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

by Morley Roberts

CHAPTER XI

It was Maitland's custom to rely for advice and assistance on particular people at certain crises. In some cases he now appealed to Rivers; in very many he appealed to me; but when his health was particularly involved it was his custom to relapse desperately on his friend Dr. Lake. He even came to Lake on his return from Magna Graecia when he had taken Potsdam on his way home to England. He had gone there at Schmidt's strong invitation and particular desire that he should taste for once a real Westphalian ham. It is a peculiarly savage and not wholly safe custom of Germans to eat such hams uncooked, and Maitland, having fallen in with this custom, though he escaped trichinosis, procured for himself a peculiarly severe attack of indigestion. He came over from Folkestone to Lake in order to get cured. The ham apparently had not given him the lasting satisfaction which he usually got out of fine fat feeding. As I have said, Lake and Maitland had been friends from the time that Maitland's father bought his chemist's business from the Doctor's father. For they had been schoolfellows together at Hinkson's school in Mirefields. Nevertheless it was only in 1894 that they renewed their old acquaintance. Dr. Lake saw him once at Ewell, soon after a local practitioner had frightened Maitland very seriously by diagnosing phthisis and giving a gloomy prognosis. On that occasion Lake went over Maitland's chest and found very little wrong. Technically speaking, there was perhaps a slight want of expansion at the apex of each lung, and apparently some emphysema at the base of the left one, but certainly no active tubercular mischief.

I speak of these things more or less in detail because health played so great a part in the drama of his life; as, indeed, it does in most lives. It is not the casual thing that novelists mostly make of it. It is a perpetually acting cause. Steady ill-health, even more than actually acute disease, is what helps to bring about most tragedies. When Lake made his diagnosis, with which I agree, though there is something else I must presently add to it, he took him to London, that he might see a notable physician, in order to reassure Maitland's mind thoroughly. They went together to Dr. Prior Smithson. I have never noted that it was Maitland who introduced Dr. Lake to Rivers. When Lake had arranged this London visit Maitland wrote to Rivers saying: "I am coming up to town to see a scoundrel specialist in diseases of the lung, who is as likely as not to upset all my plans of life. But don't be afraid of my company; you shall have no pathology. There will be with me an old schoolfellow of mine, a country surgeon, in whose house I am staying at present. He would think it very delightful to meet you." They did meet upon that occasion, when Dr. Smithson confirmed Lake's diagnosis and temporarily did a great deal to reassure Maitland. From my own medical knowledge and my general study of Maitland, combined with what some of his doctors have told me, I have come to the conclusion that he did suffer from pulmonary tuberculosis, but that it was practically arrested at an early stage. However, even arrested tuberculosis in many cases leaves a very poor state of nutrition. That his joy in food remained with him, though with a few lapses, points strongly to the conclusion that at this time tuberculosis was certainly not very active in him. He always needed much food, and food, especially, which he liked and desired. To want it was a tragedy, as I shall show presently.

