The Fountainhead (76 page)

Wynand spoke about the newspaper business; he showed no reluctance to discuss it with Roark, and she pronounced a few sentences when it seemed necessary. Her voice had a luminous simplicity; she was being carried along, unresisting, any personal reaction would be superfluous, even pain or fear. She thought, if in the flow of conversation Wynand’s next sentence should be: “You’ve slept with him,” she would answer: “Yes, Gail, of course,” just as simply. But Wynand seldom looked at her; when he did, she knew by his face that hers was normal.

Afterward, they were in the drawing room again, and she saw Roark standing at the window, against the lights of the city. She thought: Gail built this place as a token of his own victory—to have the city always before him—the city where he did run things at last. But this is what it had really been built for—to have Roark stand at that window—and I think Gail knows it tonight—Roark’s body blocking miles out of that perspective, with only a few dots of fire and a few cubes of lighted glass left visible around the outline of his figure. He was smoking and she watched his cigarette moving slowly against the black sky, as he put it between his lips, then held it extended in his fingers, and she thought: they are only sparks from his cigarette, those points glittering in space behind him.

She said softly: “Gail always liked to look at the city at night. He was in love with skyscrapers.”

Then she noticed she had used the past tense, and wondered why.

She did not remember what she said when they spoke about the new house. Wynand brought the drawings from his study, spread the plans on a table, and the three of them stood bent over the plans together. Roark’s pencil moved, pointing, across the hard geometrical patterns of thin black lines on white sheets. She heard his voice, close to her, explaining. They did not speak of beauty and affirmation, but of closets, stairways, pantries, bathrooms. Roark asked her whether she found the arrangements convenient. She thought it was strange that they all spoke as if they really believed she would ever live in this house.

When Roark had gone, she heard Wynand asking her:

“What do you think of him?”

She felt something angry and dangerous, like a single, sudden twist within her, and she said, half in fear, half in deliberate invitation:

“Doesn’t he remind you of Dwight Carson?”

“Oh, forget Dwight Carson!”

Wynand’s voice, refusing earnestness, refusing guilt, had sounded exactly like the voice that had said: “Forget the Stoddard Temple.”

The secretary in the reception room looked, startled, at the patrician gentleman whose face she had seen so often in the papers.

“Gail Wynand,” he said, inclining his head in self-introduction. “I should like to see Mr. Roark. If he is not busy. Please do not disturb him if he is. I had no appointment.”

She had never expected Wynand to come to an office unannounced and to ask admittance in that tone of grave deference.

She announced the visitor. Roark came out into the reception room, smiling, as if he found nothing unusual in this call.

“Hello, Gail. Come in.”

“Hello, Howard.”

He followed Roark to the office. Beyond the broad windows, the darkness of late afternoon dissolved the city; it was snowing; black specks whirled furiously across the lights.

“I don’t want to interrupt if you’re busy, Howard. This is not important.” He had not seen Roark for five days, since the dinner.

“I’m not busy. Take your coat off. Shall I have the drawings brought in?”

“No. I don’t want to talk about the house. Actually, I came without any reason at all. I was down at my office all day, got slightly sick of it, and felt like coming here. What are you grinning about?”

“Nothing. Only you said that it wasn’t important.”

Wynand looked at him, smiled and nodded.

He sat down on the edge of Roark’s desk, with an ease which he had never felt in his own office, his hands in his pockets, one leg swinging.

“It’s almost useless to talk to you, Howard. I always feel as if I were reading to you a carbon copy of myself and you’ve already seen the original. You seem to hear everything I say a minute in advance. We’re unsynchronized.”

“You call that unsynchronized?”

“All right. Too well synchronized.” His eyes were moving slowly over the room. “If we own the things to which we say ‘Yes,’ then I own this office?”

“Then you own it.”

