XIII
DOMINIQUE GLANCED ABOUT THE BEDROOM OF THE PENTHOUSE. IT was her first contact with surroundings she was ready to recognize. She knew she had been brought here after many days in a hospital. The bedroom seemed lacquered with light. It’s that clarity of crystal over everything, she thought; that has remained; it will remain forever. She saw Wynand standing by her bed. He was watching her. He looked amused.
She remembered seeing him at the hospital. He had not looked amused then. She knew the doctor had told him she would not survive, that first night. She had wanted to tell them all that she would, that she had no choice now but to live; only it did not seem important to tell people anything, ever.
Now she was back. She could feel bandages on her throat, her legs, her left arm. But her hands lay before her on the blanket, and the gauze had been removed; there were only a few thin red scars left.
“You blasted little fool!” said Wynand happily. “Why did you have to make such a good job of it?”
Lying on the white pillow, with her smooth gold hair and a white, high-necked hospital gown, she looked younger than she had ever looked as a child. She had the quiet radiance presumed and never found in childhood: the full consciousness of certainty, of innocence, of peace.
“I ran out of gas,” she said, “and I was waiting there in my car when suddenly ...”
“I’ve already told that story to the police. So has the night watchman. But didn’t you know that glass must be handled with discretion?”
Gail looks rested, she thought, and very confident. It has changed everything for him, too; in the same way.
“It didn’t hurt,” she said.
“Next time you want to play the innocent bystander, let me coach you.”
“They believe it though, don’t they?”
“Oh yes, they believe it. They have to. You almost died. I don’t see why he had to save the watchman’s life and almost take yours.”
“Who?”
“Howard, my dear. Howard Roark.”
“What has he to do with it?”
“Darling, you’re not being questioned by the police. You will be, though, and you’ll have to be more convincing than that. However, I’m sure you’ll succeed. They won’t think of the Stoddard trial.”
“Oh.”
“You did it then and you’ll always do it. Whatever you think of him, you’ll always feel what I feel about his work.”
“Gail, you’re glad I did it?”
“Yes.”
She saw him looking down at her hand that lay on the edge of the bed. Then he was on his knees, his lips pressed to her hand, not raising it, not touching it with his fingers, only with his mouth. That was the sole confession he would permit himself of what her days in the hospital had cost him. She lifted her other hand and moved it over his hair. She thought: It will be worse for you than if I had died, Gail, but it will be all right, it won’t hurt you, there’s no pain left in the world, nothing to compare with the fact that we exist: he, you and I—you’ve understood all that matters, though you don’t know you’ve lost me.
He lifted his head and got up.
“I didn’t intend to reproach you in any way. Forgive me.”
“I won’t die, Gail. I feel wonderful.”
“You look it.”
“Have they arrested him?”
“He’s out on bail.”
“You’re happy?”
“I’m glad you did it and that it was for him. I’m glad he did it. He had to.”
“Yes. And it will be the Stoddard trial again.”
“Not quite.”
“You’ve wanted another chance, Gail? All these years?”
“Yes.”
“May I see the papers?”
“No. Not until you’re up.”
“Not even the Banner?”
“Particularly not the Banner.”
“I love you, Gail. If you stick to the end ...”
“Don’t offer me any bribes. This is not between you and me. Not even between him and me.”
“But between you and God?”
“If you want to call it that. But we won’t discuss it. Not until after it’s over. You have a visitor waiting for you downstairs. He’s been here every day.”
“Who?”
“Your lover. Howard Roark. Want to let him thank you now?”
The gay mockery, the tone of uttering the most preposterous thing he could think of, told her how far he was from guessing the rest. She said:
“Yes. I want to see him. Gail, if I decide to make him my lover?”
“I’ll kill you both. Now don’t move, lie flat, the doctor said you must take it easy, you’ve got twenty-six assorted stitches all over you.”
He walked out and she heard him descending the stairs.
When the first policeman had reached the scene of the explosion, he had found, behind the building, on the shore of the river, the plunger that had set off the dynamite. Roark stood by the plunger, his hands in his pockets, looking at the remnants of Cortlandt.
“What do you know about this, buddy?” the policeman asked.
“You’d better arrest me,” said Roark. “I’ll talk at the trial.”
