They buried Noakes on the other side of the kopje behind the house. He had lasted through the winter and early spring, but the season of the rains and heat, when the damp oozed through wooden walls and mud floor, and hung clammily upon sheets and pillows, gave the remnants of his lungs no breathing chance, and Noakes went uncomplainingly to his place.

Joyce laid “the dear lady’s” letter on his breast before nailing down the rough wooden coffin. It seemed as if most of his own heart too were enclosed with the letter, to be put away under the ground for ever and ever. Wilson the farmer, himself, and a Kaffir carried the coffin to the hole that had been dug beneath a blue gum-tree. There Wilson read the burial service of the Church of England.

He was a religious man, when he was not drunk, and set great store by a prayer-book that he had saved from the wreckage of churchgoing times. Over a fat, phlegmatic, brick-red face the sun had spread a glaze, as if to shield the colour from other counteracting climatic influences. His speech was thick and uneducated. At first Joyce had resented his intention as a mockery, and only to avoid unseemly wrangling did he stand there and listen, while the Kaffir squatted by, scratching his limbs in meditative wonder at the incantation. But very soon the solemn beauty of the service appealed to him. “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” He stooped and threw some handfuls of the red soil reverently into the grave. It seemed not unfitting that the rude voice should give the broken life this rude burial.

The service over, Wilson signed to the Kaffir to fill in the grave, and flicking the perspiration from his forehead, for the sun beat down fiercely, turned to Joyce.

“Come in now and have a drink.”

But Joyce refused and remained there alone, with his head sunk on his breast, watching the Kaffir. When the task was done, he set at the grave-head a great stone he had previously brought there, and slowly went away. His steps took him mechanically back over the kopje. But when he arrived at the prickly-pear hedge on top, the sight of the mean shanty and the Kaffir huts and the straggling fields high with corn and maize, jarred upon his mood. He turned, and descending, struck across the rank, sodden veldt, that stretched eastward in a terrible monotony to the sky-line. There, at any rate, he could be alone, away from the sights and sounds of his dreary toil. A broad gully, half filled with a red, swollen stream, stopped his progress. Half a mile farther up was a bridge. But he was tired and hot and sick at heart. A slab in the shade of an overhanging edge of the ravine met his eye. He clambered down and sat there, looking into the small swirling flood.

A centipede crawled close by. He drew his knife from his belt, cut the creature in two, and flicked the pieces into the water, which swept them instantaneously out of sight. He looked at his knife that had so speedily given death to the insect. Was he much better, more useful? One gash, a leap into the stream, and he would be carried away into eternity. Till yesterday his life had some meaning—the support of the poor forlorn man just buried. Now, what was the good of his living? There was no joy for himself, no service to one of God’s creatures. But after digging his knife idly into the crumbling slab, he returned it to his belt.

Yet what he had dreaded with almost morbid heart-sinking these latter months had come about. He was alone. Noakes had gone—passed away like a shadow, as the burial service hath it. The phrase brought back to his mind a tag from old days of scholarship—[Greek]—“man is the dream of a shadow.” He mused upon the saying. Time was, he remembered, when he had wondered at the strange Greek melancholy underlying even Pindar’s gladness in outward things, thews and sinews and supple forms. Now he understood. What sane man who had watched the world could escape it—this overwhelming sense of the futility of things? To what ends had Noakes’s life been lived? The ceaseless awful toil of grinding out despicable literature at sweated wages; the begetting of a child to an inheritance of misery in the world’s tragedy; the crowning futility of his senseless exile—what purpose had it all served? Save for the pity of it, could it be taken seriously? And he himself dangling his legs over this gully? Verily, the dream of a shadow.

The lines in which the passage occurred came into his head. He repeated them aloud. Such reminiscences of former culture occasionally visited him and smote him with their ironic incongruity. He broke into a mirthless laugh.

The westering sun had already touched the top of the far distant High Veldt when he turned his steps homeward.

Wilson was squirting tobacco juice over a gate and giving directions as to the repairing of one of the sluices, that drained the land into the gully, whence Joyce had come.

“This damn thing will all go to glory soon,” he said.

“We ought to get some pipes,” said Joyce.

“And lay on gas and hot-water,” returned Wilson, sarcastically. “Where’s the money to come from?”

Joyce shrugged his shoulders and continued his way to the house. He did not much care. Things were going badly. Well, things had gone badly with him since he stepped aside from the paths of honest living. He could expect nothing else.