“You know what I feel here? No, I won’t say I feel at home—I don’t think I’ve ever felt at home anywhere. And I won’t say I feel as I did in the palaces I’ve visited or in the great European cathedrals. I feel as I did when I was still in Hell’s Kitchen—in the best days I had there—there weren’t many. But sometimes—when I sat like this—only it was some piece of broken wall by the wharf—and there were a lot of stars above and dump heaps around me and the river smelt of rotting shells. ... Howard, when you look back, does it seem to you as if all your days had rolled forward evenly, like a sort of typing exercise, all alike? Or were there stops—points reached—and then the typing rolled on again?”

“There were stops.”

“Did you know them at the time—did you know that that’s what they were?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t. I knew afterward. But I never knew the reasons. There was one moment—I was twelve and I stood behind a wall, waiting to be killed. Only I knew I wouldn’t be killed. Not what I did afterward, not the fight I had, but just that one moment when I waited. I don’t know why that was a stop to be remembered or why I feel proud of it. I don’t know why I have to think of it here.”

“Don’t look for the reason.”

“Do you know it?”

“I said don’t look for it.”

“I have been thinking about my past—ever since I met you. And I had gone for years without thinking of it. No, no secret conclusions for you to draw from that. It doesn’t hurt me to look back this way, and it doesn’t give me pleasure. It’s just looking. Not a quest, not even a journey. Just a kind of walk at random, like wandering through the countryside in the evening, when one’s a little tired.... If there’s any connection to you at all, it’s only one thought that keeps coming back to me. I keep thinking that you and I started in the same way. From the same point. From nothing. I just think that. Without any comment. I don’t seem to find any particular meaning in it at all. Just ‘we started in the same way’ ... Want to tell me what it means?”

“No.”

Wynand glanced about the room—and noticed a newspaper on top of a filing cabinet.

“Who the hell reads the
Banner
around here?”

“I do.”

“Since when?”

“Since about a month ago.”

“Sadism?”

“No. Just curiosity.”

Wynand rose, picked up the paper and glanced through the pages. He stopped at one and chuckled. He held it up: the page bore photographed drawings of the buildings for “The March of the Centuries” exposition.

“Awful, isn’t it?” said Wynand. “It’s disgusting that we have to plug that stuff. But I feel better about it when I think of what you did to those eminent civic leaders.” He chuckled happily. “You told them you don’t co-operate or collaborate.”

“But it wasn’t a gesture, Gail. It was plain common sense. One can’t collaborate on one’s own job. I can co-operate, if that’s what they call it, with the workers who erect my buildings. But I can’t help them to lay bricks and they can’t help me to design the house.”

“It was the kind of gesture I’d like to make. I’m forced to give those civic leaders free space in my papers. But it’s all right. You’ve slapped their faces for me.” He tossed the paper aside, without anger. “It’s like that luncheon I had to attend today. A national convention of advertisers. I must give them publicity—all wiggling, wriggling and drooling. I got so sick of it I thought I’d run amuck and bash somebody’s skull. And then I thought of you. I thought that you weren’t touched by any of it. Not in any way. The national convention of advertisers doesn’t exist as far as you’re concerned. It’s in some sort of fourth dimension that can never establish any communication with you at all. I thought of that-and I felt a peculiar kind of relief.”

He leaned against the filing cabinet, letting his feet slide forward, his arms crossed, and he spoke softly:

“Howard, I had a kitten once. The damn thing attached itself to me—a flea-bitten little beast from the gutter, just fur, mud and bones—followed me home, I fed it and kicked it out, but the next day there it was again, and finally I kept it. I was seventeen then, working for the Gazette, just learning to work in the special way I had to learn for life. I could take it all right, but not all of it. There were times when it was pretty bad. Evenings, usually. Once I wanted to kill myself. Not anger—anger made me work harder. Not fear. But disgust, Howard. The kind of disgust that made it seem as if the whole world were under water and the water stood still, water that had backed up out of the sewers and ate into everything, even the sky, even my brain. And then I looked at that kitten. And I thought that it didn’t know the things I loathed, it could never know. It was clean—clean in the absolute sense, because it had no capacity to conceive of the world’s ugliness. I can’t tell you what relief there was in trying to imagine the state of consciousness inside that little brain, trying to share it, a living consciousness, but clean and free. I would lie down on the floor and put my face on that cat’s belly, and hear the beast purring. And then I would feel better.... There, Howard. I’ve called your office a rotting wharf and yourself an alley cat. That’s my way of paying homage.”

