Gilbert Keith Chesterton

by Maisie Ward

You will understand how difficult it is to get time to think and adjust my conclusions.

Yrs affect.

FRANCES CHESTERTON.

This group of letters is for Frances amazingly unreserved. I have never known a happier Catholic than she was once the shivering on the bank was over and the plunge had been taken. One would say she had been in the Church all her life.

This was indeed a year of fulfillment: the year of the completion of their home, for they surprisingly acquired a daughter! I sometimes wondered why Frances and Gilbert had never adopted a child: they lavished much love on nieces, nephews and godchildren, but this was the only fulfillment to their longing until almost old age—and even then their conscious act was merely that of engaging a secretary. They had had many secretaries before, some of whom came with a quite inadequate training. "They learnt on Gilbert," as a friend once put it. It was difficult, too, for the secretaries, since neither Gilbert nor Frances had any idea of hours or of the arrangement of work. It was quite probable that Gilbert would suddenly want to dictate late in the evening or again that Frances would ask the secretary of the moment to run into the village for the fish in the middle of the morning. Hence rather general discomfort. Gilbert dictated straight to the typewriter, so shorthand was not needed. He went very slowly with many pauses. But it is typical of this period that no carbons were kept of letters sent, no files of letters received.

In 1926 came Dorothy Collins. Not only did she bring order out of chaos, but she became first the very dear friend of both Frances and Gilbert and finally all that their own daughter could have been. I remember how Frances talked of her to me when she was hoping Dorothy would become a Catholic (which she did some years later) and again when she herself was left solitary by her husband's death, and how I felt with inward thanksgiving that no child could mean more to her mother. But long before this stage was reached came a great lightening of the burden of living. No longer would Frances cry over income tax returns, no longer would money worry her. Chauffeur as well as secretary Dorothy drove them both to London for engagements and through England and Europe on holidays or lecture tours. She went with them to America and handled the business of their second tour there. Now when friends rang up to make arrangements Frances or Gilbert could say: "Would you ring again when Dorothy comes in. I'm not quite sure. She keeps the engagement book." And while Dorothy sternly warded off the undesirables, it worked out much better for friends as no engagement book had been kept before with any regularity. Now engagements were kept as well as an engagement book. Frances would still deal with the clothing question, but Dorothy handled it if she were unwell, and in every case delivered him punctually and brought him home again. A few of the lectures and debates of these years were: "Is Journalism Justifiable?", "An Aspect of St. Francis of Assisi," "The Problem of Liberty," "Is the House of Commons any Use," "What Poland Is," "Culture and the Coming Peril," "Progress and Old Books," "Americanization," "The Modern Novel," "If I Were a Dictator."

The excitement of Catholics everywhere had been intense when Gilbert came into the church: in England it was almost as great over Frances. Her real wish to remain in the background, her dislike of publicity, were seldom believed in by those who did not know her. I happened to be present at a conversation between the proprietor and the editor of a Catholic paper which had displayed a poster all over London announcing her conversion. One of them had heard that she was annoyed and for a moment both seemed a little dashed. Then said one: "Of course she has to pretend not to like it"—and this was at once accepted by the other: for both took for granted that such publicity could in reality have given her nothing but pleasure.

It was difficult at first for either Frances or Gilbert to see the wood for the trees in their new environment, and it was the greatest good fortune that the year of Frances's reception was also that of the new simplification following upon Dorothy's arrival. For the preceding few years had resembled the hectic period of the lionising of the young Chesterton of 1904. Requests poured in, for lectures, for articles, for introductions to books. "Are there no other Catholics to do things?" Frances asked me rather plaintively. Of these years Monsignor Knox said later, "his health had begun to decline, and he was overworked, partly through our fault."

A dip into the post bag brings up some letters from Father Martindale to Gilbert and Frances passing on various requests, but also realising the difficulty: "I sympathize with all desperately busy men": "I have already protected him by advising small or fussy groups not to invite him now and again." The solitary recollection I have of any interest Gilbert showed in a review of his books is the remark he made to my husband when Father Martindale had said of The Queen of Seven Swords "Francis Thompson is here outpassed." Gilbert repeated the phrase and said eagerly: "He wouldn't say it unless he meant it, would he?"

C.C.M., who has himself been caricatured talking on the radio, typing and eating at the same time, as different from G.K.C. as possible in his pale slimness and almost transparent appearance, was no less busy over a thousand activities. It was interesting that he should ask Gilbert's help, especially in that cementing of Catholics throughout the Empire that has always so passionately preoccupied him. In the War he had discovered in military hospitals the ordinary Englishman and above all the ordinary Australian and New Zealander. To them and to the Apostolate of the Sea he was to devote primarily all his later life.