And I feel—now—as if I had taken hours to tell her.
Then one of our men came to us. He drew back when he saw Mrs. Jevons, and
I followed him to the doorway. He said they were busy with Major
Thesiger. They hadn't started yet with Mr. Jevons.
And then—ages afterwards—one of the surgeons came and called me out of the room. He said the Major would be all right. They'd got the bit of shell out. But—there was Jevons's hand. They'd have to take it off. They couldn't possibly save it. And it was going to be a beastly business. They'd run out of anaesthetics. Thesiger had had the last they'd got.
Yes, of course it would have been better. But Jevons wouldn't hear of it. He knew they were short and Thesiger didn't, and he'd insisted on their doing Thesiger first.
It was an awful mistake, he said, because it would hurt Jevons ten times more than it would hurt anybody else. He thought that I had better get Mrs. Jevons out of that room; the ward where they were operating was next to it.
I couldn't get her out of it.
There were five minutes when I sat there and Viola crouched on the floor beside me with her face hidden on my knees and her hands grabbing me tighter and tighter.
And the door opened and I saw two nuns looking in. I heard one say to another, "C'est sa pauvre femme qui devient folle." And the door closed on us.
* * * * *
"All that fuss about a hand!" Jimmy had come out of his faint and was trying to restore Viola to a sense of proportion. If all the rest of him had been blown away, he said, by that confounded shell, and only his hand had been left, she might have had something to cry for.