In 1897 when he went down to Salcombe he reported to Lake a great improvement in health, saying that his cough was practically gone, and that of course the wonderful weather accounted for it. He ate heartily, and even walked five miles a day without fatigue. He added: "The only difficulty is breathing through the nose. The other day a traction engine passed me on the road, and the men upon it looked about them wondering where the strange noises came from. It was my snoring! All the nasal cavities are excoriated! But I shall get used to this. I have a suspicion that it is not the lung that accounts for this difficulty, for it has been the same ever since I can remember." By this he probably meant merely that it had lasted a long time. There was a specific reason for it. From Salcombe he reported to Lake that he had recovered a great deal of weight, but that for some time his wheezing had been worse than ever when the weather got very bad. He wrote: "Then again a practical paradox that frenzies one, for sleep came when bad weather prevented me from being so much out of doors!" All this he did not understand, but it is highly probable that at that time he had a little actual tubercular mischief, and a slight rise of temperature. As frequently happens, enforced rest in the house did for him what nothing else could do. But his health certainly was something of a puzzle. In 1898, when he was in Paris with Thérèse, he saw a Dr. Piffard, apparently not a lung specialist, but, as I am told, a physician of high standing. This doctor spoke rather gravely to him, and of course told him that he was working much too hard, for he was still keeping up his ridiculous habit of writing eight hours a day. He said that there was a moist spot in the right lung, with a little chronic bronchitis, and that the emphysema was very obvious. He had, too, some chronic rheumatism, and also on the right side of his forehead what Maitland described as a patch of psoriasis. Psoriasis, however, is not as a rule unilateral, and it was due to something else. This patch had been there for about a year, and was slowly getting worse. Dr. Piffard prescribed touching him under the right clavicle with the actual cautery, and for the skin gave him some subcutaneous injections of an arsenical preparation. He fed him with eggs, milk, and cod-liver oil, ordering much sleep and absolute rest. During this treatment he improved somewhat, and owned that he was really better. The cough had become trifling, his breath was easier and his sleep very good. His strength had much increased. He also declared that he saw a slight amelioration in the patch of so-called psoriasis. The truth is, I think, that nearly all this improvement was due to making him rest and eat. No doubt very much of his ill-health was the result of his abnormal habits, although there was something else at the back of it. For one thing he had rarely taken sufficient exercise, the exercise necessary for his really fine physique. As I have said, he never played a game in his life after he left Hinkson's school in Mirefields. Cricket he knew not. Football was a mystery to him, and a brutal mystery at that. It is true that occasionally he rowed in a boat at the seaside, for he did so at Salcombe when his eldest boy was there with him, but any kind of game or sport he actually loathed. It was a surprise to me to find out that Rivers, while he was at Folkestone, actually persuaded him to take to a bicycle. He even learned to like it. Rivers told Lake that he rode not badly, and with great dignity; and as Rivers rode beside him he heard him murmur: "Marvellous proceedings! Was the like ever seen?"

However, the time was now coming when he was to appeal to Lake once more. In 1901 he had proposed to come over to England and see me, but he said that the doctor in Paris had forbidden him to go north, rather indicating the south for him. He wrote to me: "Now I must go to the centre of France—I don't think the Alps are possible—and vegetate among things which serve only to remind me that here is not England. Then, again, I had thought night and day of an English potato, of a slice of English meat, of tarts and puddings, and of teacakes. Night and day had I looked forward to ravening on these things. Well, well!" But he did at last come back to England for some time.

There is no doubt that the feeding in his French home was not fat, or fine, or confused feeding. Probably the notion of a Scotch haggis would give any French cook a fit of apoplexy. Just before he did come over from Paris, Lake had a letter from him which was much like the one he wrote to me: "Best wishes for the merry, merry time,—if merriment can be in the evil England of these days. I wish I could look in upon you at Christmas. I should roar with joy at an honest bit of English roast beef. Could you post a slice in a letter?—with gravy?" Lake said to his wife when he received this letter: "Why, this is written by a starving man!" Naturally enough, although I heard from him comparatively seldom, I had always been aware of these hankerings of his for England and English food. He did not take kindly to exile, or to the culinary methods of a careful French interior. Truly as he loved the Latin countries, there was much in their customs which troubled him greatly, and the food was his especial trouble when he was not being fed in Italy with oil and Chianti. I find occasional melancholy letters of his upon the subject, when he indulged in dithyrambs about the fine abundance of feeding in England—eggs and bacon and beer. There was no doubt he was not living in the way he should have lived. At any rate, it was about this time—although I did not know it, as I was either in the North of England or abroad, I forget which—that he came once more to Lake, and was found standing on his doorstep tolerably early in the morning. According to the doctor, on his arrival from Paris he was in the condition of a starved man. The proof of this is very simple. At that time, and for long after, Rivers was living at Folkestone, and as Lake's house was at that time full he was unable to entertain Maitland for long, and it was proposed that he should go over for a time and stay at Folkestone. When Lake examined Maitland he was practically no more than a skeleton, but after one week in Rivers' house he had picked up no less than seven pounds weight. There were then no physical signs of active mischief in the lungs except the remaining and practically incurable patch of emphysema. Although this sudden increase of weight does not entirely exclude tuberculosis, it is yet rather uncommon for so rapid an increase to take place in such cases, and it rather puts tuberculosis out of court as being in any way the real cause of much of his ill-health. Now of all this I knew very little, or next door to nothing, until afterwards. Although I was aware that he was uneasy about many things, I had not gathered that there was anything seriously wrong with him except his strong and almost irresistible desire to return to England. I now know that his reticence in speaking to me was due to his utter inability to confess that his third venture had almost come to disaster over the mere matter of the dining-table. I knew so much of the past that he feared to tell me of the present, though I do not think he could have imagined that I should say anything to make him feel that he had once again been a sad fool for not insisting good-humouredly on having the food he wanted. But he was ashamed to speak to me of his difficulties, fearing, perhaps, that I might not understand, or understand too well.

