ole, a very happy man throughout all that wildly
enterprising time. He made and, as I shall tell in its place, spent
great sums of money. He was constantly in violent motion, constantly
stimulated mentally and physically and rarely tired. About him was an
atmosphere of immense deference much of his waking life was triumphal
and all his dreams. I doubt if he had any dissatisfaction with himself
at all until the crash bore him down. Things must have gone very rapidly
with him.... I think he must have been very happy.

As I sit here writing about all these things, jerking down notes and
throwing them aside in my attempt to give some literary form to the tale
of our promotions, the marvel of it all comes to me as if it came for
the first time the supreme unreason of it. At the climax of his Boom, my
uncle at the most sparing estimate must have possessed in substance and
credit about two million pounds'-worth of property to set off against
his vague colossal liabilities, and from first to last he must have had
a controlling influence in the direction of nearly thirty millions.

This irrational muddle of a community in which we live gave him that,
paid him at that rate for sitting in a room and scheming and telling
it lies. For he created nothing, he invented nothing, he economised
nothing. I cannot claim that a single one of the great businesses
we organised added any real value to human life at all. Several like
Tono-Bungay were unmitigated frauds by any honest standard, the giving
of nothing coated in advertisements for money. And the things the
Hardingham gave out, I repeat, were nothing to the things that came
in. I think of the long procession of people who sat down before us and
propounded this and that. Now it was a device for selling bread under
a fancy name and so escaping the laws as to weight--this was afterwards
floated as the Decorticated Health-Bread Company and bumped against the
law--now it was a new scheme for still more strident advertisement,
now it was a story of unsuspected deposits of minerals, now a cheap and
nasty substitute for this or that common necessity, now the treachery of
a too well-informed employee, anxious to become our partner. It was
all put to us tentatively, persuasively. Sometimes one had a large pink
blusterous person trying to carry us off our feet by his pseudo-boyish
frankness, now some dyspeptically yellow whisperer, now some earnest,
specially dressed youth with an eye-glass and