They were hustled
below by the third officer, who was superintending the sluicing of the
dusty, black decks. As Marcella went slowly below with Jimmy she heard
him declaring that coaling was the bane of his existence, as he pointed
out to the ship's doctor marks of black hands deliberately printed high
up on the shining white paint.
When she had finished her letters Marcella sat for a while perfectly
still while Jimmy slept and the fowls in the coops crooned. Down below
in the bunkers the coal went thudding faintly, heard up on the boat deck
more as vibrations than sounds, mingling with the tinkling of guitars,
the lazy splash of oars; somewhere a man with a voice like a rook was
cawing:
"A mother was chay-sing her boy round the room,
She was chay-sing her boy round the room"
over and over again. Somewhere at the end of a ventilator shaft a man
was polishing boots; he was swearing monotonously, between each rub of
his brush, using a list of twelve words beginning with "blast" uttered
very softly and increasing in volume of sound and violence of meaning at
the twelfth word, when he would start pianissimo again. Marcella's eyes
closed; she was not asleep, she was thinking very vividly of Louis, but
all the murmur of sounds about her intruded on her consciousness, making
clear thought impossible.
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