The Fountainhead (122 page)

“He loved you.”

“Yes.”

“Yet he built this house for us.”

“Yes.”

“I only wanted to know.”

He turned to leave.

“God damn you!” she cried. “If you can take it like this, you had no right to become what you became!”

“That’s why I’m taking it.”

He walked out of the room. He closed the door softly.

Guy Francon telephoned Dominique that evening. Since his retirement he had lived alone on his country estate near the quarry town. She had refused to answer calls today, but she took the receiver when the maid told her that it was Mr. Francon. Instead of the fury she expected, she heard a gentle voice saying:

“Hello, Dominique.”

“Hello, Father.”

“You’re going to leave Wynand now?”

“Yes.”

“You shouldn’t move to the city. It’s not necessary. Don’t overdo it. Come and stay here with me. Until ... the Cortlandt trial.”

The things he had not said and the quality of his voice, firm, simple and with a note that sounded close to happiness, made her answer, after a moment:

“All right, Father.” It was a girl’s voice, a daughter’s voice, with a tired, trusting, wistful gaiety. “I’ll get there about midnight. Have a glass of milk for me and some sandwiches.”

“Try not to speed as you always do. The roads aren’t too good.”

When she arrived, Guy Francon met her at the door. They both smiled, and she knew that there would be no questions, no reproaches. He led her to the small morning room where he had set the food on a table by a window open to a dark lawn. There was a smell of grass, candles on the table and a bunch of jasmine in a silver bowl.

She sat, her fingers closed about a cold glass, and he sat across the table, munching a sandwich peacefully.

“Want to talk, Father?”

“No. I want you to drink your milk and go to bed.”

“All right.”

He picked up an olive and sat studying it thoughtfully, twisting it on a colored toothpick. Then he glanced up at her.

“Look, Dominique. I can’t attempt to understand it all. But I know this much—that it’s the right thing for you. This time, it’s the right man.”

“Yes, Father.”

“That’s why I’m glad.”

She nodded.

“Tell Mr. Roark that he can come here any time he wants.”

She smiled. “Tell whom, Father?”

“Tell ... Howard.”

Her arm lay on the table; her head dropped down on her arm. He looked at the gold hair in the candlelight. She said, because it was easier to control a voice: “Don’t let me fall asleep here. I’m tired.”

But he answered:

“He’ll be acquitted, Dominique.”

 

All the newspapers of New York were brought to Wynand’s office each day, as he had ordered. He read every word of what was written and whispered in town. Everybody knew that the story had been a self-frame-up; the wife of a multi-millionaire would not report the loss of a five-thousand-dollar ring in the circumstances; but this did not prevent anyone from accepting the story as given and commenting accordingly. The most offensive comments were spread on the pages of the
Banner.

Alvah Scarret had found a crusade to which he devoted himself with the truest fervor he had ever experienced. He felt that it was his atonement for any disloyalty he might have committed toward Wynand in the past. He saw a way to redeem Wynand’s name. He set out to sell Wynand to the public as the victim of a great passion for a depraved woman; it was Dominique who had forced her husband to champion an immoral cause, against his better judgment; she had almost wrecked her husband’s paper, his standing, his reputation, the achievement of his whole life—for the sake of her lover. Scarret begged readers to forgive Wynand—a tragic, self-sacrificing love was his justification. It was an inverse ratio in Scarret’s calculations: every filthy adjective thrown at Dominique created sympathy for Wynand in the reader’s mind; this fed Scarret’s smear talent. It worked. The public responded, the
Banner’s
old feminine readers in particular. It helped in the slow, painful work of the paper’s reconstruction.

Letters began to arrive, generous in their condolences, unrestrained in the indecency of their comment on Dominique Francon. “Like the old days, Gail,” said Scarret happily, “just like the old days!” He piled all the letters on Wynand’s desk.

Wynand sat alone in his office with the letters. Scarret could not suspect that this was the worst of the suffering Gail Wynand was to know. He made himself read every letter. Dominique, whom he had tried to save from the
Banner
...

