Mr. Macdonald asked him if he knew Chesterton well.
"Never read a word he wrote," the barber answered. "But I always listened to him on the wireless. He seemed to be sitting beside me in the room."
"That man," Edward Macdonald comments, "emphasised what I still think: that G.K.C. in another year or so would have become the dominating voice from Broadcasting House."
In 1934 Gilbert had jaundice and on his recovery he started with Frances and Dorothy on one of those trips that were his greatest pleasure. They went to Rome—it was Holy Year—and thence to Sicily, intending to go on to Palestine. At Syracuse, however, Gilbert became really ill with inflammation of the nerves of the neck and shoulders. They stayed five weeks in Syracuse, gave up the trip to Palestine and returned home by Malta. Gilbert and Frances were to have dined at Admiralty House but he was too unwell to dine out and only came up one afternoon. Lady Fisher remembers going to see them at the Osborne Hotel. Gilbert was sitting on a rickety basket chair, obviously in pain and talking a good deal in order to hide it. She sympathised with him for the cold weather, his obvious physical misery, and the discomfort of his chair.
"You must never sympathise with me," Gilbert answered, "for I can always turn every chair into a story."
The next year they motored in France and Italy and Gilbert records in the Autobiography an experience in a French café when he felt a rare thrill—not in talking on the radio but in listening—on a day that "was dateless, even for my dateless life; for I had forgotten time and had no notion of anything anywhere, when in a small French town I strolled into a café noisy with French talk. Wireless songs wailed unnoted; which is not surprising, for French talk is much better than wireless. And then, unaccountably, I heard a voice speaking in English; and a voice I had heard before. For I heard the words, '. . . wherever you are, my dear people, whether in this country or beyond the sea,' and I remembered Monarchy and an ancient cry; for it was the King; and that is how I kept the Jubilee."
After he got home I remember how delightedly Gilbert quoted the captions on two banners hung in the heart of the London slums. One read, "Down with Capitalism—God Save the King." The other read, "Lousy but loyal." He knew that it was true and it served to increase the passionate quality of his pity. Patient he could be for himself, but the lot of the poor aroused in him a terrible anger—and in a broadcast on Liberty he gave that anger vent. For worse than the presence of lice in our slums was the absence of liberty. He would gladly, he said, have spoken merely as an Englishman but he had been asked to speak as a Catholic, and therefore, "I am going to point out that Catholicism created English liberty; that the freedom has remained exactly in so far as the faith has remained; and that where it is true that all our Faith has gone, all our freedom is going. If I do this, I cannot ask most of you to agree with me; if I did anything else, I could not ask any of you to respect me."
Other speakers in the series had dwelt on the liberty secured to Englishmen by our Parliamentary and Juridical system, both, he noted of Catholic origin. But in his eyes even that liberty was being imperilled today where it was not lost, while the most important freedom of all—freedom to handle oneself and one's daily life—had disappeared for the mass of the people. The liberty so widely praised that followed the Reformation
has been a limited liberty because it was only a literary liberty. . . . You always talked about verbal liberty; you hardly ever talked about vital liberty . . . the faddist was free to preach his fads; but the free man was no longer free to protect his freedom. . . . Monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, responsible forms of rule, have collapsed under plutocracy, which is irresponsible rule. And this has come upon us because we departed from the old morality in three essential points. First, we supported notions against normal customs. Second, we made the State top-heavy with a new and secretive tyranny of wealth. And third, we forgot that there is no faith in freedom without faith in free will. A servile fatalism dogs the creed of materialism; because nothing, as Dante said, less than the generosity of God could give to Man, after all ordinary orderly gifts, the noblest of all things, which is Liberty.
The thoughts that had thronged and pressed on him for half a century found final expression in these broadcasts. Most of all in two talks: one given only three months before his death in a series entitled "The Spice of Life," the other two years earlier in one called "Seven Days Hard." He was haunted by the ingratitude of humanity. As in his boyhood, he saw the wonder of the world that God has given to the children of men and he saw them unconscious of that wonder. What did a week mean for most of them? Seven dull days. What did it really mean? "What has really happened during the last seven days and nights? Seven times we have been dissolved into darkness as we shall be dissolved into dust; our very selves, so far as we know, have been wiped out of the world of living things; and seven times we have been raised alive like Lazarus, and found all our limbs and senses unaltered, with the coming of the day."