“Good Gad!” said Sir Lawson.
The footman was again at the door. Dr. Fortune was wanted at the telephone. “There’s one here, isn’t there? Put me through.” The footman, hardly able to speak at the sight of the dead Archduke, retired gulping.
The bell rang. Reggie took up the receiver. “Yes. Yes. At once,” and he put it down. “I must be going. Serious case. Mrs. Jones’s little girl may have German measles.”
CASE II
THE SLEEPING COMPANION
BIRDIE screamed like a sea-gull 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 rag-time?—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.