Now he and Thérèse lived together with Madame Espinel. The old lady, a very admirable and delicate creature of an aristocratic type, was no longer young, and was typically French. She was in a poor state of health, and lived, like Cornaro, on next to nothing. Her views on food were what Maitland would have described as highly exiguous. She stood bravely by the French breakfast, a thing Maitland could endure with comfort for no more than a week or two at a time. Her notions as to the midday meal and dinner were not characterised by that early English abundance which he so ardently desired. After a long period of subdued friction on the subject it appears that his endurance of what he called prolonged starvation actually broke down. He demanded something for breakfast, something fat, something in the nature of bacon. How this was procured I do not know; I presume that bacon can be bought in Paris, though I do not remember having ever seen it there; perhaps it was imported from England for his especial benefit. However pleasing for the moment the result may have been to him from the gastronomic point of view, it led Madame Espinel to make as he alleged, uncalled-for and bitter remarks upon the English grossness of his tastes. As he was certainly run down and much underfed, his nerves were starved too, and he got into one of his sudden rages and practically ran away from France. I hinted, or said, not long ago that he was in a way an intellectual coward because he would never entertain any question as to the nature of the universe, or of our human existence in it. Things were to be taken as they stood, and not examined, for fear of pain or mental disturbance. It was a little later than this that Rivers said acutely to Lake: "Why, the man is a moral coward. He stands things up to a certain point and then runs away." So now he ran away from French feeding to Lake's doorstep, and Lake, as I have said, sent him to Rivers with the very best results, for Mrs. Rivers took a great interest in him, looking on him no doubt as a kind of foolish child of genius, and fed him, by Lake's direction, for all that she was worth. As soon as he was in anything like condition, or getting on towards it, he was unable to remain any longer at Folkestone and proposed to return once more to France. This, however, the doctor forbade, and thinking that a prolonged course of feeding and rest was the one thing he required, induced him to go to a sanatorium in the east of England. At this time Lake had practically no belief whatever in the man being tuberculous, but he used Maitland's firm conviction that he was in that condition to induce him to enter this establishment. It was perhaps the best thing which could be done for him. He was looked after very well, and the doctor at the sanatorium agreed with Lake in finding no evidence of active pulmonary trouble.

As I have said, Maitland kept much, or most, of this from me—it was very natural. He wrote to me from the sanatorium very many letters, from which I shall not quote, as they were after all only the natural moans of a solitary invalid. But he forbade me to come to him, and I did not insist on making the visit which I proposed. I was quite aware, if it were only by instinct and intuition, that he had no desire for me to discover exactly how things had been going with him in France. Nevertheless I did understand vaguely, though it was not till afterwards that I discovered there had been a suggestion made that he should not return there, or, indeed, go back to the circumstances which had proved so nearly disastrous. I do not think that this suggestion was ever made personally to him, although I understand it was discussed by some of his friends. It appears that a year or so afterwards when he was talking to Miss Kingdon, she told him that it had been thought possible that he might not return to France. This he received with much amazement and indignation, for certainly he did go back, and henceforth I believe the management of the kitchen was conducted on more reasonable lines. Certainly he recovered his normal weight, and soon after his return was actually twelve stone. As a matter of fact, even before he left the sanatorium, he protested that he was actually getting obese.

