The Midnight Watch
Page 9
‘And he isn’t scared of you. He’s tougher than you are. You go up against him, you’ll come off second best. Trust me, I’ve known him for years.’ The carpenter stepped closer, tall and sinewy and strong. Gill could see the topsails of a tattooed tea clipper showing above the low collar of his shirt. ‘I don’t believe you saw any rockets,’ the carpenter went on. ‘Our skipper wouldn’t ignore a call for help at sea. No man would. I don’t know what kind of talk goes on down in the engine room but we don’t talk against our ship up here on deck. As I say, if anyone brings shame to this ship it’ll be you. So the best you can do is get down off of that rickety crate and stop spouting your nonsense.’
‘It isn’t nonsense,’ said Gill, stiffening and clenching his scarred hand into a fist. ‘And you’ve got no jurisdiction over me. I’m engine room, is what I am. Engine room!’
‘Listen to you – delegation, jurisdiction. Pah!’ The carpenter spat on the deck. ‘Those are mighty fine words for an orphan boy from Sheffield.’
At that moment, the aft door opened and the bosun stepped into the space. No one had heard him coming. The men were at once a blur of movement: standing, doing up their shirt buttons, taking off their cloth caps and holding them by their side. The bosun was kind, but he was tough and unyielding too. His eyes moved slowly from man to man and then settled on Gill.
‘Everything under control here, Mr McGregor?’ the bosun asked of the carpenter while looking at Gill.
‘Always under control, Mr Bosun,’ the carpenter said, turning away and stepping towards his bunk. ‘The fireman’s helping me with my vocabulary, that’s all.’
‘Assistant donkeyman!’ spat out Gill, as much to the bosun as to the carpenter. And then, apologetically, ‘I mean, I’m not a fireman any more…’
‘Well,’ said the bosun, ‘fireman, donkeyman or candlestick maker, you’d better help open this place up a little – it stinks in here.’
Gill stood down from his crate. He knew he had lost the men. As they pulled on their boots and sou’westers and threw open the forward hatch to let in light and air, they did not look at him. None of them would form a committee with him, or come with him to protest to the captain, or help him right the great wrong that had been done. The carpenter had seen to that.
* * *
Herbert Stone often marvelled at the bewitching resonance of his captain’s voice. When Lord told of rounding the Horn five times in sail, of meeting Mr Shackleton, of landing a thousand men on the beaches during military manoeuvres, he spoke as an indulgent grandfather might to a loved child. He used words like ‘poppycock’ and ‘balderdash’, and seemed always to speak from a position of special knowledge. He even pronounced the name of the Titanic in his own particular way, with a strange elongation of the second syllable – Ti-tar-nic.
So when Lord insisted that it could not have been the Titanic’s rockets that Stone saw during his watch, Stone felt compelled to believe him. ‘I did not see the Titanic,’ Stone said to himself. But he was having trouble writing it. The Titanic was large, stationary, and had fired rockets, so he knew his letter must say that what he saw was small, moving, and showing signals that were not rockets. He had set these things out clearly enough – ‘I judged her to be a small tramp steamer – steaming away to the S.W. I observed a flash of light in the sky’ – but then he began to lose his way. He became uncertain. He pressed his pencil hard into the page to make his words dark and bold, but when he read them aloud they seemed timid and ambiguous. He persevered for a day, and then another, and as the ship neared Boston he at last had a draft ready for the captain.
Captain Lord was talking quietly with the chief officer over Thursday luncheon in the dining saloon when Stone drew up a chair and handed him the letter. Stone thought he would read it at once, but instead he carefully folded the two sheets in half and put them in his pocket. He spoke of the weather, of the warming sea temperature, of the possibility of fog ahead. He asked Stone what he thought of these matters and nodded thoughtfully at the answers. The thick velvet curtains swayed with the gentle roll of the ship and the polished silver cutlery rattled softly on the tables. The ship’s engine throbbed steadily.
Stone understood. The captain’s calm nodding, his upturned palms, his fingers opened slightly towards him, said that everything had been restored. The semaphore flags and their message were forgotten.
