“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 no use, she laughed again — a woman’s laugh that is like a child’s, just one syllable, a crow and a cry of delight.
“Do you know how you make me feel?” she demanded. “Like one day in London during a caterpillar plague when a hot furry thing dropped in my mouth.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Oh please wake up,” she begged. “I want to see you. I can’t explain things on the phone. It was no fun for me either, you understand.”
“I’m very busy. There’s a sneak preview in Glendale tonight.”
“Is that an invitation?”
“George Boxley, the English writer, is going with me.” He surprised himself. “Do you want to come along?”
“How could we talk?”
She considered. “Why don’t you call for me afterwards,” she suggested. “We could ride around.”
Miss Doolan on the huge Dictograph was trying to cut in a shooting director — the only interruption ever permitted. He flipped the button and called “wait” impatiently into the machine.
“About eleven?” Kathleen was saying confidently. The idea of “Riding around” seemed so unwise that if he could have thought of the words to refuse her he would have spoken them but he did not want to be the caterpillar. Suddenly he had no attitude left except the sense that the day, at least, was complete. It had an evening — a beginning, a middle and an end.
He rapped on the screen door, heard her call from inside, and stood waiting where the level fell away. From below came the whir of a lawn mower — a man was cutting his grass at midnight. The moon was so bright that Stahr could see him plainly a hundred feet off and down as he stopped and rested on the handle before pushing it back across his garden. There was a midsummer restlessness abroad — early August with imprudent loves and impulsive crimes. With little more to expect from summer one tried anxiously to live in the present — or, if there was no present, to invent one.
She came at last. She was all different and delighted. She wore a suit with a skirt that she kept hitching up as they walked down to the car with a brave gay, stimulating reckless air of “Tighten up your belt, baby. Let’s get going — to any pole.” Stahr had brought his limousine with the chauffeur, and the intimacy of the four walls whisking them along a new curve in the dark took away any strangeness at once. In its way the little trip they made was one of the best times he had ever had in life. It was certainly one of the times when, if he knew he was going to die, it was not tonight.
She told him her story. She sat beside him cool and gleaming for a while, spinning on excitedly, carrying him to far places with her, meeting and knowing the people she had known. The story was vague at first. “This Man” was the one she had loved and lived with. “This American” was the one who had rescued her when she was sinking into a quicksand.
“Who is he — the American?”
Oh, names — what did they matter? No one important like Stahr, not rich. He had lived in London and now they would live out here. She was going to be a good wife, a real person. He was getting a divorce — not just on account of her — but that was the delay.
“But the first man?” asked Stahr. “How did you get into that?”
Oh, that was a blessing at first. From sixteen to twenty-one the thing was to eat. The day her stepmother presented her at Court they had one shilling to eat with so as not to feel faint. Sixpence apiece but the stepmother watched while she ate. After a few months the stepmother died and she would have sold out for that shilling but she was too weak to go into the streets. London can be harsh — oh quite.
Was there nobody?
There were friends in Ireland who sent butter. There was a soup kitchen. There was a visit to an uncle who made advances to her when she had a full stomach, and she held out and got fifty pounds out of him for not telling his wife.
“Couldn’t you work?” Stahr asked.
“I worked. I sold cars. Once I sold a car.”
“But couldn’t you get a regular job?”
“It’s hard — it’s different. There was a feeling that people like me forced other people out of jobs. A woman struck me when I tried to get a job as chambermaid in a hotel.”
“But you were presented at Court?”
“That was my stepmother who did that — on an off chance. I was nobody. My father was shot by the Black and Tans in twenty-two when I was a child. He wrote a book called ‘Last Blessing.’ Did you ever read it?”
“I don’t read.”
“I wish you’d buy it for the movies. It’s a good little book. I still get a royalty from it — ten shillings a year.”
Then she met “The Man” and they travelled the world around. She had been to all the places that Stahr made movies of, and lived in cities whose names he had never heard. Then The Man went to seed, drinking and sleeping with the housemaids and trying to force her off on his friends. They all tried to make her stick with him. They said she had saved him and should cleave to him longer now, indefinitely, to the end. It was her duty. They brought enormous pressure to bear. But she had met The American, and so finally she ran away.
“You should have run away before.”
“Well, you see it was difficult.” She hesitated, and plunged. “You see I ran away from a king.”
