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.
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.