He had not added another word in reply to all the official questions that followed.
It was Wynand who got him released on bail, in the early hours of the morning. Wynand had been calm at the emergency hospital where he had seen Dominique’s wounds and had been told she would not live. He had been calm while he telephoned, got a county judge out of bed and arranged Roark’s bail. But when he stood in the warden’s office of a small county jail, he began to shake suddenly. “You bloody fools!” he said through his teeth and there followed every obscenity he had learned on the waterfront. He forgot all the aspects of the situation save one: Roark being held behind bars. He was Stretch Wynand of Hell’s Kitchen again and this was the kind of fury that had shattered him in sudden flashes in those days, the fury he had felt when standing behind a crumbling wall, waiting to be killed. Only now he knew that he was also Gail Wynand, the owner of an empire, and he couldn’t understand why some sort of legal procedure was necessary, why he didn’t smash this jail, with his fists or through his papers, it was all one to him at the moment, he wanted to kill, he had to kill, as that night behind the wall, in defense of his life.
He managed to sign papers, he managed to wait until Roark was brought out to him. They walked out together, Roark leading him by the wrist, and by the time they reached the car, Wynand was calm. In the car, Wynand asked:
“You did it, of course?”
“Of course.”
“We’ll fight it out together.”
“If you want to make it your battle.”
“At the present estimate, my personal fortune amounts to forty million dollars. That should be enough to hire any lawyer you wish or the whole profession.”
“I won’t use a lawyer.”
“Howard! You’re not going to submit photographs again?”
“No. Not this time.”
Roark entered the bedroom and sat down on a chair by the bed. Dominique lay still, looking at him. They smiled at each other. Nothing has to be said, not this time either, she thought.
She asked:
“You were in jail?”
“For a few hours.”
“What was it like?”
“Don’t start acting about it as Gail did.”
“Gail took it very badly?”
“Very.”
“I won’t.”
“I might have to go back to a cell for years. You knew that when you agreed to help me.”
“Yes. I knew that.”
“I’m counting on you to save Gail, if I go.”
“Counting on me?”
He looked at her and shook his head. “Dearest ...” It sounded like a reproach.
“Yes?” she whispered.
“Don’t you know by now that it was a trap I set for you?”
“How?”
“What would you do if I hadn’t asked you to help me?”
“I’d be with you, in your apartment, at the Enright House, right now, publicly and openly.”
“Yes. But now you can’t. You’re Mrs. Gail Wynand, you’re above suspicion, and everyone believes you were at the scene by accident. Just let it be known what we are to each other—and it will be a confession that I did it.”
“I see.”
“I want you to keep quiet. If you had any thoughts of wanting to share my fate, drop them. I won’t tell you what I intend to do, because that’s the only way I have of controlling you until the trial. Dominique, if I’m convicted, I want you to remain with Gail. I’m counting on that. I want you to remain with him, and never tell him about us, because he and you will need each other.”
“And if you’re acquitted?”
“Then ...” He glanced about the room, Wynand’s bedroom. “I don’t want to say it here. But you know it.”
“You love him very much?”
“Yes.”
“Enough to sacrifice ...”
He smiled. “You’ve been afraid of that ever since I came here for the first time?”
“Yes.”
He looked straight at her. “Did you think that possible?”
“No.”
“Not my work nor you, Dominique. Not ever. But I can do this much for him: I can leave it to him if I have to go.”
“You’ll be acquitted.”
“That’s not what I want to hear you say.”
“If they convict you—if they lock you in jail or put you in a chain gang—if they smear your name in every filthy headline—if they never let you design another building—if they never let me see you again—it will not matter. Not too much. Only down to a certain point.”
“That’s what I’ve waited to hear for seven years, Dominique.”
He took her hand, he raised it and held it to his lips, and she felt his lips where Wynand’s had been. Then he got up.
“I’ll wait,” she said. “I’ll keep quiet. I won’t come near you. I promise.”
He smiled and nodded. Then he left.
