The Fountainhead (77 page)

She sat alone in the drawing room, with the lights turned off and the door open; she sat erect and quiet, her eyes on the slit of light under the door of the study across the hall. She thought: This is my task, even when alone, even in the darkness, within no knowledge but my own, to look at that door as I looked at him here, without complaint.... Roark, if it’s the punishment you chose for me, I’ll carry it completely, not as a part to play in your presence, but as a duty to perform alone—you know that violence is not hard for me to bear, only patience is, you chose the hardest, and I must perform it and offer it to you ... my ... dearest one...

When Roark looked at her, there was no denial of memory in his eyes. The glance said simply that nothing had changed and nothing was needed to state it. She felt as if she heard him saying: Why are you shocked? Have we ever been parted? Your drawing room, your husband and the city you dread beyond the windows, are they real now, Dominique? Do you understand? Are you beginning to understand? “Yes,” she would say suddenly, aloud, trusting that the word would fit the conversation of the moment, knowing that Roark would hear it as his answer.

It was not a punishment he had chosen for her. It was a discipline imposed on both of them, the last test. She understood his purpose when she found that she could feel her love for him proved by the room, by Wynand, even by his love for Wynand and hers, by the impossible situation, by her enforced silence—the barriers proving to her that no barriers could exist.

She did not see him alone. She waited.

She would not visit the site of construction. She had said to Wynand: “I’ll see the house when it’s finished.” She never questioned him about Roark. She let her hands lie in sight on the arms of her chair, so that the relief of any violent motion would be denied her, her hands as her private barometer of endurance, when Wynand came home late at night and told her that he had spent the evening at Roark’s apartment, the apartment she had never seen.

Once she broke enough to ask:

“What is this, Gail? An obsession?”

“I suppose so.” He added: “It’s strange that you don’t like him.”

“I haven’t said that.”

“I can see it. I’m not really surprised. It’s your way. You would dislike him—precisely because he’s the type of man you should like.... Don’t resent my obsession.”

“I don’t resent it.”

“Dominique, would you understand it if I told you that I love you more since I’ve met him? Even—I want to say this—even when you lie in my arms, it’s more than it was. I feel a greater right to you.”

He spoke with the simple confidence they had given each other in the last three years. She sat looking at him as she always did; her glance had tenderness without scorn and sadness without pity.

“I understand, Gail.”

After a moment she asked:

“What is he to you, Gail? In the nature of a shrine?”

“In the nature of a hair shirt,” said Wynand.

When she had gone upstairs, he walked to a window and stood looking up at the sky. His head thrown back, he felt the pull of his throat muscles and he wondered whether the peculiar solemnity of looking at the sky comes, not from what one contemplates, but from that uplift of one’s head.

VI

“T
HE BASIC TROUBLE WITH THE MODERN WORLD,” SAID ELLSWORTH Toohey, ”is the intellectual fallacy that freedom and compulsion are opposites. To solve the gigantic problems crushing the world today, we must clarify our mental confusion. We must acquire a philosophical perspective. In essence, freedom and compulsion are one. Let me give you a simple illustration. Traffic lights restrain your freedom to cross a street whenever you wish. But this restraint gives you the freedom from being run over by a truck. If you were assigned to a job and prohibited from leaving it, it would restrain the freedom of your career. But it would give you freedom from the fear of unemployment. Whenever a new compulsion is imposed upon us, we automatically gain a new freedom. The two are inseparable. Only by accepting total compulsion can we achieve total freedom.

“That’s right!” shrieked Mitchell Layton.

It was an actual shriek, thin and high. It had come with the startling suddenness of a fire siren. His guests looked at Mitchell Layton.

