“A murder outside the window, you mean.”
“There you go,” said Stahr smiling. “It might be a spider working on the pane.”
“Of course—I see.”
“I’m afraid you don’t, Mr. Boxley. You see it for your medium but not for ours. You keep the spiders for yourself and you try to pin the murders on us.”
“I might as well leave,” said Boxley. “I’m no good to you. I’ve been here three weeks and I’ve accomplished nothing. I make suggestions but no one writes them down.”
“I want you to stay. Something in you doesn’t like pictures, doesn’t like telling a story this way—”
“It’s such a damned bother,” exploded Boxley. “You can’t let yourself go—”
He checked himself. He knew that Stahr, the helmsman, was finding time for him in the middle of a constant stiff blow—that they were talking in the always creaking rigging of a ship sailing in great awkward tacks along an open sea. Or else—it seemed at times—they were in a huge quarry where even the newly cut marble bore the tracery of old pediments, half obliterated inscriptions of the past.
“I keep wishing you could start over,” Boxley said. “It’s this mass production.”
“That’s the condition,” said Stahr. “There’s always some lousy condition. We’re making a life of Rubens—suppose I asked you to do portraits of rich dopes like Pat Brady and me and Gary Cooper and Marcus when you wanted to paint Jesus Christ! Wouldn’t you feel you had a condition? Our condition is that we have to take people’s own favorite folklore and dress it up and give it back to them. Anything beyond that is sugar. So won’t you give us some sugar, Mr. Boxley?”
Boxley knew he could sit with Wylie White tonight at the Troc raging at Stahr, but he had been reading Lord Charnwood and he recognized that Stahr like Lincoln was a leader carrying on a long war on many fronts; almost single—handed he had moved pictures sharply forward through a decade, to a point where the content of the “A productions” was wider and richer than that of the stage. Stahr was an artist only as Mr. Lincoln was a general, perforce and as a layman.
“Come down to La Borwits’ office with me,” said Stahr. “They sure need some sugar there.”
In La Borwits’ office two writers, a shorthand secretary and a supervisor sat in a tense smokey stalemate where Stahr had left them three hours before. He looked at the faces one after another and found nothing. La Borwits spoke with awed reverence for his defeat.
“We’ve just got too many characters, Monroe.” Stahr snorted affably. “That’s the principal idea of the picture.” He took some change out of his pocket, looked up at the suspended light and tossed up half a dollar which clanked into the bowl. He looked at the coins in his hands and selected a quarter.
La Borwits watched miserably; he knew this was a favorite idea of Stahr’s and he saw the sands running out. At the moment everyone’s back was toward him. Suddenly he brought up his hands from their placid position under the desk and threw them high in the air, so high that they seemed to leave his wrists—and then he caught them neatly as they were descending. After that he felt better. He was in control.
One of the writers had taken out some coins also and presently rules were defined. “You have to toss your coin through the chains without hitting them. Whatever falls into the light is the kitty.”
They played for half an hour—all except Boxley who sat aside and dug into the script, and the secretary who kept tally. She calculated the cost of the four men’s time, arriving at a figure of sixteen hundred dollars. At the end La Borwits was winner by $5.50 and a janitor brought in a step-ladder to take the money out of the light.
Boxley spoke up suddenly.
“You have the stuffings of a tuhkey here,” he said.
“What!”
“It’s not pictures.”
They looked at him in astonishment. Stahr concealed a smile.
“So we’ve got a real picture man here!” exclaimed La Borwits.
“A lot of beautiful speeches,” said Boxley boldly. “But no situations. After all, you know, it’s not going to be a novel: and it’s too long. I can’t exactly describe how I feel but it’s not quite right. And it leaves me cold.”
He was giving them back what had been handed him for three weeks. Stahr turned away, watching the others out of he corner of his eye.
“We don’t need less characters,” said Boxley. “We need more. As I see it that’s the idea.”
“That’s the idea,” said the writers.
“Yes—that’s the idea,” said La Borwits.
Boxley was inspired by the attention he had created.
“Let each character see himself in the other’s place,” he said. “The policeman is about to arrest the thief when he sees that the thief actually has his face. I mean show it that way. You could almost call the thing ’Put Yourself in My Place.’”