The sight of the rough bed, tenantless now for the first time for many months, was inexpressibly cheerless. The indentations too of the coffin still remained upon it. He smoothed them out mechanically. Then reaching for a thick pile of foolscap that was on the shelf, he sat down with it upon the bed. It was the MS. of the novel which Noakes had copied from the yellow package-paper—all written in his beautiful round hand. He had been a writing master in his youth and retained a professional pride in penmanship. For months this copying had been all he could do.

Joyce read here and there, at last became interested. The work was good. And then for the first time he seriously contemplated mailing it to a publisher. When the Kaffir came in later to help him prepare supper, he had made up his mind.

It was a gloomy book, dealing with the abject side of colonial pioneer work—a tragedy of wasted lives and hopes foredoomed to disappointment. A picture of wrecks and derelicts; men of broken fortunes, breaking hearts, degraded lives; poor fools, penniless, craftless, who had come hither like Noakes, allured by vague visions of El Dorado, to find no place for them in this new rude land where unskilled labour belongs to the natives, who defy competition. He called it “The Wasters.” Almost unconsciously, his intellectual powers had returned to him whilst writing it. The English was pure, the style vigorous and scholarly. And the feeling—he had written it with his heart’s blood. Before he went to sleep that night, he appended to it an alternative title, “The Dream of a Shadow.”

In the course of time the manuscript was despatched and Joyce settled down to many months’ forgetfulness of it, and to humdrum loneliness and labour. Time went quickly, for he took no heed of its flight, having nothing to hope for. He tried to begin another book, but the stimulus of Noakes’s appreciation was gone and he sank again into intellectual apathy. In the long evenings he taught a Kaffir boy to read and write, while Wilson boozed away the profits of the farm. At the best of times there was little sympathy between the two men. Often mutual antipathy manifested itself actively under a thin disguise. The farmer despised Joyce for a broken-down gentleman unacquainted with any handicraft or the principles of farming, and Joyce considered his partner a dull sot, who was letting the farm go to rack and ruin. Still, a habit of life is a strange help in living. Often Joyce told himself that he must sell out and try his luck elsewhere. But there was no particular reason for bringing matters to a crisis on one day more than on another. So the months wore on.

The work of the harvest knocked him up. He got ague and lay in bed for three weeks. Wilson cursed the day he ever took him into the place; and had it not been for the humaneness of their next neighbour, who farmed more healthy ground some forty miles away, towards the High Veldt, and carried Joyce off thither one day in an ox-waggon, he might have speedily followed Noakes. He returned to the farm cured but terribly gaunt. The lines had deepened in his face, over which the beard grew straggling, accentuating the hollows of his cheeks. His hands had whitened and thinned during his illness. Wilson sniffed contemptuously at them and looked at his own huge glazed and freckled paw.

Winter set in. There was plenty to do—ricks to thatch, buildings to repair, fields to irrigate. Joyce did not spare himself. Work, if joyless, was at least an anodyne. It brought on prostrating fatigue, which in its turn brought long heavy hours of sleep. In that way it was as good as adulterated whisky.

Some men thrive physically and morally in the wilds. The incessant conflict with the elemental forces of nature braces nerves and strengthens the will. And these are exclusive of such as find satisfaction of primitive instincts only in uncivilised lands—such as are a reversion to the savage type, and, in the forest or the desert, live a life truer to their natures than amid the decencies of civilisation. But the men who thrive are physically and morally adapted to the struggle—men of energy, ambition, daring, who see in it a means towards the yet ungained or forfeited place in civilisation. The pioneer work of new colonies is done by them, and they generally gain their reward. Joyce had found all the successful men in South Africa belonging to this type. He had looked at Noakes and himself and groaned inwardly. They were doomed to perish, it seemed, by natural selection. In the case of Noakes the foreboding had been fulfilled. Would it be so with himself? His unfitness for his environment weighed heavier day by day on his mind: all the more since the loss of the companionship that had cheered him in dark hours. A habit of brooding silence fell upon him. He spoke as little as in those awful years of prison. And as his life grew lonelier and more self-centred, softer memories faded, and those chiefly remained that had branded themselves in his brain. The gaol came back to his dreams. Once, in the shed where he had taken up his abode since the beginning of spring, he awoke in a sweating terror. The disposition of his bed as regards the window and the height of the latter from the ground corresponded with the arrangements of his cell. The nightmare held him paralysed. And this in some form or the other repeated itself at intervals, so that he was forced to rearrange his room.