“It happens, upon rare occasions, that world forces too great to comprehend become focused in a single event, like rays gathered by a lens to one point of superlative brightness, for all of us to see. Such an event is the outrage of Cortlandt. Here, in a microcosm, we can observe the evil that has crushed our poor planet from the day of its birth in cosmic ooze. One man’s Ego against all the concepts of mercy, humanity and brotherhood. One man destroying the future home of the disinherited. One man condemning thousands to the horror of the slums, to filth, disease and death. When an awakening society, with a new sense of humanitarian duty, made a mighty effort to rescue the underprivileged, when the best talents of society united to create a decent home for them—the egotism of one man blew the achievement of others to pieces. And for what? For some vague matter of personal vanity, for some empty conceit. I regret that the laws of our state allow nothing more than a prison sentence for this crime. That man should forfeit his life. Society needs the right to rid itself of men such as Howard Roark.”
Thus spoke Ellsworth M. Toohey in the pages of the New Frontiers.
Echoes answered him from all over the country. The explosion of Cortlandt had lasted half a minute. The explosion of public fury went on and on, with a cloud of powdered plaster filling the air, with glass, rust and refuse raining out of the cloud.
Roark had been indicted by a grand jury, had pleaded “Not guilty” and had refused to make any other statement. He had been released on a bond furnished by Gail Wynand, and he awaited trial.
There were many speculations on his motive. Some said it was professional jealousy. Others declared that there was a certain similarity between the design of Cortlandt and Roark’s style of building, that Keating, Prescott and Webb might have borrowed a little from Roark—“a legitimate adaptation”—“there’s no property rights on ideas”—“in a democracy, art belongs to all the people”—and that Roark had been prompted by the vengeance lust of an artist who had believed himself plagiarized.
None of it was too clear, but nobody cared too much about the motive. The issue was simple: one man against many. He had no right to a motive.
A home, built in charity, for the poor. Built upon ten thousand years in which men had been taught that charity and self-sacrifice are an absolute not to be questioned, the touchstone of virtue, the ultimate ideal. Ten thousand years of voices speaking of service and sacrifice—sacrifice is the prime rule of life—serve or be served—crush or get crushed—sacrince is noble—make what you can of it, at the one end or the other—serve and sacrifice—serve and serve and serve ...
Against that—one man who wished neither to serve nor to rule. And had thereby committed the only unforgivable crime.
It was a sensational scandal, and there was the usual noise and the usual lust of righteous anger, such as is proper to all lynchings. But there was a fierce, personal quality in the indignation of every person who spoke about it.
“He’s just an egomaniac devoid of all moral sense”—
—said the society woman dressing for a charity bazaar, who dared not contemplate what means of self-expression would be left to her and how she could impose her ostentation on her friends, if charity were not the all-excusing virtue—
—said the social worker who had found no aim in life and could generate no aim from within the sterility of his soul, but basked in virtue and held an unearned respect from all, by grace of his fingers on the wounds of others—
—said the novelist who had nothing to say if the subject of service and sacrifice were to be taken away from him, who sobbed in the hearing of attentive thousands that he loved them and loved them and would they please love him a little in return—
—said the lady columnist who had just bought a country mansion because she wrote so tenderly about the little people-
-said all the little people who wanted to hear of love, the great love, the unfastidious love, the love that embraced everything, forgave everything and permitted them everything—
—said every second-hander who could not exist except as a leech on the souls of others.
Ellsworth Toohey sat back, watched, listened and smiled.
Gordon L. Prescott and Gus Webb were entertained at dinners and cocktail parties; they were treated with tender, curious solicitude, like survivors of disaster. They said that they could not understand what possible motive Roark could have had, and they demanded justice.
Peter Keating went nowhere. He refused to see the press. He refused to see anyone. But he issued a written statement that he believed Roark was not guilty. His statement contained one curious sentence, the last. It said: “Leave him alone, please can’t you leave him alone?”
Pickets from the Council of American Builders paced in front of the Cord Building. It served no purpose, because there was no work in Roark’s office. The commissions he was to start had been canceled.
This was solidarity. The debutante having her toenails pedicured—the housewife buying carrots from a pushcart—the bookkeeper who had wanted to be a pianist, but had the excuse of a sister to support—the businessman who hated his business—the worker who hated his work—the intellectual who hated everybody—all were united as brothers in the luxury of common anger that cured boredom and took them out of themselves, and they knew well enough what a blessing it was to be taken out of themselves. The readers were unanimous. The press was unanimous.
Gail Wynand went against the current.
