He is Conservative, if Conservatism means that he cynically holds his hand till he has seen what the next dodge is likely to be; and he is Liberal in the sense of believing that if everybody looks after himself then there will not be anybody who is not looked after. You have overdone it, my good friends and representatives in Parliament. He no longer believes a word you say. You offer him good and necessary things, and he glances sideways at you, and his lips shape the words "By-election." You try to keep him from rash and dangerous courses, and he wants to know what you are getting out of it. You ration him, but he knows where to get sugar and butter while you make the best of saccharine tablets and West African margarine; you de-control, and he knows better than you do why hens cease to lay and rabbits to breed. It is we of the cheaper Press who really have him in hand, and he cocks his ears back at us occasionally. He did so when the Daily Circus gave him pictures of bathing girls instead of war news; he is doing so to-day when—oh, lots of things—are pushed on and off the proscenium like Monty Rooke's camouflage canvas trees and linoleum sentries. He sniffs at all these things, says nothing, and calls for another glass of his country's seven-times-accursed beer.
Yet he follows, if not his leader, his neighbor. This he sometimes does to the most astonishing conclusions, just as he looks up at the sky-line because he sees somebody else doing so, or is prepared to swear that he hears a maroon because the man next to him says "Listen!" The vaguer the rumor the greater is the scope for his self-and-collective suggestion. He sees Russians, he knows that dead Field-Marshals are still alive. He can tell you from private information that such-and-such a battalion has been cut up or such-and-such a battle-fleet sent to the bottom of the sea. And not one of these larger things is half so large to him as the smaller thing that looms huge because it is in his own immediate neighborhood. We on the Circus provide pictures to give him at least the photographic semblance of body for his belief. But what when the very flesh and blood of the drama passes along his street every day? What when he has spoken with the chief actor himself, knows who he married, the number of his children and their names? What when he knows the house he lives in, who lived there before, why he left so suddenly, and the very words he is said to have said on leaving?
Do you see what I am coming to—those first faint whisperings of something wrong—or if not positively wrong so much the better for public-house debate on the point—with Philip Esdaile's house in Lennox Street?
II
The first that Esdaile knew of all this was from the younger of Mollie's two maids. Monty and Audrey had arranged to dispense with the services of these two domestics, but Philip, still lingering on, had wanted the younger one at least back. She had promised to come, but had not done so, and Philip had sought her out. Thereupon she had said that she would rather not come.
"Why?" Philip had asked; but she had given no satisfactory reason.
He had then turned to the second maid, but with no better result.
After all, it didn't matter. It was very little trouble for himself and Monty to make their own breakfasts. They could take their other meals at the Chelsea Arts Club, and there would be no difficulty in getting a woman one or two days a week to clean.