The suggested line was so successful that Wells's testimony was not called for. The case was withdrawn. No apology was even asked from Gilbert, whose solicitor tells me that Messrs. Lever "behaved very reasonably when once it was made clear to them that Gilbert was not a scurrilous person making a vulgar and slanderous attack upon their business."
With H. G. Wells as with Shaw, Gilbert's relations were exceedingly cordial, but with a cordiality occasionally threatened by explosions from Wells. Gilbert's soft answer however invariably turned away wrath and all was well again. "No one," Wells said to me, "ever had enmity for him except some literary men who did not know him." They met first, Wells thinks, at the Hubert Blands, and then Gilbert stayed with Wells at Easton. There they played at the non-existent game of Gype and invented elaborate rules for it. Cecil came too and they played the War game Wells had invented. "Cecil," says Wells, comparing him with Gilbert, "seemed condensed: not quite big enough for a real Chesterton."
They built too a toy theatre at Easton and among other things dramatized the minority report of the Poor Law Commission. The play began by the Commissioners taking to pieces Bumble the Beadle, putting him into a huge cauldron and stewing him. Then out from the cauldron leaped a renewed rejuvenated Bumble several sizes larger than when he went in.
In the early days of their acquaintance Wells remembers meeting the whole Chesterton family in the street of a French town and inviting them to lunch. His own youngest son, a small boy, had left the room for a moment when Wells exclaimed: "Where's Frank? Good God, Gilbert, you're sitting on him."
The anxious way in which Gilbert got up and turned apologetically towards his own chair was unforgettable. An absent-minded man who in a gesture of politeness once gave his seat to three ladies in a bus might well be alarmed over the fate of a small boy found under him.
In his memoirs Wells relates another pleasing story of a
Chestertonian encounter:
I once saw [Henry] James quarrelling with his brother William James, the psychologist. He had lost his calm; he was terribly unnerved. He appealed to me, to me of all people, to adjudicate on what was and what was not permissible in England. William was arguing about it in an indisputably American accent, with an indecently naked reasonableness. I had come to Rye with a car to fetch William James and his daughter to my home at Sandgate. William had none of Henry's passionate regard for the polish upon the surface of life and he was immensely excited by the fact that in the little Rye inn, which had its garden just over the high brick wall of the garden of Lamb House, G. K. Chesterton was staying. William James had corresponded with our vast contemporary and he sorely wanted to see him. So with a scandalous directness he had put the gardener's ladder against that ripe red wall and clambered up and peeped over!
Henry had caught him at it. It was the sort of thing that isn't done. It was most emphatically the sort of thing that isn't done. . . . Henry instructed the gardener to put away that ladder and William was looking thoroughly naughty about it.
To Henry's manifest relief, I carried William off and in the road just outside the town we ran against the Chestertons who had been for a drive in Romney Marsh; Chesterton was heated and I think rather swollen by the sunshine; he seemed to overhang his one-horse fly; he descended slowly but firmly; he was moist and steamy but cordial; we chatted in the road and William got his coveted impression.
The two must have suited each other a good deal better than Chesterton and the more conventional brother. Of Henry's reactions there was a comment from the other side of the Atlantic.