by David Dyer
There’s the rush of yet another rocket soaring skyward, and once again the light of the explosion reveals something that brings her fear. In the lifeboat sit Mr Hart and the women and girls he led up here, but nowhere in it does she see her mother or her siblings.
‘Where is my mother?’ she shouts down to Mr Hart, but he does not respond, perhaps because he cannot hear her over the shouting of sailors, but more likely, she thinks, because he is ashamed. He has gotten into a lifeboat knowing there are still hundreds of women and children on the ship.
But she doesn’t need him to tell her where her mother and siblings are after all. When she turns away from the rail, they are there before her. Her mother is embracing her father and next to her, holding hands dutifully in a chain, are Dolly, Ada, Connie, Will and Tom. Little Tom lets go of Connie’s hand and rushes forward. His eyes are alight with the excitement of adventure. He holds tight to his blue blanket; his golden curls sit on the shoulder panels of his lifejacket.
‘Stella!’ he cries. ‘We waited for you. We didn’t get in the boat.’
And as Stella stares hard at her mother, trying to hate her for her breach of promise, she can already feel Tom’s cold little hand slipping into hers.
* * *
When Stone, looking into the night, sees another rocket he says softly to Gibson, as if thinking aloud, ‘A ship isn’t going to fire rockets at sea for nothing.’ He walks again to the Morse lamp key. ‘There must be something the matter with her.’
Gibson says, ‘We should wake Sparks.’ As Stone hesitates, the apprentice presses. ‘We should wake him up and get him to send a message.’
Stone is unsure. It isn’t up to the apprentice to order the waking of the wireless operator, it’s up to the captain. ‘The captain told us to use the Morse lamp,’ he says, taking to the key again. ‘He didn’t say anything about wireless.’
In London, Mr Thomas Scanlan, MP asks Captain Lord why he didn’t give such a command. ‘When you were in doubt as to the name of this ship and the meaning of her sending up a rocket, could you not have ascertained definitely by calling in the assistance of your Marconi operator?’
Lord’s response is immediate, and he seems to think it a complete answer to the question. ‘When? At one o’clock in the morning?’
Scanlan, round-faced, thick-set, swelling with Irish bluster, says simply, ‘Yes.’
‘I did not think anything about it,’ Lord says. ‘I was not at all concerned about the steamer.’
‘Had this steamer which you saw, and which you say was at all events about the same size as your own, had a Marconi installation, and had you obtained the assistance of your operator, you could have got into direct communication with her, whoever she was?’
‘If she had had a Marconi, of course we could have got into communication.’
‘You had the Marconi?’
‘Yes, we had.’
‘Would not it have been quite a simple thing for you at that time to have wakened your Marconi operator and asked him to speak to this ship?’
‘It would if it had worried me a great deal, but it did not worry me. I was still thinking of the company signal.’
‘At all events, now, in the light of your experience, would it not have been a prudent thing to do?’
‘Well, we would have got the Titanic’s signals if we had done.’
‘As a matter of mere precaution, when you were in doubt and left word that someone was to come down to your cabin and give you a message, would not it have been a proper thing to have tried the experiment?’
‘I was waiting for further information. I had a responsible officer on the bridge who was finding things out for me.’
He is right. On the bridge his second officer is diligently finding things out for him – looking through binoculars, operating the Morse tapper, and taking bearings – while the wireless operator sleeps peacefully below. As Herbert Stone goes about this work, carefully and conscientiously, the bridge bell tolls three times, once for each half-hour of the watch. It is half past one.
The eighth rocket
As Stella Sage leans over the rail and watches the seamen disconnect Mr Hart’s boat from the falls and push it gently away from the ship, another rocket is fired. The explosion no longer surprises people. Most do not even look up.
The lights of the other ship are still no closer. She wonders why it is not coming to them. ‘You should have got into the lifeboat,’ she says to her mother.
‘I thought it best that we stay together,’ her mother replies. ‘No matter what happens.’
