The Midnight Watch (24 page)

I ordered more bourbon and asked more questions. I felt I was getting nearer to him, that I was following well enough my daughter’s advice to ‘find out what sort of man he is’. Behind the cover of my disguise I began to feel the full power of his charm. How different this man was to that trapped, defiant figure in the
Californian
’s chartroom! Attack him and he hardens, I thought; flatter him gently and he opens up like one of those giant exotic plants that turn their fronds ever so slowly to the sun.

I drank my drink and dabbed at my lips, wondering how I might bring him round to talking about his officers. In what ways had steam made them soft? Did he have anyone in particular in mind? But then I looked with horror at my napkin. Sitting in it was my moustache. I tried quickly to replace it but I was too late. Lord reached forward and took off my glasses.

‘You are the newspaper man!’ he said. ‘From Boston.’

I nodded, peeling away my false beard. I was embarrassed, but also a little relieved.

‘I ought to have known,’ he said tiredly. ‘You Americans have no manners and no honour. None at all.’

I met his gaze and waited. I tried to see what was
beneath.
He seemed, suddenly, to be young. I thought for a moment that he might say something more; that he wanted, perhaps, to tell me everything. ‘I can help you, you know,’ I said as gently as I could. ‘I will write whatever you want me to write.’

He leaned closer. His hand moved a little, as if to reach out to shake mine. His eyes were red. I don’t think he’d slept for days. ‘I do not know whose interests you serve,’ he said in a harsh whisper, ‘or why you hound me as you do, but I will say not one more word to you.’ He stood up, his supper half finished, and walked away down the aisle.

The train rattled and swayed, and as Lord closed the carriage door behind him, I thought for some reason of the
Bremen
and all that she had seen, and I felt a soft glow of anger. I may be an American, without manners or honour, but I knew exactly whose interests I served.

For a time, as I sipped bourbon and watched the silvery landscape slip by outside, I wondered why Lord hadn’t found any bodies. In my indignant mood I wondered whether he’d searched for them at all. He said he had, but was he lying about that too, just as he was lying about the rockets? It was a conundrum, but the solution came as I sat alone in that dining car rattling south to Washington. Knowing I wouldn’t sleep, I gathered up some newspapers from the central vestibule and surrounding seats. I read about the evidence given so far in the inquiry, including Mr Boxhall’s account of his firing of rockets. They ‘go right up into the air and they throw stars,’ he’d said. But it was a small article buried deep that gave me the clue I needed. A bedroom steward had told the senators in Washington how, after the
Titanic
sank, the passengers in his lifeboat rowed towards the lights of a ship. ‘We kept pulling and pulling until daybreak,’ he explained. ‘Then we saw the
Carpathia
coming up, and we turned around and came back to her.’ I soon found similar reports in other papers: lifeboats trying to reach a light during the night hours, and turning around only when the
Carpathia
arrived at dawn.

I ought to have thought of it earlier: once the
Titanic
sank, her lifeboats had rowed towards the
Californian
, so that stroke by stroke a gap opened up between them and the silent, floating dead. At dawn, the
Carpathia
made her way to these lifeboats, and the
Californian
made her way to the
Carpathia
. Lord saw no bodies because he was never at the wreck site. It was simple, really. And when I checked my notes of what Cyril Evans had told me, I saw that the wreckage he described – an oar, a lifejacket, a shawl – could easily have come from the lifeboats, not the ship.

But even if I knew why Lord had not found the
Titanic
’s dead, I was no closer to knowing why he hadn’t gone to them while they were yet living. This, I hoped as the new day approached, was just what the Washington senators would find out.

*   *   *

I worried a little for Lord when he said that we Americans have no manners and no honour. I hoped he wouldn’t say such things to the grand senators of Washington.

The British had, after all, set the city alight during the War of 1812 – an act of monstrous petulance – and every Washington schoolchild knew the cry of the invading British commander: ‘I will make a cow pasture of these Yankee Capitol grounds!’ It might have all been a hundred years ago, but the ashes of the White House, the Capitol Building and the Treasury could still be tasted on the wind from time to time. And now this: a British ship with a British captain driven recklessly to her doom so that Washington’s best men were drowned. Clarence Moore, master of the Chevy Chase hunt, was dead, and President Taft’s sorrow for Archibald Butt was that of a bereaved brother. He was said to wander the White House in tears, asking to be left alone.

