A psychologist or a romancer might comment on the matter of the last
chapter till the sun went down, but the world perhaps would not be
much further advanced. It is better, I think, for the man's apology
or condemnation to come out of the drama that followed. This is
where Life mocks at Art. The tragic climax and catastrophe are in
the first act, and the remainder is a long and bitter commentary.
Maitland and I never discussed his early life. Practically we never
spoke of Moorhampton though we often enough touched on ancient things
by implication. His whole life as I saw it, and as I shall relate
it, is but a development of the nature which made his disaster
possible.
So one comes back to my own return from Australia. I had gone out
there as a boy, and came back a man, for I had had a man's
experiences; work, adventure, travel, hunger, and thirst. All this
hardened a somewhat neurotic temperament, at any rate for the time,
till life in a city, and the humaner world of books removed the
temper which one gets when plunged in the baths of the ocean. During
some months I worked for a position in the Civil Service and thought
very little of Maitland, for he was lost. Yet as I got back into the
classics he returned to me at times, and I wrote to my own friends in
Moorhampton about him. They sent me vague reports of him in the
United States, and then at last there came word that he was once more
in England; possibly, and even probably, in London. Soon afterwards
I found an advertisement in the _Athenæum_ of a book entitled
"Children of the Dawn," by Henry Maitland. As soon as I saw it I
went straightway to the firm which published it, and being ignorant
of the ways of publishers, demanded Maitland's address, which was
promptly and very properly refused--for all they knew I might have
been a creditor. They promised, however, to send on a letter to him,
and I wrote one at once, receiving an answer the very next day. He
appointed as our meeting-place the smoking-room of the Horse Shoe
Hotel at the bottom of Tottenham Court Road. Conceivably it was one
of the most curious meetings that had ever taken place in such a
locality. We met late at night in the crowded smoking-room, and I
found him very much his old self, for he was still a handsome and
intelligent boy, though somewhat worn and haggard considering his
years. As for myself, I remember that he told me, chuckling, that I
looked like a soldier, which was no doubt the result of some years on
horseback--possibly I walked with a cavalry stride. We sat and drank
coffee, and had whiskey, and smoked, until we were turned out of the
hotel at half-past twelve. It was perhaps owing to the fact that I
was ever the greater talker that he learnt more of my life in
Australia than I learnt of his in the United States. He was, in
fact, somewhat reserved as to his adventures there. And yet, little
by little, I learnt a great deal--it was always a case of little by
little with him. At no time did he possess any great fluency or
power of words when speaking of his own life.
It seems that friends had given him some letters to writers and
others in New York, and he made the acquaintance there of many whose
names I forget. I only recollect the name of Lloyd Garrison, the
poet. Maitland told me that upon one occasion Lloyd Garrison induced
him to go home with him about two o'clock in the morning to hear a
sonnet on which Garrison had been working, as he affirmed almost with
tears, for three whole months. As Maitland said, the result hardly
justified the toil. Among the friends that he made there were a few
artistic and literary tendencies who had made a little club, where it
was _de rigueur_ at certain times to produce something in the form of
a poem. Maitland showed me the set of verses with which he had paid
his literary footing; they were amusing, but of no great importance.
So long as Maitland's money lasted in New York he had not an
unpleasant time. It was only when he exhausted his means and had to
earn a living by using his wits that he found himself in great
difficulties, which were certainly not to be mitigated by the
production of verse. But Maitland never pretended to write poetry,
though he sometimes tried. I still have a few of his poems in my
possession, one of them a set of love verses which he put into one of
his books but omitted on my most fervent recommendation. I believe,
however, that there is still much verse by him in existence, if he
did not destroy it in later years when circumstances, his wanderings
and his poverty, made it inconvenient to preserve comparatively
worthless papers. And yet, if he did not destroy it, it might now be
of no small interest to men of letters.
