The Fountainhead (116 page)

“Ellsworth ... you’re ...”

“Insane? Afraid to say it? There you sit and the word’s written all over you, your last hope. Insane? Look around you. Pick up any newspaper and read the headlines. Isn’t it coming? Isn’t it here? Every single thing I told you? Isn’t Europe swallowed already and we’re stumbling on to follow? Everything I said is contained in a single word—collectivism. And isn’t that the god of our century? To act together. To think—together. To feel—together. To unite, to agree, to obey. To obey, to serve, to sacrifice. Divide and conquer—nrst. But then—unite and rule. We’ve discovered that one at last. Remember the Roman Emperor who said he wished humanity had a single neck so he could cut it? People have laughed at him for centuries. But we’ll have the last laugh. We’ve accomplished what he couldn’t accomplish. We’ve taught men to unite. This makes one neck ready for one leash. We’ve found the magic word. Collectivism. Look at Europe, you fool. Can’t you see past the guff and recognize the essence? One country is dedicated to the proposition that man has no rights, that the collective is all. The individual held as evil, the mass—as God. No motive and no virtue permitted—except that of service to the proletariat. That’s one version. Here’s another. A country dedicated to the proposition that man has no rights, that the State is all. The individual held as evil, the race—as God. No motive and no virtue permitted—except that of service to the race. Am I raving or is this the cold reality of two continents already? Watch the pincer movement. If you’re sick of one version, we push you into the other. We get you coming and going. We’ve closed the doors. We’ve fixed the coin. Heads —collectivism, and tails—collectivism. Fight the doctrine which slaughters the individual with a doctrine which slaughters the individual. Give up your soul to a council—or give it up to a leader. But give it up, give it up, give it up. My technique, Peter. Offer poison as food and poison as antidote. Go fancy on the trimmings, but hang on to the main objective. Give the fools a choice, let them have their fun—but don’t forget the only purpose you have to accomplish. Kill the individual. Kill man’s soul. The rest will follow automatically. Observe the state of the world as of the present moment. Do you still think I’m crazy, Peter?” Keating sat on the floor, his legs spread out. He lifted one hand and studied his finger tips, then put it to his mouth and bit off a hangnail. But the movement was deceptive; the man was reduced to a single sense, the sense of hearing, and Toohey knew that no answer could be expected.

Keating waited obediently; it seemed to make no difference; the sounds had stopped and it was now his function to wait until they started again.

Toohey put his hands on the arms of his chair, then lifted his palms, from the wrists, and clasped the wood again, a little slap of resigned finality. He pushed himself up to his feet.

“Thank you, Peter,” he said gravely. “Honesty is a hard thing to eradicate. I have made speeches to large audiences all my life. This was the speech I’ll never have a chance to make.”

Keating lifted his head. His voice had the quality of a down payment on terror; it was not frightened, but it held the advance echoes of the next hour to come:

“Don’t go, Ellsworth.”

Toohey stood over him, and laughed softly.

“That’s the answer, Peter. That’s my proof. You know me for what I am, you know what I’ve done to you, you have no illusions of virtue left. But you can’t leave me and you’ll never be able to leave me. You’ve obeyed me in the name of ideals. You’ll go on obeying me without ideals. Because that’s all you’re good for now.... Good night, Peter.”

“T
HIS IS A TEST CASE. WHAT WE THINK OF IT WILL DETERMINE what we are. In the person of Howard Roark, we must crush the forces of selfishness and antisocial individualism—the curse of our modern world—here shown to us in ultimate consequences. As mentioned at the beginning of this column, the district attorney now has in his possession a piece of evidence—we cannot disclose its nature at this moment—which proves conclusively that Roark is guilty. We, the people, shall now demand justice.”

This appeared in “One Small Voice” on a morning late in May. Gail Wynand read it in his car, driving home from the airport. He had flown to Chicago in a last attempt to hold a national advertiser who had refused to renew a three-million dollar contract. Two days of skillful effort had failed; Wynand lost the advertiser. Stepping off the plane in Newark, he picked up the New York papers. His car was waiting to take him to his country house. Then he read “One Small Voice.”

