IN 1909, WITH Orthodoxy well behind him, and George Bernard Shaw just published, Gilbert and his wife left London for the small country town that was to be their home for the rest of their lives. It was an odd coincidence that they should leave Overstrand Mansions, Battersea, and come to Overroads, Beaconsfield, for they did not name their new home but found it ready christened.
It will be remembered that in one of the letters during the engagement Gilbert had suggested a country home. The reason for the choice of Beaconsfield he gives in the Autobiography:
After we were married, my wife and I lived for about a year in Kensington, the place of my childhood; but I think we both knew that it was not to be the real place for our abode. I remember that we strolled out one day, for a sort of second honeymoon, and went upon a journey into the void, a voyage deliberately objectless. I saw a passing omnibus labelled "Hanwell" and, feeling this to be an appropriate omen,* we boarded it and left it somewhere at a stray station, which I entered and asked the man in the ticket-office where the next train went to. He uttered the pedantic reply, "Where do you want to go to?" And I uttered the profound and philosophical rejoinder, "Wherever the next train goes to." It seemed that it went to Slough; which may seem to be singular taste, even in a train. However, we went to Slough, and from there set out walking with even less notion of where we were going. And in that fashion we passed through the large and quiet cross-roads of a sort of village, and stayed at an inn called The White Hart. We asked the name of the place and were told that it was called Beaconsfield (I mean of course that it was called Beconsfield and not Beaconsfield), and we said to each other, "This is the sort of place where some day we will make our home."**
[* At Hanwell is London's most famous lunatic asylum.]
[** Autobiography, p. 219.]
They both wanted a home. They both deeply desired a family. The wish is normal to both man and woman, normal in a happy marriage, and theirs was unusually happy; it was almost abnormally keen in both Frances and Gilbert. Few men have so greatly loved children. As a schoolboy his letters are full of it—making friends with Scottish children on the sands, with French children by the medium of pictures. Later he was writing "In Defence of Baby Worship" and welcoming with enthusiasm the arrival of his friends' children into the world.
In the Notebook he had written:
Sunlight in a child's hair.
It is like the kiss of Christ upon all children.
I blessed the child: and hoped the blessing would go with him
And never leave him;
And turn first into a toy, and then into a game
And then into a friend,
And as he grew up, into friends
And then into a woman.
GRASS AND CHILDREN
Grass and children
There seems no end to them.
But if there were but one blade of grass
Men would see that it is fairer than lilies,
And if we saw the first child
We should worship it as the God come on earth.