His moralities somehow collapsed — she had managed to top him. A confusion of thoughts raced through his head — one of them a faint old credo that all royalty was diseased.
“It wasn’t the King of England,” she said. “My king was out of job as he used to say. There are lots of kings in London.” She laughed — then added almost defiantly, “He was very attractive until he began drinking and raising hell.”
“What was he king of?”
“He was a very learned man,” she said. “He could have taught all sorts of subjects. But he wasn’t much like a king. Not nearly as much as you. None of them were.”
This time Stahr laughed.
“They were the standard article,” he said.
“You know what I mean. They all felt old fashioned. Most of them tried so hard to keep up with things. They were always advised to keep up with things. One was a Syndicalist for instance. And one used to carry around a couple of clippings about a tennis tournament when he was in the semi-finals. I saw those clippings a dozen times.”
They rode through GriffithPark and out past the dark studios of Burbank, past the airports and along the way to Pasadena past the neon signs of roadside cabarets. Up in his head he wanted her but it was late and just the ride was an overwhelming joy. They held hands and once she came close in to his arms saying, “Oh you’re so nice. I do like to be with you.” But her mind was divided — this was not his night as the Sunday afternoon had been his. She was absorbed in herself, stung into excitement by telling of her own adventures; he could not help wondering if he was getting the story she had saved up for The American.
“How long have you known The American?” he asked.
“Oh I knew him for several months. We used to meet. We understand each other. He used to say ‘It looks like a cinch from now on.’”
“Then why did you call me up?”
She hesitated.
“I wanted to see you once more. Then too — he was supposed to arrive today but last night he wired that he’d be another week. I wanted to talk to a friend — after all you are my friend.”
He wanted her very much now but one part of his mind was cold and kept saying: she wants to see if I’m in love with her, if I want to marry her. Then she’d consider whether or not to throw this man over. She won’t consider it till I’ve committed myself. “Are you in love with The American?” he asked. “Oh yes. It’s absolutely arranged. He saved my life and my reason. He’s moving half way around the world for me. I insisted on that.”
“But are you in love with him?” “Oh yes, I’m in love with him.”
The “Oh yes” told him she was not — told him to speak for himself — that she would see. He took her in his arms and kissed her deliberately on the mouth and held her for a long time. It was so warm.
“Not tonight,” she whispered.
“All right.”
They passed over suicide bridge with the high new wire.
“I know what it is,” she said, “but how stupid. English people don’t kill themselves when they don’t get what they want.”
They turned around in the driveway of a hotel and started back. It was a dark night with no moon. The wave of desire had passed and neither spoke for a while. Her talk of kings had carried him oddly back in flashes to the pearly White Way of Main Street in Erie, Pennsylvania when he was fifteen. There was a restaurant with lobsters in the window and green weeds and bright light on a shell cavern and behind a red curtain the terribly strange brooding mystery of people and violin music. That was just before he left for New York. This girl reminded him of the fresh iced fish and lobsters in the window. She was Beautiful Doll. Minna had never been Beautiful Doll.
They looked at each other and her eyes asked “Shall I marry The American?” He did not answer. After a while he said:
“Let’s go somewhere for the week-end.”
She considered.
“Are you talking about tomorrow?”
“I’m afraid I am.”
“Well, I’ll tell you tomorrow,” she said.
“Tell me tonight. I’d be afraid — “
“ — find a note in the car?” she laughed. “No there’s no note in the car. You know almost everything now.”
“Almost everything.”
“Yes — almost. A few little things.”
He would have to know what they were. She would tell him tomorrow. He doubted — or he wanted to doubt — if there had been a maze of philandering — a fixation had held her to The Man, the king, firmly and long. Three years of a highly anomalous position — one foot in the Palace and one in the background. “You had to laugh a lot,” she said. “I learned to laugh a lot.”
“He could have married you — like Mrs. Simpson,” Stahr said in protest.
“Oh, he was married. And he wasn’t a romantic.” She stopped herself.
“Am I?”
“Yes,” she said unwillingly, as if she were laying down a trump. “Part of you is. You’re three or four different men but each of them out in the open. Like all Americans.”
“Don’t start trusting Americans too implicitly,” he said, smiling. “They may be out in the open but they change very fast.”
She looked concerned.
“Do they?”
“Very fast and all at once,” he said. “And nothing ever changes them back.”
“You frighten me. I always had a great sense of security with Americans.”
