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ideals--but I don’t beg. Take your choice. There’s no other." The boy went back

to his paper. A year later he came to Wynand and asked if his offer were still

open. Wynand said that it was. The boy had remained on the Banner ever since. He

was the only one on the staff who loved Gail Wynand.

Alvah Scarret, sole survivor of the original Gazette, had risen with Wynand. But

one could not say that he loved Wynand--he merely clung to his boss with the

automatic devotion of a rug under Wynand’s feet. Alvah Scarret had never hated

anything, and so was incapable of love. He was shrewd, competent and

unscrupulous in the innocent manner of one unable to grasp the conception of a

scruple. He believed everything he wrote and everything written in the Banner.

He could hold a belief for all of two weeks. He was invaluable to Wynand--as a

barometer of public reaction.

No one could say whether Gail Wynand had a private life. His hours away from the

office had assumed the style of the Banner’s front page--but a style raised to a

grand plane, as if he were still playing circus, only to a gallery of kings. He

bought out the entire house for a great opera performance--and sat alone in the

empty auditorium with his current mistress. He discovered a beautiful play by an

unknown playwright and paid him a huge sum to have the play performed once and

never again; Wynand was the sole spectator at the single performance; the script

was burned next morning. When a distinguished society woman asked him to

contribute to a worthy charity cause, Wynand handed her a signed blank

check--and laughed, confessing that the amount she dared to fill in was less

than he would have given otherwise. He bought some kind of Balkan throne for a

penniless pretender whom he met in a speakeasy and never bothered to see

afterward; he often referred to "my valet, my chauffeur and my king."

At night, dressed in a shabby suit bought for nine dollars, Wynand would often

ride the subways and wander through the dives of slum districts, listening to

his public. Once, in a basement beer joint, he heard a truck driver denouncing

Gail Wynand as the worst exponent of capitalistic evils, in a language of

colorful accuracy. Wynand agreed with him and helped him out with a few

expressions of his own, from his Hell’s Kitchen vocabulary. Then Wynand picked

up a copy of the Banner left by someone on a table, tore his own photograph from

page 3, clipped it to a hundred-dollar bill, handed it to the truck driver and

walked out before anyone could utter a word.

The succession of his mistresses was so rapid that it ceased to be gossip. It

was said that he never enjoyed a woman unless he had bought her--and that she

had to be the kind who could not be bought.

He kept the details of his life secret by making it glaringly public as a whole.

He had delivered himself to the crowd; he was anyone’s property, like a monument

in a park, like a bus stop sign, like the pages of the Banner. His photographs

appeared in his papers more often than pictures of movie stars. He had been

photographed in all kinds of clothes, on every imaginable occasion. He had never

been photographed naked, but his readers felt as if he had. He derived no

pleasure from personal publicity; it was merely a matter of policy to which he

submitted. Every corner of his penthouse had been reproduced in his papers and

magazines. "Every bastard in the country knows the inside of my icebox and

bathtub," he said.

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One phase of his life, however, was little known and never mentioned. The top

floor of the building under his penthouse was his private art gallery. It was

locked. He had never admitted anyone, except the caretaker. A few people knew

about it. Once a French ambassador asked him for permission to visit it. Wynand

refused. Occasionally, not often, he would descend to his gallery and remain

there for hours. The things he collected were chosen by standards of his own. He

had famous masterpieces; he had canvases by unknown artists; he rejected the

works of immortal names for which he did not care. The estimates set by

collectors and the matter of great signatures were of no concern to him. The art

dealers whom he patronized reported that his judgment was that of a master.

One night his valet saw Wynand returning from the art gallery below and was

shocked by the expression of his face; it was a look of suffering, yet the face

seemed ten years younger. "Are you ill, sir?" he asked. Wynand looked at him

indifferently and said: "Go to bed."

"We could make a swell spread for the Sunday scandal sheet out of your art

gallery," said Alvah Scarret wistfully. "No," said Wynand. "But why, Gail?"