Roark smiled. Wynand saw that the smile was grateful.

“Keep still,” Wynand said sharply. “Don’t say anything.” He walked to a window and stood looking out. “I don’t know why in hell I should speak like that. These are the first happy years of my life. I met you because I wanted to build a monument to my happiness. I come here to find rest, and I find it, and yet these are the things I talk about.... Well, never mind.... Look at the filthy weather. Are you through with your work here? Can you call it a day?”

“Yes. Just about.”

“Let’s go and have dinner together somewhere close by.”

“All right.”

“May I use your phone? I’ll tell Dominique not to expect me for dinner.”

He dialed the number. Roark moved to the door of the drafting room—he had orders to give before leaving. But he stopped at the door. He had to stop and hear it.

“Hello, Dominique? ... Yes.... Tired? ... No, you just sounded like it.... I won’t be home for dinner, will you excuse me, dearest? ... I don’t know, it might be late.... I’m eating downtown.... No. I’m having dinner with Howard Roark.... Hello, Dominique? ... Yes.... What? ... I’m calling from his office.... So long, dear.” He replaced the receiver.

In the library of the penthouse Dominique stood with her hand on the telephone, as if some connection still remained.

For five days and nights, she had fought a single desire—to go to him. To see him alone—anywhere—his home or his office or the street—for one word or only one glance—but alone. She could not go. Her share of action was ended. He would come to her when he wished. She knew he would come, and that he wanted her to wait. She had waited, but she had held on to one thought—of an address, an office in the Cord Building.

She stood, her hand closed over the stem of the telephone receiver. She had no right to go to that office. But Gail Wynand had.

When Ellsworth Toohey entered Wynand’s office, as summoned, he made a few steps, then stopped. The walls of Wynand’s office—the only luxurious room in the Banner Building—were made of cork and copper paneling and had never borne any pictures. Now, on the wall facing Wynand’s desk, he saw an enlarged photograph under glass: the picture of Roark at the opening of the Enright House; Roark standing at the parapet of the river, his head thrown back.

Toohey turned to Wynand. They looked at each other.

Wynand indicated a chair and Toohey sat down. Wynand spoke, smiling:

“I never thought I would come to agree with some of your social theories, Mr. Toohey, but I find myself forced to do so. You have always denounced the hypocrisy of the upper caste and preached the virtue of the masses. And now I find that I regret the advantages I enjoyed in my former proletarian state. Were I still in Hell’s Kitchen, I would have begun this interview by saying: Listen, louse!—but since I am an inhibited capitalist, I shall not do so.”

Toohey waited; he looked curious.

“I shall begin by saying: Listen, Mr. Toohey. I do not know what makes you tick. I do not care to dissect your motives. I do not have the stomach required of medical students. So I shall ask no questions and I wish to hear no explanations. I shall merely tell you that from now on there is a name you will never mention in your column again.” He pointed to the photograph. “I could make you reverse yourself publicly and I would enjoy it, but I prefer to forbid the subject to you entirely. Not a word, Mr. Toohey. Not ever again. Now don’t mention your contract or any particular clause of it. It would not be advisable. Go on writing your column, but remember its title and devote it to commensurate subjects. Keep it small, Mr. Toohey. Very small.”

“Yes, Mr. Wynand,” said Toohey easily. “I don’t have to write about Mr. Roark at present.”

“That’s all.”

Toohey rose. “Yes, Mr. Wynand.”

V

G
AIL WYNAND SAT AT HIS DESK IN HIS OFFICE AND READ THE proofs of an editorial on the moral value of raising large families. Sentences like used chewing gum, chewed and rechewed, spat out and picked up again, passing from mouth to mouth to pavement to shoe sole to mouth to brain.... He thought of Howard Roark and went on reading the
Banner;
it made things easier.

