The Fountainhead (69 page)

“Well?” asked Ellsworth Toohey. “Now do you get the point?”

He stood leaning informally against the back of Scarret’s chair, and Scarret sat staring down at a hamper full of mail by the side of his desk.

“Thousands,” sighed Scarret, “thousands, Ellsworth. You ought to see what they call him. Why didn’t he print the story of his wedding? What’s he ashamed of? What’s he got to hide? Why didn’t he get married in church, like any decent man. How could he marry a divorcee? That’s what they’re all asking. Thousands. And he won’t even look at the letters. Gail Wynand, the man they called the seismograph of public opinion.”

“That’s right,” said Toohey. “That kind of a man.”

“Here’s a sample,” Scarret picked up a letter from his desk and read aloud: “ ‘I’m a respectable woman and mother of five children and I certainly don’t think I want to bring up my children with your newspaper. Have taken same for fourteen years, but now that you show that you’re the kind of man that has no decency and making a mockery of the holy institution of marriage which is to commit adultery with a fallen woman also another man’s wife who gets married in a black dress as she jolly well ought to, I won’t read your newspaper any more as you’re not a man fit for children, and I’m certainly disappointed in you. Very truly yours. Mrs. Thomas Parker.’ I read it to him. He just laughed.”

“Uh-huh,” said Toohey.

“What’s got into him?”

“It’s nothing that got into him, Alvah. It’s something that got out at last.”

“By the way, did you know that many papers dug up their old pictures of Dominique’s nude statue from that goddamn temple and ran it right with the wedding story—to show Mrs. Wynand’s interest in art, the bastards! Are they glad to get back at Gail! Are they giving it to him, the lice! Wonder who reminded them of that one.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Well, of course, it’s just one of those storms in a teacup. They’ll forget all about it in a few weeks. I don’t think it will do much harm.”

“No. Not this incident alone. Not by itself.”

“Huh? Are you predicting something?”

“Those letters predict it, Alvah. Not the letters as such. But that he wouldn’t read them.”

“Oh, it’s no use getting too silly either. Gail knows where to stop and when. Don’t make a mountain out of a mo——” He glanced up at Toohey and his voice switched to: “Christ, yes, Ellsworth, you’re right. What are we going to do?”

“Nothing, my friend, nothing. Not for a long time yet.”

Toohey sat down on the edge of Scarret’s desk and let the tip of his pointed shoe play among the envelopes in the hamper, tossing them up, making them rustle. He had acquired a pleasant habit of dropping in and out of Scarret’s office at all hours. Scarret had come to depend on him.

“Say, Ellsworth,” Scarret asked suddenly, “are you really loyal to the
Banner?”

“Alvah, don’t talk in dialect. Nobody’s really that stuffy.”

“No, I mean it.... Well, you know what I mean.”

“Haven’t the faintest idea. Who’s ever disloyal to his bread and butter?”

“Yeah, that’s so.... Still, you know, Ellsworth, I like you a lot, only I’m never sure when you’re just talking my language or when it’s really yours.”

“Don’t go getting yourself into psychological complexities. You’ll get all tangled up. What’s on your mind?”

“Why do you still write for the
New Frontiers?”

“For money.”

“Oh, come, that’s chicken feed to you.”

“Well, it’s a prestige magazine. Why shouldn’t I write for them? You haven’t got an exclusive on me.”

“No, and I don’t care who you write for on the side. But the
New Frontiers
has been damn funny lately.”

“About what?”

“About Gail Wynand.”

“Oh, rubbish, Alvah!”

“No sir, this isn’t rubbish. You just haven’t noticed, guess you don’t read it close enough, but I’ve got an instinct about things like that and I know. I know when it’s just some smart young punk taking pot-shots or when a magazine means business.”

“You’re nervous, Alvah, and you’re exaggerating. The
New Frontiers
is a liberal magazine and they’ve always sniped at Gail Wynand. Everybody has. He’s never been any too popular in the trade, you know. Hasn’t hurt him, though, has it?”

“This is different. I don’t like it when there’s a system behind it, a kind of special purpose, like a lot of little trickles dribbling along, all innocently, and pretty soon they make a little stream, and it all fits pat, and pretty soon ...”

“Getting a persecution mania, Alvah?”

“I don’t like it. It was all right when people took cracks at his yachts and women and a few municipal election scandals—which were never proved,” he added hastily. “But I don’t like it when it’s that new intelligentsia slang that people seem to be going for nowadays: Gail Wynand, the exploiter, Gail Wynand, the pirate of capitalism, Gail Wynand, the disease of an era. It’s still crap, Ellsworth, only there’s dynamite in that kind of crap.”