"Look, Alvah. Every man on earth has a soul of his own that nobody can stare at.

Even the convicts in a penitentiary and the freaks in a side show. Everybody but

me. My soul is spread in your Sunday scandal sheet--in three-color process. So I

must have a substitute--even if it’s only a locked room and a few objects not to

be pawed."

It was a long process and there had been premonitory signs, but Scarret did not

notice a certain new trait in Gail Wynand’s character until Wynand was

forty-five. Then it became apparent to many. Wynand lost interest in breaking

industrialists and financiers. He found a new kind of victim. People could not

tell whether it was a sport, a mania or a systematic pursuit. They thought it

was horrible, because it seemed so vicious and pointless.

It began with the case of Dwight Carson. Dwight Carson was a talented young

writer who had achieved the spotless reputation of a man passionately devoted to

his convictions. He upheld the cause of the individual against the masses. He

wrote for magazines of great prestige and small circulation, which were no

threat to Wynand. Wynand bought Dwight Carson. He forced Carson to write a

column in the Banner, dedicated to preaching the superiority of the masses over

the man of genius. It was a bad column, dull and unconvincing; it made many

people angry. It was a waste of space and of a big salary. Wynand insisted on

continuing it.

Even Alvah Scarret was shocked by Carson’s apostasy. "Anybody else, Gail," he

said, "but, honest, I didn’t expect it of Carson." Wynand laughed; he laughed

too long, as if he could not stop it; his laughter had an edge of hysteria.

Scarret frowned; he did not like the sight of Wynand being unable to control an

emotion; it contradicted everything he knew of Wynand; it gave Scarret a funny

feeling of apprehension, like the sight of a tiny crack in a solid wall; the

crack could not possibly endanger the wall--except that it had no business being

there.

A few months later Wynand bought a young writer from a radical magazine, a man

known for his honesty, and put him to work on a series of articles glorifying

exceptional men and damning the masses. That, too, made a great many of his

readers angry. He continued it. He seemed not to care any longer about the

delicate signs of effect on circulation.

He hired a sensitive poet to cover baseball games. He hired an art expert to

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handle financial news. He got a socialist to defend factory owners and a

conservative to champion labor. He forced an atheist to write on the glories of

religion. He made a disciplined scientist proclaim the superiority of mystical

intuition over the scientific method. He gave a great symphony conductor a

munificent yearly income, for no work at all, on the sole condition that he

never conduct an orchestra again.

Some of these men had refused, at first. But they surrendered when they found

themselves on the edge of bankruptcy through a series of untraceable

circumstances within a few years. Some of the men were famous, others obscure.

Wynand showed no interest in the previous standing of his prey. He showed no

interest in men of glittering success who had commercialized their careers and

held no particular beliefs of any kind. His victims had a single attribute in

common: their immaculate integrity.

Once they were broken, Wynand continued to pay them scrupulously. But he felt no

further concern for them and no desire to see them again. Dwight Carson became a

dipsomaniac. Two men became drug addicts. One committed suicide. This last was

too much for Scarret. "Isn’t it going too far, Gail?" he asked. "That was

practically murder."

"Not at all," said Wynand, "I was merely an outside circumstance. The cause was

in him. If lightning strikes a rotten tree and it collapses, it’s not the fault

of the lightning."

"But what do you call a healthy tree?"

"They don’t exist, Alvah," said Wynand cheerfully, "they don’t exist."

Alvah Scarret never asked Wynand for an explanation of this new pursuit. By some

dim instinct Scarret guessed a little of the reason behind it. Scarret shrugged

and laughed, telling people that it was nothing to worry about, it was just "a

safety valve." Only two men understood Gail Wynand: Alvah Scarret--partially;

Ellsworth Toohey--completely.

Ellsworth Toohey--who wished, above all, to avoid a quarrel with Wynand at that

time--could not refrain from a feeling of resentment, because Wynand had not

chosen him as a victim. He almost wished Wynand would try to corrupt him, no

matter what the consequences. But Wynand seldom noticed his existence.

