Curtain Up (10 page)

       
. . . if you deny . . . frustrate my love, I've nothing.
Nothing
left. It's all of me.

       
OCTAVIA: It isn't natural. You must turn to Spring, not autumn.

       
JUNIUS: I want no April to freeze me. I want the gold of October. Can't you see, can't you understand?
⁴⁵

The central political argument, however, is a debate about land value tax, a policy advocated by the American political economist Henry George in the late nineteenth century which found favour with Asquith and Lloyd George, and subsequently the Labour Party, in the early twentieth:

       
JUNIUS: All that results from unimproved land should be sacred.

       
ROCKHAVEN: Humph! You differ from the socialists there.

       
JUNIUS: Land is different from everything else. It's not for some men, or a few men, but for all men. Man
must
pay that one tax to mankind, then, for God's sake leave him alone to work or starve! He's had his opportunity.

       
ROCKHAVEN: How are you going to value your land?

       
JUNIUS: The value of land alters from day to day. But there's already a rent paid for every plot and field in England. Deduct the value of buildings and improvements and there's your ground rent.

       
ROCKHAVEN: You wouldn't collect enough from this one source to run the country.

       
JUNIUS: The rent roll of England is roughly four millions. It ought to be enough if the government only stuck to essentials.

       
ROCKHAVEN: Essentials?

       
JUNIUS: The Army, the Navy and the Administration of Justice. Now we pay for a grandmother not a government!

       
ROCKHAVEN: The incapables would loathe to lose their grandmother.

       
. . .

       
ROCKHAVEN: I suppose you believe that all men are born equal?

       
JUNIUS: No. But there is a chance they might be bred equal if they had an equal chance.

       
ROCKHAVEN: You'll never eliminate human nature.

       
JUNIUS: I want to eliminate poverty. Now we're taxing wealth. What harm does wealth do a country? If there
is
a man capable of making money, for Heaven's sake encourage him to make more!

This is hardly the stuff of gripping drama, but neither is it what immediately springs to mind as the likely subject of breakfast conversation in the Miller/Watts/Christie households.
Oranges and Lemons
does not appear to have been performed. Agatha says in her autobiography that after
The Claimant
Madge ‘wrote one or two other plays, but they did not receive London productions',
⁴⁶
which does not rule out the possibility that they were performed at regional repertory theatres in productions listed in the Lord Chamberlain's plays card index (which
Oranges and Lemons
isn't), or indeed by amateurs. We are told by Agatha that Madge was ‘quite a good amateur actress herself, and acted with the Manchester Amateur Dramatic' so, after her brief spell as a West End playwright, we must assume that this is where she focused her theatrical energies.

Amongst Agatha's own unpublished and unperformed early works are two very different full-length plays,
The Clutching Hand
and
The Lie.
The first of these, ‘A Play in Four Acts by A. Christie', states on the title page that it is ‘Adapted from the novel
The Exploits of Elaine
by Arthur B. Reeve'. Significantly, this is undoubtedly her first dramatic adaptation of a novel, albeit not one of her own.
⁴⁷

Arthur B. Reeve was a journalist who became America's most popular writer of detective fiction in the second decade of the twentieth century. His recurring character, ‘scientific detective' Craig Kennedy, was billed as ‘The American Sherlock
Holmes', and Kennedy's investigations are characterised by the use of pioneering forensic techniques and bizarre gadgets created by him in his lab. In fact he would probably have had more success than me in dating some of Agatha's manuscripts and correspondence. Of course this particular detective's investigative techniques may well have appealed to Agatha the chemist, although it is notable that her own sleuths tend to treat forensic evidence as secondary to an analysis of character and an understanding of motive.

The Exploits of Elaine
itself is an odd hybrid. Conceived by Pathé in 1914 as a fourteen-part film serial, it was primarily a vehicle for their star Pearl White, who had been a huge success in the
Perils of Pauline
series. Arthur B. Reeve was employed to create the storyline, and included the character of Craig Kennedy. This meant that the syndicated newspaper instalments of the story, when compiled into a book the following year, effectively became both the next Craig Kennedy novel and the ‘book of the film' of
The Exploits of Elaine.
It has to be said that the result is far from being a literary masterpiece; Reeve is no Raymond Chandler, and the disjointed ‘novel', the chapter titles of which exactly reflect the titles of the film serial's episodes, very much betrays its origins.