“Gail!” Alvah Scarret had gasped. “We can’t defend a dynamiter!”
“Keep still, Alvah,” Wynand had said, “before I bash your teeth in.”
Gail Wynand stood alone in the middle of his office, his head thrown back, glad to be living, as he had stood on a wharf on a dark night facing the lights of a city.
“In the filthy howling now going on all around us,” said an editorial in the Banner, signed “Gail Wynand” in big letters, “nobody seems to remember that Howard Roark surrendered himself of his own free will. If he blew up that building—did he have to remain at the scene to be arrested? But we don’t wait to discover his reasons. We have convicted him without a hearing. We want him to be guilty. We are delighted with this case. What you hear is not indignation—it’s gloating. Any illiterate maniac, any worthless moron who commits some revolting murder, gets shrieks of sympathy from us and marshals an army of humanitarian defenders. But a man of genius is guilty by definition. Granted that it is a vicious injustice to condemn a man simply because he is weak and small. To what level of depravity has a society descended when it condemns a man simply because he is strong and great? Such, however, is the whole moral atmosphere of our century—the century of the second-rater.”
“We hear it shouted,” said another Wynand editorial, “that Howard Roark spends his career in and out of courtrooms. Well, that is true. A man like Roark is on trial before society all his life. Whom does that indict—Roark or society?”
“We have never made an effort to understand what is greatness in man and how to recognize it,” said another Wynand editorial. “We have come to hold, in a kind of mawkish stupor, that greatness is to be gauged by self-sacrifice. Self-sacrifice, we drool, is the ultimate virtue. Let’s stop and think for a moment. Is sacrifice a virtue? Can a man sacrifice his integrity? His honor? His freedom? His ideal? His convictions? The honesty of his feeling? The independence of his thought? But these are a man’s supreme possessions. Anything he gives up for them is not a sacrifice but an easy bargain. They, however, are above sacrificing to any cause or consideration whatsoever. Should we not, then, stop preaching dangerous and vicious nonsense? Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed. It is the unsacrificed self that we must respect in man above all.”
This editorial was quoted in the New Frontiers and in many newspapers, reprinted in a box under the heading: “Look who’s talking!”
Gail Wynand laughed. Resistance fed him and made him stronger. This was a war, and he had not engaged in a real war for years, not since the time when he laid the foundations of his empire amid cries of protest from the whole profession. He was granted the impossible, the dream of every man: the chance and intensity of youth, to be used with the wisdom of experience. A new beginning and a climax, together. I have waited and lived, he thought, for this.
His twenty-two newspapers, his magazines, his newsreels were given the order: Defend Roark. Sell Roark to the public. Stem the lynching.
“Whatever the facts,” Wynand explained to his staff, “this is not going to be a trial by facts. It’s a trial by public opinion. We’ve always made public opinion. Let’s make it. Sell Roark. I don’t care how you do it. I’ve trained you. You’re experts at selling. Now show me how good you are.”
He was greeted by silence, and his employees glanced at one another. Alvah Scarret mopped his forehead. But they obeyed.
The Banner printed a picture of the Enright House, with the caption: “Is this the man you want to destroy?” A picture of Wynand’s home: “Match this, if you can.” A picture of Monadnock Valley: “Is this the man who has contributed nothing to society?”
The Banner ran Roark’s biography, under the byline of a writer nobody had ever heard of; it was written by Gail Wynand. The Banner ran a series on famous trials in which innocent men had been convicted by the majority prejudice of the moment. The Banner ran articles on men martyred by society: Socrates, Galileo, Pasteur, the thinkers, the scientists, a long, heroic line—each a man who stood alone, the man who defied men.
“But, Gail, for God’s sake, Gail, it was a housing project!” wailed Alvah Scarret.
Wynand looked at him helplessly: “I suppose it’s impossible to make you fools understand that that has nothing to do with it. All right. We’ll talk about housing projects.”
The Banner ran an expose of the housing racket: the graft, the incompetence, the structures erected at five times the cost a private builder would have needed, the settlements built and abandoned, the horrible performance accepted, admired, forgiven, protected by the sacred cow of altruism. “Hell is said to be paved with good intentions,” said the Banner. “Could it be because we’ve never learned to distinguish what intentions constitute the good? Is it not time to learn? Never have there been so many good intentions so loudly proclaimed in the world. And look at it.”
