The Evangeline (19 page)

‘Yes, of course,’ said Marlowe in a voice that could be heard as clearly at the back of the courtroom as at the front. He was used to making himself heard in the open air; he had none of the lifeless whisper of an indoor voice.

‘Where were you raised, Mr Marlowe?’

‘Seattle.We did not always live there, in the city, but always somewhere on the Sound: Everett for a few years, Port Townsend for a year or so after that.’

‘And was it because of your father’s work that you always lived in the Seattle area?’

‘My father worked on ships. He was a boilermaker by trade.’

‘How long did you live there—in Seattle?’

Marlowe spread his knees apart and hunched forward. He held his large hands together and squinted into the dull glare of the courtroom light.

‘Until my father died. Then I left.’

Darnell waited, expecting more, but Marlowe had the habit of economy in speech as well as in other things.

‘Would you explain for the jury,’ said Darnell in a gentle, soothing voice,‘what happened—how your father died and what, because of his death, you had to do?’

‘He died when I was twelve. It was an accident; happened while he was working on a freighter come in for repairs. There was not any money—all my mother had was a small widow’s pension—and there was my sister to raise.’

This time Darnell did not wait quite so long. ‘Your sister— how old was she?’

‘Just a baby—a year … a year and a half.With my father gone, I had to do my part. I didn’t mind; I had grown up with ships and I was waiting for the chance. I wanted to go to sea. I wasn’t all that good in school.’

‘You had grown up with ships? You mean, listening to your father?’

‘That, and going with him when he had one to work on. It was great fun for me—a boy of eight or nine—having the run of a ship, free to explore every nook and cranny. The men who worked in them, holed up in port with nothing pressing they had to do, would tell you stories of things they had seen from all the different places in the world. My head was always filled with thoughts of adventures, of mysterious places I would one day explore, a seaman on one of those freighters taking cargo from one side of the ocean to the other.’

‘You went to work with your father? You mean on those days you weren’t in school?’

‘Saturdays, mainly; and most days in the summer—including the one when it happened.’

Darnell had begun to move from the counsel table across the front of the courtroom to the jury box. He stopped in mid-stride and abruptly turned his head. He had not known.

‘You were there?You were on the ship the day your father died?’

Marlowe sat back in the chair and slowly nodded.‘I was out on deck, near the stern, watching a couple of hands mending rope. The explosion almost tore the ship in two. I knew my father was gone the moment it happened. He knew the risk. He always had me in another part of the ship, away from where he did the work.’

The fretted lines on Darnell’s forehead spread and deepened as he studied Marlowe a moment longer.Was it, he wondered, as a witness of his father’s death that Marlowe had learned the double lesson that every life was settled in advance and that every fate was unknowable? A wave of fatigue came over Darnell. He rested his hand on the jury box railing, staring down at the floor as if he were watching in his mind what young Marlowe had been through. When he raised his eyes to the witness, the sense of weakness had passed.

‘You shipped out—went to sea on a freighter—when you were how old again?’

‘Twelve. I knew the captain of a ship from Singapore. He had known my father. I was a cabin boy.’

‘And how long has it been now? How many years have you lived your life at sea?’

‘More than forty.’

‘And are you married? Do you have children of your own?’

‘No, I never married. I suppose I never felt the need. My home was always where I happened to be—on a ship, or in whatever port I found myself when one voyage ended and I was waiting for another.’

Darnell was in no hurry. He wanted the jury to get to know Marlowe in a way that went beyond the narrow facts of his biography; he wanted those twelve people, all of whom had led their lives in the sheltered comfort of urban congregations, to get some feel for the harsh imperatives and the distant solitude of the sea;he wanted them, so far as they were able,to enter into Marlowe’s strange, exotic and solitary life. Darnell stood near the jury box, drawing Marlowe out, asking him to explain—to men and women whose only adventures away from land had been on some short commercial cruise—a life spent in constant motion, in which each destination was only the next point of departure. Darnell wanted desperately to convey the sense that because nothing around Marlowe ever stayed the same, the only firm ground was to be found in the man himself. The scene was always shifting, the world become a child’s kaleidoscope, but the eyes that saw it were always those of Marlowe and Marlowe never changed, Marlowe endured. That was the difference Darnell wanted to show, that the whole panoply of modern life—the passing fads, the latest advanced opinion all right-thinking people had to share—had no meaning once you stepped off the apparent solidity of the shore.Whatever else you might think of him, Marlowe was real.

