Authors: Laura Z. Hobson
Vera looked unbelieving.
“You mean it’s that simple? People’s lives—”
“It’s like everything else, Vee.” Ann shrugged. “Him who hath—”
Jasper Crown stared patiently at the man opposite him.
The man opposite him was an enemy, Jasper was thinking, though probably an unconscious one. The man opposite him, talking too eagerly, explaining too minutely, had been for some months now Jasper’s most active supporter and ally, had already been instrumental in raising a quarter million toward the new project. Instrumental. Not decisive. Nobody could wind up the thing with a prospective investor except Jasper himself; others could, at most, pave the way, prepare his entrance. Then the rest was up to him, Jasper, who had thought up what would in effect be the first global network.
Now, Jasper knew that the man opposite, this plump, slightly bald Timothy Grosvenor, was potentially, at least, an enemy. He would have to be destroyed. Jasper sat listening to him, staring at him patiently. Destroyed…
Destroyed merely in relation to the new project. The project was bigger than any other consideration. There was need, immediate and constantly growing need, for a radio network that wasn’t paralyzed by a lot of polite rules about handling the news. The next years, the next months even, would decide forever that radio and not day-old newspapers would tell the world its major news. The Austrian crisis had been the newest proof that radio was entering a new era. The press of the nation was tired, old, outmoded. The people gave it no heed, paid it no attention—witness the 1936 elections. The new, young, potent means of communication was not the linotype machine, not the printed picture, but the air wave, the radio dial, the human, urging voice.
But radio, thus far, had been afraid of its own potentiality. The men at the top were such cautious men, always talking about being unbiased, about not editorializing, boasting of giving equal time to both sides of anything—even the side that would destroy free communication the moment it came to power. All the men who now controlled the forty or fifty million radios in the U.S.—controlled them by the simple expedient of running the broadcasting stations that fed them words, music, gags, news—that whole group of men were cautious, timidly maintaining the farce of impersonality.
His network would be different in every way the law would allow—JCN, the Jasper Crown Network. Every announcer would say, “Jasper Crown reporters have just learned…” or “Jasper Crown’s correspondents in the Far East, in London, in Berlin”—for Jasper Crown representatives would dot the news capitals of the world within a year. Money? Cost? Budget?
That kind of measuring and weighing was the unimaginative, fearful wariness of little men. It came from insecurity, the impulse to hedge, to take the small risk instead of the great one. Not for him, the small, tight vision.
For years he had dreamed of the day he would own his own radio chain. The difficulties were prodigious; there were, even, no unused wave lengths that could be licensed; there were official regulations of all kinds. Yet, one by one, he had found ways to get around all the obstacles. Deals with independent owners, short-wave deals with foreign companies, contracts and subcontracts. In spite of everything it could be done.
Now in a few months, the American part of the dream would materialize. One key station was already his. His own fifty-thousand-watt transmitter pierced the sky. Soon he would have another station, and then the affiliates would sign—he would be well on the way to the ultimate dream: one band of the globe-girdling ether earmarked Jasper Crown.
Ten million dollars’ capitalization. He had been that bold, setting forth to raise ten million dollars. And that would cover only the first steps—the purchase last month of Grosvenor’s Mid West station, one of the best-known independent stations in the land, the financing of a hundred deals within the U.S., a few deals abroad, the beginnings of the new kinds of programs.
Ten million dollars. The boldness of his concept, the boldness of his demands from investors, had been the most persuasive element in his success thus far. Nothing could defeat him now. Over half of it was raised. Soon there would be a band-wagon rush to subscribe, again the little minds, the wary minds, afraid now to be left out of a good thing. Nasty, such people. Still, they wanted to be used, so one used them.
Crown was a powerful-looking man. He was a man just over middle height, yet with so impressive a bulk of shoulder, chest, lean muscularity in every line of him, that he seemed big, commanding, even among much taller men.
His black hair was thick, defiant, springing impatiently away from his wide, oddly undomed forehead. This flat expanse over his eyes lifted in contour only at the marked protuberance of bone just above each black, finely arched eyebrow. His forehead forced the attention; the perceptive observer compared it to that of a strong, butting animal. It was a vigorous, handsome brow, though every description of it denied that.
