Eugenia has taken herself to what she believes to be a eugenics clinic advertising perfect partners. Her maid, Stevens, accompanies her:
EUGENIA: Talking of divorce, Eugenics will revolutionise the divorce laws.
STEVENS: Indeed Ma’am. Well I’ve heard as in Norway and Sweden and such countries you can get rid of your ’usband as easy as asking, with no more reason than just losing your taste for him. Very unfair I calls it. All men is trying at times, but don’t turn them helpless creatures adrift, call ’em your cross and put up with ’em.19
In the preface to his 1908 play Getting Married, under the heading ‘What does the word marriage mean?’ George Bernard Shaw had written: ‘In Sweden, one of the most highly civilized countries in the world, a marriage is dissolved if both parties wish it, without any question of conduct. That is what marriage means in Sweden. In Clapham that is what they call by the senseless name of free love.’20 The divorce laws were the subject of much debate in the early twentieth century, and it was not until 1923’s Matrimonial Causes Act that women were able to file for divorce on the same basis as men. Prior to that, men had simply to prove infidelity on the part of their spouse, whilst women had to establish further exacerbating circumstances such as rape or incest.
Christie’s play goes on:
EUGENIA: It’s an equal law for men and for women. Men can obtain a divorce with equal ease.
STEVENS: Ah! Ma’am, but a wife’s an ’abit to a man, and we all know how attached a man is to his ’abits, drinking and smoking and such like.
EUGENIA: So you class a wife with drinking and smoking, Stevens!
STEVENS: Well, Ma’am it’s true she comes more expensive sometimes.
EUGENIA: Stevens, you are lamentably behind the spirit of the age …
STEVENS: (thoughtfully) It seems to me M’am, what with the gentlemen being as difficult and scarce to get hold of as they are, that it’s a pity to ask too much of ’em …
EUGENIA: … next week, the Marriage Supervision Bill will become Law. It ensures that only the physically and mentally sound shall marry … I’m sure I don’t know what society is coming to. A few years ago money was everything – like birth used to be, and now nothing counts but notoriety. To be anybody one must have a new religion, or a new pet. My baby kangaroo, in spite of the fuss with the police, kept me in the forefront of society last season. But this year, Hyde Park is a walking menagerie, and an elephant would hardly attract attention. Eugenics, I feel assured, will be the next society craze. Let me then, be the first to take it up … This advertisement caught my eye this morning (reads) ‘Eugenic Institute. Men and Women of England. Protect the Race. Choose mates of physical and mental perfection. Come here and find your mate (Guaranteed with Medical Certificate). Remember the Race and Come. And here we are. What do you think of it, Stevens. Shan’t I be the most talked of woman in society?
STEVENS: It’s my experience, M’am, as anything that mentions racing, is shady.
Even the suffrage movement does not escape Stevens’ wisdom: ‘I holds as votes is very much the same as husbands, they’re a lot of trouble to get, and not much use once you’ve got ’em.’
Women over the age of thirty were finally enfranchised in Britain in 1918, but this play’s 1914 setting places it at the height of the suffrage campaign; the previous year, the Women’s Social and Political Union had mobilised thousands of supporters to march through the streets of London behind the coffin of suffragette Emily Davison, who had thrown herself in front of the king’s horse at Epsom. The characters in a play, of course, all speak with their own voices and without the benefit of authorial comment. Agatha’s writing, as ever, is well considered and fully engaged with the issues of the day, but it is up to the audience whether they believe Stevens to be speaking from a position of ignorance or whether they think her homespun philosophy may contain some pearls of wisdom.
Meanwhile, the ‘Eugenic Institute’ in the play turns out not to be all that Eugenia had hoped. The farcical construction of the piece is not as well handled as the comic dialogue, but suffice to say that Eugenia’s schemes to find the physically perfect partner are frustrated, and she resigns herself to marrying the devoted but self-professedly imperfect Goldberg who, from his name, we may assume to be Jewish. Agatha’s play thus wittily subverts eugenic philosophy and underlines the importance of putting the heart first. They decide to tie the knot immediately, before the new ‘Marriage Supervision Bill’ takes effect:
GOLDBERG: It seems to me, the only solution is for us to get married before next Wednesday.
EUGENIA: (reflectively) After all, if everyone is forced into Eugenics it will be far more chic to have an uneugenic husband …
GOLDBERG: Well, you know man hunting’s quite ousting foxhunting as a sport amongst the fair sex. You can hunt a man all the year round, you see, and English women are so deuced sporting.
Agatha’s own hunt for a husband, which had started in the social whirlwind of colonial Cairo and moved on to the more genteel setting of English house parties, was about to result in her marriage, at the age of twenty-five. Abandoning her fiancé, family friend Reggie Lucy, she opted instead for love from a stranger, and the promise of adventure offered by dashing young airman Archie Christie.
‘Archie and I were poles apart in our reaction to things. I think that from the start that fascinated us. It is the old excitement of “the stranger”.’21 Married on Christmas Eve 1914, their early years together were disrupted by war, with Archie gaining distinction for his contribution to the ground-based operations of the Royal Flying Corps, mostly on overseas postings, while Agatha remained in Torquay as a member of the Voluntary Aid Detachment at the Red Cross hospital in Torquay, completing the examination of the Society of Apothecaries and becoming a dispenser.
At the end of the war Archie, by now a colonel, was stationed at the Air Ministry in London, and after the war ended he found himself a job in the City. The couple divided their time between a flat in St John’s Wood and Ashfield, Agatha’s mother’s house in Torquay, where their daughter Rosalind was born on 5 August 1919.
The following year Agatha enjoyed a successful publishing debut with her novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Written on a break from her hospital work during the war, it was finally accepted for publication by Devon-born John Lane of the idiosyncratic and often controversial publishing house The Bodley Head, which specialised in books of poetry, and whose authors included Eden Phillpotts’ friend Arnold Bennett. The Bodley Head had been responsible at the end of the previous century for the notoriously decadent literary quarterly The Yellow Book. The five-book deal she signed with the firm was to establish her profile as an author, but it was to be another ten years until a play of hers was produced.
In 1922, Archie was engaged to take part in a world tour to promote the forthcoming British Empire exhibition, and Agatha took the opportunity to join her husband on this eye-opening voyage, which took in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii and Canada, with a stop for Agatha in New York in November on the way back, while Archie continued his work in Canada. In New York, Agatha stayed with her elderly American godmother Cassie Sullivan, and it is her name and address, along with the date 9 November 1922, that tantalisingly appears in handwriting on the front of the typed one-act playscript The Last Séance. In her autobiography, Agatha remembers this as one of her very first short stories, later rewritten for publication (which occurred in the American magazine Ghost Stories in 1926). The scenario works much better as a short play, however, and I believe that it was in this format that she first envisaged and wrote it, as an exercise in the then popular theatrical genre of Grand Guignol. In a
