Whatever kind of disaster his marriage was to be for Maitland, there
is no doubt that it was for me also something in the nature of a
catastrophe. There are marriages and marriages. By some of them a
man's friend gains, and by others he loses, and they are the more
frequent, for it is one of the curiosities of human life that a man
rarely finds his friend's wife sympathetic. As it was, I knew that
in a sense I had now lost Henry Maitland, or had partially lost him,
to say the least of it. Unfair as it was to the woman, I felt very
bitter against her, and he knew well what I felt. Thinking of her as
I did, anything like free human intercourse with his new household
would be impossible, unless, indeed, the affair turned out other than
I expected. And then he had left London and gone to his beloved
Devonshire. How much he loved it those who have read "The
Meditations" can tell, for all that is said there about that county
was very sincere, as I can vouch for. Born himself in a grim part of
Yorkshire, and brought up in Mirefields and Moorhampton, that rainy
and gloomy city of the north, he loved the sweet southern county.
And yet it is curious to recognise what a strange passion was his for
London. He had something of the same passion for it as Johnson had,
although the centre of London for him was not Fleet Street but the
British Museum and its great library. He wrote once to his doctor
friend: "I dare not settle far from London, as it means ill-health to
me to be out of reach of the literary 'world'--a small world enough,
truly." But, of course, it was most extraordinarily his world. He
was a natural bookworm compelled to spin fiction. And yet he did
love the country, though he now found no peace there. With his wife
peace was impossible, and this I soon learnt from little things that
he wrote to me, though he was for the first few months of his
marriage exceedingly delicate on this subject, as if he were willing
to give her every possible chance. I was only down in Devonshire
once while he was there with his wife. I went a little trip in a
steamship to Dartmouth, entering its narrow and somewhat hazardous
harbour in the middle of the great blizzard which that year
overwhelmed the south of England, and especially the south of Devon,
in the heaviest snow drifts. When I did at last get away from
Dartmouth, I found things obviously not all they should be, though
very little was said about it between us. I remember we went out for
a walk together, going through paths cut in snow drifts twelve or
even fifteen feet in depth. Though such things had been a common
part of some of my own experiences they were wonderfully new to
Maitland, and made him for a time curiously exhilarated. I did not
stay long in Devon, nor, as a matter of fact, did he. For though he
had gone there meaning to settle, he found the lack of the British
Museum and his literary world too much for him, and besides that his
wife, a girl of the London streets and squares, loathed the country,
and whined in her characteristic manner about its infinite dulness.
Thus it was that he soon left the west and took a small house in
Ewell, about which he wrote me constant jeremiads.
He believed, with no rare ignorance, as those who are acquainted with
the methods of the old cathedral builders will know, that all honest
work had been done of old, that all old builders were honourable men,
and that modern work was essentially unsound. He had never learned
that the first question the instructed ask the attendant verger on
entering a cathedral is: "When did the tower fall down?" It rarely
happens that one is not instantly given a date, not always very long
after that particular tower was completed. I remember that it
annoyed him very much when I proved to him by documentary evidence
that a great portion of the work in Peterborough Cathedral was of the
most shocking and scandalous description. Nevertheless these facts
do not excuse the modern jerry-builder, and the condition of his
house was one, though only one, of the perpetual annoyances he had to
encounter.
But, after all, though pipes break and the roof leaks, that is
nothing if peace dwells in a house. There could be no peace in
Maitland's house, for his wife had neither peace nor any
understanding. Naturally enough she was an uneducated woman. She
had read nothing but what such people read. It is true she did not
speak badly. For some reason which I cannot understand she was not
wholly without aspirates. Nevertheless many of her locutions were
vulgar, and she had no natural refinement. This, I am sure, would
have mattered little, and perhaps nothing, if she had been a simple
housewife, some actual creature of the kitchen like Rousseau's
Thérèse. As I have said, I think that Maitland was really incapable
of a great passion, and I am sure that he would have put up with the
merest haus-frau, if she had known her work and possessed her patient
soul in quiet without any lamentations. If there was any lamenting
to be done Maitland himself might have done it in choice terms not
without humour. And indeed he did lament, and not without cause. On
my first visit to Ewell after his return from Devon I again met Mrs.
