And now my story converges on what, in that queer corner of refuge out
of the world, was destined to be my uncle’s deathbed. There is a
background of the Pyrenees, of blue hills and sunlit houses, of the old
castle of Luzon and a noisy cascading river, and for a foreground the
dim, stuffy room whose windows both the _religieuse_ and hostess
conspired to shut, with its waxed floor, its four-poster bed, its
characteristically French chairs and fireplace, its champagne bottles
and dirty basins and used towels and packets of _Somatosé_ on the
table. And in the sickly air of the confined space in behind the
curtains of the bed lay my little uncle, with an effect of being
enthroned and secluded, or sat up, or writhed and tossed in his last
dealings of life. One went and drew back the edge of the curtains if
one wanted to speak to him or look at him.
Usually he was propped up against pillows, because so he breathed more
easily. He slept hardly at all.
I have a confused memory of vigils and mornings and afternoons spent by
that bedside, and how the _religieuse_ hovered about me, and how meek
and good and inefficient she was, and how horribly black were her
nails. Other figures come and go, and particularly the doctor, a young
man plumply rococo, in bicycling dress, with fine waxen features, a
little pointed beard, and the long black frizzy hair and huge tie of a
minor poet. Bright and clear-cut and irrelevant are memories of the
Basque hostess of my uncle’s inn and of the family of Spanish people
who entertained me and prepared the most amazingly elaborate meals for
me, with soup and salad and chicken and remarkable sweets. They were
all very kind and sympathetic people, systematically so. And
constantly, without attracting attention, I was trying to get
newspapers from home.
My uncle is central to all these impressions.
I have tried to make you picture him, time after time, as the young man
of the Wimblehurst chemist’s shop, as the shabby assistant in Tottenham
Court Road, as the adventurer of the early days of Tono-Bungay, as the
confident, preposterous plutocrat. And now I have to tell of him
strangely changed under the shadow of oncoming death, with his skin lax
and yellow and glistening with sweat, his eyes large and glassy, his
countenance unfamiliar through the growth of a beard, his nose pinched
and thin. Never had he looked so small as now. And he talked to me in a
whispering, strained voice of great issues, of why his life had been,
and whither he was going. Poor little man! that last phase is, as it
were, disconnected from all the other phases. It was as if he crawled
out from the ruins of his career, and looked about him before he died.
For he had quite clear-minded states in the intervals of his delirium.
He knew he was almost certainly dying. In a way that took the burthen
of his cares off his mind. There was no more Neal to face, no more
flights or evasions, no punishments.
“It has been a great career, George,” he said, “but I shall be glad to
rest. Glad to rest!... Glad to rest.”
His mind ran rather upon his career, and usually, I am glad to recall,
with a note of satisfaction and approval. In his delirious phases he
would most often exaggerate this self-satisfaction, and talk of his
splendours. He would pluck at the sheet and stare before him, and
whisper half-audible fragments of sentences.
“What is this great place, these cloud-capped towers, these any
pinnacles?... Ilion. Sky-pointing.... Ilion House, the residence of one
of our great merchant princes.... Terrace above terrace. Reaching to
the heavens.... Kingdoms Cæsar never knew.... A great poet, George.
Zzzz. Kingdoms Cæsar never knew.... Under entirely new management.
“Greatness....Millions... Universities.... He stands on the terrace—on
the upper terrace—directing—directing—by the globe—directing—the
trade.”
It was hard at times to tell when his sane talk ceased and his delirium
began. The secret springs of his life, the vain imaginations were
revealed. I sometimes think that all the life of man sprawls abed,
careless and unkempt, until it must needs clothe and wash itself and
come forth seemly in act and speech for the encounter with one’s
fellow-men. I suspect that all things unspoken in our souls partake
somewhat of the laxity of delirium and dementia. Certainly from those
slimy, tormented lips above the bristling grey beard came nothing but
dreams and disconnected fancies....
Sometimes he raved about Neal, threatened Neal. “What has he got
invested?” he said. “Does he think he can escape me?... If I followed
him up.... Ruin. Ruin.... One would think _I_ had taken his money.”
And sometimes he reverted to our airship flight. “It’s too long,
George, too long and too cold. I’m too old a man—too old—for this sort
of thing.... You know you’re not saving—you’re killing me.”
Towards the end it became evident our identity was discovered. I found
the press, and especially Boom’s section of it, had made a sort of hue
and cry for us, sent special commissioners to hunt for us, and though
none of these emissaries reached us until my uncle was dead, one felt
the forewash of that storm of energy. The thing got into the popular
French press. People became curious in their manner towards us, and a
number of fresh faces appeared about the weak little struggle that went
on in the closeness behind the curtains of the bed. The young doctor
insisted on consultations, and a motor-car came up from Biarritz, and
suddenly odd people with questioning eyes began to poke in with
inquiries and help. Though nothing was said, I could feel that we were
no longer regarded as simple middle-class tourists; about me, as I
went, I perceived almost as though it trailed visibly, the prestige of
Finance and a criminal notoriety. Local personages of a plump and
prosperous quality appeared in the inn making inquiries, the Luzon
priest became helpful, people watched our window, and stared at me as I
went to and fro; and then we had a raid from a little English clergyman
and his amiable, capable wife in severely Anglican blacks, who swooped
down upon us like virtuous but resolute vultures from the adjacent
village of Saint Jean de Pollack.
