d 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...