The Midnight Watch (10 page)
‘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
Transcript.
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.’
‘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.
‘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.’
