The Midnight Watch (8 page)

‘Seals,’ Stewart said. ‘They’re seals.’

The large black creatures lay on the ice, their skin glistening in the sun, their grotesque bodies slippery and fat. They clapped their fins as if applauding, and lifted their heads to emit strange chattering snorts. It seemed to Stone that they were laughing at him. Then, as if responding to an invisible cue, they slid one by one from the ice shelf into the sea.

Perhaps the captain felt the sting of their laughter too, because he rang the telegraph for full ahead and ordered the quartermaster to steer due west for Boston. Their search for bodies was over.

*   *   *

In the wireless room, Cyril Evans chewed hard on the knuckle of his forefinger. He had no messages to send. Other operators had messages to send from their captains, but not him. And his ship was right there, on the scene.

He heard the
Carpathia
’s captain talking to the
Baltic
: ‘To Commander,
Baltic
. The
Titanic
has gone down with all hands, as far as we know, with the exception of 20 boatloads, which we have picked up. Number not accurately fixed yet. We cannot see any more boats about at all. Rostron.’ Then, a little later: ‘To Commander,
Baltic
. Am proceeding for Halifax or New York full speed. You had better proceed to Liverpool. Have about 800 passengers aboard. Rostron.’ The
Baltic
’s captain made his replies, other ships called the
Carpathia
and were answered, the ether crackled. Evans listened but sent nothing. No one was talking to him.

He began to hear Cape Race working a new ship amid the clatter – distant, distorted, barely audible, but slowly growing in strength. It was the
Olympic
, the
Titanic
’s giant twin sister, steaming at full speed from the southwest. She would soon be in range, but for now all he could hear was Cape Race talking to her. ‘To Wireless Operator,
Olympic
: We will pay you liberally for story of rescue of
Titanic
’s passengers, any length possible for you to send, earliest possible moment. Mention prominent persons.
The World.
’ He could not hear a reply but he did hear, beneath the crisscrossing and interfering signals of closer stations, another intriguing message from Cape Race, this time to a passenger of the
Titanic
: ‘To Mr W. T. Stead,
Titanic
. We will pay you one dollar per word for your story of this deplorable catastrophe. Please respond at earliest opportunity.
The New York Times
.’ Evans was not sure he had heard right but then the message came through again, and there it was, most definitely –
one dollar per word.
He scratched out some quick calculations. Mr Marconi paid him four pounds per month. That was about twenty dollars. He could easily send ten words per minute. So he could earn one month’s pay in two minutes. ‘Cyril Evans was the only Marconi man on his ship,’ he scratched in his notepad, ‘and he was the first to hear of the disaster.’ There. Twenty words. One month’s wages.

He tried to call up the
Olympic
and Cape Race but could get no reply; instead he called up the operator on the
Birma
, who during the morning had become something of a friend. They exchanged messages at speed, but again Balfour on the
Baltic
interrupted him. Evans could hear the shouting anger in the staccato speed of Balfour’s letters. ‘Stand by stand by! Keep out! You have been told to keep out and stand by. Signed: Balfour.’ Evans gripped his key tight. Balfour might be an inspector, but Evans had
precedence
. He tried again to send to the
Birma
, but again the
Baltic
signal came in, loud and persistent. ‘Stand by or you will be reported. Signed: Balfour.’ Evans threw off his headphones and went below to the steward’s washroom to splash icy water on his face. He splashed again. He was being treated poorly, and he felt the injustice of it.

Back in the wireless room, he replaced his headphones and waited. When at last he heard the faint signals of the
Olympic
, working other ships, asking questions, seeking information about her lost sister, he held back no more. He took off his headphones so that he would hear nothing from Balfour and sent at his best speed: ‘
Californian
to
Olympic.
We were the second boat on the scene of disaster. All we could see there were some boxes and coats and a few empty boats and what looked like oil on the water. When we were near the
Carpathia
he would not answer me, though I kept calling on him, as I wanted the position. He kept talking to Balfour on the
Baltic
. The latter says he is going to report me for jamming. But we were the nearer boat to the
Carpathia
.’ That explained everything, Evans thought, taking up his headphones once more. At first there was silence, but then he heard the distant
Olympic
again, still faint but uninterrupted
. ‘Don’t worry, we will take note of the fact that in cases of distress nearer ships should have precedence.’ Evans smiled to himself. He had the mighty
Olympic
herself on his side. That ought to silence Balfour on the
Baltic.

