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

by Morley Roberts

Nevertheless, great as these hours were that we spent together, they were sometimes deeply melancholy, and he had nothing to console him for the miseries which were ever in the background. It was upon one of these Sundays, I think early in January, 1888, that I found him in a peculiarly melancholy and desperate condition. No doubt he was overworked, for he always was overworked; but he said that he could stand it no longer, he must get out of London for a few days or so. For some reason which I cannot for the world understand, he decided to go to Eastbourne, and begged me to go with him. Why he should have selected, in Christmas weather and an east wind, what is possibly the coldest town in England in such conditions, I cannot say, but I remember that the journey down to the sea was mercilessly cold. Of course we went third class, and the carriages were totally unheated. We were both of us practically in extreme poverty. I was living in a single room in Chelsea, for which I paid four shillings a week, and for many months my total weekly expenses were something under twelve shillings. At that particular moment he was doing extremely badly, and the ten shillings that he paid regularly to his wife frequently left him with insufficient to live upon. I can hardly understand how it was that he determined to spend even the little extra money needed for such a journey. When we reached Eastbourne we walked with our bags in our hands down to the sea front, and then, going into a poor back street, selected rooms. It was perhaps what he and I often called "the native malignity of matter," and his extreme ill luck in the matter of landladies, which pursued him for ever throughout his life in lodgings, that the particular landlady of the house in which we took refuge was extraordinarily incapable. The dwelling itself was miserably draughty and cold, and wretchedly furnished. The east wind which blows over the flat marshes between Eastbourne and the Downs entered the house at every crack, and there were many of them. The first night we were in the town it snowed very heavily, and in our shabby little sitting-room we shivered in spite of the starved fire. We sat there with our overcoats on and did our best to be cheerful. Heaven alone knows what we talked of, but most likely, and very possibly, it may have been Greek metres, always his great passion. Yet neither of us was in good case. We both had trouble enough on our shoulders. I remember that he spoke very little of his wife, for I would not let him do so, although I knew she was most tremendously on his mind, and was, in fact, what had driven him for the moment out of London. Of course, he had a very natural desire that she should die and have done with life, with that life which must have been a torment to herself as it was a perpetual torture and a running sore to him. At the same time the poor fellow felt that he had no right to wish that she would die, but I could see the wish in his eyes, and heaven knows that I wished it fervently for him.

The next morning we went for a long walk across the Downs to the little village of East Dean. It was blowing a whole gale from the north east, and it was quite impossible to go near the steep cliffs. The snow was in places two feet deep, and a sunk road across the Downs was level with the turf. I think now that none but madmen would have gone out on such a day. Doubtless we were mad enough; at any rate we were writers, and by all traditions had the right to be mad. But when we once got started we meant going through it at all events. I did not remember many colder days, in spite of my travels, but we persevered, and at last came to the little village and there took refuge in the public-house and drank beer. Maitland, with his extraordinary mixture of fine taste and something which was almost grossness in regard to food, loved all malt liquors—I think partly because he felt some strange charm in their being historically English drinks. The walk back to Eastbourne tried us both hard, for neither of us had been well fed for months, and the wind and snow in our faces made walking heavy and difficult. Nevertheless Maitland was now almost boisterously cheerful, as he often was outwardly when he had most reason to be the opposite. While he walked back the chief topic of conversation was the very excellent nature of the pudding which he had instructed our landlady to prepare against a hungry return.

He was always extraordinarily fond of rich, succulent dishes. A fritto misto for instance, made him shout for joy, though he never met with it until he went to Italy. With what inimitable fervour of the gastronomic mind would he declare these preferences! Dr. Johnson said that in a haggis there was much "fine, confused feeding," and Maitland undoubtedly agreed with him, as he always said when he quoted the passage. In many of his books there are examples of his curious feeling with regard to food. They are especially frequent in "Paternoster Row"; as, for instance, when one character says: "Better dripping this than I've had for a long time.... Now, with a little pepper and salt, this bread and dripping is as appetising a food as I know. I often make a dinner of it." To which the other replies: "I have done the same myself before now. Do you ever buy pease-pudding?" and to this the Irishman's reply was enthusiastic. "I should think so! I get magnificent pennyworths at a shop in Cleveland Street, of a very rich quality indeed. Excellent faggots they have there, too. I'll give you a supper of them one night before you go." I had often heard of this particular shop in Cleveland Street, and of one shop where they sold beef, kept by a man whose pride was that he had been carving beef behind the counter for thirty years without a holiday.

And now we were hurrying back to Eastbourne, Maitland said, not because it was cold; not because the north-east wind blew; not because we were exposed to the very bitterest weather we remembered; but because of an exceedingly rich compound known as an apple pudding. He and the wind worked me up to an almost equal expression of ardour, and thus we came back to our poverty-stricken den in good spirits. But, alas, the dinner that day was actually disastrous. The meat was grossly overdone, the vegetables were badly cooked, the beer was thin and flat. We were in dismay, but still we said to each other hopefully that there was the pudding to come. It was brought on and looked very fine, and Maitland cut into it with great joy and gave me a generous helping. I know that I tasted it eagerly, but to my tongue there was an alien flavour about it. I looked up and said to Maitland, "It is very curious, but this pudding seems to me to taste of kerosene." Maitland laughed, but when his turn came to try he laughed no longer, for the pudding actually did taste of lamp oil. It appeared, on plaintive and bitter inquiry, that our unfortunate landlady after making it had put it under the shelf on which she kept her lamp gear. We subsided on melancholy and mouldy cheese. This disappointment, however childish it may appear to the better fed, was to Henry Maitland something really serious. Those who have read "The Meditations of Mark Sumner," without falling into the error of thinking that the talk about food in that melancholy book was only his fun, will understand that it was a very serious matter with Maitland. It took all his philosophy and a very great deal of mine to survive the tragedy, and to go on talking as we did of new words and the riches of philology. And as we talked the wind roared down our street in a vicious frenzy. It was a monstrously bad time to have come to Eastbourne, and we had no compensations.