When his means were almost exhausted he went to Boston, and from
there drifted to Chicago. With a very few comments and alterations,
the account given in "Paternoster Row," contains the essence of
Maitland's own adventures in America. It is, of course, written in a
very light style, and is more or less tinged with humour. This
humour, however, is purely literary, for he felt very little of it
when he was telling me the story. He certainly lived during two
days, for instance, upon peanuts, and he did it in a town called
Troy. I never gathered what actually drove him to Chicago: it was,
perhaps, the general idea that one gets in America that if one goes
west one goes to the land of chances, but it certainly was not the
land for Henry Maitland. Nevertheless, as he relates in "Paternoster
Row," he reached it with less than five dollars in his pocket, and
with a courage which he himself marvelled at, paid four and a half
dollars for a week's board and lodging, which made him secure for the
moment. This boarding-house he once or twice described to me. It
was an unclean place somewhere on Wabash Avenue, and was occupied
very largely by small actors and hangers-on at the Chicago theatres.
The food was poor, the service was worse, and there was only one
common room, in which they ate and lived. It was at this time, when
he had taken a look round Chicago and found it very like Hell or
Glasgow, which, indeed, it is, that he determined to attack the
editor of the _Chicago Tribune_. The description he gives of this
scene in "Paternoster Row" is not wholly accurate. I remember he
said that he walked to and fro for hours outside the offices of the
paper before he took what remained of his courage in both hands,
rushed into the elevator, and was carried to an upper story. He
asked for work, and the accessible and genial editor demanded, in
return, what experience he had had with journalism. He said, with
desperate boldness, "None whatever," and the editor, not at all
unkindly, asked him what he thought he could do for them. He
replied, "There is one thing that is wanting in your paper." "What
is that?" asked the editor. "Fiction," said Maitland, "I should like
to write you some." The editor considered the matter, and said that
he had no objection to using a story provided it was good; it would
serve for one of the weekly supplements, because these American
papers at the end of the week have amazing supplements, full of all
sorts of conceivable matter. Maitland asked if he might try him with
a story of English life, and got permission to do so.
He went away and walked up and down the lake shore for hours in the
bitter wind, trying to think out a story, and at last discovered one.
On his way home he bought a pen, ink, and paper, which they did not
supply at the boarding-house. As it was impossible to write in his
bedroom, where there was, of course, no fire, and no proper heating,
it being so poor a place, he was compelled to write on the table of
the common room with a dozen other men there, talking, smoking, and
no doubt quarrelling. He wrote this story in a couple of days, and
it was long enough to fill several columns of the paper. To his
intense relief it was accepted by the editor after a day or two's
waiting, and he got eighteen dollars according to "Paternoster Row,"
though I believe as a matter of fact it was less in reality. He
stayed for some time in Chicago working for the _Tribune_, but at
last found that he could write no more. I believe the editor himself
suggested that the stories were perhaps not quite what he wanted.
The one that I saw I only remember vaguely. It was, however, a sort
of psychological love-story placed in London, written without much
distinction.
The account Broughton gives in "Paternoster Row" of his visit to Troy
is fairly representative of Maitland's experiences. It was there
that he lived for two or three days on peanuts, buying five cents'
worth in the street now and then at some Italian peanut stand. In
"Paternoster Row" he calls them loathsome, and no doubt they soon do
become loathsome. A few are rather pleasing, more than a few are
objectionable; and when anybody tries a whole diet of them for a day
or two there is no doubt "loathsome" would be the proper word. After
that he worked for a photographer for a few days, and then, I think,
for a plumber, but of this I remember very little. It is quite
certain that he never earned enough money in America to enable him to
return to England, but who lent it to him I have no idea. To have
been twenty-four hours with no more than a handful of peanuts in his
pocket was no doubt an unpleasant experience, but, as I told him, it
seemed very little to me. On one occasion in Australia I had been
rather more than four and a half days without food when caught in a
flood. Nevertheless this starvation was for him one of the
initiation ceremonies into the mysteries of literature, and he was
always accustomed to say, "How can such an one write? He never
starved."
