The Last Tycoon / Последний магнат. Книга для чтения на английском языке. Френсис Фицджеральд

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СКАЧАТЬ 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[30],” 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[31].’”

      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 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 the things I had first opened my eyes on, like the sheep on the back lot of the old Laemmle studio; but this was where Stahr had come to earth after that extraordinary illuminating flight where he saw which way we were going, and how we looked doing it, and how much of it mattered. You could say that this was where an accidental wind blew him, but I don’t think so. I would rather think that in a “long shot”[32] he saw a new way of measuring our jerky hopes and graceful rogueries and awkward sorrows, and that he came here from choice to be with us to the end. Like the plane coming down into the Glendale airport, into the warm darkness.

      Chapter II

      It was nine o’clock of a July night and there were still some extras in the drug-store across from the studio – I could see them bent over the pin-games inside – as I parked my car. “Old” Johnny Swanson stood on the corner in his semi-cowboy clothes, staring gloomily past the moon. Once he had been as big in pictures as Tom Mix or Bill Hart[33] – now it was too sad to speak to him, and I hurried across the street and through the front gate.

      There is never a time when СКАЧАТЬ