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

by Morley Roberts

It was characteristic, and one of the causes of his continued disastrous troubles, that Maitland was incapable of being abruptly or strenuously straightforward. A direct "No," or "This shall not be done," seemed to him, no doubt, to invite argument and struggle, the one thing he invariably procured for himself by invariably avoiding it.

"Paternoster Row," was written, if I remember rightly, partly in 1890, and finished in 1891, in which year it was published. It is an odd thing to think of that he was married to his second wife in March 1891, shortly before this book came out. In the third volume there is practically a strange and bitter, and very remarkable, forecast of the result of that marriage, showing that whilst Maitland's instincts and impulses ran away with him, his intellect was yet clear and cold. It is the passage where the hero suggests that he should have married some simple, kind-hearted work-girl. He says, "We should have lived in a couple of poor rooms somewhere, and—we should have loved each other." Whereupon Gifford—here Maitland's intellect—exclaims upon him for a shameless idealist, and sketches, most truly the likely issue of such a marriage, given Maitland or Reardon. He says: "To begin with, the girl would have married you in firm persuasion that you were a 'gentleman' in temporary difficulties, and that before long you would have plenty of money to dispose of. Disappointed in this hope, she would have grown sharp-tempered, querulous, selfish. All your endeavours to make her understand you would only have resulted in widening the impassable gulf. She would have misconstrued your every sentence, found food for suspicion in every harmless joke, tormented you with the vulgarest forms of jealousy. The effect upon your nature would have been degrading." Never was anything more true.

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."