Nevertheless to have been hard up in Chicago was a very great
experience, as every one knows who knows that desperate city of the
plains. Since that time I myself have known Chicago well, and have
been there "dead broke." Thus I can imagine the state that he must
have been in, and how desperate he must have become, to get out of
his difficulties in the way that he actually employed. The endeavour
to obtain work in a hustling country like the United States is ever a
desperate proceeding for a nervous and sensitive man, and what it
must have been to Henry Maitland to do what he did with the editor of
the _Chicago Tribune_ can only be imagined by those who knew him. In
many ways he was the most modest and the shyest man who ever lived,
and yet he actually told this editor: "I have come to point out to
you there is a serious lack in your paper." To those who knew
Maitland this must seem as surprising as it did to myself, and in
later years he sometimes thought of that incident with inexpressible
joy in his own courage. Of course the oddest thing about the whole
affair is that up to that moment he had never written fiction at all,
and only did it because he was driven to desperation. As will be
seen when I come later to discuss his qualifications as a writer this
is a curious comment on much of his bigger work. To me it seems that
he should never have written fiction at all, although he did it so
admirably. I think it would be very interesting if some American
student of Maitland would turn over the files of the _Tribune_ in the
years 1878 and 1879 and disinter the work he did there. This is
practically all I ever learnt about his life on the other side of the
Atlantic. I was, indeed, more anxious to discover how he lived in
London, and in what circumstances. I asked him as delicately as
possible about his domestic circumstances, and he then told me that
he was married, and that his wife was with him in London.
It is very curious to think that I never actually met his first wife.
I had, of course, seen her photograph, and I have on several
occasions been in the next room to her. On those occasions she was
usually unable to be seen, mostly because she was intoxicated. When
we renewed our acquaintance in the Horse Shoe Tavern he was then
living in mean apartments in one of the back streets off Tottenham
Court Road not very far from the hotel and indeed not far from a
cellar that he once occupied in a neighbouring street. Little by
little as I met him again and again I began to get some hold upon his
actual life. Gradually he became more confidential, and I gathered
from him that the habits of his wife were perpetually compelling him
to move from one house to another. From what he told me, sometimes
hopefully, and more often in desperation, it seems that this poor
creature made vain and violent efforts to reform, generally after
some long debauch. And of this I am very sure, that no man on earth
could have made more desperate efforts to help her than he made. But
the actual fact remains that they were turned out of one lodging
after the other, for even the poorest places, it seems, could hardly
stand a woman of her character in the house. I fear it was not only
that she drank, but at intervals she deserted him and went back, for
the sake of more drink, and for the sake of money with which he was
unable to supply her, to her old melancholy trade. And yet she
returned again with tears, and he took her in, doing his best for
her. It was six months after our first meeting in Tottenham Court
Road that he asked me to go and spend an evening with him. Naturally
enough I then expected to make Mrs. Maitland's acquaintance, but on
my arrival he showed some disturbance of mind and told me that she
was ill and would be unable to see me. The house they lived in then
was not very far from Mornington Crescent. It was certainly in some
dull neighbourhood not half a mile away. The street was, I think, a
cul-de-sac. It was full of children of the lower orders playing in
the roadway. Their fathers and mothers, it being Saturday night, sat
upon the doorsteps, or quarrelled, or talked in the road. The front
room in which he received me was both mean and dirty. The servant
who took me upstairs was a poor foul slut, and I do not think the
room had been properly cleaned or dusted for a very long time. The
whole of the furniture in it was certainly not worth seven and
sixpence from the point of view of the ordinary furniture dealer.
There were signs in it that it had been occupied by a woman, and one
without the common elements of decency and cleanliness. Under a
miserable and broken sofa lay a pair of dirty feminine boots. And
yet on one set of poor shelves there were, still shining with gold,
the prizes Maitland had won at Moorhampton College, and his painfully
acquired stock of books that he loved so much.
As I came in by arrangement after my own dinner, we simply sat and
smoked and drank a little whiskey. Twice in the course of an hour
our conversation was interrupted by the servant knocking at the door
and beckoning to Maitland to come out. In the next room I then heard
voices, sometimes raised, sometimes pleading. When Maitland returned
the first time he said to me, "I am very sorry to have to leave you
for a few minutes. My wife is really unwell." But I knew by now the
disease from which she suffered. Twice or thrice I was within an ace
of getting up and saying, "Don't you think I'd better go, old chap?"
And then he was called out again. He came back at last in a state of
obvious misery and perturbation, and said, "My dear man, my wife is
so ill that I think I must ask you to go." I shook hands with him in
silence and went, for I understood. A little afterwards he told me
that that very afternoon his wife had gone out, and obtaining drink
in some way had brought it home with her, and that she was then
almost insane with alcohol. This was the kind of life that Henry
Maitland, perhaps a great man of letters, lived for years.
