The Fountainhead (91 page)

He watched the electric signs that flashed in disciplined spasms over the black river. Then he pointed to a blurred light, far to the south, a faint reflection of blue.

“That’s the Banner Building. See, over there?—that blue light. I’ve done so many things, but I’ve missed one, the most important. There’s no Wynand Building in New York. Some day I’ll build a new home for the
Banner.
It will be the greatest structure of the city and it will bear my name. I started in a miserable dump, and the paper was called the
Gazette.
I was only a stooge for some very filthy people. But I thought, then, of the Wynand Building that would rise some day. I’ve thought of it all the years since.”

“Why haven’t you built it?”

“I wasn’t ready for it.”

“Why?”

“I’m not ready for it now. I don’t know why. I know only that it’s very important to me. It will be the final symbol. I’ll know the right time when it comes.”

He turned to look out to the west, to a patch of dim scattered lights. He pointed:

“That’s where I was born. Hell’s Kitchen.” She listened attentively; he seldom spoke of his beginning. “I was sixteen when I stood on a roof and looked at the city, like tonight. And decided what I would be.”

The quality of his voice became a line underscoring the moment, saying: Take notice,
this
is important. Not looking at him, she thought this was what she had waited for, this should give her the answer, the key to him. Years ago, thinking of Gail Wynand, she had wondered how such a man faced his life and his work; she expected boasting and a hidden sense of shame, or impertinence flaunting its own guilt. She looked at him. His head lifted, his eyes level on the sky before him, he conveyed none of the things she had expected; he conveyed a quality incredible in this connection: a sense of gallantry.

She knew it was a key, but it made the puzzle greater. Yet something within her understood, knew the use of that key and made her speak.

“Gail, fire Ellsworth Toohey.”

He turned to her, bewildered.

“Why?”

“Gail, listen.” Her voice had an urgency she had never shown in speaking to him. “I’ve never wanted to stop Toohey. I’ve even helped him. I thought he was what the world deserved. I haven’t tried to save anything from him ... or anyone. I never thought it would be the
Banner
—the
Banner
which he fits best—that I’d want to save from him.”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“Gail, when I married you, I didn’t know I’d come to feel this kind of loyalty to you. It contradicts everything I’ve done, it contradicts so much more than I can tell you—it’s a sort of catastrophe for me, a turning point—don’t ask me why—it will take me years to understand —I know only that this is what I owe you. Fire Ellsworth Toohey. Get him out before it’s too late. You’ve broken many much less vicious men and much less dangerous. Fire Toohey, go after him and don’t rest until you’ve destroyed every last bit of him.”

“Why? Why should you think of him just now?”

“Because I know what he’s after.”

“What is he after?”

“Control of the Wynand papers.”

He laughed aloud; it was not derision or indignation; just pure gaiety greeting the point of a silly joke.

“Gail ...” she said helplessly.

“Oh for God’s sake, Dominique! And here I’ve always respected your judgment.”

“You’ve never understood Toohey.”

“And I don’t care to. Can you see me going to Ellsworth Toohey? A tank to eliminate a bedbug? Why should I fire Elsie? He’s the kind that makes money for me. People love to read his twaddle. I don’t fire good booby-traps like that. He’s as valuable to me as a piece of flypaper.”

“That’s the danger. Part of it.”

“His wonderful following? I’ve had bigger and better sob-sisters on my payroll. When a few of them had to be kicked out, that was the end of them. Their popularity stopped at the door of the
Banner.
But the
Banner
went on.”

“It’s not his popularity. It’s the special nature of it. You can’t fight him on his terms. You’re only a tank—and that’s a very clean, innocent weapon. An honest weapon that goes first, out in front, and mows everything down or takes every counterblow. He’s a corrosive gas. The kind that eats lungs out. I think there really is a secret to the core of evil and he has it. I don’t know what it is. I know how he uses it and what he’s after.”

“Control of the Wynand papers?”

“Control of the Wynand papers—as one of the means to an end.”

“What end?”

“Control of the world.”

He said with patient disgust: “What is this, Dominique? What sort of gag and what for?”

