PREFACE

This book was dictated by J.H. mostly in my presence, and I consider it well worth publishing. No doubt Henry Maitland is not famous, though since his death much has been written of him. Most of it, however, outside of literary criticism, has been futile and uninstructed. But J.H. really knew the man, and here is what he has said of him. We shall be told, no doubt, that we have used Maitland's memory for our own ends. Let that be as it may; such an accusation can only be met by denial. When there is no proof of guilt, there may well be none of innocence. The fact remains that Henry Maitland's life was worth doing, even in the abbreviated and censored form in which it now appears. The man was not eminent, only because he was not popular and did not live long enough. One gets to eminence nowadays by longevity or by bad work. While Maitland starved, X or Y or Z may wallow in a million sixpences. In this almost childishly simple account of a man's life there is the essence of our literary epoch. Here is a writing man put down, crudely it may be, but with a certain power. There is no book quite like it in the English tongue, and the critic may take what advantage he will of that opening for his wit.

At any rate here we have a portrait emerging which is real. Henry Maitland stands on his feet, and on his living feet. He is not a British statue done in the best mortuary manner. There is far too little sincere biography in English. We are a mealy-mouthed race, hypocrites by the grave and the monument. Ten words of natural eulogy, and another ten of curious and sympathetic comment, may be better than tons of marble built up by a hired liar with his tongue in his cheek. In the whole book, which cannot be published now, there are things worth waiting for. I have cut and retrenched with pain, for I wanted to risk the whole, but no writer or editor is his own master in England. I am content to have omitted some truth if I have permitted nothing false. The reader who can say truly, "I should not have liked to meet Henry Maitland," is a fool or a fanatic, or more probably both. Neither of those who are primarily responsible for this little book is answerable to such. We do not desire his praise, or even his mere allowance. Such as are interested in the art of letters, and in those who practise in the High Court of Literature, will perceive what we had in our minds. Here is life, not a story or a constructed diary, and the art with which it is done is a secondary matter. If Henry Maitland bleeds and howls, so did Philoctetes, and the outcry of Henry Maitland is more pertinent to our lives. For all life, even at its best, is tragic; and there is much in Maitland's which is dramatically common to our world as we see it and live in it. If we have lessened him at times from the point of view of a hireling in biographic praise, we have set him down life size all the same; and as we ask no praise, we care for no blame. Here is the man.

MORLEY ROBERTS.

NOTE.—The full manuscript, which may possibly be published after some years, is, in the meantime placed in safe custody.

THE PRIVATE LIFE OF HENRY MAITLAND

CHAPTER I

It is never an easy thing to write the life, or even such a sketch as I propose making, of a friend whom one knew well, and in Henry Maitland's case it is most uncommonly difficult. The usual biographer is content with writing panegyric, and as he must depend for his material, and even sometimes for his eventual remuneration, on the relatives of his subject, he is from the start in a hopeless position, except, it may be, as regards the public side of the life in question. But in the case of a man of letters the personal element is the only real and valuable one, or so it seems to me, and even if I were totally ignorant of Maitland's work I think it would yet be possible for me to do a somewhat lifelike and live sketch of him. I believe, moreover, that it is my duty to do it, although no doubt in some ways it must be painful to those connected with him. Yet soon after his death many came to me desiring me to write his biography. It was an understood thing that of all his friends I knew him best, and was certainly the greatest and chief authority on his career from the Moorhampton College days up to his final break with his second wife. But in 1904 there were many obstacles to my doing this work. His two sons were young. His sisters and his mother were still alive. I say nothing of the wife herself, then being taken care of, or of a third lady of whom I must speak presently. Several people came to me with proposals about a book on Henry Maitland. One of the partners of a big publishing house made me a definite offer for it on behalf of his firm. On the other hand one of his executors, Miss Kingdon, a most kindly and amiable and very able woman employed in a great accountant's office in the city, who had done very much for Henry Maitland in his later life, begged me not to do the book, or if I did it to hold it over until her responsibilities as executrix and trustee for the sons were at an end. But it is now nearly nine years since he died, and I feel that if I do not put down at once what I knew of him it never will be written, and something will be lost, something which has perhaps a little value, even though it is not so great as those could wish who knew and loved Henry Maitland.

There is no doubt many people will accuse me of desiring to use his memory for my own advantage. "My withers are unwrung." Those who speak in this way must have little knowledge of the poor profit to be derived from writing such a book, and the proportion of that profit to the labour employed in it. On three separate occasions I spoke to Maitland about writing his biography, and it was an understood thing between us that if he died before me I was to write his life and tell the whole and absolute truth about him. This he gave me the most definite permission to do. I believe he felt that it might in some ways be of service to humanity for such a book to be written. Only the other day, when I wrote to Miss Kingdon concerning the biography, she answered me: "If I seem lacking in cordiality in this matter do not attribute it to any want of sympathy with you. I am not attempting to dissuade you. Henry Maitland was sent into hell for the purpose of saving souls; perhaps it is a necessary thing that his story should be written by all sorts of people from their different points of view." Once I proposed to him to use his character and career as the chief figure in a long story. He wrote to me, "By all means. Why not?" Had I not the letter in which he said this I should myself almost doubt my own recollection, but it is certain that he knew the value of his own experience, and felt that he might perhaps by his example save some from suffering as he did.