Maitland. She made me exceedingly uneasy, both personally, as I had
no sympathy for her, and also out of fear for his future. It did not
take me long to discover that they were then living on the verge of a
daily quarrel, that a dispute was for ever imminent, and that she
frequently broke out into actual violence and the smashing of
crockery. While I was with them she perpetually made whining and
complaining remarks to me about him in his very presence. She said:
"Henry does not like the way I do this, or the way I say that." She
asked thus for my sympathy, casting bitter looks at her husband. On
one occasion she even abused him to my face, and afterwards I heard
her anger in the passage outside, so that I actually hated her and
found it very hard to be civil.
By this time I had established a habit of never spending any time in
the company of folks who neither pleased nor interested me. I
commend this custom to any one who has any work to do in the world.
Thus my forthcoming refusal to see any more of her was anticipated by
Maitland, who had a powerful intuition of the feelings I entertained
for his wife. In fact, things soon became so bad that he found it
necessary to speak to me on the subject, as it was soon nearly
impossible for any one to enter his house for fear of an exhibition
of rage, or even of possible incivility to the guest himself. As he
said, she developed the temper of a devil, and began to make his life
not less wretched, though it was in another way, than the poor
creature had done who was now in her grave. Naturally, however, as
we had been together so much, I could not and would not give up
seeing him. But we had to meet at the station, and going to the
hotel would sit in the smoking-room to have our talk. These talks
were now not wholly of books or of our work, but often of his
miseries. One day when I found him especially depressed he
complained that it was almost impossible for him to get sufficient
peace to do any of his work. On hearing this the notion came to me
that, though I had been unable to prevent him marrying this woman, I
might at any rate make the suggestion that he should take his courage
in both his hands and leave her. But I was in no hurry to put this
into his head so long as there seemed any possibility of some kind of
peace being established. However, she grew worse daily, or so I
heard, and at last I spoke.
He answered my proposal in accents of despair, and I found that he
was now expecting within a few months his first child's birth. Under
many conditions this might have been a joy to him, but now it was no
joy. And yet there was, he said, some possibility that after this
event things might improve. I recognised such a possibility without
much hope of its ever becoming a reality. Indeed it was a vain hope.
It is true enough that for a time, the month or so while she was
still weak after childbirth, she was unable to be actively offensive;
but, honestly, I think the only time he had any peace was before she
was able to get up and move about the house. During the last weeks
of her convalescence she vented her temper and exercised her uncivil
tongue upon the nurses, more than one of whom left the house, finding
it impossible to stay with her. However he was at any rate more or
less at peace in his own writing room during this period. When she
again became well I gathered the real state of the case from him both
from letters and conversations, and I saw that eventually he would
and must leave her. Knowing him as I did, I was aware that there
would be infinite trouble, pain, and worry before this was
accomplished, and yet the symptoms of the whole situation pointed out
the inevitable end. I had not the slightest remorse in doing my best
to bring this about, but in those days I had trouble enough of my own
upon my shoulders, and found it impossible to see him so often as I
wished; especially as a visit from me, or from anybody else, always
meant the loss of a day's work to him. Yet I know that he bore ten
thousand times more than I myself would have borne in similar
circumstances, and I shall give a wrong impression of him if any one
thinks that most of his complaints and confessions were not dragged
out of him by me. He did not always complain readily, but one saw
the trouble in his eyes. Yet now it became evident that he would and
must revolt at last. It grew so clear at last, that I wanted him to
do it at once and save himself years of misery, but to act like that,
not wholly out of pressing and urgent necessity but out of wisdom and
foresight, was wholly beyond Henry Maitland.