Suddenly they were at work again—taking up this new theme in turn like hepcats in a swing band and going to town with it. They might throw it out again tomorrow but life had come back for a moment. Pitching the coins had done it as much as Boxley. Stahr had recreated the proper atmosphere—never consenting to be a driver of the driven, but feeling like and acting like and sometimes even looking like a small boy getting up a show.
He left them, touching Boxley on the shoulder in passing—a deliberate accolade—he didn’t want them to gang up on him and break his spirit in an hour.
Episode 16 (Part 2)
Doctor Baer was waiting in his inner office. With him was a colored man with a portable cardiograph like a huge suitcase. Stahr called it the lie detector. He stripped to the waist and the weekly examination began.
“How’ve you been feeling?”
“Oh—the usual,” said Stahr.
“Been hard at it? Getting any sleep?”
“No—about five hours. If I go to bed early I just lie there.”
“Take the sleeping pills.”
“The yellow one gives me a hangover.”
“Take two red ones then.”
“That’s a nightmare.”
“Take one of each—the yellow first.”
“All right—I’ll try. How’ve you been?”
“Say—I take care of myself, Monroe. I save myself.”
“The hell you do—you’re up all night sometimes.”
“Then I sleep all next day.”
After ten minutes Baer said:
“Seems O. K. The blood pressure’s up five points.”
“Good,” said Stahr. “That’s good isn’t it?”
“That’s good. I’ll develop the cardiograms tonight. When are you coming away with me?”
“Oh, some time,” said Stahr lightly. “In about six weeks things’ll ease up.”
Baer looked at him with a genuine looking that had grown over three years.
“You got better in thirty-three when you laid up,” he said. “Even for three weeks.”
“I will again.”
No he wouldn’t, Baer thought. With Minna’s help he had enforced a few short rests years ago and lately he had hinted around trying to find who Stahr considered his closest friends. Who could take him away and keep him away. It would almost surely be useless. He was due to die very soon now. Within six months one could say definitely. What was the use of developing the cardiograms? You couldn’t persuade a man like Stahr to stop and lie down and look at the sky for six months. He would much rather die. He said differently but what it added up to was the definite urge toward total exhaustion that he had run into before. Fatigue was a drug as well as a poison and Stahr apparently derived some rare almost physical pleasure from working lightheaded with weariness. It was a perversion of the life force he had seen before but he had almost stopped trying to interfere with it. He had cured a man or so—a hollow triumph of killing and preserving the shell.
“You hold your own,” he said.
They exchanged a glance. Did Stahr know? Probably. But he did not know when—he did not know how soon now.
“If I hold my own I can’t ask more,” said Stahr.
The colored man had finished packing the apparatus.
“Next week same time?”
“O. K., Bill,” said Stahr. “Good bye.”
As the door closed Stahr switched open the Dictograph. Miss Doolan’s voice came through immediately.
“Do you know a Miss Kathleen Moore?”
“What do you mean?” he asked startled.
“A Miss Kathleen Moore is on the line. She said you asked her to call.”
“Well, my God!” he exclaimed. He was swept with indignant rapture. It had been five days—this would never do at all.
“She’s on now?”
“Yes.”
“Well, all right then.”
In a moment he heard the voice up close to him.
“Are you married?” he asked, low and surly.
“No, not yet.”
His memory blocked out her face and form—as he sat down she seemed to lean down to his desk keeping level with his eyes.
“What’s on your mind?” he asked in the same surly voice. It was hard to talk that way.
“You did find the letter?” she asked.
“Yes. It turned up that night.”
“That’s what I want to speak to you about.”
He found an attitude at length—he was outraged.
“What is there to talk about?” he demanded.
“I tried to write you another letter but it wouldn’t write.”
“I know that too.”
There was a pause.
“Oh cheer up!” she said surprisingly. “This doesn’t sound like you. It is Stahr, isn’t it? That very nice Mr. Stahr?”
“I feel a little outraged,” he said almost pompously. “I don’t see the use of this. I had at least a pleasant memory of you.”
“I don’t believe it’s you,” she said. “Next thing you’ll wish me luck.” Suddenly she laughed. “Is this what you planned to say? I know how awful it gets when you plan to say anything—”
“I never expected to hear from you again,” he said with dignity; but it was
