And the maternal passion is not more terrible than the passion that Viola had for Jevons. It made her say to her mother as the Canon and I brought Jimmy in (the dear old man had seen in an instant why he wore his coat slung loose over his right shoulder), "You can see what we're doing with my husband."
And when we were all in the drawing-room and I was explaining gently that Reggie was all right, but that we'd had to send him to the military hospital, it made her say, "If it wasn't for your son-in-law your son wouldn't be alive."
God knows what thirst she satisfied, what bitterness she exhausted, what secret anguish she avenged.
They were all there, the Thesiger women—they had come, you see, to meet Reggie—Victoria and Millicent and Mildred; and they heard her. But it was Mildred who saw. She spoke to her mother.
"Can't you see?" she said.
Viola was kneeling by the sofa where her father had made Jimmy lie, and she had unbuttoned and taken from him his heavy coat. She looked at me and said, "Please take them away somewhere and tell them. Jimmy is so tired."
I know that must seem awful. It was awful to come back from the battlefields of Flanders, from sieges and sackings and slaughter, and see the women flashing fire at each other. And they were mother and daughter. But, you see, they were women. I know that the war should have purged them of their passions (perhaps it did purge them); but your lover is your lover and your son your son for all that.
And it wasn't easy for Mrs. Thesiger to see how her son-in-law could have saved her son. I am not sure that she wouldn't have thought it presumption in Jevons to suppose that he could save anybody, let alone her son. There were people like the Thesigers from whom heroism was expected as a matter of course; and there were people like Jevons. You know what she said about his going to the front.
When I had finished the tale—and I let her have the whole of it, from the first shell that hit the Town Hall to the bit of the third shell that hit Jimmy—she said, "You mean that if he hadn't gone back for his car—" She had broken down and was sobbing quietly, but you could see how her mind worked.
I said, "I mean that if he hadn't gone back to the Town Hall to look for
Reggie he wouldn't have been hit."