Stahr folded my hand over the ring, stood up and addressed Wylie.
“Come up to the bridal suite,” he said. “See you later, Cecelia.”
Before they went out of hearing I heard Wylie’s question, “Did you open Schwartze’s note?” And Stahr:
“Not yet.”
I must be slow, for only then did I realize that Stahr was Mr. Smith.
Afterwards Wylie told me what was in the note. Written by the headlights of the taxi it was almost illegible.
Dear Monro, You are the best of them all I have always admired your mentality so when you turn against me I know it’s no use! I must be no good and am not going to continue the journey let me warn you once again
look out! I know.
Your friend MANNIE
Stahr read it twice, and raised his hand to the morning stubble on his chin.
“He’s a nervous wreck,” he said. “There’s nothing to be done, absolutely nothing. I’m sorry I was short with him—but I don’t like a man to approach me telling me it’s for my sake.”
“Maybe it was,” said Wylie.
“It’s poor technique.”
“I’d fall for it,” said Wylie. “I’m vain as a woman. If anybody pretends to be interested in me I’ll ask for more. I like advice.”
Stahr shook his head distastefully. Wylie kept on ribbing him—he was one of those to whom this privilege was permitted.
“You fall for some kinds of flattery,” he said. “This ’little Napoleon stuff.’”
“It makes me sick,” said Stahr, “but it’s not as bad as some man trying to help you.”
“If you don’t like advice why do you pay we?”
“That’s a question of merchandise,” said Stahr. “I’m a merchant. I want to buy what’s in your mind.”
“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 sour belly,” said Stahr. “He wanted to be head man himself but he didn’t have the judgement 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 Schwartze 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 Pat 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 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.”
“Good bye.”
Obviously Stahr had put the pilots right up on the throne with him and let them rule with him for a while. 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 tram 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?”
The pilot considered that this was very valuable advice. But he doubted if he’d ever be in a position to apply it.
“What I wanted to know,” he told me ruefully, “is how he ever got to be Mr. Stahr.”
I’m afraid Stahr could never have answered that one, for the embryo is not equipped with a memory. But I could answer a little. He had flown up very high to see, on strong wings when he was young. And while he was up there he had looked on all the kingdoms, with the kind of eyes that can stare straight into the sun. Beating his wings tenaciously—finally frantically—and keeping on beating them he had stayed up there longer than most of us, and then, remembering all he had seen from his great height of how things were, he had settled gradually to earth.
The motors were off and all our five senses began to readjust themselves for landing. I could see a line of lights for the Long Beach Naval Station ahead and to the left, and on the right a twinkling blur for Santa Monica. The California moon was out, huge and orange over the Pacific. However I happened to feel about these things—and they were home after all—I know that Stahr must have felt much more. These were
