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blown into the dimensions of a thing from the abyss--like those drawings of

beetles the size of a house advancing upon human figures in the pages of the

Banner’s Sunday supplement--curiosity, because Ellsworth Toohey was still in the

building, because Toohey had gained admittance past the orders given, and

because Toohey was laughing.

"I came to take my leave of absence, Mr. Wynand," said Toohey. His face was

composed; it expressed no gloating; the face of an artist who knew that

overdoing was defeat and achieved the supreme of offensiveness by remaining

normal. "And to tell you that I’ll be back. On this job, on this column, in this

building. In the interval you will have seen the nature of the mistake you’ve

made. Do forgive me, I know this is in utterly bad taste, but I’ve waited for it

for thirteen years and I think I can permit myself five minutes as a reward. So

you were a possessive man, Mr. Wynand, and you loved your sense of property? Did

you ever stop to think what it rested upon? Did you stop to secure the

foundations? No, because you were a practical man. Practical men deal in bank

accounts, real estate, advertising contracts and gilt-edged securities. They

leave to the impractical intellectuals, like me, the amusements of putting the

gilt edges through a chemical analysis to learn a few things about the nature

and the source of gold. They hang on to Kream-O Pudding, and leave us such

trivia as the theater, the movies, the radio, the schools, the book reviews and

the criticism of architecture. Just a sop to keep us quiet if we care to waste

our time playing with the inconsequentials of life, while you’re making money.

Money is power. Is it, Mr. Wynand? So you were after power, Mr. Wynand? Power

over men? You poor amateur! You never discovered the nature of your own ambition

or you’d have known that you weren’t fit for it. You couldn’t use the methods

required and you wouldn’t want the results. You’ve never been enough of a

scoundrel. I don’t mind handing you that, because I don’t know which is worse:

to be a great scoundrel or a gigantic fool. That’s why I’ll be back. And when I

am, I’ll run this paper."

Wynand said quietly:

"When you are. Now get out of here."

#

The city room of the Banner walked out on strike.

The Union of Wynand Employees walked out in a body. A great many others,

non-members, joined them. The typographical staff remained.

Wynand had never given a thought to the Union. He paid higher wages than any

other publisher and no economic demands had ever been made upon him. If his

employees wished to amuse themselves by listening to speeches, he saw no reason

to worry about it. Dominique had tried to warn him once: "Gail, if people want

to organize for wages, hours or practical demands, it’s their proper right. But

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when there’s no tangible purpose, you’d better watch closely."

"Darling, how many times do I have to ask you? Keep off the Banner."

He had never taken the trouble to learn who belonged to the Union. He found now

that the membership was small--and crucial; it included all his key men, not the

big executives, but the rank below, expertly chosen, the active ones, the small,

indispensable spark plugs: the best leg men, the general assignment men, the

rewrite men, the assistant editors. He looked up their records: most of them had

been hired in the last eight years; recommended by Mr. Toohey.

Non-members walked out for various reasons: some, because they hated Wynand;

others, because they were afraid to remain and it seemed easier than to analyze

the issue. One man, a timid little fellow, met Wynand in the hall and stopped to

shriek: "We’ll be back, sweetheart, and then it’ll be a different tune!" Some

left, avoiding the sight of Wynand. Others played safe. "Mr. Wynand, I hate to

do it, I hate it like hell, I had nothing to do with that Union, but a strike’s

a strike and I can’t permit myself to be a scab." "Honest, Mr. Wynand, I don’t

know who’s right or wrong, I do think Ellsworth pulled a dirty trick and Harding

had no business letting him get away with it, but how can one be sure who’s

right about anything nowadays? And one thing I won’t do is I won’t picket line.

No, sir. The way I feel is, pickets right or wrong."

The strikers presented two demands: the reinstatement of the four men who had

been discharged; a reversal of the Banner’s stand on the Cortlandt case.

