by Janet Morgan
Agatha’s own friends, particularly the younger married couples, rallied round to assist in this process of maximising choice while minimising risk. On her return from Cairo she found herself invited four or five times a year for country house visits, of which the centrepiece might be a local hunt or military ball, a race meeting, a regatta. Attractive young people to fill the house and help make up a party were much in demand and it was not necessary to be rich to enjoy friends’ hospitality and do them credit. There were, of course, fares to find and the right clothes, though not necessarily many. Although the getting and spending of money was thought an inappropriate subject for conversation, people breezily acknowledged into which serviceable category – ‘very rich’, ‘well-off’, ‘not well-off’, ‘poor’ – their friends and acquaintances came. Hosts and hostesses ensured that impoverished girls were not induced to gamble for money at cards or at the races; once arrived at a house there would be no unexpected expenses, apart from small tips to the maid. What is more, certainly in the society in which Agatha spent her girlhood, there was little defensiveness about being badly off or, for that matter, rich, perhaps because in other ways – socially, morally, even as a nation – people felt easy and assured. There was no shame in retrimming a hat, recycling the same six dresses or wearing mended stockings; there was, moreover, time in which to do it.
Again, Agatha’s album illustrates the weekends she spent with people she and Clara had met in Cairo: Mr Park-Lyle, ‘the Sugar King’, and his kind, if artificially preserved, wife, with whom she stayed in Suffolk, where the party played tennis and croquet and gazed at the lake; Sir Walter and Lady Barttelot, at Littlegreen House in Petersfield, from which they went to the races at Goodwood; and the Ralston-Patricks, where Agatha nervously rode round a field (her previous experience being confined to ambling a dispirited horse about the lanes of Devonshire and scrabbling over an occasional wall), and, exhilaratingly, in a motor car. Agatha had first seen motor cars in France as a child and had been greatly excited by them. Robin Ralston-Patrick’s motor was highly temperamental and to make an expedition in it exhausting, but she never forgot a fifty-mile trip they made to Banbury in 1909, equipped with rugs, scarves and baskets of provisions and seen off with tender farewells. More alarming was the occasion when she was driven back to Torquay from Petersfield by Lady Barttelot’s brother. They charged along the lanes at what Agatha believed to be nearer fifty miles an hour than what was considered the ‘safe’ speed of twenty, with her driver, rather like Toad in The Wind in the Willows, dashing past the places where he believed the police to be lurking – ‘Yes, the villains, that’s what they do, hide behind a hedge and then come out and measure the time’ – and then dropping suddenly to ten miles an hour – ‘that dished him!’ She found her driver disconcerting but she loved his bright red motor.
On one of these visits Agatha met Charles Cochran, the theatrical impresario, and his delicate and adoring wife, Evelyn. Some months later the Cochrans invited her to stay with them in London and here she particularly enjoyed hearing intimate theatrical gossip. Agatha had been taken to plays and musical comedies since she was a small child: her Ealing grandmother was especially fond of them and, fortified with half a pound of coffee creams from the Army and Navy Stores, would take her to matinée performances, buying the score to play at home afterwards. Frederick had taken a great interest in the local amateur dramatic society in Torquay, for which he had stage-managed (this, as Agatha wrote dryly, ‘was then the term used for production and did not mean a harassed young woman in trousers being blamed for everything …’), while Madge and Monty had initiated Agatha into going weekly to the pit stalls in the local theatre. (Frederick’s account book shows that in 1901 a seat at the play cost a shilling, comparing well with one shilling and sixpence for a haircut and ninepence for a banana.) In Dinard, at the end of the year that had taken the Millers to Pau, Agatha had begun her own theatrical performances. Her parents’ bedroom there had a large bow window, almost an alcove, across which the curtains could be drawn, and Agatha conscripted Marie into helping her present a version of various fairy stories, ‘Sleeping Beauty’, ‘Cinderella’ and so on, which Frederick and Clara patiently endured every evening after dinner. Now, as Agatha grew into her twenties, the amateur theatricals became grander, with a bigger cast: one set of photographs, taken in 1912 or so, shows her larking about with a dozen friends, the women in beads and veils and the men in baggy trousers, turbans and magnificent whiskers, for a performance of The Blue Beard of Unhappiness, an original work in part derived from A Thousand and One Nights, Blue Beard and light musical comedy. (Its nature is indicated by the title of Act 1: Why Did They Bag-Dad?) It was put on at Cockington Court, where Agatha’s friends the Mallocks lived; Mrs Mallock played Scheherazade, and Agatha, in voluminous harem trousers, Sister Anne.