There’s a resignation in her tone, but Stella remains determined. She will somehow get the family into a lifeboat. Nothing will stop her, even though the world has become perverse. The deck slopes ever more steeply forward, the lights burn a dim orange-red, and the band has stopped playing ragtime. The sad music of hymns now floats in the frigid air.
The rearmost boat is being loaded at the very aft end of the ship, supervised by the same senior officer she saw earlier politely inviting men to get in. He has a kind look to his face. This will be their boat, Stella decides, and she hustles the family to it.
But there are problems. The senior officer is being assisted by a junior who does not have a kind look to his face. The young man shouts and curses and waves a gun in the air. A large crowd is surging and pushing, and because the ship is listing, the lifeboat hangs away from the ship’s side. A three-foot gap has opened up, with nothing but the black sea beneath.
‘Let the little ones through!’ Stella shouts. ‘Let them through!’
At the aft end of the lifeboat a plank has been laid down and women are being helped across it one by one. Stella positions her family at the forward end and then jumps quickly into the boat. A woman on board shouts at her. ‘Get out! There’s no more room!’ But Stella ignores her and calls to her sisters to jump too. Dolly and Ada leap across. Connie hesitates; the gap is too wide. She starts to cry. George lifts her under the arms and swings her into the boat. He passes little Tom in next and then helps his mother.
There are already some forty people in the boat and it is filling fast, but Stella at least has her mother, sisters and youngest brother aboard.
Then things begin to go wrong. People who’ve seen the Sages jump begin to do the same. A young woman leaps over, a baby is thrown and caught by a passenger, a child lands awkwardly on a steel rowlock and howls in pain. An older boy jumps in, at which point the junior officer leaps after him and tries to pull him out. There’s a struggle; the officer threatens the youth with the gun; women beg him not to shoot. When the boy at last gets out of the boat, another young woman tries to jump in. She catches her foot on the lip of the ship’s side and trips. As she clutches the rim of the lifeboat, her legs flailing in empty space, Stella thinks she must surely fall into the water. But two men standing on the promenade deck below take hold of her legs and pull her screaming back aboard the ship.
Stella begins to feel strangely distant from the events around her. She senses she is losing control. Ada and Dolly are both crying now, the crowd is pushing forward harder. Then comes a deafening explosion as the junior officer fires his gun into the air. Some men drift away but Stella can still see her father. George has put his arm around him to shield him from the shoving of other men.
Someone is shouting and Stella is surprised to find it’s her own voice, calling Will to get into the boat. But the junior officer blocks him. ‘There will be no more men in the boat!’ he says, holding the gun flat in his hand, ready to strike anyone who might try to get past him. Will is placid; he seems almost to smile.
Her mother, teetering beside her, begs for Will to be let on board. ‘He’s only eleven,’ she says. But still the officer refuses. Two more women step across the plank into the boat. One is holding a baby in her arms.
The ship, it seems, has righted itself a little, because the lifeboat now hangs closer to the ship’s side. But no one else gets in. The boat jerks and sways. The lowering has be
gun.
Stella, standing upright in the boat, turns to her mother and takes hold of both her hands. She knows what is about to happen, and she must try to stop it. ‘You have a special strength too, Mother,’ she says. ‘Be strong now. Let them go. Let him go.’
For a moment the world drifts away. All Stella can see is her mother enfolding her, kissing her on the cheek – so gently! – and saying, ‘You’re right, my dear daughter. I have a special strength.’ And before Stella can say anything more, her mother has slipped herself free and stepped out of the lifeboat as daintily as if she were leaving an omnibus. Ada and Dolly scramble out after her.
The lowering of the boat stops. The junior officer, standing a few feet above, looks at Stella. ‘You too?’ he asks.
She’s still holding the hands of Connie and Tom. Connie is sobbing for her mother and Tom repeats to himself in a high-pitched voice, ‘There’s no occasion! There’s no occasion!’ Their little hands tighten on hers.
