However, when the baby finally came, a new and very wonderful experience
developed for Jerome.
He had spent little thought beforehand on what it would seem like to
find himself a father. Now the fact rushed upon him and unexpectedly
overwhelmed him with its grandeur.
Jerome was a father!
Yes, the great miracle had happened to him. He was a father. There was a
baby boy, and the boy was his son. He hadn’t realized what it would be
like to have a son. Now he knew, and the knowledge thrilled him—deeply.
Jerome remembered how the clerk from the tackle store had exulted in his
superb technique of casting, and how the fellow who sold typewriters had
talked about his great dream, architecture; and he thought: “How very,
very little all these things are compared with having a son!” These
things, only because he happened to think of them, and all things like
them on which men set their hearts. Even love. Yes, he thought, even love
was not quite in a class with having a son. Love had come to him twice
and failed. He was through with it now. He had loved Stella; she had
thrown him down and married another man (how far away all that seemed!);
then he had loved Lili, and had come gradually to love her no longer. But
he was the father of Lili’s child.
He had a little son—and that, he told himself, was something that would
last! He had given up so much; but having a son seemed to recompense for
everything.
And indeed, for a time the child seemed to be drawing Jerome and Lili a
little together again. Lili had hated her baby before it came; now she
had it she responded to the appeal of the little new life also. She had
her glimmerings: dim, errant aspirations toward something better in life
than she had known. Being a mother awakened what was finest. When he saw
the baby at her breast, Jerome looked down at Lili with hopeful eyes.
She had failed to hold his love, but she was the baby’s mother; and love
itself, he dimly felt, might steal back somehow as time went on....
All these mighty and often quite overpowering emotions transpired during
the first two weeks of his august fatherhood. When Jerome had been a
father two weeks, he, together with Lili and the baby and Xenophon
Curry’s entire troupe of songbirds, bade farewell to Melbourne and
travelled back to Sydney, the port where the first Australian engagement
had been played, and from which they were to embark.
It really was a joy to see the dear old _Skipping Goone_ once more. Some
of the salutations of affection were perhaps just touched with satire;
but upon the whole the troupers had settled into a state of romantic
enthusiasm over this novel style of beating about the world. Even Captain
Bearman, though he could scarcely be termed a popular favourite, was made
the recipient of cherry smiles and waves and nods. The _Skipping Goone_’s
master had voyaged to New Zealand and back twice with mixed cargoes. Now
they were off to New Guinea (merely a cargo call); and then would come
Manila.