CHAPTER XXI
THE ROAD TO ROUNDABOUT
Patrick Dalroy looked at the invader with a heavy and yet humourous expression, and merely said, “I didn’t steal your car; really, I didn’t.”
“Oh, no,” answered Dorian, “I’ve heard all about it since, and as you’re rather the persecuted party, so to speak, it wouldn’t be fair not to tell you that I don’t agree much with Ivywood about all this. I disagree with him; or rather, to speak medically, he disagrees with me. He has, ever since I woke up after an oyster supper and found myself in the House of Commons with policemen calling out, ‘Who goes home?’”
“Indeed,” inquired Dalroy, drawing his red bushy eyebrows together. “Do the officials in Parliament say, ‘Who goes home?’”
“Yes,” answered Wimpole, indifferently, “it’s a part of some old custom in the days when Members of Parliament might be attacked in the street.”
“Well,” inquired Patrick, in a rational tone, “why aren’t they attacked in the street?”
There was a silence. “It is a holy mystery,” said the Captain at last. “But, ‘Who goes home?’—that is uncommonly good.”
The Captain had received the poet into the car with all possible expressions of affability and satisfaction, but the poet, who was keen-sighted enough about people of his own sort, could not help thinking that the Captain was a little absent-minded. As they flew thundering through the mazes of South London (for Pump had crossed Westminster Bridge and was making for the Surrey hills), the big blue eyes of the big red-haired man rolled perpetually up and down the streets; and, after longer and longer silences, he found expression for his thoughts.
“Doesn’t it strike you that there are a very large number of chemists in London nowadays?”