Wynand had never been afraid of death. Through the years the thought of suicide

had occurred to him, not as an intention, but as one of the many possibilities

among the chances of life. He examined it indifferently, with polite curiosity,

as he examined any possibility--and then forgot it. He had known moments of

blank exhaustion when his will deserted him. He had always cured himself by a

few hours in his art gallery.

Thus he reached the age of fifty-one, and a day when nothing of consequence

happened to him, yet the evening found him without desire to take a step

farther.

#

Gail Wynand sat on the edge of the bed, slumped forward, his elbows on his

knees, the gun on the palm of his hand.

Yes, he told himself, there’s an answer there somewhere. But I don’t want to

know it. I don’t want to know it.

And because he felt a pang of dread at the root of this desire not to examine

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his life further, he knew that he would not die tonight. As long as he still

feared something, he had a foothold on living; even if it meant only moving

forward to an unknown disaster. The thought of death gave him nothing. The

thought of living gave him a slender alms--the hint of fear.

He moved his hand, weighing the gun. He smiled, a faint smile of derision. No,

he thought, that’s not for you. Not yet. You still have the sense of not wanting

to die senselessly. You were stopped by that. Even that is a remnant--of

something.

He tossed the gun aside on the bed, knowing that the moment was past and the

thing was of no danger to him any longer. He got up. He felt no elation; he felt

tired; but he was back in his normal course. There were no problems, except to

finish this day quickly and go to sleep. He went down to his study to get a

drink. When he switched on the light in the study, he saw Toohey’s present. It

was a huge, vertical crate, standing by his desk. He had seen it earlier in the

evening. He had thought "What the hell," and forgotten all about it.

He poured himself a drink and stood sipping it slowly. The crate was too large

to escape his field of vision, and as he drank he tried to guess what it could

possibly contain. It was too tall and slender for a piece of furniture. He could

not imagine what material property Toohey could wish to send him; he had

expected something less tangible--a small envelope containing a hint at some

sort of blackmail; so many people had tried to blackmail him so unsuccessfully;

he did think Toohey would have more sense than that.

By the time he finished his drink, he had found no plausible explanation for the

crate. It annoyed him, like a stubborn crossword puzzle. He had a kit of tools

somewhere in a drawer of his desk. He found it and broke the crate open.

It was Steven Mallory’s statue of Dominique Francon. Gail Wynand walked to his

desk and put down the pliers he held as if they were of fragile crystal. Then he

turned and looked at the statue again. He stood looking at it for an hour. Then

he went to the telephone and dialed Toohey’s number. "Hello?" said Toohey’s

voice, its hoarse impatience confessing that he had been awakened out of sound

sleep. "All right. Come over," said Wynand and hung up. Toohey arrived half an

hour later. It was his first visit to Wynand’s home. Wynand himself answered the

doorbell, still dressed in his pyjamas. He said nothing and walked into the

study, Toohey following.

The naked marble body, its head thrown back in exaltation, made the room look

like a place that did not exist any longer: like the Stoddard Temple. Wynand’s

eyes rested on Toohey expectantly, a heavy glance of suppressed anger.

"You want, of course, to know the name of the model?" Toohey asked, with just a

hint of triumph in his voice.

"Hell, no," said Wynand. "I want to know the name of the sculptor."

He wondered why Toohey did not like the question; there was something more than

disappointment in Toohey’s face.

"The sculptor?" said Toohey. "Wait...let me see...I think I did know it....It’s

Steven...or Stanley...Stanley something or other....Honestly, I don’t remember."

"If you knew enough to buy this, you knew enough to ask the name and never

forget it."

"I’ll look it up, Mr. Wynand."

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"Where did you get this?"

"In some art shop, you know, one of those places on Second Avenue."

"How did it get there?"

"I don’t know. I didn’t ask. I bought it because I knew the model."