Gail Wynand stood at the window of his office and looked at his city.
"I have supported strikes at a time when it was dangerous to do so. I have fought Gail Wynand all my life. I had never expected to see the day or the issue when I would be forced to say — as I say now — that I stand on the side of Gail Wynand," wrote Austen Heller in the Chronicle.
Wynand sent him a note: "God damn you, I didn't ask you to defend me. G W
The New Frontiers described Austen Heller as "A reactionary who has sold himself to Big Business." Intellectual society ladies said that Austin Heller was old-fashioned.
Gail Wynand stood at a desk in the city room and wrote editorials as usual. His derelict staff saw no change in him; no haste, no outbursts of anger. There was nobody to notice that some of his actions were new: he would go to the pressroom and stand looking at the white stream shot out of the roaring giants, and listen to the sound. He would pick up a lead slug off the composing room floor, and finger it absently on the palm of his hand, like a piece of jade, and lay it carefully on a table, as if he did not want it to be wasted. He fought other forms of such waste, not noticing it, the gestures instinctive: he retrieved pencils, he spent a half-hour, while telephones shrieked unanswered, repairing a typewriter that had broken down. It was not a matter of economy; he signed checks without looking at the figures; Scarret was afraid to think of the amounts each passing day cost him. It was a matter of things that were part of the building where he loved every doorknob, things that belonged to the Banner that belonged to him.
Late each afternoon he telephoned Dominique in the country. "Fine. Everything under control. Don't listen to panic-mongers ... No, to hell with it, you know I don't want to talk about the damn paper. Tell me what the garden looks like ... Did you go swimming today? ... Tell me about the lake ... What dress are you wearing? ... Listen to WLX tonight, at eight, they'll have your pet — Rachmaninoff's Second Concerto ... Of course I have time to keep informed about everything ... Oh, all right, I see one can't fool an ex-newspaper woman, I did go over the radio page ... Of course we have plenty of help, it's just that I can't quite trust some of the new boys and I had a moment to spare ... Above all, don't come to town. You promised me that ... Good night, dearest ... "
He hung up and sat looking at the telephone, smiling. The thought of the countryside was like the thought of a continent beyond an ocean that could not be crossed; it gave him a sense of being locked in a besieged fortress and he liked that — not the fact, but the feeling. His face looked like a throwback to some distant ancestor who had fought on the ramparts of a castle.
One evening he went out to the restaurant across the street; he had not eaten a complete meal for days. The streets were still light when he came back — the placid brown haze of summer, as if dulled sunrays remained stretched too comfortably on the warm air to undertake a movement of withdrawal, even though the sun had long since gone; it made the sky look fresh and the street dirty; there were patches of brown and tired orange in the corners of old buildings. He saw pickets pacing in front of the Banner's entrance. There were eight of them and they marched around and around in a long oval on the sidewalk. He recognized one boy — a police reporter, he had never seen any of the others. They carried signs: "Toohey, Harding, Alien, Falk ... " "The Freedom of the Press ... " "Gail Wynand Tramples Human Rights ... "
His eyes kept following one woman. Her hips began at her ankles, bulging over the tight straps of her shoes; she had square shoulders and a long coat of cheap brown tweed over a huge square body. She had small white hands, the kind that would drop things all over the kitchen. She had an incision of a mouth, without lips, and she waddled as she moved, but she moved with surprising briskness. Her steps defied the whole world to hurt her, with a malicious slyness that seemed to say she would like nothing better, because what a joke it would be on the world if it tried to hurt her, just try it and see, just try it. Wynand knew she had never been employed on the Banner; she never could be; it did not appear likely that she could be taught to read; her steps seemed to add that she jolly well didn't have to. She carried a sign: "We demand ... "
He thought of the nights when he had slept on the couch in the old Banner Building, in the first years, because the new presses had to be paid for and the Banner had to be on the streets before its competitors, and he coughed blood one night and refused to see a doctor, but it turned out to be nothing, just exhaustion.
He hurried into the building. The presses were rolling. He stood and listened for a while.
At night the building was quiet. It seemed bigger, as if sound took space and vacated it; there were panels of light at open doors, between long stretches of dim hallways. A lone typewriter clicked somewhere, evenly, like a dripping faucet. Wynand walked through the halls. He thought that men had been willing to work for him when he plugged known crooks for municipal elections, when he glamorized red-light districts, when he ruined reputations by scandalous libel, when he sobbed over the mothers of gangsters. Talented men, respected men had been eager to work for him. Now he was being honest for the first time in his career. He was leading his greatest crusade — with the help of finks, drifters, drunkards, and humble drudges too passive to quit. The guilt, he thought, was not perhaps with those who now refused to work for him.
The sun hit the square crystal inkstand on his desk. It made Wynand think of a cool drink on a lawn, white clothes, the feel of grass under bare elbows. He tried not to look at the gay glitter and went on writing. It was a morning in the second week of the strike. He had retreated to his office for an hour and given orders not to be disturbed; he had an article to finish; he knew he wanted the excuse, one hour of not seeing what went on in the building.
The door of his office opened without announcement, and Dominique came in. She had not been allowed to enter the Banner Building since their marriage.
He got up, a kind of quiet obedience in his movement, permitting himself no questions. She wore a coral linen suit, she stood as if the lake were behind her and the sunlight rose from the surface to the folds of her clothes. She said:
"Gail, I've come for my old job on the Banner."
He stood looking at her silently; then he smiled; it was a smile of convalescence.
He turned to the desk, picked up the sheets he had written, handed them to her and said:
"Take this to the back room. Pick up the wire flimsies and bring them to me. Then report to Manning at the city desk."
The impossible, the not to be achieved in word, glance or gesture, the complete union of two beings in complete understanding, was done by a small stack of paper passing from his hand to hers. Their fingers did not touch. She turned and walked out of the office.
Within two days, it was as if she had never left the staff of the Banner. Only now she did not write a column on houses, but kept busy wherever a competent hand was needed to fill a gap. "It's quite all right, Alvah," she said to Scarret, "it's a proper feminine job to be a seamstress. I'm here to slap on patches where necessary — and boy! is this cloth ripping fast! Just call me when one of your new journalists runs amuck more than usual."
Scarret could not understand her tone, her manner or her presence. "You're a lifesaver, Dominique," he mumbled sadly. "It's like the old days, seeing you here — and oh! how I wish it were the old days! Only I can't understand. Gail wouldn't allow a photo of you in the place, when it was a decent, respectable place — and now when it's practically as safe as a penitentiary during a convict riot, he lets you work here!"