Love of the Last Tycoon: The Authorized Text (No Series) Read Online Free

Smith?” I asked, half asleep.
    “Yeah.”
    “Who is Mr. Smith? I suspect he spoiled Mr. Schwartz’s trip.”
    “It was Schwartz’s fault.”
    “I’m prejudiced against steam-rollers,” I said. “My father tries to be a steam-roller around the house, and I tell him to save it for the studio.”
    I wondered if I was being fair; words are the palest counters at that time in the morning. “Still, he steam-rollered me into Bennington and I’ve always been grateful for that.”
    “There would be quite a crash,” Wylie said, “if steam-roller Brady met steam-roller Smith.”
    “Is Mr. Smith a competitor of Father’s?”
    “Not exactly. I should say no. But if he was a competitor, I know where my money would be.”
    “On Father?”
    “I’m afraid not.”
    It was too early in the morning for family patriotism. The pilot was at the desk with the purser and he shook his head as they regarded a prospective passenger who had put two nickels in the electric phonograph and lay alcoholically on a bench fighting off sleep. The first song he had chosen, “Lost,” thundered through the room, followed, after a slight interval, by his other choice, “Gone,” which was equally dogmatic and final. The pilot shook his head emphatically and walked over to the passenger.
    “Afraid we’re not going to be able to carry you this time, old man.”
    “Wha?”
    The drunk sat up, awful-looking, yet discernibly attractive, and I was sorry for him in spite of his passionately ill-chosen music.
    “Go back to the hotel and get some sleep. There’ll be another plane tonight.”
    “Only going up in ee air. ”
    “Not this time, old man.”
    In his disappointment the drunk fell off the bench—and above the phonograph, a loudspeaker summoned us respectable people outside. In the corridor of the plane I ran into Monroe Stahr and fell all over him, or wanted to. There was a man any girl would go for, with or without encouragement. I was emphatically with out it, but he liked me and sat down opposite till the plane took off.
    “Let’s all ask for our money back,” he suggested. His dark eyes took me in, and I wondered what they would look like if he fell in love. They were kind, aloof and, though they often reasoned with you gently, somewhat superior. It was no fault of theirs if they saw so much. He darted in and out of the role of “one of the boys” with dexterity—but on the whole I should say he wasn’t one of them. But he knew how to shut up, how to draw into the background, how to listen. From where he stood (and though he was not a tall man, it always seemed high up) he watched the multitudinous practicalities of his world like a proud young shepherd to whom night and day had never mattered. He was born sleepless, without a talent for rest or the desire for it.
    We sat in unembarrassed silence—I had known him since he became Father’s partner a dozen years ago, when I was seven and Stahr was twenty-two. Wylie was across the aisle and I didn’t know whether or not to introduce them, but Stahr kept turning his ring so abstractedly that he made me feel young and invisible, and I didn’t dare. I never dared look quite away from him or quite at him, unless I had something important to say—and I knew he affected many other people in the same manner.
    “I’ll give you this ring, Cecilia.”
    “I beg your pardon. I didn’t realize that I was—–”
    “I’ve got half a dozen like it.”
    He handed it to me, a gold nugget with the letter S in bold relief. I had been thinking how oddly its bulk contrasted with his fingers, which were delicate and slender like the rest of his body, and like his slender face with the arched eyebrows and the dark curly hair. He looked spiritual at times, but he was a fighter—somebody out of his past knew him when he was one of a gang of kids in the Bronx, and gave me a description of how he walked always at the head of his gang, this rather frail boy, occasionally throwing a command