“Why?”
“Do you know about the ‘We Don’t Read Wynand’ movement?”
“I’ve heard about it.”
“It’s run by somebody named Gus Webb. They paste stickers on parked windshields and in public privies. They hiss Wynand newsreels in theaters. I don’t think it’s a large group, but…Last week an unappetizing female threw a fit in my store–the one on Fifty Avenue–calling us enemies of labor because we advertised in the Banner. You can ignore that, but it becomes serious when one of our oldest customers, a mild little old lady from Connecticut and a Republican for three generations, calls us to say that perhaps maybe she should cancel her charge account, because somebody told her that Wynand is a dictator.”
“Gail Wynand knows nothing about politics except of the most primitive kind,” said Toohey. “He still thinks in terms of the Democratic Club of Hell’s Kitchen. There was a certain innocence about the political corruption of those days, don’t you think so?”
“I don’t care. That’s not what I’m talking about. I mean, the Banner is becoming a kind of liability. It hurts business. One’s got to be so careful nowadays. You get tied up with the wrong people and first thing you know there’s a smear campaign going on and you get splashed too. I can’t afford that sort of thing.”
“It’s not entirely an unjustified smear.”
“I don’t care. I don’t give a damn whether it’s true or not. Who am I to stick my neck out for Gail Wynand? If there’s a public sentiment against him, my job is to get as far away as I can, pronto. And I’m not the only one. There’s a bunch of us who’re thinking the same. Jim Ferris of Ferris & Symes, Billy Shultz of Vimo Flakes, Bud Harper of Toddler Togs, and…hell, you know them all, they’re all your friends, our bunch, the liberal businessmen. We all want to yank our ads out of the Banner.”
“Have a little patience, Homer. I wouldn’t hurry. There’s a proper time for everything. There’s such a thing as a psychological moment.”
“Okay, I’ll take your word for it. But there’s–there’s a kind of feeling in the air. It will become dangerous some day.”
“It might. I’ll tell you when it will.”
“I thought Ellsworth worked on the Banner,” said Renee Slottern vacantly, puzzled.
The others turned to her with indignation and pity.
“You’re naive, Renee,” shrugged Eve Layton.
“But what’s the matter with the Banner?”
“Now, child, don’t you bother with dirty politics,” said Jessica Pratt. “The Banner is a wicked paper. Mr. Wynand is a very evil man. He represents the selfish interests of the rich.”
“I think he’s good-looking,” said Renee. “I think he has sex appeal.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” cried Eve Layton.
“Now, after all, Renee is entitled to express her opinion,” Jessica Pratt said with immediate rage.
“Somebody told me Ellsworth is the president of the Union of Wynand Employees,” drawled Renee.
“Oh dear me, no, Renee. I’m never president of anything. I’m just a rank-and-file member. Like any copy boy.”
“Do they have a Union of Wynand Employees?” asked Homer Slottern.
“It was just a club, at first,” said Toohey. “It became a union last year.”
“Who organized it?”
“How can one tell? It was more or less spontaneous. Like all mass movements.”
“I think Wynand is a bastard,” declared Mitchell Layton. “Who does he think he is anyway? I come to a meeting of stockholders and he treats us like flunkies. Isn’t my money as good as his? Don’t I own a hunk of his damn paper? I could teach him a thing or two about journalism. I have ideas. What’s he so damn arrogant about? Just because he made that fortune himself? Does he have to be such a damn snob just because he came from Hell’s Kitchen? It isn’t other people’s fault if they weren’t lucky enough to be born in Hell’s Kitchen to rise out of! Nobody understands what a terrible handicap it is to be born rich. Because people just take for granted that because you were born that way you’d just be no good if you weren’t What I mean is if I’d had Gail Wynand’s breaks, I’d be twice as rich as he is by now and three times as famous. But he’s so conceited he doesn’t realize this at all!”
Nobody said a word. They heard the rising inflection of hysteria in Mitchell Layton’s voice. Eve Layton looked at Toohey, silently appealing for help. Toohey smiled and made a step forward.
“I’m ashamed of you, Mitch,” he said.