No doubt very much that I say of him will not be true to others. To myself it is true at any rate. We know very little of each other, and after all it is perhaps in biography that one is most acutely conscious of the truth in the pragmatic view of truth. Those things are true in Henry Maitland's life and character which fit in wholly with all my experience of him and make a coherent and likely theory. I used to think I knew him very well, and yet when I remember and reflect it seems to me that I know exceedingly little about him. And yet again, I am certain that of the two people in the world that I was best acquainted with he was one. We go through life believing that we know many, but if we sit down and attempt to draw them we find here and there unrelated facts and many vague incoherencies. We are in a fog about our very dear friend whom but yesterday we were ready to judge and criticise with an air of final knowledge. There is something humiliating in this, and yet how should we, who know so little of ourselves, know even those we love? To my mind, with all his weaknesses, which I shall not extenuate, Maitland was a noble and notable character, and if anything I should write may endure but a little while it is because there is really something of him in my words. I am far more concerned to write about Henry Maitland for those who loved him than for those who loved him not, and I shall be much better pleased if what I do about him takes the shape of an impression rather than of anything like an ordinary biography. Every important and unimportant political fool who dies nowadays is buried under obituary notices and a mausoleum in two volumes—a mausoleum which is, as a rule, about as high a work of art as the angels on tombstones in an early Victorian cemetery. But Maitland, I think, deserves, if not a better, a more sympathetic tribute.

When I left Radford Grammar School my father, being in the Civil Service, was sent to Moorhampton as Surveyor of Taxes, and his family shortly followed him. I continued my own education at Moorhampton College, which was then beginning to earn a high reputation as an educational centre. Some months before I met Maitland personally I knew his reputation was that of an extraordinary young scholar. Even as a boy of sixteen he swept everything before him. There was nobody in the place who could touch him at classical learning, and everybody prophesied the very greatest future for the boy. I met him first in a little hotel not very far from the College where some of us young fellows used to go between the intervals of lectures to play a game of billiards. I remember quite well seeing him sit on a little table swinging his legs, and to this day I can remember somewhat of the impression he made upon me. He was curiously bright, with a very mobile face. He had abundant masses of brown hair combed backwards over his head, grey-blue eyes, a very sympathetic mouth, an extraordinarily well-shaped chin—although perhaps both mouth and chin were a little weak—and a great capacity for talking and laughing.

Henceforth he and I became very firm friends at the College, although we belonged to two entirely different sets. I was supposed to be an extraordinarily rowdy person, and was always getting into trouble both with the authorities and with my fellows, and he was a man who loathed anything like rowdiness, could not fight if he tried, objected even then to the Empire, hated patriotism, and thought about nothing but ancient Greece and Rome, or so it would appear to those who knew him at that time.

I learnt then a little of his early history. Even when he was but a boy of ten or eleven he was recognised as a creature of most brilliant promise. He always believed that he owed most, and perhaps everything, to his father, who must have been a very remarkable man. Henry never spoke about him in later life without emotion and affection. I have often thought since that Maitland felt that most of his disasters sprang from the premature death of his father, whom he loved so tenderly. Indeed the elder man must have been a remarkable figure, a gentle, courtly, and most kindly man, himself born in exile and placed in alien circumstances. Maitland often used to speak, with a catch in his voice, of the way his father read to him. I remember not what books, but they were the classic authors of England; Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Tennyson. Some seem to imagine that the father had what is called a well-stocked library. This was not true, but he had many good books and taught his son to love them. Among these there was one great volume of Hogarth's drawings which came into Henry Maitland's personal possession, only, I think, when he was finally domiciled in a London flat, where he and I often looked at it. It is curious that as a boy Hogarth had a fascination for him. He sometimes copied these drawings, for as a child he had no little skill as a draughtsman. What appealed to him in later days in Hogarth was the power of the man's satire, his painful bitterness, which can only be equalled by the ironies of Swift in another medium. Although personally I admire Hogarth I could never look at him with anything like pleasure or, indeed, without acute discomfort. I remember that Maitland in later years said in his book about the Victorian novelist: "With these faces who would spend hours of leisure? Hogarth copied in the strict sense of the word. He gives us life and we cannot bear it."

