We might have enjoyed that run back, Viola said; only somehow we didn't. Reggie was ill from his anesthetic all the way, and Jimmy's temperature went up with every mile, and we missed the boat at Ostend, and had to stay there all night; and Jimmy became delirious in the night and thought that he had left Viola behind in the Town Hall at Melle. And there was no room on the morning boat; and when we did get on board the Naval Transport at Dunkirk, Kendal took it into his head to be seasick till he nearly died.
We had no peace till seven o'clock on Tuesday, when we got to Canterbury.
XV
I think I have said that Jevons made me suffer. He did. I can say that before those three weeks of his all my contacts with him were infected by the poison of my suffering. But all that was nothing to what he made me suffer since, what I suffer now when I remember the things I have said of him, the things I have thought and felt—my furtive belittling of him, my unwilling admiration, the doubt that I encouraged in the mean hope that it would become a certainty.
I would give anything to be like the Canon or my wife, the only two of us whose conscience doesn't reproach them when they see Jimmy's right sleeve.
I remember Norah saying to me once, "I shall be sorry for you if you don't take care." Well, I am sorry for myself.
But I am still sorrier for Mrs. Thesiger.
I know there's a great deal to be said for her. I had wired to them from Dunkirk to tell them that Reggie was slightly wounded but recovering, and that the four of us would be in Canterbury that evening. It wasn't my fault if Reggie, being a British officer, was taken from us at Dover, and sent to a military hospital; but I admit I ought to have wired again to the Thesigers to inform them of the fact. I ought to have remembered that Reggie was more important to Mrs. Thesiger than Jevons, even if Jevons had done what Mrs. Thesiger didn't yet know he'd done.
The maternal passion is a terrible thing. It has made women commit crimes. It made my mother-in-law push Viola from her on her threshold and turn on me as I was helping Jimmy out of the car. It made her say, "You've brought my son-in-law. What have you done with my son?"
(To do her justice, she hadn't seen what had happened to Jimmy. Though he was tired and weak, he could still stand up and stagger along if you held him tight.)