On the deck, Ada and Dolly have joined their brothers, and her mother clutches Will. Stella sees her father behind George, being buffeted by men. He holds out his arms and calls to her. ‘There’s another boat,’ he says, ‘on the other side, big enough to take us all.’
Stella looks at her father: his narrow, anguished face, his fear, his love. ‘Of course there is,’ she says softly to herself. ‘Another boat, big enough to take us all.’
She steps out of the lifeboat into the warmth of his embrace.
* * *
On the Californian’s bridge Stone stands in silence with Gibson, transfixed by the strange ship in the distance. She has fired another rocket, the eighth that Stone has seen. It is twenty minutes to two.
The atmosphere is odd. The air is perfectly clear, but seems to quiver with an unearthly energy. It makes Stone think of the ether between the stars, which can be neither seen nor felt, which has neither weight nor substance, and which, a teacher once told him, allows heavenly bodies to fly through it without the slightest hindrance. He waves a hand in front of his face. He wants to make sure the air is there; he wants to feel a breeze. The dead calm agitates him.
‘Look at her now, Jim,’ he says to the apprentice, his voice rising in pitch. ‘She looks queer, don’t you think? She looks very queer out of the water. There’s a funny change of her lights.’
Gibson peers through his binoculars. ‘She seems to have a big side out of the water,’ he says.
‘Yes, her lights look peculiar. Unnatural, somehow – as if some are being shut in and others opened out.’
‘They don’t look the same as they did before.’
‘No,’ Stone says, ‘they don’t.’
The lights seem to pulse and flare, like someone blowing on an ember. Stone waits for more rockets. Four bells comes and goes – two o’clock, halfway through the watch – and now he notices that the ship’s lights are fading. He turns to Gibson. ‘Go down, wake him up and tell him,’ he says, suddenly firm.
Gibson hesitates. ‘Tell him what?’
‘That we couldn’t get her with the lamp, that we tried again but couldn’t, that she’s fired eight rockets altogether and now she’s disappearing in the southwest. Make sure you wake him. Make sure.’
When Gibson is gone, Stone leans forward over the bridge rail towards the ship, as if by being a little closer he might solve her riddles. When he’d first seen the ship, with Captain Lord standing by his side at the rail outside the chartroom, her masthead light and red sidelight were beautifully clear and steady. Now all he can see is the yellowish, indistinct glare of deck lights.
He doesn’t hear Gibson come back, and gives a little cry of surprise when he finds him standing at his elbow.
‘Sorry, Second,’ the apprentice says.
‘Is he coming up?’ Stone asks, turning inboard from the rail.
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
Gibson shrugs.
‘Well, what did he say?’
‘He asked me if they had any colour in them.’
‘And?’
‘I said they were white, all white.’
‘What else?’
‘I said she was disappearing in the southwest, just like you said. Then he said, “Very well,” and we are to let him know if anything is wanted.’
‘If anything is wanted,’ Stone repeats slowly. ‘So he’s not coming up?’
‘No.’
Stone, left alone with his thoughts and his decisions, turns slowly to the steamer once again. Her lights – the queer, glowing, changing lights – dim further.
In London, Mr Butler Aspinall, KC tries one last time to understand. ‘What did you think, at the time, the rockets meant?’
Stone stares straight ahead, keeping his body still. ‘I knew they were signals of some sort.’
‘I know that – of course – they are signals. But signals of what sort, did you think?’
‘I did not know at the time,’ Stone says.
Aspinall feels as if he is clutching at mist. There is something strange about this witness. He seems able to suspend his own thinking, like an animal that can stop its breathing when it senses danger.
Even the Commissioner seems unnerved by the vacuum of Stone’s answers. ‘Now, do try to be frank!’ he implores.
‘I am,’ Stone says.
‘If you try, you will succeed. What did you think these rockets were going up at intervals of three or four minutes for?’
‘I just took them as white rockets, and informed the captain and left him to judge.’