It was in such conditions that the child was born and spent the first
months of its life. Those who have read his books, and have seen the
painful paternal interest he has more than once depicted, will
understand how bitterly he felt that his child, the human being for
whose existence he was responsible, should be brought up in such
conditions by a mother whose temper and conduct suggested almost
actual madness. He wrote to me: "My dire need at present is for a
holiday. It is five years since I had a real rest from writing, and
I begin to feel worn out. It is not only the fatigue of inventing
and writing; at the same time I keep house and bring up the boy, and
the strain, I can assure you, is rather severe. What I am now trying
to do is to accumulate money enough to allow of my resting, at all
events from this ceaseless production, for half a year or so. It
profits me nothing to feel that there is a market for my work, if the
work itself tells so severely upon me. Before long I shall really be
unable to write at all. I am trying to get a few short stories done,
but the effort is fearful. The worst of it is, I cannot get away by
myself. It makes me very uncomfortable to leave the house, even for
a day. I foresee that until the boy is several years older there
will be no possibility of freedom for me. Of one thing I have very
seriously thought, and that is whether it would be possible to give
up housekeeping altogether, and settle as boarders in some family on
the Continent. The servant question is awful, and this might be an
escape from it, but of course there are objections. I might find all
my difficulties doubled."
I do not think that this letter requires much comment or
illustration. Although it is written soberly enough, and without
actual accusation, its meaning is as plain as daylight. His wife was
alternately too familiar, or at open hostility with the servant; none
could endure her temper. She complained to him, or the servant
complained to him, and he had to make peace, or to try to make
it--mostly in vain. And then the quarrel broke out anew, and the
servant left. The result was that Maitland himself often did the
household work when he should have been writing. He was dragged away
from his ordinary tasks by an uproar in the kitchen; or perhaps one
or both of the angry women came to him for arbitration about some
point of common decency. There is a phrase of his in "The
Meditations" which speaks of poor Hooker, whose prose he so much
admired, being "vixen-haunted." This epithet of his is a reasonable
and admirable one, but how bitter it was few know so well as myself.
In this place it does not seem to me unnatural or out of place to
comment a little on Raymond, the chief character in "The Vortex." He
was undoubtedly in a measure the later Maitland. His idea was to
present a man whose character developed with somewhat undue slowness.
He said that Raymond would probably never have developed at all after
a certain stage but for the curious changes wrought in his views and
sentiments by the fact of his becoming a father. Of course it must
be obvious to any one, from what I have said, that Maitland himself
would never have remained so long with his second wife after the
first few months if it had not been that she was about to become a
mother. The earlier passages in "The Vortex" where he speaks about
children, or where Raymond himself speaks about them, are meant to
contrast strongly with his way of thinking in the later part of the
book when this particular character had children of his own. The
author declared that Raymond, as a bachelor, was largely an egoist.
Of course the truth of the matter is that Maitland himself was
essentially an egoist. I once suggested to him that he came near
being a solipsist, a word he probably had never heard of till then,
as he never studied psychology, modern or otherwise. However, when
Raymond grew riper in the experience which killed his crude egoism,
he became another man. Maitland, in writing about this particular
book, said: "That Raymond does nothing is natural to the man. The
influences of the whirlpool--that is London--and its draught on the
man's vitality embarrass any efficiency there might have been in
him." Through the whole story of Maitland one feels that everything
that was in any way hostile to his own views of life did essentially
embarrass, and almost make impossible, anything that was in him. He
had no strength to draw nutriment by main force from everything
around him, as a strong man does. He was not so fierce a fire as to
burn every kind of fuel.
I remember in this connection a very interesting passage in Hamley's
"Operations of War": "When a general surveying the map of the theatre
finds direct obstacles in the path he must advance by, he sees in
them, if he be confident of his skill in manoeuvring, increased
opportunities for obtaining strategical successes ... in fact, like
any other complications in a game, they offer on both sides
additional opportunities to skill and talent, and additional
embarrassments to incapacity." But then Maitland loathed and hated
and feared obstacles of every kind. He was apt to sit down before
them wringing his hands, and only desperation moved him, not to
attack, but to elude them. It is an odd thing in this respect to
note that he played no games, and despised them with peculiar vigour.