Homer Slottern gasped. One did not rebuke Mitchell Layton on this subject; one did not rebuke Mitchell Layton on any subject.
Mitchell Layton’s lower lip vanished.
“I’m ashamed of you, Mitch,” Toohey repeated sternly, “for comparing yourself to a man as contemptible as Gail Wynand.”
Mitchell Layton’s mouth relaxed in the equivalent of something almost as gentle as a smile.
“That’s true,” he said humbly.
“No, you would never be able to match Gail Wynand’s career. Not with your sensitive spirit and humanitarian instincts. That’s what’s holding you down, Mitch, not your money. Who cares about money? The age of money is past. It’s your nature that’s too fine for the brute competition of our capitalistic system. But that, too, is passing.”
“It’s self-evident,” said Eve Layton.
It was late when Toohey left. He felt exhilarated and he decided to walk home. The streets of the city lay gravely empty around him, and the dark masses of the buildings rose to the sky, confident and unprotected. He remembered what he had said to Dominique once: “A complicated piece of machinery, such as our society…and by pressing your little finger against one spot…the center of all its gravity…you can make the thing crumble into a worthless heap of scrap iron…” He missed Dominique. He wished she could have been with him to hear this evening’s conversation.
The unshared was boiling up within him. He stopped in the middle of a silent street, threw his head back and laughed aloud, looking at the tops of skyscrapers.
A policeman tapped him on the shoulder, asking: “Well, Mister?”
Toohey saw buttons and blue cloth tight over a broad chest, a stolid face, hard and patient; a man as set and dependable as the buildings around them.
“Doing your duty, officer?” Toohey asked, the echoes of laughter like jerks in his voice. “Protecting law and order and decency and human lives?” The policeman scratched the back of his head. “You ought to arrest me, officer.”
“Okay, pal, okay,” said the policeman. “Run along. We all take one too many once in a while.”
7.
IT WAS only when the last painter had departed that Peter Keating felt a sense of desolation and a numb weakness in the crook of his elbows. He stood in the hall, looking up at the ceiling. Under the harsh gloss of paint he could still see the outline of the square where the stairway had been removed and the opening closed over. Guy Francon’s old office was gone. The firm Keating & Dumont had a single floor left now.
He thought of the stairway and how he had walked up its red-plushed steps for the first time, carrying a drawing on the tips of his fingers. He thought of Guy Francon’s office with the glittering butterfly reflections. He thought of the four years when that office had been his own.
He had known what was happening to his firm, in these last years; he had known it quite well while men in overalls removed the stairway and closed the gap in the ceiling. But it was that square under the white paint that made it real to him, and final.
He had resigned himself to the process of going down, long ago. He had not chosen to resign himself–that would have been a positive decision–it had merely happened and he had let it happen. It had been simple and almost painless, like drowsiness carrying one down to nothing more sinister than a welcome sleep. The dull pain came from wishing to understand why it had happened.
There was “The March of the Centuries” exposition, but that alone could not have mattered. “The March of the Centuries” had opened in May. It was a flop. What’s the use, thought Keating, why not say the right word? Flop. It was a ghastly flop. “The title of this venture would be most appropriate,” Ellsworth Toohey had written, “if we assumed that the centuries had passed by on horseback.” Everything else written about the architectural merits of the exposition had been of the same order.
Keating thought, with wistful bitterness, of how conscientiously they had worked, he and the seven other architects, designing those buildings. It was true that he had pushed himself forward and hogged the publicity, but he certainly had not done that as far as designing was concerned. They had worked in harmony, through conference after conference, each giving in to the others, in true collective spirit, none trying to impose his personal prejudices or selfish ideas. Even Ralston Holcombe had forgotten Renaissance. They had made the buildings modern, more modem than anything ever seen, more modern than the show windows of Slottern’s Department Store. He did not think that the buildings looked like “coils of toothpaste when somebody steps on the tube or stylized versions of the lower intestine,” as one critic had said. But the public seemed to think it, if the public thought at all. He couldn’t tell. He knew only that tickets to “The March of the Centuries” were being palmed off at Screeno games in theaters, and that the sensation of the exposition, the financial savior, was somebody named Juanita Fay who danced with a live peacock as sole garment.