The Midnight Watch

by David Dyer

  ‘It was an American ship, really.’

  ‘Yes. But sunk by the British.’

  ‘I’m sure lots of Brits died, too.’

  ‘But not Ismay, not Ismay.’

  He ate his molasses. It seemed to calm him. He turned back to me. ‘Anyway, John. You’re not here because you’re worried about our reputation. Why are you here?’

  I hesitated.

  ‘Come on, John,’ Thomas said, rubbing his teeth with a fat thumb. ‘Don’t be shy. You want something, don’t you? Something strange. I know you.’

  ‘I want to be the first to see them – Astor, Butt, Guggenheim – I want to be the first.’

  ‘You mean, their bodies? Their poor frozen bodies?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Thomas smiled at me – a great, wide warm smile. ‘I should’ve guessed. You are a sick little man.’

  ‘We all have our … oddities, I suppose.’ I cast my eyes about the room. All those leather boxes! Thomas raised an eyebrow and I hurried quickly along. ‘You know about this ship? The Californian?’

  ‘Never seen it. But I know something of her captain. Leyland’s youngest, Stanley Lord – very keen, very reliable. He’s been a good man for us. But I wouldn’t get your hopes up. We haven’t heard a thing from him.’

  Thomas promised to send a boy to me the moment he had any news, and to make sure I was the first aboard when the ship arrived in Boston early Friday morning. ‘For you, John,’ he said, ‘I’d do anything.’

  I rose and left him. Outside, a gloomy dusk had drawn down. The edges of the Custom House Tower had softened and blurred and men were lighting the lamps of their automobiles. I stopped in at a cable office and sent my own message to the Californian. It was a simple one that required only a simple answer: ‘How many bodies of Titanic victims on board – men and women?’ I started towards my office but an impulse made me turn about and stroll instead down to Long Wharf. The startled cries of plovers and ospreys rose above the whispering harbour as I headed north along Atlantic Avenue to the tip of the peninsula. At last I reached Constitution Wharf, walking to the very end so that I felt as if I were in the harbour itself.

  I stood there to catch my breath, to light a cigarette, and to think. I thought of my wife Olive, and what she would make of all these chivalrous American millionaires, standing aside to let women into the lifeboats. I thought about President Taft, fat and sad and lonely, sending his Navy boats out to find the body of poor Archie, his most loyal friend. I thought of Bumpton, my rival, with his pencil sharpened and his active verbs at the ready, pushing through the crowds of reporters on the Cunard pier in New York, determined to be first to write a Thrilling Tale of Survival. I thought about what the city editor had said: ‘This is it for you, John. This is it.’ I thought about times and speeds and distances and hoped that, with a bit of luck, my ship would come in first, ahead of the Carpathia.

  But even as I thought these things, and wondered what to do next, the islands of the harbour began to disappear behind veils of mist. I heard the forlorn ringing of the channel buoys, but could no longer see their flashing lights. Curtains of vapour drifted through the masts of ships at the East Boston piers. I was watching the beginnings of a New England fog – a thick, dense grey that would glide in silently from the Atlantic over the coming days. It would envelope us all, causing automobiles to lose their way and babies to cry. But most importantly, it would slow the Californian.

  I stared out into the gloom and my thoughts became as dismal as the fog.

  Across the way were two vessels. One I recognised as the United States Revenue Cutter Winnisimmet: a hundred feet long with a single tall funnel atop a huge Babcock & Wilcox steam boiler and engine. Closer in, beneath the sagging timbers of the pier, was the Chelsea ferry herself, graceful but tired.

  As I looked at these vessels, an idea began to form in my mind. It was an audacious idea, quite daring, but if I was lucky it might just work. Follow my heart, the city editor had advised, and there would be my treasure also. I realised I had been thinking of things the wrong way around.