It was the next night that the great news came. In spite of the dreariest weather we had spent most of the day in the open air. After our dinner, which this time was more of a success, or at any rate less of a tragic failure, we were sitting hugging the fire to keep warm when a telegram was brought in for him. He read it in silence and handed it over to me with the very strangest look upon his face that I had ever seen. It was unsigned, and came from London. The message was: "Your wife is dead." There was nothing on earth more desirable for him than that she should die, the poor wretch truly being like a destructive wind, for she had torn his heart, scorched his very soul, and destroyed him in the beginning of his life. All irreparable disasters came from her, and through her. Had it not been for her he might then have held, or have begun to hope for, a great position at one of the universities. And now a voice out of the unknown cried that she was dead.

He said to me, with a shaking voice and shaking hands, "I cannot believe it—I cannot believe it." He was as white as paper; for it meant so much—not only freedom from the disaster and shame and misery that drained his life-blood, but it would mean a cessation of money payments at a time when every shilling was very hard to win. And yet this was when he was comparatively well known, for it was two years after the publication of "The Mob." And still, though his books ran into many editions, for some inexplicable reason, which I yet hope to explain, he sold them one after another for fifty pounds. And I knew how he worked; how hard, how remorselessly. I knew who the chief character was in "Paternoster Row" before "Paternoster Row" was written. I knew with what inexpressible anguish of soul he laboured, with what dumb rage against destiny. And now here was something like freedom at last, if only it were true.

This message came so late at night that there was no possibility of telegraphing to London to verify it even if he had been sure that he could get to the original sender. It was also much too late to go up to town. We sat silently for hours, and I knew that he was going back over the burning marl of the past. Sometimes he did speak, asking once and again if it could be true, and I saw that while he was still uncertain he was bitter and pitiless. Yet if she were only really dead...

We went up to town together in the morning. In the train he told me that while he was still uncertain, he could not possibly visit the place she lived in, and he begged me to go there straight and bring him word as to the truth of this report. I was to explore the desperate slum in the New Cut in which she had exhausted the last dreadful years of her life, and upon leaving him I went there at once. With Maitland's full permission I described something of the milieu in "John Quest." On reaching the New Cut I dived into an inner slum from an outer one, and at last found myself in a kitchen which was only about eight or nine feet square. It was, of course, exceedingly dirty. The person in charge of it was a cheerful red-headed girl of about eighteen years of age. On learning the cause of my visit she went out and brought in her mother, and I soon verified the fact that Marian Maitland was dead. She had died the first bitter night we spent at Eastbourne, and was found next morning without any blankets, and with no covering for her emaciated body but a damp and draggled gown.

Presently the neighbours came in to see the gentleman who was interested in this woman's death. They talked eagerly of the funeral, for, as Maitland knew only too well, a funeral, to these people, is one of their great irregular but recurring festivals. At Maitland's desire I gave them carte blanche up to a certain sum, and I think they felt that, as the agent of the husband, I behaved very well. Of course they knew all about the poor girl who lay dead upstairs, and although they were honest enough people in their way, and though the red-headed girl to whom I first talked worked hard in a factory making hooks and eyes, as she told me, they seemed to have no moral feelings whatever about her very obvious profession. I myself did not see the dead woman. I was not then acquainted with death, save among strangers. I could not bring myself to look upon her. Although death is so dreadful always, the surroundings of death may make things worse. But still, she was dead, and I hastened back to Maitland to tell him so. It was a terrible and a painful relief to him; and when he was sure she was gone, he grieved for her, grieved for what she might have been, and for what she was. He remembered now that at intervals she used to send him heart-breaking messages asking to be forgiven, messages that even his unwisdom at last could not listen to. But he said very little. So far as the expression of his emotions went he often had very great self-control. It is a pity that his self-control so rarely extended itself to acts. But now he was free. Those who have forged their own chains, and lived in a hell of their own dreadful making, can understand what this is and what it means. But he did go down to the pit in which she died, and when I saw him a day or two later he was strangely quiet, even for him. He said to me, "My dear chap, she had kept my photograph, and a very little engraving of the Madonna di San Sisto, all these years of horrible degradation." He spoke in the almost inaudible tone that was characteristic of him, especially at that time. We arranged the funeral together, and she was buried. If only all the misery that she had caused him could have been buried with her, it would have been well. She died of what I may call, euphemistically, specific laryngitis. Once he told me a dreadful story about her in hospital. One of the doctors at St. Thomas's had questioned her, and after her answers sent for Maitland, and speaking to him on the information given him by the wife, was very bitter. Henry, even as he told me this years after, shook with rage and indignation. He had not been able to defend himself without exposing his wife's career.