This is not the way a man writes to a neurotic cold-hearted woman who has made a hermit of him!
Mrs. Cecil was of course never in the intimacy of the family. She only married Cecil in 1917—by which date Gilbert and Frances had been married sixteen years—and before that she was merely an acquaintance. But Frances's intimates could have told her how absurd her story was, for by a rare good fortune the operation Frances underwent to enable her to bear children is itself evidence one could hardly have hoped for in a matter which civilized people are not much given to discussing. Frances talked of the operation to Monsignor O'Connor, to Dorothy Collins and to Annie Firmin, and I have quoted the doctor's letter about it (see above, [Chapter XV]). It was an abiding tragedy for both husband and wife that it was unsuccessful. Frances would have shrunk from no suffering in her passionate wish for a child.
There is another curiosity in the Legend: Gilbert, despite this story, was apparently perfectly happy in London during the first eight years of marriage: it was only after the removal to Beaconsfield and in almost middle life that he began to be "frustrated."
Poor Frances: what a picture of her had been proposed for posterity: so powerful she could waft Gilbert away from London and from his friends, could force him to make her his banker and reduce him to a "bounty" strictly limited to half-a-crown, yet so powerless that "she had to sign" the cheques for G.K.'s Weekly, much as she hated it. Her poetry (described as "quite charming") is spoken of as appearing in "little Parish Magazines"—the only papers she cared to read owing to her implacable hatred for Fleet Street. It is hard to picture Frances with an implacable hatred for anything, and it will be remembered that she actually begged Father O'Connor to leave Gilbert to be "a jolly journalist." The periodicals in which her poems appeared were The Observer, The Sunday Times, The Daily Chronicle, the Westminster Gazette and The New Witness. Personally I have never much admired Frances's verse, but a professional journalist might have been quite pleased at "making" all these papers. Not one poem ever appeared in a Parish Magazine so far as either Dorothy or I have been able to ascertain. The point is not a very important one but the sneer is symptomatic.
A curious magic pervades The Chestertons: succulent sausages appear in the kitchen at Overstrand Mansions, and flowing torrents of beer, so that Gilbert can steal away from an unsympathetic wife to consume them with his Fleet Street friends. A studio materialises in a meadow at Beaconsfield. Can we imagine Gilbert cooking or even ordering sausages, getting beer to the flat, designing or discovering the studio? Anyone thinking about what really happened would realise that Frances ordered the beer and sausages, Frances built the studio. But that is not the sort of thought we are to think about Frances.
About her we are told: that she always wore the wrong colors: that she gave Gilbert insufficient and indigestible food: that she did not know what work meant: that Mrs. Belloc thought Gilbert ought to beat her: that she kept the journalists away when Gilbert was dying (in point of fact both telephone and door bell were so near the sick room that the use of both had to be avoided): that she did not give her guests enough to eat at his funeral: that she actually sought the quiet of her own room instead of staying downstairs to receive condolences when her husband's coffin had just been lowered into the grave.
With all this spate of detail, we are not told that Frances left £1000 to Mrs. Cecil plus £500 for her Cecil Houses.
Even if I could have ignored the attack on Frances, I should be obliged as his biographer to deal with the attack on Gilbert—more subtly but no less certainly made. The story of the marriage affects Gilbert as much as Frances, and the book culminates in the final assertion that his drinking killed him. Here are the comments (sent to me by Dorothy) of the doctor who attended Gilbert and Frances from 1919 until they died:
"Today Dr. Bakewell came in and answered the questions about the book which we asked him.
"(1) He says that the idea that G.K. was better when drinking in Fleet Street because the stimulus of conversation would eat up effects of the alcohol is absolute nonsense. It would have just as bad an effect under any conditions. Dr. Bakewell said that G.K. was his patient for nearly twenty years and during that time he never treated him for alcoholism or saw any trace of it, though in an absentminded way he was always liable to drink too much of anything if it were there—even water.