After breakfast he went to his study. His desk was piled with every important newspaper, book and magazine received that morning from all over the country. He worked alone at his desk for three hours, reading and making brief notes with a large blue pencil across the printed pages. The notes looked like a spy’s shorthand; nobody could decipher them except the dry, middle-aged secretary who entered the study when Wynand left it. He had not heard her voice in five years, but no communication between them was necessary. When he returned to his study in the evening, the secretary and the pile of papers were gone; on his desk he found neatly typed pages containing the things he had wished to be recorded from his morning’s work.
At ten o’clock he arrived at the Banner Building, a plain, grimy structure in an undistinguished neighborhood of lower Manhattan. When he walked through the narrow halls of the building, the employees he met wished him a good morning. The greeting was correct and he answered courteously; but his passage had the effect of a death ray that stopped the motor of living organisms.
Among the many hard rules imposed upon the employees of all Wynand enterprises, the hardest was the one demanding that no man pause in his work if Mr. Wynand entered the room, or notice his entrance. Nobody could predict what department he would choose to visit or when. He could appear at any moment in any part of the building–and his presence was as unobtrusive as an electric shock. The employees tried to obey the rule as best they could; but they preferred three hours of overtime to ten minutes of working under his silent observation.
This morning, in his office, he went over the proofs of the Banner’s Sunday editorials. He slashed blue lines across the spreads he wished eliminated. He did not sign his initials; everybody knew that only Gail Wynand could make quite that kind of blue slashes, lines that seemed to rip the authors of the copy out of existence.
He finished the proofs, then asked to be connected with the editor of the Wynand Herald, in Springville, Kansas. When he telephoned his provinces, Wynand’s name was never announced to the victim. He expected his voice to be known to every key citizen of his empire.
“Good morning, Cummings,” he said when the editor answered.
“My God!” gasped the editor. “It isn’t…”
“It is,” said Wynand. “Listen, Cummings. One more piece of crap like yesterday’s yarn on the Last Rose of Summer and you can go back to the high school Bugle.”
“Yes, Mr. Wynand.”
Wynand hung up. He asked to be connected with an eminent Senator in Washington.
“Good morning, Senator,” he said when the gentleman came on the wire within two minutes. “It is so kind of you to answer this call. I appreciate it. I do not wish to impose on your time. But I felt I owed you an expression of my deepest gratitude. I called to thank you for your work in passing the Hayes-Langston Bill.”
“But…Mr. Wynand!” The Senator’s voice seemed to squirm. “It’s so nice of you, but…the Bill hasn’t been passed.”
“Oh, that’s right. My mistake. It will be passed tomorrow.” A meeting of the board of directors of the Wynand Enterprises, Inc., had been scheduled for eleven-thirty that morning. The Wynand Enterprises consisted of twenty-two newspapers, seven magazines, three news services and two newsreels. Wynand owned seventy-five percent of the stock. The directors were not certain of their functions or purpose. Wynand had ordered meetings of the board always to start on time, whether he was present or not. Today he entered the board room at twelve twenty-five. A distinguished old gentleman was making a speech. The directors were not allowed to stop or notice Wynand’s presence. He walked to the empty chair at the head of the long mahogany table and sat down. No one turned to him; it was as if the chair had just been occupied by a ghost whose existence they dared not admit. He listened silently for fifteen minutes. He got up in the middle of a sentence and left the room as he had entered.
On a large table in his office he spread out maps of Stoneridge, his new real-estate venture, and spent half an hour discussing it with two of his agents. He had purchased a vast tract of land on Long Island, which was to be converted into the Stoneridge Development, a new community of small home owners, every curbstone, street and house to be built by Gail Wynand. The few people who knew of his real-estate activities had told him that he was crazy. It was a year when no one thought of building. But Gail Wynand had made his fortune on decisions which people called crazy.
