The Midnight Watch

by David Dyer

  For half an hour they heard nothing, but then Stone caught a barely audible note, seemingly dead ahead. Then: a longer note, deep and mournful, like the cry of a whale who’d lost her calf. The Californian’s own foghorn sounded again, reverberating, booming, and again there was a soft, distant reply, as insubstantial as the vapour.

  But with each repetition the sound grew a little louder.

  ‘Direction, Mr Stewart?’

  ‘Three or four points on the port bow.’

  ‘You, Mr Stone?’

  ‘Dead ahead, I think.’

  But when the foghorn next sounded, it seemed to Stone to come from astern. The captain ordered, ‘Half ahead,’ to get clear of the danger, Stone supposed. He cupped his ears from beneath to shield them from the increasing throb of the engine, closed his eyes and listened hard. When the sound came again it was very close. Stone opened his eyes and stared forward; he could see nothing. He turned his head left and right, closing his eyes again to try to judge the sound’s direction. The foghorn seemed to sound in a deeper part of his mind and he had sudden clarity.

  ‘It is dead ahead, Captain!’ he called.

  ‘Mr Stewart?’ There was a distinct urgency in the captain’s voice now.

  ‘I agree: dead ahead.’

  ‘Stop engine!’

  The foghorn came again, almost as loud as their own now, and Stone could hear the chugging of the other vessel’s steam engine. Any moment, he thought, there must be a collision. Instinctively he held onto the bridge rail. Captain Lord called for two short blasts and one long one on the foghorn: ‘You are standing into danger.’

  A call came from the crow’s nest: ‘Light fine to port!’ And then a second call: ‘Light to starboard!’

  Stone could see them: two faint white lights growing brighter by the second and moving slowly towards each other. Two small boats, he thought, but then the blackness between the lights slowly resolved itself into a steel hull, and Stone saw one ship, dead ahead, turning fast, her masthead lights drawing together as her angle changed.

  The ship disappeared under their bow. Stone braced himself for impact, but the other ship was handled deftly and she darted clear at the last moment, steadying her course as she drifted close down the Californian’s starboard side. She was a large ocean tug, more than a hundred feet long, with a tall funnel amidships emitting a stream of glowing sparks and embers. She glided astern, back into the fog, but just before she disappeared she seemed to Stone to be turning again and applying full power. A great burst of flame erupted from her funnel and the pounding of her engine could be heard above the low pulse of their own.

  ‘She’s turning,’ he called to the captain and chief, who were looking forward. ‘She’s coming again.’

  By slow degrees the tug adopted a course parallel to their own and thrashed her way through the water until she drew abreast, veering recklessly close. The beam of a searchlight swept up and down the Californian’s length, and then was switched off and replaced by a softer light on the tug’s bridge. The vessel was only yards away; Stone could clearly see the men on her bridge. One lifted a megaphone to his mouth.

  ‘SS Californian, SS Californian. We are the Revenue Cutter Winnisimmet with members of the United States press aboard. They have permission from your owners to board your ship.’

  Stone saw his captain’s surprise: Lord’s mouth was open but no words came. The chief strode to the bridge locker and retrieved the captain’s own megaphone, but the captain waved it away. Instead he walked inboard and rang ‘Full ahead’ on the engine telegraph and told the helmsman to hold steady his course.

  The chief lifted the megaphone to his mouth and called, ‘Stand clear! Stand clear!’ The Californian began to draw ahead. Despite the heavy labouring of the cutter’s engine she could not keep up. Men scurried about her bridge and her telegraph clanged.

  Stone saw another man take hold of the megaphone and call up to them – a thin man with black floppy hair. ‘You have a duty to respond,’ Stone heard him say. ‘I have your owners’ permission to board.’ As the vessel drifted astern once more his words were drowned out by the pounding din of her engine, but Stone caught fragments – ‘the Boston American’… ‘pay good money’… ‘I have permission.’ The man seemed determined. He leaned so far outboard that Stone thought he might try to leap the distance between the two ships. But the gap opened up yard by yard, the mist swirling in turbulent gusts about the vessels. Soon the cutter vanished astern and all that could be heard was the fading chug of her overworked engine. Stone stared aft. What sort of place must Boston be if newspapermen went to such trouble?