He had shifted his quarters owing to the arrival of a fat Boer woman who claimed connubial relations with Wilson. The suggestion had proceeded from himself from motives of delicacy and good-nature. At first he had welcomed her in spite of unprepossessing manners and appearance, and tried to win her esteem by little acts of civility. But the lady drank; and one day Wilson, finding her alone in Joyce’s hut, whither she had come to steal whisky, grew unreasonably jealous and blacked both her eyes. After which occurrence Joyce and she let each other severely alone. He relapsed into his sombre apathy.

The life was killing him, brutalizing him. He lost even interest in the Kaffir boy’s education, which had not been without its light side of amusement. Hour after hour he would sit, on summer nights, on the doorstep of his shed, pipe in mouth, elbows on knees, thinking of nothing, his mind a dull blank. Now and then he thought of Yvonne, but only in a vague, far-off way. He never wrote or felt urged to write. What was the good? And he had received no letter from Yvonne since the one that had accompanied her line to Noakes. Once, several months afterwards, one of the ox-waggons from the town had been overturned in a swollen river, and many stores including the mail had been swept away. The driver told him there had been letters for him. Possibly one from Yvonne. At the time he regretted it, but his morbid indifferentism had already begun to darken his mind. He laid conjecture dully aside. The weeks and months passed and, with all his other longings for sweeter things, the desire for her letters died. And so the last strand wore through of the last thread that bound him to England.

As for the novel, he had long since ceased to concern himself about its fate. Probably it had been lost in transit, either going or returning. The yellow sheets on which he had written the first draft lay on the mud floor in the corner of his hut and rotted and grew mildewed with the damp.

At last, one day, like a bolt from the blue, came the publishers’ letter, offering alternative terms for the book, the usual royalty the firm paid to unknown authors, or eighty pounds down for the copyright, to be paid on publication. It aroused him, with a shock, from his torpor. That night he could not sleep. He got up and wandered about the veldt through the dewy grasses, under the bright African starlight, his veins alive with a new excitement. Perhaps he had found a vocation—one to bring him money, congenial work, the right at last to take his forfeited place in a civilised land. He returned to the house at daybreak, worn out with fatigue, but throbbing with wild schemes for the future. And the following evening, as soon as the toil of the day was over, he lit his small, smoking lamp, and sat down in feverish haste to begin a new story, the scheme of which he had half-heartedly worked out soon after Noakes’s death. The copyright of the other he sold for the eighty pounds.

And then gradually the longing for England grew more insistent, until at last it took the form of a settled determination. One day he saddled a rough farm-pony and rode to the good Samaritan who had taken him in during his illness. The farmer, a hard-headed Scotchman, shook his head dubiously when Joyce unfolded his plan.

“Stick to the farm and buy Wilson out. You ’ll mak’ more money, and then you can retire in a few years.”

“The profits are nearly swallowed up in improvements and transit,” said Joyce. “It is a bare subsistence.”

“That’s because you don’t go the right way to work. If I had the land, I’d make it pay soon enough.”

“You are a practical farmer, and I am not,” said Joyce. “Even if I desired to gain experience, it is precious little I could gain with Wilson—and I long for home again.”

“That’s all very well—but if you fail with your writing? I have heard it is a precarious trade.”

“I’m used to failure,” replied Joyce. “That’s what I came into the world for. You can’t say that I am a conspicuous success as a colonist.”

“Sell out from Wilson, and come here,” said the farmer, “on the metayer system. I will put you up to a few things.”

Joyce looked round him; they were sitting on the verandah of the nicely-built house. Everything had the trim appearance of scientific English farming—the outbuildings solid and clean, the fields high with grain, the dams in perfect repair, the yard spick and span. A flower garden lay beneath him. A well-trimmed vine covered the lattice-work of the verandah. All was a striking contrast to his own ramshackle, neglected surroundings. A month ago he would have leaped at the offer. But now he declined it. He distrusted himself, his power of content. If he once put his hand to the plough, he would not be able to draw back. And he held ploughs in cordial detestation. He rode back, having thanked his friend and obtained his consent to act as arbiter, if need were, between Wilson and himself.

A day or two later, he took advantage of a sober and quasi-friendly moment, to announce his intention to Wilson, who listened to him stolidly.

“I hope my sudden withdrawal won’t cause you inconvenience,” said he, politely. “If it does—”

“My good friend,” replied Wilson, “I am only too damn glad to get rid of you.”

“Then if you ’ll give me a lump sum down for my share, and lend me a team, I ’ll leave the infernal place this afternoon,” said Joyce, nettled.

Wilson went into the house and came out with a roll of greasy notes.

