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.

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.