  CHAPTER 8

  ‘His pure tight skin was an excellent fit,’ Herbert Stone recited to himself as he slowly climbed the stairs at midday to begin his first watch since the disaster. He mouthed the words repeatedly as a sort of prayer, trying to keep at bay as best he could the troubling thoughts that had pressed in on him since his meetings with the captain and the chief officer. ‘And closely wrapped up in it, and embalmed with inner health and strength … Starbuck seemed prepared to endure for long ages to come, and to endure always…’ Step by step, word by word, he climbed towards the bridge. ‘Inner health and strength, inner health and strength…’

  When he got to the bridge there was bright air all around and the third officer stood by his side. Groves was still animated: he talked of the great disaster, of the Carpathia, which he had been the first to identify as the rescue ship, of the futile search for bodies, of the sparse and pathetic wreckage. ‘I still can’t believe what’s happened,’ he said. ‘I still can’t believe it. That ship of all ships, on her very first voyage.’

  The sun was at its zenith, high and white in a cloudless sky, and Stone saw no sign of field ice or bergs, only radiant blue water stretching to a sharp horizon. On the foredeck, crewmen painted handrails and laid out ropes for splicing.

  ‘Course is due west,’ said Groves. ‘No ships about. The water’s warmer – we’re in the Gulf Stream. No more ice.’

  Stone stood silently watching the seamen at their work. Groves lingered. ‘You all right, Second?’

  ‘The captain wants me to write it all down,’ Stone said, ‘in a letter addressed to him.’ He held up a thick pad of writing paper he had brought from his cabin. The cold wind flicked its pages. ‘I’m going to work on it during my watch.’

  Groves looked back at him wide-eyed, his large open face clear and bright. In the noon sun his brow seemed to shine as white as alabaster; it put Stone in mind of the marble cherubs in his local church, polished smooth by the daily caresses of loving parishioners. There was no dissembling in this man, or judgement either, just a pragmatic openness – an honesty and innocence that seemed to glow from within him with enough radiance to encompass them both.

  ‘What do you think I should write?’ Stone asked.

  ‘Just write the truth,’ Groves said. ‘Write down what you saw.’

  Just write the truth. It was the sort of powerful simplicity that had allowed Charlie Groves to bump along with the rich boys at Cambridge even though he himself was poor; that had given him the confidence to laugh openly at P&O passengers and their ridiculous white suits. Just write the truth. There was no calculus of morality for Charlie Groves. In his conception the truth was the surest guide to what was right. This was Groves’ peculiar gift, Stone supposed – to see simplicity where he himself could see only dense complexities.

  First among these complexities was the captain, his face all bronze and angular, telling him he could not have seen distress rockets, and second among them was Starbuck, driven by a loyalty more powerful than Groves’ truth.

  ‘But what did I see?’ Stone asked.

  ‘It was only last night,’ Groves said, almost smiling. ‘You must remember.’

  But Stone wasn’t sure what he remembered any more. He had thought of that midnight watch a hundred times since and every time it was different. When he tried to write it down, it changed yet again.

  ‘You saw her rockets,’ Groves continued, ‘you remember that, at least. You told me about them this morning – “Yes, old chap, I saw her rockets on my watch.” That’s what you said. It was your very first thought. So you can write that down for starters.’

  ‘But the captain says I didn’t see her rockets. He says they were too low and faint to be distress rockets.’

  ‘But he was asleep below. You were on the bridge. You saw them. What did you think they were?’

  ‘I called down to the captain about them.’

 
‘And what did he say?’

  ‘He told me to watch her.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘To Morse her.’

  ‘So you watched her and Morsed her.’

  ‘Yes. That’s what I did.’

  ‘Then that’s what you write.’

  Groves spoke as if he were stating a simple solution to a simple problem, but his face had darkened. His eyes disappeared into the shadow of his cap as he leaned forward and his lips were drawn tight between his teeth. He turned away, and Stone sensed exasperation – disgust, even. He suspected Groves was thinking that if he, Groves, had seen the rockets, he would have done more than watch and Morse. Stone had seen him leap into the water from a pier without a moment’s thought to rescue a woman’s parasol; he would think even less about waking the wireless operator in the middle of the night, or hauling the captain up to the bridge. ‘People expect to get woken up on ships,’ Groves had once told him. And each night, Stone knew, Groves woke Evans on his way down from his watch just to get the gossip.

