The Midnight Watch

by David Dyer

  Just before half past ten there was a hush. An usher called for us to stand and be silent, and in swept Lord Mersey and his five nautical assessors. They sat, and a barrister stood up and began to speak. My pressman neighbour told me the speaker was Sir Rufus Isaacs, KC, the Attorney-General. I struggled to understand what he was saying – his back was to us and he spoke quickly in a soft drone, as if already bored – but I could tell that something was wrong. A murmur sprang up in the watching crowd. Chair legs scraped on the floor. Soon Lord Mersey announced that the Lusitania had been delayed on its voyage from New York. The Duff-Gordons would not be appearing today.

  There was rustling and whispering in the hall and some people got up to leave. The usher asked for silence. He was ignored, but through the noise I could hear fragments of what the Attorney-General was saying to the Commissioner. There were ‘some other witnesses’ due to give evidence today and he proposed to call them now. This was followed by unhappy mumbling from Lord Mersey, but Isaacs went on. ‘The reason, as your lordship will appreciate, is that we cannot always get them here. They are here today and I think it will be convenient to examine them now.’

  Seated in the very front row of the public part of the hall, neatly dressed and huddled together, were the men of the Californian. I was behind them and many yards distant but I could see them clearly enough: Lord, Stewart, Groves, Gibson and Evans. Stone sat alone, separated from the other men by an empty seat. He was looking down at his lap, nodding his head gently and mouthing words silently to himself.

  Isaacs, turning towards these men, gave a quick nod and Captain Lord stood up. The audience fell silent. I sensed their puzzlement: no one knew who he was. They saw only a tall man in a dark blue suit with a shiny bald head. In a moment he was at the witness desk.

  ‘This,’ said Isaacs to Lord Mersey, ‘is the master of the Leyland steamship Californian of Liverpool.’

  Slowly Isaacs turned to Lord, and as if to double-check his facts asked, ‘Are you the master of the SS Californian of Liverpool?’

  In Boston, in his chartroom, Lord had seemed monumental – in his square black uniform with its golden epaulettes that shone like beacons – but here, in his civilian suit, in this grand hall, he looked small.

  ‘Yes, I am,’ he said quietly, staring straight back at his questioner. Neither the Commissioner nor the Attorney-General, I noticed, had done him the courtesy of using his name.

  No matter. I knew it. He was Stanley Lord – Lord of the Californian – preparing for one last time to tell his story.

  * * *

  It took two days for the Californian witnesses to give their evidence. At times they threw their words into the hall with defiance and clarity, even pride; at others they looked at their feet and mumbled sulkily, as might petulant schoolboys in a headmaster’s office. The Commissioner listened carefully throughout, encouraging, reprimanding, cajoling, and trying to make sense of the events being described to him. He seemed perplexed. Eight rockets fired by the Titanic and eight rockets seen by the Californian: what other conclusion could there be? When the round-faced, bright-eyed Groves was asked whether he thought the ship they saw was the Titanic, he said, ‘Most decidedly I do.’

  Stewart and Stone, on oath under the penetrating gaze of the Commissioner, no longer had the courage for the blatant lies they’d told in Boston. Who was on the bridge at the relevant time? ‘Mr Stone was on watch,’ Stewart conceded, rather meekly. ‘I turned in about half past nine.’ And were any signals seen? ‘I saw white rockets bursting in the sky,’ Stone admitted. ‘I informed the master.’

  Yet Lord, for hour after hour, denied absolutely that it was the Titanic they’d seen. Staring straight ahead with unwavering eyes, he spoke of company signals, of rockets answering Morse lamps, of rockets fired by a ship that was definitely not the Titanic. He said these things and seemed to believe them. His hands were never clenched and never in his pockets. There was the light of the sincere about him, and the wise. At times he seemed to smile inwardly, like a priest in possession of profound knowledge that others could not share.

  ‘What is in my brain at the present time is this,’ said the Commissioner, addressing Isaacs but looking directly at Lord. ‘What they saw was the Titanic. That is what is in my brain.’