The clergyman was one of those odd types that oscillate between remote
country towns in England and the conduct of English Church services on
mutual terms in enterprising hotels abroad, a tremulous, obstinate
little being with sporadic hairs upon his face, spectacles, a red
button nose, and aged black raiment. He was evidently enormously
impressed by my uncle’s monetary greatness, and by his own inkling of
our identity, and he shone and brimmed over with tact and fussy
helpfulness. He was eager to share the watching of the bedside with me,
he proffered services with both hands, and as I was now getting into
touch with affairs in London again, and trying to disentangle the
gigantic details of the smash from the papers I had succeeded in
getting from Biarritz, I accepted his offers pretty generously, and
began the studies in modern finance that lay before me. I had got so
out of touch with the old traditions of religion that I overlooked the
manifest possibility of his attacking my poor, sinking vestiges of an
uncle with theological solicitudes. My attention was called to that,
however, very speedily by a polite but urgent quarrel between himself
and the Basque landlady as to the necessity of her hanging a cheap
crucifix in the shadow over the bed, where it might catch my uncle’s
eye, where, indeed, I found it had caught his eye.
“Good Lord!” I cried; “is _that_ still going on!”
That night the little clergyman watched, and in the small hours he
raised a false alarm that my uncle was dying, and made an extraordinary
fuss. He raised the house. I shall never forget that scene, I think,
which began with a tapping at my bedroom door just after I had fallen
asleep, and his voice—
“If you want to see your uncle before he goes, you must come now.”
The stuffy little room was crowded when I reached it, and lit by three
flickering candles. I felt I was back in the eighteenth century. There
lay my poor uncle amidst indescribably tumbled bedclothes, weary of
life beyond measure, weary and rambling, and the little clergyman
trying to hold his hand and his attention, and repeating over and over
again:
“Mr. Ponderevo, Mr. Ponderevo, it is all right. It is all right.
“Only Believe! ‘Believe on me, and ye shall be saved’!”
Close at hand was the doctor with one of those cruel and idiotic
injection needles modern science puts in the hands of these
half-educated young men, keeping my uncle flickeringly alive for no
reason whatever. The _religieuse_ hovered sleepily in the background
with an overdue and neglected dose. In addition, the landlady had not
only got up herself, but roused an aged crone of a mother and a
partially imbecile husband, and there was also a fattish, stolid man in
grey alpaca, with an air of importance—who he was and how he got there,
I don’t know. I rather fancy the doctor explained him to me in French I
did not understand. And they were all there, wearily nocturnal, hastily
and carelessly dressed, intent upon the life that flickered and sank,
making a public and curious show of its going, queer shapes of human
beings lit by three uncertain candles, and every soul of them keenly
and avidly resolved to be in at the death. The doctor stood, the others
were all sitting on chairs the landlady had brought in and arranged for
them.
And my uncle spoilt the climax, and did not die.
I replaced the little clergyman on the chair by the bedside, and he
hovered about the room.
“I think,” he whispered to me mysteriously, as he gave place to me, “I
believe—it is well with him.”
I heard him trying to render the stock phrases of Low Church piety into
French for the benefit of the stolid man in grey alpaca. Then he
knocked a glass off the table, and scrabbled for the fragments. From
the first I doubted the theory of an immediate death. I consulted the
doctor in urgent whispers. I turned round to get champagne, and nearly
fell over the clergyman’s legs. He was on his knees at the additional
chair the Basque landlady had got on my arrival, and he was praying
aloud, “Oh, Heavenly Father, have mercy on this thy Child....” I
hustled him up and out of the way, and in another minute he was down at
another chair praying again, and barring the path of the _religieuse_,
who had found me the corkscrew. Something put into my head that
tremendous blasphemy of Carlyle’s about “the last mew of a drowning
kitten.” He found a third chair vacant presently; it was as if he was
playing a game.
“Good Heavens!” I said, “we must clear these people out,” and with a
certain urgency I did.
I had a temporary lapse of memory, and forgot all my French. I drove
them out mainly by gesture, and opened the window, to the universal
horror. I intimated the death scene was postponed, and, as a matter of
fact, my uncle did not die until the next night.
I did not let the little clergyman come near him again, and I was
watchful for any sign that his mind had been troubled. But he made
none. He talked once about “that parson chap.”
“Didn’t bother you?” I asked.
“Wanted something,” he said.
I kept silence, listening keenly to his mutterings. I understood him to
say, “They wanted too much.” His face puckered like a child’s going to
cry. “You can’t get a safe six per cent.,” he said. I had for a moment
a wild suspicion that those urgent talks had not been altogether
spiritual, but that, I think, was a quite unworthy and unjust
suspicion. The little clergyman was as simple and honest as the day. My
uncle was simply generalising about his class.
But it may have been these talks that set loose some long dormant
string of ideas in my uncle’s brain, ideas the things of this world had
long suppressed and hidden altogether. Near the end he suddenly became
clearminded and lucid, albeit very weak, and his voice was little, but
clear.
“George,” he said.
“I’m here,” I said, “close beside you.”
“George. You have always been responsible for the science. George. You
know better than I do. Is—Is it proved?”
“What proved?”
“Either way?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Death ends all. After so much—Such splendid beginnin’s. Somewhere.
Something.”