The Midnight Watch (15 page)

It was progress of a sort, I supposed, but I couldn’t help feeling nostalgia for those older, lazier days when soft breezes calmed human lives. This modern frenzy of steam-making seemed to bring with it a fevered insanity: I had read in dispatches of a man in Brooklyn who killed his own baby then leapt out a window; of a psychic healer in Dallas – described as ‘a holy man of the Punjab’ – sent to jail for rubbing his oily palms on women’s tumours; of a farmer in Pennsylvania who shot his wife and then forced his nine-year-old grandson to shoot him dead with the same shotgun. And, of course, most insane of all: the
Titanic
, with steam engines the size of office buildings, undone so easily by silent ice. ‘And still the horror grows,’ declared
The
Boston Daily Globe
.

As I stood alone on the sunny bridge of the
Californian
and reflected on all this madness, I could not help but wonder what disorder and chaos might be found beneath the neat decks of this ordinary, sleepy steamer. I brought to my mind the captain’s face and tried again to read what I had seen. There were some peculiarities beneath that hard-fired exterior.

Why had he said his ship’s position was a state secret?

Why had he silenced the wireless man? Why had none of his officers said a single word?

Why had he first said his ship was twenty miles from the
Titanic
but then later said thirty? Why was he trying to push the
Titanic
further away?

Why, if the captain had received the wireless distress call scarcely after his ship had been brought to a standstill, as he claimed, did he then use the term ‘overnight position’? Why was he trying to shrink his overnight hours to nothing? What had happened during those hours?

And I thought, too, about the man standing behind the captain – the man with the pretty face and deep eyes who remained so perfectly still that I wondered what he was trying to conceal with such fixed concentration.

There was a story on this ship. I could smell it.

I looked about. The engine telegraph, compass and ship’s wheel, each mounted on steel stands, had been covered in green canvas. A small locker amidships was labelled ‘glasses’. It was locked. On the forward bulkhead, beneath a canvas windbreak, was a stoppered speaking tube, and adjacent to this was a card behind glass showing the ship’s dimensions, turning circle, stopping distance, and other details. There was also a ‘compass deviation’ card. It was all very interesting, but it was not what I was looking for.

I walked slowly back and forth. At each end of the bridge an extended awning provided some protection for a small foldout table. I pulled both tables down and stowed them again. Perhaps this was where the officers carried out their navigational calculations. Behind the starboard table, secured to the rear steel wall, I saw a small cupboard. There was a latch, but it was not locked. Inside was a water bottle, a tin tankard full of pencils, and there, resting on a lower shelf, I saw what I wanted: a small notebook, with pages sewn into a soft cover. On the cover were printed the words ‘
Californian
Scrap Log’.

This, I was sure, would give me some clues as to what had happened. But I was disappointed. About half the log’s pages had been torn out, and the remainder were blank, apart from a ruled margin and the word ‘date’ printed in pencil at the top of each. There was no writing, no clues.

I idly flicked the stubs of the missing pages with my thumb. The pages had been torn out about half an inch from the spine. Then I noticed something odd: one of the stubs had a perfectly straight edge. All the others had been ripped, but this one seemed to have been cut carefully with a knife. I counted back: if one page were used per day, then the cut page represented the 15
th
of April – the date of the disaster. So whatever had happened on this ship that night, it had warranted removal with surgical precision.

*   *   *

‘File your story by three o’clock or don’t bother filing at all.’

I received the note at one o’clock from a breathless message boy. I recognised the rushed yet masterful lettering of Krupp.

I told the boy to come back at half past two – I would have something for him then. But as the wall clock in the Marginal Street saloon neared two o’clock, I still had not put one word on the page. I’d drunk three bourbons to liberate my muse, but nothing came. The more I thought of that enigmatic captain – his inscrutable face, the liquid charm of his voice, the almost hypnotic power he seemed to have over those around him – the fewer words I had. There was something about him that resisted my efforts; it was as if a curtain were drawn around him, behind which I could not see. In the era before Hearst and Pulitzer I would have tried to get at the man by learning something of his past – about his mother and father, his apprenticeship, how he had come to be the Leyland Line’s youngest commander. But these days there was no time for such things.