  ‘I know,’ said Isaacs, turning towards Lord to see what effect the Commissioner’s words might have. ‘I know.’

  Lord did not flinch. He made no response at all. He simply stared into the middle distance like a man who, with his head in a noose, sees through to some greater truth beyond this world.

  At the end of the second day, when it was all over, I followed the Californian witnesses out into the street. Stewart gathered them together and kept them away from the press. Even in this broad public place hundreds of miles from their ship, the men did what they were bidden. Lord was not among them. I was told he’d returned already to Liverpool; he needed to get back to his ship. But that evening I saw a photograph of him in a newspaper, standing alone in his immaculate double-breasted suit. His bowler hat, starched collar and long umbrella gave him the look of a London gentleman. The nobility of his face was clear, with its sharp lines, powerful jaw and high cheekbones. But due to some fault in the printing process his eyes appeared as blank white circles, without pupils, like a ghost’s, or a demon’s.

  * * *

  For days afterwards I sat in my room in the Waterloo hotel, going through my notes. I had a promise to keep, but how to do so with such confusing material? I had thought I’d return to Boston after the Californian witnesses had made their appearance at the inquiry, but my writing about Herbert Stone had become something of a mania. I sketched scenes of his childhood and youth – his father’s workroom, his father drowning kittens, his early days at sea – and tried to convey something of his nervous shyness. ‘Herbert Stone,’ I wrote at the beginning of my manuscript, ‘tapped his teeth with his fingers as if playing a small piano.’ I bought and read as much as I could of the novel Moby-Dick so that I might better understand his dreams and motivations.

  But I had not been able to push my storyline past the moment when, in the chartroom of his ship, Stone lied for his captain. It had been loyal – Starbuck-loyal – but it also disabled him. I remembered it well: as Stone spoke he’d taken on something of the glazed exterior of his captain and retreated deep into himself. His lie had conveyed him far away from who he was, and by the time he appeared before the inquiry in London he seemed to have disappeared completely. He’d stood on the witness stand, grasping its thin rail for support, and given answers of a peculiar emptiness.

  So I wrote to Mrs Stone and asked for her help. She had not spoken to me at the inquiry, at her husband’s request, but I thought she might do so now. What, I asked, had she thought of Herbert’s testimony? Did she think he might agree to see me? She replied at once: her husband was now back at sea on the Californian, and as for his answers in London, all she could say was that he’d done his very best.

  But she also told me a third thing: although her husband had rejoined the Californian, Captain Lord had not. The Leyland Line had suspended him. It was, Mrs Stone wrote, all so very sad: the captain had removed his belongings from the ship without saying a word to anyone. He would not even let the apprentice help him. ‘But Herbert was the most upset of all,’ she wrote, and added one final detail: when the captain walked with his bags from his cabin for the last time, Herbert said, ‘I’m sorry, Captain,’ and extended his hand to say goodbye. But the captain had not taken it. He just turned away, saying, ‘Yes, I am sure you are.’

  CHAPTER 17

  In late May, when the days grew long and young women in green trousers took to the Serpentine in rowboats, I received a letter from Harriet begging me to come home. Her mother had become impossible in the summer heat; something had gone wrong in a séance and Vivienne was angry about it. But still I stayed in England. For the time being, my daughter was on her own.

  A few days later I received a surprising transatlant
ic telegram from my old friend Jack Thomas. ‘To John Steadman and his engine man,’ it read, ‘my hearty thanks for nothing.’ I didn’t know what he meant, until I saw in the London papers that Senator Smith had delivered his findings. Large sections of his speech and report to the Senate were published verbatim, and what I read shocked me. ‘It is not a pleasant duty to criticise the conduct or comment upon the shortcomings of others,’ Smith had said to the United States Senate, ‘but the plain truth should be told.’ And that plain truth was that Captain Lord had been informed of the Titanic’s distress rockets and done nothing. Had he gone to them, ‘there is a very strong probability that every human life that was sacrificed through this disaster could have been saved’.