“Daintiness is a girl’s greatest asset. Be sure to launder your undies every night, and learn to talk on some cultured subject, and you will have all the dates you want.” “Your horoscope for tomorrow shows a beneficent aspect. Application and sincerity will bring rewards in the fields of engineering, public accounting and romance.” “Mrs. Huntington-Cole’s hobbies are gardening, the opera and early American sugar bowls. She divides her time between her little son ‘Kit’ and her numerous charitable activities.” “I’m jus’ Millie, I’m jus’ a orphan.” “For the complete diet send ten cents and a self-addressed, stamped envelope.” ... He turned the pages, thinking of Howard Roark.

He signed the advertising contract with Kream-O Pudding—for five years, on the entire Wynand chain, two full pages in every paper every Sunday. The men before his desk sat like triumphal arches in flesh, monuments to victory, to evenings of patience and calculation, restaurant tables, glasses emptied into throats, months of thought, his energy, his living energy flowing like the liquid in the glasses into the opening of heavy lips, into stubby fingers, across a desk, into two full pages every Sunday, into drawings of yellow molds trimmed with strawberries and yellow molds trimmed with butterscotch sauce. He looked, over the heads of the men, at the photograph on the wall of his office: the sky, the river and a man’s face, lifted.

But it hurts me, he thought. It hurts me every time I think of him. It makes everything easier—the people, the editorials, the contracts—but easier because it hurts so much. Pain is a stimulant also. I think I hate that name. I will go on repeating it. It is a pain I wish to bear.

Then he sat facing Roark in the study of his penthouse—and he felt no pain; only a desire to laugh without malice.

“Howard, everything you’ve done in your life is wrong according to the stated ideals of mankind. And here you are. And somehow it seems a huge joke on the whole world.”

Roark sat in an armchair by the fireplace. The glow of the fire moved over the study; the light seemed to curve with conscious pleasure about every object in the room, proud to stress its beauty, stamping approval upon the taste of the man who had achieved this setting for himself. They were alone. Dominique had excused herself after dinner. She had known that they wanted to be alone.

“A joke on all of us,” said Wynand. “On every man in the street. I always look at the men in the street. I used to ride in the subways just to see how many of them carried the
Banner
. I used to hate them and, sometimes, to be afraid. But now I look at every one of them and I want to say: ‘Why, you poor fool!’ That’s all.”

He telephoned Roark’s office one morning.

“Can you have lunch with me, Howard? ... Meet me at the Nordland in half an hour.”

He shrugged, smiling, when he faced Roark across the restaurant table.

“Nothing at all, Howard. No special reason. Just spent a revolting half-hour and wanted to take the taste of it out of my mouth.”

“What revolting half-hour?”

“Had my picture taken with Lancelot Clokey.”

“Who’s Lancelot Clokey?”

Wynand laughed aloud, forgetting his controlled elegance, forgetting the startled glance of the waiter.

“That’s it, Howard. That’s why I had to have lunch with you. Because you can say things like that.”

“Now what’s the matter?”

“Don’t you read books? Don’t you know that Lancelot Clokey is ‘our most sensitive observer of the international scene’? That’s what the critic said—in my own
Banner.
Lancelot Clokey has just been chosen author of the year or something by some organization or other. We’re running his biography in the Sunday supplement, and I had to pose with my arm around his shoulders. He wears silk shirts and smells of gin. His second book is about his childhood and how it helped him to understand the international scene. It sold a hundred thousand copies. But you’ve never heard of him. Go on, eat your lunch, Howard. I like to see you eating. I wish you were broke, so that I could feed you this lunch and know you really needed it.”

