The men in the waggon started to sing, “For he’s a jolly good fellow.” The rude music of their voices came back strongly to Lawless’ ears, and then grew fainter, and yet more faint, until only the silence reigned about him, and the waggon showed smaller and smaller as it trailed slowly across the veld, farther and farther into the illimitable blue distance. Hayhurst had ridden off some time before, taking an opposite direction to that followed by the waggon. The occupant of the shanty was left alone. The world seemed to have emptied suddenly and to have overlooked himself in its indiscriminate sweeping away of all life.
He gazed about him at the solitudes—waste land on all sides, stretching away league upon league in one great sameness,—vast, unchanging open spaces of veld, green and brown and orange, in which the yellow stones shone warmly in the sunshine, and the dew that lay heavily on the ground like a veil of silver flashed a prismatic defiance with the fire of myriads of gems.
He turned about and went into the house. The advent of these men had been unwelcome, their departure left a blank feeling of desolation behind. He had had as much of the solitudes as was good for him, he decided; if Van Bleit arrived, he would settle matters with him speedily and return to the beaten track. He felt depressed, and knew not that it was the influence of Graves’ personality working upon his mind. This man who had stirred up thoughts of failure by his talk, who in his person stood for waste—the result of neither competition nor intellectual incapacity, but of his own ineffectually—had set him thinking of the purposelessness of his life, its want of aim, of every high and right intention that once had actuated him, and which he had flung aside and trampled on in weak resentment against the tide of circumstances he had himself set loose and made no attempt to stem. He also stood for waste—the waste of powers which had left him stunted mentally and morally enervated. It is waste that is responsible for the world’s great failures.
He made an effort to shake off the mood that held him, and moving across the littered room surveyed the disordered breakfast-table with disgust. Empty bottles stood upon the table, and lay under it where they had been rolled the night before when they had yielded the last drop of their contents. They had been thirsty souls, these men who had happened out of the darkness and vanished again with the light,—failures, in a certain sense, each one of them,—a queer conglomerate of misdirected energy.
Lawless had a feeling that he ought to reduce the muddle to order, but he had only a vague idea how to set about it. He caught up the empty bottles, and going outside with them flung them out upon the veld.
“It’s no use, Grit, playing Aunt Sally with those bottles. You can’t hide your debauch from me.”
He turned his face with a laugh and a look of quick relief in the direction of the voice, and there stood Tottie in her short tweed skirt, with a golden lock straggling rakishly over one eye, and her lips unusually pallid.
“You! Gods! I’m glad,” he cried.
“Don’t stare at me like that,” she exclaimed,—“look somewhere else, can’t you? I won’t have the eye of man upon me until I have attended to my toilet. There wasn’t the vestige of a glass in the hut, you lunatic.”
He followed her into the house.