  Every human life. I drank more gin and loosened my shirt.

  Smith demanded ‘drastic action’ by the government of England against not only Captain Lord, but the owners of his ship, which were, Smith pointed out, also the owners of the Titanic. He offered a devastating comparison: ‘Contrast, if you will, the conduct of the captain of the Carpathia in this emergency … By his utter self-effacement and his own indifference to peril, by his promptness and his knightly sympathy, he rendered a great service to humanity. He should be made to realise the debt of gratitude this nation owes to him!’

  What must Jack Thomas have made of it all? He had asked me to write him a hero, and instead, here on the public record forever, was a statement that Cunard was a company of action and ‘knightly sympathy’, while the International Mercantile Marine was a company of inaction and indifference. Captain Smith of the IMM sank the Titanic and Captain Lord of the IMM left her passengers to die.

  And what effect must these words have had on Lord himself? Senator Smith’s speech had been published in every newspaper across America and England. There could be no wider audience. Just how could his convivial chitchat with the folksy American senators have yielded such poisonous results?

  More was to come. At the end of July, in London’s high summer, I sat among the hushed men and women of the Scottish Drill Hall to hear Lord Mersey deliver his sombre, measured report on the disaster. He began reading just after ten o’clock, and just before noon he reached the part of his findings dealing with the Californian. His words had a hypnotic monotony as he described the eight rockets fired by the Titanic and the eight rockets seen by the Californian. ‘It was suggested that the rockets seen by the Californian were from some other ship, not the Titanic,’ he said. ‘But no other ship to fit this theory has ever been heard of.’ He read on with the steady rhythm of a pendulum clock, as if he were intoning a liturgy. ‘When she first saw the rockets, the Californian could have pushed through the ice to the open water without any serious risk and so have come to the assistance of the Titanic.’ His final words echoed Senator Smith’s and were shocking in their simplicity: ‘Had she done so she might have saved many if not all of the lives that were lost.’

  Every person in the hall was silent. They had registered something astonishing in Lord Mersey’s flat words. Newspapermen rushed out to write their merciless headlines. ‘This portion of the report,’ The Daily Telegraph declared the next day, ‘stands out as a thing apart – a horror which in the days to come will wound the human instinct of the race wherever the story of the Titanic is recounted.’

  I had once suspected that this story would disgrace a nation, and I was right.

  For a time I remained sitting in the hall. I thought about Liverpool’s monolithic buildings and its proud, serious men. Captain Lord could not stay there, I thought. He must take himself away, to an island, a cave, a mountain top – any place where the surging sea crashing onto rocks, or the jagged cries of swooping gulls might drown out the memory of what his own country had said about him.

  But two weeks later, an acquaintance of mine at a London newspaper told me he’d heard from a source within the Board of Trade that the board had received a letter from Captain Lord. The captain wasn’t hiding in a cave, then, or on an island, but sitting in his parlour writing letters. What, I wondered, did he have to say?

  I secured an interview with Sydney Buxton, the President of the Board. His office, in a narrow brick building squeezed between the granite masterpieces of Whitehall, was cramped and hot. Buxton sat behind a large mahogany desk too big for the room. He was thin and wiry, perhaps sixty years old, with an overhanging upper lip and a small tuft of hair that sat on top of his head like the feathers of an exotic bird. He had poured me a drink – a very fine whisky – which I sipped as he read the letter of introduction I’d given him. In his usual overblown style, Senator William Alden Smith of Michigan asked Mr Buxton to render me every assistance in relation to the Titanic disaster, and in particular the conduct of the Californian. ‘If he could give such assistance,’ Smith went on, ‘he would be owed a very great debt by the entirety of the American Nation, which was desirous of seeing that justice be done.’ The letter was written on the striking blue letterhead of the United States Senate, and I need hardly say that I had written every word of it myself.

