During that time in 1876, we students at Moorhampton College were much disturbed by a series of thefts in the common room, and from a locker room in which we kept our books and papers and our overcoats. Books disappeared unaccountably and so did coats. Money was taken from the pockets of coats left in the room, and nobody knew who was to blame for this. Naturally enough we suspected a porter or one of the lower staff, but we were wrong. Without our knowledge the college authorities set a detective to discover who was to blame. One day I went into the common room, and standing in front of the fire found a man, a young fellow about my age, called Sarle, with whom I frequently played chess—he was afterwards president of the chess club at Oxford—and he said to me: "Have you heard the news?" "What news?" I asked. "Your friend, Henry Maitland, has been stealing those things that we have lost," he said. And when he said it I very nearly struck him, for it seemed a gross and incredible slander. But unfortunately it was true, and at that very moment Maitland was in gaol. A detective had hidden himself in the small room leading out of the bigger room where the lockers were and had caught him in the act. It was a very ghastly business and certainly the first great shock I ever got in my life. I think it was the same for everybody who knew the boy. The whole college was in a most extraordinary ferment, and, indeed, I may say the whole of Moorhampton which took any real interest in the college.
Professor Little, who was then the head of the college, sent for me and asked me what I knew of the matter. I soon discovered that this was because the police had found letters from me in Maitland's room which referred to Marian Hilton. I told the professor with the utmost frankness everything that I knew about the affair, and maintained that I had done my utmost to get him to break with her, a statement which all my letters supported. I have often imagined a certain suspicion, in the minds of some of those who are given to suspicion, that I myself had been leading the same kind of life as Henry Maitland. This was certainly not true; but I believe that one or two of those who did not like me—and there are always some—threw out hints that I knew Maitland had been taking these things. Yet after my very painful interview with Professor Little, who was a very delightful and kindly personality—though certainly not so strong a man as the head of such an institution should be—I saw that he gave me every credit for what I had tried to do. Among my own friends at the college was a young fellow, Edward Wolff, the son of the Rev. Mr. Wolff, the Unitarian minister at the chapel in Broad Street. Edward was afterwards fifth wrangler of his year at Cambridge. He got his father to interest himself in Henry Maitland's future. Mr. Wolff and several other men of some eminence in the city did what they could for him. They got together a little money and on his release from prison sent him away to America. He was met on coming out of prison by Dr. Lake's father, who also helped him in every possible way.
It seemed to me then that I had probably seen the last of Maitland, and the turn my own career took shortly afterwards rendered this even more likely. In the middle of 1876 I had a very serious disagreement with my father, who was a man of great ability but very violent temper, and left home. On September 23 of that year I sailed for Australia and remained there, working mostly in the bush, for the best part of three years. During all that time I heard little of Henry Maitland, though I have some dim remembrance of a letter I received from him telling me that he was in America. It was in 1879 that I shipped before the mast at Melbourne in a blackwall barque and came back to England as a seaman.
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.