The Midnight Watch (3 page)

*   *   *

The first thing Herbert Stone noticed when the standby quartermaster woke him for the midnight watch was just how calm everything was. There was no pitch, no roll, and no throb of the engine. For ten days the ship had rocked him back and forth like a baby, and her engine had lulled him with its rhythmic heartbeat. Now there was nothing. Never before, not even in port, had he felt the ship to be so silent and still.

Stone was tired and moved slowly. By the time he got up, used the washroom and dressed himself he was running late. It was already after midnight. The third officer would be waiting. He hurried along the alleyway to the chartroom to read the captain’s night orders before heading up to the bridge. But when he reached the doorway he was surprised to see Captain Lord himself leaning over the chart table, working with his dividers and parallel rulers. Having brought the lamp low over the table, he stood in a golden circle of light.

Stone waited silently. The captain was carrying out his task delicately and precisely. He seemed to stand at the very centre of things, surrounded by light, a high priest performing a sacred ritual. The polished brass leaves of his cap glittered, and beneath its glossy black rim Stone could see his focused, intense eyes. Captain Lord would introduce himself to people by saying, ‘I’m Lord – Lord of the
Californian
,’ but Stone knew that he was lord of so much more. He was one of Leyland’s very best, having been appointed captain at the age of twenty-eight – unheard of! – and was on the way up. He was now thirty-four, but seemed to Stone like an old man of the sea, wise and inscrutable.

‘We have stopped because of the ice,’ the captain said to him, without looking up from the chart. ‘I’m not going to try to find a way through it until daylight. We will drift until then. We will keep up steam for the engine, but you shouldn’t need it. Now come and look at this.’ He turned from the chart table and walked past Stone into the cross-alleyway.

Stone followed him outside to the starboard rail of the boat deck. The cold shocked him and he pulled on his gloves. The captain never wore gloves; he grasped the hard steel of the rail with bare hands.

Stone stared into the darkness, waiting for his eyes to adjust. There was no swell and no wind and no horizon. The sea was dead flat and solid black. He understood now why the ship was so still.

‘Can you see her?’ the captain asked, pointing into the night.

A tiny cluster of lights slowly showed itself, suspended between the stars and the ocean.

‘A small steamer,’ the captain said. ‘She has stopped, just like us.’

Stone was already late for his watch but the captain did not yet dismiss him. He stood waiting. The captain’s close presence made him think of Captain Ahab and Starbuck standing at the rail of the
Pequod
, looking for Ahab’s great white whale. ‘Close!’ Ahab says. ‘Stand close to me.’ But Stone heard no such words from his captain, and saw no vengeful whale on the horizon. He saw only the lights of the distant ship: placid, silent and perfectly still.

‘Tonight’s watch will be an easy one for you,’ the captain said, dismissing him at last, ‘with nothing much to do.’

It was ten minutes past midnight when Stone finally walked up the steep stairs to the upper navigating bridge – a broad, open platform running the full width of the ship atop the amidships accommodation block. It had no walls or ceiling; the only protection from the elements was afforded by a chest-high steel bulkhead at the forward end, designed to deflect upwards the steady wind caused by the ship’s movement. There was a fully enclosed, steam-heated lower bridge directly beneath the upper and accessible from the chartroom, but it was never used. ‘A warm bridge means a sleeping officer,’ claimed Captain Lord. So Stone and his fellow officers stood on the open upper bridge, no matter what the weather, and shielded themselves as best they could.

On this bitterly cold night the heavy, still air soaked through to the skin as if it were liquid. Charlie Groves was standing just abaft the ship’s steering compass, rubbing his gloved hands together and hopping from one foot to the other. His open, round face, lit from beneath by the soft glow of the compass card, seemed disembodied, floating free in the darkness.

‘Sorry I’m late, old chap,’ Stone said. ‘The captain was talking to me.’

‘Oh yes, I know,’ Groves replied. ‘The captain likes his chitchat.’

Stone gave a short laugh as he took the bridge binoculars from Groves and looped their lanyard around his neck. He thought Groves would want to hurry off to the warmth below, but the third officer lingered awhile. He seemed to want to talk.