He sat in a tapestry armchair of his drawing room, half lying, legs and stomach forward, like an obnoxious child flaunting his bad posture. Everything about the person of Mitchell Layton was almost and not quite, just short of succeeding: his body had started out to be tall, but changed its mind, leaving him with a long torso above short, stocky legs; his face had delicate bones, but the flesh had played a joke on them, puffing out, not enough to achieve obesity, just enough to suggest permanent mumps. Mitchell Layton pouted. It was not a temporary expression nor a matter of facial arrangement. It was a chronic attribute, pervading his entire person. He pouted with his whole body.

Mitchell Layton had inherited a quarter of a billion dollars and had spent the thirty-three years of his life trying to make amends for it.

Ellsworth Toohey, in dinner clothes, stood lounging against a cabinet. His nonchalance had an air of gracious informality and a touch of impertinence, as if the people around him did not deserve the preservation of rigid good manners.

His eyes moved about the room. The room was not exactly modern, not quite Colonial and just a little short of French Empire; the furnishings presented straight planes and swan-neck supports, black mirrors and electric hurricane lamps, chromium and tapestry; there was unity in a single attribute: in the expensiveness of everything.

“That’s right,” said Mitchell Layton belligerently, as if he expected everyone to disagree and was insulting them in advance. “People make too damn much fuss about freedom. What I mean is it’s a vague, over-abused word. I’m not even sure it’s such a God-damn blessing.
I
think people would be much happier in a regulated society that had a definite pattern and a unified form—like a folk dance. You know how beautiful a folk dance is. And rhythmic too. That’s because it took generations to work it out and they don’t let just any chance fool come along to change it. That’s what we need. Pattern, I mean, and rhythm. Also beauty.”

“That’s an apt comparison, Mitch,” said Ellsworth Toohey. “I’ve always told you that you had a creative mind.”

“What I mean is, what makes people unhappy is not too little choice, but too much,” said Mitchell Layton. “Having to decide, always to decide, torn every which way all of the time. Now in a society of pattern, a man could feel safe. Nobody would come to him all the time pestering him to do something. Nobody would have to do anything. What I mean is, of course, except working for the common good.”

“It’s spiritual values that count,” said Homer Slottern. “Got to be up to date and keep up with the world. This is a spiritual century.”

Homer Slottern had a big face with drowsy eyes. His shirt studs were made of rubies and emeralds combined, like gobs of salad dripping down his starched white shirt front. He owned three department stores.

“There ought to be a law to make everybody study the mystical secrets of the ages,” said Mitchell Layton. “It’s all been written out in the pyramids in Egypt.”

“That’s true, Mitch,” Homer Slottern agreed. “There’s a lot to be said for mysticism. On the one hand. On the other hand, dialectic materialism ...”

“It’s not a contradiction,” Mitchell Layton drawled contemptuously. “The world of the future will combine both.”

“As a matter of fact,” said Ellsworth Toohey, “the two are superficially varied manifestations of the same thing. Of the same intention.” His eyeglasses gave a spark, as if lighted from within; he seemed to relish this particular statement in his own way.

“All I know is, unselfishness is the only moral principle,” said Jessica Pratt, “the noblest principle and a sacred duty and much more important than freedom. Unselfishness is the only way to happiness. I would have everybody who refused to be unselfish shot. To put them out of their misery. They can’t be happy anyway.”

Jessica Pratt spoke wistfully. She had a gentle, aging face; her powdery skin, innocent of make-up, gave the impression that a finger touching it would be left with a spot of white dust.

Jessica Pratt had an old family name, no money, and a great passion: her love for her younger sister Renée. They had been left orphaned at an early age, and she had dedicated her life to Renée’s upbringing. She had sacrificed everything; she had never married; she had struggled, plotted, schemed, defrauded through the years—and achieved the triumph of Renée’s marriage to Homer Slottern.

Renée Slottern sat curled up on a footstool, munching peanuts. Once in a while she reached up to the crystal dish on a side table and took another. She exhibited no further exertion. Her pale eyes stared placidly out of her pale face.

“That’s going too far, Jess,” said Homer Slottern. “You can’t expect everybody to be a saint.”

