The Midnight Watch Read Online Free PDF

spilled from the sidewalks into the roadway and we were forced to slow. As we neared the end of Broadway, trolley cars were backed up and automobiles crept along in low gear. I paid for the cab and pushed my way south on foot. Soon enough I was at Bowling Green Park, an oval of lawn fenced in by a tall iron grille. At its western edge was the towering facade of number 9, Broadway – the offices of J. P. Morgan’s International Mercantile Marine, owners of the White Star Line.
    It was a strange sight. Squeezed around the park’s perimeter and along its interior pathways was a great crowd of people. Men in small black bowlers and women in great hats of every colour surged along the sidewalks; people emerging from the subway stairs had nowhere to go; mounted policeman tried to use the flanks of their horses to keep people off the roadway. They shouted at anyone who reached out a hand to pat a horse. The bells of trolley cars sounded incessantly. Automobile horns blared. Two men were taking photographs of the scene with Box Brownie cameras.
    So this, I thought, is what happens when you put the best of New York society onto a boat and run it into an iceberg.
    On the western side of Broadway a large portion of the crowd had formed itself into an amorphous queue, three or four people abreast, which led to the wide brick and granite steps of number 9. Two policemen stood at the top of the stairs, guarding the enormous revolving door of polished brass and glass. The door was flanked by twin granite columns etched with the names of J. P. Morgan’s shipping companies: the American Line, the Atlantic Transport Line, the Dominion Line, the Red Star Line, the Leyland Line and – there, at the bottom, his most famous acquisition of all – the White Star Line.
    Morgan, I thought, must be embarrassed. He was a man who bought shipping lines and railroads as if they were curios and trinkets, but now the most perfect of all his prizes was adrift in the North Atlantic with half of New York aboard. It was as if he had invited friends for cocktails at his magnificent white-marble library and then set the place alight. It was worse than embarrassing. It was bad manners.
    I pushed my way up the stairs and presented my card to a policeman with a tired face who let me through. I entered a hallway crowded with people. Cablegram boys in green blazers rushed in and out and men pressed themselves against walls to allow women to pass. Reporters smoked cigarettes and whispered names to each other. To my left, in the cavernous passenger office, young men guided people into queues marked with soft burgundy ropes on brass stands. Behind counters, White Star staff answered questions, and behind them, still others sat at desks talking on telephones.
    A White Star page, his chest puffed with importance beneath a blue tunic, directed me to the freight office, where Mr Franklin would come down shortly to speak. ‘He comes down every hour,’ the boy said.
    The freight office was smaller than the passenger office and filled with the smoke of too many cigarettes and the heat of too many steam radiators. As soon as I pushed inwards I bumped into Dan Byrne of the Dow Jones service, a boisterous man with a florid face and dubious morals whom I knew from the Republic collision and the Triangle fire. He had been in the freight office all morning. He held me by the arm and told me some very interesting things: that Franklin had been on the telephones since two a.m.; that the young Vincent Astor had been in tears of worry about his father; that frumpy Mrs Guggenheim had been up to see Franklin personally to demand news of her husband. Morgan, I learned, was in France, but his fretful son had gone upstairs and not come down again. Even the President of the United States had been calling: his friend Archie Butt was aboard. As was Bruce Ismay: President of the International Mercantile Marine, Chairman of the White Star Line, and Franklin’s boss.
    ‘My god,’ I said.