Call Mr. Fortune

Mr. Reginald Fortune, M.A., M.B., B.Ch., F.R.C.S., was having a lecture from his father.

“You only do just enough,” Dr. Fortune complained. “Never brilliant. No zeal. Now, Reginald, it won’t do. Just enough is always too little. Take my word for it. And do be attentive to the Archduke. God bless you!”

“Have a good time, sir,” said Mr. Reginald Fortune, and watched his father settle down in the car (a long process) beside his mother and drive off. They were gone at last, which Reginald had begun to think impossible, and the opulent practice of Dr. Fortune lay for a month in the virgin hands of Reginald.

“Beautifully patient the mater is,” Reginald communed with himself as he ate his third muffin. “Fretful game to spend your life waitin’ for a man to get ready. Quaint old bird, the pater. Deathbed manner for a tummy-ache. Wonder the patients lap it up.”

But old Dr. Fortune was good at diagnosis, and he had his reasons for saying that Reggie lacked zeal. At Oxford, at his hospital, Reggie did what was necessary to take respectable degrees, but no more than he could help. It was remarked by his dean that he did things too easily. He always had plenty of time, and spent it here, there, and everywhere, on musical comedy and prehistoric man, golf and the newer chemistry, bargees and psychical research. There was nothing which he knew profoundly, but hardly anything of which he did not know enough to find his way about in it.

Birdie screamed like a seagull and leapt on to the stage. The audience rumbled the usual applause, and Dr. Reginald Fortune put up his opera-glasses. He considered himself a connoisseur in the art of music halls, and Birdie Bolton was unique and bizarre. She was no longer young, and had never been pretty. A helmet of black hair, a gaunt face which never smiled, a body as lean as a boy’s, which sometimes slouched and sometimes jerked⁠—such were her charms. She wore nothing much above the waist but diamonds, and below it barbaric flounces in a maze of colour. She began to sing in a voice wildly unfit for the strange creature she looked⁠—a small, sweet voice⁠—and what she sang was a simple ditty about her true love forsaking her. And then she went mad. There was a shrieking chorus⁠—can you imagine a steam whistle playing ragtime?⁠—and a dance of weird, wild vehemence. The lean body was contorted a dozen ways at once, the long white arms whirled and stabbed. She seemed to be a dozen women fighting, and each of them a prodigy of force. It was not a pretty dance, but it had meaning.

Birdie sank down panting on her crazy rainbow flounces and nodded at the audience which thundered at her.

Dr. Reginald Fortune shut up his opera-glasses. “She’s a bit of a wonder, you know,” he said to the naval lieutenant who was his companion.

“It’s a wild bird,” the lieutenant agreed, and as the rest of the revue was merely frocks and the absence of frocks they went off to supper.

In the morning, which was Sunday, Birdie Bolton came to see Dr. Reginald Fortune.

It was a night in June. The Chief of the Criminal Investigation Department was pensive. “Did you ever want to marry, Fortune?” he murmured.

“Often; but never one at a time.” Reggie Fortune looked curiously at his host. The dinner had been good, the claret very good, the cigars were of the most benignant. But still⁠—“Why this touch of sentiment, Lomas?” said he.

“Some students say women have no minds,” Lomas murmured drowsily. “But that’s partiality. The trouble is, women aren’t human beings. Consider the parallel case of the dog. He is intelligent. But he sets different values on things from our values. Inhuman values. Think of bones, cats, boots. It is so also with women.”

“ ‘I love a lassie’⁠—but she ate my best pumps. Lomas, my good child, are you merely drivelling or shall we come to something soon?”

“I am much exposed to women,” said the Chief of the Criminal Investigation Department pathetically, and roused himself. “But this is a family skeleton. I have a sister, Fortune. She is intelligent. She is almost as omniscient as you, my dear fellow, and much more practical. But she can be quite maddening. She is maddening me now. Unfortunately she has no husband. She had too much intelligence. She owns a princely school at Tormouth. I believe it makes her as rich as Rockefeller. She certainly does herself very well. A month ago she wrote to me that a strange thing had happened.

“ ‘Oh, to be in England now that April’s here,’ ” said Reggie Fortune as, trying to hide himself in his coat, he slipped and slid down the gangway to his native land. The Boulogne boat behind him, lost in driving snow, could be inferred from escaping steam and the glimmer of a rosette of lights. “The Flying Dutchman’s new packet,” Reggie muttered, and hummed the helmsman’s song from the opera, till a squall coming round the corner stung what of his face he could not bury like small shot.

He continued to suffer. The heat in the Pullman was tinned. He did not like the toast. The train ran slow, and whenever he wiped the steamy window he saw white-blanketed country and fresh swirls of snow. So he came into Victoria some seven hours late, and it had no taxi. He said what he could. You imagine him, balanced by the two suitcases which he could not bear to part with, wading through deep snow from the Tube station at Oxford Circus to Wimpole Street, and subsiding limp but still fluent into the arms of Sam his factotum. And the snow went on falling.

It was about this time, in his judgment 11 p.m. on 15th April, that a man fell from the top story of Montmorency House, the hugest and newest of the new blocks of flats thereabouts. He fell down the well which lights the inner rooms and, I suppose, made something of a thud as his body passed through the cushion of snow and hit the concrete below.

After lunch Reggie Fortune, drowsing over the last published play of Herr Wedekind, was roused by the telephone, which, speaking with the voice of Superintendent Bell, urged him to come at once to the mortuary.

“Who’s dead?” he asked. “Sandford hanged himself in red tape? Kimball had a stroke?”

“It’s what you might call anonymous,” said the voice of the Superintendent. “Just the sort of case you like.”

“I never like a case,” said Reggie, with indignation, and rang off.

At the door of the mortuary Superintendent Bell appeared as his car stopped.

“You’re damned mysterious,” Reggie complained.

“Not me, sir. If you can tell me who the fellow is, I’ll be obliged. But what I want to know first is, what was the cause of death. You’ll excuse me, I won’t tell you how he was found till you’ve formed your opinion.”

“What the devil do you mean by that?”

“I don’t want you to be prejudiced in any way, sir, if you take my meaning.”

“Damn your impudence. When did you ever see me prejudiced?”

“Dear me, Mr. Fortune, I never heard you swear so much,” said Bell sadly. “Don’t be hasty, sir. I have my reasons. I have, really.”

He led the way into the room where the dead man lay. He pulled back the sheet which covered the body. “Well, well!” said Reggie Fortune. For the dead man’s face was not there.