Comfortable people talk of his pessimism, and his greyness of
outlook, and never understand. The man really was a hedonist, he
loved things beautiful--beautiful and orderly. He rejoiced in every
form of Art, in books and music, and in all the finer inheritance of
the past. But this was the life he lived, and the life he seemed to
be doomed to live from the very first.
When a weak man has a powerful sense of duty he is hard to handle by
those who have some wisdom. In the early days I had done my best to
induce him to give up this woman, long before he married her, when he
was but a foolish boy. Now I once more did my best to get him to
leave her, but I cannot pretend for an instant that anything I said
or did would have had any grave effect if it had not been that the
poor woman was herself doomed to be her own destroyer. Her outbreaks
became more frequent, her departures from his miserable roof more
prolonged. The windy gaslight of the slums appealed to her, and the
money that she earned therein; and finally when it seemed that she
would return no more he changed his rooms, and through the landlady
of the wretched house at which he found she was staying he arranged
to pay her ten shillings a week. As I know, he often made much less
than ten shillings a week, and frequently found himself starving that
she might have so much more to spend in drink.
This went on for years. It was still going on in 1884 when I left
England again and went out to Texas. I had not succeeded in making a
successful attack upon the English Civil Service, and the hateful
work I did afterwards caused my health to break down. I was in
America for three years. During that time I wrote fully and with a
certain regularity to Maitland. When I came back and was writing
"The Western Trail," he returned me the letters he had received from
me. Among them I found some, frequently dealing with literary
subjects, addressed from Texas, Minnesota, Iowa, the Rocky Mountains,
Lower British Columbia, Oregon, and California. In his letters to me
he never referred to Marian, but I gathered that his life was very
hard, and, of course, I understood, without his saying it, that he
was still supporting her. I found that this was so when I returned
to England in 1887. At that time, by dint of hard, laborious work,
which included a great deal of teaching, he was making for the first
time something of a living. He occupied a respectable but very
dismal flat somewhere at the back of Madame Tussaud's, in a place at
that time called "Cumberland Residences." It was afterwards renamed
"Cumberland Mansions," and I well remember Maitland's frightful and
really superfluous scorn of the snobbery which spoke in such a change
of name. As I said, we corresponded the whole of the time I was in
America. I used to send him a great deal of verse, some of which he
pronounced actually poetry. No doubt this pleased me amazingly, and
I wish that I still possessed his criticisms written to me while I
was abroad. It is, from any point of view, a very great disaster
that in some way which I cannot account for I have lost all his
letters written to me previous to 1894. Our prolonged, and
practically uninterrupted correspondence began in 1884, so I have
actually lost the letters of ten whole years. They were interesting
from many points of view. Much to my surprise, while I was in
America, they came to me, not dated in the ordinary way, but
according to the Comtist calendar. I wrote to him for an
explanation, because up to that time I had never heard of it. In his
answering letter he told me that he had become a Positivist. This
was doubtless owing to the fact that he had come accidentally under
the influence of some well-known Positivists.
It seems that in desperation at his utter failure to make a real
living at literature he had taken again to a tutor's work, which in a
way was where he began. I find that in the marriage certificate
between him and Marian Hilton he called himself a teacher of
languages. But undoubtedly he loathed teaching save in those rare
instances where he had an intelligent and enthusiastic pupil. At the
time that I came back to England he was teaching Harold Edgeworth's
sons. Without a doubt Harold Edgeworth was extremely kind to Henry
Maitland and perhaps to some little extent appreciated him, in spite
of the preface which he wrote in later years to the posthumous
"Basil." He was not only tutor to Harold Edgeworth's sons, but was
also received at his house as a guest. He met there many men of a
certain literary eminence; Cotter Morrison, for instance, of whom he
sometimes spoke to me, especially of his once characterising a social
chatterer as a cloaca maxima of small talk. He also met Edmund
Roden, with whom he remained on terms of friendship to the last,
often visiting him in his house at Felixstowe, which is known to many
men of letters. I think the fact that Edmund Roden was not only a
man of letters but also, oddly enough, the manager of a great
business, appealed in some way to Maitland's sense of humour. He
liked Roden amazingly, and it was through him, if I remember rightly,
that he became socially acquainted with George Meredith, whom,
however, he had met in a business way when Meredith was reading for
some firm of publishers at a salary of two hundred a year.
