I do remember telling him I thought it was a pity—if he meant to go out—that he hadn't seen Viola all this time.
And I remember his answer. "I haven't seen her—all this time—because
I meant to go out. I meant that nothing on this earth should stop me."
"How do you know," I said, "that she'd have stopped you?"
"How do I know? How do I know anything?—It's you who don't know. You don't know anything at all."
* * * * *
Well, he went—like that—without telling any of them.
I ran down on the car with him to Folkestone and saw him off on the boat to Ostend, he and Kendal, his chauffeur—he, as he pointed out to me, superior to Kendal only in the perfect fitting of his khaki. "Otherwise there isn't a pin to choose between us. Except," he said, "that Kendal doesn't funk it and I do."
And with Kendal grinning from ear to ear over Mr. Jevons's delicious joke, and Jimmy waving his khaki cap in a final valediction, and Kendal's grin dying abruptly as he achieved the military salute he judged appropriate, we parted.
Jimmy's last words to me, thrown over the gunwale, were, "Don't run after me, Furny. You won't catch me this time."