CHAPTER IV
HESTER
Ishmael sat and watched his own thoughts pass before him. It is not given to every man to see all that he has lived by lying broken around him, and this was what had happened to Ishmael. He could see, now that he had lost him, how it was the thought of his son at Cloom, far more than Cloom itself, which had held ever deepening place in his heart and soul. He remembered the night when Phoebe had whispered to him that she was going to have a baby … how she had clung about his neck and how happy she had seemed. He remembered too—the recollection swam up to him through years of blurred forgetting—an earlier night, when Phoebe had won him back to her … that night of passion which must have been on her side a calculated thing, a trap for him to fall in blindly—as he had. Phoebe—who had seemed so transparent, and whom, as he now realised, no one but Archelaus had ever really known…. Yet none of that hurt or even outraged him. What Phoebe had been was of supreme unimportance. Not at this distance of years could he conjure up the emotions of an outraged husband which even at the time would have seemed to him both inadequate and ridiculous. Not the realisation that that night of passion had been a faked thing on her part—a set-piece on a stage—touched him. He took, as he was guiltily aware, too little to it himself, beyond animal appetite, for him to dare judge of that.
But that other night, after she had told him he was to expect a child to be born to him, that night when he had gone out into the scented garden and felt drowning and yet uplifted on the tide of the deepest emotion of his life—to know that that had all been based on a delusion was what upset the whole of life now.
Could truth be built on untruth? If what he had felt then was all the time based upon a lie, how could there be anything worth the living for in that which he had left? The rapture, the deep and sacred joy, when through his fatherhood he had felt kin to God Himself—what of that? What of the life, the religion, the love, the hopes, that had gone on piling up upon that one thing from that day on? Were they all as valueless as what they had been built on? If so, then he was bereft indeed, left in an empty world, that only echoed mockery to the plaints of men and the quiet eternal laughter of the Being who made them for ends of supreme absurdity.
It was not his relationship towards Nicky that Ishmael was weighing as he sat in the still room; it was his whole relationship towards life. It was not his fatherhood that he felt reeling; it was the fatherhood of God. It was not love that he felt slipping from his grasp; it was truth: not Nicky that he was despairing of, but the figure of Christ Himself.
If all that emotion, that love, that faith, that ardent passion of joy and work, were founded, caused by, built upon what had never been, could they really exist either?
Once he did hear his voice saying aloud "My boy … mine …"; but even then, his passion for truth outweighing indulgence to self, he knew that it was the mere mechanical speech of the situation rising to his lips unconsciously. He said the words again to try and get at exactly what their import was. "Mine…."
All that had struck him while Archelaus had been lying watching him read the letters was "This couldn't happen to a woman … how unfairly it's arranged … it's only a man this could happen to …"; and that had shown him how small, after all, was the man's share, that such a thing could be possible. Him or another, it really did not seem to matter so very much. Both he and Archelaus had had Phoebe. That this spark of life should have been from him or from Archelaus … was that, after all, so important? It seemed such a small share. Fatherhood, looked at dispassionately, seemed to him a thing very artificial in its convention. Life, that there should be life—yes, that was different, but not that it should have been from him or another on that particular occasion…. When one thought that both had equally possessed the woman they seemed to merge so in her personality as to lose individual personalities of their own.
If he had not kept away from Phoebe for those two months, thus, in the light of her letter, putting the matter beyond doubt, how would any of the three of them ever have known whose son Nicky was? Women always said they knew, even when they were going equally with two men; but did they? Was it not rather that they always decided it was the child of the man they cared for most? And if conditions had all along been normal between him and Phoebe, then how would he have felt in the light of his brother's avowal? It would have been impossible to say whether the child had been his or his brother's; and yet Nicky would have been himself, even as he was now, and he, Ishmael, would have felt the same about him, and nothing would have been really different any more than if he had never known; or, knowing that there was doubt, still could not have told for certain which of the two it was who had fathered Nicky. How, then, was it different now that he did know beyond a doubt? Nicky was the same….