And yet she cried inconsolably for Jimmy's hand.
God knows what memories came to her when she thought of it. I don't think she thought of it as the hand that had written masterpieces and flung them aside, that could steer a car straight through hell-fire, and that could nurse, and bind up wounds. I know I thought of all these obvious things. But she must have thought of the hand that she knew like her own hand, the hand with the firm, nervous fingers, and the three strong lines in the pinkish palm, the hand she adored and had shrunk from, whose gesture had been torture to her and whose touch was ecstasy, the hand that the surgeons had cut off and tossed into a basket to be cast out with the refuse of the wards.
Not that either of us had much time for thinking of anything but how we could get out of Ghent before the Germans got into it. Viola said it would be quite easy. There was the ambulance, and there was her car and there was Jimmy's car.
I told her that Jimmy's god-like car was lying bottom upwards in a ditch between Ghent and Melle, an object half piteous, half obscene. She said it was a jolly good thing then that she'd brought hers. Perhaps it was.
We had just got Jimmy and Reggie into their first sleep at six o'clock in the morning when the orders came for us to clear out.
We cleared out in Viola's car, with Reggie on his stretcher and Jimmy (propped up with pillows) at his head, and Viola at his feet, and two wounded men in front with Colville, and Kendal and me standing one on each step. (Most of our luggage was on the Boulevard in front of the Convent where we had left it.)
We went, as we had come, through Bruges. We drew up to rest in the Market
Place under the Belfry.
"You'd better look at it while you can, Viola," said Jevons. "You may never see it again."
"I? I shall never see anything else," she said.
We looked at the Belfry. It was as if, under that menace of destruction, we saw it for the first time.