‘And so,’ the captain said, turning to Stewart, ‘the crew are working well?’
‘They are,’ said the chief. ‘Very well.’
‘They carry out their business on deck in the normal way?’
‘They do.’
When, a little later, Stone stood on the bridge and watched the men go about their work he saw that the chief was right. They chipped rust and spliced ropes and seemed carefree and happy. The sun drifted lower ahead of him, the deck pulsed reassuringly beneath his feet, and Boston drew closer.
But not long afterwards, when Cyril Evans came to the bridge looking for the captain, Stone saw a yellow Marconi slip fluttering in the wireless operator’s hand and sensed it would bring new worry. He asked if he might see it.
‘It’s a service message,’ said Evans, ‘for the captain.’
‘Does it refer to the management of the ship?’
‘I suppose it does.’
‘Then I may see it. I am the officer of the watch.’
Evans seemed unconvinced, but he offered up the message. ‘To Captain, Californian. Press reports you were near Titanic and have remains victims on board. Have you anything to report? Leyland.’
Stone stood for a moment leaning forward into the wind, using its resisting pressure to steady himself. Press reports? He’d heard that American reporters would stop at nothing to get a story, but how did they know his ship had been near the Titanic? Those four words ‘you were near Titanic’ in Evans’ spidery handwriting seemed almost to be an accusation.
‘Why does Leyland – why do the press – think we have remains on board?’ he asked.
Evans was quick with his answer. ‘Because the Carpathia sent a report to the Olympic saying that we were searching for bodies.’
‘But we didn’t find any.’
‘They must have assumed we did.’
Stone thought a little longer. ‘The report was sent to the Olympic – so how does the press know?’
‘There’s a United Press man on the Olympic. I’ve heard him sending messages about it – about us having bodies, I mean.’
‘You’ve been listening to this man’s messages?’
Evans smiled. ‘I listen to all the messages. There’s only one frequency. You can’t avoid it. It’s not eavesdropping.’
Stone gave the Marconigram back to Evans and waved him away. He stared ahead. The sun sank towards the horizon as if tired of its own weight, and the North Atlantic heaped up in low, lethargic swells like those of the tropics. Its golden stillness annoyed Stone; its very calm seemed to mock him.
The whole world, then, knew they’d been near the Titanic. The press were asking questions. So were the owners of the Californian. Stone wondered whether the captain would still tell him that there was nothing whatsoever to worry about.
Later, at twilight, when Stone went to the bridge to take his star sights, Captain Lord was talking to the chief officer at the forward bridge rail. As soon as the captain saw him he took him aside and showed him four Marconigrams. Stone read them carefully. All were inquiries about bodies, but this time they came directly from Boston and New York newspapers. Their tone bordered on the desperate; they begged for information. ‘Please rush answers at our expense,’ asked one. ‘Send collect any news even if slight,’ said another. ‘Relieve the world’s anxiety!’
The most direct message came from the Boston American: ‘How many bodies of Titanic victims on board – men and women?’ Stone felt the insult of it on the captain’s behalf. The new technology had brought with it new rudeness. No ‘Dear sir’ or ‘Yours sincerely’, just ‘How many bodies?’
‘I have told them nothing whatsoever,’ said the captain. ‘I have told Mr Evans to transmit nothing. If you say one word to newspapermen they will demand more. They pounce like animals. They have no honour. No, no one is to speak to them.’
The captain lingered on the bridge as the sky darkened and the stars grew brighter. Stone wondered why. He sensed a subtle change in his mood – a stiffening, a deepening coldness, as if he were preparing to carry out an unpleasant duty.
‘I have read your letter,’ the captain said.
Stone had been holding his sextant by his side, letting it sway loosely back and forth, but now he slowly returned it to its rosewood box, which sat on a nearby ledge. Then he stared straight ahead and waited.
‘In parts,’ the captain continued, ‘it is satisfactory.’
‘But in others…?’
‘It is not.’
Stone worried that his nervousness would turn to anger. He had worked for days on that letter. ‘But,’ he said, very quietly, very deliberately, ‘it says just what you said it ought.’