When they met in the building, Scarret looked at him expectantly, with an entreating, tentative half-smile, an eager pupil waiting for the teacher’s recognition of a lesson well learned and well done. Wynand said nothing. Scarret ventured once:

“It was clever, wasn’t it, Gail?”

“Yes.”

“Have any idea on where we can milk it some more?”

“It’s your job, Alvah.”

“She’s really the cause of everything, Gail. Long before all this. When you married her. I was afraid then. That’s what started it. Remember when you didn’t allow us to cover your wedding? That was a sign. She’s ruined the
Banner.
But I’ll be damned if I don’t rebuild it now right on her own body. Just as it was. Our old
Banner.”

“Yes.”

“Got any suggestions, Gail? What else would you like me to do?”

“Anything you wish, Alvah.”

A
TREE BRANCH HUNG IN THE OPEN WINDOW. THE LEAVES MOVED against the sky, implying sun and summer and an inexhaustible earth to be used. Dominique thought of the world as background. Wynand thought of two hands bending a tree branch to explain the meaning of life. The leaves drooped, touching the spires of New York’s skyline far across the river. The skyscrapers stood like shafts of sunlight, washed white by distance and summer. A crowd filled the county courtroom, witnessing the trial of Howard Roark.

Roark sat at the defense table. He listened calmly.

Dominique sat in the third row of spectators. Looking at her, people felt as if they had seen a smile. She did not smile. She looked at the leaves in the window.

Gail Wynand sat at the back of the courtroom. He had come in, alone, when the room was full. He had not noticed the stares and the flashbulbs exploding around him. He had stood in the aisle for a moment, surveying the place as if there were no reason why he should not survey it. He wore a gray summer suit and a panama hat with a drooping brim turned up at one side. His glance went over Dominique as over the rest of the courtroom. When he sat down, he looked at Roark. From the moment of Wynand’s entrance Roark’s eyes kept returning to him. Whenever Roark looked at him, Wynand turned away.

“The motive which the State proposes to prove,” the prosecutor was making his opening address to the jury, “is beyond the realm of normal human emotions. To the majority of us it will appear monstrous and inconceivable.”

Dominique sat with Mallory, Heller, Lansing, Enright, Mike—and Guy Francon, to the shocked disapproval of his friends. Across the aisle, celebrities formed a comet: from the small point of Ellsworth Toohey, well in front, a tail of popular names stretched through the crowd: Lois Cook, Gordon L. Prescott, Gus Webb, Lancelot Clokey, Ike, Jules Fougler, Sally Brent, Homer Slottern, Mitchell Layton.

“Even as the dynamite which swept a building away, his motive blasted all sense of humanity out of this man’s soul. We are dealing, gentlemen of the jury, with the most vicious explosive on earth—the egotist!”

On the chairs, on the window sills, in the aisles, pressed against the walls, the human mass was blended like a monolith, except for the pale ovals of faces. The faces stood out, separate, lonely, no two alike. Behind each, there were the years of a life lived or half over, effort, hope and an attempt, honest or dishonest, but an attempt. It had left on all a single mark in common: on lips smiling with malice, on lips loose with renunciation, on lips tight with uncertain dignity—on all—the mark of suffering.

“... In this day and age, when the world is torn by gigantic problems, seeking an answer to questions that hold the survival of man in the balance—this man attached to such a vague intangible, such an inessential as his artistic opinions sufficient importance to let it become his sole passion and the motivation of a crime against society.”

The people had come to witness a sensational case, to see celebrities, to get material for conversation, to be seen, to kill time. They would return to unwanted jobs, unloved families, unchosen friends, to drawing rooms, evening clothes, cocktail glasses and movies, to unadmitted pain, murdered hope, desire left unreached, left hanging silently over a path on which no step was taken, to days of effort not to think, not to say, to forget and give in and give up. But each of them had known some unforgotten moment—a morning when nothing had happened, a piece of music heard suddenly and never heard in the same way again, a stranger’s face seen in a bus—a moment when each had known a different sense of living. And each remembered other moments, on a sleepless night, on an afternoon of steady rain, in a church, in an empty street at sunset, when each had wondered why there was so much suffering and ugliness in the world. They had not tried to find the answer and they had gone on living as if no answer were necessary. But each had known a moment when, in lonely, naked honesty, he had felt the need of an answer.

