The Midnight Watch

by David Dyer

  ‘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.

  CHAPTER 3

  Penn Station soared above me. Although it was only midmorning, I had been drinking on the train and the building confused me. The floor was acres of concrete but embedded in it were twinkling glass bricks. Everywhere there was indestructible granite but it was baby pink in colour. There were colonnades of giant Corinthian columns but the ironwork was as frivolous as dainty lace. Why all this contrast? My eyes hurt; I felt an incipient headache. It was time for another drink.

  I went to my favourite hotel off Christopher Street and headed straight to the back bar, known for opening early. I hadn’t been here for a year, but nothing had changed. The room was closed in and gloomy and the air glowed dull red. Two prostitutes leaned against a giant papier-mâché horse, which was as tall as a man and stood on floor panels of red glass lit from beneath. I laughed. The horse reminded me of Boston’s Watch and Ward Society, trying to stamp out the warm red glow of vice wherever it was seen. I tipped my hat at the prostitutes and ordered two bourbon highballs from a pretty waitress.

  I sat in a corner and spent an hour or so reading the morning editions I had bought at the station. Great scareheads proclaimed the dramatic accident at sea: the Allan Line’s Virginian had relayed to Cape Race that the Titanic had struck an iceberg and was calling for help. The embarrassment at White Star, it was said, was equally dramatic. There were some very famous Americans on board the ship.

  My headache worsened. I had never much liked New York. If you took a deep breath in Boston you could smell the sharp, clear air of revolution, of new thinking, but all I ever smelled in New York was melodrama and money. The city’s newspapers were filled with action, indignation and thrills, but they had no nuance and no heart. I ordered another highball, rubbed my temples and read no more.

  By midday my headache began to ease and I set out downtown. The weather was growing warm. I could smell fried fish and horse manure. Wagons trundled by with potatoes, carrots and onions left over from the Monday morning markets. I drifted east along Fourth Street, past Washington Square, and for old time’s sake I took a detour to the monumental brown-brick and terracotta edifice of the ten-storey Asch Building.

  In the year or so since the fire, the upper brickwork had been scrubbed of the soot that had streaked upwards from the windows like clownish eyelashes, and the interiors had been refurbished and replaced. From where I stood I could not see them, but I knew that new young immigrant girls now worked at the sewing machines, the braiders and corders, the seamers and binders. ‘Welcome to America,’ I whispered to them. I hoped they were safe. I was not religious – I had abandoned my Catholicism as a child – but I did make the sign of the cross, and I did pause to remember.

  On Broadway I hailed a hansom, and by Canal Street the traffic had thickened. Our horse grew fractious and lively. Two young women drove by too close in a shiny automobile, veering from side to side and shouting suffragette slogans through a megaphone. The horse shied alarmingly; the women laughed, and I did too. One of them reminded me of my daughter Harriet, just turned seventeen, who romped and leapt through life with the same energy as these young drivers. The encounter made me think two things: that I must visit Harriet as soon as I returned to Boston, and that this century, whether it be wonderful or horrible, was going to belong to the women.

  We passed Wall Street. Broadway became narrow and gloomy. The great stone edifices of ten- and twenty-storey buildings blocked the light. People spilled from the sidewalks into the roadway and we were forced to slow. As we neared the end of Broadway, trolley cars were backed up and automobiles crept along in low gear. I paid for the cab and pushed my way south on foot. Soon enough I was at Bowling Green Park, an oval of lawn fenced in by a tall iron grille. At its western edge was the towering facade of number 9, Broadway – the offices of J. P. Morgan’s International Mercantile Marine, owners of the White Star Line.

  It was a strange sight. Squeezed around the park’s perimeter and along its interior pathways was a great crowd of people. Men in small black bowlers and women in great hats of every colour surged along the sidewalks; people emerging from the subway stairs had nowhere to go; mounted policeman tried to use the flanks of their horses to keep people off the roadway. They shouted at anyone who reached out a hand to pat a horse. The bells of trolley cars sounded incessantly. Automobile horns blared. Two men were taking photographs of the scene with Box Brownie cameras.

  So this, I thought, is what happens when you put the best of New York society onto a boat and run it into an iceberg.

  On the western side of Broadway a large portion of the crowd had formed itself into an amorphous queue, three or four people abreast, which led to the wide brick and granite steps of number 9. Two policemen stood at the top of the stairs, guarding the enormous revolving door of polished brass and glass. The door was flanked by twin granite columns etched with the names of J. P. Morgan’s shipping companies: the A
merican Line, the Atlantic Transport Line, the Dominion Line, the Red Star Line, the Leyland Line and – there, at the bottom, his most famous acquisition of all – the White Star Line.