As well as concocting sketches with her friends, Agatha was by now doing a fair amount of her own writing. Much of this was poetry. With her liking for words and her ear for rhythm and patterns, she found it easy, particularly since she need not start cold but could choose a verse form to follow or a model to parody. Poetry, too, offered a convenient vehicle for an adolescent to express confused but deeply felt emotions; being in a formalised code, it kept her secrets safe, and, being poetry, it could be opaque. Agatha read and bought a good deal of poetry. Amongst the volumes was a beautifully bound edition of Herrick, in olive green leather, tooled with a design of gold tulips. The edition, published in 1906, falls open at the poem called ‘Discontents in Devon’:
More Discontents I never had
Since I was born, than here;
Where I have been, and still am sad,
In this dull Devon-shire:
Yet justly too I must confess;
I ne’er invented such
Ennobled numbers for the Presse,
Than where I loathed so much.
A poem Agatha wrote at the age of eleven had been published in the local paper. The new tram service had been extended to Ealing, much to the fury of the residents, and Agatha recollected her first verse as being:
When first the electric trams did run
In all their scarlet glory,
’Twas well, but ere the day was done,
It was another story.
This poem, however, cannot be traced. Between 1901 and 1906 only three poems about trams appeared in issues of The Middlesex County Times and The Hanwell and Ealing Post, none resembling Agatha’s. Later, Eileen Morris, her closest and cleverest friend, suggested she send work to the Poetry Review, whose editor did accept some of Agatha’s poems, for a guinea each. Though her early verse disappeared without trace, we can still read some of the poetry she wrote at the age of seventeen or eighteen, since it was printed in The Road of Dreams, the volume Geoffrey Bles published in 1924, and reprinted in Poems, published by Collins, in 1973. It is, apart from an occasional phrase, sentimental and derivative. One long sentence tells the story of Harlequin and Columbine, Pierrot and Pierrette, whose Dresden china figures decorated both Auntie-Grannie’s house and Ashfield. The theme of magical Harlequin, the lover and protector of lovers, was to resurface twenty years later in Agatha’s book, The Mysterious Mr Quin.
Agatha also set her ‘Harlequin poems’ to music. Her composition was, in her own words, ‘not of a very high order’, but it was competent and expressive. A waltz she wrote was published, despite the fact that, in her own view, it was trite. ‘One Hour With Thee’ (‘a pretty hefty time for a waltz to last,’ she later observed), depicted on its cover a young woman looking much like Agatha herself, with golden hair, sloping shoulders, and a bunch of pansies at her bosom. To Agatha’s great pride, it was occasionally included in the repertoire of the local dance band.
By the time she was seventeen Agatha had set aside her musical ambitions, doing so with remarkable despatch. Her studies with Charles Fürster had led her to hope that with practice and hard work she might become a professional concert pianist but, after one disastrous oc
casion when she was bidden to play before a visitor and, on sitting down to the piano, found herself ‘overwhelmed by inefficiency’, she asked Fürster to be honest with her. ‘He told me no lies,’ she wrote. ‘He said that quite frankly he thought I had not the temperament to play in public, and I knew he was right.’ It is interesting that, although she was miserable for a while, she immediately accepted this verdict: ‘If the thing you want beyond anything cannot be, it is much better to recognise it and go forward instead of dwelling on one’s regrets and hopes.’ Although Agatha did not know herself well, even then she recognised that public performance unnerved her. Rather than battling against her temperament, she complied with it.