“... a ruthless, arrogant egotist who wished to have his own way at any price ...”

Twelve men sat in the jury box. They listened, their faces attentive and emotionless. People had whispered that it was a tough-looking jury. There were two executives of industrial concerns, two engineers, a mathematician, a truck driver, a bricklayer, an electrician, a gardener and three factory workers. The impaneling of the jury had taken some time. Roark had challenged many talesmen. He had picked these twelve. The prosecutor had agreed, telling himself that this was what happened when an amateur undertook to handle his own defense; a lawyer would have chosen the gentlest types, those most likely to respond to an appeal for mercy; Roark had chosen the hardest faces.

“... Had it been some plutocrat’s mansion, but a
housing project,
gentlemen of the jury, a housing project!”

The judge sat erect on the tall bench. He had gray hair and the stern face of an army officer.

“... a man trained to serve society, a builder who became a destroyer ...”

The voice went on, practiced and confident. The faces filling the room listened with the response they granted to a good weekday dinner: satisfying and to be forgotten within an hour. They agreed with every sentence; they had heard it before, they had always heard it, this was what the world lived by; it was self-evident—like a puddle before one’s feet.

The prosecutor introduced his witnesses. The policeman who had arrested Roark took the stand to tell how he had found the defendant standing by the electric plunger. The night watchman related how he had been sent away from the scene; his testimony was brief; the prosecutor preferred not to stress the subject of Dominique. The contractor’s superintendent testified about the dynamite missing from the stores on the site. Officials of Cortlandt, building inspectors, estimators took the stand to describe the building and the extent of the damage. This concluded the first day of the trial.

Peter Keating was the first witness called on the following day.

He sat on the stand, slumped forward. He looked at the prosecutor obediently. His eyes moved, once in a while. He looked at the crowd, at the jury, at Roark. It made no difference.

“Mr. Keating, will you state under oath whether you designed the project ascribed to you, known as Cortlandt Homes?”

“No. I didn’t.”

“Who designed it?”

“Howard Roark.”

“At whose request?”

“At my request.”

“Why did you call on him?”

“Because I was not capable of doing it myself.”

There was no sound of honesty in the voice, because there was no sound of effort to pronounce a truth of such nature; no tone of truth or falsehood; only indifference.

The prosecutor handed him a sheet of paper. “Is this the agreement you signed?”

Keating held the paper in his hand. “Yes.”

“Is that Howard Roark’s signature?”

“Yes.”

“Will you please read the terms of this agreement to the jury?”

Keating read it aloud. His voice came evenly, well drilled. Nobody in the courtroom realized that this testimony had been intended as a sensation. It was not a famous architect publicly confessing incompetence; it was a man reciting a memorized lesson. People felt that were he interrupted, he would not be able to pick up the next sentence, but would have to start all over again from the beginning.

He answered a great many questions. The prosecutor introduced in evidence Roark’s original drawings of Cortlandt, which Keating had kept; the copies which Keating had made of them; and photographs of Cortlandt as it had been built.

“Why did you object so strenuously to the excellent structural changes suggested by Mr. Prescott and Mr. Webb?”

“I was afraid of Howard Roark.”

“What did your knowledge of his character lead you to expect?”

“Anything.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. I was afraid. I used to be afraid.”

The questions went on. The story was unusual, but the audience felt bored. It did not sound like the recital of a participant. The other witnesses had seemed to have a more personal connection with the case.

When Keating left the stand, the audience had the odd impression that no change had occurred in the act of a man’s exit; as if no person had walked out.

“The prosecution rests,” said the District Attorney.