No doubt my proposal sounded absurd, unconventional, and perhaps not a little horrifying. Nevertheless when I have had anything to do in life I have not been accustomed to let convention stand in my way. Such marriages have been arranged and have not been unsuccessful. There was, I thought, a real possibility of such a marriage as I proposed being anything but a failure. Our conversation ended at last in both of them undertaking to consider the matter if, after meeting Maitland again, they still remained of the same mind, and if he found that such a step was possible. I have often wondered since whether any situation exactly like this ever occurred before. I own that I found it somewhat interesting, and when at last I went back to Maitland I felt entitled to tell him that he could do much better than marrying an unknown girl of the lower classes whom he had accosted in the streets in desperation. But he received what I had to say in a very curious manner. It seemed to depress him profoundly. Naturally enough, I did not tell him the names of those who were prepared to make his acquaintance, but I did tell him that I had been to a lady who had once met him and greatly admired his work, who would be ready to consider the possibility of her becoming his wife if on meeting once again they proved sympathetic. He shook his head grimly, and, after a long silence, he told me that he had not kept his word, and that he had asked Ada Brent to marry him. He had, he said, gone too far to withdraw.
There is such a thing in life as the tyranny of honour, and personally I cared very little for this point of honour when I thought of his future. It was not as if this girl's affections were in any way engaged. If they had been I would have kept silence, bitterly as I regretted the whole affair. She was curious about him, and that was all. It would do her no harm to lose him, and, indeed, as the event proved, it would have been better if she had not married at all. Therefore I begged him to shut up the flat and leave London at once. I even offered to try and find the money for him to do so. But, like all weak people, he was peculiarly obstinate, and nothing that I could urge had the least effect upon him. I have often thought it was his one great failure in rectitude which occurred at Moorhampton that made him infinitely more tenacious of doing nothing which might seem in any way dishonourable, however remotely. I did not succeed in moving him, with whatever arguments I plied him, and the only satisfaction I got out of it was the sense that he knew I was most deeply interested in him, and had done everything, even much more than might have been expected, to save him from what I thought must lead to irreparable misery. Certainly the whole incident was remarkable. There was, perhaps, a little air of curiously polite comedy about it, and yet it was the prelude to a tragedy.
It was soon after this, in fact it was on the following Sunday, that I made the acquaintance of the young woman who was to be his second wife, to bear his children, to torture him for years, to drive him almost mad, and once more make a financial slave of him. We three met in the gloomy sitting-room at 7K. My first impression of this girl was more unfavourable than I had expected. She was the daughter of a small tradesman but little removed from an artisan, and she looked it. In the marriage certificate her father is described as a carver, for what reason I am unable to determine, for I have a very distinct recollection that Maitland told me he was a bootmaker, probably even a cobbler. I disliked the young woman at first sight, and never got over my early impression. From the very beginning it seemed impossible that she could ever become in any remote degree what he might justifiably have asked for in a wife. Yet she was not wholly disagreeable in appearance. She was of medium height and somewhat dark. She had not, however, the least pretence to such beauty as one might hope to find even in a slave of the kitchen. She possessed neither face nor figure, nor a sweet voice, nor any charm—she was just a female. And this was she that the most fastidious man in many ways, that I knew, was about to marry. I went away with a sick heart, for it was nothing less than a frightful catastrophe, and I had to stand by and see it happen. He married her on March 20, 1891, and went to live near Exeter.
CHAPTER VII
For many months after he left London I did not see Maitland, although we continued to correspond, somewhat irregularly. He was exceedingly reticent as to the results of his marriage, and I did not discover definitely for some time to what extent it was likely to prove a failure. Indeed, I had many things to do, and was both financially and in other matters in a parlous condition. In some ways it was a relief to me that he should be living in the country, as I always felt, rightly or wrongly, a certain feeling of responsibility with regard to him when he was close at hand. Marriage always takes one's friends away from one, and for a time he was taken from me. But as I am not anxious to write in great detail about the more sordid facts of his life, especially when they do not throw light on his character, I am not disturbed at knowing little of the earlier days of his second marriage. The results are sufficient, and they will presently appear. For Maitland remained Maitland, and his character did not alter now. So I may return for a little while to matters more connected with his literary life.
