Mr. Fortune himself is convinced that he was meant by Providence to be a general practitioner: to attend to my lumbago and your daughter’s measles. He has been heard to complain of the chance that has made him, knowing something of everything, nothing completely, into a specialist. His only qualification, he will tell you, is that he doesn’t get muddled.
There you have it, then. He is singularly sensitive to people. “Very odd how he knows men,” said Superintendent Bell reverently. “As if he had an extra sense to tell him of people’s souls, like smells or colours.” And he has a clear head. He is never confused about what is important and what isn’t, and he has never been known to hesitate in doing what is necessary.
Consider his dealing with the affair of the unknown murderer.
There was not much interesting crime that Christmas. The singular case of Sir Humphrey Bigod, who was found dead in a chalkpit on the eve of his marriage, therefore obtained a lot of space in the papers, which kept it up, even after the coroner’s jury had declared for death by misadventure, with irrelevant inventions and bloodthirsty hints of murder and tales of clues. This did not disturb the peace of the scientific adviser to the Criminal Investigation Department, who knew that the lad was killed by a fall and that there was no means of knowing any more. Mr. Fortune was much occupied in being happy, for after long endeavour he had engaged Joan Amber to marry him. The lady has said the endeavour was hers, but I am not now telling that story. Just after Christmas she took him to the children’s party at the Home of Help.
It is an old-fashioned orphanage, a huge barrack of a building, but homely and kind. Time out of mind people of all sorts, with old titles and new, with money and with brains, have been the friends of its children. When Miss Amber brought Reggie Fortune under the flags and the strings of paper roses into its hall, which was as noisy as the parrot house, he gasped slightly. “Be brave, child,” she said. “This is quiet to what it will be after tea. And cool. You will be much hotter. You don’t know how hot you’ll be.”
“Woman, you have deceived me,” said Mr. Fortune bitterly. “I thought philanthropists were respectable.”
“Yes, dear. Don’t be frightened. You’re only a philanthropist for the afternoon.”
“I ask you. Is that Crab Warnham?”
“Of course it’s Captain Warnham.” Miss Amber smiled beautifully at a gaunt man with a face like an old jockey. He flushed as he leered back. “Do you know his wife? She’s rather precious.”
“Poor woman. He doesn’t look comfortable here, does he? The last time I saw Crab Warnham was in a place that’s several kinds of hell in Berlin. He was quite at home there.”