The Fountainhead (118 page)

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.

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!”

“Can the commentaries, Alvah. We haven’t the time.”

She wrote a brilliant review of a movie she hadn’t seen. She dashed off a report on a convention she hadn’t attended. She batted out a string of recipes for the “Daily Dishes” column, when the lady in charge failed to show up one morning. “I didn’t know you could cook,” said Scarret. “I didn’t either,” said Dominique. She went out one night to cover a dock fire, when it was found that the only man on duty had passed out on the floor of the men’s room. “Good job,” Wynand told her when he read the story, “but try that again and you’ll get fired. If you want to stay, you’re not to step out of the building.”

This was his only comment on her presence. He spoke to her when necessary, briefly and simply, as to any other employee. He gave orders. There were days when they did not have time to see each other. She slept on a couch in the library. Occasionally, in the evening, she would come to his office, for a short rest, when they could take it, and then they talked, about nothing in particular, about small events of the day’s work, gaily, like any married couple gossiping about the normal routine of their common life.

They did not speak of Roark or Cortlandt. She had noticed Roark’s picture on the wall of his office and asked: “When did you hang that up?” “Over a year ago.” It had been their only reference to Roark. They did not discuss the growing public fury against the Banner. They did not speculate on the future. They felt relief in forgetting the question beyond the walls of the building; it could be forgotten because it stood no longer as a question between them; it was solved and answered; what remained was the peace of the simplified: they had a job to do—the job of keeping a newspaper going—and they were doing it together.

She would come in, unsummoned, in the middle of the night, with a cup of hot coffee, and he would snatch it gratefully, not pausing in his work. He would find fresh sandwiches left on his desk when he needed them badly. He had no time to wonder where she got things. Then he discovered that she had established an electric plate and a stock of supplies in a closet. She cooked breakfast for him, when he had to work all night, she came in carrying dishes on a piece of cardboard for a tray, with the silence of empty streets beyond the windows and the first light of morning on the rooftops.

Once he found her, broom in hand, sweeping an office; the maintenance department had fallen apart, charwomen appeared and disappeared, no one had time to notice.

“Is that what I’m paying you for?” he asked.

“Well, we can’t work in a pigsty. I haven’t asked you what you’re paying me, but I want a raise.”

“Drop this thing, for God’s sake! It’s ridiculous.”

“What’s ridiculous? It’s clean now. It didn’t take me long. Is it a good job?”

“It’s a good job.”

She leaned on the broom handle and laughed. “I believe you thought, like everybody else, that I’m just a kind of luxury object, a high-class type of kept woman, didn’t you, Gail?”

“Is this the way you can keep going when you want to?”

“This is the way I’ve wanted to keep going all my life—if I could find a reason for it.”

He learned that her endurance was greater than his. She never showed a sign of exhaustion. He supposed that she slept, but he could not discover when.

At any time, in any part of the building, not seeing him for hours, she was aware of him, she knew when he needed her most. Once, he fell asleep, slumped across his desk. He awakened and found her looking at him. She had turned off the lights, she sat on a chair by the window, in the moonlight, her face turned to him, calm, watching. Her face was the first thing he saw. Lifting his head painfully from his arm, in the first moment, before he could return fully to control and reality, he felt a sudden wrench of anger, helplessness and desperate protest, not remembering what had brought them here, to this, remembering only that they were both caught in some vast, slow process of torture and that he loved her.

She had seen it in his face, before he had completed the movement of straightening his body. She walked to him, she stood by his chair, she took his head and let it rest against her, she held him, and he did not resist, slumped in her arms, she kissed his hair, she whispered: “It will be all right, Gail, it will be all right.”

 

At the end of three weeks Wynand walked out of the building one evening, not caring whether there would be anything left of it when he returned, and went to see Roark.

