The Evangeline

by D. W. Buffa

  ‘You could have just carried him and left the violin.’

  ‘That would not have been saving his life; that would have been more like killing him. Besides, it wasn’t heavy.’

  ‘It took up room.’

  ‘He held it on his lap, when he wasn’t playing it. And if he hadn’t played it, none of us would be here to tell about it. That’s a fact.’

  For the rest of the morning, until court recessed for lunch, Darnell had Marlowe describe the way they had rigged a sail and set a course for South America, and what they had done at the beginning for water and for food. It was only in the afternoon that Darnell finally asked the question that everyone had been waiting for. Despite the fact that it was expected, the question was greeted with a sense of disbelief, as if even now there was still the hope that it might not be true, that what the witnesses for the prosecution had said had been the product of minds unbalanced by the trauma of what they had gone through.

  Darnell stood now, not at the end of the jury box, but at the side of the counsel table near the two empty chairs. The jury’s eyes would have to move from him to Marlowe and back again with each exchange.

  ‘There was a point at which you were out of food and water. What did you do then?’

  It seemed to Darnell that Marlowe began to age before his eyes. The lines in his haggard face cut deeper into his heavy skin; the corners of his mouth bent under the burden of what he knew. His eyes, never cheerful, became sombre and withdrawn, as if they had pronounced a judgment of harsh unforgiveness on everything they had seen.‘We elected to do whatever was necessary to survive.’

  In normal conversation it might have passed unnoticed, but Darnell was in that heightened state of sensibility that comes with total concentration. ‘“We elected,”’ he repeated, searching Marlowe’s eyes for a meaning Marlowe himself was not aware of.

  ‘You decided that the only way any of you could go on living was from the blood, the flesh, of one of the others?’ asked Darnell. His voice was firm, unyielding, as if the events they were about to explore were unfit for the normal range of human sympathy and understanding. ‘And when I say you, I mean all of you, everyone who was still alive. But it was not a thought that came to all of you at once, was it? Someone thought of it first—someone suggested it to the others.Was it you? Or was it Trevelyn?’

  Marlowe bent his head; his brooding lower lip trembled. ‘Trevelyn may have been the first to suggest it; I don’t say he was the first to think it. The possibility we would have to face that alternative was in my mind almost from the beginning, when I realised how many of us were left and how little there was to eat. When that ship—the one Trevelyn described—would not stop to pick us up, then I knew it was only a matter of time before there wouldn’t be any other choice.’

  ‘But it was Trevelyn’s idea?’ insisted Darnell. ‘He was the one who started it, pushed for it, said it was the only way—that someone had to die if any of the others were to live?’

  Marlowe was being offered a way to absolve himself of at least some of the responsibility, but that would be an act of moral cowardice, and Marlowe would not accept it. ‘Trevelyn spoke his mind, said what he thought needed to be said.We were all nearly dead, but he was worse off than most, with a wrist that was broken and a foot black with frostbite, the toes nearly gone. Sure, he spoke from fear, but I wouldn’t fault him too much for that. He could still speak, still make sense; some of the others were already half out of their minds, seeing things that weren’t there and saying things that were plain crazy.’

  ‘But he was the first to speak of it openly,’ repeated Darnell in a quieter voice. ‘The first actually to suggest that someone be killed…?’

  Marlowe’s mind appeared to be elsewhere. He did not hear the question. ‘I knew what we were going to do—what we had to do—when that ship passed by, when they ignored us. I knew it when Mr Wilson jumped in after them.’ Marlowe bent forward. ‘No one tried to stop him. Stop him? They were glad he was gone, glad there was a little more room, glad there would be one less man with whom to share whatever food we could get. That’s when I knew how far gone we were, how starved and demented we had become. I knew before Trevelyn had said a word about it that we were at the point where we had to choose the way we were going to die.’

  ‘You mean, choose the way at least some of you could live, don’t you?’

  There was something stern and implacable in the look that Marlowe gave Darnell, something secret and remote in his dark, impenetrable eyes.‘None of us were going to live; we were all going to die. And I think most of us knew it, whatever we might have said to encourage each other. I knew we weren’t going to be rescued. I thought there was a chance of it until that ship that could have saved us sailed out of sight. We were doomed, and I knew it. We were all going to die; we were never going to be rescued.’

  ‘But you didn’t tell the others that, did you? You didn’t tell them there was no chance of rescue.You stayed on a course for South America. If you were convinced you were all going to die anyway, why not just give up? Why start taking the lives of one another if you were going to die anyway?’