Evans relaxed. He imagined himself explaining the Marconi rules to reporters standing in the sunshine on the Boston pier, gathered around him as eager children might surround their schoolteacher. He would wait while they pencilled the word ‘precedence’ in their notebooks. ‘Mr Evans,’ they would write, ‘the Marconi man who went to bed only because he had been told to shut up and keep out by the
Titanic
, became a reluctant hero the next morning when he did all he could to carry out the duties of the nearest ship.’ Evans leaned back from his key and allowed the vision to build and clarify before him – the angle of the reporters’ hats, the smell of clamshells on the pier, the taste of the bean and cod soup they would buy for him.

But then something happened that chilled his imaginings and choked his flow of words. His friend on the
Birma
was again in his earphones, calling him, bringing him back from Boston to the icy Atlantic. ‘Were you the nearest ship to the
Titanic
?’ the operator asked, and even as Evans tapped back, ‘Yes, the nearest,’ his fingers began to tighten on the key.

‘Nearer than the
Carpathia
?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did your ship see the
Titanic
?’

Evans had not forgotten, during the frantic events of the morning, what the apprentice Gibson had told him at dawn. ‘We saw her rockets, you know. We saw them with our own eyes.’ And all morning he had wanted to send: ‘We saw her. We saw the
Titanic
sinking.’ Even Mr Balfour would have been awed into silence by such a message. And its words would surely be worth more than a dollar apiece to
The World
and
The New York Times
– they would be worth ten times as much. People would forget Jack Binns and the
Republic
. They would know only Cyril Evans and the
Californian
, the ship that watched the
Titanic
sink.

But he had not sent out Gibson’s words. When he thought of them again – ‘We saw her rockets, you know’ – they frightened him. He did not understand them and he could not think through their implications. If his own ship had been close enough to see, why did the
Carpathia
get there first?

Now his friend on the
Birma
was asking him directly, ‘Did your ship see the
Titanic
?’ He sensed the rhythm of ‘yes’ in his hand; he felt the tiny ripple of muscle in the forefinger that would send it. It would take but an instant, and the rest would follow in a few seconds more: ‘We saw her distress rockets.’ But he did not send them. His left hand slid over to clasp tightly his right and he sat still, head hanging low, waiting, wondering, thinking of the captain and Mr Stone. Why had they not gone to the
Titanic
during the midnight watch? There must be a reason, but he could not think of it.

As he lifted his head he sensed, in the floor, ceiling and walls around him, the shame of it. ‘No,’ he sent at last to his friend on the
Birma
. ‘We did not see the
Titanic
.’ It was the first time, he reflected, that he had ever used his key to send a falsehood out into the world.

*   *   *

Herbert Stone waited in the stuffy chartroom, where there was a faint smell of turpentine. He sat down on the settee but then stood up again. He took his cap off, he put it on again. He read and reread the notices on the noticeboard.

He reminded himself that he had come to sea to be tested and strengthened, just as Starbuck and Captain Ahab had been by their great white whale. But had
this
been his test? This strange black night? This bright morning, with the white sun beating down mercilessly on him? Those semaphore flags, fluttering and waving and telling him that fifteen hundred people had died? He had seen the way the chief officer looked at him, and even Charlie Groves stood distant, as if fearful of catching a disease, or of being asked to share some part of the responsibility for all those people.

He waited ten minutes, then twenty, then thirty. When the captain at last entered the room he walked past Stone without stopping and stepped into his cabin. The chief officer followed and took up a position just outside the door, as if standing guard. Stone noticed just how thin Stewart was, how gaunt his face, how rock-like his strength. He imagined, for a moment, that the chief might strike him. But the chief only said, ‘You had better go in,’ and Stone, clutching his cap tightly, walked past him and through the doorway. The chief closed the door behind him.

