What Happened
Chesterton received the ovations of the Fenwick students and faculty. He planted a crabtree (the only surviving crabtree, replaced in later years by its lesser cousin, the crabapple tree) by our library and bore with the motion picture camera men.
No newspaper accounts provide a transcript of his speech, but we found one. A clerical philosopher transcribed a portion of it word for word and stored it under a figurine of an Alpine ibex in his office. He kindly shared this tidbit with us:
”Thank you all very much for having me. Do you know, I think modern people have somehow got their minds all wrong about human life. They seem to expect what Nature has never promised; and then try to ruin all that Nature has really given (like crabtrees). At all those atheist chapels of Boisdelierre’s they’re always talking of Peace, Perfect Peace, and Utter Peace, and Universal Joy and souls that beat as one. But they don’t look any more cheerful than anyone else; and the next thing they do is to start smashing a thousand good jokes and good stories and good songs and good friendships.”
The clerical philosopher then got distracted and ceased his transcription when he noticed a sign on a wooden pole painted white, suspending a square board also painted white, depicting a highly grotesque blue ship such as a child might draw which had within it a disproportionately large, red St. George’s cross that appeared somewhere behind Chesterton’s head. It soon disappeared. Mr. Philippe Boisdelierre spent the rest of the speech fuming and searching for the culprit. A school wide email was sent out to address this issue after the fact. When asked if he knew anything about the sign, which was reportedly inspired by one of his books, Mr. Chesterton responded: “I'm not entirely sure what you mean when you accuse me of knowing anything about this sign. Signs that appear behind one’s head, as you know, are customarily unseen by the person whose head it is behind. We receive our eyes on the front of our faces. We have no real say in the matter. It seems to me that you are alluding to something of which I am unaware.”