ed
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 m