thomas, IMM’s Boston agent, led me along a narrow hallway to his office at the back of the building.

  ‘I knew you’d come, old boy,’ he said, inviting me to sit next to him on a large leather couch. ‘I knew you’d come.’

  Jack Thomas was fat, much fatter than Franklin, and his body ebbed and flowed next to mine with a wheezy fluidity. He leered at me with tiny eyes set in a puffy face and his breath smelled of the sulphurous blackstrap molasses he ate throughout the day. There were leather boxes stacked against the walls; some of them, I knew, contained illicit photographs stuffed into crumpled envelopes. I knew more than I wished to know about Jack Thomas. Our fathers had been good friends, and some years ago my father asked me to help Jack in relation to an incident involving an Italian sailor, a bowl of fruit and a hidden Brownie camera. It had all been a trap, of course, the sailor turning out to be the son of a member of Watch and Ward’s vice brigade. But fate is fickle, and it also turned out that I knew something of that particular member from a story I’d once written about the young prostitutes of North Street. So the Brownie photograph was delivered up, nothing more was said, and Thomas had been very grateful ever since.

  ‘You’ve been busy?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, the people come and the people go. They want to know whether so-and-so is on the list or isn’t on the list. I just show them the Tra
nscript. I know nothing more than that. I give them a free copy and send them on their way.’

  ‘That’s very generous of you.’

  Thomas looked at me with half a smile. ‘Well, it is a three-cent newspaper, you know. Not the penny trash you peddle.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  ‘This whole thing – it’s a terrible tragedy.’

  ‘Oh, come, come. I don’t want hysterics from you, John, of all people. These things happen.’

  These things happen? I thought of the fifteen hundred dead, and Philip Franklin’s heaving sobs of yesterday, the immensity of his shock and grief. This man sitting next to me really was something special.

  ‘I’ll tell you what is disturbing, though,’ Thomas continued. ‘Morgan was almost on board. Morgan! New York tells me he changed his mind at the last minute. Can you imagine?’

  ‘Lucky for him.’

  ‘Why yes, and lucky for Ismay too.’

  I looked at him, not knowing what he meant.

  ‘Morgan wouldn’t have let him slink away in a lifeboat,’ Thomas explained. ‘Oh no. Absolutely not. He would have made him stand by his side, straight and tall, and Astor, Butt, Guggenheim, too – all of them. “Sorry, old boys,” he would have said, “the game is up. We’ve drawn a bad hand, so you might as well stop your whimpering, Ismay.”’ Thomas broke into laughter. ‘That’s what he would have said.’

  ‘So you think Ismay should have died for the company?’

  ‘Of course!’ Thomas became suddenly serious, tapping the newspaper on his lap with a violent finger. ‘Of course. It is a catastrophe for us that he saved himself. There are women missing from this list, you know. First-class women! Look —’ Thomas thrust the newspaper at me, pointing. ‘His is the only name listed under “I”. The only one. Ismay. President of the International Mercantile Marine. J. P. Morgan’s main man.’ Thomas heaved himself to his feet, wheezing and gasping, and helped himself to a spoonful of molasses from a sticky glass jar on his desk. ‘This is not good for us, John. Not good. All those American millionaires – Morgan’s friends – all dead. You know Senator Smith, down in Washington? He’s already turning this into America versus Britain. It’s the Tea Party all over again.’