by Anne Hart
By contrast, in ‘The Augean Stables’ Mrs Ferrier, who was in the public eye as the wife of the Present Prime Minister and the daughter of a past one, ‘was looked up to by the whole nation and was a most valuable asset to the party’:
Poirot looked at her with attention. He saw a tall woman still handsome, with character and intelligence in her face. Mrs Ferrier was a popular figure. As the wife of the Prime Minister, she naturally came in for a good share of limelight. As the daughter of her father, her popularity was even greater. Dagmar Ferrier represented the popular ideal of English womanhood.
She was a devoted wife, a fond mother, she shared her husband’s love of country life. She interested herself in just those aspects of public life which were generally felt to be proper spheres of womanly activity.
Poirot, uttering time-worn clichés about women one moment, and vigorously defending the emancipated ‘new women’ the next, reflected his times. However, like many of his English contemporaries he took it for granted that a woman’s most appropriate sphere was the domestic milieu – a place of great interest to Poirot himself, as we shall in due course see.
But for all the people Poirot met in his discovery and exploration of the English, there was one who stands above all as his most useful example and informant. I refer, of course, to Captain Arthur Hastings.
NOTE
1 The second version.
9
CAPTAIN ARTHUR HASTINGS, OBE
‘This is my friend, Captain Hastings. He assists me in my cases.’
—Hercule Poirot, LORD EDGWARE DIES
‘Mon ami Hastings’, ‘my poor Hastings’, ‘my colleague, Captain Hastings’. Though a constant in Poirot’s epic life for only seven years, and an intermittent companion for twelve years after that, the importance of being Hastings in the history of detective literature should not be underestimated. Besides his contribution as Poirot’s most trusted adviser on the English, Hastings set a style in recording the great detective’s achievements that has addicted readers ever since. Poirot himself perceived him as a major influence and counted him his dearest friend. ‘If only,’ he would sigh in the years following his friend’s departure, ‘ce cher Hastings were available’; or he would exclaim, in the excitement of a chase, ‘How my dear friend Hastings would have enjoyed this!’
Of Poirot’s exploits, twenty-six stories and eight books are narrated by Hastings, but so enthralled was he with his subject, and so full of proper English reticence about himself, that he tells us practically nothing about his own early life. We know that he went to Eton, but the only member of his family ever mentioned is his great-aunt Mary whose handwriting, he once recalled, had been ‘exactly as though a spider had got into an ink pot and were walking over a sheet of notepaper!’ It is possible that Hastings was orphaned at an early age, for one of the first things we learn about him is that he had ‘no near relations or friends’. Perhaps great-aunt Mary had been his guardian?
Old Etonian though he was, Hastings always had his living to earn and, it may be recalled, he first met Poirot during a business trip to Belgium for Lloyd’s of London. While Hastings had always nurtured a secret ambition to be an amateur detective in the tradition of Sherlock Holmes, his encounter with the Belgian Police Force’s most famous detective provided an exhilarating new model. Thereafter, beneath his boyish and bluff exterior, there burned in Arthur Hastings a passion for detection à la Hercule Poirot. Quite how he went about practising his new hobby is never revealed, but we find him, in the early pages of The Mysterious Affair at Styles, confiding his admiration for Poirot to Mary Cavendish, a person he was trying hard to impress. ‘My system is based on his – though of course I have progressed rather further,’ he told her.
Upon the outbreak of the Great War, Hastings offered his services to his country and was commissioned into the army with the rank of captain. Early in 1916 he was wounded:
I had been invalided home from the Front; and, after spending some months in a rather depressing Convalescent Home, was given a month’s sick leave … I was trying to make up my mind what to do, when I ran across John Cavendish. I had seen very little of him for some years. Indeed, I had never known him particularly well. He was a good fifteen years my senior, for one thing, though he hardly looked his forty-five years. As a boy, though, I had often stayed at Styles, his mother’s place in Essex.
We had a good yarn about old times, and it ended in his inviting me down to Styles to spend my leave there.