It took all morning, and lasted until sometime after lunch. Finally, in midafternoon, Darnell brought the questioning up to events that were closer to hand.

‘You had spent much of your life on cargo ships, on freighters. The
Evangeline
was a sailing vessel. It did not carry a cargo; it was a pleasure craft that carried passengers. What happened to make you go from the one to the other?’

‘When I started, years ago, the ships I sailed carried cargoes in the hold: sacks of grain, bales of wire, timber, iron ore. The ships were not that large and the crews that sailed them were, for the most part, small. The ports we went to might be miles up a river. Then they started building container ships that could carry hundreds of freight cars on deck, ships ten times larger than the ones I had sailed, ships so large there were harbours you could not enter because there was not room enough to turn around. The ships were larger, and because of that, not so much life in them…’

‘I’m sorry,’ interjected Darnell with a puzzled smile. ‘“Not so much life in them”?’

‘The action of the sea, the closeness of it. If you were in the navy, it’s the difference between being on a battleship or a carrier as against living life on a destroyer. The bigger they are the more like being on shore. Do you see my meaning?’

‘Yes, I do. Thank you. Please, go on.You went from freighters to sailing vessels?’

‘Yes, but like everything else, it was all a matter of chance. I had been injured—hurt my leg in an accident on board the freighter I had been on—was laid up in the hospital for a while, out in Sumatra. The captain of a British schooner was in the bed next to me, suffering from a siege of malaria. He offered me a berth, and once I had been out on a ship like that—the quiet way they run, the wind whistling by you—I never much wanted to go back to the other. It was a relief, really. The freighters were all too big, the engines too large and powerful, the routes they sail too safe and predictable: the sea isn’t just some straight-lined road you take from point to point.’

‘So from that time on, you made your living on board sailing vessels?’

‘Yes. I still had some work on freighters, but less of it all the time until, finally, all I did was hire out on sailing ships.’

‘Does this mean that you had earned a reputation as a man who knew his way around ships, or boats, of this kind?’

‘I learned my way well enough.’

Darnell gave the jury a look which said that, for men of Marlowe’s type, understatement was even more a fact than a habit.

‘And is that how you happened to become the captain of the
Evangeline
? Because Benjamin Whitfield had heard of you by reputation?’

‘No, it wasn’t that at all. That was also chance.We met here—in San Francisco—a couple years back. I was working for a Mr Elgin, and Mr Elgin was a friend, a business associate, of Mr Whitfield. He—Mr Whitfield—had an interest in sailing ships. He had become an avid racer, and went all over the world to do it.’

‘He designed, or helped design, the
Evangeline
, did he not?’

‘Mr Whitfield always wanted the best.What had been built by others did not measure up.’

‘The
Evangeline
was built here, in the United States?’

‘Yes, in Seattle.’

‘Where you were raised?’

‘Yes.’

‘And were you involved in any way with the construction?’

‘Mr Whitfield had me oversee it,’ said Marlowe, then immediately shook his head. ‘No, that’s putting too much importance on what I did. The design followed Mr Whitfield’s conception—the look he wanted, what he wanted her to do—but he employed a naval architect to do it. My job was just to be there, to be his ears and eyes; but, more than that, to learn everything I could about her by seeing the way she was built.’

‘Would it be fair to say, then, that you were comfortable with the way she was built? That you were confident in the ability of the
Evangeline
to sail anywhere in the world?’

There was nothing in Marlowe’s eyes to suggest that, even now, after everything that had happened, he had any doubt that the ship was everything she was supposed to have been and more. ‘She was the finest ship of her kind ever built.’

Up to this point, Darnell had been the soul of geniality, asking questions the way a curious friend might inquire into the recent travels of a man he had known intimately for years. Now, suddenly, he looked at Marlowe with hard, sceptical eyes.‘You can say that? After she sank like a rock in the south Atlantic? After all those lives were lost? After what those of you who survived had to do? How can you possibly tell me now that she was the “finest ship of her kind ever built”?’