Under it were dark-brown eyes that were as unusual. For they could look as cool, as impassive, as pale-blue eyes; could obliterate their intensity of pigmentation, their warmth and depth of physical color, by some overlay of level-staring coldness. Then his gaze had a quality that was at once dead and cruel.
Jasper Crown was thirty-five years old. He had a secret vanity about his youth, for his success was out of all proportion to it. He liked to remember that at thirty-four, when he had resigned as vice-president of the biggest radio company in the world, he had a sixty-thousand-a-year salary and stock (in his ex-company as well as in its chief rival) worth a million dollars. Talking to some Wall Street millionaire, old, paunchy, frightened of his own advancing age, Jasper was wise enough to refrain from hammering too hard at the youth equation. But always, inevitably, there came into the conversation the quiet mention of the vigor of idea, of execution, of command that one could expect from a man who had made good, practically and demonstrably made good in a harsh, competitive world, while he was still in his early thirties.
He would see the old eyes of the Wall Streeter flinch a little, flinch, from the envy of Jasper’s own youngness, flinch from the suddenly evoked contrast with the Wall Streeter’s approaching or arrived oldness. Jasper always veered quickly to a less difficult or painful theme. But the effect was achieved. The Wall Streeter was remembering that he too, as a young man of the mid-thirties, had been at his most daring, his most productive, his most sure-touched. Whether his personal history would check out on that recollection or not, Jasper knew that every one of these rich and powerful old men had some hidden fantasy that that was the way he had been. Envy, mourning over one’s lost youth, might bring a momentary hatred of the young, vital Jasper, but with it was a stronger faith in his project, in his proposals, for there was the nostalgic self-identification through memory with a young and able and bold man.
And that was all that mattered now to Jasper. Faith, belief from men with money—to be delicately, shrewdly nurtured along toward the investment point during many a talk, many a discussion, first in the formality of their offices, then in the more personal and always reassuring atmosphere of Jasper’s apartment, or at one of his clubs.
Personal, intimate equations of life mattered too, yes, but on a lesser, remoter plane. Two years ago he had moved into virtual bachelorhood. He dined occasionally with Beth, sent her flowers on anniversaries. But he knew that he would never go back to her, emotionally or physically. He simply could not bond himself to the steady, time-filling demands of the usual marriage. There was the other reason, too.
He knew she was still resentful that he had moved out. But she was, at least, apparently adjusted to it. She no longer said things about the uselessness of beating against his will. She no longer told him, in her quiet, brownish voice, that she felt an implacable thing in him, and that she knew it was his need for fame and power.
He knew what she meant. But he himself phrased it differently. He thought of it as a principle of the deepest humanity, the desire to make the world a better, finer, freer place. To be effective in that desire one needed a voice, an audience. The most convincing and brilliant talk to a small group of stragglers around a soapbox would achieve nothing. For him, he had to fight largely, noticeably.
The two estimates of the implacable thing in Jasper Crown were both true. The two overlapped, interwove, intermarried. If you responded to him, trusted him, you called the thing by one set of names; if you disliked him, mistrusted him, you used the other set. It was fairly easy to make a case for either.
Now, staring silently with cold brown eyes at Timothy Grosvenor, the implacable thing drove him on to his decision.
Grosvenor was a Westerner by birth, the son of a well-to-do Nevada lawyer with stock in silver mines and a large divorce practice as well. Timothy had gone into radio in the early days and managed quite a success on his own. There was something hearty in his plump and ruddy face that people responded to, though Crown himself was irritated by it. But he admitted that Tim had worked hard, incessantly, to raise money, to produce ideas. He had been effective, more so than half the cohorts and supporters of the new project. Crown had felt sure of his loyalties; so sure that he had encouraged Tim virtually to retire from the active management of his own station, until the time came when the newly formed company bought it. The purchase deal was generous—Tim and his stockholders were delighted with it. It was clear that this was the greatest opportunity for Tim himself. He was to be Executive Vice-President of the new Jasper Crown Network.