  The standby quartermaster sounded the first bell of the watch. But still the third officer lingered. He seemed to be building up to something. When at last he spoke, he was tentative and thoughtful.

  ‘We all have to live with this, you know,’ he said. ‘You’re not the only one with this thing on his mind.’

  ‘But you have nothing to trouble yourself with.’

  ‘That’s not so. I could have saved everyone.’

  Stone looked at him in astonished silence.

  ‘I was in the wireless room,’ Groves continued. ‘I had the head-phones on. If I’d wound up the detector I would have heard her. She was calling for help by then. Sparks told me this morning that the detector had wound down.’ He paused, hanging his head. ‘Sparks has shown me before how to wind it. I knew how. I just didn’t notice.’

  Stone stared hard at him. For Groves there was a straightforward causation: if he had thought to wind up the machinery, he could have saved everyone. But the moral quality of that omission, Stone knew as he nervously clutched his notebook and searched his friend’s face for sympathy, was very different from that of his own. Groves had had no hint at all that anything was wrong, but he, Stone, had seen the rockets.

  When Groves at last left the bridge, Stone stood alone beneath the great canopy of the sky. There were no longer any men on the foredeck. The derrick booms were stowed, the decks were secured, life on the Californian had recovered its ordinary rhythm. He leaned against the forward bridge rail, rested his notebook on the steel ledge and began to write.

  * * *

  There was fire in the makeup of donkeyman Ernest Gill. His father was a blacksmith’s assistant, and as a child Ernie had played among the glowing forges of Sheffield as freely as other children might play among trees and meadows. He knew from the very beginning that his would be a tough life – every day his father told him so, and said, too, that with all these fires about they would never be far from hell. Ernie was fascinated by the red-hot iron and leaned as close as he dared when his father beat and shaped it with a hammer. ‘You see,’ his father used to say, ‘apply enough heat and anything will bend.’

  Ernie liked school. He had ideas, and when he spoke he found that other boys would gather to listen. A teacher taught him the Rule of Three, beginning with Caesar’s Veni, vidi, vici, which he used in varying forms whenever he could. His mother, a hard little stone of a woman who beat her husband with pebbly fists whenever he drank too much, claimed Ernie was destined for better things than the Sheffield forges, and helped him with his studies as best she could. But she died when he was eleven years old and he left school to earn what money he could. As an adolescent he worked for a glassblower, stoking the furnaces and cleaning away the ash. One day he picked up a flask that he thought had cooled but which in fact was white-hot. His skin sizzled and came away. When his hand finally heeled it was disfigured with unsightly lumps and scars, and never again could he fully open it.

  When his father died Ernie moved to Liverpool and got work in the engine rooms of ships. He was a trimmer and then a fireman, shovelling coal into boilers to keep up the steam. He was quick with his devil’s claw and slice-bar to rid the fires of ash and clinkers, and he had the hottest, cleanest burn of any fireman. By the time he signed on to the Californian he was ready for promotion. He was twenty-seven years old, newly engaged to a girl in Liverpool, and tired of shovelling coal. When, on his third voyage, he was made assistant donkeyman he put on a clean boilersuit to work closely with the gentlemanly engineers and had nothing more to do with coal.

  His new position, and the whiteness of his overalls, gave him a sense that, in his own humble way at least, he had become something of a leader of men. Which was why, early in the afternoon following the sinking of the Titanic, he called a special meeting in the focsle. He had seen something very strange during the night, he said, and something needed to be done about it.

  The focsle was a private place: it could not be seen from the bridge, and anyone approaching from the ’tween decks could be heard in advance opening and closing bulkhead doors. Gill sat on an upturned crate in an area between the forward stores and the men’s bunks, where half-casks and cotton-filled sacks lay about. The men drifted in one by one: the ordinary seamen and able-bodied seamen, the trimmers and firemen, the carpenter and the bosun’s mate. They talked among themselves rather than to Gill, but he didn’t care. They would listen to him soon enough. His news would shock them all.

