The Last Tycoon

“You’re no merchant,” said Wylie. “I knew a lot of them when I was a publicity man, and I agree with Charles Francis Adams.”

“What did he say?”

“He knew them all—Gould, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Astor—and he said there wasn’t one he’d care to meet again in the hereafter. Well—they haven’t improved since then, and that’s why I say you’re no merchant.”

“Adams was probably a sourbelly,” said Stahr. “He wanted to be head man himself, but he didn’t have the judgment or else the character.”

“He had brains,” said Wylie rather tartly.

“It takes more than brains. You writers and artists poop out and get all mixed up, and somebody has to come in and straighten you out.” He shrugged his shoulders. “You seem to take things so personally, hating people and worshipping them—always thinking people are so important—especially yourselves. You just ask to be kicked around. I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it—on the inside.”

He broke off.

“What did I say to Schwartz in the airport? Do you remember exactly?”

“You said, ‘Whatever you’re after, the answer is No!’”

Stahr was silent.

“He was sunk,” said Wylie, “but I laughed him out of it. We took Billy Brady’s daughter for a ride.”

Stahr rang for the stewardess.

“That pilot,” he said, “would he mind if I sat up in front with him awhile?”

“That’s against the rules, Mr. Smith.”

“Ask him to step in here a minute when he’s free.”

Stahr sat up front all afternoon. While we slid off the endless desert and over the table-lands, dyed with many colors like the white sands we dyed with colors when I was a child. Then in the late afternoon, the peaks themselves—the Mountains of the Frozen Saw—slid under our propellers and we were close to home.

When I wasn’t dozing I was thinking that I wanted to marry Stahr, that I wanted to make him love me. Oh, the conceit! What on earth did I have to offer? But I didn’t think like that then. I had the pride of young women, which draws its strength from such sublime thoughts as “I’m as good as she is.” For my purposes I was just as beautiful as the great beauties who must have inevitably thrown 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 overwork. 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.”

“Good-bye.”

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 decide—on what basis? You can’t test the best way—except by doing it. So you just do it.”

The pilot thought he had missed something.

“How do you mean?”

“You choose some one way for no reason at all—because that mountain’s pink or the blueprint is a better blue. You see?”