ROUNDS
I find that most round things are nice,
Particularly Eternity and a baby.
Frances cared no less deeply both for Eternity and for babies and for many years went on hoping for the family that would complete their lives. At last it was decided to have an operation to enable her to have children. Her doctor writes:
I well remember an incident which occurred during her convalescence from that operation. I received a telephone call from the matron of the Nursing Home in which Mrs. Chesterton was staying, suggesting that I should come round and remonstrate with Mr. Chesterton. On my arrival I found him sitting on the stairs, where he had been for two hours, greatly incommoding passers up and down and deaf to all requests to move on. It appeared that he had written a sonnet to his wife on her recovery from the operation and was bringing it to give her. He was not however satisfied with the last line, but was determined to perfect it before entering her room to take tea with her.
By the time they left London she must, I think, have given up the hope she had so long cherished. Still if there could not be children there might be perhaps something of a home. In the conditions of their life, there was danger that any house of bricks and mortar should be rather a headquarters than a home, and it was lucky that he was able to feel she took home with her wherever they went—
Your face that is a wandering home
A flying home for me.
The years before them were to be filled with the vast activities that not only took Gilbert to London and all over England incessantly, but were to take him increasingly over Europe and America. Beaconsfield gave a degree of quiet that made it possible, when they were able to be at home, not to be swamped by engagements and to lead a life of their own. Gilbert could go to London when he liked, but he need not always be on tap, so to say, for all the world. Frances could have a garden and indulge her hungry appetite for all that was fruitful. G.K., later, under the title "The Homelessness of Jones"* showed his love for a house rather than a flat, and they gave even to their first little house "Overroads" the stamp of a real home.
[* A chapter in What's Wrong with the World.]
For a man and his wife to leave London for the country might seem to be their own affair. Not so, however, with the Chestertons. After a lapse of over thirty years I find the matter still a subject of furious controversy and indeed passion. Frances, says one school of opinion, committed a crime against the public good by removing Gilbert from Fleet Street. No, says the other school, she had to move him or he would have died of working too hard and drinking too much. The suggestion, which I believe to be a fact, that Gilbert himself wanted to move, is seldom entertained.
There is in all this the legitimate feeling of distress among any group at losing its chief figure, its pride and joy. "I lost Gilbert," Lucian Oldershaw once said, "first when I introduced him to Belloc, next when he married Frances, and finally when he joined the Catholic Church. . . . I rejoiced, though perhaps with a maternal sadness, at all these fulfillments."