V
GAIL 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.
He drove to the foot of the hill and slammed the brakes on, startled, looking up. In his absence the house had taken shape; it could be recognized now—it looked like the drawing. He felt a moment of childish wonder that it had really come out just as on the sketch, as if he had never quite believed it. Rising against the pale blue sky, it still looked like a drawing, unfinished, the planes of masonry like spreads of water-color filled in, the naked scaffolding like pencil lines; a huge drawing on a pale blue sheet of paper.
He left the car and walked to the top of the hill. He saw Roark among the men. He stood outside and watched the way Roark walked through the structure, the way he turned his head or raised his hand, pointing. He noticed Roark’s manner of stopping: his legs apart, his arms straight at his sides, his head lifted; an instinctive pose of confidence, of energy held under effortless control, a moment that gave to his body the structural cleanliness of his own building. Structure, thought Wynand, is a solved problem of tension, of balance, of security in counterthrusts.
He thought: There’s no emotional significance in the act of erecting a building; it’s just a mechanical job, like laying sewers or making an automobile. And he wondered why he watched Roark, feeling what he felt in his art gallery. He belongs in an unfinished building, thought Wynand, more than in a completed one, more than at a drafting table, it’s his right setting, it’s becoming to him—as Dominique said a yacht was becoming to me.
Afterward Roark came out and they walked together along the crest of the hill, among the trees. They sat down on a fallen tree trunk, they saw the structure in the distance through the stems of the brushwood. The stems were dry and naked, but there was a quality of spring in the cheerful insolence of their upward thrust, the stirring of a self-assertive purpose.
Wynand asked:
“Howard, have you ever been in love?”
Roark turned to look straight at him and answer quietly:
“I still am.”
“But when you walk through a building, what you feel is greater than that?”
“Much greater, Gail.”
“I was thinking of people who say that happiness is impossible on earth. Look how hard they all try to find some joy in life. Look how they struggle for it. Why should any living creature exist in pain? By what conceivable right can anyone demand that a human being exist for anything but for his own joy? Every one of them wants it. Every part of him wants it. But they never find it. I wonder why. They whine and say they don’t understand the meaning of life. There’s a particular kind of people that I despise. Those who seek some sort of a higher purpose or ‘universal goal,’ who don’t know what to live for, who moan that they must ‘find themselves.’ You hear it all around us. That seems to be the official bromide of our century. Every book you open. Every drooling self-confession. It seems to be the noble thing to confess. I’d think it would be the most shameful one.”
“Look, Gail.” Roark got up, reached out, tore a thick branch off a tree, held it in both hands, one fist closed at each end; then, his wrists and knuckles tensed against the resistance, he bent the branch slowly into an arc. “Now I can make what I want of it: a bow, a spear, a cane, a railing. That’s the meaning of life.”
“Your strength?”
“Your work.” He tossed the branch aside. “The material the earth offers you and what you make of it ... What are you thinking of, Gail?”
“The photograph on the wall of my office.”
 
To remain controlled, as he wished, to be patient, to make of patience an active duty executed consciously each day, to stand before Roark and let her serenity tell him: “This is the hardest you could have demanded of me, but I’m glad, if it’s what you want”—such was the discipline of Dominique’s existence.
She stood by, as a quiet spectator of Roark and Wynand. She watched them silently. She had wanted to understand Wynand. This was the answer.
She accepted Roark’s visits to their house and the knowledge that in the hours of these evenings he was Wynand’s property, not hers. She met him as a gracious hostess, indifferent and smiling, not a person but an exquisite fixture of Wynand’s home, she presided at the dinner table, she left them in the study afterward.
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.