Harding, the managing editor, wrote an article explaining his position; it was

published in the New Frontiers. "I did ignore Mr. Wynand’s orders in a matter of

policy, perhaps an unprecedented action for a managing editor to take. I did so

with full realization of the responsibility involved. Mr. Toohey, Alien, Falk

and I wished to save the Banner for the sake of its employees, its stockholders

and its readers. We wished to bring Mr. Wynand to reason by peaceful means. We

hoped he would give in with good grace, once he had seen the Banner committed to

the stand shared by most of the press of the country. We knew the arbitrary,

unpredictable and unscrupulous character of our employer, but we took the

chance, willing to sacrifice ourselves to our professional duty. While we

recognize an owner’s right to dictate the policy of his paper on political,

sociological or economic issues, we believe that a situation has gone past the

limits of decency when an employer expects self-respecting men to espouse the

cause of a common criminal. We wish Mr. Wynand to realize that the day of

dictatorial one-man rule is past. We must have some say in the running of the

place where, we make our living. It is a fight for the freedom of the press.

Mr. Harding was sixty years old, owned an estate on Long Island, and divided his

spare time between skeet-shooting and breeding pheasants. His childless wife was

a member of the Board of Directors of the Workshop for Social Study; Toohey, its

star lecturer, had introduced her to the Workshop. She had written her husband’s

article.

The two men off the copy desk were not members of Toohey’s Union. Alien’s

daughter was a beautiful young actress who starred in all of Ike’s plays. Falk’s

brother was secretary to Lancelot Clokey.

Gail Wynand sat at the desk in his office and looked down at a pile of paper. He

had many things to do, but one picture kept coming back to him and he could not

get rid of it and the sense of it clung to all his actions--the picture of a

ragged boy standing before the desk of an editor: "Can you spell cat?"--"Can you

spell anthropomorphology?" The identities cracked and became mixed, it seemed to

him that the boy stood here, at his desk, waiting, and once he said aloud: "Go

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away!" He caught himself in anger, he thought: You’re cracking, you fool, now’s

not the time. He did not speak aloud again, but the conversation went on

silently while he read, checked and signed papers: "Go away! We have no jobs

here." I’ll hang around. Use me when you want to. You don’t have to pay me."

"They’re paying you, don’t you understand, you little fool? They’re paying you."

Aloud, his voice normal, he said into a telephone: ’Tell Manning that we’ll have

to fill in with mat stuff....Send up the proofs as soon as you can....Send up a

sandwich. Any kind."

A few had remained With him: the old men and the copy boys. They came in, in the

morning, often with cuts on their faces and blood on their collars; one stumbled

in, his skull open, and had to be sent away in an ambulance. It was neither

courage nor loyalty; it was inertia; they had lived too long with the thought

that the world would end if they lost their jobs on the Banner. The old ones did

not understand. The young ones did not care.

Copy boys were sent out on reporter’s beats. Most of the stuff they sent in was

of such quality that Wynand was forced past despair into howls of laughter: he

had never read such highbrow English; he could see the pride of the ambitious

youth who was a journalist at last. He did not laugh when the stories appeared

in the Banner as written; there were not enough rewrite men.

He tried to hire new men. He offered extravagant salaries. The people he wanted

refused to work for him. A few men answered his call, and he wished they hadn’t,

though he hired them. They were men who had not been employed by a reputable

newspaper for ten years; the kind who would not have been allowed, a month ago,

into the lobby of his building. Some of them had to be thrown out in two days;

others remained. They were drunk most of the time. Some acted as if they were

granting Wynand a favor. "Don’t you get huffy, Gail, old boy," said one--and was

tossed bodily down two flights of stairs. He broke an ankle and sat on the

bottom landing, looking up at Wynand with an air of complete astonishment.

Others were subtler; they merely stalked about and looked at Wynand slyly,

almost winking, implying that they were fellow criminals tied together in a

dirty deal.

He appealed to schools of journalism. No one responded. One student body sent

him a resolution signed by all its members: "...Entering our careers with a high

regard for the dignity of our profession, dedicating ourselves to uphold the

honor of the press, we feel that none among us could preserve his self-respect

and accept an offer such as yours."