As we know, it was at the post office at Styles St Mary on 17 July 1916 that Hastings had his ecstatic reunion with Poirot ‘whom I have not seen for years’, and it was at Styles Court, as dawn was breaking the next day, that its mistress, Emily Inglethorp, was taken violently ill and died. In a flash Hastings’s hobby came into its own. ‘Do you know what I think,’ he whispered to Mary Cavendish, ‘I believe she has been poisoned!’, and by six o’clock that morning he was ransacking the library at Styles ‘until I discovered a medical book which gave a description of strychnine poisoning.’ Within the hour he was banging on the door of Leastways Cottage, the home of Mrs Inglethorp’s little colony of Belgian refugees. This was one of the most exciting moments of Hastings’s life. Not only was his master at hand, but he, Arthur Hastings, had an authentic murder to lay at his feet!
In the earliest moments of this first collaboration the pattern of the relationship between Poirot and Hastings was set. As Hastings poured forth the confusing details of Mrs Inglethorp’s death and his own theories on it, Poirot dressed himself, arranged his moustaches ‘with exquisite care’, smiled kindly upon his excited pupil and said:
‘… I am pleased with you. You have a good memory, and you have given me the facts faithfully. Of the order in which you present them, I say nothing – truly, it is deplorable! But I make allowances – you are upset … Excuse me, mon ami, you dressed in haste, and your tie is one one side. Permit me.’ With a deft gesture, he rearranged it.
What was really being rearranged, of course, was Arthur Hastings’s life, for within hours of the murder at Styles there fell upon him not the mantle of Sherlock Holmes, but that of the loyal and credulous Dr Watson instead. ‘It is not my habit to explain until the end is reached,’ Poirot told him firmly as they hurried towards Styles Court. So began Hastings’s joyful and bewildered new vocation, and so began, a few months later, his famous first narrative, The Mysterious Affair at Styles:
The intense interest aroused in the public by what was known at the time as ‘The Styles Case’ has now somewhat subsided. Nevertheless, in view of the world-wide notoriety which attended it, I have been asked, both by my friend Poirot and the family themselves, to write an account of the whole story.
By the time Hastings wrote these words he and Poirot were in London, Hastings at a ‘half-fledged Army job’ at the War Office and Poirot busily establishing himself as a private detective.
Three years later Hastings the Narrator was at it again. Picking up his pen, chewing his pipe stem, and breathing heavily, he began the first of a series of short memoirs of Poirot’s cases:
Pure chance led my friend Hercule Poirot, formerly chief of the Belgian force, to be connected with the Styles Case. His success brought him notoriety, and he decided to devote himself to the solving of problems in crime. Having been wounded on the Somme and invalided out of the Army, I finally took up my quarters with him in London. Since I have a first-hand knowledge of most of his cases, it has been suggested to me that I select some of the most interesting and place them on record.
In the intervening time, and over the course of many future cases, Poirot and his resident pupil became indispensable to each other. ‘I had a friend – a friend who for many years never left my side,’ Poirot was later to tell Dr Sheppard in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd; and years again after that, in Lord Edgware Dies, Hastings was still saying ‘Poirot! You are not going to leave me behind. I always go with you.’ They made an odd couple, the dandified little foreign detective and his bluff
-looking English friend. Though about thirty years old when his adventures with Poirot began, Hastings’s naïvety and enthusiasm always made him seem younger than he actually was, and very much younger than Poirot. He was also much taller, with a ‘straight back’ and ‘broad shoulders’. Poirot moved like a cat, while Hastings was apt to rush upstairs two at a time and knock things over. Poirot’s moustache was flamboyant, while Hastings’s was a conventional ‘toothbrush’. Poirot drank tisanes and sirops, while Hastings preferred whisky and soda. Poirot was artful and eccentric, while Hastings was gullible, faithfully played by the rules, and had ‘a horror of doing anything conspicuous’.
