“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.