  When he turned forward again, he saw that something had changed in his captain; there was a quality about the softly lit figure he had not seen before. Perhaps it was the way his cap sat not quite straight, or the way the fog’s moisture on his cheeks made him appear to sweat, or the way he seemed to be speaking orders quietly to himself. Stone did not know what he now saw. It might be anger or it might be fear. When Evans brought up a message from the Leyland Line – delayed, he said, because of some problem at the Wellfleet station – the captain seemed hardly to notice. Nor did he seem to remember that his ship was still steaming at full speed through fog towards the rocks and islands of Boston Harbor.

  As the fog swirled and eddied, Stone thought of his beloved Moby-Dick disappearing into the black water. ‘How did it end?’ Gill had asked him, and an image now came to him clear and true: Captain Ahab being dragged downwards by the dying whale into the black ink of the ocean.

  CHAPTER 9

  These were strange times in Boston.

  There was so much mud under the bleached white pavers you only had to apply a little pressure for it to come bubbling up through the cracks. I was often splashed: perhaps it was the way I walked, with my weight always at the edge of those dainty white squares, never at the centre.

  For us in the dirty business of newspapers it was the time of the great muckraking crusades. Pulitzer and Hearst battled to outdo each other. Pulitzer started it all with The World down in New York – with its stories of crimes, scandals and monstrosities – but Hearst had taken things to new heights. Or lows. He would stop at nothing, even instigating a war with Spain to sell more papers. He said to one of his photographers in Cuba, ‘You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war,’ and that’s exactly what he did. And when the New York Journal published stories of brave American soldiers, circulation rose to a million copies a day.

  I never knew why Krupp was sent up from New York, but what I did know was that when he arrived at the Boston American he had a score to settle. He wanted to beat New York at their own game and give the Boston American the highest readership in the country. This wasn’t such a crazy plan: if Mrs Baker Eddy could achieve record circulation in only a few years with her very sober Christian Science Monitor, then there was no telling what a man like Krupp could do with a paper like the American. I did what I could to help, not with New York-style tales of adventure and manhood, but with touching little stories of the intimate and the domestic, the downtrodden and the destitute, the liars and hypocrites. I wandered the brothels, taverns and jilt shops to talk to pimps and hookers and to catch glimpses of their clients. Sex was like Mr Bell’s underground telephone wires: invisible, but connecting everyone. The city had a fascinating hypocrisy, a curious doubleness. Watch and Ward were everywhere, burning books, hunting opium smokers, arresting men for giving away racehorses, but on Charles Street women were known to live with women and channel the spirits of the dead in occult gatherings. The city censor banned a hundred books of ‘passion’, but Boss Curley was allowed to run his election campaign from prison. Boston Corbett cut off his own penis after staring lustfully at a prostitute, but then roamed North Street yearning for what he’d lost.

  At times, I did embrace the sensational and the shocking. I impersonated a madman to expose the brutality of asylums. When a headless, legless, armless torso was found in the East River in New York I trave
lled south to become part of a joint newspaper-police force searching for more body parts. I devised tricks and stunts. I persuaded my own daughter, at fourteen years old, to pose as a child prostitute. I helped my wife find board and lodging for fugitive suffragette window-smashers. And I pretended to be a grieving Italian father so as to see the burnt bodies of the Shirtwaist girls on the pier in Manhattan.

  Such was the spirit of the times. So when, on the morning after the fog rolled into Boston, I walked into Krupp’s office and told him I wanted to hire an ocean tug to take me out to the Californian, he at once said yes. The papers down in New York were sending boats out to meet the Carpathia; he would do the same for the Californian. ‘But,’ he added, ‘there had better be bodies on that boat.’ It was becoming his refrain.

  The adventure seemed like a good idea. Why wait for the Californian to come to me? My inspiration to go to her instead was no less a person than the President of the United States himself and his dispatch of the Navy to find Archie Butt.