“I’m serious, Gail. I’m terribly serious.”

“Control of the world, my dear, belongs to men like me. The Tooheys of this earth wouldn’t know how to dream about it.”

“I’ll try to explain. It’s very difficult. The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see. But if you’ll listen ...”

“I won’t listen. You’ll forgive me, but discussing the idea of Ellsworth Toohey as a threat to me is ridiculous. Discussing it seriously is offensive.”

“Gail, I ...”

“No. Darling, I don’t think you really understand much about the
Banner.
And I don’t want you to. I don’t want you to take any part in it. Forget it. Leave the
Banner
to me.”

“Is it a demand, Gail?”

“It’s an ultimatum.”

“All right.”

“Forget it. Don’t go acquiring horror complexes about anyone as big as Ellsworth Toohey. It’s not like you.”

“All right, Gail. Let’s go in. It’s too cold for you here without an overcoat.”

He chuckled softly—it was the kind of concern she had never shown for him before. He took her hand and kissed her palm, holding it against his face.

 

For many weeks, when left alone together, they spoke little and never about each other. But it was not a silence of resentment; it was the silence of an understanding too delicate to limit by words. They would be in a room together in the evening, saying nothing, content to feel each other’s presence. They would look at each other suddenly—and both would smile, the smile like hands clasped.

Then, one evening, she knew he would speak. She sat at her dressing-table. He came in and leaned against the wall beside her. He looked at her hands, at her naked shoulders, but she felt as if he did not see her; he was looking at something greater than the beauty of her body, greater than his love for her; he was looking at himself—and this, she knew, was the one incomparable tribute.

“I breathe for my own necessity, for the fuel of my body, for my survival ... I’ve given you, not my sacrifice or my pity, but my ego and my naked need ...” She heard Roark’s words, Roark’s voice speaking for Gail Wynand—and she felt no sense of treason to Roark in using the words of his love for the love of another man.

“Gail,” she said gently, “some day I’ll have to ask your forgiveness for having married you.”

He shook his head slowly, smiling. She said:

“I wanted you to be my chain to the world. You’ve become my defense, instead. And that makes my marriage dishonest.”

“No. I told you I would accept any reason you chose.”

“But you’ve changed everything for me. Or was it I that changed it? I don’t know. We’ve done something strange to each other. I’ve given you what I wanted to lose. That special sense of living I thought this marriage would destroy for me. The sense of life as exaltation. And you—you’ve done all the things I would have done. Do you know how much alike we are?”

“I knew that from the first.”

“But it should have been impossible. Gail, I want to remain with you now—for another reason. To wait for an answer. I think when I learn to understand what you are, I’ll understand myself. There is an answer. There is a name for the thing we have in common. I don’t know it. I know it’s very important.”

“Probably. I suppose I should want to understand it. But I don’t. I can’t care about anything now. I can’t even be afraid.”

She looked up at him and said very calmly:

“I am afraid, Gail.”

“Of what, dearest?”

“Of what I’m doing to you.”

“Why?”

“I don’t love you, Gail.”

“I can’t care even about that.”

She dropped her head and he looked down at the hair that was like a pale helmet of polished metal.

“Dominique.”

She raised her face to him obediently.

“I love you, Dominique. I love you so much that nothing can matter to me—not even you. Can you understand that? Only my love—not your answer. Not even your indifference. I’ve never taken much from the world. I haven’t wanted much. I’ve never really wanted anything. Not in the total, undivided way, not with the kind of desire that becomes an ultimatum, ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ and one can’t accept the ‘no’ without ceasing to exist. That’s what you are to me. But when one reaches that stage, it’s not the object that matters, it’s the desire. Not you, but I. The ability to desire like that. Nothing less is worth feeling or honoring. And I’ve never felt that before. Dominique, I’ve never known how to say ‘mine’ about anything. Not in the sense I say it about you. Mine. Did you call it a sense of life as exaltation? You said that. You understand. I can’t be afraid. I love you, Dominique—I love you—you’re letting me say it now—I love you.”