  ‘That was just it, you see. That was the one thing we couldn’t do, the one thing I couldn’t let us do.We couldn’t just give up. Tell someone he’s dying of cancer, that he doesn’t have more than a month, would you have him take a pistol and put it to his head? Wouldn’t you tell him that he might still have a chance, that miracles sometimes happen, that he has an obligation—not just to himself, but to others—to set the right example and keep fighting to the end? No, Mr Darnell, you have to go on! We were going to die, I believed that. No, I knew it! And once I knew that, I knew something else as well—that it was just us out there and that none of the normal rules applied.We had to have rules of our own, both about how we were going to live and how we were going to die. All us were going to die, but every death was going to count, every death was going to be a sacrifice, a way to save another life. It was the only way to give any meaning to what was going to happen to us. Some died so others could live. It did not matter how much longer any one would live; it mattered that we did not give up and all die at once. And so we died one by one, instead of all at once; and we lived off their bodies because it was not yet our turn.’

  Marlowe gazed out at the courtroom crowd, more concerned, it seemed, for the shock he knew he must have caused them, than for how they felt about him.

  ‘Whatever the reason it was done, this was something agreed to by all of them?’ asked Darnell.‘There weren’t any who objected to having someone sacrificed so the others could live?’

  ‘There were some who did, some who argued against it; but they were bound like all the others.We agreed among ourselves that whatever the majority decided, all of us would follow that decision.’

  ‘You mean the decision on the question of whether someone would be chosen to be killed so the others could use him to keep on living?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And once that was decided, lots were drawn to see who the first victim would be?’

  ‘Lots were drawn.’

  ‘Why that method and not another? Why not decide the same way the first question had been resolved: by vote of the majority?’

  ‘That would have been an obscenity, to have us decide who was going to live and who was going to die. What we had decided—all we could decide—is that we were willing to die for one another; but who should do it, and in what order, that was something which could only be left to chance—left to God, if you would rather.’

  Darnell turned to the jury. He looked at each of the jurors in turn, drawing their attention to the importance of the question he was about to ask. ‘But you did decide who was going to live and who was going to die, didn’t you, when you decided that neither you nor Hugo Offenbach would be included, that the two of you would continue to live?’

  Marlowe nodded grimly. ‘We were all going to die,’ was his only answer.

  ‘But you did not, did you
?’ asked Darnell, staring right at him. ‘You thought you were all going to die, you thought that with the passing of that ship you had lost your last, your only, chance at rescue, but you and Hugo Offenbach and four others survived. If you had known that, if you had known that some of you were going to be rescued, wouldn’t you have had to do the same thing: sacrifice some so at least a few could survive?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you had to be one of the survivors, because you were the only one who could handle the boat?’

  ‘No,’ said Marlowe vehemently.‘Trevelyn could have done that.’

  ‘Trevelyn? He was too weak, too injured.’

  Marlowe was not listening. He was angry, enraged. His eyes were wild; he looked half-demented. ‘If I had thought there was any chance, any chance at all, that we would ever be rescued, do you think—does anyone think—that I would have allowed it? Do you think I would have let anyone die before I did? Good God, do you believe—does anyone believe—that I would not have killed myself before I let anything happen to that boy?’

  Chapter Nineteen

  DARNELL FELT THE GROUND CRUMBLING beneath his feet. His whole defence—the only defence he had— had been based on the proposition that there had not been any choice, that if Marlowe and the others had not decided that someone had to die, no one would have survived. But now Marlowe had told the jury that before the first victim was chosen, before that first grim lottery was played, he knew that none of them would ever see the shore, that every last one of them would die at sea. What was it one of the survivors, one of the witnesses for the prosecution, had said? Better they all should perish of hunger and thirst than start a slaughter that would go on until there was only one of them left alive and no one left to kill?

  Now Darnell had to argue that it did not matter what Marlowe had thought about their chances of survival—the simple fact was that they had survived, and that all of them would have died if they had not done what they did.

  ‘Forget for the moment what you thought were the chances that anyone would ever find you. There was a point at which you knew that death—not just for you, but for all of you—was imminent. Isn’t that when the decision was made to sacrifice one to save the rest?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Marlowe.

  ‘You were out there forty days before you were rescued?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The ship that saw you but did not stop, the one that Arnold Wilson jumped in after, this happened somewhere around the tenth day after the Evangeline went down in the storm?’

  ‘Yes, about then.’

  ‘And by this time, many of those people whose safety and well-being you felt to be your responsibility were already sick and dying, and some of them, like Arnold Wilson, nearly out of their minds from exposure and the lack of food?’

  Marlowe bit hard on his lip and nodded.

  ‘You could not have lasted—any of you—more than another day or two, if that?’

  ‘It’s hard to say how long any of us might have lived.’

  Darnell dismissed the answer as being of no account. There was a more important point he was trying to make.‘Could any of you have lasted another two weeks?’

  ‘No, we would all have been dead by then.’

  Darnell gave him a look that demanded more precision.

  ‘Some of us might have lived a few more days.’

  ‘So even if you had known—if, for example, the ship that had passed by told you that they couldn’t stop, but that they would send help which would arrive in two weeks—it would have done no good?’

  Marlowe seemed not to understand the question. It was just the reaction Darnell wanted.