Despite their great friendship, they constantly exasperated each other. ‘Let us hear M. le Capitaine Hastings on the case,’ Poirot might say, and then gleefully pounce on Hastings’s impulsive and misled conclusions. ‘Never, never will you use the brains the good God has given you,’ he might cry or, as in Peril at End House, launch into a full-scale lecture:
‘You have an extraordinary effect on me, Hastings. You have so strongly the flair in the wrong direction that I am almost tempted to go by it! You are that wholly admirable type of man, honest, credulous, honourable, who is invariably taken in by any scoundrel. You are the type of man who invests in doubtful oil fields, and nonexistent gold mines.’
And he delighted in keeping poor Hastings in the dark. ‘I don’t quite see what you are driving at, Poirot,’ Hastings would complain when dragged without explanation off a train or dispatched on some inexplicable errand. In Mrs McGinty’s Dead Poirot recalls his disciple’s
‘… incredulous wonder, his open-mouthed appreciation of my talents – the ease with which I misled him without uttering an untrue word, his bafflement, his stupendous astonishment when he at last perceived the truth that had been clear to me all along.’
When goaded to retaliate, Hastings could be almost as patronizing. Often this took the form of digs at Poirot’s age. ‘The idea crossed my mind,’ he ruminated in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, ‘that poor old Poirot was growing old. Privately I thought it lucky that he had associated with him someone of a more receptive type of mind.’ In Peril at End House, sixteen years later, he was saying much the same thing: ‘Poor old Poirot. He was perplexed by this case – I could see that. His powers were not what they were.’
His friend’s habits of eavesdropping, prying, and dissembling never failed to horrify him. ‘The English character is adverse to lying on a wholesale scale’, he was apt to observe primly when recounting some particularly outrageous deception of Poirot’s. Not surprisingly, his own considerable vanity was often offended by Poirot’s taunts and lectures. ‘He always displayed a ridiculous distrust of my capacities,’ he wrote accusingly in The Big Four. In ‘The Adventure of “The Western Star”’ he threw a tantrum:
‘It’s all very well,’ I said, my anger rising, ‘but you’ve made a perfect fool of me! From beginning to end! No, it’s all very well to try and explain it away afterwards. There really is a limit!’
‘But you were so enjoying yourself, my friend, I had not the heart to shatter your illusions.’
‘It’s no good. You’ve gone a bit too far this time.’
‘Mon Dieu! but how you enrage yourself for nothing, mon ami!’
‘I’m fed up!’ I went out, banging the door.
Though running battles were the order of the day with Hastings and Poirot, they did nothing to shake their friendship. ‘His loyalty to me is absolute,’ said Poirot in Dumb Witness. Inspector Japp, whom Hastings disliked, put it more baldly. ‘Where the master goes, there the dog follows,’ he once said in what, as Hastings rightly remarked, ‘I could not think was the best of taste.’
It says much for Hastings’s honesty that, as Poirot’s chronicler, he recorded so many belittling remarks about himself. Indeed, the debt we owe him as scribe has been sadly overlooked. It can’t always have been easy, in the years he shared rooms with Poirot, to be ever an unpaid companion and factotum, forever on call to read the newspapers aloud, run for taxis, and work out railway timetables. He had, as well, to hold down a job of his own – though, admittedly, Hastings was fortunate in having employers who gave him astonishing latitude – and on top of all this there was always the task on hand of writing up Poirot’s latest case. One imagines Hastings who, after all, was far from studious, toiling away in every spare moment at the sitting-room table at what Poirot lightly called the ‘record of my little successes’. Said peppery old Miss Peabody to Hastings in Dumb Witness:
‘Can you write decent English?’
‘I hope so.’
‘H’m – where did you go to school?’
‘Eton.’
‘Then you can’t.’
But Hastings did write decent, if somewhat turgid, English, and so successful was he in recording bewildering progressions of events, conversations en bloc, and Gallic eccentricities, that his books were avidly read and garnered Poirot much celebrity. In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd a suitably impressed Dr Sheppard told Poirot: ‘Well, as a matter of fact I’ve read some of Captain Hastings’s narratives’; and in The Big Four Dr Quentin, another country physician, exclaimed: ‘… M. Poirot? You see, I’ve read all about your methods, and I may say I’m an enormous admirer of yours.’1
In the summer of 1923, to Poirot’s great surprise, a significant new person appeared in Arthur Hastings’s life. Hastings, who had been working for some time as ‘a sort of private secretary … to an M.P.’, was on his way back to London from ‘transacting some business in Paris’ when he fell impetuously in love with Dulcie Duveen, a most unlikely person. At the very least, as Poirot had often observed, ‘Always you have had a penchant for auburn hair!’