‘The captain was on the bridge with me,’ Groves said at last, ‘when we ran into the ice. It was low slushy stuff – we didn’t see it until we’d got right into it. I thought we’d be trapped, but the captain whipped us around and we got out of it all right. He knows how to handle a ship.’

‘Yes,’ said Stone. ‘He does at that.’

There must have been something in his tone, because Groves turned to him with a sympathetic smile. ‘He
is
a good skipper, you know. Just give him a little more time. A few more trips and he’ll loosen up with you.’

‘Thank you,’ Stone said. He knew that most second officers would not take advice from a third, but he and Charlie Groves were the same age, and besides, Stone liked him. Groves had been educated at a school in Cambridge but was no snob. Stone had never heard him put on airs and graces. Groves once worked for P&O but had left because he couldn’t stand the passengers. Tramp steamers were more his style. He was the sort of man, Stone thought, for whom the world was a playground. One day, Groves said, he would fly in an aeroplane. But for now he was learning all he could about the
Californian
’s new wireless installation, and often gave Stone little speeches about wavelengths and frequencies and self-sustaining electromagnetic fields. He’d befriended Cyril Evans and would hurry down to the wireless cabin each night after his watch.

‘So now we’re stopped for the night,’ Stone said.

‘Yes. Until dawn.’

Stone looked through the binoculars at the lights in the south that the captain had pointed out to him. He could see a white masthead light and a smudge of others behind. He could not tell how far away the ship was. Her lights grew neither brighter nor darker, but remained perfectly steady.

‘She came up from the southeast,’ Groves explained. ‘Stopped about half an hour ago. She’s a big passenger ship – had lots of lights on at first, but she seemed to put them out when she stopped.’

Stone let the binoculars hang on their lanyard and looked at the ship with his naked eye. She was not going to cause him any trouble. He told Groves his eyes were in and he was happy to take over.

‘Very good,’ Groves said. ‘Enjoy yourself.’

Stone watched the third officer disappear down the bridge stairs and then stared into the darkness. He could hear the distant hiss of a steam condenser, and fragments of conversation drifting up through an engine room vent, but otherwise the
Californian
was silent and still. The North Atlantic was a flat calm stretching ahead into an engulfing moonless blackness and the air was absolutely clear and sharp, seeming somehow to focus the light of the stars into cold, hard points of blue-white. The ship’s bow was pointing back towards England, and in the eastern sky he could see more stars rising slowly from the ocean, throwing little threads of silver across the water.

He walked to the rear bridge rail. Somewhere out there, Groves had said, was the icefield. Stone couldn’t see it now, but he could hear its low, grinding whisper – it felt close and alive. Then, slowly, just beyond the ship’s stern, he began to make it out: a cold and feeble light, as if the ice had somehow caught and stored up starlight. It was so faint, so delicate and so elusive that he could see it only with the sensitivity of his peripheral vision. When he stared directly at it, it vanished into darkness. There was a smell too, equally insubstantial, a clammy glacial odour that faded to nothing the more he breathed it in.

No wonder they’d run into the ice at full speed. The captain would have been expecting icebergs, great towering things with straight edges and clear outlines, like the bergs they’d passed that afternoon, not this low shapeless ice that you could barely see.

Stone shivered. The stillness pressed in on him. The ice seemed to suck everything from the world – the waves, the wind, light, warmth – everything.

*   *   *

Charlie Groves hurried aft along the boat deck to the wireless room, but when he knocked on the door there was no answer. He walked in anyway. The room smelled of cigarette ash and shirts that had been worn for too long, but it was warm. The light was on and Evans was snoring lightly in his bunk with an open magazine across his chest.

‘You awake, Sparks?’

Evans muttered something and rolled over towards the bulkhead.

‘There’s a big ship stopped on our starboard beam,’ said Groves, sitting at the desk. ‘Have you been speaking to her?’

Evans grunted and pulled a pillow tight over his head. His magazine slipped to the floor.

Groves looked at the boxes and wires and dials in front of him. Science at its best, he had always thought, was indistinguishable from magic, and each component before him performed its own special trick – the condenser, the key, the headphones, the transformer, the magnetic detector. He placed the earphones on his head and took up a pencil and notepad. He had been practising and could easily pick up three words out of four.

