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.