At night, dressed in a shabby suit bought for nine dollars, Wynand would often ride the subways and wander through the dives of slum districts, listening to his public. Once, in a basement beer joint, he heard a truck driver denouncing Gail Wynand as the worst exponent of capitalistic evils, in a language of colorful accuracy. Wynand agreed with him and helped him out with a few expressions of his own, from his Hell's Kitchen vocabulary. Then Wynand picked up a copy of the Banner left by someone on a table, tore his own photograph from page 3, clipped it to a hundred-dollar bill, handed it to the truck driver and walked out before anyone could utter a word.
The succession of his mistresses was so rapid that it ceased to be gossip. It was said that he never enjoyed a woman unless he had bought her — and that she had to be the kind who could not be bought.
He kept the details of his life secret by making it glaringly public as a whole. He had delivered himself to the crowd; he was anyone's property, like a monument in a park, like a bus stop sign, like the pages of the Banner. His photographs appeared in his papers more often than pictures of movie stars. He had been photographed in all kinds of clothes, on every imaginable occasion. He had never been photographed naked, but his readers felt as if he had. He derived no pleasure from personal publicity; it was merely a matter of policy to which he submitted. Every corner of his penthouse had been reproduced in his papers and magazines. "Every bastard in the country knows the inside of my icebox and bathtub," he said.
One phase of his life, however, was little known and never mentioned. The top floor of the building under his penthouse was his private art gallery. It was locked. He had never admitted anyone, except the caretaker. A few people knew about it. Once a French ambassador asked him for permission to visit it. Wynand refused. Occasionally, not often, he would descend to his gallery and remain there for hours. The things he collected were chosen by standards of his own. He had famous masterpieces; he had canvases by unknown artists; he rejected the works of immortal names for which he did not care. The estimates set by collectors and the matter of great signatures were of no concern to him. The art dealers whom he patronized reported that his judgment was that of a master.
One night his valet saw Wynand returning from the art gallery below and was shocked by the expression of his face; it was a look of suffering, yet the face seemed ten years younger. "Are you ill, sir?" he asked. Wynand looked at him indifferently and said: "Go to bed."
"We could make a swell spread for the Sunday scandal sheet out of your art gallery," said Alvah Scarret wistfully. "No," said Wynand. "But why, Gail?"
"Look, Alvah. Every man on earth has a soul of his own that nobody can stare at. Even the convicts in a penitentiary and the freaks in a side show. Everybody but me. My soul is spread in your Sunday scandal sheet — in three-color process. So I must have a substitute — even if it's only a locked room and a few objects not to be pawed."
It was a long process and there had been premonitory signs, but Scarret did not notice a certain new trait in Gail Wynand's character until Wynand was forty-five. Then it became apparent to many. Wynand lost interest in breaking industrialists and financiers. He found a new kind of victim. People could not tell whether it was a sport, a mania or a systematic pursuit. They thought it was horrible, because it seemed so vicious and pointless.
It began with the case of Dwight Carson. Dwight Carson was a talented young writer who had achieved the spotless reputation of a man passionately devoted to his convictions. He upheld the cause of the individual against the masses. He wrote for magazines of great prestige and small circulation, which were no threat to Wynand. Wynand bought Dwight Carson. He forced Carson to write a column in the Banner, dedicated to preaching the superiority of the masses over the man of genius. It was a bad column, dull and unconvincing; it made many people angry. It was a waste of space and of a big salary. Wynand insisted on continuing it.
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.