“One for you, old man,” said Joyce.
“For me?”
Noakes stretched out his thin arm eagerly, and clutched the undreamed of prize.
“From Yvonne. It’s to cheer you up, old chap, I expect. It’s just like her, you know.”.
Joyce ran through his letter rapidly and went out to superintend the unloading. But Noakes, who was past work, remained in bed and pored over Yvonne’s simple lines till the tears came into his eyes.
When all was settled, the stores taken in, the teams secured, the natives who had driven them established in the huts, and finally the Englishman in charge provided with food and whisky and sent to sleep, Joyce sat down by his friend’s side and gave himself up to the greatest pleasure his life then held. The wind howled outside, and the draught swept in through the cracks on the doors, and the ill-fitting windows, and up the rude chimney beneath which a fire was smouldering. Noakes coughed incessantly. The atmosphere was tainted with the smell of the lamp, the thin smoke from the fuel, the piles of sacking and mealy-bags that lay in corners of the room, and the strips of bultong or dried beef hanging in the gloom of the rafters. The room itself, occupying nearly the whole area of the ground-floor of the rudely built wooden house, was cheerless in aspect. The table, two or three wooden chairs, some shelves holding cooking utensils and odds and ends of crockery, a litter of stores and boxes, a frameless dirty oleograph of the bubble-blowing boy, a churchman’s almanac, two years old, against the wall, and Noakes’s sack bed—that was all the room contained. In a corner was a ladder leading to the loft, where Joyce and the farmer slept, and whence now came the muffled sounds of the snoring of the English driver. But for a few moments Joyce forgot the cheerless surroundings.
He sat late with Noakes, reading the letters aloud and talking of Yvonne. At last, after a short silence, Noakes raised himself on his elbow and gazed earnestly at his friend. He was very gaunt and wasted—
“That’s the only tender thing a woman has ever done for me,” he said. “No,” he added in reply to Joyce’s questioning look, “my wife was never tender. God knows why she married me.”
“We ’ll make our fortunes and go back, and you shall know her,” said Joyce.
“No. I shall never go back. I shall never get half a mile beyond this door again.”