Singing was, as we have seen, the one thing she could undertake confidently in public but here too her early hopes were disappointed. In Paris she had one of the most respected singing teachers of the time, Monsieur Boué, who trained her to make the best use of her soprano voice, taking her through Cherubini, Schubert and, eventually, arias from Puccini. At home, she studied with a Hungarian composer and an English ballad teacher. Agatha sang at local concerts and to fellow guests after dinner but her ambition to become an opera singer flowered in 1909, when Madge, who had become interested in Wagner, took her to hear Die Walküre at Covent Garden. Richter conducted and Brünnhilde was sung by an American soprano, Minni Saltzman-Stephens, whose performance enraptured Agatha, already overwhelmed by the power and beauty of the music. ‘Although I did not deceive myself,’ she wrote in the unpublished draft of her autobiography, ‘I used to go over and over in my mind the faint possibility that one day I might sing Isolde. It did no harm, I told myself, at any rate to go through it in fantasy.’ An American friend of the Millers, who was connected with the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, came to hear Agatha sing, taking her through arias and exercises: ‘And then she said to me: “the songs you sang told me nothing, but the exercises do. You will make a good concert singer, and should be able to do well and make an name at that. Your voice is not strong enough for opera, and never will be.”’ Again, Agatha’s reaction was brave and drastic. ‘I came back to real life and put wishful thinking aside. I pointed out to Mother that she could now save the expense of music lessons. I could sing as much as I liked, but there was no point in studying singing.’
Here her disappointment went deeper. The ‘cherished secret fantasy’ was one she had taken seriously, although she tried to persuade herself that it had been no more than that; ‘faint possibility’ in the first draft of her Autobiography becomes ‘illusion’ in the second and ‘dream’ in the last. ‘I did not want to be a concert singer,’ she wrote. ‘It would not have been an easy thing to do anyway. Musical careers for girls did not meet with encouragement.’ ‘Yet’, she declared, ‘if there had been any chance of my singing in opera, I would have fought for it, but that was for the privileged few, who had the right vocal cords. I am sure there can be nothing more soul-destroying in life than to persist in trying to do anything that you will do badly and in a second-rate manner.’ These urgent arguments show that she did mind; becoming an opera singer she saw as the pinnacle of attainment. Moreover, she continued to do so; towards the end of Agatha’s life she startled a young friend by saying wistfully, ‘If I’d been an opera singer, I might have been rich.’
‘So,’ as Agatha put it, ‘let us take it from there.’ Here was a creative and thoughtful eighteen-year-old girl, well-read, her days full of leisure, needing something to which to apply a good mind. One day as she sat in bed, recovering from influenza, bored with reading and playing Patience, she found herself reduced to idling with a silly game she had learnt in Pau and with which she always amused herself when she was ill. It consisted of dampening little pieces of bread and moulding them into tops which could be baked in the sun or a slow oven and then painted, so that they spun prettily as well as merrily. (In the second draft of her Autobiography this long explanation is dispensed with; Agatha succinctly deals herself bridge hands instead.) Clara, thinking this a pathetic expedient for dealing with boredom, suggested that the invalid try to write a story, something which Madge had done successfully before her marriage, when a series of her tales had been published in Vanity Fair. After several false starts Agatha found herself ‘thoroughly interested and going along at a great rate’, and a couple of days later the story was finished. ‘The House of Beauty’, as she called it, was some 6,000 words long – about thirty pages. She typed a fair copy in purple ink on Madge’s old Empire typewriter and signed it with the pseudonym ‘Mac Miller Esq’. It is a powerfully imaginative story, about madness and dreams, echoing the writings about the occult that Agatha and her friends were reading at the end of 1908, by Edgar Allan Poe and May Sinclair – ‘psychic stories’, Agatha called them. There was at this time a great interest in mysticism and spiritualism; one of Agatha’s friends constantly sought to persuade her to read theoretical books on the subject but she found the writing tedious and their assertions improbable. Nevertheless, she was interested in dreams and in the thin boundary between the real and the imaginary, and she was both fascinated and repelled by ‘madness’, a word which the Victorians had used to describe all sorts of instability and which was often believed to be hereditary.