The ladies in the gallery look on in fascinated horror. They put aside their opera glasses. What they see is plain enough to the naked eye: a man who reported the rockets to his captain but who now desperately wishes he had done more. Herbert Stone is sorry. They can see it in his anguished eyes now welling with tears, in his clutching of the flimsy rail of the witness stand. Let him go, they think. He is a good man. He has been tortured enough.
But the Commissioner, a man who has built his career on judging, deciding and thinking, does not let him go. He is appalled by the blind faith the witness has in his captain, as pitiful and absolute as the trust an infant son might have in his father. ‘You mean to say,’ Lord Mersey says, his hands resting in clenched fists before him on his great desk, ‘that you did not think for yourself?’
Stone is silent.
‘You know, you do not make a good impression upon me at present,’ Lord Mersey tells him.
Aspinall tries to help the witness. ‘You know they were not being sent up for fun, were they?’
‘No.’
‘Did you think that they were distress signals?’
‘No.’
But for Stone on his freezing bridge, in the depths of night, whether the steamer has been sending up her rockets for fun, or distress, or some other reason, matters no longer, for at twenty past two, her lights disappear altogether.
Stone walks to the rear bulkhead, picks up the speaking tube and blows into its mouthpiece. Moments later he hears the captain’s weary voice.
‘What is it?’
‘The ship firing the rockets has disappeared, bearing southwest by west.’
Stone can hear the captain breathing at the other end of the tube.
‘There was no colour in them?’
‘No, Captain, they were all white rockets. All white.’
‘Very well. Put it in the log.’
Stone hears the stopper being replaced in the tube. He takes the scrap log from its small cupboard and writes an entry in it by the light of the compass binnacle. He describes the rockets and notes the times he whistled down to Captain Lord, and the time he sent down the apprentice. He has informed the master, as was his duty. Now the troublesome steamer has gone, and there is peace at last on the bridge of the Californian.
* * *
When Stella feels the deck beneath her feet rise suddenly she almost falls, but steadies herself. A low groan comes from deep in the ship and the deck lights glow red. Ahead o
f her the seawater has reached the forward end of the boat deck. It creeps along, swirling in menacing currents around the feet of desperate men trying to right an upturned boat. One of them kicks at the water as if it were a dog biting his heels. Another, standing nearby in a splendid military uniform, shouts at people in an American accent and waves a gun at a poor cowering boy with dark skin. But it’s all in vain: the boat floats uselessly upside down in the deepening water. Stella can see no other lifeboats.
A man in evening dress is trying to lash himself to a wooden door. Another ties steamer chairs together to form a raft, but the chairs keep sliding away from him. A woman has strapped her lifejacket around her waist rather than placing it over her shoulders, and it looks like an outlandish girdle. She’s struggling to carry two children – a baby in a sling and a sleeping toddler propped over one shoulder. She cries out for help but no one comes.
Stella would like to go to her aid, but she must think of her own family. If Doug and Fred could hunt about for chairs, or anything made of wood, perhaps they could lash together a raft big enough to hold them all.
But it’s so difficult to stand up. The deck is too steep to walk any further aft. Stella keeps her balance by leaning against the wall of a small deckhouse. Her father is squatting on his haunches to bring his face level with little Tom’s. She can hear him talking of the ship that is coming to take them all to Jacksonville, but Tom doesn’t care any more. His eyelids droop with exhaustion and he holds his blanket to his face. He’s had enough of the adventure now, he wants to go to bed.
Will has run off again. Her mother is calling out for him, but there’s nothing that can be done. The water is only a few feet away.
Doug chases three dogs that have come loping along. The animals are skittish and nervous. Stella is grateful that someone has at least thought to free them from their kennels. When Doug tries to loop a rope through their collars she asks why. ‘So they won’t be alone,’ he says.
Fred comes to her and once again takes her hand. He doesn’t say a word, but squeezes her hand in nervous little pulses. Dolly comes to her too, crying and saying she’s scared of drowning.