The Fountainhead (99 page)

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.”

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.