He was perfectly conscious after these experiences at Folkestone, and the east of England, that he owed very much both to Lake and Rivers. In fact he wrote to the doctor afterwards, saying that he and Rivers had picked him out of a very swampy place. He had always a great admiration for Rivers as a writer, and used to marvel wonderfully at his success. It seemed an extraordinary thing to Maitland that a man could do good work and succeed by it in England.

It was in 1902 that Maitland and Thérèse took up their abode in St. Pée d'Ascain, under the shadow of the Pyrenees. From there he wrote me very frequently, and seemed to be doing a great deal of work. He liked the place, and, as there was an English colony in the town, had made not a few friends or acquaintances. By now it was a very long time since I had seen him, for we had not met during the time of his illness in England; and as I had been very much overworked, it occurred to me that three or four days at sea, might do something for me, and that I could combine this with a visit to my old friend. I did not, however, write to him that I was coming. Knowing his ways and his peculiar nervousness, which at this time most visibly grew upon him, I thought it best to say nothing until I actually came to Bordeaux. When I reached the city on the Gironde I put up at a hotel and telegraphed to know whether he could receive me. The answer I got was one word only, "Venez," and I went down by the early train, through the melancholy Landes, and came at last to St. Pée by the way of Bayonne. He met me at the station—which, by the way, has one of the most beautiful views I know—and I found him looking almost exactly as he had looked before, save that he wore his hair for the time a little differently from his custom in order to hide a fading scar upon his forehead, the result of that mysterious skin trouble. We were, I know, very glad to meet.

I stayed at a little hotel by myself as he could not put me up, but went later to his house. It was now that I at last met Thérèse. As I have said, she was a very beautiful woman, tall and slender, of a pale, but clear complexion, very melancholy lovely eyes, and a voice that was absolute music. I could not help thinking that he had at last come home, for at that time my knowledge of their little domestic difficulties owing to the warring customs of their different countries was very vague, and she impressed me greatly. And yet I knew before I left that night that all was not well with Maitland, though it seemed so well with him. He complained to me when we were alone about his health, and even then protested somewhat forcibly against the meals. The house itself, or their apartment, was—from the foreign point of view—quite comfortable, but it did not suggest the kind of surroundings which I knew Maitland loved. There is, save in the best, a certain air of cold barrenness about so many foreign houses. The absence of rugs or carpets and curtains, the polish and exiguity of the furniture, the general air of having no more in the rooms than that which will just serve the purposes of life did not suit his sense of abundance and luxury.

Blake has said, though I doubt if I quote with accuracy: "We do not know that we have enough until we have had too much," and this is a saying of wisdom as well concerning the things of the mind as those of the body. He had had at last a little too much domesticity, and, besides that, his desires were set towards London and the British Museum, with possibly half the year spent in Devonshire. He yearned to get away from the little polished French home he had made for himself and take Thérèse back to England with him. But this was impossible, for her mother still lived with them and naturally would not consent to expatriate herself at her age from her beloved France. It had been truly no little sacrifice for her, a very gentle and delicate woman even then suffering from cardiac trouble, to leave Paris and its neighbourhood and stay with her child nigh upon the frontier of Spain, almost beyond the borders of French civilisation.

I stayed barely a week in St. Pée d'Ascain, but during that time we talked much both of his work and of mine. Once more his romance of the sixth century was in his mind and on his desk, though he worked more, perhaps, at necessary pot-boilers than at this long pondered task. Although he did not write so much as of old I found it almost impossible to get him to go out with me, save now and again for half an hour in the warmest and quietest part of the day. He had developed a great fear of death, and life seemed to him extraordinarily fragile. Such a feeling is ever the greatest warning to those who know, and yet I think if he had been rather more courageous and had faced the weather a little more, it might have been better for him. During these few days I became very friendly with Madame Espinel and her daughter, but more especially with the latter, because she spoke English, and my French has never been very fluent. It requires at least a month's painful practice for me to become more or less intelligible to those who speak it by nature. As I went away he gave me a copy of his new book "The Meditations of Mark Sumner." It is one of those odd things which occur so frequently in literary life that I myself had in a way given to him the notion of this book. It was not that I suggested that he should write it, indeed I had developed the idea of such a book to him upon my own account, for I proposed at that time to write a short life of an imaginary man of letters to whom I meant to attribute what I afterwards published in "Apteryx." Perhaps this seed had lain dormant in Maitland's mind for years, and when he at last wrote the book he had wholly forgotten that it was I who first suggested the idea. Certainly no two books could have been more different, although my own plan was originally much more like his. In the same way I now believe that my story "The Purification" owed its inception without my being aware of it to the suppressed passage in "Outside the Pale" of which I spoke some time ago. This passage I never read; but, when Maitland told me of it, it struck me greatly and remained in my mind. These influences are one of the great uses of literary companionship among men of letters. As Henry Maitland used to say: "We come together and strike out sparks."

