Marcella wrote long letters home; only to Wullie did she mention Louis, and even to him she said very little.
Noon came, and the boat deck was very hot. The chiming of bells in the churches told when the moment of the Elevation came and passed; the little reports sounded from the old mountain: she thought they sounded like guns that had been fired a thousand years ago. Jimmy said he didn't feel well, and went to sleep after a while; an Italian boy with black, hyacinthine curls and swimming black eyes spied her white frock from his little boat out in the bay: tying up to the accommodation ladder, he stood singing a passionate song to the twanging of a guitar. She wondered whether this were a personal tribute or a way of earning money. The cap he held out for a coin showed it was the one; his eloquent eyes and picturesque gestures as he begged her little withering bunch of vine leaves showed it was the other. She tossed them to him carelessly, and he bowed and kissed them gracefully.
At last the family parties began to come on board, with hot, tired mothers, cross children and disillusioned fathers; then came the emigrant girls, their hats covered in bright flowers. 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. The peculiar languor of shipboard life seized upon her mind and her body: when she went below both were partly anaesthetized; her feet scarcely felt the boards of the deck; her fingers were scarcely conscious of the letters and books she held. Her eyes and her mind took in the returning passengers dully.