The news editor had remained at his desk; the city editor had gone. Wynand

filled in as city editor, managing editor, wire man, rewrite man, copy boy. He

did not leave the building. He slept on a couch in his office--as he had done in

the first years of the Banner’s existence. Goalless, tieless, his shirt collar

torn open, he ran up and down the stairs, his steps like the rattle of a machine

gun. Two elevator boys had remained; the others had vanished, no one knew just

when or why, whether prompted by sympathy for the strike, fear or plain

discouragement.

Alvah Scarret could not understand Wynand’s calm. The brilliant machine--and

that, thought Scarret, was really the word which had always stood for Wynand in

his mind--had never functioned better. His words were brief, his orders rapid,

his decisions immediate. In the confusion of machines, lead, grease, ink, waste

paper, unswept offices, untenanted desks, glass crashing in sudden showers when

a brick was hurled from the street below, Wynand moved like a figure in

double-exposure, superimposed on his background, out of place and scale. He

doesn’t belong here, thought Scarret, because he doesn’t look modern--that’s

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what it is--he doesn’t look modern, no matter what kind of pants he’s

wearing--he looks like something out of a Gothic cathedral. The patrician head,

held level, the fleshless face that had shrunk tighter together. The captain of

a ship known by all, save the captain, to be sinking.

Alvah Scarret had remained. He had not grasped that the events were real; he

shuffled about in a stupor; he felt a fresh jolt of bewilderment each morning

when he drove up to the building and saw the pickets. He suffered no injury

beyond a few tomatoes hurled at his windshield. He tried to help Wynand; he

tried to do his work and that of five other men, but he could not complete a

normal day’s task. He was going quietly to pieces, his joints wrenched loose by

a question mark. He wasted everybody’s time, interrupting anything to ask: "But

why? Why? How, just like that all of a sudden?"

He saw a nurse in white uniform walking down the hall--an emergency first-aid

station had been established on the ground floor. He saw her carrying a

wastebasket to the incinerator, with wadded clumps of gauze, bloodstained. He

turned away; he felt sick. It was not the sight, but the greater terror of an

implication grasped by his instinct: this civilized building--secure in the

neatness of waxed floors, respectable with the strict grooming of modern

business, a place where one dealt in such rational matters as written words and

trade contracts, where one accepted ads for baby garments and chatted about

golf--had become, in the span of a few days, a place where one carried bloody

refuse through the halls. Why?--thought Alvah Scarret.

"I can’t understand it," he droned in an accentless monotone to anyone around

him, "I can’t understand how Ellsworth got so much power....And Ellsworth’s a

man of culture, an idealist, not a dirty radical off a soapbox, he’s so friendly

and witty, and what an erudition!--a man who jokes all the time is not a man of

violence--Ellsworth didn’t mean this, he didn’t know what it would lead to, he

loves people, I’d stake my shirt on Ellsworth Toohey."

Once, in Wynand’s office, he ventured to say:

"Gail, why don’t you negotiate? Why don’t you meet with them at least?"

"Shut up."

"But, Gail, there might be a bit of truth on their side, too. They’re

newspapermen. You know what they say, the freedom of the press..."

Then he saw the fit of fury he had expected for days and had thought safely

sidetracked--the blue irises vanishing in a white smear, the blind, luminous

eyeballs in a face that was all cavities, the trembling hands. But in a moment,

he saw what he had never witnessed before: he saw Wynand break the fit, without

sound, without relief. He saw the sweat of the effort on the hollow temples, and

the fists on the edge of the desk.

"Alvah...if I had not sat on the stairs of the Gazette for a week...where would

be the press for them to be free on?"

There were policemen outside, and in the halls of the building. It helped, but

not much. One night acid was thrown at the main entrance. It burned the big

plate glass of the ground floor windows and left leprous spots on the walls.

Sand in the bearings stopped one of the presses. An obscure delicatessen owner

got his shop smashed for advertising in the Banner. A great many small

advertisers withdrew. Wynand delivery trucks were wrecked. One driver was