“It’s just the modern way of saying the same old things, nothing more. Besides, I can’t be responsible for the policy of a magazine just because I sell them an article once in a while.”

“Yeah, but ... That’s not what I hear.”

“What do you hear?”

“I hear you’re financing the damn thing.”

“Who,
me?
With what?”

“Well, not you yourself exactly. But I hear it was you who got young Ronny Pickering, the booze hound, to give them a shot in the arm to the tune of one hundred thousand smackers, just about when
New Frontiers
was going the way of all frontiers.”

“Hell, that was just to save Ronny from the town’s more expensive gutters. The kid was going to the dogs. Gave him a sort of higher purpose in life. And put one hundred thousand smackers to better use than the chorus cuties who’d have got it out of him anyway.”

“Yeah, but you could’ve attached a little string to the gift, slipped word to the editors that they’d better lay off Gail or else.”

“The
New Frontiers
is not the
Banner,
Alvah. It’s a magazine of principles. One doesn’t attach strings to its editors and one doesn’t tell them ‘or else.’ ”

“In this game, Ellsworth? Whom are you kidding?”

“Well, if it will set your mind at rest, I’ll tell you something you haven’t heard. It’s not supposed to be known—it was done through a lot of proxies. Did you know that I got Mitchell Layton to buy a nice fat chunk of the
Banner?”

“No!”

“Yes.”

“Christ, Ellsworth, that’s great! Mitchell Layton? We can use a reservoir like that and ... Wait a minute. Mitchell Layton?”

“Yes. What’s wrong with Mitchell Layton?”

“Isn’t he the little boy who couldn’t digest grandpaw’s money?”

“Grandpaw left him an awful lot of money.”

“Yeah, but he’s a crackpot. He’s the one who’s been a Yogi, then a vegetarian, then a Unitarian, then a nudist—and now he’s gone to build a palace of the proletariat in Moscow.”

“So what?”

“But Jesus!—a Red among our stockholders?”

“Mitch isn’t a Red. How can one be a Red with a quarter of a billion dollars? He’s just a pale tea-rose. Mostly yellow. But a nice kid at heart.”

“But—on the
Banner!”

“Alvah, you’re an ass. Don’t you see? I’ve made him put some dough into a good, solid, conservative paper. That’ll cure him of his pink notions and set him in the right direction. Besides, what harm can he do? Your dear Gail controls his papers, doesn’t he?”

“Does Gail know about this?”

“No. Dear Gail hasn’t been as watchful in the last five years as he used to be. And you’d better not tell him. You see the way Gail’s going. He’ll need a little pressure. And you’ll need the dough. Be nice to Mitch Layton. He can come in handy.”

“That’s so.”

“It is. You see? My heart’s in the right place. I’ve helped a puny little liberal mag like the
New Frontiers,
but I’ve also brought a much more substantial hunk of cash to a big stronghold of arch-conservatism such as the New York
Banner.”

“So you have. Damn decent of you, too, considering that you’re a kind of radical yourself.”

“Now are you going to talk about any disloyalty?”

“Guess not. Guess you’ll stand by the old
Banner.”

“Of course I will. Why, I love the
Banner.
I’d do anything for it. Why, I’d give my life for the New York
Banner.”

VIII

W
ALKING THE SOIL OF A DESERT ISLAND HOLDS ONE ANCHORED to the rest of the earth; but in their penthouse, with the telephone disconnected, Wynand and Dominique had no feeling of the fifty-seven floors below them, of steel shafts braced against granite—and it seemed to them that their home was anchored in space, not an island, but a planet. The city became a friendly sight, an abstraction with which no possible communication could be established, like the sky, a spectacle to be admired, but of no direct concern in their lives.

For two weeks after their wedding they never left the penthouse. She could have pressed the button of the elevator and broken these weeks any time she wished; she did not wish it. She had no desire to resist, to wonder, to question. It was enchantment and peace.

He sat talking to her for hours when she wanted. He was content to sit silently, when she preferred, and look at her as he looked at the objects in his art gallery, with the same distant, undisturbing glance. He answered any question she put to him. He never asked questions. He never spoke of what he felt. When she wished to be alone, he did not call for her. One evening she sat reading in her room and saw him standing at the frozen parapet of the dark roof garden outside, not looking back at the house, only standing in the streak of light from her window.

When the two weeks ended, he went back to his work, to the office of the
Banner.
But the sense of isolation remained, like a theme declared and to be preserved through all their future days. He came home in the evening and the city ceased to exist. He had no desire to go anywhere. He invited no guests.