The Banner editorials were written by Gail Wynand as he stood at a table in the composing room, written as always on a huge piece of print stock, with a blue pencil, in letters an inch high. He slammed the G W at the end, and the famous initials had never carried such an air of reckless pride.
Dominique had recovered and returned to their country house. Wynand drove home late in the evening. He brought Roark along as often as he could. They sat together in the living room, with the windows open to the spring night. The dark stretches of the hill rolled gently down to the lake from under the walls of the house, and the lake glittered through the trees far below. They did not talk of the case or of the coming trial. But Wynand spoke of his crusade, impersonally, almost as if it did not concern Roark at all. Wynand stood in the middle of the room, saying:
“All right, it was contemptible—the whole career of the Banner. But this will vindicate everything. Dominique, I know you’ve never been able to understand why I’ve felt no shame in my past. Why I love the Banner. Now you’ll see the answer. Power. I hold a power I’ve never tested. Now you’ll see the test. They’ll think what I want them to think. They’ll do as I say. Because it is my city and I do run things around here. Howard, by the time you come to trial, I’ll have them all twisted in such a way there won’t be a jury who’ll dare convict you.”
He could not sleep at night. He felt no desire to sleep. “Go on to bed,” he would say to Roark and Dominique, “I’ll come up in a few minutes.” Then, Dominique from the bedroom, Roark from the guest room across the hall, would hear Wynand’s steps pacing the terrace for hours, a kind of joyous restlessness in the sound, each step like a sentence anchored, a statement pounded into the floor.
Once, when Wynand dismissed them, late at night, Roark and Dominique went up the stairs together and stopped on the first landing; they heard the violent snap of a match in the living room below, a sound that carried the picture of a hand jerked recklessly, lighting the first of the cigarettes that would last till dawn, a small dot of fire crossing and recrossing the terrace to the pounding of steps.
They looked down the stairs and then looked at each other.
“It’s horrible,” said Dominique.
“It’s great,” said Roark.
“He can’t help you, no matter what he does.”
“I know he can’t. That’s not the point.”
“He’s risking everything he has to save you. He doesn’t know he’ll lose me if you’re saved.”
“Dominique, which will be worse for him—to lose you or to lose his crusade?” She nodded, understanding. He added: “You know that it’s not me he wants to save. I’m only the excuse.”
She lifted her hand. She touched his cheekbone, a faint pressure of her finger tips. She could allow herself nothing else. She turned and went on to her bedroom, and heard him closing the guest-room door.
“Is it not appropriate,” wrote Lancelot Clokey in a syndicated article, “that Howard Roark is being defended by the Wynand papers? If anyone doubts the moral issues involved in this appalling case, here is the proof of what’s what and who stands where. The Wynand papers—that stronghold of yellow journalism, vulgarity, corruption and muckraking, that organized insult to public taste and decency, that intellectual underworld ruled by a man who has less conception of principles than a cannibal—the Wynand papers are the proper champions of Howard Roark, and Howard Roark is their rightful hero. After a lifetime devoted to blasting the integrity of the press, it is only fit that Gail Wynand should now support a cruder fellow dynamiter.”
“All this fancy talk going ’round,” said Gus Webb in a public speech, “is a lot of bull. Here’s the plain dope. That guy Wynand’s salted away plenty, and I mean plenty, by skinning suckers in the real-estate racket all these years. Does he like it when the government muscles in and shoves him out, so’s the little fellows can get a clean roof over their heads and a modern John for their kids? You bet your boots he don’t like it, not one bit. It’s a put-up job between the two of them, Wynand and that redheaded boy friend of his, and if you ask me the boy friend got a good hunk of cash out of Mr. Wynand for pulling the job.”
“We have it from an unimpeachable source,” wrote a radical newspaper, “that Cortlandt was only the first step in a gigantic plot to blow up every housing project, every public power plant, post office and school house in the U.S.A. The conspiracy is headed by Gail Wynand-as we can see—and by other bloated capitalists of his kind, including some of our biggest moneybags.”