She seemed suddenly so alone that he took her hand.
“Where will we go tomorrow?” he said. “Maybe up in the mountains. I’ve got everything to do tomorrow but I won’t do any of it. We can start at four and get there by afternoon.”
“I’m not sure. I seem to be a little mixed up. This doesn’t seem to be quite the girl who came out to California for a new life.”
He could have said it then, said “It is a new life” for he knew it was, he knew he could not let her go now, but something else said to sleep on it as an adult, no romantic. And tell her tomorrow. Still she was looking at him her eyes wandering from his forehead to his chin and back again, and then up and down once more with that odd slowly waving motion of her head.
… It is your chance, Stahr. Better take it now. This is your girl. She can save you, she can worry you back to life. She will take looking after and you will grow strong to do it. But take her now — tell her and take her away. Neither of you knows it but far away over the night The American has changed his plans. At this moment his train is speeding through Albuquerque; the schedule is accurate. The engineer is on time. In the morning he will be here.
… The chauffeur turned up the hill to Kathleen’s house. It seemed warm even in darkness — wherever he had been near her was by way of being enchanted place for Stahr: this limousine — the rising house at the beach, the very distances they had already covered together over the sprawled city. The hill they climbed now gave forth a sort of glow, a sustained sound that struck his soul alert with delight.
As he said good bye he felt again that it was impossible to leave her, even for a few hours. There was only ten years between them but he felt that madness about it akin to the love of an ageing man for a young girl. It was a deep and desperate time-need, a clock ticking with his heart, and it urged him against the whole logic of his life to walk past her into the house now — and say “This is forever.”
Kathleen waited, irresolute herself — pink and silver frost waiting to melt with spring. She was a European, humble in the face of power, but there was a fierce self — respect that would only let her go so far. She had no illusions about the considerations that swayed princes.
“We’ll go to the mountains tomorrow,” said Stahr. Many thousands of people depended on his balanced judgement — you can suddenly blunt a quality you have lived by for twenty years.
He was very busy the next morning, Saturday. At two o’clock when he came from luncheon there was a stack of telegrams — a company ship was lost in the Arctic, a star was in disgrace, a writer was sueing for one million dollars, Jews were dead miserably beyond the sea. The last telegram stared up at him:
I WAS MARRIED AT NOON TODAY GOODBYE, and on a sticker attached “Send your answer by Western Union Telegram.”
Chapter 6
Episode 17
I knew nothing about any of this. I went up to Lake Louise and when I came back didn’t
go near the studio. I think I would have started East in mid-August — if Stahr hadn’t called me up one day at home.
“I want you to arrange something, Cecelia — I want to meet a Communist Party member.”
“Which one?” I asked, somewhat startled.
“Any one.”
“Haven’t you got plenty out there?”
“I mean one of their organizers — from New York.”
The summer before I had been all politics — I could probably have arranged a meeting with Harry Bridges. But my boy had been killed in an auto accident after I went back to college and I was out of touch with such things. I had heard there was a man from “The New Masses” around somewhere.
“Will you promise him immunity?” I asked, joking.
“Oh yes,” Stahr answered seriously. “I won’t hurt him. Get one that can talk — tell him to bring one of his books along.”
He spoke as if he wanted to meet a member of the “I AM” cult.
“Do you want a blonde, or a brunette?”
“Oh, get a man,” he said hastily.
Hearing Stahr’s voice cheered me up — since I barged in on Father it had all seemed a paddling about in thin spittle. Stahr changed everything about it — changed the angle from which I saw it, changed the very air. He was like a brazier out of doors on a cool night.
“I don’t think your father ought to know,” he said. “Can we pretend the man is a Bulgarian musician or something?”
“Oh, they don’t dress up any more,” I said.
It was harder to arrange than I thought — Stahr’s negotiations with the Writers Guild, which had continued over a year, were approaching a dead end. Perhaps they were afraid of being corrupted, and I was asked what Stahr’s “proposition” was. Afterwards Stahr told me that he prepared for the meeting by running off the Russian Revolutionary Films that he had in his film library at home. He also ran off “Doctor Caligari” and Salvador Dali’s “Un Chien Andalou,” possibly suspecting that they had a bearing on the matter. He had been startled by the Russian Films back in the twenties and on Wylie White’s suggestion he had had the script department get him up a two-page “treatment” of the “Communist Manifesto.”
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 129