Agatha Christie’s Poirot. Anne Hart
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 not that he was forever lost to Poirot in ‘the free and easy life of the South American continent’, for on a morning a year and a half later we find him at the rail of a ship approaching the cliffs of Dover:
I had landed in France two days before, transacted some necessary business, and was now en route for London. I should be there some months – time enough to look up old friends, and one old friend in particular. A little man with an egg-shaped head and green eyes – Hercule Poirot! I proposed to take him completely by surprise.
Poirot was indeed surprised as, in the interests of an enormous commission, he was busy packing for a dreaded sea voyage to Rio. Tearful embraces concluded, he explained to Hastings:
‘And there was a second attraction – you, my friend. For this last year and a half I have been a very lonely old man. I thought to myself, why not? I am beginning to weary of this unending solving of foolish problems. I have achieved sufficient fame. Let me take this money and settle down somewhere near my old friend.’
How these two might have resolved all this we shall never know, as fate immediately intervened to plunge them into the all-consuming case of The Big Four.14 To meet this challenge, Poirot unpacked his enormous trunk and Hastings moved his luggage to Farraway Street. It was just like old times.
An earlier case, ‘The Veiled Lady’, had found Hastings musing on Poirot’s vanity:
He always imagines that the whole world is thinking and talking of Hercule Poirot … but I could hardly believe that his existence struck terror into the criminal world.
The Big Four proved Hastings wrong. In it Poirot found himself the chief adversary of an international conspiracy of four master criminals out ‘to destroy the existing social order’. This struggle became a duel to the death, an epic that saw such excitements as Poirot sacrificing his moustache to foil the enemy, Hastings sacrificing himself to save Poirot, the reappearance of the dashing Countess Rossakoff (Poirot’s ‘woman in a thousand’), and a premature funeral for Poirot at which he was mourned and buried. ‘World-wide unrest, the labour troubles which beset every nation, and the revolutions that break out in some’ loomed in the background.
While locked in combat with the Titans, Poirot ‘abandoned his private practice almost entirely’, and Hastings’s ‘business complications’, his reason for coming to England, fell by the way. ‘Little Cinderella as you call her, what does she say?’ asked Poirot uneasily after six months of the campaign had passed with no end in sight. Replied Hastings: ‘I haven’t gone into details, of course, but she understands.’
In the end it took Poirot and Hastings the better part of a year to save the world from anarchy. ‘The great case of my life,’ Poirot called it. ‘Anything else will seem tame after this.’15
Hastings, sailing away to Buenos Aires, no doubt thought so too. And, in the wake of The Big Four and Hasting’s second departure, Poirot made an extraordinary decision – he would leave Farraway Street, retire to the country, and devote the rest of his life to the scientific cultivation of vegetable marrows.
We now come to one of the strangest periods in Poirot’s life – a year of seclusion in the quiet village of King’s Abbot, a seclusion so complete as to drive the village Intelligence Corps, led by his neighbour, Miss Caroline Sheppard, close to despair. Who was he? Where had he come from? Why was he there? ‘Someone very like Caroline must have invented the questions on passports,’ observed Miss Sheppard’s brother. ‘The one thing we do know about him is that he is interested in the growing of vegetable marrows.’
Vegetable marrows? Poirot? Had he gone quite mad? Was he pining for Hastings? Or the audacious Countess Rossakoff? Or both? Was a year spent virtually alone in a neat walled garden and an overheated sitting-room in King’s Abbot Poirot’s tidy version of a nervous breakdown? It is true that he was now comfortably off, his reputation assured by the recent publication of Hastings’s memoirs, but this period of self-imposed exile, with only the marrows and