“Too little attention has been paid to the feminine angle of this case,” wrote Sally Brent in the New Frontiers. “The part played by Mrs. Gail Wynand is certainly highly dubious, to say the least. Isn’t it just the cutest coincidence that it was Mrs. Wynand who just so conveniently sent the watchman away at just the right time? And that her husband is now raising the roof to defend Mr. Roark? If we weren’t blinded by a stupid, senseless, old-fashioned sense of gallantry where a so-called beautiful woman is concerned, we wouldn’t allow that part of the case to be hushed up. If we weren’t overawed by Mrs. Wynand’s social position and the so-called prestige of her husband—who’s making an utter fool of himself—we’d ask a few questions about the story that she almost lost her life in the disaster. How do we know she did? Doctors can be bought, just like anybody else, and Mr. Gail Wynand is an expert in such matters. If we consider all this, we might well see the outlines of something that looks like a most revolting ‘design for living.’ ”
“The position taken by the Wynand press,” wrote a quiet, conservative newspaper, “is inexplicable and disgraceful.”
The circulation of the Banner dropped week by week, the speed accelerating in the descent, like an elevator out of control. Stickers and buttons inscribed “We Don’t Read Wynand” grew on walls, subway posts, windshields and coat lapels. Wynand newsreels were booed off the theater screens. The Banner vanished from corner newsstands; the news vendors had to carry it, but they hid it under their counters and produced it grudgingly, only upon request. The ground had been prepared, the pillars eaten through long ago; the Cortlandt case provided the final impact.
Roark was almost forgotten in the storm of indignation against Gail Wynand. The angriest protests came from Wynand’s own public: from the Women’s Clubs, the ministers, the mothers, the small shopkeepers. Alvah Scarret had to be kept away from the room where hampers of letters to the editor were being filled each day; he started by reading the letters—and his friends on the staff undertook to prevent a repetition of the experience, fearing a stroke.
The staff of the Banner worked in silence. There were no furtive glances, no whispered cuss words, no gossip in washrooms any longer. A few men resigned. The rest worked on, slowly, heavily, in the manner of men with life belts buckled, waiting for the inevitable.
Gail Wynand noticed a kind of lingering tempo in every action around him. When he entered the Banner Building, his employees stopped at sight of him; when he nodded to them, their greeting came a second too late; when he walked on and turned, he found them staring after him. The “Yes, Mr. Wynand,” that had always answered his orders without a moment’s cut between the last syllable of his voice and the first letter of the answer, now came late, and the pause had a tangible shape, so that the answer sounded like a sentence not followed but preceded by a question mark.
“One Small Voice” kept silent about the Cortlandt case. Wynand had summoned Toohey to his office, the day after the explosion, and had said: “Listen, you. Not a word in your column. Understand? What you do or yell outside is none of my business—for the time being. But if you yell too much, I’ll take care of you when this is over.”
“Yes, Mr. Wynand.”
“As far as your column is concerned, you’re deaf, dumb and blind. You’ve never heard of any explosion. You’ve never heard of anyone named Roark. You don’t know what the word Cortlandt means. So long as you’re in this building.”
“Yes, Mr. Wynand.”
“And don’t let me see too much of you around here.”
“Yes, Mr. Wynand.”
Wynand’s lawyer, an old friend who had served him for years, tried to stop him.
“Gail, what’s the matter? You’re acting like a child. Like a green amateur. Pull yourself together, man.”
“Shut up,” said Wynand.
“Gail, you are ... you were the greatest newspaperman on earth. Do I have to tell you the obvious? An unpopular cause is a dangerous business for anyone. For a popular newspaper—it’s suicide.”
“If you don’t shut your mouth, I’ll send you packing and get myself another shyster.”
Wynand began to argue about the case—with the prominent men he met at business luncheons and dinners. He had never argued before on any subject; he had never pleaded. He had merely tossed final statements to respectful listeners. Now he found no listeners. He found an indifferent silence, half boredom, half resentment. The men who had gathered every word he cared to drop about the stock market, real estate, advertising, politics, had no interest in his opinion on art, greatness and abstract justice.
He heard a few answers:
“Yes, Gail, yes, sure. But on the other hand, I think it was damn selfish of the man. And that’s the trouble with the world today—selfish-ness. Too much selfishness everywhere. That’s what Lancelot Clokey said in his book—swell book, all about his childhood, you read it, saw your picture with Clokey. Clokey’s been all over the world, he knows what he’s talking about.”
