Jessica Pratt had an old family name, no money, and a great passion: her love for her younger sister Renée. They had been left orphaned at an early age, and she had dedicated her life to Renee’s upbringing. She had sacrificed everything; she had never married; she had struggled, plotted, schemed, defrauded through the years–and achieved the triumph of Renee’s marriage to Homer Slottern.
Renee Slottern sat curled up on a footstool, munching peanuts. Once in a while she reached up to the crystal dish on a side table and took another. She exhibited no further exertion. Her pale eyes stared placidly out of her pale face.
“That’s going too far, Jess,” said Homer Slottern. “You can’t expect everybody to be a saint.”
“I don’t expect anything,” said Jessica Pratt meekly. “I’ve given up expecting long ago. But it’s education that we all need. Now I think Mr. Toohey understands. If everybody were compelled to have the proper kind of education, we’d have a better world. If we force people to do good, they will be free to be happy.”
“This is a perfectly useless discussion,” said Eve Layton. “No intelligent person believes in freedom nowadays. It’s dated. The future belongs to social planning. Compulsion is a law of nature. That’s that. It’s self-evident.”
Eve Layton was beautiful. She stood under the light of a chandelier, her smooth black hair clinging to her skull, the pale green satin of her gown alive like water about to stream off and expose the rest of her soft, tanned skin. She had the special faculty of making satin and perfume appear as modern as an aluminum table top. She was Venus rising out of a submarine hatch.
Eve Layton believed that her mission in life was to be the vanguard–it did not matter of what. Her method had always been to take a careless leap and land triumphantly far ahead of all others. Her philosophy consisted of one sentence–“I can get away with anything.” In conversation she paraphrased it to her favorite line: “I? I’m the day after tomorrow.” She was an expert horsewoman, a racing driver, a stunt pilot, a swimming champion. When she saw that the emphasis of the day had switched to the realm of ideas, she took another leap, as she did over any ditch. She landed well in front, in the latest. Having landed, she was amazed to find that there were people who questioned her feat. Nobody had ever questioned her other achievements. She acquired an impatient anger against all those who disagreed with her political views. It was a personal issue. She had to be right, since she was the day after tomorrow.
Her husband, Mitchell Layton, hated her.
“It’s a perfectly valid discussion,” he snapped. “Everybody can’t be as competent as you, my dear. We must help the others. It’s the moral duty of intellectual leaders. What I mean is we ought to lose that bugaboo of being scared of the word compulsion. It’s not compulsion when it’s for a good cause. What I mean is in the name of love. But I don’t know how we can make this country understand it. Americans are so stuffy.”
He could not forgive his country because it had given him a quarter of a billion dollars and then refused to grant him an equal amount of reverence. People would not take his views on art, literature, history, biology, sociology and metaphysics as they took his checks. He complained that people identified him with his money too much; he hated them because they did not identify him enough.
“There’s a great deal to be said for compulsion,” stated Homer Slottern. “Provided it’s democratically planned. The common good must always come first, whether we like it or not.”
Translated into language, Homer Slottern’s attitude consisted of two parts, they were contradictory parts, but this did not trouble him, since they remained untranslated in his mind. First, he felt that abstract theories were nonsense, and if the customers wanted this particular kind, it was perfectly safe to give it to them, and good business, besides. Second, he felt uneasy that he had neglected whatever it was people called spiritual life, in the rush of making money; maybe men like Toohey had something there. And what if his stores were taken away from him? Wouldn’t it really be easier to live as manager of a State-owned Department Store? Wouldn’t a manager’s salary give him all the prestige and comfort he now enjoyed, without the responsibility of ownership?
“Is it true that in the future society any woman will sleep with any man she wants,” asked Renee Slottern. It had started as a question, but it petered out. She did not really want to know. She merely felt a vapid wonder about how it felt to have a man one really wanted and how one went about wanting.
“It’s stupid to talk about personal choice,” said Eve Layton. “It’s old-fashioned. There’s no such thing as a person. There’s only a collective entity. It’s self-evident.”
Ellsworth Toohey smiled and said nothing.
“Something’s got to be done about the masses,” Mitchell Layton declared. “They’ve got to be led. They don’t know what’s good for them. What I mean is, I can’t understand why people of culture and position like us understand the great ideal of collectivism so well and are willing to sacrifice our personal advantages, while the working man who has everything to gain from it remains so stupidly indifferent. I can’t understand why the workers in this country have so little sympathy with collectivism.”
“Can’t you?” said Ellsworth Toohey. His glasses sparkled.
“I’m bored with this,” snapped Eve Layton, pacing the room, light streaming off her shoulders.
The conversation switched to art and its acknowledged leaders of the day in every field.
“Lois Cook said that words must be freed from the oppression of reason. She said the stranglehold of reason upon words is like the exploitation of the masses by the capitalists. Words must be permitted to negotiate with reason through collective bargaining. That’s what she said. She’s so amusing and refreshing.”
“Dee–what’s his name again?–says that the theater is an instrument of love. It’s all wrong, he says, about a play taking place on the stage–it takes place in the hearts of the audience.”
“Jules Fougler said in last Sunday’s Banner that in the world of the future the theater will not be necessary at all. He says that the daily life of the common man is as much a work of art in itself as the best Shakespearean tragedy. In the future there will be no need for a dramatist. The critic will simply observe the life of the masses and evaluate its artistic points for the public. That’s what Jules Fougler said. Now I don’t know whether I agree with him, but he’s got an interesting fresh angle there.”
“Lancelot Clokey says the British Empire is doomed. He says there will be no war, because the workers of the world won’t allow it, it’s international bankers and munitions markers who start wars and they’ve been kicked out of the saddle. Lancelot Clokey says that the universe is a mystery and that his mother is his best friend. He says the Premier of Bulgaria eats herring for breakfast.”
“Gordon Prescott says that four walls and a ceiling is all there is to architecture. The floor is optional. All the rest is capitalistic ostentation. He says nobody should be allowed to build anything anywhere until every inhabitant of the globe has a roof over his head…Well, what about the Patagonians? It’s our job to teach them to want a roof. Prescott calls it dialectic trans-spatial interdependence.”
Ellsworth Toohey said nothing. He stood smiling at the vision of a huge typewriter. Each famous name he heard was a key of its keyboard, each controlling a special field, each hitting, leaving its mark, and the whole making connected sentences on a vast blank sheet. A typewriter, he thought, presupposes the hand that punches its keys.
He snapped to attention when he heard Mitchell Layton’s sulking voice say:
“Oh, yes, the Banner, God damn it!”
“I know,” said Homer Slottern.
“It’s slipping,” said Mitchell Layton. “It’s definitely slipping A swell investment it turned out to be for me. It’s the only time Ellsworth’s been wrong.”
“Ellsworth is never wrong,” said Eve Layton.
“Well, he was, that time. It was he who advised me to buy a piece of that lousy sheet.” He saw Toohey’s eyes, patient as velvet, and he added hastily: “What I mean is, I’m not complaining, Ellsworth. It’s all right. It may even help me to slice something off my damned income tax. But that filthy reactionary rag is sure going downhill.”
“Have a little patience, Mitch,” said Toohey.
“You don’t think I should sell and get out from under?”
“No, Mitch, I don’t.”
“Okay, if you say so. I can afford it. I can afford anything.”
“But I jolly well can’t!” Homer Slottern cried with surprising vehemence. “It’s coming to where one can’t afford to advertise in the Banner. It’s not their circulation–that’s okay–but there’s a feeling around–a funny kind of feeling….Ellsworth, I’ve been thinking of dropping my contract.”