“I don’t expect anything,” said Jessica Pratt meekly. “I’ve given up expecting long ago. But it’s education that we all need. Now I think Mr. Toohey understands. If everybody were compelled to have the proper kind of education, we’d have a better world. If we force people to do good, they will be free to be happy.”

“This is a perfectly useless discussion,” said Eve Layton. “No intelligent person believes in freedom nowadays. It’s dated. The future belongs to social planning. Compulsion is a law of nature. That’s that. It’s self-evident.”

Eve Layton was beautiful. She stood under the light of a chandelier, her smooth black hair clinging to her skull, the pale green satin of her gown alive like water about to stream off and expose the rest of her soft, tanned skin. She had the special faculty of making satin and perfume appear as modern as an aluminum table top. She was Venus rising out of a submarine hatch.

Eve Layton believed that her mission in life was to be the vanguard—it did not matter of what. Her method had always been to take a careless leap and land triumphantly far ahead of all others. Her philosophy consisted of one sentence—“I can get away with anything.” In conversation she paraphrased it to her favorite line: “I? I’m the day after tomorrow.” She was an expert horsewoman, a racing driver, a stunt pilot, a swimming champion. When she saw that the emphasis of the day had switched to the realm of ideas, she took another leap, as she did over any ditch. She landed well in front, in the latest. Having landed, she was amazed to find that there were people who questioned her feat. Nobody had ever questioned her other achievements. She acquired an impatient anger against all those who disagreed with her political views. It was a personal issue. She had to be right, since she was the day after tomorrow.

Her husband, Mitchell Layton, hated her.

“It’s a perfectly valid discussion,” he snapped. “Everybody can’t be as competent as you, my dear. We must help the others. It’s the moral duty of intellectual leaders. What I mean is we ought to lose that bugaboo of being scared of the word compulsion. It’s not compulsion when it’s for a good cause. What I mean is in the name of love. But I don’t know how we can make this country understand it. Americans are so stuffy.”

He could not forgive his country because it had given him a quarter of a billion dollars and then refused to grant him an equal amount of reverence. People would not take his views on art, literature, history, biology, sociology and metaphysics as they took his checks. He complained that people identified him with his money too much; he hated them because they did not identify him enough.

“There’s a great deal to be said for compulsion,” stated Homer Slottern. “Provided it’s democratically planned. The common good must always come first, whether we like it or not.”

Translated into language, Homer Slottern’s attitude consisted of two parts; they were contradictory parts, but this did not trouble him, since they remained untranslated in his mind. First, he felt that abstract theories were nonsense, and if the customers wanted this particular kind, it was perfectly safe to give it to them, and good business, besides. Second, he felt uneasy that he had neglected whatever it was people called spiritual life, in the rush of making money; maybe men like Toohey had something there. And what if his stores were taken away from him? Wouldn’t it really be easier to live as manager of a State-owned Department Store? Wouldn’t a manager’s salary give him all the prestige and comfort he now enjoyed, without the responsibility of ownership?

“Is it true that in the future society any woman will sleep with any man she wants,” asked Renée Slottern. It had started as a question, but it petered out. She did not really want to know. She merely felt a vapid wonder about how it felt to have a man one really wanted and how one went about wanting.

“It’s stupid to talk about personal choice,” said Eve Layton. “It’s old-fashioned. There’s no such thing as a person. There’s only a collective entity. It’s self-evident.”

Ellsworth Toohey smiled and said nothing.

“Something’s got to be done about the masses,” Mitchell Layton declared. “They’ve got to be led. They don’t know what’s good for them. What I mean is, I can’t understand why people of culture and position like us understand the great ideal of collectivism so well and are willing to sacrifice our personal advantages, while the working man who has everything to gain from it remains so stupidly indifferent. I can’t understand why the workers in this country have so little sympathy with collectivism.”