He wondered for a moment what paper he held. He looked at the name on the top of the page. But it was the Banner, and the column was there, in its proper place, column one, first page, second section.

He leaned forward and told the chauffeur to drive to his office. He sat with the page spread open on his lap, until the car stopped before the Banner Building.

He noticed it at once, when he entered the building. In the eyes of two reporters who emerged from an elevator in the lobby; in the pose of the elevator man who fought a desire to turn and stare back at him; in the sudden immobility of all the men in his anteroom, in the break of a typewriter’s clicking on the desk of one secretary, in the lifted hand of another—he saw the waiting. Then he knew that all the implications of the unbelievable were understood by everyone on his paper.

He felt a first dim shock; because the waiting around him contained wonder, and something was wrong if there could be any wonder in anyone’s mind about the outcome of an issue between him and Ellsworth Toohey.

But he had no time to take notice of his own reactions. He had no attention to spare for anything except a sense of tightness, a pressure against the bones of his face, his teeth, his cheeks, the bridge of his nose—and he knew he must press back against that, keep it down, hold it.

He greeted no one and walked into his office. Alvah Scarret sat slumped in a chair before his desk. Scarret had a bandage of soiled white gauze on his throat, and his cheeks were flushed. Wynand stopped in the middle of the room. The people outside had felt relieved: Wynand’s face looked calm. Alvah Scarret knew better.

“Gail, I wasn’t here,” he gulped in a cracked whisper that was not a voice at all. “I haven’t been here for two days. Laryngitis, Gail. Ask my doctor. I wasn’t here. I just got out of bed, look at me, I’ve got a hundred and three, fever, I mean, the doctor didn’t want me to, but I ... to get up, I mean, Gail, I wasn’t here, I wasn’t here!”

He could not be certain that Wynand heard. But Wynand let him finish, then assumed the appearance of listening, as if the sounds were reaching him, delayed. After a moment, Wynand asked:

“Who was on the copy desk?”

“It ... it went through Allen and Falk.”

“Fire Harding, Allen, Falk and Toohey. Buy off Harding’s contract. But not Toohey’s. Have them all out of the building in fifteen minutes.”

Harding was the managing editor; Falk, a copyreader; Allen, the slot man, head of the copy desk; all had worked on the Banner for more than ten years. It was as if Scarret had heard a news flash announcing the impeachment of a President, the destruction of New York City by a meteor and the sinking of California into the Pacific Ocean.

“Gail!” he screamed. “We can’t!”

“Get out of here.”

Scarret got out.

Wynand pressed a switch on his desk and said in answer to the trembling voice of the woman outside:

“Don’t admit anyone.”

“Yes, Mr. Wynand.”

He pressed a button and spoke to the circulation manager.

“Stop every copy on the street.”

“Mr. Wynand, it’s too late! Most of them are ...”

“Stop them.”

“Yes, Mr. Wynand.”

He wanted to put his head down on the desk, lie still and rest, only the form of rest he needed did not exist, greater than sleep, greater than death, the rest of having never lived. The wish was like a secret taunt against himself, because he knew that the splitting pressure in his skull meant the opposite, an urge to action, so strong that he felt paralyzed. He fumbled for some sheets of clean paper, forgetting where he kept them. He had to write the editorial that would explain and counteract. He had to hurry. He felt no right to any minute that passed with the thing unwritten.

The pressure disappeared with the first word he put on paper. He thought—while his hand moved rapidly—what a power there was in words; later, for those who heard them, but first for the one who found them; a healing power, a solution, like the breaking of a barrier. He thought, perhaps the basic secret the scientists have never discovered, the first fount of life, is that which happens when a thought takes shape in words.

He heard the rumble, the vibration in the walls of his office, in the floor. The presses were running off his afternoon paper, a small tabloid, the Clarion. He smiled at the sound. His hand went faster, as if the sound were energy pumped into his fingers.

He had dropped his usual editorial “we.” He wrote: “... And if my readers or my enemies wish to laugh at me over this incident, I shall accept it and consider it the payment of a debt incurred. I have deserved it. ”

He thought: It’s the heart of this building, beating—what time is it?—do I really hear it or is it my own heart?—once, a doctor put the ends of his stethoscope into my ears and let me hear my own heartbeats -it sounded just like this—he said I was a healthy animal and good for many years—for many ... years ...