I have, I think, before this endeavoured to describe or suggest his personal appearance, but whenever I think of him I regret deeply that no painter ever made an adequate portrait of the man. He was especially interesting-looking, and most obviously lovable and sympathetic when any of his feelings were roused. His grey eyes were very bright and intelligent, his features finely cut, and at times he was almost beautiful; although his skin was not always in such a good condition as it should have been, and he was always very badly freckled. For those who have never seen him a photograph published in a dull literary journal, which is now defunct, is certainly the most adequate and satisfying presentment of him in existence. On a close inspection of this photograph it will be observed that he brushed his hair straight backward from his forehead without any parting. He had a curious way of dressing his hair, about which he was very particular. It was very fine hair of a brown colour, perhaps of a rather mousy tint, and it was never cut except at the ends at the nape of his neck. Whenever he washed his face he used to fasten this hair back with an elastic band which he always carried in his waistcoat pocket. On some occasions, when I have stayed the night at 7K and seen him at his toilette, this elastic band gave him a very odd appearance, almost as if he wore, for the time being, a very odd halo; but as his hair was so long in front it would otherwise have fallen into the basin of water. He told me that once in Germany a waiter entered the room while he was washing his face, and on perceiving this peculiar head-dress betrayed signs of mixed amusement and alarm. As Maitland said, "I believe he thought I was mad."
His forehead was high, his head exceedingly well shaped but not remarkably large. He always wore a moustache. Considering his very sedentary life his natural physique was extremely good, and he was capable of walking great distances if he were put to it and was in condition. Seen nude, he had the figure of a possible athlete. I used to tell him that he might be an exceedingly strong man if he cared to take the trouble to become one, but his belief, which is to be found expressed in one passage of "The Meditations," was that no one in our times could be at once intellectually and physically at his best. Indeed, he had in a way a peculiar contempt for mere strength, and I do not doubt that much of his later bodily weakness and illness might have been avoided if he had thought more of exercise and open air.
In no way was he excessive, in spite of his jocular pretence of a monstrous addiction to "strong waters" as he always called them. He did love wine, as I have written, but he loved it with discretion, although not with real knowledge. It was a case of passion and faith with him. I could imagine that in some previous incarnation—were there such things as reincarnations—he must have been an Italian writer of the South he loved so well. A little while ago I spoke of the strange absence of colour in his rooms. On rereading "The Meditations," I find some kind of an explanation, or what he considered an explanation, of this fact, to which I myself drew his attention. He seemed to imagine that his early acquaintance with his father's engravings inspired him with a peculiar love of black and white. More probably the actual truth is that his father's possible love of colour had never been developed any more than his son's.
His fantastic attempts at times to make one believe that he was a great drinker, when a bottle of poor and common wine served him and me for a dinner and made us joyous, were no more true than that he was a great smoker. He had a prodigious big pot of tobacco in his rooms in the early days, a pot containing some form of mild returns which to my barbaric taste suggested nothing so much as hay that had been stored next some mild tobacco. It was one of my grievances against him that when I visited his rooms hard up for tobacco, a thing which frequently occurred in those days, I was almost unable to use his. But it was always a form of joke with him to pretend that his habits were monstrously excessive. As I have said, one of his commonest forms of humour was exaggeration. Many people misunderstood that his very expressions of despair were all touched with a grim humour. Nevertheless he and his rooms were grim enough. On his shelves there was a French book, the title of which I forget, dealing without any reticence with the lives of the band of young French writers under the Second Empire, who perished miserably in the conditions to which they were exposed. This book is a series of short and bitter biographies, ending for the most part with, "mourut à l'hôpital," or "brûlait la cervelle." We were by no means for ever cheerful in these times.