Nevertheless, in spite of his making money by some tutorial work,
Maitland was still as poor as a rat in a cellar, and the absurd
antinomy between the society he frequented at times and his real
position, made him sometimes shout with laughter which was not always
really humorous. It was during this period of his life that a lady
asked him at an "at-home" what his experience was in the management
of butlers. According to what he told me he replied seriously that
he always strictly refrained from having anything to do with men
servants, as he much preferred a smart-looking young maid. It was
during this period that he did some work with a man employed, I
think, at the London Skin Hospital. This poor fellow, it seemed,
desired to rise in life, and possessed ambition. He wanted to pass
the London matriculation examination and thus become, as he imagined,
somebody of importance. Naturally enough, being but a clerk, he
lacked time for work, and the arrangement come to between him and
Maitland was that his teacher should go to his lodging at seven
o'clock in the morning and give him his lesson in bed before
breakfast. As this was just before the time that Maitland worked for
Mr. Harold Edgeworth, he was too poor, so he said, to pay bus fares
from the slum in which he lived, and as a result he had to rise at
six o'clock in the morning, walk for a whole hour to his pupil's
lodging, and then was very frequently met with the message that Mr.
So-and-so felt much too tired that morning to receive him, and begged
Mr. Maitland would excuse him. It is a curious comment on the
authority of "The Meditations of Mark Sumner," which many cling to as
undoubtedly authentic, that he mentions this incident as if he did
not mind it. As a matter of fact he was furiously wrath with this
man for not rising to receive him, and used to go away in a state of
almost ungovernable rage, as he told me many and many a time.
After my return from America we used to meet regularly once a week on
Sunday afternoons, for I had now commenced my own initiation into the
mystery of letters, and had become an author. By Maitland's advice,
and, if I may say so, almost by his inspiration--most certainly his
encouragement--I wrote "The Western Trail," and having actually
printed a book I felt that there was still another bond between me
and Maitland. I used to turn up regularly at 7K Cumberland
Residences at three o'clock on Sundays. From then till seven we
talked of our work, of Latin and of Greek, of French, and of
everything on earth that touched on literature. Long before seven
Maitland used to apply himself very seriously to the subject of
cooking. As he could not afford two fires he usually cooked his pot
on the fire of the sitting-room. This pot of his was a great
institution. It reminds me something of the gypsies' pot in which
they put everything that comes to hand. Maitland's idea of cooking
was fatness and a certain amount of gross abundance. He used to put
into this pot potatoes, carrots, turnips, portions of meat, perhaps a
steak, or on great days a whole rabbit, all of which he had bought
himself, and carried home with his own hands. We used to watch the
pot boiling, and perhaps about seven or half-past he would
investigate its contents with a long, two-pronged iron fork, and
finally decide much to our joy and contentment that the contents were
edible. After our meal, for which I was usually ready, as I was
practically starving much of this time myself, we removed the débris,
washed up in company, and resumed our literary conversation, which
sometimes lasted until ten or eleven. By that time Maitland usually
turned me out, although my own day was not necessarily done for
several hours. At those times when I was writing at all, I used to
write between midnight and six o'clock in the morning.
Those were great talks that we had, but they were nearly always talks
about ancient times, about the Greeks and Romans, so far as we
strayed from English literature. It may seem an odd thing, and it
_is_ odd until it is explained, that he had very little interest in
the Renaissance. There is still in existence a letter of his to
Edmund Roden saying how much he regretted that he took no interest in
it. That letter was, I think, dated from Siena, a city of the
Renaissance. The truth of the matter is that he was essentially a
creature of the Renaissance himself, a pure Humanist. For this very
reason he displayed no particular pleasure in that period. He was
interested in the time in which the men of the Renaissance revelled
after its rediscovery and the new birth of learning. He would have
been at his best if he had been born when that time was in flower.