Maitland's family came, I think, from Worcester, but something led the elder Maitland to Mirefield's, and there he came in contact with a chemist called Lake, whose business he presently bought. Perhaps the elder Maitland was not a wholly happy man. He was very gentle, but not a person of marked religious feeling. Indeed I think the attitude of the family at that time was that of free thought. From everything that Henry said of his father it always seemed to me that the man had been an alien in the cold Yorkshire town where his son was born. And Maitland knew that had his father lived he would never have been thrown alone into the great city of Moorhampton, "Lord of himself, that heritage of woe." Not all women understand the dangers that their sons may meet in such surroundings, and those who had charge of Henry Maitland's future never understood or recognized them in his youth. But his father would have known. In one chapter of "The Vortex," there is very much of Maitland. It is a curiously wrought picture of a father and his son in which he himself played alternately the part of father and child. I knew his anxieties for his own children, and on reading that chapter one sees them renewed. But in it there was much that was not himself. It was drawn rather from what he believed his father had felt. In "The Vortex" the little boy spends an hour alone with his father just before bedtime, and he calls it "A golden hour, sacred to memories of the world's own childhood."

Maitland went to school in Mirefields and this school has been called a kind of "Dotheboys Hall," which of course is absolutely ridiculous. It was not, in fact, a boarding-school at all, but a day school. The man who ran it was called Hinkson. Maitland said he was an uneducated man, or at any rate uneducated from his point of view in later years, yet he was a person of very remarkable character, and did very good work, taking it all round. A man named Christopher started this school and sold it to Hinkson, who had, I believe, some kind of a degree obtained at Durham. The boys who attended it were good middle class and lower middle class, some the sons of professional men, some the offspring of the richer tradesmen. Upon the whole it was a remarkably good school for that time. Many of the boys actually left the Grammar School at Mirefields to attend it. Henry Maitland always owned that Hinkson took great pains with his scholars, and affirmed that many owed him much. As I said, the general religious air of Maitland's home at that time was one of free thought. I believe the feminine members of the family attended a Unitarian Church, but the father did not go to church at all. One example of this religious attitude of his home came out when Hinkson called on his boys to repeat the collect of the day and Maitland replied with an abrupt negative that they did not do that kind of thing at home. Whereupon Hinkson promptly set him to acquire it, saying sternly that it would do him no harm.

For the most part in those early days the elder Maitland and his son spent Sunday afternoon in the garden belonging to their Mirefields house. Oddly enough this garden was not attached to the dwelling but was a kind of allotment. It has been photographically reproduced by Henry Maitland in the seventh chapter of the first volume of "Morning." Very often Henry Maitland's father read to him in that garden.

One of Maitland's schoolfellows at Hinkson's school was the son of the man from whom his father had bought the druggist's business. The elder Lake was a friend of Barry Sullivan, and theatrically mad. He started plays in which Henry always took some part, though not the prominent part which has been attributed to him by some. Nevertheless he was always interested in plays and had a very dramatic way of reading anything that was capable of dramatic interpretation. He always loved the sound of words, and even when he was a boy of about twelve he took down a German book and read some of it aloud to the younger Lake, who did not know German and said so. Whereupon Maitland shook his fist at him and said: "But Lake, listen, listen, listen—doesn't it sound fine?" This endured through all his life. At this same time he used to read Oliver Wendell Holmes aloud to some of the other boys. This was when he was thirteen. Even then he always mouthed the words and loved their rhythm.

Naturally enough, his father being a poor man, there would have been no opportunity of Henry Maitland's going to Moorhampton and to its great college if he had not obtained some scholarship. This, I think, was the notion that his father had at the time, and the necessity for it became more imperative when his father died. He did obtain this scholarship when he was somewhere about sixteen, and immediately afterwards was sent over to Moorhampton quite alone and put into lodgings there. At his school in Mirefields he had taken every possible prize, and I think it was two exhibitions from the London University which enabled him to go to Moorhampton. The college was a curious institution, one of the earliest endeavours to create a kind of university centre in a great provincial city. We certainly had a very wonderful staff there, especially on the scientific side. Among the men of science at the college were Sir Henry Bissell; Schorstein, the great chemist; Hahn, also a chemist, and Balfour, the physicist. On the classical side were Professor Little and Professor Henry Parker, who were not by any means so eminent as their scientific colleagues. The eminence of our scientific professors did not matter very much from Henry Maitland's point of view, perhaps, for from the day of his birth to the day of his death, he took no interest whatever in science and loathed all forms of speculative thought with a peculiar and almost amusing horror. Mathematics he detested, and if in later years I ever attempted to touch upon metaphysical questions he used to shut up, to use an American phrase, just like a clam. But on the classical side he was much more than merely successful. He took every possible prize that was open to him. In his book "The Exile," there is a picture of a youth on prize day going up to receive prize after prize, and I know that this chapter contains much of what he himself must have felt when I saw him retire to a modest back bench loaded with books bound in calf and tooled in gold.