There is a passage in one of his letters to Rivers about a certain
Evans, mentioned with a note of exclamation, and thus kindly
embalmed: "Evans, strange being! Yet, if his soul is satisfied with
golf and bridge, why should he not go on golfing and bridging? At
all events he is working his way to sincerity."
The long letter I quoted from above was written, I believe, in 1895,
when the boy was nearly three years old. I have not attempted, and
shall not attempt, to give any detailed account month by month, or
even year by year, of his domestic surroundings. It was a wonder to
me that the marriage lasted, but still it did last, and all one knew
was that some day it must come to an end. The record of his life in
these days would be appalling if I remembered it sufficiently, or had
kept a diary--as no doubt I ought to have done--or had all the
documents which may be in existence dealing with that time. That he
endured so many years was incredible, and still he did endure, and
the time went on, and he worked; mostly, as he said to me, against
time, and a good deal on commission. He wrote: "The old fervours do
not return to me, and I have got into the very foolish habit of
perpetually writing against time and to order. The end of this is
destruction." But still I think he knew within him that it could not
last. Had it not been for the boy, and, alas, for the birth of yet
another son, he would now have left her. He acknowledged it to
me--if he could not fight he would have to fly.
This extraordinary lack of power to deal with any obstacle must seem
strange to most men, though no doubt many are weak. Yet few are so
weak as Maitland. Oddly enough I have heard the idea expressed that
there was more power of fight in Maitland than he ever possessed, and
on inquiry I have learned that this notion was founded on a partial,
or perhaps complete misunderstanding of certain things he expressed
in the latter part of "The Vortex." Towards the end of the book it
seems to be suggested that Maitland, or Raymond, tended really
towards what he calls in one of his letters a "barrack-room" view of
life. Some people seem to think that the man who was capable of
writing what he did in that book really meant it, and must have had a
little touch of that native and natural brutality which makes
Englishmen what they are. But Maitland himself, in commenting on
this particular attitude of Raymond, declared that this quasi or
semi-ironic imperialism of the man was nothing but his hopeless
recognition of facts which filled him with disgust. The world was
going in a certain way. There was no refusing to see it. It stared
every one in the eyes. Then he adds: "But _what_ a course for things
to take!"
Raymond in fact talks with a little throwing up of the arm, and in a
voice of quiet sarcasm, "Go ahead--I sit by and watch, and wonder
what will be the end of it all." This was his own habit of mind in
later years. He had come at last and at long last, to recognise a
course of things which formerly he could not, or would not, perceive;
and he recognised it with just that tossing of arm or head,
involuntary of course. I do not think that at this time he would
have seen a battalion of Guards go by and have turned to me saying:
"And this, _this_ is the nineteenth century!" He once wrote to
Rivers, what he had said a hundred times to me: "I have a conviction
that all I love and believe in is going to the devil. At the same
time I try to watch with interest this process of destruction,
admiring any bit of sapper work that is well done." It is rather
amusing to note that in the letter, written in the country, which
puts these things most dolefully, he adds: "The life here shows
little trace of vortical influence." Of course this is a reference
to the whirlpool of London.
In 1896 I was myself married, and went to live in a little house in
Fulham. I understood what peace was, and he had none. As Maitland
had not met my wife for some years I asked him to come and dine with
us. It was not the least heavy portion of his burden that he always
left his own house with anxiety and returned to it with fear and
trembling. This woman of his home was given to violence, even with
her own young children. It was possible, as he knew, for he often
said so to me, that he might return and find even the baby badly
injured. And yet at last he made up his mind to accept my
invitation. Whether it was the fact that he had accepted one from
me--and I often fancy that his wife had a grudge against me because I
would not go to her house any more--I do not know, but when I met him
in the hall of my own house I found him in the most extraordinary
state of nervous and physical agitation. Though usually of a
remarkable, if healthy, pallor, he was now almost crimson, and his
eyes sparkled with furious indignation. He was hot, just as if he
had come out of an actual physical struggle. What he must have
looked like when he left Ewell I do not know, for he had had all the
time necessary to travel from there to Fulham to cool down in. After
we shook hands he asked me, almost breathlessly, to allow him to wash
his face, so I took him into the bathroom. He removed his coat, and
producing his elastic band from his waistcoat pocket, put it about
his hair like a fillet, and began to wash his face in cold water. As
he was drying himself he broke out suddenly: "I can't stand it any
more. I have left her for ever." I said: "Thank heaven that you
have. I am very glad of it--and for every one's sake don't go back
on it."
