She looked at the soft light on the walls around her. That lighting was part of the room, giving the walls a special texture of more than material or color. She thought that there were other rooms beyond these walls, rooms she had never seen which were hers now. And she found that she wanted them to be hers.
“Gail, I haven’t asked you what we are to do now. Are we going away? Are we having a honeymoon? Funny, I haven’t even wondered about it. I thought of the wedding and nothing beyond. As if it stopped there and you took over from then on. Also out of character, Gail.”
“But not in my favor, this time. Passivity is not a good sign. Not for you.”
“It might be–if I’m glad of it.”
“Might. Though it won’t last. No, we’re not going anywhere. Unless you wish to go.”
“No.”
“Then we stay here. Another peculiar manner of making an exception. The proper manner for you and me. Going away has always been running–for both of us. This time, we don’t run.”
“Yes, Gail.”
When he held her and kissed her, her arm lay bent, pressed between her body and his, her hand at her shoulder–and she felt her cheek touching the faded jasmine bouquet on her wrist, its perfume still intact, still a delicate suggestion of spring.
When she entered his bedroom, she found that it was not the place she had seen photographed in countless magazines. The glass cage had been demolished. The room built in its place was a solid vault without a single window. It was lighted and air-conditioned, but neither light nor air came from the outside.
She lay in his bed and she pressed her palms to the cold, smooth sheet at her sides, not to let her arms move and touch him. But her rigid indifference did not drive him to helpless anger. He understood. He laughed. She heard him say–his voice rough, without consideration, amused–“It won’t do, Dominique.” And she knew that this barrier would not be held between them, that she had no power to hold it. She felt the answer in her body, an answer of hunger, of acceptance, of pleasure. She thought that it was not a matter of desire, not even a matter of the sexual act, but only that man was the life force and woman could respond to nothing else; that this man had the will of life, the prime power, and this act was only its simplest statement, and she was responding not to the act nor to the man, but to that force within him.
“Well?” asked Ellsworth Toohey. “Now do you get the point?”
He stood leaning informally against the back of Scarret’s chair, and Scarret sat staring down at a hamper full of mail by the side of his desk.
“Thousands,” sighed Scarret, “thousands, Ellsworth. You ought to see what they call him. Why didn’t he print the story of his wedding? What’s he ashamed of? What’s he got to hide? Why didn’t he get married in church, like any decent man? How could he marry a divorcee? That’s what they’re all asking. Thousands. And he won’t even look at the letters. Gail Wynand, the man they called the seismograph of public opinion.”
“That’s right,” said Toohey. “That kind of a man.”
“Here’s a sample,” Scarret picked up a letter from his desk and read aloud: “‘I’m a respectable woman and mother of five children and I certainly don’t think I want to bring up my children with your newspaper. Have taken same for fourteen years, but now that you show that you’re the kind of man that has no decency and making a mockery of the holy institution of marriage which is to commit adultery with a fallen woman also another man’s wife who gets married in a black dress as she jolly well ought to, I won’t read your newspaper any more as you’re not a man fit for children, and I’m certainly disappointed in you. Very truly yours. Mrs. Thomas Parker.’ I read it to him. He just laughed.”
“Uh-huh,” said Toohey.
“What’s got into him?”
“It’s nothing that got into him, Alvah. It’s something that got out at last.”
“By the way, did you know that many papers dug up their old pictures of Dominique’s nude statue from that goddamn temple and ran it right with the wedding story–to show Mrs. Wynand’s interest in art, the bastards! Are they glad to get back at Gail! Are they giving it to him, the lice! Wonder who reminded them of that one.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Well, of course, it’s just one of those storms in a teacup. They’ll forget all about it in a few weeks. I don’t think it will do much harm.”
“No. Not this incident alone. Not by itself.”
“Huh? Are you predicting something?”
“Those letters predict it, Alvah. Not the letters as such. But that he wouldn’t read them.”
“Oh, it’s no use getting too silly either. Gail knows where to stop and when. Don’t make a mountain out of a mo–” He glanced up at Toohey and his voice switched to: “Christ, yes, Ellsworth, you’re right. What are we going to do?”
“Nothing, my friend, nothing. Not for a long time yet.” Toohey sat down on the edge of Scarret’s desk and let the tip of his pointed shoe play among the envelopes in the hamper, tossing them up, making them rustle. He had acquired a pleasant habit of dropping in and out of Scarret’s office at all hours. Scarret had come to depend on him.
“Say, Ellsworth,” Scarret asked suddenly, “are you really loyal to the Banner!”
“Alvah, don’t talk in dialect. Nobody’s really that stuffy,”
“No, I mean it….Well, you know what I mean.”
“Haven’t the faintest idea. Who’s ever disloyal to his bread and butter?”
“Yeah, that’s so….Still, you know, Ellsworth, I like you a lot, only I’m never sure when you’re just talking my language or when it’s really yours.”
“Don’t go getting yourself into psychological complexities. You’ll get all tangled up. What’s on your mind?”
“Why do you still write for the New Frontiers!”
“For money.”
“Oh, come, that’s chicken feed to you.”
“Well, it’s a prestige magazine. Why shouldn’t I write for them? You haven’t got an exclusive on me.”
“No, and I don’t care who you write for on the side. But the New Frontiers has been damn funny lately.”
“About what?”
“About Gail Wynand.”
“Oh, rubbish, Alvah!”
“No sir, this isn’t rubbish. You just haven’t noticed, guess you don’t read it close enough, but I’ve got an instinct about things like that and I know. I know when it’s just some smart young punk taking potshots or when a magazine means business.”
“You’re nervous, Alvah, and you’re exaggerating. The New Frontiers is a liberal magazine and they’ve always sniped at Gail Wynand. Everybody has. He’s never been any too popular in the trade, you know. Hasn’t hurt him, though, has it?”
“This is different. I don’t like it when there’s a system behind it, a kind of special purpose, like a lot of little trickles dribbling along, all innocently, and pretty soon they make a little stream, and it all fits pat, and pretty soon…”
“Getting a persecution mania, Alvah?”
“I don’t like it. It was all right when people took cracks at his yachts and women and a few municipal election scandals–which were never proved,” he added hastily. “But I don’t like it when it’s that new intelligentsia slang that people seem to be going for nowadays: Gail Wynand, the exploiter, Gail Wynand, the pirate of capitalism, Gail Wynand, the disease of an era. It’s still crap, Ellsworth, only there’s dynamite in that kind of crap.”
“It’s just the modern way of saying the same old things, nothing more. Besides, I can’t be responsible for the policy of a magazine just because I sell them an article once in a while.”
“Yeah, but…That’s not what I hear.”
“What do you hear?”
“I hear you’re financing the damn thing.”
“Who, me? With what?”
“Well, not you yourself exactly. But I hear it was you who got young Ronny Pickering, the booze hound, to give them a shot in the arm to the tune of one hundred thousand smackers, just about when New Frontiers was going the way of all frontiers.”
“Hell, that was just to save Ronny from the town’s more expensive gutters. The kid was going to the dogs. Gave him a sort of higher purpose in life. And put one hundred thousand smackers to better use than the chorus cuties who’d have got it out of him anyway.”
“Yeah, but you could’ve attached a little string to the gift, slipped word to the editors that they’d better lay off Gail or else.”
“The New Frontiers is not the Banner, Alvah. It’s a magazine of principles. One doesn’t attach strings to its editors and one doesn’t tell them ‘or else.'”