The Fountainhead (89 page)

A few had remained with him: the old men and the copy boys. They came in, in the morning, often with cuts on their faces and blood on their collars; one stumbled in, his skull open, and had to be sent away in an ambulance. It was neither courage nor loyalty; it was inertia; they had lived too long with the thought that the world would end if they lost their jobs on the
Banner.
The old ones did not understand. The young ones did not care.

Copy boys were sent out on reporters’ beats. Most of the stuff they sent in was of such quality that Wynand was forced past despair into howls of laughter: he had never read such highbrow English; he could see the pride of the ambitious youth who was a journalist at last. He did not laugh when the stories appeared in the
Banner
as written; there were not enough rewrite men.

He tried to hire new men. He offered extravagant salaries. The people he wanted refused to work for him. A few men answered his call, and he wished they hadn’t, though he hired them. They were men who had not been employed by a reputable newspaper for ten years; the kind who would not have been allowed, a month ago, into the lobby of his building. Some of them had to be thrown out in two days; others remained. They were drunk most of the time. Some acted as if they were granting Wynand a favor. “Don’t you get huffy, Gail, old boy,” said one—and was tossed bodily down two flights of stairs. He broke an ankle and sat on the bottom landing, looking up at Wynand with an air of complete astonishment. Others were subtler; they merely stalked about and looked at Wynand slyly, almost winking, implying that they were fellow criminals tied together in a dirty deal.

He appealed to schools of journalism. No one responded. One student body sent him a resolution signed by all its members: “... Entering our careers with a high regard for the dignity of our profession, dedicating ourselves to uphold the honor of the press, we feel that none among us could preserve his self-respect and accept an offer such as yours.”

The news editor had remained at his desk; the city editor had gone. Wynand filled in as city editor, managing editor, wire man, rewrite man, copy boy. He did not leave the building. He slept on a couch in his office—as he had done in the first years of the Banner’s existence. Coatless, tieless, his shirt collar torn open, he ran up and down the stairs, his steps like the rattle of a machine gun. Two elevator boys had remained; the others had vanished, no one knew just when or why, whether prompted by sympathy for the strike, fear or plain discouragement.

Alvah Scarret could not understand Wynand’s calm. The brilliant machine—and that, thought Scarret, was really the word which had always stood for Wynand in his mind—had never functioned better. His words were brief, his orders rapid, his decisions immediate. In the confusion of machines, lead, grease, ink, waste paper, unswept offices, untenanted desks, glass crashing in sudden showers when a brick was hurled from the street below, Wynand moved like a figure in double-exposure, superimposed on his background, out of place and scale. He doesn’t belong here, thought Scarret, because he doesn’t look modern—that’s what it is—he doesn’t look modern, no matter what kind of pants he’s wearing—he looks like something out of a Gothic cathedral. The patrician head, held level, the fleshless face that had shrunk tighter together. The captain of a ship known by all, save the captain, to be sinking.

Alvah Scarret had remained. He had not grasped that the events were real; he shuffled about in a stupor; he felt a fresh jolt of bewilderment each morning when he drove up to the building and saw the pickets. He suffered no injury beyond a few tomatoes hurled at his windshield. He tried to help Wynand; he tried to do his work and that of five other men, but he could not complete a normal day’s task. He was going quietly to pieces, his joints wrenched loose by a question mark. He wasted everybody’s time, interrupting anything to ask: “But why? Why? How, just like that all of a sudden?”

He saw a nurse in white uniform walking down the hall—an emergency first-aid station had been established on the ground floor. He saw her carrying a wastebasket to the incinerator, with wadded clumps of gauze, bloodstained. He turned away; he felt sick. It was not the sight, but the greater terror of an implication grasped by his instinct: this civilized building—secure in the neatness of waxed floors, respectable with the strict grooming of modern business, a place where one dealt in such rational matters as written words and trade contracts, where one accepted ads for baby garments and chatted about golf—had become, in the span of a few days, a place where one carried bloody refuse through the halls. Why?—thought Alvah Scarret.

“I can’t understand it,” he droned in an accentless monotone to anyone around him, “I can’t understand how Ellsworth got so much power. ... And Ellsworth’s a man of culture, an idealist, not a dirty radical off a soapbox, he’s so friendly and witty, and what an erudition!—a man who jokes all the time is not a man of violence—Ellsworth didn’t mean this, he didn’t know what it would lead to, he loves people, I’d stake my shirt on Ellsworth Toohey.”

Once, in Wynand’s office, he ventured to say:

“Gail, why don’t you negotiate? Why don’t you meet with them at least?”

“Shut up.”

“But, Gail, there might be a bit of truth on their side, too. They’re newspapermen. You know what they say, the freedom of the press ...”

Then he saw the fit of fury he had expected for days and had thought safely sidetracked—the blue irises vanishing in a white smear, the blind, luminous eyeballs in a face that was all cavities, the trembling hands. But in a moment, he saw what he had never witnessed before: he saw Wynand break the fit, without sound, without relief. He saw the sweat of the effort on the hollow temples, and the fists on the edge of the desk.

“Alvah ... if I had not sat on the stairs of the
Gazette
for a week ... where would be the press for them to be free on?”

There were policemen outside, and in the halls of the building. It helped, but not much. One night acid was thrown at the main entrance. It burned the big plate glass of the ground floor windows and left leprous spots on the walls. Sand in the bearings stopped one of the presses. An obscure delicatessen owner got his shop smashed for advertising in the
Banner.
A great many small advertisers withdrew. Wynand delivery trucks were wrecked. One driver was killed. The striking Union of Wynand Employees issued a protest against acts of violence; the Union had not instigated them; most of its members did not know who had. The
New Frontiers
said something about regrettable excesses, but ascribed them to “spontaneous outbursts of justifiable popular anger.”

Homer Slottern, in the name of a group who called themselves the liberal businessmen, sent Wynand a notice canceling their advertising contracts. “You may sue us if you wish. We feel we have a legitimate cause for cancellation. We signed to advertise in a reputable newspaper, not in a sheet that has become a public disgrace, brings pickets to our doors, ruins our business and is not being read by anybody.” The group included most of the
Banner’s
wealthiest advertisers.

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 Austen 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, Allen, 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.