Quite how this ended up on Agatha's bookshelf, and why she felt drawn to adapt it for the stage, is something of a mystery; it may have been done in response to her sister's challenge to write a piece of detective fiction, which more famously resulted in her first published novel,
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
. We know that she had read Gaston Leroux's
The Mystery of the Yellow Room
, Edgar Allan Poe's short story ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue', Maurice Leblanc's Arsène Lupin stories and, of course, Arthur Conan Doyle and Wilkie Collins; but we can now add Arthur B. Reeve's brand of pulp fiction to the august roll-call of those who inspired Agatha's early experiments in crime fiction.

The book and play concern the efforts of the plucky young Elaine Dodge to track down her father's murderer, a master criminal known as The Clutching Hand, who leaves ‘a warning
letter signed with a mysterious clutching fist' next to the body of each of his victims. In order to do this, she enlists the help of Craig Kennedy, scientific detective, and his ‘Doctor Watson', the journalist Walter Jameson. Other characters include the lawyer Perry Bennett and three gangsters named Limpy Red, Dan the Dude and Spike. Whilst the play is an interesting early exercise in the efficient adaptation of a novel for the stage, it would be fair to say that Agatha is no Damon Runyon when it comes to a grasp of New York vernacular. Her leading characters tend to speak in cut-glass English accents and her gangsters endearingly lapse into cockney while referring to ‘drug stores' and ‘janitors'. Agatha's father was a New Yorker, but although she was proud of her American ancestry she herself did not travel to America until she was thirty-one, and it seems either that Frederick Miller's American accent cannot have been a strong one, or that by the time Agatha wrote
The Clutching Hand
her memory of it was distant.

Although
The Clutching Hand
never made it as far as the stage, a number of its ideas re-emerge in Christie's early adventure fiction, particularly the character of an adventurous young heroine and the pursuit of an enigmatic master criminal, both of which are central to 1922's
The Secret Adversary
. In
The Secret of Chimneys
(1925),
the Comrades of the Red Hand clearly take their cue from The Clutching Hand, whilst fingerprinting, as adopted by the police at the turn of the century and explained at length by Craig Kennedy in
The Exploits of Elaine
, provides vital evidence. As Agatha says in her autobiography, ‘Thriller plays are usually much alike in plot – all that alters is the Enemy. There is an international gang
à la
Moriarty – provided first by the Germans, the “Huns” of the first war; then the Communists, who in turn were succeeded by the Fascists. We have the Russians, we have the Chinese, we go back to the international gang again, and the Master Criminal wanting world supremacy is always with us.'
⁴⁸
For good measure, the original
Exploits of Elaine
also includes Chinese devil worshippers and even a medium performing a
séance, none of whom, perhaps thankfully, make it into the stage adaptation. There can be no doubt, however, that Agatha was drawn to its sense of adventure and in particular to the central figure of the feisty heroine. Here, to cherish, is Arthur B. Reeve's own description of Elaine: ‘Elaine Dodge was both the ingénue and the athlete – the thoroughly modern type of girl – equally at home with tennis and tango, table talk and tea. Vivacious eyes that hinted at a stunning amber brown sparkled beneath masses of the most wonderful auburn hair. Her pearly teeth, when she smiled, were marvellous. And she smiled often, for her life seemed to be a continuous film of enjoyment.'
⁴⁹

When, in 1922, Christie was writing notes for the novel
The Man in the Brown Suit
in Notebook 34, while on the Grand Tour, they appear under the heading ‘Adventurous Anne Episode 1'.
⁵⁰
Reeve's heroine and ‘episodic' format were therefore very much on her mind – although she later claimed that ‘Anne the Adventuress', the title under which the novel was serialised in the
Evening News
the following year, was ‘as silly a title as I had ever heard'.
⁵¹
All of this, though, seems to indicate that the script for
The Clutching Hand
pre-dates 1922, and Agatha's own first visit to America.