She reached over and took the cablegram off the mirror. She crumpled it, her fingers twisting slowly in a grinding motion against her palm. He stood listening to the crackle of the paper. She leaned forward, opened her hand over the wastebasket, and let the paper drop. Her hand remained still for a moment, the fingers extended, slanting down, as they had opened.

T
HE LEAVES STREAMED DOWN, TREMBLING IN THE SUN. THEY were not green; only a few, scattered through the torrent, stood out in single drops of a green so bright and pure that it hurt the eyes; the rest were not a color, but a light, the substance of fire on metal, living sparks without edges. And it looked as if the forest were a spread of light boiling slowly to produce this color, this green rising in small bubbles, the condensed essence of spring. The trees met, bending over the road, and the spots of sun on the ground moved with the shifting of the branches, like a conscious caress. The young man hoped he would not have to die.

Not if the earth could look like this, he thought. Not if he could hear the hope and the promise like a voice, with leaves, tree trunks and rocks instead of words. But he knew that the earth looked like this only because he had seen no sign of men for hours; he was alone, riding his bicycle down a forgotten trail through the hills of Pennsylvania where he had never been before, where he could feel the fresh wonder of an untouched world.

He was a very young man. He had just graduated from college—in the spring of the year 1935—and he wanted to decide whether life was worth living. He did not know that this was the question in his mind. He did not think of dying. He thought only that he wished to find joy and reason and meaning in life—and that none had been offered to him anywhere.

He had not liked the things taught to him in college. He had been taught a great deal about social responsibility, about a life of service and self-sacrifice. Everybody had said it was beautiful and inspiring. Only he had not felt inspired. He had felt nothing at all.

He could not name the thing he wanted of life. He felt it here, in this wild loneliness. But he did not face nature with the joy of a healthy animal—as a proper and final setting; he faced it with the joy of a healthy man—as a challenge; as tools, means and material. So he felt anger that he should find exaltation only in the wilderness, that this great sense of hope had to be lost when he would return to men and men’s work. He thought that this was not right; that man’s work should be a higher step, an improvement on nature, not a degradation. He did not want to despise men; he wanted to love and admire them. But he dreaded the sight of the first house, poolroom and movie poster he would encounter on his way.

He had always wanted to write music, and he could give no other identity to the thing he sought. If you want to know what it is, he told himself, listen to the first phrases of Tchaikovsky’s
First Concerto
—or the last movement of Rachmaninoff’s
Second.
Men have not found the words for it nor the deed nor the thought, but they have found the music. Let me see that in one single act of man on earth. Let me see it made real. Let me see the answer to the promise of that music. Not servants nor those served; not altars and immolations; but the final, the fulfilled, innocent of pain. Don’t help me or serve me, but let me see it once, because I need it. Don’t work for my happiness, my brothers—show me yours—show me that it is possible—show me your achievement—and the knowledge will give me courage for mine.

He saw a blue hole ahead, where the road ended on the crest of a ridge. The blue looked cool and clean like a film of water stretched in the frame of green branches. It would be funny, he thought, if I came to the edge and found nothing but that blue beyond; nothing but the sky ahead, above and below. He closed his eyes and went on, suspending the possible for a moment, granting himself a dream, a few instants of believing that he would reach the crest, open his eyes and see the blue radiance of the sky below.

His foot touched the ground, breaking his motion; he stopped and opened his eyes. He stood still.

In the broad valley, far below him, in the first sunlight of early morning, he saw a town. Only it was not a town. Towns did not look like that. He had to suspend the possible for a while longer, to seek no questions or explanations, only to look.

There were small houses on the ledges of the hill before him, flowing down to the bottom. He knew that the ledges had not been touched, that no artifice had altered the unplanned beauty of the graded steps. Yet some power had known how to build on these ledges in such a way that the houses became inevitable, and one could no longer imagine the hills as beautiful without them—as if the centuries and the series of chances that produced these ledges in the struggle of great blind forces had waited for their final expression, had been only a road to a goal—and the goal was these buildings, part of the hills, shaped by the hills, yet ruling them by giving them meaning.