Whatever the immediate cause of this outburst was, it seems that that
afternoon the whole trouble came to a culmination. The wife behaved
like a maniac; she shrieked, and struck him. She abused him in the
vilest terms, such as he could not or would not repeat to me. It was
with the greatest difficulty that I at last got him calm enough to
meet any one else. When he did calm down after he had had something
to eat and a little to drink, the prospect of his freedom, which he
believed had come to him once more, inspired him with pathetic and
peculiar exhilaration. In one sense I think he was happy that night.
He slept in London.
I should have given a wholly false impression of Maitland if any one
now imagined that I believed that the actual end had come to his
marriage. No man knew his weakness better than I did, and I moved
heaven and earth in my endeavours to keep him to his resolution, to
prevent him going back to Epsom on any pretext, and all my efforts
were vain. In three days I learned that his resolution had broken
down. By the help of some busybody who had more kindness than
intelligence, they patched up a miserable peace, and he went back to
Ewell. And yet that peace was no peace. Maitland, perhaps the most
sensitive man alive, had to endure the people in the neighbouring
houses coming out upon the doorstep, eager to inquire what disaster
was occurring in the next house. There were indeed legends in the
Epsom Road that the mild looking writer beat and brutalised his wife,
though most knew, by means of servants' chatter, what the actual
facts were.
It was in this year that he did at last take an important step which
cost him much anxiety before putting it through. His fears for his
eldest child were so extreme that he induced his people in the north
to give the child a home--the influence and example of the mother he
could no longer endure for the boy. His wife parted with the child
without any great difficulty, though of course she made it an
occasion for abusing her husband in every conceivable way. He wrote
to me in the late summer of that year: "I much want to see you, but
just now it is impossible for me to get to town, and the present
discomfort of everything here forbids me to ask you to come. I am
straining every nerve to get some work done, for really it begins to
be a question whether I shall ever again finish a book.
Interruptions are so frequent and so serious. The so-called holiday
has been no use to me; a mere waste of time--but I was obliged to go,
for only in that way could I have a few weeks with the boy who, as I
have told you, lives now at Mirefields and will continue to live
there. I shall never let him come back to my own dwelling. Have
patience with me, old friend, for I am hard beset." He ends this
letter with: "If the boy grows up in clean circumstances, that will
be my one satisfaction."
Whether he had peace or not he still worked prodigiously, though not
perhaps for so many hours as was his earlier custom. But his health
about this time began to fail. Much of this came from his habits of
work, which were entirely incompatible with continued health of brain
and body. He once said to Rivers: "Visitors--I fall sick with terror
in thinking of them. If by rare chance any one comes here it means
to me the loss of a whole day, a most serious matter." And his whole
day was, of course, a long day. No man of letters can possibly sit
for ever at the desk during eight hours, as was frequently "his brave
custom" as he phrased it somewhere. If he had worked in a more
reasonable manner, and had been satisfied with doing perhaps a
thousand words a day, which is not at all an unreasonably small
amount for a man who works steadily through most of the year, his
health might never have broken down in the way it did. He had been
moved in a way towards these hours, partly by actual desperation;
partly by the great loneliness which had been thrust upon him; very
largely by the want of money which prevented him from amusing himself
in the manner of the average man, but chiefly by his sense of
devotion to what he was doing. One of his favourite stories was that
of Heyne, the great classical scholar, who was reported to work
sixteen hours a day. This he did, according to the literary
tradition, for the whole of his working life, except upon the day
when he was married. He made, for that occasion only, a compact with
the bride that he was to be allowed to work half his usual stint.