These disturbing themes are all present in ‘The House of Beauty’, together with a happier but no less interesting thread, the search for a well-known but elusive place, in this case ‘a strangely beautiful house’. Despite its infelicities of style (the word ‘exquisite’ is particularly hard-worked) and extravagance of treatment (everything is there: death, delirium, the jungle, madness, music, even a black-robed nun), ‘The House of Beauty’ is a compelling story, well-constructed and conveying with complete conviction how fragile and tenacious a dream can be. From the beginning Agatha demonstrated the two skills that characterise all her writing: she was an excellent storyteller and she could tap her readers’ deeply held fantasies. There are glimpses, too, of another characteristic that was not yet fully developed: she could be very funny. The snatches she gives of a dinner-table conversation (each person in turn opening his remarks with the proposition that it has been an unusually wet summer) have a nice comic touch, and her picture of one of the guests, a professor with an ‘unpleasantly cadaverous countenance’ and ‘a big white beard that wagged with peculiar vindictiveness when he talked’, is effective if not vastly original. ‘The House of Beauty’, drastically revised, was to be published as ‘The House of Dreams’ in Sovereign Magazine in January 1926.
Agatha’s next effort was ‘The Call of Wings’, later published in The Hound of Death in 1933 (and again in The Golden Ball in 1971). It describes how easily those who are disposed to believe in psychic phenomena can be manipulated, especially when new mechanical inventions – in this case, the wireless – are brought into service. Agatha then tried ‘a grisly story about a séance’, which, rewritten many years later, appeared as The Sittaford Mystery. Fourth came ‘a dialogue between a deaf lady and a nervous man at a party’, which has not survived. Agatha’s papers do include a copy of her fifth try, ‘The Little Lonely God’, a story of the encounter in the British Museum between an explorer aimlessly passing the time in London, to which he has returned after eighteen years trekking about the globe, and an equally solitary young woman, in pathetically shabby clothes, whom he assumes to be a governess, alone in the world. It is sentimental, with a little twist at the end, and lacks the force of ‘The House of Beauty’; there are no dreams and no deaths; and, unlike the description in her first story of the heroine’s breakdown at the piano, nothing that appears to be based on Agatha’s direct experience.
As ‘Mac Miller’, ‘Nathaniel Miller’ and ‘Sydney West’ Agatha followed Madge’s example and sent her stories to various magazines, from which they were all promptly returned. Other early efforts have remained among her papers. They are all in purple ink and on the two submitted under the pseudonym of ‘Sydney West’, she wrote ‘Both these written when I was about 17.’ One, called ‘In the M
arketplace’, reads like a parable. A man comes to the Salesman in the Great Marketplace of the World and, when asked what he desires, replies ‘Everything.’ He goes away, laden with rich gifts but unsatisfied, and twice returns for more. Only when, ‘after long years’, he passes through the Marketplace untempted and answers the Salesman’s question, ‘What do you desire?’ with the one word ‘Nothing’, are all the Market’s stores and treasures brought out and laid at his feet. This moral tale has a biblical ring, but what the moral is remains obscure.
It is interesting to compare ‘Sydney West’s’ other offering, ‘The Choice’, with ‘Callis Miller’s’ ‘Mrs Jordan’s Ghost’, the tale Clara had written years before. Superficially the two stories are much alike. Both have at their centre the figure of a woman, most likely a projection of the author herself, who has ‘sinned and suffered’ but is ennobled by pity and repentance. Both are written in a deliberately naïve and declamatory style, with consciously rhetorical sentences (‘it is in truth a smooth way …’) and phrases repeated like an incantation (‘The second shadow is like the shadow of a child, though not like that of any earthly child that I have ever seen’). Agatha’s and Clara’s stories also have deeper similarities. Both sound, or are written so that they sound, as if they originated in dreams. They are pure metaphor, their meaning wrapped in the fogs of sleep and the subconscious; the stories themselves attempt to expose the authors’ hopes and anxieties. But there is a difference. Agatha’s tale is more artful than her mother’s. She cannot resist giving it a tweak: in ‘The Choice’, for instance, her narrator consciously makes the ‘wrong’ decision and, because that choice brings complacency, knows it to be the ‘right’ decision. In an otherwise prissy parable, Agatha has a joke at the narrator’s expense.
