CHAPTER II
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.