He never mentioned it, but she knew that he did not want her to step out of the house, neither with him nor alone. It was a quiet obsession which he did not expect to enforce. When he came home, he asked: “Have you been out?”—never: “Where have you been?” It was not jealousy—the “where” did not matter. When she wanted to buy a pair of shoes, he had three stores send a collection of shoes for her choice—it prevented her visit to a store. When she said she wanted to see a certain picture, he had a projection room built on the roof.

She obeyed, for the first few months. When she realized that she loved their isolation, she broke it at once. She made him accept invitations and she invited guests to their home. He complied without protest.

But he maintained a wall she could not break—the wall he had erected between his wife and his newspapers. Her name never appeared in their pages. He stopped every attempt to draw Mrs. Gail Wynand into public life—to head committees, sponsor charity drives, endorse crusades. He did not hesitate to open her mail—if it bore an official letterhead that betrayed its purpose—to destroy it without answer and to tell her that he had destroyed it. She shrugged and said nothing.

Yet he did not seem to share her contempt for his papers. He did not allow her to discuss them. She could not discover what he thought of them, nor what he felt. Once, when she commented on an offensive editorial, he said coldly:

“I’ve never apologized for the
Banner.
I never will.”

“But this is really awful, Gail.”

“I thought you married me as the publisher of the
Banner.”

“I thought you didn’t like to think of that.”

“What I like or dislike doesn’t concern you. Don’t expect me to change the
Banner
or sacrifice it. I wouldn’t do that for anyone on earth.”

She laughed. “I wouldn’t ask it, Gail.”

He did not laugh in answer.

In his office in the Banner Building, he worked with a new energy, a kind of elated, ferocious drive that surprised the men who had known him in his most ambitious years. He stayed in the office all night when necessary, as he had not done for a long time. Nothing changed in his methods and policy. Alvah Scarret watched him with satisfaction. “We were wrong about him, Ellsworth,” said Scarret to his constant companion, “it’s the same old Gail, God bless him. Better than ever.” “My dear Alvah,” said Toohey, “nothing is ever as simple as you think—nor as fast.” “But he’s happy. Don’t you see that he’s happy?” “To be happy is the most dangerous thing that could have happened to him. And, as a humanitarian for once, I mean this for his own sake.”

Sally Brent decided to outwit her boss. Sally Brent was one of the proudest possessions of the
Banner,
a stout, middle-aged woman who dressed like a model for a style show of the twenty-first century and wrote like a chambermaid. She had a large personal following among the readers of the
Banner.
Her popularity made her overconfident.

Sally Brent decided to do a story on Mrs. Gail Wynand. It was just her type of story and there it was, simply going to waste. She gained admittance to Wynand’s penthouse, using the tactics of gaining admittance to places where one is not wanted which she had been taught as a well-trained Wynand employee. She made her usual dramatic entrance, wearing a black dress with a fresh sunflower on her shoulder -her constant ornament that had become a personal trade-mark-and she said to Dominique breathlessly: “Mrs. Wynand, I’ve come here to help you deceive your husband!”

Then she winked at her own naughtiness and explained: “Our dear Mr. Wynand has been unfair to you, my dear, depriving you of your rightful fame, for some reason which I just simply can’t understand. But we’ll fix him, you and I. What can a man do when we girls get together? He simply doesn’t know what good copy you are. So just give me your story, and I’ll write it, and it will be so good that he just simply won’t be able not to run it.”

Dominique was alone at home, and she smiled in a manner which Sally Brent had never seen before, so the right adjectives did not occur to Sally’s usually observant mind. Dominique gave her the story. She gave the exact kind of story Sally had dreamed about.

“Yes, of course I cook his breakfast,” said Dominique. “Ham and eggs is his favorite dish, just plain ham and eggs ... Oh yes, Miss Brent, I’m very happy. I open my eyes in the morning and I say to myself, it can’t be true, it’s not poor little me who’s become the wife of the great Gail Wynand who had all the glamorous beauties of the world to choose from. You see, I’ve been in love with him for years. He was just a dream to me, a beautiful, impossible dream. And now it’s like a dream come true.... Please, Miss Brent, take this message from me to the women of America: Patience is always rewarded and romance is just around the corner. I think it’s a beautiful thought and perhaps it will help other girls as it has helped me.... Yes, all I want of life is to make Gail happy, to share his joys and sorrows, to be a good wife and mother.”

Alvah Scarret read the story and liked it so much that he lost all caution. “Run it off, Alvah,” Sally Brent urged him, “just have a proof run off and leave it on his desk. He’ll okay it, see if he won’t.” That evening Sally Brent was fired. Her costly contract was bought off—it had three more years to run—and she was told never to enter the Banner Building again for any purpose whatsoever.