“Can’t you?” said Ellsworth Toohey. His glasses sparkled.

“I’m bored with this,” snapped Eve Layton, pacing the room, light streaming off her shoulders.

The conversation switched to art and its acknowledged leaders of the day in every field.

“Lois Cook said that words must be freed from the oppression of reason. She said the stranglehold of reason upon words is like the exploitation of the masses by the capitalists. Words must be permitted to negotiate with reason through collective bargaining. That’s what she said. She’s so amusing and refreshing.”

“Ike—what’s his name again?—says that the theater is an instrument of love. It’s all wrong, he says, about a play taking place on the stage—it takes place in the hearts of the audience.”

“Jules Fougler said in last Sunday’s Banner that in the world of the future the theater will not be necessary at all. He says that the daily life of the common man is as much a work of art in itself as the best Shakespearean tragedy. In the future there will be no need for a dramatist. The critic will simply observe the life of the masses and evaluate its artistic points for the public. That’s what Jules Fougler said. Now I don’t know whether I agree with him, but he’s got an interesting fresh angle there.”

“Lancelot Clokey says the British Empire is doomed. He says there will be no war, because the workers of the world won’t allow it, it’s international bankers and munition makers who start wars and they’ve been kicked out of the saddle. Lancelot Clokey says that the universe is a mystery and that his mother is his best friend. He says the Premier of Bulgaria eats herring for breakfast.”

“Gordon Prescott says that four walls and a ceiling is all there is to architecture. The floor is optional. All the rest is capitalistic ostentation. He says nobody should be allowed to build anything anywhere until every inhabitant of the globe has a roof over his head ... Well, what about the Patagonians? It’s
our
job to teach them to
want
a roof. Prescott calls it dialectic trans-spatial interdependence.”

Ellsworth Toohey said nothing. He stood smiling at the vision of a huge typewriter. Each famous name he heard was a key of its keyboard, each controlling a special field, each hitting, leaving its mark, and the whole making connected sentences on a vast blank sheet. A typewriter, he thought, presupposes the hand that punches its keys.

He snapped to attention when he heard Mitchell Layton’s sulking voice say:

“Oh, yes, the
Banner,
God damn it!”

“I know,” said Homer Slottern.

“It’s slipping,” said Mitchell Layton. “It’s definitely slipping. A swell investment it turned out to be for me. It’s the only time Ellsworth’s been wrong.”

“Ellsworth is never wrong,” said Eve Layton.

“Well, he was, that time. It was he who advised me to buy a piece of that lousy sheet.” He saw Toohey’s eyes, patient as velvet, and he added hastily: “What I mean is, I’m not complaining, Ellsworth. It’s all right. It may even help me to slice something off my damned income tax. But that filthy reactionary rag is sure going downhill.”

“Have a little patience, Mitch,” said Toohey.

“You don’t think I should sell and get out from under?”

“No, Mitch, I don’t.”

“Okay, if you say so. I can afford it. I can afford anything.”

“But I jolly well can’t!” Homer Slottern cried with surprising vehemence. “It’s coming to where one can’t afford to advertise in the
Banner.
It’s not their circulation—that’s okay—but there’s a feeling around—a funny kind of feeling.... Ellsworth, I’ve been thinking of dropping my contract.”

“Why?”

“Do you know about the ‘We Don’t Read Wynand’ movement?”

“I’ve heard about it.”

“It’s run by somebody named Gus Webb. They paste stickers on parked windshields and in public privies. They hiss Wynand newsreels in theaters. I don’t think it’s a large group, but ... Last week an unappetizing female threw a fit in my store—the one on Fifth Avenue—calling us enemies of labor because we advertised in the
Banner.
You can ignore that, but it becomes serious when one of our oldest customers, a mild little old lady from Connecticut and a Republican for three generations, calls us to say that perhaps maybe she should cancel her charge account, because somebody told her that Wynand is a dictator.”