"I'm Done"

"Sister," the old man told Nurse Gwendoline Howell, "you're trying to keep me alive as an old curiosity, but I'm done, I'm finished, I'm going to die." Before the next dawn, George Bernard Shaw had lapsed into final unconsciousness. A little over 24 hours later, the 94-year-old philosopher, playwright, professional pixie and self-styled "Bishop of Everywhere" was dead (see p. 30).

"Oh, Nancy." The end that came so peacefully and quietly to Bernard Shaw, in bed at Ayot St. Lawrence last week, was not unwelcome. "I am longing for my eternal rest," Shaw told a friend just after his 94th birthday. The broken thighbone that sent Shaw into the hospital when he slipped and fell in his garden last September had shown signs of knitting better than his doctors dared hope, but the Shavian spirit was broken for good. When Shaw guessed that he might live only to become a bedridden invalid, he lost interest in the business.

Last week Lady Astor drove down from London to pay him a visit. "Oh, Nancy," Shaw murmured to his longtime friend as she sat gently stroking the parchment skin on his still defiantly bearded white head, "I want to sleep, to sleep." These quiet words were among the last that voluble Bernard Shaw was heard to speak. When the end came, Shaw met it with a faint quizzical smile that might have been construed as satisfied.

On the morning of Shaw's death, newsmen, who had stood a two-day deathwatch in the rain and fog outside the gates of the plain house called Shaw's Corner, were cheered at 4:30 a.m. by a sudden lifting of the fog. A half-hour later the stars were burning brightly when Housekeeper Alice Laden appeared at the gates and told the reporters, "Mr. Shaw is dead." Next day the world's newspapers were crammed with the highlights of his long life, restatements of his sauciest witticisms and the tributes of the great to a figure who had lived to see his own immortality established.

Not Atheist, Irish. In the tiny (pop. 110) village where Shaw had spent the last 44 years of his life, however, the parting amenities were those due an old man and a kindly neighbor. With the subject of their prayers gone beyond protest, a few Ayot neighbors, family servants and the daughter of a local publican gathered in Shaw's parlor for a brief service read by the local Anglican pastor, the Reverend R. J. Davies. "Mr. Shaw was not really an atheist," Pastor Davies said later, "I would call him rather an Irishman."

Early this week, according to his own wishes, the body of Bernard Shaw was cremated at Golders Green; a few close friends and no clergymen were present. A sprig of rosemary from the garden of his famed correspondent, the late Actress Ellen Terry, lay on his casket during the trip to the crematory. "I want my ashes mingled with those of my wife," Shaw had told Nancy Astor. "After that, you may bury me wherever you like." Likeliest resting place: Westminster Abbey.

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