The private life of Henry Maitland: A record dictated by J. H.

by Morley Roberts

CHAPTER VIII

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."