“My dear chap!” Mr. Fortune was shocked. “Dead. Quite dead. Please don’t have any more. I ought not to have given it you. It’s a 1914. Hope, hope, fallacious hope! They promised so well, the nineteen fourteens; they had such charm; and now - -! A sad world. Waste, waste! The great mystery of existence, Lomas. Life takes no end o’ trouble to turn out fine things and then lets ‘em go corrupt before they’ve been any use. Very disheartening.”
But all that was afterwards.
The introduction of Mr. Fortune to the case, though he did not then perceive it, was nearly a year before. Rather late in the season, Cosmo Florian, a young painter accused of low, hybrid birth and flashy talent, gave a one - man show. Florian’s work annoyed alike the fashionable artists and the superior critics. Both found it contumacious. Naturally, Mr. Fortune took his wife to see it.
There was no doubt of Florian’s talent. He could paint light. He could compel emotions. But he had no style of his own. Here he was imitating old Flemish pictures, there he had made a composition of figures defying any likeness to reality.
“He is immensely clever,” said Mrs. Fortune. “I suppose he might do anything, if he knew what he wanted to do.”
“Yes. As you say,” Reggie agreed. “Not a man yet. But he ought to be some day. Roped in all sorts of people, hasn’t he?”
The people were various. Surveying the mixture - the elaboration of smart clothes and cosmetic work mingling with an arrogance of shaggy slovenliness - Mrs. Fortune wrinkled her engaging nose. “They’re really all the same,” she said.
“Common desire for self - assertion, yes,” Reggie murmured. “Common desire to be in the movement, and the front of it. General inferiority complex. But with marked divergence of taste. However. Other species also present. The natural man who just wants to be ordinary. Like me. Correct, commonplace, and simple.” His eyes indicated a large young man, dressed, like himself, in sombre professional respectability, but exhibiting, unlike himself, a plain contempt for his company.
This man, however, found friends, or they found him. His large correctitude was caught in a group of which the other members were a little man, dark, sleek, side - whiskered, in bright violet clothes with a waist, a man of middle size in loose tweeds and a mop of sandy hair, a girl with whom pains had been taken. Her thin, bare arms had a marble sheen; some of the shape of her slim body was displayed, the rest concealed in a froth of filmy frills, the same colour as her turquoise eyes, which invited attention to the concentration of art on her head. The lips, the complexion, had the emphasis of a magazine cover; the eyebrows were orange lines. A little blue hat was cocked askew, to show that her flaxen hair had been cropped short and put into tight poodle curls. She smiled and smiled. The three men - the black morning coat, the shaggy brown tweeds, and the waisted violet jacket - were not amused. Their diversity was made uniform in sulkiness. “Goldilocks and the three bears,” Mrs. Fortune whispered.
“What? “Reggie gazed at her. “You’re so subtle, Joan.”
“My child, you know the story. The great big bear and the middle - sized bear and the little wee bear, and they lived in a house of their own in a wood, and there was a little girl called Goldilocks, who wasn’t a well - brought - up little girl, who came in and ate their porridge and broke the chair of the little wee bear, and - -”
“Oh, yes. Yes.” Reggie put his arm in hers and drew her away, for the small man in the violet clothes was looking at them. “I remember. Pleasant tale.”
“Goldilocks was a little pig,” said Mrs. Fortune.
“Yes. You may be right,” Reggie murmured. “But indiscreet. I know the great big bear. It’s Golly Dodd.”
“Who is he, Reggie?”
“Oh, quite a good boy. Eminent at football, and a conscientious house physician. Now in practice in Kensington. Doin’ quite well. People like that physique. Gives confidence in illness. Golly - short for Goliath, you know.” Reggie turned to the pictures.
They came to one which stopped them. The painter had played some of his favourite tricks with light falling across a dark interior, and the work was of a flagrant skill, but he had tried for something more - a tragic mystery - and only achieved the macabre. Something like a naked man lay in the darkness - something like a woman vanished into it; and the light fell on a childish face distorted by a smile of silly hate.
“Whatever does he call it?” said Mrs. Fortune.
Reggie turned over the catalogue. “Happy Families,” he read. “Very young, isn’t he?” He glanced round. Golly Dodd, the large doctor, was at his elbow. “Well, well. Fancy meetin’ you,” - the greetings were made - “didn’t know you were an amateur of art, young man. Is this risin’ genius a friend of yours?” Reggie asked.
“I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen him,” said Mrs. Fortune.
“There he is,” - Dr. Dodd indicated the little dark man in the violet clothes still talking to the painted girl - ” talking to Faustine Rook.”
“Faustine?” Reggie murmured.
“Well, that’s what she’s called.” Dr. Dodd gave an embarrassed laugh. “Her real name’s Fanny - Fanny Rook, daughter of old Rook, the East Indies merchant.”
“Well, well.” Reggie turned to the lurid picture. “What’s all this about?”
“I don’t know.” Dr. Dodd’s large face showed a. puzzled dislike. “I’m no art critic.” He found beside him the middle - sized bear, the man of shaggy, sandy hair and tweeds. “What’s this picture, Lindsay?”
He was answered in a mellow, oratorical voice: “Florian’s conception of husband murder, I am instructed. The classical tragedy in the manner of the moment. The case of Agamemnon as reported by the artistry of modern journalism. You are to behold Agamemnon slain in his bath - ‘Alas, I am stricken! Alas I am stricken again’ - and the lady Clytaemnestra retiring. One must allow, Florian has made a horror of it.”
“What is the child’s face for?” said Mrs. Fortune.
Lindsay gave her a condescending smile. “You observed that? Yes, one feels that his best touch. But here he is; you shall tell him so.”
The little man approached, and Dr. Dodd, with visible reluctance, introduced everybody - Mr. dark Lindsay, Mr. Cosmo Florian, Mr. and Mrs. Fortune.
Lindsay resumed charge of the conversation. “Mrs. Fortune requires an explanation of your hateful child, Cosmo. One feels the force, mon maitre. But your own emotion, come.”
