Glory In The Name

For the others, it was a mixed experience. Bowater was aware of the shift in mood among the sailors, from anticipation of something new to an uncomfortable realization that a quintet was just a gang of five stiffs like the old man, playing music with no words, and that was as good as it was going to get. There would be no minstrel show, no one in blackface imitating Negroes and singing “Camptown Races” or “Old Folks at Home,” no olio with its crude jests, no burlesque with scantily clad women capering around the stage. Just a bunch of stiffs, sawing away.

Some of the hands tried to remain respectfully alert. Some squirmed, shifted, glanced at the door. Some fell asleep, and Bowater was thankful for that, except for when Jimmy Ogden began to snore and Ruffin Tanner hit him a bit too hard, and he shouted as he jerked awake.

No, it was not the finest musical experience that Samuel Bowater had ever enjoyed, neither the best musicians nor the best audience. He was supremely annoyed to have to divide his attention between Wendy and his cretinous crew.

When it was over the Cape Fears walked en masse back to the docks, with coats wrapped tight around them against the buffeting November wind, as Bowater walked Wendy to the boardinghouse at which she was lodging to have their private farewell.

They stood on the porch, catching a bit of a lee from the house, stood for a long time, not moving or speaking. A part of Samuel’s mind raged against the impropriety of it all, a part wanted to sweep her away, to use the war as his excuse for throwing all of his well-worn propriety overboard. At last he reached out for her, took her in his arms, hugged her, and she hugged him. A real hug, and not a brotherly one. He looked in her eyes. “I have missed you.”

“I have missed you. You’ll send word?”

“I will.” He kissed her, and she kissed him back. They said nothing more, and she pulled herself from his arms.

Bowater caught up with his men at last on the dock, and Bayard Quayle, who was on sentry duty, did no more than peek out from where he was huddled in the engine-room door to see who it was boarding the vessel. The men each thanked Bowater for the experience and disappeared forward.

“Well, damn me, that was somethin,” Taylor said as he and Bowater walked forward.

“Did you enjoy it, Chief?”

“I surely did, Cap’n. I always figured that Mozart and such was too highfalutin for a simple country fiddler like me, but now I see there ain’t so much to it. And all together, with them…whatta ya call ’em, the bigger ones?”

“Violas? Cello?”

“Yeah. Why, it sounds like a choir of angels!”

“I’ll admit the first violin was not the best I have heard. But the music itself is very complicated. It sounds simple, well played, but that is deceptive.”

“Aw, I don’t know,” Taylor said. “Hmmm, hmm, hm, hm…” The chief began to hum the first violin’s part with surprising recall. “Reckon I could scratch that out.”

“You remember that part?”

“Oh, hell, yes. I got a great head for remembering little ditties and such. I hear a tune, I got it”-Taylor snapped his fingers in the air-“like that.”

“Yes, well…” It was irritating that Taylor should think remembering and reproducing a “little ditty” by Mozart was the same as hearing and then playing some campfire song. “I fear it is a bit more than that, you know. Well, good night, Chief.”

Taylor pulled a cigar from his pocket, clamped it in his teeth. “Good night, Cap’n. We’ll have a full head of steam by sunup.”

“Very good, Chief.” Bowater walked to the forward end of the deckhouse, climbed the ladder to the boat deck. He stepped though the wheelhouse and into his cabin. The steam pipes that ran along the deck filled the cabin with glorious warmth, like stepping into a lover’s embrace.

Jacob was asleep below, and Bowater had given him permission to remain asleep and he was glad that he did. He wanted to be alone. He was in an irritable mood. His night ashore had been ruined, and all his telling himself that he was glad to introduce his men to such finer things as classical music was not enough to make him believe it.

Hieronymus Taylor…son of a bitch white trash peckerwood… The chief never failed to irritate him, and then it irritated him further that he let Taylor irritate him, until he had irritation built upon irritation.

It was irritating that Taylor was so damned good at his work. Taylor had a sense for engines that was profound, almost mystical. Every steamer on which Bowater sailed had always had a myriad of problems with the engines. But nothing beyond the most minor of difficulties ever seemed to take place aboard the Cape Fear. Bowater had watched Taylor once fix the small steam engine that drove the steering gear-an engine that had squealed its way to what seemed an untimely death-with just a twist of a wrench and a feather touch of a screwdriver. It was like a laying on of hands. It was spooky.

Samuel unbuttoned his coat and hung it on a hanger, smoothed it out, hung the hanger on a rod. He pulled his braces off his shoulders and took off his shirt and hung it up with equal care.

From the galley below he heard a screeching sound, like straining metal or a cat in great pain. He stopped, cocked his ear, frowned.

The sound again, but less discordant, and he realized it was Taylor’s violin. He was tuning his violin in the galley below.

Is he intending to play at this damned time of night?

Bowater stood in that spot and listened and did not know what to do. He wanted to tell Taylor to quit it, that he did not care to hear his caterwauling when he was going to bed, that he did not care to hear the damned “Bonnie Blue Flag” at that hour, or any. But he did not want Taylor to know he had irritated him.

Then the screeching stopped and there came up through the deck a series of notes that were not “Dixie” or “Roll the Old Chariot Along” but rather Mozart. Mozart’s Quintet in G Minor.

Bowater got down on his hands and knees, held his ear an inch above the deck. Taylor was playing the piece flawlessly, remembering note for note what he had heard two hours before. He went through the first movement, the notes rising and falling with the very passion the old master had infused into them. He did not miss a one. He made the first violin of the Norfolk and Elizabeth City Quintet sound like a hack in a minstrel show.

For ten minutes Bowater remained in his supplicant position, listening to the music coming up through the deck, nodding his head to the rhythm, mouthing the melody as it floated through the deck. He listened to Taylor breeze effortlessly over sections of which, he recalled, the first violin had made a hash. He listened to the chief engineer’s beautiful interpretation of that classic work.

Devil take that peckerwood son of a bitch… Bowater thought, despite himself. Now he was more annoyed than ever.

Hieronymus Taylor sat on Johnny St. Laurent’s stool, in the warmth of the galley, eyes closed, and let his fingers dance over the neck of his violin, let the music flow from his head, down his arm, up the bow, to be coaxed at last out of the body of the instrument.

He hummed softly as he played the Quintet in G Minor. He had not heard it for two years at least before that night, was not sure he could execute it perfectly, but his fingers and his bowing arm knew what to do, once he stopped thinking and just let them go.

The first violin of the Norfolk and Elizabeth City Quintet had not been so very bad, though he had no genuine feel for the music. Still, Taylor could sense Bowater tightening every time the poor bastard made a hash of it. From the corner of his eye he saw the captain shake his head in disgust with each minor imperfection.

Goddamned blueblood, stick-up-his-ass patrician son of a bitch… Taylor thought.

Wendy Atkins…son of a bitch… he thought.

He heard the music go awry as his concentration drifted, and he refocused on Mozart. Not one damned thing good enough for that bastard… Bowater made him feel insignificant, a poor relation, the hired man who lives in the barn. It irritated him and it irritated him that he allowed it to irritate him.

He crept up on the section where the first violin had made a mess of the tempo. He stood, climbed up on an