Agatha Christie’s Poirot. Anne Hart

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      Towards the end of this hectic period there came an unexpected lull, a dearth of interesting cases. To cheer Poirot up, Hastings resorted to Watson’s methods and read aloud from the morning paper:

      ‘Here’s an Englishman mysteriously done to death in Holland …’

      ‘They always say that – and later they find that he ate the tinned fish and that his death is perfectly natural.’

      ‘Well, if you’re determined to grouse!’

      At that moment a beautiful young lady, heavily veiled, was ushered in. She was, she explained, ‘in a soft musical voice’, being shamefully blackmailed by a brute.

      ‘The dirty swine!’ cried Hastings.

‘Have faith in Papa Poirot, said Poirot reassuringly, and within a day, using tactics that shook Hastings, he had the problem of ‘The Veiled Lady’¹² solved.

      In ‘The Adventure of the “Western Star”’ two very different ladies coincidentally consulted Poirot on the same delicate matter – Mary Marvell, the well-known film star, referred by a friend from ‘The Affair at the Victory Ball’, and Lady Yardly, of an impoverished old country family, sent by Mary Cavendish of The Mysterious Affair at Styles. There followed an energetic tale of feudal estates, sinister Chinamen, and legendary temple diamonds.

      Murder on the Links, published in 1923, was the second full-length book devoted to Poirot. Its title tends to conjure up summer days somewhere in the British Isles but, set in a fashionable villa in northern France, it is one of Poirot’s Continental mysteries and very dramatic it is.

      Early in this adventure we find Poirot and Hastings at breakfast. Once again Poirot was in a fret:

      ‘The cases I have been employed upon lately were banal to the last degree. In verity I am reduced to recovering lost lap-dogs for fashionable ladies! The last problem that presented any interest was that intricate affair of the Yardly diamond, and that was – how many months ago, my friend?’

      He shook his head despondently.

      ‘Cheer up, Poirot, the luck will change. Open your letters. For all you know, there may be a great case looming on the horizon.’

      For once Hastings was correct. In the morning post came a letter from France from Paul Renauld, a well-known South American millionaire. ‘For God’s sake, come!’ it pleaded. ‘I go in daily fear of my life … I will send a car to meet you at Calais … I shall be content for you to name your own fee …’ and so on.

      ‘The Continental express leaves Victoria at 11 o’clock,’ cried Poirot, and by the afternoon they were face to face with an imposing sergent de ville at the gate of the Villa Geneviève.

      ‘M. Renauld was murdered this morning,’ announced le sergent.

      ‘I have a feeling,’ said Poirot, ‘that this is going to be a big affair – a long, troublesome problem that will not be easy to work out.’ Adding zest to the case was the war instantly declared between M. Poirot and M. Giraud of the Paris Sûreté.

      ‘I know you by name, M. Poirot,’ said Giraud, ‘you cut quite a figure in the old days, didn’t you? But methods are very different now.’

      ‘The human foxhound!’ Poirot called Giraud, who spent most of his time crawling on hands and knees in search of significant footprints, cigarette stubs and unlighted matches, tactics that Poirot professed to deplore. For his part Giraud referred to Poirot as the ‘old fossil’.

      So heated did the rivalry at the villa Geneviève become that Poirot wagered Giraud 500 francs he would find the murderer first. ‘I have no wish to take your money from you,’ sneered Giraud. The end of the affair saw Giraud back in Paris with ‘a crise of the nerves’, and Poirot back in London with a splendid model of a foxhound costing 500 francs and no doubt exhibited to Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard at the first possible moment.

      Murder on the Links did more than dispel Poirot’s immediate boredom – it changed his life profoundly, for it was during this adventure that Hastings fell in love with a most unlikely person, Dulcie Duveen.

      Now Hastings was forever falling in love, but until he met Dulcie he had always fallen in love with young women from very proper backgrounds. As he himself wrote:

      I am old-fashioned. A woman, I consider, should be womanly. I have no patience with the modern neurotic girl who dances from morning to night, smokes like a chimney, and uses language which would make a Billingsgate fishwoman blush!

      Who, then, could have imagined Arthur Hastings seriously proposing marriage to an impudent young woman with an explicit vocabulary who had earned her living since the age of six as a dancer and an acrobat? And who could have imagined the nimble-witted and passionate Dulcie (or Cinderella, as she liked to be called) deciding to marry Hastings? ‘She looked over her shoulder. A dimple appeared in each cheek. She was like a lovely picture by Greuze,’ wrote the smitten Hastings. ‘I knew you weren’t such a mutt as you looked,’ declared Cinderella. While Giraud hunted footprints and matches, and Poirot reviewed his grey cells, Hastings and Cinderella were falling in love.

      How did Poirot take all this? In principle, in the matter of marriages, he took a dim view of the way les Anglais conducted themselves: ‘No method – absolutely none whatever. They leave all to chance!’ And in the matter of marriage and Hastings in particular – up to now but a theoretical possibility – had he not said, ‘Some day, if you permit, I will arrange you a marriage of great suitability’? And here was Hastings, his ever present student and friend, contemplating marriage to an acrobat and talking of emigration to the Argentine.

      In justice it must be said that Poirot initially took all this very well. He generously put his friend’s happiness before his own in reuniting the lovers at the dénouement of Murder on the Links, even though Hastings’s declaration, ‘in future I must take my own line’, must have come as a shock. Perhaps Poirot did not believe him? Perhaps he expected this infatuation, like the others, would come to nothing?

      But it did come to something, and in the latter part of 1923 there must have been a great packing of valises and trunks at 14 Farraway Street, and Mrs Pearson must have wrung her hands at the loss of such a good tenant, as Hastings departed for marriage and a ranch in the Argentine.

Before these unsettling events occurred, were there long discussions over tisanes and whiskies and sodas in the joint sitting-room? Or did Hastings leave quite suddenly? Whatever the circumstances, it was a decidedly forlorn Poirot, mourning his friend who ‘has gone away across the sea to the South America’, whom the Endicott family invited to the country in the short story ‘The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding’.¹³

      ‘You are not like me, old and alone,’ lamented Poirot at the Endicotts’ Christmas, but he soon cheered up under the influence of crackling logs and snowmen, and honoured the occasion by donning a red waistcoat and treating the household to the capture of a pair of criminals about to make off with a famous jewel.

      And what of Hastings? Fear СКАЧАТЬ