“I have foisted upon my readers a contemptible blackguard whose spiritual stature is my only excuse. I had not reached a degree of contempt for society such as would have permitted me to consider him dangerous. I am still holding on to a respect for my fellow men sufficient to let me say that Ellsworth Toohey cannot be a menace.”

They say sound never dies, but travels on in space—what happens to a man’s heartbeats?—so many of them in fifty-six years—could they be gathered again, in some sort of condenser, and put to use once more? If they were re-broadcast, would the result be the beating of those presses?

“But I have sponsored him under the masthead of my paper, and if public penance is a strange, humiliating act to perform in our modern age, such is the punishment I impose upon myself hereby.”

Not fifty-six years of those soft little drops of sound a man never hears, each single and final, not like a comma, but like a period, a long string of periods on a page, gathered to feed those presses—not fifty-six, but thirty-one, the other twenty-five went to make me ready—I was twenty-five when I raised the new masthead over the door—Publishers don’t change the name of a paper—This one does—The New York
Banner
—Gail Wynand’s
Banner ...

“I ask the forgiveness of every man who has ever read this paper.”

A healthy animal—and that which comes from me is healthy—I must bring that doctor here and have him listen to those presses—he’ll grin in his good, smug, satisfied way, doctors like a specimen of perfect health occasionally, it’s rare enough—I must give him a treat—the healthiest sound he ever heard—and he’ll say the Banner is good for many years....

The door of his office opened and Ellsworth Toohey came in.

Wynand let him cross the room and approach the desk, without a gesture of protest. Wynand thought that what he felt was curiosity—if curiosity could be blown into the dimensions of a thing from the abyss -like those drawings of beetles the size of a house advancing upon human figures in the pages of the
Banner’s
Sunday supplement—curiosity, because Ellsworth Toohey was still in the building, because Toohey had gained admittance past the orders given, and because Toohey was laughing.

“I came to take my leave of absence, Mr. Wynand,” said Toohey. His face was composed; it expressed no gloating; the face of an artist who knew that overdoing was defeat and achieved the supreme of offensive-ness by remaining normal. “And to tell you that I’ll be back. On this job, on this column, in this building. In the interval you will have seen the nature of the mistake you’ve made. Do forgive me, I know this is in utterly bad taste, but I’ve waited for it for thirteen years and I think I can permit myself five minutes as a reward. So you were a possessive man, Mr. Wynand, and you loved your sense of property? Did you ever stop to think what it rested upon? Did you stop to secure the foundations? No, because you were a practical man. Practical men deal in bank accounts, real estate, advertising contracts and gilt-edged securities. They leave to the impractical intellectuals, like me, the amusements of putting the gilt edges through a chemical analysis to learn a few things about the nature and the source of gold. They hang on to Kream-O Pudding, and leave us such trivia as the theater, the movies, the radio, the schools, the book reviews and the criticism of architecture. Just a sop to keep us quiet if we care to waste our time playing with the inconsequentials of life, while you’re making money. Money is power. Is it, Mr. Wynand? So you were after power, Mr. Wynand? Power over men? You poor amateur! You never discovered the nature of your own ambition or you’d have known that you weren’t fit for it. You couldn’t use the methods required and you wouldn’t want the results. You’ve never been enough of a scoundrel. I don’t mind handing you that, because I don’t know which is worse: to be a great scoundrel or a gigantic fool. That’s why I’ll be back. And when I am, I’ll run this paper.”

Wynand said quietly:

“When you are. Now get out of here.”

 

The city room of the
Banner
walked out on strike.

The Union of Wynand Employees walked out in a body. A great many others, non-members, joined them. The typographical staff remained.

Wynand had never given a thought to the Union. He paid higher wages than any other publisher and no economic demands had ever been made upon him. If his employees wished to amuse themselves by listening to speeches, he saw no reason to worry about it. Dominique had tried to warn him once: “Gail, if people want to organize for wages, hours or practical demands, it’s their proper right. But when there’s no tangible purpose, you’d better watch closely.” “Darling, how many times do I have to ask you? Keep off the
Banner.”