The architect to design Stoneridge had not been chosen. News of the project had seeped into the starved profession. For weeks Wynand had refused to read letters or answer calls from the best architects of the country and their friends. He refused once more when, at the end of his conference, his secretary informed him that Mr. Ralston Holcombe most urgently requested two minutes of his time on the telephone.
When the agents were gone, Wynand pressed a button on his desk, summoning Alvah Scarret. Scarret entered the office, smiling happily. He always answered that buzzer with the flattered eagerness of an office boy.
“Alvah, what in hell is the Gallant Gallstone?”
Scarret laughed. “Oh, that? It’s the title of a novel. By Lois Cook.”
“What kind of a novel?”
“Oh, just a lot of drivel. It’s supposed to be a sort of prose poem. It’s all about a gallstone that thinks that it’s an independent entity, a sort of a rugged individualist of the gall bladder, if you see what I mean, and then the man takes a big dose of castor oil–there’s a graphic description of the consequences–I’m not sure it’s correct medically, but anyway that’s the end of the Gallant Gallstone. It’s all supposed to prove that there’s no such thing as free will.”
“How many copies has it sold?”
“I don’t know. Not very many, I think. Just among the intelligentsia. But I hear it’s picked up some, lately, and…”
“Precisely. What’s going on around here, Alvah?”
“What? Oh, you mean you noticed the few mentions which…”
“I mean I’ve noticed it all over the Banner in the last few weeks. Very nicely done, too, if it took me that long to discover that it wasn’t accidental.”
“What do you mean?”
“What do you think I mean? Why should that particular title appear continuously, in the most inappropriate places? One day it’s in a police story about the execution of some murderer who ‘died bravely like the Gallant Gallstone.’ Two days later it’s on page sixteen, in a state yarn from Albany. ‘Senator Hazleton thinks he’s an independent entity, but it might turn out that he’s only a Gallant Gallstone.’ Then it’s in the obituaries. Yesterday it was on the women’s page. Today, it’s in the comics. Snooxy calls his rich landlord a Gallant Gallstone.”
Scarret chortled peacefully. “Yes, isn’t it silly?”
“I thought it was silly. At first. Now I don’t.”
“But what the hell, Gail! It’s not as if it were a major issue and our by-liners plugged it. It’s just the small fry, the forty-dollar-a-week ones.”
“That’s the point. One of them. The other is that the book’s not a famous bestseller. If it were, I could understand the title popping into their heads automatically. But it isn’t. So someone’s doing the popping. Why?”
“Oh, come, Gail! Why would anyone want to bother? And what do we care? If it were a political issue…But hell, who can get any gravy out of plugging for free will or against free will?”
“Did anyone consult you about this plugging?”
“No. I tell you, nobody’s behind it. It’s just spontaneous. Just a lot of people who thought it was a funny gag.”
“Who was the first one that you heard it from?”
“I don’t know….Let me see….It was…yes, I think it was Ellsworth Toohey.”
“Have it stopped. Be sure to tell Mr. Toohey.”
“Okay, if you say so. But it’s really nothing. Just a lot of people amusing themselves.”
“I don’t like to have anyone amusing himself on my paper.”
“Yes, Gail.”
At two o’clock Wynand arrived, as guest of honor, at a luncheon given by a National Convention of Women’s Clubs. He sat at the right of the chairwoman in an echoing banquet hall filled with the odors of corsages–gardenias and sweet peas–and of fried chicken. After luncheon Wynand spoke. The Convention advocated careers for married women; the Wynand papers had fought against the employment of married women for many years. Wynand spoke for twenty minutes and said nothing at all; but he conveyed the impression that he supported every sentiment expressed at the meeting. Nobody had ever been able to explain the effect of Gail Wynand on an audience, particularly an audience of women. He did nothing spectacular; his voice was low, metallic, inclined to sound monotonous; he was too correct, in a manner that was almost deliberate satire on correctness. Yet he conquered all listeners. People said it was his subtle, enormous virility; it made the courteous voice speaking about school, home and family sound as if he were making love to every old hag present.