Three hundred jaws make a lot of noise chewing together. The benches were always too far from or close to the table and needed complicated co-operative action to adjust. He almost slapped a camper for blowing bubbles in his glass of milk.
After the meal Breavman and Ed performed, Breavman pumping out intricate chords that he knew were lost and Ed ruining the high registers of his harmonica to rise above the general mess-hall din.
Breavman, who always wanted to hear Handel playing in his head, beat the wire strings of a borrowed guitar. He had no callouses to resist the bite of the strings on the fingers of his left hand.
His campers and Ed’s shared a bunkhouse, and the counsellors had a partitioned area to themselves in the same wood building. They had between them decided on a policy of rigorous discipline for the first few days. Then they would ease off and be nice guys. After a stern talk the boys went to bed efficiently, except for Martin, who took half an hour to urinate. Ed told them to keep quiet in the morning no matter what time they got up.
The counsellors lay on their cots, the atmosphere of strict control hanging heavy. Martin’s queer clipped voice rang out.
“Can I make number two before line-up?”
“Yes, Martin.”
“Can I clean my nose?”
“If it isn’t a noisy operation.”
“Can I write my brother?”
Ed leaned over and whispered to Breavman, “He has no brother.”
When they were asleep he ran to the kitchen, where there was a telephone. He phoned Shell in New York. He wanted her voice to obliterate the day. He wanted to hear her say the word “darling.” He had phoned her half a dozen times from the city and he owed a huge bill.
He gave nothing to her and waited, reading over and over the Telephone Company’s printed instructions on how to dial a number. An interior voice was screaming: It doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.
Shell told him how much she loved Joseph Conrad.
They said good-bye softly, both of them knowing the three minutes had failed.
He wrote for two hours, describing the day in detail. The black-fly bites on his arm disturbed him and he put that down. His Indian jacket was too hot but he didn’t feel like taking it off. He put that down.