And now on to more serious matters, in the shape of an unpublished and unperformed three-act ‘domestic drama' called simply
The Lie
. In her autobiography Agatha mysteriously states, ‘I wrote a gloomy play, mainly about incest. It was refused firmly by every manager I sent it to. “An unpleasant subject”. The curious thing is that, nowadays, it is the kind of play which might quite likely appeal to a manager.'
⁵²
I believe
The Lie
to be that play and, although the chronology in her autobiography is notoriously inaccurate, Agatha clearly places it in the mid-1920s after her and Archie's return from the Grand Tour. The action of the play, of which there are two drafts, takes place in a suburban house, located in Wimbledon (amended to Putney) in version one or Hampstead in version two. The house belongs to John, who is married to Nan. Nan's mother and grandmother live with
them, and her younger sister Nell, who is fighting off the attentions of an ineffectual young suitor, shares a flat with a female friend elsewhere.

Nan is disillusioned with the boredom of her marriage to John, whom she married when she was seventeen, and the fact that he lavishes more of his attention on her golf- and tennis-playing younger sister than on her. In an attempt to get some excitement back into her life, she spends a night with an older admirer, Sir Peter (whom we never meet), claiming that she is staying with family friends. But when she returns home the next day she discovers that a friend of John's has told him that he has seen her dining with Sir Peter, and it is not long before he establishes that she has not in fact been staying with the family friends. As Nan explains to her mother, Hannah:

I suppose he's a good husband. He's kind and polite, and feeds and clothes me well, and doesn't beat me. Oh! A model husband! But I'm outside his life – right outside it. He goes to his business in the morning, and when he comes back in the afternoon, if it's summertime, he plays golf or tennis with Nell. In the evening there's music – with Nell. He'd sooner talk to her than to me. He never cares to be with me – he never wants me – I don't interest him. Although I'm his wife I never dare laugh and joke with him as Nell does. And so it's gone on from day to day – until I felt I couldn't bear it any longer! (a pause) And then, Sir Peter came.
He
wanted to talk to me,
he
liked to be with me – I was
the
person to him! What happened? John told me to drop him! Altogether! Told me quite coldly and calmly, not because he cared – not because he was jealous – but because I was his wife, and he disliked having his property talked about!
⁵³

As Hannah explains to her own mother, ‘A love not expressed is no love at all to Nan. And a man like John, upright, honourable, and straight as a die, lacks one thing – imagination.' We are told that Hannah herself followed her dream: ‘I loved him!
He was fascinating. His bad qualities were all beneath the surface. I promised to marry him. My people did their best to stop it, they knew him better than I did, but I was young and headstrong, I wouldn't listen! I went my own way, and shut my eyes to the truth.' As a result of this experience, she now advises, ‘Love isn't everything. Marry a man you can respect and admire. Love will come.'

In order to preserve Nan's marriage, and indeed in order to prevent three generations of her family becoming homeless, Hannah enlists the assistance of Nell, who is asked to lie for her sister and claim that Nan in fact stayed overnight with her after dining with Sir Peter. This is ‘the Lie' of the title. It is believed that this plan will work, because of John's apparent affinity with Nell. Hannah persuades Nell with the forceful argument, ‘I believe with all my heart and soul, that in every life there comes a moment, one supreme and all powerful moment, when we hold our fate in our hands, to decide our entire life for good or evil! Nell! Don't let this moment pass by!'

The whole drama is played out in the course of one evening – ‘one never knows what a day might bring forth' is a repeated line in the play – and the tension that Agatha builds as the various revelations unfold in a suburban front room over a matter of hours is skilfully sustained. The final scene is brilliantly dramatic as, with the disgraced Nan upstairs in her room, Nell faces her brother-in-law to tell him ‘the Lie'. His astonishing response, having seen through and dismissed Nell's fiction for the attempt to protect her sister that it is, is to declare his secret love for Nell – which is clearly reciprocated as they embrace and ‘he kisses her long and passionately'.