The fathers of the Renaissance rediscovered Rome and Athens, and so
did he. No one can persuade me that if this had been his fate his
name would not now have been as sacred to all who love literature as
those of Petrarch and his glorious fellows. As a matter of fact it
was this very quality of his which gave him such a lofty and lordly
contempt for the obscurantist theologian. In my mind I can see him
treating with that irony which was ever his favourite weapon, some
relic of the dark ages of the schools. In those hours that we spent
together it was wonderful to hear him talk of Greece even before he
knew it, for he saw it as it had been, or as his mind made him think
it had been, not with the modern Greek--who is perhaps not a Greek at
all--shouting in the market-place. I think that he had a historical
imagination of a very high order, even though he undoubtedly failed
when endeavouring to use it. That was because he used it in the
wrong medium. But when he saw the Acropolis in his mind he saw it
before the Turks had stabled their horses in the Parthenon, and
before the English, worse vandals than the Turks, had brought away to
the biting smoke of London the marbles of Pheidias. Even as a boy he
loved the roar and fume of Rome, although he had not yet seen it and
could only imagine it. He saw in Italy the land of Dante and
Boccaccio, a land still peopled in the south towards Sicily with such
folks as these and Horace had known. My own education had been
wrought out in strange, rough places in the new lands. It was a
fresh education for me to come back to London and sit with Maitland
on these marvellous Sunday afternoons and evenings when he wondered
if the time would ever come for him to see Italy and Greece in all
reality. It was for the little touches of realism, the little
pictures in the Odes, that he loved Horace, and loved still more his
Virgil; and, even more, Theocritus and Moshos, for Theocritus wrote
things which were ancient and yet modern, full of the truth of
humanity. Like all the men of the Renaissance he turned his eyes
wistfully to the immemorial past, renewed in the magic alembic of his
own mind.
Nevertheless, great as these hours were that we spent together, they
were sometimes deeply melancholy, and he had nothing to console him
for the miseries which were ever in the background. It was upon one
of these Sundays, I think early in January, 1888, that I found him in
a peculiarly melancholy and desperate condition. No doubt he was
overworked, for he always was overworked; but he said that he could
stand it no longer, he must get out of London for a few days or so.
For some reason which I cannot for the world understand, he decided
to go to Eastbourne, and begged me to go with him. Why he should
have selected, in Christmas weather and an east wind, what is
possibly the coldest town in England in such conditions, I cannot
say, but I remember that the journey down to the sea was mercilessly
cold. Of course we went third class, and the carriages were totally
unheated. We were both of us practically in extreme poverty. I was
living in a single room in Chelsea, for which I paid four shillings a
week, and for many months my total weekly expenses were something
under twelve shillings. At that particular moment he was doing
extremely badly, and the ten shillings that he paid regularly to his
wife frequently left him with insufficient to live upon. I can
hardly understand how it was that he determined to spend even the
little extra money needed for such a journey. When we reached
Eastbourne we walked with our bags in our hands down to the sea
front, and then, going into a poor back street, selected rooms. It
was perhaps what he and I often called "the native malignity of
matter," and his extreme ill luck in the matter of landladies, which
pursued him for ever throughout his life in lodgings, that the
particular landlady of the house in which we took refuge was
extraordinarily incapable. The dwelling itself was miserably
draughty and cold, and wretchedly furnished. The east wind which
blows over the flat marshes between Eastbourne and the Downs entered
the house at every crack, and there were many of them. The first
night we were in the town it snowed very heavily, and in our shabby
little sitting-room we shivered in spite of the starved fire. We sat
there with our overcoats on and did our best to be cheerful. Heaven
alone knows what we talked of, but most likely, and very possibly, it
may have been Greek metres, always his great passion. Yet neither of
us was in good case. We both had trouble enough on our shoulders. I
remember that he spoke very little of his wife, for I would not let
him do so, although I knew she was most tremendously on his mind, and
was, in fact, what had driven him for the moment out of London. Of
course, he had a very natural desire that she should die and have
done with life, with that life which must have been a torment to
herself as it was a perpetual torture and a running sore to him. At
the same time the poor fellow felt that he had no right to wish that
she would die, but I could see the wish in his eyes, and heaven knows
that I wished it fervently for him.
The next morning we went for a long walk across the Downs to the
little village of East Dean. It was blowing a whole gale from the
north east, and it was quite impossible to go near the steep cliffs.
