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

themselves at his head. My little spurt of intellectual interest was of course making me fit to be a brilliant ornament of any salon.
    I know now it was absurd. Though Stahr’s education was founded on nothing more than a night-school course in stenography, he had a long time ago run ahead through trackless wastes of perception into fields where very few men were able to follow him. But in my reckless conceit I matched my grey eyes against his brown ones for guile, my young golf-and-tennis heart-beats against his, which must be slowing a little after years of over-work. And I planned and I contrived and I plotted—any woman can tell you—but it never came to anything, as you will see. I still like to think that if he’d been a poor boy and nearer my age I could have managed it, but of course the real truth was that I had nothing to offer that he didn’t have; some of my more romantic ideas actually stemmed from pictures— 42nd Street, for example, had a great influence on me. It’s more than possible that some of the pictures which Stahr himself conceived had shaped me into what I was.
    So it was rather hopeless. Emotionally, at least, people can’t live by taking in each other’s washing.
    But at that time it was different: Father might help, the stewardess might help. She might go up in the cockpit and say to Stahr: “If I ever saw love, it’s in that girl’s eyes.”
    The pilot might help: “Man, are you blind? Why don’t you go back there?”
    Wylie White might help—instead of standing in the aisle looking at me doubtfully, wondering whether I was awake or asleep.
    “Sit down,” I said. “What’s new?—where are we?”
    “Up in the air.”
    “Oh, so that’s it. Sit down.” I tried to show a cheerful interest: “What are you writing?”
    “Heaven help me, I am writing about a Boy Scout— The Boy Scout.”
    “Is it Stahr’s idea?”
    “I don’t know—he told me to look into it. He may have ten writers working ahead of me or behind me, a system which he so thoughtfully invented. So you’re in love with him?”
    “I should say not,” I said indignantly. “I’ve known him all my life.”
    “Desperate, eh? Well, I’ll arrange it if you’ll use all your influence to advance me. I want a unit of my own.”
    I closed my eyes again and drifted off. When I woke up, the stewardess was putting a blanket over me.
    “Almost there,” she said.
    Out the window I could see by the sunset that we were in a greener land.
    “I just heard something funny,” she volunteered, “up in the cockpit—that Mr. Smith—or Mr. Stahr—I never remember seeing his name—”
    “It’s never on any pictures,” I said.
    “Oh. Well, he’s been asking the pilots a lot about flying—I mean he’s interested? You know? ”
    “I know.”
    “I mean one of them told me he bet he could teach Mr. Stahr solo flying in ten minutes. He has such a fine mentality, that’s what he said.”
    I was getting impatient.
    “Well, what was so funny?”
    “Well, finally one of the pilots asked Mr. Smith if he liked his business, and Mr. Smith said, ‘Sure. Sure I like it. It’s nice being the only sound nut in a hatful of cracked ones.’”
    The stewardess doubled up with laughter—and I could have spit at her.
    “I mean calling all those people a hatful of nuts. I mean cracked nuts.” Her laughter stopped with unexpected suddenness, and her face was grave as she stood up. “Well, I’ve got to finish my chart.”
    “Goodbye.”
    Obviously Stahr had put the pilots right up on the throne with him and let them rule with him for awhile. Years later I travelled with one of those same pilots and he told me one thing Stahr had said.
    He was looking down at the mountains.
    “Suppose you were a railroad man,” he said. “You have to send a train through there somewhere. Well, you get your surveyors’ reports, and you find there’s three or four or half a dozen gaps, and not one is better than the other. You’ve got to