‘It does – but then it goes on to say so much more. You start well, but you destroy your good work later.’
Stone resolved to say nothing more; he could not be sure his voice would not quiver or break. But his silence seemed to embolden the captain, who now spoke in a tone that was wholly new.
‘I know what you are trying to do, Mr Stone. Please don’t think that I don’t. I know exactly what it is that you seek to do, and all I can say is that it does not become you. It is weak, and it is disloyal.’
Stone had not expected this. He did not speak or move, even as the captain walked away to take up his position again next to the chief officer at the forward part of the bridge. He wanted the captain to sense his unwavering, upright presence, to hear his silent protest. His letter was not weak. It was not disloyal. It was true.
The gloom deepened and Stone, thinking upon things, did not at first notice that something strange was happening ahead of him. The boundary between sea and sky had become complex; the varying bands of turquoise had resolved into a single neat line, a stripe which, as darkness fell, was not fading but becoming more distinct. As he watched, the band seemed to broaden. At the same time there was a softening of the ship’s steel edges, a blurring caused by something more subtle than the descending darkness. A corona encircled the foremast steaming light; the luminescence radiated outwards through wispy vapour. A moment later, the foremast disappeared altogether. They had steamed into fog – dense, deep and still.
The captain, without turning around, called to him, ‘Dead slow ahead, please, Mr Stone,’ and Stone walked to the engine telegraph and pulled it gently rearward. The answering clang came and the rhythm of the ship’s engine slowly died away. For a few moments he let his hand rest on the handle of the telegraph, feeling in the polished brass the Californian’s fading pulse as she groped her way blindly towards Boston.
Hours later, lying in his cabin, Stone could not sleep. The foghorn boomed sorrowfully every minute and the captain’s cruel words hounded him. He got up from his bunk. There was something he wanted to do.
He heard seven bells ring down from the bridge: he had half an hour before the midnight watch. It would be his final watch of the voyage – Boston Light must now be only hours away. He dressed warmly and strolled aft along the shelter deck. He wandered down to the poop where he lingered, leaning over the taffrail to gaze into the ship’s wake. The black water, visible only by the feeble light of the stern lamp, turned in on itself in gleaming laminar folds as it flowed astern into the fog and darkness. The ship was moving very slowly.
He stepped onto the lowest rung of the rail and leaned out. The rails were slippery. The water passing below mesmerised him. As he stared at it he was reminded of six newborn kittens his father had once put into a cotton bag, thin enough to show the outlines of their tiny wriggling bodies, and thrown into the clear racing waters of the River Dart. For a while the bag floated, bobbing downstream before it became sodden, and Herbert heard squeaking cries as high-pitched as a bird’s. He turned away, but his father made him watch. ‘Life is hard,’ his father said. ‘Not every mouth can be fed, not every life can be lived. We best take it from them before they know what they’ve lost.’
Odd, Stone thought, standing on the taffrail, that he should think of those kittens now, those six little beings squeezed together in that small dark bag – just like the womb they’d come from only minutes before – feeling the mystery of death come upon them. What would it have been like? He felt himself at the edge of strange new thoughts, on the cusp of some exhilarating empathy. He leaned further out. If he slipped he would fall, but he held on tight with one hand and reached with the other to grab the shreds of vapour that seemed to hang close by. But he clutched only at air. The fog was everywhere except where he was. Such was the nature of fog: to seem thickly solid in the distance but invisible close up.
The water slid by smooth and black, and he felt as trapped as the kittens in their death bag on the river.
A single toll of the bell sounded to call the midnight watch, but he did not go. Instead he leaned as far out over the rail as he dared, put his hand into a deep inner pocket of his greatcoat and drew out his copy of Moby-Dick. He held it out – this book that his mother had given him, which had made him imagine all the wonders of the sea – and it fell open in the soft light of the stern lamp. For an instant Stone thought he saw the image of Starbuck – radiant, luminescent, his arms outstretched on the cross made of starlight – but he could not be sure, because already the book was falling away from him, tumbling over itself through space. It fell silently into the sea on its spine, and floated calmly on the water, its pages opening slowly outwards. Then it was gone, taken by a downsurge into the darkness below.
