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 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 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.”
“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.”
“You’re lying about that. If that were all you saw in it, you wouldn’t have taken the chance you took. You know that I’ve never let anyone see my gallery. Did you think I’d allow you the presumption of contributing to it? Nobody has ever dared offer me a gift of that kind. You wouldn’t have risked it, unless you were sure, terribly sure, of how great a work of art this is. Sure that I’d have to accept it. That you’d beat me. And you have.”
“I’m glad to hear it, Mr. Wynand.”
“If you wish to enjoy that, I’ll tell you also that I hate seeing this come from you. I hate your having been able to appreciate it. It doesn’t fit you. Though I was obviously wrong about you: you’re a greater art expert than I thought you were.”
“Such as it is, I’ll have to accept this as a compliment and thank you, Mr. Wynand.”
“Now what was it you wanted? You intended me to understand that you won’t let me have this unless I grant an interview to Mrs. Peter Keating?”