In Hastings’s compartment on the Calais express on that fateful day there was one other passenger, a very young woman with ‘a pretty, impudent face’ who, as the train started, suddenly stuck her head out of the window and shouted ‘Hell!’ Hastings was shocked. Somehow, this young woman explained, her sister had been left behind on the platform. He looked at her carefully. ‘The girl,’ he decided, ‘was certainly all that I most disliked.’ She was small and dark, she wore a lot of make-up, she was clearly prepared to talk to strange men in trains, and she was reading a comic book. Nevertheless, he reasoned, ‘that was no reason why I should make myself ridiculous by my attitude. I prepared to unbend. After all, she was decidedly pretty.’ Before long she was telling Hastings:
‘I’m an actress. No – not the kind you’re thinking of, lunching at the Savoy covered with jewellery, and with their photograph in every paper saying how much they love Madame So and So’s face cream. I’ve been on the boards since I was a kid of six – tumbling.’
‘I beg your pardon,’ I said puzzled.
‘Haven’t you seen child acrobats?’
‘Oh, I understand.’
‘I’m American born, but I’ve spent most of my life in England. We got a new show now –’
‘We?’
‘My sister and I. Sort of song and dance, and a bit of patter, and a dash of the old business thrown in. It hits them every time.’
To his amazement Hastings then found himself telling this extraordinary girl all about himself and his friend Poirot:
‘… a very marvellous little man. Time and again he has proved to be right where the official police have failed.’
My companion listened with widening eyes.
‘Isn’t that interesting now? I just adore crime. I go to all the mysteries on the movies. And when there’s a murder on I just devour the papers.’
With these words Hastings’s fate was sealed. ‘My companion seemed to have an intuitive knowledge of what was in my mind,’ he wrote, and later when Dulcie – or Cinderella as she preferred to be called – inexplicably reappeared and disappeared again in Murder on the Links, he found himself confiding his new preoccupation to Poirot:
‘I may be old-fashioned, but I certainly don’t believe in marrying out of one’s class. It never answ
ers.’
‘I agree with you, mon ami. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it is as you say. But there is always the hundredth time! Still, that does not arise, as you do not propose to see the lady again.’
His last words were almost a question, and I was aware of the sharpness with which he darted a glance at me.
Alas for Poirot! Before he could turn around ‘la petite acrobate’ and her improbable prince had sailed away to a ‘ranch across the seas’ with Cinderella’s twin sister, Bella, and her new husband – a second match born from this unsettling case. Poirot put on the best face he could under the circumstances and even claimed, rather lamely, that in retrieving the lost Cinderella he had arranged a marriage for Hastings after all. ‘Mon ami! Vive l’amour! It can perform miracles,’ he exclaimed. ‘It defeats even Hercule Poirot!’
Argentina? In The Mysterious Affair at Styles an impassioned remark by Mary Cavendish – ‘I want to be – free!’ – had immediately conjured up in Hastings’s mind ‘a sudden vision of broad spaces, virgin tracts of forest, untrodden lands …’ This was exactly the picture that Englishmen like Hastings had of Argentina at that time. Las pampas, the Argentine prairie, was romantically famous for its enormous cattle ranches and, on a more practical level, British investors had been taking a profitable interest in Argentine railways and banks since well before the turn of the century. To prospective immigrants the flourishing Argentine appeared, unofficially, to be almost part of the British Empire. It was to a promising land, then, that the adventurous Cinderella and the suddenly starry-eyed Hastings set their course.
At the time of their marriage Cinderella appeared to be ‘little more than seventeen’, Hastings was about twenty years older, and one quails to think how little they could have known about cattle. It is a fair guess that neither of them had much money, so one suspects that it was Jack Renauld, Cinderella’s rich new brother-in-law, who staked them to their ranch.