* * *
He was still at the taffrail when he heard someone nearby humming ‘Annie Laurie’. By degrees the sound clarified into words: ‘She gived me her promise true, gived me her promise true…’ He turned inboard but could see no one. Fog drifted in thick shreds between the bollards and capstans; the stern lamp cast only the faintest glow. There was no wind. The ship, it seemed, had slowed further. He walked towards the sound, trying to resolve shadowy shapes in the gloom. ‘Her voice is low and sweet, and she’s all the world to me.’
But now the singing seemed to be behind him. Another feature of the fog: sound bouncing and leaping so you never knew from whence it came.
He turned. The curved shadow of an air vent split in two and one half moved slowly towards him. A match flared, lighting a face from beneath.
‘Evenin’, Mr Second,’ said Ernie Gill the donkeyman, drawing on his cigarette.
Stone could see a snide smile in the flickering light; he saw a familiarity, a knowledge that frightened him, and when he asked, ‘What are you doing here?’ he was surprised by the timidity of his own voice.
The donkeyman drew close; his form had a sudden clarity.
‘I’d better go up,’ Stone said, moving to step around him. ‘It’s almost midnight.’
But Gill blocked his path. ‘What did you just throw over?’
‘Nothing.’
‘I saw you. You threw a book.’
Stone, wondering just how long Gill had been watching him, remained silent.
‘Why?’ Gill pressed. ‘Why did you throw it away?’
‘I’d finished it,’ said Stone, but even before his words had vanished into the fog he felt their foolishness.
Gill gave a short, dismissive laugh. ‘How did it end?’ he asked.
When Stone again did not answer, Gill stepped yet closer. ‘Cold tonight, isn’t it?’ he said, exhaling his smoke into the fog. ‘But not as cold as the other night, when I stayed on deck awhile aft
er my watch, thinking about things, looking at the sights…’
‘What sights?’ Stone asked, and at once wished he hadn’t.
‘Very pretty ones. All bright and pretty.’
Stone tried to push past, and again Gill blocked his path. ‘But don’t worry,’ Gill said, almost in a whisper. ‘It’s not me you need to be afraid of. It’s not me.’ He turned and vanished back into the murkiness, and as he walked away Stone heard him singing again, his low voice sliding in and around the folds of the fog. ‘For Bonnie Annie Laurie, I’d lay me down and die…’
Stone arrived on the bridge just as the standby quartermaster rang the eight bells of midnight and pulled the foghorn lanyard. A long, low bass note pulsed out into the night. At the rear of the bridge Groves handed the watch over to him. They were only an hour or so from Boston Light and everyone had an eye out for it, and was listening for its signal. Extra lookouts had been posted; the chief officer and captain had come up. The fog, which had lifted briefly, now set in again thicker than ever. The captain was confident of his dead reckoning, but all were on the alert. They had heard one or two ships pass outward bound but had not seen them.
When Groves left the bridge, Stone stood for a moment, opening his eyes wide to let in every particle of light. Fog surrounded him like a wall. By the glow of the compass binnacle he could make out the shapes of men: the chief officer, the quartermaster, the standby quartermaster, and in the centre, the tall figure of the captain.
As a child, Stone had created pictures of his father using black ink and woodblocks, and this was how the captain appeared to him now: all solid squares and straight edges, black and symmetrical. He stared directly ahead, eyes piercing the fog. He looked like a disembodied spirit floating in the mist.
‘Is that you, Mr Stone?’ the captain asked without turning.
‘Yes, Captain.’
‘Move further forward, Mr Stone. We must concentrate. There are thirty islands between us and our berth. We must be vigilant.’
They were relying entirely on dead reckoning. Sheer and savage cliffs were just as likely to be ahead of them as Boston Light. After each sounding of the foghorn the captain held up a hand to command silence, and Stone strained forward to listen for echoes from land, or answering signals from distant ships. The Californian’s progress was slow and no one spoke.