As I went north by train from St. Pée d'Ascain to Bordeaux, passing ancient Dax and all the sombre silences of the wounded serried rows of pines which have made an infertile soil yield something to commerce, Maitland's spirit, his wounded and often sickly spirit, was with me. I say "sickly" with a certain reluctance, and yet that is what I felt, for I know I read "The Meditations" with great revolt in spite of its obvious beauty and literary sincerity. Life, as I know well, is hard and bitter enough to break any man's spirit, and I knew that Maitland had been through a fire that not many men had known, yet as I read I thought, and still think, that in this book he showed an undue failure of courage. If he had been through so many disasters yet there was still much left for him, or should have been. He had not suffered the greatest disaster of all, for since the death of his father in his early youth he had lost none that he loved. The calculated dispirited air of the book afflicted me, and yet, naturally enough, I found it wonderfully interesting; for here was so much of my lifelong friend, even though now and again there are little lapses in sincerity when he put another face on things, and pretended, even to himself, that he had felt in one way and not in another. There is in it only a brief mention of myself, when he refers to the one solitary friend he possessed in London through so many years which were only not barren to him in the acquisition of knowledge.

But even as I read in the falling night I came to the passage in which he speaks of the Anabasis. It is curious to think of, but I doubt if he had ever heard that modern scholarship refuses to believe it was Xenophon who wrote this book. Most assuredly had he heard it he would have rejected so revolutionary a notion with rage and indignation, for to him Xenophon and the Anabasis were one. In speaking of the march of the Greeks he quotes the passage where they rewarded and dismissed the guide who had led them through very dangerous country. The text says: "when evening came he took leave of us, and went his way by night." On reaching Bordeaux I surprised and troubled the telegraph clerk at the railway station by telegraphing to Henry Maitland those words in the original Greek, though naturally I had to write them in common script. Often-times I had been his guide but had never led him in safety.

When I reached England again I wrote him a very long letter about "The Meditations," and in answer received one which I may here quote: "My dear old boy, it is right and good that the first word about 'Mark Sumner' should come from you. I am delighted that you find it readable. For a good ten years I had this book in mind vaguely, and for two years have been getting it into shape. You will find that there is not very much reminiscence; more philosophising. Why, of course, the solitary friend is you. Good old Schmidt is mentioned later. But the thing is a curious blend, of course, of truth and fiction. Why, it's just because the world is 'inexplicable' that I feel my interest in it and its future grows less and less. I am a little oppressed by 'the burden of the mystery'; not seldom I think with deep content of the time when speculation will be at an end. But my delight in the beauty of the visible world, and my enjoyment of the great things of literature, grow stronger. My one desire now is to utter this passion—yet the result of one's attempt is rather a poor culmination for Life."