Of course a college of this description, which was not, properly speaking, a university, could only be regarded, for a boy of his culture, as a stepping-stone to one of the older universities, probably Cambridge, since most of my own friends who did go to the university went there from Moorhampton. I do not think there was a professor or lecturer or a single student in the college who did not anticipate for Henry Maitland one of the brightest possible futures, so far as success at the university could make it so. It is possible that I alone out of those who regarded him with admiration and affection had some doubt of this, and that was not because I disagreed as a boy with any of the estimates that had been formed of him, but simply because for some reason or another he chose me as a confidant. Many years afterwards he said to me with painful bitterness: "It was a cruel and most undesirable thing that I, at the age of sixteen, should have been turned loose in a big city, compelled to live alone in lodgings, with nobody interested in me but those at the college. I see now that one of my sisters should certainly have been sent with me to Moorhampton."

One day he showed me a photograph. It was that of a young girl, aged perhaps seventeen—he at the time being very little more—with her hair down her back. She was not beautiful, but she had a certain prettiness, the mere prettiness of youth, and she was undoubtedly not a lady. After some interrogation on my part he told me that she was a young prostitute whom he knew, and I do not think I am exaggerating my own feelings when I say that I recognised instinctively and at once that if his relations with her were not put an end to some kind of disaster was in front of him. It was not that I knew very much about life, for what could a boy of less than eighteen really know about it?—but I had some kind of instinctive sense in me, and I was perfectly aware, even then, that Henry Maitland had about as little savoir-vivre as anybody I had ever met up to that time, or anybody I could ever expect to meet. It may seem strange to some that even at that time I had no moral views, and extremely little religion, although I may say incidentally that I thought about it sufficiently to become deliberately a Unitarian, refusing to be confirmed in the English Church, very much to the rage of the parish clergyman, and with the result of much friction with my father. Yet although I had no moral views I did my best to get Maitland to give up this girl, but he would not do it. The thing went on, so far as I am aware, for the best part of a year. He did all he could, apparently, to get Marian Hilton to leave the streets. He even bought a sewing machine and gave it to her with this view. That was another sample of his early idealism.

This was in 1876, and the younger Lake, who was three years older than Maitland, had by then just qualified as a doctor. He was an assistant at Darwen and one day went over to Moorhampton to see Henry, who told him what he had told me about this Marian Hilton. He even went so far as to say that he was going to marry her. Dr. Lake, of course, being an older man, and knowing something of life through his own profession, did not approve of this and strongly objected. Afterwards he regretted a thousand times that he had not written direct to Maitland's people to tell them of what was going on. Still, although he was the older man, he was not so much older as to have got rid of the boyish loyalty of one youth to another, and he did not do what he knew he ought to have done. He found out that Maitland had even sold his father's watch to help this girl. This affair was also known to a young accountant who came from Mirefields whom I did not know, and also to another man at the college who is now in the Government Service. So far as I remember the accountant was not a good influence, but his other friend did what he could to get Maitland to break off this very undesirable relationship, with no more success than myself.

I have never understood how it was that he got into such frightful financial difficulties. I can only imagine that Marian must have had, in one way or another, the greater portion of the income which he got from the scholarships he held. I do know that his affection for her seemed at this time to be very sincere. And out of that affection there grew up, very naturally, a horror in his sensitive mind for the life this poor child was leading. He haunted the streets which she haunted, and sometimes saw her with other men. I suppose even then she must have been frightfully extravagant, and perhaps given to drink, but considering what his income was I think he should have been able to give her a pound a week if necessary, and yet have had sufficient to live on without great difficulty. Nevertheless he did get into difficulties, and never even spoke to me about it. I was quite aware, in a kind of dim way, that he was in trouble and looked very ill, but he did not give me his fullest confidence, although one day he told me, as he had told Lake, that he proposed marrying her. I was only a boy, but I was absolutely enraged at the notion and used every possible means to prevent him committing such an absurd act of folly. When I met him I discussed it with him. When I was away from him I wrote him letters. I suppose I wrote him a dozen letters begging that he would do no such foolish thing. I told him that he would wrong himself, and could do the girl no possible good. My instincts told me even then that she would, instead of being raised, pull him down. These letters of mine were afterwards discovered in his rooms when the tragedy had happened.

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.

The account Broughton gives in "Paternoster Row" of his visit to Troy is fairly representative of Maitland's experiences. It was there that he lived for two or three days on peanuts, buying five cents' worth in the street now and then at some Italian peanut stand. In "Paternoster Row" he calls them loathsome, and no doubt they soon do become loathsome. A few are rather pleasing, more than a few are objectionable; and when anybody tries a whole diet of them for a day or two there is no doubt "loathsome" would be the proper word. After that he worked for a photographer for a few days, and then, I think, for a plumber, but of this I remember very little. It is quite certain that he never earned enough money in America to enable him to return to England, but who lent it to him I have no idea. To have been twenty-four hours with no more than a handful of peanuts in his pocket was no doubt an unpleasant experience, but, as I told him, it seemed very little to me. On one occasion in Australia I had been rather more than four and a half days without food when caught in a flood. Nevertheless this starvation was for him one of the initiation ceremonies into the mysteries of literature, and he was always accustomed to say, "How can such an one write? He never starved."