‘There is nothing made that is ever perfect,’ Marlowe answered right back. ‘Yes, she sank; sank in the worst storm that in more than forty years I ever saw.’

Darnell moved away from the jury box railing and took a step closer to the witness stand.

‘But worst storm or not, she sank in a way you could not have expected; sank in a way she would not have sank had she been built to the specifications of the original design. Isn’t that what happened, Mr Marlowe? The
Evangeline
sank quickly because her hull broke in two?’

A look of distress, of grim disillusion, stretched across Marlowe’s strong, broad mouth. Nodding slowly, he peered deep into Darnell’s watching eyes.

‘Exactly right; just as you describe it, Mr Darnell.We were in the middle of that storm, the wind howling like a banshee—a terrible, piercing scream—the waves crashing down on her, turning us high up on one side, then the other. Then it all went quiet, and the sea, suddenly all calm, and then this strange whisper, like the distant roll of a drum, as if an army had started marching towards us but was still miles away; and then that awful God-forsaken roar, as if the whole ocean had been drawn up from the bottom—lifted right off the earth—and then hurled back with all the force of God Almighty, thrown down like some prehistoric avalanche that took all the mountains with it. It was like being hit by a locomotive: there was a sickening, sharp cracking noise; the ship seemed to cave in on itself. The passengers, the crew—the ones who were hanging on in their cabins, trying to ride it out—must have all been dead, drowned or beaten on the head, almost right away. The ones who were either already out there, or somehow got out on deck—some of them made it to the lifeboats, some of them survived.’

Darnell held Marlowe’s gaze tight. ‘Why did the
Evangeline
break in half? Why did it “cave in on itself ”?’

‘Because the metal plating of the hull was not strong enough—the centre could not hold.’

‘But the crack in the hull had been repaired,’ Darnell reminded him as he turned towards the watching eyes of the jury. ‘You remember the testimony of Benjamin Whitfield. He was asked about the defective weld; he was asked about the report— this report that has been offered into evidence,’ he said, waving it in the air. ‘He testified that the repair had been made.’

‘Yes, I heard,’ said Marlowe with a baleful look. ‘And I also heard that they could have checked the hull in its entirety, seen if any of the other seams had not been welded properly.’

Darnell shook his head.‘You heard Benjamin Whitfield testify that after the repair the ship was perfect.’

Marlowe rubbed his large hands together. There was an anguished look in his eyes. ‘She was not perfect that night she sank! She might have lasted years in normal weather, but strains put on the hull in a storm like that … It is like putting your foot on a glass; you can put some pressure on it and nothing happens— but then, just a little more, and it shatters.’

‘But if that is the case—if the risk was so great—why did you not insist that Benjamin Whitfield have the hull examined? Why didn’t you insist that this be done before you took the
Evangeline
on a long voyage around Africa?’

‘There was no occasion.’

Darnell stared at him. ‘No occasion? Lives were at stake!’

‘No occasion, because Mr Whitfield never told me about the report; he never told me about the repair.’

‘He did not tell you that there had been a crack below the waterline?’ asked Darnell with a cold, determined look.

‘No, sir—never. He told me the
Evangeline
had passed her sea trials with flying colours.’

‘He told you that? There’s no mistake?’

‘I wouldn’t have taken her out if he had told me what I heard him say in court.When he told me how well she had done in her sea trials, I was more convinced than ever that she was exactly what I thought: the finest ship of her kind ever built.’

‘So you were sent to sea, sent to sail around Africa with a crew of eight and nineteen passengers, having been told the ship was safe and sound—when she was not?’

‘It appears so, yes.’

Chapter Eighteen

I
F MARLOWE WAS TELLING THE TRUTH, IF Benjamin Whitfield had not told him about the problem with the aluminium hull and what had, and what had not, been done about it, then Whitfield had not only lied to him, but by his failure to mention this all-important detail had misled the court. But while this deepened the mystery of why the
Evangeline
had been allowed to set off around Africa in the first place, it intensified, and in a way clarified, the sense that everyone on board, whatever they may have done to survive, had been as much a victim as anyone killed. The author of a newspaper column written at the end of Marlowe’s first day of testimony spoke for a great many people when he remarked that to blame the survivors for what they did was a little like blaming the gladiators who had been forced to kill or die for the amusement of the Romans who had left them only that choice.