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.