Scarret protested in panic: “Gail, you can’t fire Sally! Not
Sally!”

“When I can’t fire anyone I wish on my paper, I’ll close it and blow up the God-damn building,” said Wynand calmly.

“But her public! We’ll lose her public!”

“To hell with her public.”

That night, at dinner, Wynand took from his pocket a crumpled wad of paper—the proof cut of the story—and threw it, without a word, at Dominique’s face across the table. It hit her cheek and fell to the floor. She picked it up, unrolled it, saw what it was and laughed aloud.

Sally Brent wrote an article on Gail Wynand’s love life. In a gay, intellectual manner, in the terms of a sociological study, the article presented material such as no pulp magazine would have accepted. It was published in the
New Frontiers.

Wynand brought Dominique a necklace designed at his special order. It was made of diamonds without visible settings, spaced wide apart in an irregular pattern, like a handful scattered accidentally, held together by platinum chains made under a microscope, barely noticeable. When he clasped it about her neck, it looked like drops of water fallen at random.

She stood before a mirror. She slipped her dressing gown off her shoulders and let the raindrops glitter on her skin. She said:

“That life story of the Bronx housewife who murdered her husband’s young mistress is pretty sordid, Gail. But I think there’s something dirtier—the curiosity of the people who pander to that curiosity. Actually, it was that housewife—she has piano legs and such a baggy neck in her pictures—who made this necklace possible. It’s a beautiful necklace. I shall be proud to wear it.”

He smiled; the sudden brightness of his eyes had an odd quality of courage.

“That’s one way of looking at it,” he said. “There’s another. I like to think that I took the worst refuse of the human spirit—the mind of that housewife and the minds of the people who like to read about her—and I made of it this necklace on your shoulders. I like to think that I was an alchemist capable of performing so great a purification.”

She saw no apology, no regret, no resentment as he looked at her. It was a strange glance; she had noticed it before; a glance of simple worship. And it made her realize that there is a stage of worship which makes the worshiper himself an object of reverence.

She was sitting before her mirror when he entered her dressing room on the following night. He bent down, he pressed his lips to the back of her neck—and he saw a square of paper attached to the corner of her mirror. It was the decoded copy of the cablegram that had ended her career on the
Banner.
FIRE THE BITCH. G W

He lifted his shoulders, to stand erect behind her. He asked:

“How did you get that?”

“Ellsworth Toohey gave it to me. I thought it was worth preserving. Of course, I didn’t know it would ever become so appropriate.”

He inclined his head gravely, acknowledging the authorship, and said nothing else.

She expected to find the cablegram gone next morning. But he had not touched it. She would not remove it. It remained displayed on the comer of her mirror. When he held her in his arms, she often saw his eyes move to that square of paper. She could not tell what he thought.

In the spring, a publishers’ convention took him away from New York for a week. It was their first separation. Dominique surprised him by coming to meet him at the airport when he returned. She was gay and gentle; her manner held a promise he had never expected, could not trust, and found himself trusting completely.

When he entered the drawing room of their penthouse and slumped down, half stretching on the couch, she knew that he wanted to lie still here, to feel the recaptured safety of his own world. She saw his eyes, open, delivered to her, without defense. She stood straight, ready. She said:

“You’d better dress, Gail. We’re going to the theater tonight.”

He lifted himself to a sitting posture. He smiled, the slanting ridges standing out on his forehead. She had a cold feeling of admiration for him: the control was perfect, all but these ridges. He said:

“Fine. Black tie or white?”

“White. I have tickets for
No Skin Off Your Nose.
They were very hard to get.”

It was too much; it seemed too ludicrous to be part of this moment’s contest between them. He broke down by laughing frankly, in helpless disgust.

“Good God, Dominique, not that one!”

“Why, Gail, it’s the biggest hit in town. Your own critic, Jules Fougler”—he stopped laughing. He understood—“said it was the greatest play of our age. Ellsworth Toohey said it was the fresh voice of the coming new world. Alvah Scarret said it was not written in ink, but in the milk of human kindness. Sally Brent—before you fired her—said it made her laugh with a lump in her throat. Why, it’s the godchild of the
Banner.
I thought you would certainly want to see it.”

“Yes, of course,” he said.

He got up and went to dress.

No Skin Off Your Nose
had been running for many months. Ellsworth Toohey had mentioned regretfully in his column that the title of the play had had to be changed slightly—“as a concession to the stuffy prudery of the middle class which still controls our theater. It is a crying example of interference with the freedom of the artist. Now don’t let’s hear any more of that old twaddle about ours being a free society. Originally, the title of this beautiful play was an authentic line drawn from the language of the people, with the brave, simple eloquence of folk expression.”