And he could do it the more richly because—as he said many years ago of the religious philosophy that was the basis of his social outlook—"I did not make it. God and humanity made it and it made me."
Meanwhile he himself distributed royally. He gave help to the Catholic Land Movement, to Cecil Houses, to all who asked him for help. He educated several nieces and nephews of Frances and gave money or lent it in considerable sums to old friends in difficulties. If some event—perhaps Judgment Day—should call together all those helped financially by Gilbert and Frances, I think they will be surprised to meet one another and to discover what a lot of them there are. They gave too to the Catholic Church at Beaconsfield, which later became Gilbert's monument, and to which Top Meadow was left after Frances's death. But even Top Meadow was distributed, a small piece being cut off the garden and left to Dorothy Collins. And I think even in a Distributist heaven it must add to Gilbert's happiness to see the seventeen rabbits, the chickens and the beehives—to say nothing of the huge quantities of vegetables produced on this fragment of his property.
For this war like the last, with all its suffering, will, if the Bureaucracy permit it, again energise the people of England into that creative action which is the only soil for the seed of Distributism. It began by distributing the people. And London was no place for a Distributist movement. It is no chance that the growth of this philosophy is among small groups and in the countryside. "On the land," as Father Vincent often says, "you need not waste a moment of time or a scrap of material." This is the fierce and pious thrift that Gilbert saw in his youth as so poetical and in his age as a part of the philosophy of Distributism.
CHAPTER XXVII
Silver Wedding
THE CONSIDERATION OF the Distributist League that flowed out of the foundation of G.K.'s Weekly in 1925 has carried us some years ahead of our story. Back then to 1926 when Frances and Gilbert had been married 25 years.
One of the things taught me long ago when I first visited them at Beaconsfield was that it was properly to be called Beckonsfield: that it was not named for Disraeli but that he, impertinently, had chosen to be named for it. Gilbert often spelt it Bekonsfield to impress his point. Both in theory and practice he had a lot of local patriotism and a little of that special pride taken by all men in houses built by themselves. But most of his pride went out to the fact that his home was intensely English. He quoted a lover of Sussex who said among the beech trees of Buckinghamshire, "This is really the most English part of England." He felt it "no accident that has called this particular stretch of England the home counties." Public life was so ugly just now, the decay of patriotism under the corroding influence of an evil and cowardly sort of pacifism was hateful to him, but England still remained to re-vitalise the English when the time should come. The oaks that had made our ships could still fill us with "heroic memories; of Nelson dying under the low oaken beams or Collingwood scattering the acorns that they might grow into battleships." Yet if, he said, "I were choosing an entirely English emblem, I should choose the beech-tree." Beaconsfield was, by one theory, named from the beech forests that surrounded it, and while the oaks suggested adventure and the British lion, the beeches suggest rather the pigs that feed upon their mast and villages that grow up in the hollows and slow curves of the hills.
"The return to the real England with real Englishmen would be a return to the beech-woods, which still make this town like a home. At least they did until recently. I shall probably be told tomorrow that several beech forests have been removed to enable a motorist, temporarily deaf and blind, to go from Birmingham to Brighton."
It is at Top Meadow, whither they moved in 1922, that I always see Frances and Gilbert in a memory picture. They were to live there for the rest of their lives, and life there was the quiet background for all the vast mental activity and the journeying over England and Ireland and Europe and America that marked the years that remained.
The house began simply as a huge room or studio built in the field opposite Overroads. At one end was a stage which became the dining room: at the other end a minute study for Gilbert. The roof was high with great beams: at the study end was a musicians' gallery. A wide open fireplace held two rushbottomed seats on one of which Frances sat in winter. They were the only warm corners, but Gilbert did not feel the cold and certainly could not have fitted into the inglenook. Opposite the fire was a long low window looking into the prettiest garden, where St. Francis stood guardian and preached perpetually to the birds. A pool held water lilies; and the flowers that surrounded the pool and the house were also cut and brought indoors in great quantities. Frances loved to have them in glowing masses against the background of books.