How much did that affect it? thought Ishmael now, as he watched for them to come round once more, and gave a nod and a wave of the hand as they breasted the slope.  It was not, it occurred to him, not for the first time, but more deeply than ever before, as though Archelaus had been some stranger.  He had built to make Cloom a good place for his descendants, for his flesh and blood, but the same blood ran in Nicky whether he or Archelaus had fathered him.  Not one jot of it was different.  And this, which to Archelaus, had he been in Ishmael’s position, would have been the sharpest pang—­which he had meant to be the sharpest—­was to Ishmael the saving element.  For it prevented Cloom being made in his eyes a thing of no account, the mere vehicle of strangers.  Cloom was more to him than his dislike of Archelaus—­that was what it amounted to.  Nicky was more to him as himself than his idea of him as his son.  Jim was everything to him as the future of Cloom, not as his grandson any more than that of Archelaus.  But sonship struck more nearly than any matter of a generation twice removed, and not so simply as all that could the thing be harmonised with his groping soul.  For he was still tormented by doubts as to whether all he had lived on and by must not be valueless since they were conceived on what did not exist, still feeling lost, without anything definite to hold to, without any solution of the riddle.  He refused to believe that the whole riddle of life might be without an answer, that there could be no pattern, only a blind mingling of threads; that was a supposition everything in him, inborn and learned, failed to tolerate.

This summer had been a ghastly effort for him, who, for all his reserve, had never been any use at deception; he had felt as though he took about with him all day a sensation as of a hollow weight—­something that bore him down and yet had no solidity, that was rather the nightmare heaviness of a dream.  Also he was obsessed by the triumphant face of Archelaus that leered at him, that stared at Nicky and Jim with a deadly possessiveness in his eyes while they went their unconscious ways, that said, as plainly as words could have, “I have won ...  I have won!...”

Life was not simple even at seventy, when such a mixture of motives and sensations could hold sway—­the old fear of Archelaus crystallised into a definite writhing under this triumph of his, the aching sense of personal loss in his son, and, sharpest pang of any, the fear that all of life lay hollow behind and before....  Ever since Nicky’s birth it had seemed to him that every revelation had come to him through his fatherhood of Nicky—­ecstasies he had otherwise not touched....  Never, much as he loved his girls, could they have given him hours such as Nicky had; neither when Georgie had told him of the advent of each, nor at the time of birth, had there been for him the deep significance of the night when Phoebe had whispered to him....  There the fact that he could only feel a thing at its height for the first time had stepped in, preventing ever again a renewal of such ecstasy.