But now the headphones were silent. There was none of the usual
dit-dah-dit
of Morse code. The third officer gave them a quick jiggle and turned the volume control through its full sweep. He waited a minute, perhaps two, but no sound came.

It was half an hour past midnight. Evans was snoring more deeply now, and Groves decided it was time for him, too, to go to bed. He placed the headphones back on the desk, switched off the light and walked out of the room.

*   *   *

Herbert Stone had been standing his watch for ten minutes or so when James Gibson arrived on the bridge with two mugs of coffee. The twenty-year-old apprentice had been rummaging around in the chief officer’s store for a new rotator for the ship’s patent log. ‘The old one was caught in the ice,’ Gibson explained, ‘and torn away. The captain asked me to rig a new one but I couldn’t find one in the store.’

A sudden high-pitched squeal made Stone jump. It was the whistle stopper in the speaking tube leading to the captain’s cabin. It squealed again as he walked forward to the tube, pulled out the stopper and put his ear to the opening. The captain’s voice was muffled and distant. ‘That ship,’ the captain said, ‘has she come any closer?’

‘No, Captain. She hasn’t moved.’

‘Very well. I’m going to lie down in the chartroom. Call me if you need me.’

‘Yes, good night, Captain.’ Stone replaced the stopper and took up a position next to Gibson at the forward bridge rail.

‘There’s something odd about that ship,’ Gibson said, looking through binoculars towards the south. ‘Her lights are strange – see, there’s a glare on her afterdeck.’

Stone took the binoculars. Gibson was right: there was a smudge of light behind the masthead light.

‘There’s something flickering, too,’ Gibson continued. ‘Do you see that? I think she’s trying to Morse us.’ He walked to the electric Morse lamp key and began signalling. The lamp, mounted high on the deckhouse abaft the bridge, threw its rhythmic light out into the darkness. Stone watched for a reply from the other ship, but couldn’t make out distinct letters. Long-short-long-short: a C, perhaps? Now a D? But he soon lost the flickering among the glare of other indistinct lights. Gibson flashed the Morse lamp for a few moments longer, then gave up. No matter; they could try again later.

In the meantime, Stone was glad to have the apprentice’s company. Stone had been helping him with his studies over the past weeks by showing him how to use a sextant and how to plot position lines. Lately Stone had begun to talk of more personal things – his recent wedding, his childhood in Devon, and even the problems he’d been having with the captain. So when Gibson went below to look again for a rotator, Stone held his coffee mug tight to warm his hands, and felt more alone than usual. He thought of his wife, at home in her sunlit garden with her hyacinths and tulips and daffodils, which only made the darkness and cold press in closer. He stood at the starboard rail and waited. A single stroke on the bridge bell told him it was half past twelve. Time was going slowly.

It would be an easy watch, the captain had said. Perhaps, thought Stone, looking down at the black water below, but even on a stopped ship on a calm sea the midnight watch was the hardest of all. Sailors sometimes called it the graveyard watch, because it was said that during its four lonely hours the spirits of drowned men could be seen rising from the surface of the sea, quiet as mist. It was also the watch during which good men, with everything to live for, had been known to throw themselves over the side into the depths. Perhaps they saw mermaids beckoning them, or perhaps the vastness of the ocean and sky made their loneliness unbearable, or perhaps their will was overwhelmed by a momentary curiosity, or a momentary insanity. Whatever the reason, Stone knew that the shock of entering the water would bring any man out of his reverie, so that in full and sane consciousness he would watch his ship steam away until it slipped forever out of sight. Stone thought that must be the most profound loneliness the universe could devise. ‘Alone,’ he whispered to himself, ‘alone. All, all alone, alone on a wide, wide sea.’

But when he lifted his head and glanced towards the south, he was reminded that he was not, after all, entirely alone. The other ship was still there, suspended in the darkness, placid and quiet. There were no souls of dead men flying up to heaven, just her steady faint lights, hanging there, keeping him company while he sipped the last of his coffee and waited for Gibson to return.

Then, just above the other ship, he saw something unusual: a small white light climbing into the air. Stone wasn’t quite sure at first what it was. It rose slowly, higher and higher, until it burst silently into a delicate shower of stars. For a short time, while the upward streak was still visible and the star cluster drifted slowly downward, it looked like a fragile white flower – perfectly white, clear and startling against the blackness of the void.