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.