  Morgan, I thought, must be embarrassed. He was a man who bought shipping lines and railroads as if they were curios and trinkets, but now the most perfect of all his prizes was adrift in the North Atlantic with half of New York aboard. It was as if he had invited friends for cocktails at his magnificent white-marble library and then set the place alight. It was worse than embarrassing. It was bad manners.

  I pushed my way up the stairs and presented my card to a policeman with a tired face who let me through. I entered a hallway crowded with people. Cablegram boys in green blazers rushed in and out and men pressed themselves against walls to allow women to pass. Reporters smoked cigarettes and whispered names to each other. To my left, in the cavernous passenger office, young men guided people into queues marked with soft burgundy ropes on brass stands. Behind counters, White Star staff answered questions, and behind them, still others sat at desks talking on telephones.

  A White Star page, his chest puffed with importance beneath a blue tunic, directed me to the freight office, where Mr Franklin would come down shortly to speak. ‘He comes down every hour,’ the boy said.

  The freight office was smaller than the passenger office and filled with the smoke of too many cigarettes and the heat of too many steam radiators. As soon as I pushed inwards I bumped into Dan Byrne of the Dow Jones service, a boisterous man with a florid face and dubious morals whom I knew from the Republic collision and the Triangle fire. He had been in the freight office all morning. He held me by the arm and told me some very interesting things: that Franklin had been on the telephones since two a.m.; that the young Vincent Astor had been in tears of worry about his father; that frumpy Mrs Guggenheim had been up to see Franklin personally to demand news of her husband. Morgan, I learned, was in France, but his fretful son had gone upstairs and not come down again. Even the President of the United States had been calling: his friend Archie Butt was aboard. As was Bruce Ismay: President of the International Mercantile Marine, Chairman of the White Star Line, and Franklin’s boss.

  ‘My god,’ I said. ‘Poor Franklin. Who isn’t on that boat?’

  There was a commotion: a desk was moved, people stood aside, a door opened and closed, and there, suddenly, as if appearing from nowhere, was the man himself. I thought he would stand behind the desk but instead, in two quick strides, he stood upon it. The pressmen shouted questions and surged closer and a table was knocked over. A man fell against a wall clock and dislodged its brass pendulum. It seemed for a moment that Franklin too might be knocked down.

  ‘Gentlemen, please,’ he said, coughing in the thick smoke. ‘Some patience.’

  One or two reporters called for silence and others suggested that respect be shown. In a moment or so the room became still.

  Philip Albright Small Franklin towered above us all. He looked monumental, as if he were a statue of himself, as if he were already immortal. In the press he was known as the tycoon of American shipping – when it came to the North Atlantic he was John Pierpont Morgan’s man. I had met him several times: when the Cedric was overdue and thought sunk, during the drama of the Republic collision, and in the days after the Triangle fire, when I learned that he had cried with grief and donated money to the dead girls’ families. He was toastmaster to the White Star’s billion-dollar passenger list, but he was a good man too. He was fatter than the previous year, I saw, but there was still a magical lightness about his being. He was known to climb ladders and leap gaps. Nothing scared him. When an Atlantic Transport ship ran aground one night in New York Harbor, he dashed out to the vessel himself in a tug, making tea for the passengers and supervising their rescue. His head was shiny-bald and his eyes were strikingly intense. They commanded attention. People who saw them thought, Here is a man who gets things done.

  ‘Everybody on the Titanic,’ he told the assembled group, ‘is safe. The ship is diverting to Halifax.’

  It pains me to admit it, but I was dismayed. No bodies. That meant no story for me.

  ‘I have made arrangements,’ Franklin continued, ‘with the New Haven railroad to send a special train to Halifax to meet the passengers. The train will consist of twenty-eight sleepers, two diners, and coaches sufficient for seven hundred and ten people. That, you will appreciate, is enough for the entire first and second class of the ship. I have been speaking to the Canadian government over the long-distance telephone. They will do everything they can to help us. We plan to – we will – get our passengers to New York just as soon as possible.’

  Franklin undertook to answer questions.