  Buxton accepted the letter unquestioningly – perhaps because Senator Smith had made it so very clear to the world that the American people expected ‘drastic action’ in relation to Captain Lord. The Leyland Line had done its duty; Lord had been sacked. Now it was the turn of the British government.

  ‘Very well, then,’ Buxton said, turning his face into the breeze of an electric fan that had been placed on a nearby table. The fan whirred loudly in an irregular way; I wondered whether it generated more heat than air. ‘What does your senator want us to do?’

  ‘Captain Lord, I think, has written to you?’ I asked.

  ‘He has.’

  ‘Perhaps I could see that correspondence?’

  Buxton pushed across to me a large brown envelope, from which I withdrew two thin sheets of paper. The handwriting was precise, the slope of the letters perfectly parallel. Lord asked, in short, that the board overturn the London inquiry’s findings in relation to the Californian. The Commissioner, Lord wrote, had got it all wrong. The ship they saw that night could not possibly have been the Titanic: her lights were too dim, and she moved. The Titanic had bright lights and was stopped. Lord wrote of times, positions and bearings.

  I had heard all this before. But then, at the end of the letter, I read: ‘If you consider there was any laxity aboard the Californian the night in question, I respectfully draw your attention to the information given here, which was given in evidence, which proves that any laxity was not on my part.’ And: ‘I fail to see why I should have to put up with all the public odium, through no fault or neglect on my part.’

  This admission of laxity was entirely new. He had made no such concession in Washington or London. But it came with a sting in its tail: the laxity was not on his part, and of course there was only one other candidate. I didn’t like it. I have never liked it when a strong man tries to blame a weak one.

  ‘He has lost his position, of course, with Leyland,’ Buxton said when I’d finished reading. ‘He’s on the beach – and will be for a long time.’ The board president was perhaps hinting that this was punishment enough. ‘It’s a bad business,’ he continued, pinching his nose. ‘A bad, bad business.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It is.’

  ‘Does your man,’ Buxton went on, holding up the senator’s letter, ‘want us to send the captain to prison? We could, of course.’

  I hesitated. Lord’s letter had made me angry. It contained not one particle of regret or remorse. I did not a see a man planning to retreat from the world, only a man making excuses for himself and blaming others. I thought about what Mrs Stone had told me of her husband: how he had trusted his captain; how he had, in a way, loved him; how he’d hoped to be as loyal to him as Starbuck had to Ahab, unto death. I remembered Stone bravely telling his lies in Boston because Lord had told him to. Herbert Stone deserved more from his captain, I thought, than this nasty little letter.

  ‘It would be better,’ I said at last, ‘for L
ord to stand up and take it on the chin, to admit to his mistake and say sorry.’

  Buxton narrowed his face and breathed hard through his nose, making a soft whistling sound. He seemed to be a man perpetually short of air. ‘But it’s rather a lot, isn’t it,’ he said, ‘to take on the chin? I mean, all those people – dead.’

  Both of us sat quietly for a moment. I was sweating just a little. Buxton poured me another drink, and one for himself. ‘Tell me, then,’ he pressed, standing now to look out of the window, ‘tell me – because I will take note of it – what does your man in Washington want me to do?’

  I looked again at Lord’s letter lying on the desk before me. I made a mental note of the address written neatly at the top of the page: 10 Ormond Street, Liscard. I imagined him sitting in his house, ‘on the beach’, waiting, thinking. I thought, too, of his wife and son.

  ‘The senator says,’ I replied after a while, ‘only that he wants justice to be done – you can see it there in his letter.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I can see that. But what is justice, in this case?’ Buxton turned away from the window and looked at me over the top of his spectacles.

  ‘Perhaps,’ I offered, ‘only that the captain be at last made to tell the truth?’

  Buxton’s puzzled look developed into a smile and then a short, swallowed laugh. ‘Make him tell the truth?’ he echoed. ‘Oh, you Americans really are wonderful!’

  * * *

  I did not think myself so very wonderful, nor my idea of getting Lord to tell the truth so very silly, so the next day, a warm Thursday in mid-August, I took an early train north.