The
Titanic
’s officers had been spat upon when they got off the train at Union Station. None of them had come voluntarily – they had all been subpoenaed. They pushed out their chests, clenched their fists and fought back. ‘We welcome this inquiry,’ fifth officer Harry Lowe had said, ‘but you Americans got up against us, and now we Britishers are up against you, and we shall see how it comes out!’ I laughed when I read this in the newspapers. Mr Lowe seemed intent on making a cow pasture of the Capitol grounds all over again.

But Washington is an unyielding, indestructible sort of place – all that marble, all those hard, bright edges, all that whiteness
– and as I say, I worried a little for Captain Lord. He seemed vulnerable as he stood in the main hall of Union Station in the late morning, dressed in a plain blue day suit, staring straight ahead. Tall as he was, he was still dwarfed by the great white arches that soared a hundred feet above him. Their inlaid gold octagons shone down on him like a thousand suns.

Cyril Evans stood two or three yards behind him, pasting down his hair with the back of his hands like a cat cleaning itself. Soon, under oath, he would at last have his chance to tell the world how, on the morning the
Titanic
sank, he’d had precedence. Certainly Jack Binns had never spoken at such an auspicious venue.

I watched the two men from a distance. Jack Thomas had told them that a Washington representative of IMM would meet them from the train, but there was not yet any sign of him. Lord and Evans were alone.

I waited, but when no one came I decided to wait no longer. I stepped outside into the bright sunshine and struck out on foot for the Capitol.

I arrived at the Senate Office Building on Constitution Avenue just before one o’clock. The building was new and enormous, with towering columns and lofty facades of polished marble and limestone. Inside, an usher showed me to the Committee on Territories room, where the inquiry was being held, but told me I couldn’t go in yet – the room was full. The luncheon adjournment was only a few minutes away and I could try my luck in the afternoon session.

I sat on one of the polished cedar benches of the anteroom. I could hear muffled voices engaged in the steady rhythm of question and answer. The questioner, I knew, was Senator Smith of Michigan, but in time I began also to recognise the singsong lilt of Ernie Gill. Soon the questioning stopped, the door was flung open and Gill hurried out with the crowd, weaving through clumps of strolling women. I followed him as he slipped along the wide corridors to the top of the steps leading down to the avenue. He paused, taking in the grand vista that lay before him. When I called to him he turned, smiled, and held out his hand to shake mine. His face was flushed; he was triumphant. He told me Senator Smith had read out his affidavit to everyone in the room, and he, Ernie Gill of Liverpool, had sworn that every word of it was true.

‘Do you know the captain is on his way here now?’ I asked.

‘Yes. Mr Franklin has been giving evidence about it.’

‘Aren’t you going to stay and hear what he says?’

‘I don’t need to. I saw the rockets. He didn’t.’ Gill smoothed his great shaggy moustache with his forefinger and thumb. What a strange world it was, I thought, that this small man from the engine room of a British tramp steamer should find himself addressing senators of the United States Congress. I remembered Gill telling me that he’d been good at public speaking at school, that he’d learned the Rule of Three, and that the other boys had listened to him. Today he could not have hoped for a more esteemed audience. The giant dome of Capitol building loomed close, and behind him, in the middle distance, the Washington Monument shone white and glorious in the vibrant light of early afternoon. We stood at the centre of the nation.

Gill lit a cigarette. At the curb below an automobile drew up and three passengers alighted, two of whom, I saw, were Stanley Lord and Cyril Evans in their suits and bowler hats. The third was no doubt the IMM man. They began to walk up the stairs, and in moments would be at the place where Gill and I stood.

I thought Gill might step away – there was still time – but he kept his position, smoking his cigarette, until he stood face to face with his captain. Lord, if he was surprised to see us, did not show it. Evans and the IMM man held back, but Lord was only a yard or so away. None of us spoke. We stood in a triangle, waiting, as if we were the last remaining pieces in a chess game. I wondered whether, in England, some rule of etiquette required a man’s accusers to speak first.