  No, he did not have any more information about damage to the Titanic; his understanding was that it was slight and the ship was making her way to Halifax under her own steam. If not, she would be towed. He was planning to charter a tug to send out to her if necessary. No, he had not heard directly from Mr Ismay, he was relying on dispatches from the Allan Line in Montreal. He read out a message he had received from their Boston office: ‘The Allan Line, Montreal, confirms the report that the Virginian, Parisian and Carpathia are in attendance.’ Franklin was waiting for an update from Captain Haddock of the Olympic, the Titanic’s sister ship, which was nearing the scene.

  So, I thought, definitely no bodies then. The Boston American would send down Bumpton. He would write a dashing, racing tale of rescue and adventure – a good New York story. I needed another drink. But before I let go of the story for good there was a puzzle I wanted to solve. There was something about what Franklin had said that didn’t quite make sense.

  ‘Mr Franklin,’ I asked, ‘you said you are talking to the Olympic and other stations. But have you heard directly from the Titanic?’

  ‘No,’ Franklin replied, with some exasperation. ‘But I am not worried at all about that, I am not worried about that.’

  ‘But Mr Franklin – and I’m sorry if you’ve already answered this – do you know why her signals would stop so abruptly?’

  ‘I am told that there are any number of possible reasons – atmospheric conditions, or damage to the wireless apparatus, or anything at all.’

  That is odd, I thought. I had in mind the Republic accident of three years before: a ship rammed and slowly sinking, a wireless room in tatters, a Marconi boy scared out of his wits, a freezing North Atlantic fog pressing in thick and heavy – and yet all the while an unending stream of Morse code had poured from the ship, calling for help, guiding ships to the rescue. If the wireless had worked then, under such conditions, why not now, on a calm clear Atlantic?

  I don’t know whether it was the bourbon, or the vision of Bumpton’s eager face arriving at Penn Station, or simple puzzlement that made me put my next question, but it came flying out into the room before I realised I’d asked it. It seemed independent of me, as if it had its own form and presence.

  ‘Might it be because the Titanic has sunk?’

  People gasped. Franklin looked at me. He did not seem angry; his face was expressionless, waxlike, as if he’d been expecting the question. The thick smoke in the room softened the shine of his brow.

  ‘Let me tell you this,’ he said, his words low and measured. ‘I am absolutely confident that the Titanic is safe. Perfectly safe. It is inconceivable that she would have met with any serious accident without our being notified. In any event, the ship is unsinkable. Her bulkheads will keep her afloat indefinitely, so there’s no danger to the passengers. That much I do know.’

  I was watching his face carefully, trying to read it. There was something strange about it.

  ‘She is unsinkable,’ Franklin said again, more to himself than the reporters. ‘Her bulkheads, her bulkheads…’

  He stepped down from the desk, turned and walked out the door. The pressmen followed, rushing to their offices and telephones.

  I am not a rusher. I strolled from the building and found a saloon near Battery Par
k. I sat alone in a corner and tried to think. I could already see what sort of story this was becoming: a rerun of the Republic accident. A damaged ship, a spotty boy at his wireless key calling for help, a brave rescue at sea. A good story, no doubt, but it had been done before, and my own paper would not want me to write it. Bumpton was the adventure man. ‘His pen,’ the city editor had told me, ‘has a sensitivity to the narrative arc of adventure which yours does not. And his verbs are more active.’

  I doodled in my notebook, experimenting with some headline phrases: Titanic’s danger over. Steamer hit iceberg late last night. Hours of anxiety at last relieved. ‘This afternoon,’ I then wrote, ‘Mr Franklin expressed his utmost confidence in the new liner Titanic.’ Too dry, I thought. I tried adding some Bumpton-like verbs. ‘The Titanic is limping towards Halifax. Mr Franklin has commanded a special train to race north on the New Haven line to collect her passengers.’ Limp. Command. Race. But still my copy was no good. Perhaps the city editor was right. My pen was just not suited to thrilling adventure.

  I found a telegraph office and wired my newspaper – ‘No bodies no story’ – and then caught a cab back to the station. As soon as I stepped into the vast brightness of the main concourse I saw on a nearby newsstand the late edition of The Evening Sun, proclaiming in inch-high letters: ALL SAVED FROM TITANIC AFTER COLLISION.

  What a shame, I thought, before I could stop myself.

  CHAPTER 4

  Cyril Evans was woken by the glare of his cabin light. Stewart, the chief officer, stood in the doorframe, his hand on the light switch.

  ‘You’d better get up,’ said the chief. ‘A ship has been firing rockets. You’d better see whether anything is the matter.’

  ‘What time is it?’ Evans asked, blinking his eyes and swinging his legs from his bunk.

  ‘A quarter to six.’