The snow was in places two feet deep, and a sunk road across the
Downs was level with the turf. I think now that none but madmen
would have gone out on such a day. Doubtless we were mad enough; at
any rate we were writers, and by all traditions had the right to be
mad. But when we once got started we meant going through it at all
events. I did not remember many colder days, in spite of my travels,
but we persevered, and at last came to the little village and there
took refuge in the public-house and drank beer. Maitland, with his
extraordinary mixture of fine taste and something which was almost
grossness in regard to food, loved all malt liquors--I think partly
because he felt some strange charm in their being historically
English drinks. The walk back to Eastbourne tried us both hard, for
neither of us had been well fed for months, and the wind and snow in
our faces made walking heavy and difficult. Nevertheless Maitland
was now almost boisterously cheerful, as he often was outwardly when
he had most reason to be the opposite. While he walked back the
chief topic of conversation was the very excellent nature of the
pudding which he had instructed our landlady to prepare against a
hungry return.
He was always extraordinarily fond of rich, succulent dishes. A
_fritto misto_ for instance, made him shout for joy, though he never
met with it until he went to Italy. With what inimitable fervour of
the gastronomic mind would he declare these preferences! Dr. Johnson
said that in a haggis there was much "fine, confused feeding," and
Maitland undoubtedly agreed with him, as he always said when he
quoted the passage. In many of his books there are examples of his
curious feeling with regard to food. They are especially frequent in
"Paternoster Row"; as, for instance, when one character says: "Better
dripping this than I've had for a long time.... Now, with a little
pepper and salt, this bread and dripping is as appetising a food as I
know. I often make a dinner of it." To which the other replies: "I
have done the same myself before now. Do you ever buy
pease-pudding?" and to this the Irishman's reply was enthusiastic.
"I should think so! I get magnificent pennyworths at a shop in
Cleveland Street, of a very rich quality indeed. Excellent faggots
they have there, too. I'll give you a supper of them one night
before you go." I had often heard of this particular shop in
Cleveland Street, and of one shop where they sold beef, kept by a man
whose pride was that he had been carving beef behind the counter for
thirty years without a holiday.
And now we were hurrying back to Eastbourne, Maitland said, not
because it was cold; not because the north-east wind blew; not
because we were exposed to the very bitterest weather we remembered;
but because of an exceedingly rich compound known as an apple
pudding. He and the wind worked me up to an almost equal expression
of ardour, and thus we came back to our poverty-stricken den in good
spirits. But, alas, the dinner that day was actually disastrous.
The meat was grossly overdone, the vegetables were badly cooked, the
beer was thin and flat. We were in dismay, but still we said to each
other hopefully that there was the pudding to come. It was brought
on and looked very fine, and Maitland cut into it with great joy and
gave me a generous helping. I know that I tasted it eagerly, but to
my tongue there was an alien flavour about it. I looked up and said
to Maitland, "It is very curious, but this pudding seems to me to
taste of kerosene." Maitland laughed, but when his turn came to try
he laughed no longer, for the pudding actually did taste of lamp oil.
It appeared, on plaintive and bitter inquiry, that our unfortunate
landlady after making it had put it under the shelf on which she kept
her lamp gear. We subsided on melancholy and mouldy cheese. This
disappointment, however childish it may appear to the better fed, was
to Henry Maitland something really serious. Those who have read "The
Meditations of Mark Sumner," without falling into the error of
thinking that the talk about food in that melancholy book was only
his fun, will understand that it was a very serious matter with
Maitland. It took all his philosophy and a very great deal of mine
to survive the tragedy, and to go on talking as we did of new words
and the riches of philology. And as we talked the wind roared down
our street in a vicious frenzy. It was a monstrously bad time to
have come to Eastbourne, and we had no compensations.
It was the next night that the great news came. In spite of the
dreariest weather we had spent most of the day in the open air.
After our dinner, which this time was more of a success, or at any
rate less of a tragic failure, we were sitting hugging the fire to
keep warm when a telegram was brought in for him. He read it in
silence and handed it over to me with the very strangest look upon
his face that I had ever seen. It was unsigned, and came from
London. The message was: "Your wife is dead." There was nothing on
earth more desirable for him than that she should die, the poor
wretch truly being like a destructive wind, for she had torn his
heart, scorched his very soul, and destroyed him in the beginning of
his life. All irreparable disasters came from her, and through her.