During this year, and indeed during the greater part of 1902, I was myself very ill and much troubled, though I worked exceedingly hard upon my longest book, "Rachel." In consequence of all I went through during the year I wrote to him very seldom until the beginning of the following spring I was able to send him the book. For a long time after discovering the almost impossibility of making more than a mere living out of fiction, I had in a sense given up writing for the public, as every man is more or less bound to do at last if he be not gratified with commercial success. Indeed for many years I wrote for some three people: for my wife; for Rawson, the naturalist, my almost lifelong friend; and for Maitland, the only man I had known longer than Rawson. Provided they approved, and were a little enthusiastic, I thought all was well, even though I could earn no more than a mere living. And yet I was conscious through all these working years that I had never actually conquered Maitland's utmost approval. For I knew what his enthusiasm was when he was really roused; how obvious, how sincere, and how tremendous. When I reflect that I did at last conquer it just before he died I have a certain melancholy pleasure in thinking of that book of mine, which indeed in many ways means very much to me, much more than I can put down, or would put down for any one now living. Were this book which I am now doing a life of myself rather than a sketch of him, I should certainly put in the letter, knowing that I should be forgiven for inserting it because it was a letter of Maitland's. It was, indeed, a highly characteristic epistle, for when he praised he praised indeed, and his words carried conviction to me, ever somewhat sceptical of most men's approval. He did even more than write to me, for I learnt that he spoke about this book to other friends of his, especially, as I know, to Edmund Roden; and also to George Meredith, who talked to me about it with obvious satisfaction when I next met him. Nothing pleased Maitland better than that any one he loved should do good work. If ever a man lived who was free from the prevalent vices of artistic and literary jealousy, it was Maitland.

But now his time was drawing to an end. He and Thérèse and Madame Espinel left St. Pée d'Ascain in June 1903 and went thirty miles further into the Pyrenees. He wrote to me a few days after reaching the little mountain town of St. Christophe. The change apparently did him good. He declared that he had now no more sciatica, of which disease, by the way, I had not previously heard, and he admitted that his general health was improving. St. Christophe is very picturesquely situated, and Maitland loved it not the less for its associations in ancient legend, since it is not very far from the Port or Col de Roncesvalles, where the legendary Roland was slain fighting in the rearguard to protect Charlemagne's army. He and Thérèse went once further down the valley and stayed a night at Roncesvalles. If any man's live imagination heard the horn of Roland blow I think it should be Maitland. And yet though he took a great pleasure in this country of his, it was not England, nor had he all things at his command which he desired. I find that he now greatly missed the British Museum, which readers of "The Meditations" will know he much frequented in those old days. For he was once more hard at work upon "Basil," and wrote to me that he was greatly in want of exact knowledge as to the procedure in the execution of wills under the later Roman Empire. This was a request for information, and such requests I not infrequently received, always doing my best to tell him what I could discover, or to give him the names of authorities not known to himself. He frequently referred to me about points of difficulty, even when he was in England but away from London. At that time, naturally enough, I knew nothing whatever about wills under the Roman Empire, but in less than a week after he had written to me I think it highly probable that I knew more than any lawyer in London who was not actually lecturing on the subject to some pupils. I sent him a long screed on the matter. Before this reached him I got another letter giving me more details of what he required, and since this is certainly of some interest as showing his literary methods and conscientiousness I think it may be quoted. He says: "And now, hearty thanks for troubling about the legal question. The time with which I am concerned is about A.D. 540. I know, of course, that degeneration and the Gothic War made semi-chaos of Roman civilisation; but as a matter of fact the Roman law still existed. The Goths never interfered with it, and portions even have been handed down. Now the testator is a senator. He has one child only, a daughter, and to her leaves most of his estate. There are legacies to two nephews, and to a sister. A very simple will, you see—no difficulty about it. But he dying, all the legatees being with him at the time, how, as a matter of fact, were things settled? Was an executor appointed? Might an executor be a legatee?

Probate, I think, as you say, there was none, but who inherited? Still fantastic things were done in those times, but what would the law have dictated? Funny, too, that this is the only real difficulty which bothers me in the course of my story. As regards all else that enters into the book I believe I know as much as one can without being a Mommsen. The senator owns property in Rome and elsewhere. I rather suppose it was a case of taking possession if you could, and holding if no one interfered with you. Wills of this date were frequently set aside on the mere assertion of a powerful senator that the testator had verbally expressed a wish to benefit him.... It is a glorious age for the romancer." As a full answer to this letter I borrowed and sent to him Saunders' "Justinian," and received typically exaggerated thanks.