This part of it is all confused and horrible.

We had to wait before we could see our surgeons at the Convent.  The nuns took us into a little parlour and left us there.

And I told her then what had happened.  I can see her sitting in the nuns’ parlour, looking out of the window as I told her; looking as if she wasn’t listening.  And I can hear my own voice.  It sounded strange and affected, as if I had made it all up and didn’t believe what I was telling her.

“He saved Reggie’s life—­do you see? at the risk of his own.

“At—­the risk—­of his own.”

And still she looked as if she wasn’t listening.  It didn’t sound as if it had really happened.

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.

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.