He had not telephoned Roark since the beginning of the siege. Roark telephoned him often; Wynand answered, quietly, just answering, originating no statement, refusing to prolong the conversation. He had warned Roark at the beginning: “Don’t try to come here. I’ve given orders. You won’t be admitted.” He had to keep out of his mind the actual form which the issue of his battle could take; he had to forget the fact of Roark’s physical existence; because the thought of Roark’s person brought the thought of the county jail.

He walked the long distance to the Enright House; walking made the distance longer and safer; a ride in a cab would pull Roark too close to the Banner Building. He kept his glance slanted toward a point six feet ahead of him on the sidewalk; he did not want to look at the city.

“Good evening, Gail,” Roark said calmly when he came in.

“I don’t know what’s a more conspicuous form of bad discipline,” said Wynand, throwing his hat down on a table by the door, “to blurt things right out or to ignore them blatantly. I look like hell. Say it.”

“You do look like hell. Sit down, rest and don’t talk. Then I’ll run you a hot bath—no, you don’t look that dirty, but it will be good for you for a change. Then we’ll talk.”

Wynand shook his head and remained standing at the door.

“Howard, the Banner is not helping you. It’s ruining you.”

It had taken him eight weeks to prepare himself to say that.

“Of course,” said Roark. “What of it?”

Wynand would not advance into the room.

“Gail, it doesn’t matter, as far as I’m concerned. I’m not counting on public opinion, one way or the other.”

“You want me to give in?”

“I want you to hold out if it takes everything you own.”

He saw that Wynand understood, that it was the thing Wynand had tried not to face, and that Wynand wanted him to speak.

“I don’t expect you to save me. I think I have a chance to win. The strike won’t make it better or worse. Don’t worry about me. And don’t give in. If you stick to the end—you won’t need me any longer.”

He saw the look of anger, protest—and agreement. He added:

“You know what I’m saying. We’ll be better friends than ever—and you’ll come to visit me in jail, if necessary. Don’t wince, and don’t make me say too much. Not now. I’m glad of this strike. I knew that something like that had to happen, when I saw you for the first time. You knew it long before that.”

“Two months ago, I promised you ... the one promise I wanted to keep ...”

“You’re keeping it.”

“Don’t you really want to despise me? I wish you’d say it now. I came here to hear it.”

“All right. Listen. You have been the one encounter in my life that can never be repeated. There was Henry Cameron who died for my own cause. And you’re the publisher of filthy tabloids. But I couldn’t say this to him, and I’m saying it to you. There’s Steve Mallory who’s never compromised with his soul. And you’ve done nothing but sell yours in every known way. But I couldn’t say this to him and I’m saying it to you. Is that what you’ve always wanted to hear from me? But don’t give
in
.”

He turned away, and added: “That’s all. We won’t talk about your damn strike again. Sit down, I’ll get you a drink. Rest, get yourself out of looking like hell.”

Wynand returned to the
Banner
late at night. He took a cab. It did not matter. He did not notice the distance.

Dominique said: “You’ve seen Roark.”

“Yes. How do you know?”

“Here’s the Sunday makeup. It’s fairly lousy, but it’ll have to do. I sent Manning home for a few hours—he was going to collapse. Jackson quit, but we can do without him. Alvah’s column was a mess—he can’t even keep his grammar straight any more—I rewrote it, but don’t tell him, tell him you did.”

“Go to sleep. I’ll take Manning’s place. I’m good for hours.”

They went on, and the days passed, and in the mailing room the piles of returns grew, running over into the corridor, white stacks of paper like marble slabs. Fewer copies of the
Banner
were run off with every edition, but the stacks kept growing. The days passed, days of heroic effort to put out a newspaper that came back unbought and unread.

I
N THE GLASS-SMOOTH MAHOGANY OF THE LONG TABLE RESERVED FOR the board of directors there was a monogram in colored wood—G W—reproduced from his signature. It had always annoyed the directors. They had no time to notice it now. But an occasional glance fell upon it—and then it was a glance of pleasure.