At the end of a day, he would come, unannounced, to Roark’s office or to his home. Roark had an apartment in the Enright House, one of the crystal-shaped units over the East River: a workroom, a library, a bedroom. He had designed the furniture himself. Wynand could not understand for a long time why the place gave him an impression of luxury, until he saw that one did not notice the furniture at all: only a clean sweep of space and the luxury of an austerity that had not been simple to achieve. In financial value it was the most modest home that Wynand had entered as a guest in twenty-five years.

“We started in the same way, Howard,” he said, glancing about Roark’s room. “According to my judgment and experience, you should have remained in the gutter. But you haven’t. I like this room. I like to sit here.”

“I like to see you here.”

“Howard, have you ever held power over a single human being?”

“No. And I wouldn’t take it if it were offered to me.”

“I can’t believe that.”

“It was offered to me once, Gail. I refused it.”

Wynand looked at him with curiosity; it was the first time that he heard effort in Roark’s voice.

“Why?”

“I had to.”

“Out of respect for the man?”

“It was a woman.”

“Oh, you damn fool! Out of respect for a woman?”

“Out of respect for myself.”

“Don’t expect me to understand. We’re as opposite as two men can be.”

“I thought that once. I wanted to think that.”

“And now you don’t?”

“No.”

“Don’t you despise every act I’ve ever committed?”

“Just about every one I know of.”

“And you still like to see me here?”

“Yes. Gail, there was a man who considered you the symbol of the special evil that destroyed him and would destroy me. He left me his hatred. And there was another reason. I think I hated you, before I saw you.”

“I knew you did. What made you change your mind?”

“I can’t explain that to you.”

They drove together to the estate in Connecticut where the walls of the house were rising out of the frozen ground. Wynand followed Roark through the future rooms, he stood aside and watched Roark giving instructions. Sometimes, Wynand came alone. The workers saw the black roadster twisting up the road to the top of the hill, saw Wynand’s figure standing at a distance, looking at the structure. His figure always carried with it all the implications of his position; the quiet elegance of his overcoat, the angle of his hat, the confidence of his posture, tense and casual together, made one think of the Wynand empire; of the presses thundering from ocean to ocean, of the papers, the lustrous magazine covers, the light rays trembling through newsreels, the wires coiling over the world, the power flowing into every palace, every capital, every secret, crucial room, day and night, through every costly minute of this man’s life. He stood still against a sky gray as laundry water, and snowflakes fluttered lazily past the brim of his hat.

On a day in April he drove alone to Connecticut after an absence of many weeks. The roadster flew across the countryside, not an object, but a long streak of speed. He felt no jolting motion inside his small cube of glass and leather; it seemed to him that his car stood still, suspended over the ground, while the control of his hands on the wheel made the earth fly past him, and he merely had to wait until the place he desired came rolling to him. He loved the wheel of a car as he loved his desk in the office of the
Banner:
both gave him the same sense of a dangerous monster let loose under the expert direction of his fingers.

Something tore past across his vision, and he was a mile away before he thought how strange it was that he should have noticed it, because it had been only a clump of weeds by the road; a mile later he realized that it was stranger still: the weeds were green. Not in the middle of winter, he thought, and then he understood, surprised, that it was not winter any longer. He had been very busy in the last few weeks; he had not had time to notice. Now he saw it, hanging over the fields around him, a hint of green, like a whisper. He heard three statements in his mind, in precise succession, like interlocking gears: It’s spring—I wonder if I have many left to see—I am fifty-five years old.

They were statements, not emotions; he felt nothing, neither eagerness nor fear. But he knew it was strange that he should experience a sense of time; he had never thought of his age in relation to any measure, he had never defined his position on a limited course, he had not thought of a course nor of limits. He had been Gail Wynand and he had stood still, like this car, and the years had sped past him, like this earth, and the motor within him had controlled the flight of the years.

No, he thought, I regret nothing. There have been things I missed, but I ask no questions, because I have loved it, such as it has been, even the moments of emptiness, even the unanswered—and that I loved it, that is the unanswered in my life. But I loved it.