  ‘It would have done no good to know that you would be rescued forty days after the Evangeline sank, because you would all have been dead by then. It would have done no good, unless you did exactly what you did—take the lives of some to save the others. Isn’t that true, Mr Marlowe? No matter what you knew or thought you knew, no matter what you thought your chances were, the only choice you had was to do what you did, or let all those people whose lives were in your care perish!’

  Before Marlowe could answer, Darnell turned quickly to the bench.‘No further questions, your Honour.’

  Roberts was on his feet, moving around the counsel table. The question of personal sympathy, of what he felt for the terrible moral dilemma in which Marlowe, and not just Marlowe, had been placed had been pushed aside. However easy it might be to understand what had made them do it, what the survivors had done was in some ways worse than murder. Men and women killed each other out of love and hatred, greed, jealousy and obsession—all the range of violent emotions—but they never, or almost never, argued that it was the better thing to do. If you accepted what the defence was arguing, that it was permissible to kill some to save others, where would it stop?

  ‘Mr Marlowe, let me begin where Mr Darnell ended.You did not know that you and the others would be out there in that lifeboat for forty days before you were rescued, did you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You had no way of knowing that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Instead of forty days, it could have been sixty?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You testified that you were certain—after that ship refused to stop—that you would never be rescued. Isn’t that what you said?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you were wrong, weren’t you?’

  ‘Wrong that we would not be rescued? Yes.’

  ‘The plain fact is that you didn’t know whether you would be rescued or, if you were, when it might happen—correct?’

  Roberts stood straight in front of the witness stand, ten feet away. He looked at Marlowe with a cold, determined expression. ‘For all you knew, for all you could have known, you might have been rescued not forty days after the Evangeline sank, but the day after the ship that passed you sailed out of view. Isn’t that true, Mr Marlowe? For all you knew, or could have known, another ship might at that very moment have been coming straight towards you?’

  ‘For all I knew, for all I could have known, that might have happened—but it did not. No ship came, and I—’

  ‘My point, Mr Marlowe, is that because you could not know whether a ship might not appear the next day or even the next hour, there was no necessity to do what you did!’

  Marlowe’s only reply was a stoic glance. All he knew was what had happened.

  ‘Do you disagree, Mr Marlowe?’ asked Roberts, insistent on an answer.

  ‘No ship came—’

  ‘You could not know that it wouldn’t!’

  ‘No ship came, and it was not likely one would at that time of year in that part of the south Atlantic. It was not something you could count on. That was how we found ourselves, Mr Roberts— shipwrecked and out of food, all of us sick and dying. I won’t quarrel with you if you say we should not have done what we did to stay alive. I wouldn’t quarrel with that at all. But we elected not to do that, not to die before we had to. Let there be no mistake about one thing: if it was wrong for us to have done that, I’m the one who has to bear the burden. Trevelyn was right: I made the decision, the decision to allow it, and I’m the one—no one else— who did it.You have the right man, Mr Roberts. I’m the one who did it; I’m the one who killed those poor souls; I’m the one responsible—no one else.’

  ‘Because you had to? Because it was necessary?’ asked Roberts, anticipating the defence. ‘That is the question, isn’t it? Whether you had to. And if you had to, or thought you had to, why you were in that situation in the first place.’

  Roberts poured a glass of water from a pitcher on the counsel table and took a drink.

  ‘Mr Trevelyn testified that he went to a lifeboat, but it was filled with boxes of champagne and caviar.You were the captain of the Evangeline.Why was a lifeboat used for this? Why was it not ready?’

  Marlowe did not blink. ‘It was my fault. There was no place left to store it.’

  ‘But you did not h
ave to take boxes there was no room for.’

  ‘It wasn’t my decision. But you’re right, I didn’t have to take them and I shouldn’t have. There would have been time to get rid of them, throw them out in any normal emergency. There would have been time if the Evangeline had not started sinking so fast, if the boat had not taken so much water, if there had been any stability.’

  Roberts held the glass of water next to his chest, staring down at the water’s surface as he moved the glass back and forth. ‘But the storm had been growing gradually, becoming more intense. You could have emptied the lifeboat and made it ready before the storm got worse.’

  ‘It happened too quickly. The storm had been getting worse, but I didn’t think there was any danger. I thought the Evangeline could sail through anything. There isn’t any question but that I was negligent. I should never have allowed anything to be stored in that lifeboat.’

  Roberts put down the glass. ‘So only two lifeboats got away, and one of them was never seen again, correct?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Roberts started to move towards the jury box but then, as if he had made a conscious decision against it, he came back to the counsel table. With a solemn, almost mournful expression, he raised his eyes and looked at Marlowe. ‘You killed the boy first, plunged a knife into his heart, and then gave directions to the others to drink his still-warm blood—is that correct?’

  Marlowe held himself stiff and alert, a rigid discipline that could not hide the anguish in his eyes.