While the Light Lasts. Агата Кристи

      AFTERWORD

      ‘The House of Dreams’ was first published in the Sovereign Magazine in January 1926. The story is a revised version of ‘The House of Beauty’, which Christie wrote some time before the First World War and identified in her autobiography as being ‘the first thing I ever wrote that showed any sign of promise’. Whereas the original story was obscure and excessively morbid in tone, ‘The House of Dreams’ comes close to the threatening ghost stories of the Edwardian age, and especially those of E. F. Benson. It is a great deal clearer and less introspective than the original which Christie heavily revised for publication: to develop the characters of the two women she toned down the otherworldliness of Allegra and built up Maisie’s rôle. A similar theme is explored in ‘The Call of Wings’, another early story, collected in The Hound of Death (1933).

      In 1938, Christie reflected on ‘The House of Beauty’, recalling that, while she had found ‘the imagining of it pleasant and the writing of it down extremely tedious’, the seed had been sown—‘The pastime grew on me. When I had a blank day—nothing much to do—I would think out a story. They always had sad endings and sometimes very lofty moral sentiments.’ An important spur in these early years was a neighbour on Dartmoor, Eden Phillpotts, a celebrated novelist and a close friend of the family, who advised Christie—Agatha Miller as she was then—on her stories and recommended writers whose style and vocabulary were to provide added inspiration. In later years, when her own fame had long since eclipsed his, Christie described how Phillpotts had provided the tact and sympathy so necessary to sustain the confidence of a young writer—‘I marvel at the understanding with which he doled out only encouragement and refrained from criticism.’ On Phillpotts’ death in 1960, she wrote, ‘For his kindness to me as a young girl just beginning to write, I can never be sufficiently grateful.’

       The Actress

      The shabby man in the fourth row of the pit leant forward and stared incredulously at the stage. His shifty eyes narrowed furtively.

      ‘Nancy Taylor!’ he muttered. ‘By the Lord, little Nancy Taylor!’

      His glance dropped to the programme in his hand. One name was printed in slightly larger type than the rest.

      ‘Olga Stormer! So that’s what she calls herself. Fancy yourself a star, don’t you, my lady? And you must be making a pretty little pot of money, too. Quite forgotten your name was ever Nancy Taylor, I daresay. I wonder now—I wonder now what you’d say if Jake Levitt should remind you of the fact?’

      The curtain fell on the close of the first act. Hearty applause filled the auditorium. Olga Stormer, the great emotional actress, whose name in a few short years had become a household word, was adding yet another triumph to her list of successes as ‘Cora’, in The Avenging Angel.

      Jake Levitt did not join in the clapping, but a slow, appreciative grin gradually distended his mouth. God! What luck! Just when he was on his beam-ends, too. She’d try to bluff it out, he supposed, but she couldn’t put it over on him. Properly worked, the thing was a gold-mine!

      On the following morning the first workings of Jake Levitt’s gold-mine became apparent. In her drawing-room, with its red lacquer and black hangings, Olga Stormer read and re-read a letter thoughtfully. Her pale face, with its exquisitely mobile features, was a little more set than usual, and every now and then the grey-green eyes under the level brows steadily envisaged the middle distance, as though she contemplated the threat behind rather than the actual words of the letter.

      In that wonderful voice of hers which could throb with emotion or be as clear-cut as the click of a typewriter, Olga called: ‘Miss Jones!’

      A neat young woman with spectacles, a shorthand pad and a pencil clasped in her hand, hastened from an adjoining room.

      ‘Ring up Mr Danahan, please, and ask him to come round, immediately.’

      Syd Danahan, Olga Stormer’s manager, entered the room with the usual apprehension of the man whose life it is to deal with and overcome the vagaries of the artistic feminine. To coax, to soothe, to bully, one at a time or all together, such was his daily routine. To his relief, Olga appeared calm and composed, and merely flicked a note across the table to him.

      ‘Read that.’

      The letter was scrawled in an illiterate hand, on cheap paper.

       ‘Dear Madam,

      I much appreciated your performance in The Avenging Angel last night. I fancy we have a mutual friend in Miss Nancy Taylor, late of Chicago. An article regarding her is to be published shortly. If you would care to discuss same, I could call upon you at any time convenient to yourself.

       Yours respectfully,

       Jake Levitt’

      Danahan looked slightly bewildered.

      ‘I don’t quite get it. Who is this Nancy Taylor?’

      ‘A girl who would be better dead, Danny.’ There was bitterness in her voice and a weariness that revealed her thirty-four years. ‘A girl who was dead until this carrion crow brought her to life again.’

      ‘Oh! Then …’

      ‘Me, Danny. Just me.’

      ‘This means blackmail, of course?’

      She nodded. ‘Of course, and by a man who knows the art thoroughly.’

      Danahan frowned, considering the matter. Olga, her cheek pillowed on a long, slender hand, watched him with unfathomable eyes.

      ‘What about bluff? Deny everything. He can’t be sure that he hasn’t been misled by a chance resemblance.’

      Olga shook her head.

      ‘Levitt makes his living by blackmailing women. He’s sure enough.’

      ‘The police?’ hinted Danahan doubtfully.

      Her faint, derisive smile was answer enough. Beneath her self-control, though he did not guess it, was the impatience of the keen brain watching a slower brain laboriously cover the ground it had already traversed in a flash.

      ‘You don’t—er—think it might be wise for you to—er—say something yourself to Sir Richard? That would partly spike his guns.’

      The actress’s engagement to Sir Richard Everard, MP, had been announced a few weeks previously.

      ‘I told Richard everything when he asked me to marry him.’

      ‘My word, that was clever of you!’ said Danahan admiringly.

      Olga smiled a little.

      ‘It wasn’t cleverness, Danny dear. You wouldn’t understand. All the same, if this man Levitt does what he threatens, my number is up, and incidentally Richard’s Parliamentary career goes smash, too. No, as far as I can see, there are only two things to do.’

      ‘Well?’

      ‘To pay—and that of course is endless! Or to disappear, start again.’

      The weariness was again very apparent in her voice.

      ‘It isn’t even as though I’d done anything I regretted. I was a half-starved little gutter waif, Danny, striving to keep straight. I shot a man, a beast of a man who deserved to be shot. The circumstances under which I killed him were such that no jury on earth would have convicted me. I know that now, but at the time I was only a frightened kid—and—I ran.’

      Danahan nodded.

      ‘I suppose,’ he said doubtfully, ‘there’s nothing against this man Levitt we could get hold of?’

      Olga shook her head.

      ‘Very