Chesterton around the Corner

Chesterton around the Corner | James Casper | IPNovels.com

By the time I graduated from Loyola High School in Minnesota, I had read almost everything G.K. Chesterton had written.

Not long after, at St. Louis University, I found myself in the office of Dr. Edward Sarmiento as he shared the story of publishing a poem in G.K.’s Weekly years before I was born. Sarmiento, Professor of Spanish, had received for his youthful efforts a check for one pound sterling signed by G.K. himself.

“You did?!”  I sputtered. I expected to see the check itself at any moment pulled from a drawer of his battered office desk.

“I cashed it, Jim.” He said it with that beautifully sad intonation and facial expression the Spanish manage so very well. “I was broke, and needed the money, but that must have disappointed Chesterton. I think he was hoping his autograph would be pay enough.”

Chesterton, among other things, was a canny businessman. Dr. Sarmiento, among other things, was a translator of St. John of the Cross’s poems.

Decades rolled by and my wife and I were at London’s Marylebone Station purchasing flowers and boarding the Chiltern train—destination: Beaconsfield, home of Chesterton. He had made this journey almost daily, traveling to and from his Fleet Street haunts to a town whose name Americans will mispronounce to the amusement of the British. For ever so many readers, his village home might remain a beacon, but it also beckons, and that is how it is pronounced.

Flowers in hand, we stood outside his homes, Overroads and Top Meadow. We wondered where the rail line and train station might have been in those days long past. The entrance to Top Meadow was wider than most. It had to be wide or he might have been trapped inside. We lingered before his grave, also that of his wife and secretary. I attempted to translate its Latin inscription all but worn away on a sadly weathered monument.

“You would think with all the people in this world so fond of themselves for revering Chesterton—some of them making money from writing about him—funds could be raised to restore this,” I muttered.

“We are hitchhikers, all of us,” said Kate.

This silenced me. We left our flowers.

An old, old man hailed us from afar as we stood in the cemetery. 

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