If it were true, that old legend about appearing before a supreme judge and naming one’s record, I would offer, with all my pride, not any act I committed, but one thing I have never done on this earth: that I never sought an outside sanction. I would stand and say: I am Gail Wynand, the man who has committed every crime except the foremost one: that of ascribing futility to the wonderful fact of existence and seeking justification beyond myself. This is my pride: that now, thinking of the end, I do not cry like all the men of my age: but what was the use and the meaning?
I
was the use and the meaning, I, Gail Wynand. That I lived and that I acted.

He drove to the foot of the hill and slammed the brakes on, startled, looking up. In his absence the house had taken shape; it could be recognized now—it looked like the drawing. He felt a moment of childish wonder that it had really come out just as on the sketch, as if he had never quite believed it. Rising against the pale blue sky, it still looked like a drawing, unfinished, the planes of masonry like spreads of water-color filled in, the naked scaffolding like pencil lines; a huge drawing on a pale blue sheet of paper.

He left the car and walked to the top of the hill. He saw Roark among the men. He stood outside and watched the way Roark walked through the structure, the way he turned his head or raised his hand, pointing. He noticed Roark’s manner of stopping: his legs apart, his arms straight at his sides, his head lifted; an instinctive pose of confidence, of energy held under effortless control, a moment that gave to his body the structural cleanliness of his own building. Structure, thought Wynand, is a solved problem of tension, of balance, of security in counterthrusts.

He thought: There’s no emotional significance in the act of erecting a building; it’s just a mechanical job, like laying sewers or making an automobile. And he wondered why he watched Roark, feeling what he felt in his art gallery. He belongs in an unfinished building, thought Wynand, more than in a completed one, more than at a drafting table, it’s his right setting, it’s becoming to him—as Dominique said a yacht was becoming to me.

Afterward Roark came out and they walked together along the crest of the hill, among the trees. They sat down on a fallen tree trunk, they saw the structure in the distance through the stems of the brushwood. The stems were dry and naked, but there was a quality of spring in the cheerful insolence of their upward thrust, the stirring of a self-assertive purpose.

Wynand asked:

“Howard, have you ever been in love?”

Roark turned to look straight at him and answer quietly:

“I still am.”

“But when you walk through a building, what you feel is greater than that?”

“Much greater, Gail.”

“I was thinking of people who say that happiness is impossible on earth. Look how hard they all try to find some joy in life. Look how they struggle for it. Why should any living creature exist in pain? By what conceivable right can anyone demand that a human being exist for anything but for his own joy? Every one of them wants it. Every part of him wants it. But they never find it. I wonder why. They whine and say they don’t understand the meaning of life. There’s a particular kind of people that I despise. Those who seek some sort of a higher purpose or ‘universal goal,’ who don’t know what to live for, who moan that they must ‘find themselves.’ You hear it all around us. That seems to be the official bromide of our century. Every book you open. Every drooling self-confession. It seems to be the noble thing to confess. I’d think it would be the most shameful one.”

“Look, Gail.” Roark got up, reached out, tore a thick branch off a tree, held it in both hands, one fist closed at each end; then, his wrists and knuckles tensed against the resistance, he bent the branch slowly into an arc. “Now I can make what I want of it: a bow, a spear, a cane, a railing. That’s the meaning of life.”

“Your strength?”

“Your work.” He tossed the branch aside. “The material the earth offers you and what you make of it ... What are you thinking of, Gail?”

“The photograph on the wall of my office.”

To remain controlled, as he wished, to be patient, to make of patience an active duty executed consciously each day, to stand before Roark and let her serenity tell him: “This is the hardest you could have demanded of me, but I’m glad, if it’s what you want”—such was the discipline of Dominique’s existence.

She stood by, as a quiet spectator of Roark and Wynand. She watched them silently. She had wanted to understand Wynand. This was the answer.

She accepted Roark’s visits to their house and the knowledge that in the hours of these evenings he was Wynand’s property, not hers. She met him as a gracious hostess, indifferent and smiling, not a person but an exquisite fixture of Wynand’s home, she presided at the dinner table, she left them in the study afterward.