  Things then moved quickly. My newspaper chartered the Winnisimmet that very afternoon and I persuaded Jack Thomas to send a Marconigram to the Californian authorising me to board. I dug around and found some old oilskins and stiff rubber boots. The next afternoon we steamed out of Boston Harbor and that night we found the Californian groping around in the fog a few miles east of Boston Light. So far so good.

  But I had not counted on the stubborn defiance of the Californian’s captain. He would not let me aboard and instead steamed off at full speed. We chased him but did not reach his ship until it berthed at the East Boston pier just on dawn. I was exhausted and, to be frank, more than a little angry. My grand idea had been a waste of time. But if I acted quickly I could still be the first pressman aboard. I saw a crowd of perhaps a hundred people pressed up against the locked iron gates at the landward end of the pier, and I knew that among them would be newspaper reporters. So I asked the tug master to land me at the seaward end, and he obliged by nudging his craft gently into the wharf fenders. I leapt ashore with my duffle bag and ducked into a longshoreman’s shed, where I put on a boiler suit and engineer’s cap that I had secreted from the Winnisimmet’s engine room. I tucked a clipboard under my arm and a moment later was walking up the Californian’s gangway.

  ‘Coal supplies,’ I said to the seaman stationed at the top. ‘Where’s the chief engineer?’ The seaman waved me on. I hadn’t thought it would be so easy. When I pretended to be a lunatic in the Taunton madhouse, I’d at least needed to forge admission papers.

  I wandered aft unhindered. Men went about their business undogging the hatches, running lines to the derrick winches, plugging the scuppers, and the recently painted deck plates shone bright green in the morning sun. No mud under those, I thought.

  I opened a steel door and climbed down a ladder. I walked along a lower deck, past strange machine parts lashed to wooden pallets. I tripped over dunnage timbers and old fire hoses. I found refrigerated stores: chilled eggs, frozen milk, meat and bread loaves.

  I’m not sure what I expected. I’d heard that ships sometimes carried supplies of ice wrapped in burlap, and imagined that somewhere in these cavernous holds might be a section set aside, dark and cool, with bodies laid out under sheets in neat rows. The Titanic’s dead: tidy, numbered, each with a little bag for their possessions. Some would be the richest corpses in the world – John Jacob Astor, Benjamin Guggenheim, Isidor Straus. They might stare up at me with that peculiar gaze, wondering, perhaps, why their money had not been able to save them.

  I climbed down another ladder to a yet lower deck, walked its length, and then climbed lower still. Down here the spaces were closed in and dark. I didn’t know whether my breathing was rapid because I needed air or because I was becoming tense and anxious. I looked beneath tarpaulins and searched behind stacks of rubber tyres but found nothing. I decided to start again from the upper decks, and climbing the internal stairwell in the midships accommodation block, I heard an excited commotion. By the time I reached the topmost deck I could make out Bostonian accents, and as I walked further forward they clarified into voices I knew. ‘What wreckage did you see?’ (Frank, the old drunkard from the Globe.) ‘Did you see the iceberg?’ (Rupert, with the glass eye, from the Advertiser.) ‘Were you in any danger yourself?’ (Sam, the pious Christian with fifteen children to three women, from the Monitor.) The questions rolled over each other in a frenetic fugue. I heard not a single answer.

  Jack Thomas surprised me by appearing in the alleyway in a white suit, as large and round as if inflated by some pneumatic process. He wheezed and puffed; his face was engorged with blood. ‘Old boy!’ he said, lurching towards me, fumbling in his pockets for something. ‘Where have you been? My god, what is that you’re wearing?’

  ‘He didn’t let me on, Jack.’

  ‘Don’t be peevish, old boy. I sent a Marconigram. What more could I do? At least you’re here now.’

  ‘You said I’d be first on board.’

