Bitter loss, the loss of disappointment which at the time the soul tells one is worse than loss by death, he had known over Blanche; pain, anger, hardness, with his family he could not have missed; horror and remorse had both assailed him over Phoebe; natural sorrow that held no sense of outrage he had felt for the loss of Killigrew and Boase.  But this was something different—­this aching sense of helplessness, of a passion of protectiveness that could avail neither Vassie under his roof nor Nicky on the far veldt.  He had not been of those who are insensitive to the pain of the world—­rather had it held too much of his sympathies; but now, in the sublime selfishness of great personal grief, he felt he would give everything—­the war, the whole rest of the world—­to have Nicky back in safety.  That was only at first, or when the fear was strongest; at other times his sense of proportion and knowledge of how Nicky himself would feel towards such a sentiment, brought him to a truer poise.

The war dragged on.  The nation began to see that it was not to be the “walk-over” so confidently expected; disasters occurred, long sieges wore the folk at home even as those in the beleaguered towns, growls against the Government were raised, people talked of “muddling through,” and every barrel-organ in the land ground out “Soldiers of the Queen” and “The Absent-minded Beggar.”  Then the world went mad and mafficked, felt a little ashamed of itself, and became, for the first time for years, rather usefully introspective and self-critical.  And “Nicky ...  Nicky ...  Nicky ...” beat out every swing of the pendulum of Time at Cloom.

Between the beats of intensest feeling Ishmael would fall into the arid spaces which all deep emotion holds as a strongly-running sea holds hollows—­spaces where it did not seem to matter so much after all, when in a dry far-off way he could tell himself that nothing really made any difference in life.  From these hollows he came up again as a man comes floating into consciousness after chloroform—­recalled by a sense of pain.  He had one of these spaces just after Vassie had been buried, and all the time he was consoling Dan’s frantic and noisy sorrow he was feeling a hypocrite, because, so he told himself, he really did not care.  He did care, and deeply, but he was making the mistake of thinking that any grief can go the whole way, that all else in life can possibly be blotted out.  True instinct told him it could not, that all of life could never fall in ashes round the head even when it was bowed in irrevocable loss; but a remnant of the conventional made him feel as though it ought to, and this made him distrust what grief he felt.  His thought for Nicky, even when he was in his dry spaces, he always knew was eating at him.  When, with peace, came the expectation of Nicky’s return in safety, it seemed to Ishmael that never before had he known all that fatherhood meant.  Cloom, the future, all that he had worked for all his life, would surely come back with Nicky.