Nevertheless to have been hard up in Chicago was a very great experience, as every one knows who knows that desperate city of the plains. Since that time I myself have known Chicago well, and have been there "dead broke." Thus I can imagine the state that he must have been in, and how desperate he must have become, to get out of his difficulties in the way that he actually employed. The endeavour to obtain work in a hustling country like the United States is ever a desperate proceeding for a nervous and sensitive man, and what it must have been to Henry Maitland to do what he did with the editor of the Chicago Tribune can only be imagined by those who knew him. In many ways he was the most modest and the shyest man who ever lived, and yet he actually told this editor: "I have come to point out to you there is a serious lack in your paper." To those who knew Maitland this must seem as surprising as it did to myself, and in later years he sometimes thought of that incident with inexpressible joy in his own courage. Of course the oddest thing about the whole affair is that up to that moment he had never written fiction at all, and only did it because he was driven to desperation. As will be seen when I come later to discuss his qualifications as a writer this is a curious comment on much of his bigger work. To me it seems that he should never have written fiction at all, although he did it so admirably. I think it would be very interesting if some American student of Maitland would turn over the files of the Tribune in the years 1878 and 1879 and disinter the work he did there. This is practically all I ever learnt about his life on the other side of the Atlantic. I was, indeed, more anxious to discover how he lived in London, and in what circumstances. I asked him as delicately as possible about his domestic circumstances, and he then told me that he was married, and that his wife was with him in London.

It is very curious to think that I never actually met his first wife. I had, of course, seen her photograph, and I have on several occasions been in the next room to her. On those occasions she was usually unable to be seen, mostly because she was intoxicated. When we renewed our acquaintance in the Horse Shoe Tavern he was then living in mean apartments in one of the back streets off Tottenham Court Road not very far from the hotel and indeed not far from a cellar that he once occupied in a neighbouring street. Little by little as I met him again and again I began to get some hold upon his actual life. Gradually he became more confidential, and I gathered from him that the habits of his wife were perpetually compelling him to move from one house to another. From what he told me, sometimes hopefully, and more often in desperation, it seems that this poor creature made vain and violent efforts to reform, generally after some long debauch. And of this I am very sure, that no man on earth could have made more desperate efforts to help her than he made. But the actual fact remains that they were turned out of one lodging after the other, for even the poorest places, it seems, could hardly stand a woman of her character in the house. I fear it was not only that she drank, but at intervals she deserted him and went back, for the sake of more drink, and for the sake of money with which he was unable to supply her, to her old melancholy trade. And yet she returned again with tears, and he took her in, doing his best for her. It was six months after our first meeting in Tottenham Court Road that he asked me to go and spend an evening with him. Naturally enough I then expected to make Mrs. Maitland's acquaintance, but on my arrival he showed some disturbance of mind and told me that she was ill and would be unable to see me. The house they lived in then was not very far from Mornington Crescent. It was certainly in some dull neighbourhood not half a mile away. The street was, I think, a cul-de-sac. It was full of children of the lower orders playing in the roadway. Their fathers and mothers, it being Saturday night, sat upon the doorsteps, or quarrelled, or talked in the road. The front room in which he received me was both mean and dirty. The servant who took me upstairs was a poor foul slut, and I do not think the room had been properly cleaned or dusted for a very long time. The whole of the furniture in it was certainly not worth seven and sixpence from the point of view of the ordinary furniture dealer. There were signs in it that it had been occupied by a woman, and one without the common elements of decency and cleanliness. Under a miserable and broken sofa lay a pair of dirty feminine boots. And yet on one set of poor shelves there were, still shining with gold, the prizes Maitland had won at Moorhampton College, and his painfully acquired stock of books that he loved so much.

As I came in by arrangement after my own dinner, we simply sat and smoked and drank a little whiskey. Twice in the course of an hour our conversation was interrupted by the servant knocking at the door and beckoning to Maitland to come out. In the next room I then heard voices, sometimes raised, sometimes pleading. When Maitland returned the first time he said to me, "I am very sorry to have to leave you for a few minutes. My wife is really unwell." But I knew by now the disease from which she suffered. Twice or thrice I was within an ace of getting up and saying, "Don't you think I'd better go, old chap?" And then he was called out again. He came back at last in a state of obvious misery and perturbation, and said, "My dear man, my wife is so ill that I think I must ask you to go." I shook hands with him in silence and went, for I understood. A little afterwards he told me that that very afternoon his wife had gone out, and obtaining drink in some way had brought it home with her, and that she was then almost insane with alcohol. This was the kind of life that Henry Maitland, perhaps a great man of letters, lived for years. Comfortable people talk of his pessimism, and his greyness of outlook, and never understand. The man really was a hedonist, he loved things beautiful—beautiful and orderly. He rejoiced in every form of Art, in books and music, and in all the finer inheritance of the past. But this was the life he lived, and the life he seemed to be doomed to live from the very first.