And half Heyne's usual amount was Maitland's whole day, which I
maintain was at least five hours too much. This manner of working,
combined with his quintessential and habitual loneliness made it very
hard, not only upon him, but also on his friends. It was quite
impossible to see him, even about matters of comparative urgency,
unless a meeting had been arranged beforehand. For even after his
work was done, it was never done. He started preparing for the next
day, turning over phrases in his mind, and considering the next
chapter. I believe that in one point I was very useful to him in
this matter, for I suggested to him, as I have done to others, that
my own practice of finishing a chapter and then writing some two or
three lines of the next one while my mind was warm upon the subject,
was a vast help for the next day's labour.
Now the way he worked was this. After breakfast, at nine o'clock, he
sat down and worked till one. Then he had his midday meal, and took
a little walk. In the afternoon, about half-past three, he sat down
again and wrote till six o'clock or a little after. Then he worked
again from half-past seven to ten. I very much doubt whether there
is any modern writer who has ever tried to keep up work at this rate
who did not end in a hospital or a lunatic asylum, or die young. To
my mind it shows, in a way that nothing else can, that he had no
earthly business to be writing novels and spinning things largely out
of his subjective mind, when he ought to have been dealing with the
objective world, or with books. I myself write with a certain amount
of ease. It may, indeed, be difficult to start, but when a thing is
begun I go straight ahead, writing steadily for an hour, or perhaps
an hour and a half--rarely any more. I have then done my day's work,
which is now very seldom more than two thousand words, although on
one memorable occasion I actually wrote thirteen thousand words with
the pen in ten hours. Maitland used to write three or four of his
slips, as he called them, which were small quarto pages of very fine
paper, and on each slip there were twelve hundred words. Whether he
wrote one, or two, or three slips in the day he took an equal length
of time.
Among my notes I find one about a letter of his written in June 1895
to Mrs. Lake, declining an invitation to visit Dr. Lake's house
which, no doubt, would have done him a great deal of good. He says:
"Let me put before you an appalling list of things that have to be
done, (1) Serial story (only begun) of about eighty thousand words.
(2) Short novel for Cassell's to be sent in by end of October.
Neither begun nor thought of. (3) Six short stories for the _English
Illustrated_--neither begun nor thought of. (4) Twenty papers for
_The Sketch_ of a thousand words each. Dimly foreseen." Now to a
man who had the natural gift of writing fiction and some reasonable
time to do it in, this would seem no such enormous amount of work.
For Maitland it was appalling, not so much, perhaps, on account of
the actual amount of labour--if it had been one book--but for its
variousness. He moved from one thing to another in fiction with
great slowness.
As I have said, his health was not satisfactory. I shall have
something to say about this in detail a little later. It was his own
opinion, and that of certain doctors, that his lung was really
affected by tuberculosis. Of this I had then very serious doubts.
But he wrote in January 1897: "The weather and my lung are keeping me
indoors at present, but I should much like to come to you.
Waterpipes freezing--a five-pound note every winter to the plumber.
Of course this is distinctly contrived by the building fraternity."
But things were not always as bad as may be gathered from a casual
consideration of what I have said. In writing a life events come too
thickly. For instance in 1897 he wrote to me: "Happily things are
far from being as bad as last year." It appears that a certain lady,
a Miss Greathead, about whom I really know nothing but what he told
me, interested herself with the utmost kindness in his domestic
affairs. He wrote to me: "Miss Greathead has been of very great use,
and will continue to be so, I think. This house is to be given up in
any case at Michaelmas, and another will not be taken till I see my
way more clearly. Where I myself shall live during the autumn is
uncertain. We must meet in the autumn. Work on--I have plans for
seven books."