‘Hello, old boy!’

I looked up. Jack Thomas had pushed his way into the tavern, red-faced, dabbing at spittle on his lips. ‘How did you know I was here?’ I asked.

‘Oh John, I know how to sniff
you
out.’ He heaved himself into a chair and dropped a newspaper onto the table.

‘I don’t really have time. I’ve got to file —’

‘But that’s why I’m here, old boy. I’ve come to help you out. Read that.’

He pushed the newspaper towards me. It was the morning edition of
The Boston Daily Globe.
STORY OF HEROISM
ran the front-page headline in letters an inch high.
MAJOR BUTT STOPPED STAMPEDE BY SHOOTING DOWN CRAVENS
was the sub-headline. ‘The tale of the sinking of the steamship
Titanic
,’ the story began, ‘is a story of heroism. There were brave men on board that ship…’

‘See?’ said Thomas. ‘A story of heroism. I thought, That’s the sort of thing you could write. It would certainly help us.’

‘You want me to write about Captain Lord shooting people?’

Thomas gave a great laugh; a substance came out of his nose. ‘If only he had! That would have been splendid! But no, not shooting –
sacrificing
. Sacrificing the safety of his own ship to help others in the freezing ice. An IMM captain following the very finest traditions of the British Merchant Marine. That sort of thing.’

I slid the newspaper back across the table but Thomas, breathing through closed teeth with a wet, sucking sound, pushed it straight back to me. ‘Read on,’ he said, pointing at a paragraph with a stubby finger. ‘Read it out aloud.’

‘“Major Archibald W. Butt,”’ I mumbled, bourbon blurring my diction a little, ‘“the personal aide of President Taft, stood near the starboard gangway for more than two hours assisting women and children into the lifeboats.”’ I looked up at Thomas. ‘That the part you mean?’ I asked.

‘Yes, yes. Keep going, old boy.’ Thomas leaned back to listen.

‘“With drawn revolver, Major Butt warned off excited men who tried to leap to the places held for the women and children, and when they would not obey his orders to stand back, he shot them.”’

‘He shot them!’ Thomas gave a little clap.

I read on. It was all rather gripping. ‘“It was not time for argument, and the President’s aide wounded six men before he stopped the stampede to the boats. Every man of them was lost. Major Butt declined to step into a boat himself, and his last hours were devoted to the saving of life. Just before the
Titanic
broke apart and made the dive into the sea, Major Butt leaped overboard and was drowned.”’ I looked up. ‘His last hours were devoted to saving people by shooting them?’

‘Not people. Cravens!’ Thomas was beaming.

‘Who were these cravens?’

‘You know who they were.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Italians.’

‘I thought you liked Italians.’

‘They’re not brave.’

‘They’re not American, is what you mean.’

‘Oh John, don’t be so
contrary
.’

‘I’m not being contrary.’

Perhaps it was the bourbon, but I felt very sorry for the six men who’d been shot dead by the brave major. I thought it an outrageous crime – to shoot unarmed men in the last desperate moments of their lives. ‘Thank God for Major Butt,’ I said, raising my glass in tribute.

‘Yes indeed!’ replied Thomas, raising his in reply.

‘But,’ I continued after I’d drained my glass, ‘surely the biggest craven of all was the head of your own company. And he’s no Italian.’

‘Exactly, old boy. Exactly. That’s why I’m here – asking you to make something of Captain Lord. For every villain there is a hero.’

‘But it was Rostron, of the
Carpathia,
who did all the rescuing.’

‘Yes, but he’s from
Cunard
, old boy. Captain Lord is ours, and at least he tried. He had been very safe, he told me, stopping his ship and turning in for the night —’

‘He went to bed?’

‘Only after stopping his ship, old boy. If only the
Titanic
’s captain had done the same!’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘If only.’

‘And he had his man on the bridge, of course.’

‘Of course.’

‘And as soon as he
knew
, he did all he could. You heard him: he risked everything to get there. And you can always add some of your own colour – I know that’s what you do – a sailor, perhaps, who was so scared he begged the captain to slow down, a sailor who was
sobbing,
you know, in
terror
, because of the icebergs, but whom Captain Lord strikes away —’

‘Like a craven.’