In early March had come the first trouble.
Mandreth, Drake, and Niles, Investments, was considering an investment of five hundred thousand dollars. Jacques Mandreth had written Tim a letter in which he spoke of “your venture,” “your plans,” “your company,” “your personal assurance.” It was clearly an almost-dotted-line letter. With pleasure and a gleam of triumph, Tim had turned it over to Jasper, watched his face as he read.
“Swell, Tim. Oh, good boy. This is the business, all right,” Jasper had said immediately. Already, though, as he spoke the warm words, the question was forming in his mind.
“It’s the plan for splitting the foreign coverage, I think, Jas,” Tim said with satisfaction, “that got to him. He could see that—he could imagine Ford or Du Pont or General Foods paying millions to ‘own’ London, say.”
“That’s the honey of an idea, Tim.”
“Old Jacques sat there, almost rubbing his hands. ‘You mean you’re going to have regular sponsored news programs from all over Europe every single day?’ That took a while to sink in.”
“Sure, it always staggers them. They can’t see ahead.”
“But that was only the first part. The real thing that got them was the splitting up. ‘And you mean you’re going to split up those programs and sell sponsorship of all the news for a year, let’s say, out of Berlin?’ He kept asking that over and over.” Grosvenor slapped his knee with delight.
Jasper nodded, smiled. He listened to every word. But he was thinking, too.
“They couldn’t visualize my idea at all, Jas. Just because it’s different,” the happy, chubby man went on. “The idea that maybe an international crisis might ‘belong’ to just one advertiser on the newest network—”
Jasper listened. He seemed to be all listening. But the question. was prowling around his mind, like some furtive marauder.
“Let’s see the whole file on Mandreth sometime, will you, Tim?” he finally said. So casually he said it, so easily, in his deep, throaty voice, with all the pleasant, well-bred deference to a colleague and partner. “I ought to get up to date on Mandreth.”
Tim had nodded his promise, and then had been out of town almost constantly since giving it. Jasper himself was gone when he returned to New York, gone, his secretary merely said, “for a few days’ rest down south.” He had returned only that morning and Timothy had pleaded for an immediate meeting. The documents for purchase of stock by Mandreth were being drawn. They would be signed tomorrow or the next day. Jasper agreed that there was no time to be lost.
The complete file of Timothy’s correspondence with Mandreth now lay on Jasper’s desk. Idly he glanced through it, as they talked. Only when he came to the most recent exchange of letters did Jasper fall into silence and give his whole mind to reading.
Phrase after phrase leaped out to him from the laconic lines of typewriting. He reached for a pencil, in an impulse to underline each one, then thought better of it, and sat drumming a tiny tap-tap-tap accompaniment on the desk. Tap-tap-tap; tick-tick-tick.
“I have given my most pointed attention to your proposal,” was one such phrase of Timothy’s. “I can assure you without hesitation that you will always have the opportunity, indeed the right, to…” “My plan is simple here…” “You will be glad to hear, I hope, of an idea I am developing…”
As he read, Jasper Crown felt something tighten and square off in his mind, his feelings. His suspicion had been intuitive, but now it was documented. Why, this fat, pink Tim Grosvenor was getting ahead of himself. The file itself showed the gradual abandonment of the tone of his early letters—
they
had carefully and consistently related every idea, every suggestion, every implication of the future to Crown himself. “Mr. Crown’s plans are…” “I talked with Jasper Crown at length since yesterday, and his decision is…” “Jasper Crown is in Washington, so I shall have to wait until Friday to answer…”
Those phrases had discreetly salted all the early correspondence. Then they had begun to fall away. A sentimentalist might feel that it was a natural transition, since Timothy Grosvenor had been seeing Mandreth so constantly that it was inevitable he should wish to stand more and more on his own. A sentimentalist would yield to Timothy the innocence of his human wish to appear on an equal footing with Jasper Crown.
But sentimentalists were hateful, frightened little men, afraid of seeming bold and hard. They were guileless, trusting everybody’s goodness until they were trapped by enemies who wanted to emasculate them. Then they whined, too late, that they had been betrayed by their friends.