He was a religious man, when he was not drunk, and set great store by a prayer-book that he had saved from the wreckage of churchgoing times. Over a fat, phlegmatic, brick-red face the sun had spread a glaze, as if to shield the colour from other counteracting climatic influences. His speech was thick and uneducated. At first Joyce had resented his intention as a mockery, and only to avoid unseemly wrangling did he stand there and listen, while the Kaffir squatted by, scratching his limbs in meditative wonder at the incantation. But very soon the solemn beauty of the service appealed to him. “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” He stooped and threw some handfuls of the red soil reverently into the grave. It seemed not unfitting that the rude voice should give the broken life this rude burial.
The service over, Wilson signed to the Kaffir to fill in the grave, and flicking the perspiration from his forehead, for the sun beat down fiercely, turned to Joyce.
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.