  ‘Come, come. When I couldn’t find you I could hardly deny the others, could I? Don’t sulk now, you’ve not missed a thing, and you’ve me to thank for persuading the captain to say anything at all. Stern fellow, he is – didn’t want to speak at first, said he had nothing whatsoever to say. Nothing whatsoever! Until I told him it was his duty to say something. And so he’s about to give a little press conference – only one, he said, only one, and absolutely no photographs, but he will tell us all he knows and all he did, and that will be that. It’ll make a nice little story for your paper, I should think, a nice little story.’

  ‘But what about the bodies?’

  ‘Sorry, old boy, there are no bodies. I asked him outright and he answered outright. They found none. Not a single one. They didn’t even find much wreckage, just a few bits and pieces. He’ll tell you all about it. He’ll give you a nice little story.’

  Jack Thomas was sweating. Perhaps he knew I was done for, and that ‘a nice little story’ wouldn’t save me. He eased himself into an architrave so that I could squeeze past him, then he turned and followed me along the alleyway. ‘Straight ahead,’ he called. ‘Straight through, John. Just push through. Go right to the front. That’s it, push!’

  An open louvred door led into a small room overfilled with men. On one side was a large table, on the other a green settee. There were no windows. A bare electric light bulb gave off a hard glow. Six or seven pressmen shouted, surged and retreated. There was simply not enough space for us all. One reporter stood on the leather settee in his muddy boots. Someone belched.

  Then I saw them: four men standing perfectly still, facing the crush, their backs against the bulkhead. They were very clearly Englishmen – tall, stiff and reserved. The tallest of them, the captain, stood at the centre in an immaculate blazer and cap. He had a man either side of him and a third stood partly in shadow behind.

  People tell me there’s such a thing as love at first sight. I don’t know about that. But I do know that there’s such a thing as a story at first sight. And there was something about these men – their stillness, perhaps, or maybe their unimpeachable solidarity – that told me at once that something strange had happened on this ship, something more than ‘a nice little story’.

  At first they reminded me of a Victorian family posing for a photograph, but then I thought of British soldiers mounting a last-ditch defence. The four men gazed into the middle distance and looked at no one in particular. They were a little piece of stoic England here in Boston. Then, as if responding to a secret cue, the captain raised a hand, palm outwards. He seemed somehow to shine with a special light. The pressmen grew silent.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ he began, ‘I am Lord – Lord of the Californian – and I will answer your questions.’

  His voice! It was such a surprise – its strange accent and the way it flowed around me like a warm breeze. It made me think, This is a man I would trust with my life.

  ‘But first,’ the captain continued, lifting his eyes a little, ‘let us s
ay a prayer for those who have been lost in this tragedy.’ He asked that every man in the room bow his head. ‘Eternal Father, strong to save, whose arm hath bound the restless wave.’ It was a hymn we all knew, but Lord did not sing the words, he spoke them in that voice with its own mysterious music. ‘Who bids the mighty ocean deep, its own appointed limits keep; Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee, for those in peril on the sea.’

  I looked hard at the glazed porcelain of his face, trying to read it. But I could not. I did not know what I was looking at. The officers either side of him were likewise closed off and emotionless. But then I caught something in the man at the back, the man who was almost hidden. He was clearly terrified – his eyes, as large as a woman’s, darted left and right, his eyelashes flickered, his jaw twitched – but there was something else there, something less obvious. I stared at him, and for the briefest instant his eyes locked onto mine with a pained intensity, as if he were asking for help, as if he were being held hostage. And in that moment I thought of the photograph I’d seen only days earlier in New York, in the station saloon. I remembered now the word that came to me for Harry Houdini: trapped.

  This man before me felt trapped. Why?

  And then a subtle but odd thing happened. The captain, seeing me studying the officer behind him, shifted very slightly sideways so as to block him from my view. He was protecting him. Again I wondered, Why?

  The press conference was about to begin. I got out my pencil and prepared to write down every word Captain Lord said.

  * * *

  ‘We left London on April 5th and had a comparatively pleasant voyage until about the tenth day out, April 14th, when we ran into such a mass of ice that I deemed it safest to stop the engines and let the vessel stand until the course became clear.’