I remembered what Gill had told me his ironmonger father once said: apply enough heat and anything will bend. For Lord there must have been some heat in Gill’s presence, but there he stood, unbendable as granite. And it was Lord, at last, who spoke first.

‘Smoking above decks again, donkeyman?’

I saw a flicker of confusion, almost panic, in Gill’s face. The captain addressing him this way seemed at a stroke to re-establish the natural order of things. Gill was back down in the engine room once more, amid the filthy coal and smouldering clinkers.

‘I came, I saw them, and…’ Gill seemed to choke on his words. He repeated them, as if trying to recall a third and clinching phrase to trump his captain.

But Lord would not be trumped. He did something I hadn’t seen him do before: he laughed. ‘And what, donkeyman? You conquered?’ He laughed again and stepped past us both towards the building’s great double doors. Evans and the IMM man followed him, leaving Gill and me alone. Gill was blinking and frowning. I took his hand and shook it.

‘Goodbye,’ I said. ‘You’ve done well.’

I didn’t know whether Gill was Caesar triumphant or Brutus holding a bloodied knife, but either way he was already skipping down the stairs to a large motor car that had drawn up to the curb. I could see the soft green gloves of the chauffer as he held open the door for the donkeyman from Sheffield. Ernie Gill’s father might once have told him that his life would be a tough one, and that he would never be far from hell, but here he was, riding a luxury Oldsmobile Limited up the vast boulevard of Constitution Avenue in sunshine so bright it hurt my eyes.

*   *   *

At a quarter to three, the doors to the Committee on Territories conference room were hooked open and people began to drift in. I and ten or so other men of the press found seats on spindly chairs along the eastern wall. Women fought for position in small, roped-off galleries. They flounced and pushed and stamped their feet; a black velvet hat fell to the floor; the plumes of another blocked the view and were plucked out. One lady accused someone of taking her seat. A corpulent woman unable to find space in the galleries asked me to stand. I refused – I could not take down transcript if I was standing, I explained. She rustled away, her skirts hissing like snakes.

On the opposite side of the room, in chairs set aside for witnesses, were Lord and Evans. Lord held his ship’s large logbook in his lap.

At exactly three o’clock there was a sudden hush as the committee of four senators took their places at the great mahogany table. Senator Smith read a short message for the record and then looked up. ‘Is the captain here?’ he asked. ‘Captain Lord?’

Lord stood silently.

‘Very well. If you will come up here and take this chair, I will swear you in.’ Lord walked forward and took his seat, and Senator Smith passed him a bible. ‘Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?’ asked the senator.

‘I do,’ said the captain without the slightest hesitation. He had come to Washington to tell his story, and I now brought my pencil to my notebook to write every word of it down.

I knew something of Senator William Alden Smith, the man charged with inquiring into the loss of the
Titanic
on behalf of the American people. I knew that he had grown up wretchedly poor in Michigan and had made money by selling popcorn on the street. I also knew he was descended from the revolutionary war generals Putnam and Alden, so he knew in his veins how to fight the British. It was Smith who had issued subpoenas commanding Bruce Ismay and the
Titanic
’s officers and crew to come to Washington. They complained bitterly, and London’s newspapers called him an ignorant fool and his inquiry a preposterous outrage. Smith didn’t care. It was British arrogance and pride that had killed some of America’s finest, and here before him was the man who could prove it.

‘Did you attempt,’ Smith now asked Lord, adjusting his red, white and blue necktie, ‘to communicate with the vessel
Titanic
on the Sunday, April 14
th
?’

‘Yes, sir,’ replied the captain. On the seat in front of me, a woman was sketching him in large, bold pencil strokes.

‘What was that communication?’

‘We told them we were stopped and surrounded by ice.’

‘Did the
Titanic
acknowledge that message?’

‘Yes, sir. I believe he told the operator he had read it, and told him to shut up, or stand by, or something; that he was busy.’ There was a murmur of excitement in the room. Hands went to mouths, a gasp was heard, someone made a tut-tutting sound with their tongue.