  He sat tracing the lumps and scars of his right hand with the little finger of his left. The men spoke of the seals they had seen lazing on the iceberg, of the terrible news delivered by the Carpathia’s flags, of the futile search for bodies. Some said these must have been drawn down by the suction, others said they had been swept away by currents. Every sailor had become an expert, but they didn’t know what he knew.

  ‘We are a ship of shame,’ he said when everyone was there, and looked around to see if his words had taken hold. They hadn’t. The men continued their talk as if they had not heard him, so he stood up and stepped onto his upturned crate. ‘We are a ship of shame,’ he said again. ‘We saw her rockets and did not go.’

  The men looked at him and fell silent. One word had cut through.

  ‘Rockets?’ asked a trimmer.

  ‘Rockets,’ Gill repeated. ‘Distress rockets.’

  ‘Claptrap,’ said a seaman.

  ‘It’s true. I saw them myself. I went on deck for a smoke after my watch, and that’s when I saw them. The second officer couldn’t help but see them too. And I know he did see them because the apprentice told Sparks that he did, and Sparks told me.’

  The men stared at him.

  ‘The skipper was called but he didn’t come up. He just lay there and grumped and chewed the second out about it. And that’s why I’ve called this meeting. It isn’t right that a man should refuse a ship that calls for help. It isn’t right, and something ought to be done about it.’

  Gill watched the men closely. Coughin’ Kenny spluttered into his cotton wadding, which he held up to the light so the men could see the raspberry-red clots glistening with black dots of coaldust. Brennan, the bosun’s mate, surly and sour, mumbled something inaudible. But Fat Ballantyne asked Gill to go on.

  ‘And that’s why we didn’t find any bodies,’ he continued. ‘The skipper didn’t want to find any. He didn’t want to be dragging up corpses of people he was too lazy to save when they were living.’

  Gill felt a small artery pulsing in his temple and the scar on his hand throbbed. He sensed the power of his words; he saw now that every man was listening. He was triumphant, like a preacher who has just revealed a profound truth of scripture. The men began to ask questions – what the rockets looked like, what colour they were, how far away they seemed. Fat Ballantyne, heaving himself up on his matchstick-thin legs, asked why the captain, when called, did not go up to the bridge.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Gill. ‘He just didn’t, a
nd it isn’t right. It brings shame to the ship – it brings shame to us all.’ It was time, he sensed, for the Rule of Three. ‘He was called, he did nothing, and now it’s up to us.’ He paused for effect. ‘I vote we form a Committee of Protest to go to the captain – a Special Delegation – to go up and tell him that he isn’t going to get away with it.’ A few men nodded and there were some positive mutterings. He could see they were ready to follow him.

  But McGregor, the carpenter, sitting on a small wooden stool, lifted his head and said in a low, measured voice, ‘Go up to the captain and lose us all our jobs, you mean.’

  Gill had never before heard the carpenter speak a word: McGregor was man who kept to himself, took his soundings and did his woodwork. When he stood he was as tall as Gill was standing on his crate, and his skin was such a deep brown that Gill wondered whether he was an Englishman at all. And now, having found his voice, the carpenter didn’t stop. ‘The focsle shouldn’t be talking so against the captain,’ he went on, speaking without seeming to move his lips. ‘Nothing good will come of it.’ He fixed his eyes on each man and rested them finally on Gill. ‘That’s what’s making this ship shameful – your calling this meeting, your complaining and chattering. It’s mutiny talk – that’s what it is, pure and simple. If we were back in sail, you’d be hanging from the yardarm like washing in the breeze.’

  ‘Well, we’re not in sail,’ said Gill. ‘And a protest isn’t a mutiny.’

  ‘It is with this skipper. Say one word against him and he’ll have you off articles quicker than you can cry poor. And he might just clap you in irons in the meantime – you and any poor man you talk into coming with you in your Committee of Delegation, or whatever you call it.’

  ‘I’m not scared of the captain.’ Gill flung these words out to all the men, but the carpenter blocked them.