When a weak man has a powerful sense of duty he is hard to handle by those who have some wisdom. In the early days I had done my best to induce him to give up this woman, long before he married her, when he was but a foolish boy. Now I once more did my best to get him to leave her, but I cannot pretend for an instant that anything I said or did would have had any grave effect if it had not been that the poor woman was herself doomed to be her own destroyer. Her outbreaks became more frequent, her departures from his miserable roof more prolonged. The windy gaslight of the slums appealed to her, and the money that she earned therein; and finally when it seemed that she would return no more he changed his rooms, and through the landlady of the wretched house at which he found she was staying he arranged to pay her ten shillings a week. As I know, he often made much less than ten shillings a week, and frequently found himself starving that she might have so much more to spend in drink.

This went on for years. It was still going on in 1884 when I left England again and went out to Texas. I had not succeeded in making a successful attack upon the English Civil Service, and the hateful work I did afterwards caused my health to break down. I was in America for three years. During that time I wrote fully and with a certain regularity to Maitland. When I came back and was writing "The Western Trail," he returned me the letters he had received from me. Among them I found some, frequently dealing with literary subjects, addressed from Texas, Minnesota, Iowa, the Rocky Mountains, Lower British Columbia, Oregon, and California. In his letters to me he never referred to Marian, but I gathered that his life was very hard, and, of course, I understood, without his saying it, that he was still supporting her. I found that this was so when I returned to England in 1887. At that time, by dint of hard, laborious work, which included a great deal of teaching, he was making for the first time something of a living. He occupied a respectable but very dismal flat somewhere at the back of Madame Tussaud's, in a place at that time called "Cumberland Residences." It was afterwards renamed "Cumberland Mansions," and I well remember Maitland's frightful and really superfluous scorn of the snobbery which spoke in such a change of name. As I said, we corresponded the whole of the time I was in America. I used to send him a great deal of verse, some of which he pronounced actually poetry. No doubt this pleased me amazingly, and I wish that I still possessed his criticisms written to me while I was abroad. It is, from any point of view, a very great disaster that in some way which I cannot account for I have lost all his letters written to me previous to 1894. Our prolonged, and practically uninterrupted correspondence began in 1884, so I have actually lost the letters of ten whole years. They were interesting from many points of view. Much to my surprise, while I was in America, they came to me, not dated in the ordinary way, but according to the Comtist calendar. I wrote to him for an explanation, because up to that time I had never heard of it. In his answering letter he told me that he had become a Positivist. This was doubtless owing to the fact that he had come accidentally under the influence of some well-known Positivists.

It seems that in desperation at his utter failure to make a real living at literature he had taken again to a tutor's work, which in a way was where he began. I find that in the marriage certificate between him and Marian Hilton he called himself a teacher of languages. But undoubtedly he loathed teaching save in those rare instances where he had an intelligent and enthusiastic pupil. At the time that I came back to England he was teaching Harold Edgeworth's sons. Without a doubt Harold Edgeworth was extremely kind to Henry Maitland and perhaps to some little extent appreciated him, in spite of the preface which he wrote in later years to the posthumous "Basil." He was not only tutor to Harold Edgeworth's sons, but was also received at his house as a guest. He met there many men of a certain literary eminence; Cotter Morrison, for instance, of whom he sometimes spoke to me, especially of his once characterising a social chatterer as a cloaca maxima of small talk. He also met Edmund Roden, with whom he remained on terms of friendship to the last, often visiting him in his house at Felixstowe, which is known to many men of letters. I think the fact that Edmund Roden was not only a man of letters but also, oddly enough, the manager of a great business, appealed in some way to Maitland's sense of humour. He liked Roden amazingly, and it was through him, if I remember rightly, that he became socially acquainted with George Meredith, whom, however, he had met in a business way when Meredith was reading for some firm of publishers at a salary of two hundred a year.

Nevertheless, in spite of his making money by some tutorial work, Maitland was still as poor as a rat in a cellar, and the absurd antinomy between the society he frequented at times and his real position, made him sometimes shout with laughter which was not always really humorous. It was during this period of his life that a lady asked him at an "at-home" what his experience was in the management of butlers. According to what he told me he replied seriously that he always strictly refrained from having anything to do with men servants, as he much preferred a smart-looking young maid. It was during this period that he did some work with a man employed, I think, at the London Skin Hospital. This poor fellow, it seemed, desired to rise in life, and possessed ambition. He wanted to pass the London matriculation examination and thus become, as he imagined, somebody of importance. Naturally enough, being but a clerk, he lacked time for work, and the arrangement come to between him and Maitland was that his teacher should go to his lodging at seven o'clock in the morning and give him his lesson in bed before breakfast. As this was just before the time that Maitland worked for Mr. Harold Edgeworth, he was too poor, so he said, to pay bus fares from the slum in which he lived, and as a result he had to rise at six o'clock in the morning, walk for a whole hour to his pupil's lodging, and then was very frequently met with the message that Mr. So-and-so felt much too tired that morning to receive him, and begged Mr. Maitland would excuse him. It is a curious comment on the authority of "The Meditations of Mark Sumner," which many cling to as undoubtedly authentic, that he mentions this incident as if he did not mind it. As a matter of fact he was furiously wrath with this man for not rising to receive him, and used to go away in a state of almost ungovernable rage, as he told me many and many a time.