Stone had never been in the captain’s cabin before. ‘No one is allowed in here,’ he had once heard Lord say to the chief officer, ‘except the steward to clean it.’ Well, it was clean, but it was small and windowless and dark too. The steel hatch of the skylight was dogged shut with a locking lever that had been painted over with black paint. The electric light was switched off. An oil lamp on the captain’s narrow fold-down desk cast a flickering, fragile glow.

Captain Lord turned and pulled a chair out from beneath his desk. It was a large chair, too big for the cabin, with a steel seat and thick, bolted crossbars for a back. He angled it awkwardly into the tight space between desk, bunk and door. Stone felt trapped. The white walls pressed in on him. He could smell the soap the captain used and the starch of his shirt.

The captain gestured for him to sit and Stone perched on the far end of the bunk, placing his cap next to him. Captain Lord took out a pipe, slowly packed its bowl with tobacco, and lit it. He drew a long breath and ejected smoke in a thin, continuous stream that rose and curled back on itself in little delicate eddies. The air became thick. Stone felt he could hardly breathe.

‘Now, Mr Stone,’ the captain said, looking at him, ‘you had better tell me just exactly what happened during your watch last night.’

*   *   *

Herbert Stone had wanted to be a schoolteacher. Nothing had moved his adolescent soul as much as the grand themes of Shakespeare and the magical lyricism of Coleridge, and he thought he might make a career of teaching others to love literature just as he did. But his beer-bloated father disagreed. Schoolteaching was no ambition for a son of his. Schoolteaching was for women. Herbert was weak, his father said, and prone to tears. He needed to be made a man. He would go to sea.

His mother did not want him to go. She worried that the sea would surely drown him. A reader of American literature, she bought him his own beautiful, leather-bound edition of
Moby-Dick
, hoping that he might find at sea something of that novel’s vast skies and close friendships. If he was to drown, then at least let him do so nobly, standing side by side with a captain who might place a hand upon his shoulder and say, ‘Close! Stand close to me, Herbert.’

But young Herbert soon learned that life on real ships was not at all as it was in
Moby-Dick
. The age of steam had come, so there was no climbing to windswept heights or swinging through tapestries of ropes and sails, no flying in great canvas hallways of air. Instead, when he stepped aboard his first ship, a small tramp steamer, a chief officer with a cruel mouth and stinking breath led him to the door of the pump room and told him to get below and clean its bilges. As he went obediently down the narrow rusting ladder – down and down until the sky was no more than a postage stamp of light thirty feet above his head – his visions of himself on the bridge vanished into the dim future, and for days he trawled through the acidic sludge with ungloved hands until they were red raw. He slipped and fumbled in the putrid iron-scale and grease, and alone in the darkness, with no father to scold him, he let his tears mingle freely with the grimy water.

Still, he persisted. He tried to make his father proud. He discovered that he slept in a cabin, not a bedroom; that he scrubbed the deck, not the floor; that the photograph of his mother was hung on a bulkhead, not a wall. He painted decks and spliced ropes. He studied ship stability and learned his chartwork as well as any apprentice. He mastered the arcane art of the sextant. When he turned nineteen he concluded that he had seen the worst the sea could do, and nothing it had done was so very bad or fearful. He wrote his mother not to worry. He did not think the sea would ever drown him.

When he passed his examinations and completed his indentures his mother bought him a special soft brush to keep clean the gold stripes of his officer epaulettes. He obtained a berth as a third officer, and then as second on the
Californian
. When the captain shook his hand and said, ‘I’m Lord – Lord of the
Californian
,’ he had seemed to Stone to stand as strong and tall as the ship’s towering funnel. ‘It is a good ship in a good company,’ Stone wrote to his mother, ‘and I am happy enough.’ But the captain of this new ship never did ask him to stand shoulder to shoulder. He asked instead whether Stone had done his apprenticeship in sail or steam, and when Herbert answered, ‘Steam, Captain,’ he turned away saying, ‘I thought so – steam makes men soft.’ After that, Lord said hardly another word to him.