“There,” he said, “will that satisfy you? I ’ve been wanting to part company for a long time, and I ’ve kept ’em by me.”

Joyce counted the notes, and to his surprise found the sum exceeded that which he himself calculated to be his due. After half an hour’s joint examination of their roughly-kept accounts, he found that Wilson was right.

“You are an honest man,” he said with a smile. “It is a pity you have so many other failings.”

“I can keep myself out of quod, at any rate,” replied Wilson, “which is more than some people can say.”

The retort was like a blow in the face. Joyce staggered under it.

“Another time don’t be so devilish smart with your tongue,” said Wilson. “I ain’t the one to cast a man’s misfortunes in his teeth, but, all the same, it’s best for a man like you to lie low.”

“What the devil are you talking of?” said Joyce, fiercely.

“What’s the good of bluff? You’ve given yourself away heaps of times.”

“I insist upon knowing what you mean,” said Joyce.

How could this man have learned his history? Noakes could not have betrayed him. For the honour of his dead comrade he could not let the matter drop. Wilson tilted back his chair and squirted a stream of tobacco-juice over the floor, which aroused the indignation of the Boer woman, who was sitting on some sacks near the door, peeling potatoes. Her lord was a beastly Englander, and a great many other undesirable things. Wilson, who had not yet laced his heavy boots, took one off to throw at her head, but Joyce caught his arm.

“What a brute you are!” he said angrily.

Wilson broke into a laugh.

“You’d better thank Mr. Joyce for saving your beauty from being damaged,” he said, pulling on the boot again.

“Now,” said Joyce, as soon as domestic peace was restored, “tell me what you meant just now.”

Wilson rose, went to the door and ostentatiously spat over the Boer woman’s head; then he turned round to Joyce:—

“Look here,” he said, “I have my hands full enough of quarrelling as it is. You ’d better trek off with that waggon and a couple of niggers. And I ’ll give you a piece of advice. When next you shake down alongside of a man to sleep, just keep from blabbing all your private affairs to him. And that’s why I wanted to be shut of you. We can do without your kind hereabouts. No wonder you were surprised to find me honest.”

“I suppose I must beg your pardon,” said Joyce humiliated. “I had no right to speak to you as I did.”

“If you had held your tongue, I should have held mine, as I have done for the last year and a half,” replied Wilson.

A few hours later Joyce stood up in the ox-waggon and looked back at the detested place that had so long been his home. It was just a speck in the midst of the cheerless plain under the irregular mound, the kopje, behind which poor Noakes lay buried. He drew an envelope from his pocket and looked at the blade of grass he had picked from the grave. Ashamed of his sentimentality, he twirled it between his fingers, undecided whether to throw it away or not He ended by replacing it in his pocket. After all, it symbolised a pure, tender feeling, and he was not carrying away with him too many.

He smoked in silence through the night, under the clear stars. He was sore at heart, deeply humiliated. The buoyancy of new hopes which his little literary success had occasioned during the last few weeks, had gone. The sense of the ineffaceable stain overpowered him. It was a fatality. Go where he would, he could not hide it from the knowledge of men. In his own land, accusing fingers pointed to it at street corners. In the uttermost ends of the earth he himself proclaimed it aloud.

To have lived for months and months under the silent contempt of this drunken woman-beating brute, to have been watched narrowly in all his business dealings—as he knew, from Wilson’s nature, must have been the case—to have been forced to stand helpless, degraded before this sot, while he vaunted his one virtue, honesty—it was gall and wormwood and all things bitter.

The Southern Cross flashed down from the myriad stars in its startling splendour. The moon shone bright over the vast silent plain, limitless, broken only by the undulating mounds and the infinitely stretching clumps of karroo bushes. The camp-fire, just replenished with damp twigs and shrubs, burned sulkily and the smoke ascended in spirals into the clear air. The hooded waggon depended helplessly on its shafts. The Kaffirs, wrapped in blankets, slept beneath. The oxen, outspanned some distance off, chewed the cud in sharp, rhythmic munches. The universe was still—awfully still. All gave the sense of the littleness of man and the immensity of space.

In a strange, imperious need of expansion, Joyce threw himself down on the wet earth and clutched the grasses and cried aloud:—

“Oh, God! I have suffered enough for my sin. Take this stain and degradation from my soul.”

After a while he arose, ashamed of his weakness, the futility of his appeal. Relighting his pipe, he clambered into the waggon, and sitting on the floor against the back, watched the portion of starry sky framed by the hood, until the first streaks of dawn announced the hour for inspanning the oxen again and continuing his journey.