Had it not been for her he might then have held, or have begun to
hope for, a great position at one of the universities. And now a
voice out of the unknown cried that she was dead.
He said to me, with a shaking voice and shaking hands, "I cannot
believe it--I cannot believe it." He was as white as paper; for it
meant so much--not only freedom from the disaster and shame and
misery that drained his life-blood, but it would mean a cessation of
money payments at a time when every shilling was very hard to win.
And yet this was when he was comparatively well known, for it was two
years after the publication of "The Mob." And still, though his
books ran into many editions, for some inexplicable reason, which I
yet hope to explain, he sold them one after another for fifty pounds.
And I knew how he worked; how hard, how remorselessly. I knew who
the chief character was in "Paternoster Row" before "Paternoster Row"
was written. I knew with what inexpressible anguish of soul he
laboured, with what dumb rage against destiny. And now here was
something like freedom at last, if only it were true.
This message came so late at night that there was no possibility of
telegraphing to London to verify it even if he had been sure that he
could get to the original sender. It was also much too late to go up
to town. We sat silently for hours, and I knew that he was going
back over the burning marl of the past. Sometimes he did speak,
asking once and again if it could be true, and I saw that while he
was still uncertain he was bitter and pitiless. Yet if she were only
really dead...
We went up to town together in the morning. In the train he told me
that while he was still uncertain, he could not possibly visit the
place she lived in, and he begged me to go there straight and bring
him word as to the truth of this report. I was to explore the
desperate slum in the New Cut in which she had exhausted the last
dreadful years of her life, and upon leaving him I went there at
once. With Maitland's full permission I described something of the
milieu in "John Quest." On reaching the New Cut I dived into an
inner slum from an outer one, and at last found myself in a kitchen
which was only about eight or nine feet square. It was, of course,
exceedingly dirty. The person in charge of it was a cheerful
red-headed girl of about eighteen years of age. On learning the
cause of my visit she went out and brought in her mother, and I soon
verified the fact that Marian Maitland was dead. She had died the
first bitter night we spent at Eastbourne, and was found next morning
without any blankets, and with no covering for her emaciated body but
a damp and draggled gown.
Presently the neighbours came in to see the gentleman who was
interested in this woman's death. They talked eagerly of the
funeral, for, as Maitland knew only too well, a funeral, to these
people, is one of their great irregular but recurring festivals. At
Maitland's desire I gave them carte blanche up to a certain sum, and
I think they felt that, as the agent of the husband, I behaved very
well. Of course they knew all about the poor girl who lay dead
upstairs, and although they were honest enough people in their way,
and though the red-headed girl to whom I first talked worked hard in
a factory making hooks and eyes, as she told me, they seemed to have
no moral feelings whatever about her very obvious profession. I
myself did not see the dead woman. I was not then acquainted with
death, save among strangers. I could not bring myself to look upon
her. Although death is so dreadful always, the surroundings of death
may make things worse. But still, she _was_ dead, and I hastened
back to Maitland to tell him so. It was a terrible and a painful
relief to him; and when he was sure she was gone, he grieved for her,
grieved for what she might have been, and for what she was. He
remembered now that at intervals she used to send him heart-breaking
messages asking to be forgiven, messages that even his unwisdom at
last could not listen to. But he said very little. So far as the
expression of his emotions went he often had very great self-control.
It is a pity that his self-control so rarely extended itself to acts.
But now he was free. Those who have forged their own chains, and
lived in a hell of their own dreadful making, can understand what
this is and what it means. But he did go down to the pit in which
she died, and when I saw him a day or two later he was strangely
quiet, even for him. He said to me, "My dear chap, she had kept my
photograph, and a very little engraving of the Madonna di San Sisto,
all these years of horrible degradation." He spoke in the almost
inaudible tone that was characteristic of him, especially at that
time. We arranged the funeral together, and she was buried. If only
all the misery that she had caused him could have been buried with
her, it would have been well. She died of what I may call,
euphemistically, specific laryngitis. Once he told me a dreadful
story about her in hospital. One of the doctors at St. Thomas's had
questioned her, and after her answers sent for Maitland, and speaking
to him on the information given him by the wife, was very bitter.
Henry, even as he told me this years after, shook with rage and
indignation. He had not been able to defend himself without exposing
his wife's career.