After my return from America we used to meet regularly once a week on Sunday afternoons, for I had now commenced my own initiation into the mystery of letters, and had become an author. By Maitland's advice, and, if I may say so, almost by his inspiration—most certainly his encouragement—I wrote "The Western Trail," and having actually printed a book I felt that there was still another bond between me and Maitland. I used to turn up regularly at 7K Cumberland Residences at three o'clock on Sundays. From then till seven we talked of our work, of Latin and of Greek, of French, and of everything on earth that touched on literature. Long before seven Maitland used to apply himself very seriously to the subject of cooking. As he could not afford two fires he usually cooked his pot on the fire of the sitting-room. This pot of his was a great institution. It reminds me something of the gypsies' pot in which they put everything that comes to hand. Maitland's idea of cooking was fatness and a certain amount of gross abundance. He used to put into this pot potatoes, carrots, turnips, portions of meat, perhaps a steak, or on great days a whole rabbit, all of which he had bought himself, and carried home with his own hands. We used to watch the pot boiling, and perhaps about seven or half-past he would investigate its contents with a long, two-pronged iron fork, and finally decide much to our joy and contentment that the contents were edible. After our meal, for which I was usually ready, as I was practically starving much of this time myself, we removed the débris, washed up in company, and resumed our literary conversation, which sometimes lasted until ten or eleven. By that time Maitland usually turned me out, although my own day was not necessarily done for several hours. At those times when I was writing at all, I used to write between midnight and six o'clock in the morning.

Those were great talks that we had, but they were nearly always talks about ancient times, about the Greeks and Romans, so far as we strayed from English literature. It may seem an odd thing, and it is odd until it is explained, that he had very little interest in the Renaissance. There is still in existence a letter of his to Edmund Roden saying how much he regretted that he took no interest in it. That letter was, I think, dated from Siena, a city of the Renaissance. The truth of the matter is that he was essentially a creature of the Renaissance himself, a pure Humanist. For this very reason he displayed no particular pleasure in that period. He was interested in the time in which the men of the Renaissance revelled after its rediscovery and the new birth of learning. He would have been at his best if he had been born when that time was in flower. The fathers of the Renaissance rediscovered Rome and Athens, and so did he. No one can persuade me that if this had been his fate his name would not now have been as sacred to all who love literature as those of Petrarch and his glorious fellows. As a matter of fact it was this very quality of his which gave him such a lofty and lordly contempt for the obscurantist theologian. In my mind I can see him treating with that irony which was ever his favourite weapon, some relic of the dark ages of the schools. In those hours that we spent together it was wonderful to hear him talk of Greece even before he knew it, for he saw it as it had been, or as his mind made him think it had been, not with the modern Greek—who is perhaps not a Greek at all—shouting in the market-place. I think that he had a historical imagination of a very high order, even though he undoubtedly failed when endeavouring to use it. That was because he used it in the wrong medium. But when he saw the Acropolis in his mind he saw it before the Turks had stabled their horses in the Parthenon, and before the English, worse vandals than the Turks, had brought away to the biting smoke of London the marbles of Pheidias. Even as a boy he loved the roar and fume of Rome, although he had not yet seen it and could only imagine it. He saw in Italy the land of Dante and Boccaccio, a land still peopled in the south towards Sicily with such folks as these and Horace had known. My own education had been wrought out in strange, rough places in the new lands. It was a fresh education for me to come back to London and sit with Maitland on these marvellous Sunday afternoons and evenings when he wondered if the time would ever come for him to see Italy and Greece in all reality. It was for the little touches of realism, the little pictures in the Odes, that he loved Horace, and loved still more his Virgil; and, even more, Theocritus and Moshos, for Theocritus wrote things which were ancient and yet modern, full of the truth of humanity. Like all the men of the Renaissance he turned his eyes wistfully to the immemorial past, renewed in the magic alembic of his own mind.

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.