‘Yes!’

‘With the butt of his pistol?’

‘Perfect!’

We both laughed.

‘You think Captain Lord was a hero?’

‘Of course. A tragic hero, because he didn’t get there in time, but a hero nonetheless.’

I paused. Thomas tried to encourage me. ‘Don’t write it for me, old boy,’ he said, ‘or even for IMM. Write it for England. Write it for America. Write it in defence of manhood across the world.’

‘What do you care of manhood?’

‘Whatever do you mean? I am a great fan of manhood.’

‘Well – boyhood, perhaps.’

‘Let me buy you another drink, John. I can tell you’re in one of your moods.’

He was right. I was tired and fractious. I hadn’t been sleeping properly. Nor had I seen my daughter since I returned from New York, and without her laughter and energy I soon became dissipated and flat. The tavern seemed airless; there were too few customers and too many dogs. The sawdust smelt of urine. I could hear bar girls, short of tips, arguing in a distant room. And although I liked Thomas, this afternoon, as he sat opposite me trying to get the attention of a waitress, he seemed particularly repulsive. He had rubbed cooking oil into his face to give himself a youthful sheen. His white suit, smeared with coaldust and ink, was too tight. A steamy heat rose from his lap.

But it was the story in the
Globe
that had angered me. In six columns over two pages it described in great detail the deeds of brave men, but I had seen not one word about any of the children who died.

Because by now we knew the numbers. Fifty-eight first-class men had found their way into the lifeboats but fifty-three third-class children had not. It was an almost perfect one-for-one correlation. For almost every rich man who lived a poor child had died. How had this happened on a ship that took nearly three hours to sink in calm water? What sort of tale of heroism was this? Was this the story of America? I remembered the fuss Watch and Ward had made about me using my daughter to pose as a child prostitute on North Street. They bleated and complained and tried to have my story banned, but what had they said about the fat men who’d tried to buy her? Nothing. And what now did they have to say about the dead children of the
Titanic
? Again, nothing. If only those children’s little bodies had been in the hold of the
Californian
, I could have written about them and made them live long in Boston’s conscience.

‘Why should I give you anything?’ I asked Thomas. ‘You promised me bodies and you didn’t deliver. You should go to someone else.’

‘You know it’s you I come to in times of trouble, John. You’ve saved me before. Now’s your chance to save an entire shipping line. Morgan won’t be … ungrateful, you know. Write us up a hero, John. We need it. Write us up a hero.’

The new drinks arrived. I couldn’t help but smile at my friend. For a man with such dark and depraved secrets, there was something utterly guileless about him. The shine of his face might be grotesque but at least it did shine; I knew too many people whose faces were dark and craggy quagmires. And he was always ready to join me in denouncing Watch and Ward and their sanctimonious, self-righteous moralising; he agreed that life was a thousand times richer than Watch and Ward’s frigid conception of it.

‘Very well,’ I said. ‘I’ll do what I can. I’ll do my best.’

‘You promise?’

‘For you, Jack, I’d do anything.’

So, as Thomas wobbled off to his next duty as IMM’s man in Boston and I ordered another bourbon highball with a lowball chaser, and as the light in the tavern grew yellow and musty, I turned to a new page in my notebook. ‘The story of the
Californian
,’ I began, ‘is a story of heroism. There were brave men on board that ship…’

CHAPTER 10

Herbert Stone’s mother had taught him always to look carefully at people’s eyes and listen carefully to their words. But Captain Lord’s eyes were usually hidden in the shadow of his cap, and it seemed, too, that some grinding machine was always at work on his words, so that they came from him like small, hard pebbles. Stone could no more imagine his captain saying ‘I’m sad’ or ‘I’m sorry’ than he could imagine him drinking beer or uttering a blasphemy. His face betrayed nothing; Stone only ever saw a stiff blankness.

But on the day following the captain’s meeting with the press he seemed different. That morning, a Saturday, the captain asked Stone to join him in the dining saloon, and for once he was not wearing his cap. His eyes were blue and lively; there was an unusual warmth about him.