Writing therefore to counsel the Chestertons as to which Catholic works should have precedence, we find him wanting an article for a New Zealand paper "the only one of its sort in N.Z., and you may say that it affects the entire Catholic community of the two islands," an autographed book for "a hulking devotee of yours and a member of the Australia rugger team, I think eight of them are Catholics." This "would give enormous joy to him" and "would be known in no time throughout Australia. Do try to."
From South Africa he wrote to Frances:
You will be surprised to get a letter from me from a nameless place 50 miles inland from the Nyanga mountains, which you will find (variously spelt) westward from, say Beira on the African east coast. This is the reason—
Recently a boy in a kraal here was found cutting pious pictures from a newspaper that he had somehow got hold of (he was a good little Catholic!). "Why are you cutting out that one?" "Because this is a Great Mukuru in the Catholic Church." (Mukuru is Potentate and will serve from St. Joseph right along to the Pope, not to mention the Little Flower. . . .) The Great Mukuru in this case was yourself! So there!
I hope you will smile with pleasure, but not try to answer, as please God I sail on the 31st and ought to be back in London in early Sept., a good deal better, thank God.
Please remember me affectionately to Gilbert. This is the first time a typemachine has clicked just here; its accompaniment, in an otherwise dead silence, is a distant gurgling yodel, so to say—some native feeling happy in the brilliantly hot sunlight, which, all the same, cannot make the thin air hot. I sleep (when possible) under furs, with the occasional insect dropping off the thatch over my head.
Later, planning a meeting for the Apostolate of the Sea at Queen's
Hall, he writes to Gilbert:
Similarly Fr. McNabb must be given his head and I have told him he shall be given it. I hope to be purely practical and possibly a little sentimental. . . . The Seaman is everywhere, yet, for us, nowhere. He carries everywhere his child's heart, man's body, hungry unfed soul, unique power of feeding his goodness into others. The all-round (the world) man; the sea-limited man; the man whose life is made up of storms and stars; the most secretive and the most open-hearted man of any. . . . Now I will do all the clumsy stuff. You pull it all up into the human-sublime divine-humble air.
He has no privacy, and is more lonely than anyone. He has Water, and God; and MUST find Christ walking over the waves towards him. And no ghost.
Father Vincent McNabb who was to be "given his head" at this meeting was not a new friend of Catholic days but a very old one. A friendly critic of my manuscript asks whether he, even more than Belloc or Chesterton, does not merit the title of the Father of Distributism. At least he brings into the movement something none other could bring. He bases his social philosophy closely on the gospels—of which his knowledge is almost unique—and his articles bear such titles as "The Economics of Bethlehem" or "Big Scale Agriculture and the Gospels." Hatred of machinery has combined with love of poverty to sunder him from a typewriter, and these articles are all handwritten in most exquisite and legible script. His letters have always come in old envelopes turned inside out; he walks whenever possible and wears a shabby white habit and broken boots. Both Frances and Gilbert loved him dearly and their rare meetings were red letter days for both. Besides the link of Distributism the two men were united in caring deeply for the reawakened interest in St. Thomas and his philosophy.