CHAPTER III

There are many methods of writing biography. Each has its advantages, even the chronological compilation. But chronology is no strong point of mine, and in this sketch I shall put but little stress on dates. There is great advantage in describing things as they impress themselves on the writer. A portrait gains in coherency and completeness by temporary omissions more than it can ever gain by the empty endeavour to handle each period fully. In this last chapter I might have endeavoured to describe Maitland at work, or to speak of his ambitions, or even to criticise what he had already done, or to give my own views of what he meant to achieve. There is authority for every method, and most authorities are bad, save Boswell—and few would pine for Boswell's qualities at the price of his failings. Yet one gets help from him everywhere, little as it may show. Only the other day I came across a passage in the "Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides" which has some value. Reporting Johnson, he writes: "Talking of biography, he said he did not think the life of any literary man in England had been well written. Besides the common incidents of life it should tell us his studies, his mode of living, the means by which he attained to excellence, and his opinion of his own works." Such I shall endeavour to do. Nevertheless Johnson was wrong. Good work had then been done in biography by Walton, whose Lives, by the way, Maitland loved; and Johnson himself was not far from great excellence when he described his friend Savage in the "Lives of the Poets" in spite of its want of colloquial ease. There came in then the value of friendship and actual personal knowledge, as it did in Boswell's "Life," I can only hope that my own deep acquaintance with Maitland will compensate for my want of skill in the art of writing lives, for which novel-writing is but a poor training. Yet the deeper one's knowledge the better it is to simplify as one goes, taking things by themselves, going forwards or backwards as may seem best, without care of tradition, especially where tradition is mostly bad. We do not write biography in England now as Romain Rolland writes that of Beethoven. Seldom are we grieved for our heroes, or rejoice with them. Photography, or the photographic portrait, is more in request than an impression. However, to resume in my own way, having to be content with that, and caring little for opinion, that fluctuant critic.

Long as our friendship existed it is perhaps curious that we never called each other, except on very rare occasions, by anything but our surnames. This, I think, is due to the fact that we had been at Moorhampton College together. It is, I imagine, the same thing with all schoolboys. Provided there is no nickname given, men who have been chums at school seem to prefer the surname by which they knew their friends in the early days. I have often noticed there is a certain savage tendency on the part of boys to suppress their Christian names, their own peculiar mark. And sometimes I have wondered whether this is not in some obscure way a survival of the savage custom of many tribes in which nobody is ever mentioned by his right name, because in that name there inheres mysteriously the very essence of his being and inheritance, the knowledge of which by others may expose him to some occult danger.

I believe I said above that from the time I first met Maitland after my return from Australia, until I went away again to Arizona, I was working in the Admiralty and the India Office as a writer at tenpence an hour. No doubt I thought the pay exiguous, and my prospects worth nothing. Yet when I came back from America and found him domiciled at 7K Cumberland Residences, my economic basis in life became even more exiguous, whatever hope might have said of my literary future. I was, in fact, a great deal poorer than Maitland. He lived in a flat and had at least two rooms and a kitchen. Yet it was a horrible place of extraordinary gloom, and its back windows overlooked the roaring steam engines of the Metropolitan Railway. In some ways no doubt my own apartment, when I took to living by myself in Chelsea, was superior in cheerfulness to 7K. Shortly after my return to England, when I had expended the fifty pounds I received for my first book, "The Western Trail," I took a single room in Chelsea, put in a few sticks of furniture given to me by my people, and commenced housekeeping on my own account on all I could make and the temporary ten shillings a week allowed me by my father, who at that time, for all his native respect for literature, regarded the practice of it with small hope and much suspicion. I know that it greatly amused Maitland to hear of his views on the subject of the self revelations in "The Western Trail," which dealt with my life in Western America. After reading that book he did not speak to me for three days, and told my younger brother, "These are pretty revelations about your brother having been a common loafer." At this Maitland roared, but he roared none the less when he understood that three columns of laudation in one of the reviews entirely changed my father's view of that particular book.

I should not trouble to say anything about my own particular surroundings if it were not that in a sense they also became Maitland's, although I went more frequently to him than he came to me. Nevertheless he was quite familiar with my one room and often had meals there which I cooked for him. Of course at that time, from one point of view, I was but a literary beginner and aspirant, while Maitland was a rising and respected man, who certainly might be poor, and was poor, but still he had published "The Mob" and other books, his name was well known, and his prospects, from the literary, if not from the financial point of view, seemed very good. I was the author of one book, the result of three years' bitter hard experience, written in twenty-six days as a tour de force, and though I had ambition I seemed to have nothing more to write about. From my own point of view Maitland was, of course, very successful. His flat with more rooms than one in it was a mansion, and he was certainly making something like a hundred a year. Still, I think that when he came down to me and found me comparatively independent, he rather envied me. At any rate I had not to keep an errant wife on the money that I made with infinite difficulty. He came to see me in Chelsea in my very early days, and took great joy in my conditions. For one thing I had no attendance with this room. I was supposed to look after it for myself in every way. This, he assured me, made my estate the more gracious, as any one can understand who remembers all that he has said about landladies and lodging-house servants and charwomen. He was overjoyed with the list of things I bought: a fender and fire-irons, a coal-scuttle, a dust-bin, and blacking brushes. He found me one day shaving by the aid of my own dim reflection in the glass of an etching which I had brought from home, because I had no looking-glass and no money to spare to buy one. I remember we frequently went together over the question of finance. Incidentally I found his own habit of buying cooked meat peculiarly extravagant. I have a book somewhere among my papers in which I kept accounts for my first three months in Chelsea to see how I was going to live on ten shillings a week, which Maitland assured me was preposterous riches, even if I managed to make no more.