“Yes, Gail, but aren’t you kind of old-fashioned about it? What’s all that great man stuff? What’s great about a glorified bricklayer? Who’s great anyway? We’re all just a lot of glands and chemicals and whatever we ate for breakfast. I think Lois Cook explained it very well in that beautiful little—what’s its name?—yes, The Gallant Gallstone. Yes, sir. Your own Banner plugged like blazes for that little book.”
“But look, Gail, he should’ve thought of other people before he thought of himself. I think if a man’s got no love in his heart he can’t be much good. I heard that in a play last night—that was a grand play—the new one by Ike—what the hell’s his last name?—you ought to see it—your own Jules Fougler said it’s a brave and tender stage poem.”
“You make out a good case, Gail, and I wouldn’t know what to say against it, I don’t know where you’re wrong, but it doesn’t sound right to me, because Ellsworth Toohey—now don’t misunderstand me, I don’t agree with Toohey’s political views at all, I know he’s a radical, but on the other hand you’ve got to admit that he’s a great idealist with a heart as big as a house—well, Ellsworth Toohey said ...”
These were the millionaires, the bankers, the industrialists, the businessmen who could not understand why the world was going to hell, as they moaned in all their luncheon speeches.
One morning when Wynand stepped out of his car in front of the Banner Building, a woman rushed up to him as he crossed the sidewalk. She had been waiting by the entrance. She was fat and middle-aged. She wore a filthy cotton dress and a crushed hat. She had a pasty, sagging face, a shapeless mouth and black, round, brilliant eyes. She stood before Gail Wynand and she flung a bunch of rotted beet leaves at his face. There were no beets, just the leaves, soft and slimy, tied with a string. They hit his cheek and rolled down to the sidewalk.
Wynand stood still. He looked at the woman. He saw the white flesh, the mouth hanging open in triumph, the face of self-righteous evil. Passers-by had seized the woman and she was screaming unspeakable obscenities. Wynand raised his hand, shook his head, gesturing for them to let the creature go, and walked into the Banner Building, a smear of greenish-yellow across his cheek.
“Ellsworth, what are we going to do?” moaned Alvah Scarret. “What are we going to do?”
Ellsworth Toohey sat perched on the edge of his desk, and smiled as if he wished he could kiss Alvah Scarret.
“Why don’t they drop the damn thing, Ellsworth? Why doesn’t something break to take it off the front pages? Couldn’t we scare up an international situation or something? In all my born days I’ve never seen people go so wild over so little. A dynamiting job! Christ, Ellsworth, it’s a back-page story. We get them every month, practically with every strike, remember?—the furriers’ strike, the dry cleaners’ strike ... oh what the hell! Why all this fury? Who cares? Why do they care?”
“There are occasions, Alvah, when the issues at stake are not the ostensible facts at all. And the public reaction seems out of all proportion, but isn’t. You shouldn’t be so glum about it. I’m surprised at you. You should be thanking your stars. You see, this is what I meant by waiting for the right moment. The right moment always comes. Damned if I expected it to be handed to me on a platter like that, though. Cheer up, Alvah. This is where we take over.”
“Take over what?”
“The Wynand papers.”
“You’re crazy, Ellsworth. Like all of them. You’re crazy. What do you mean? Gail holds fifty-one per cent of ...”
“Alvah, I love you. You’re wonderful, Alvah. I love you, but I wish to God you weren’t such a God-damn fool, so I could talk to you! I wish I could talk to somebody.”
Ellsworth Toohey tried to talk to Gus Webb, one evening, but it was disappointing. Gus Webb drawled:
“Trouble with you, Ellsworth, is you’re too romantic. Too God-damn metaphysical. What’s all the gloating about? There’s no practical value to the thing. Nothing to get your teeth into, except for a week or two. I wish he’d blasted it when it was full of people—a few children blown to pieces—then you’d have something. Then I’d love it. The movement could use it. But this? Hell, they’ll send the fool to the clink and that’s that. You—a realist? You’re an incurable specimen of the intelligentsia, Ellsworth, that’s all you are. You think you’re the man of the future? Don’t kid yourself, sweetheart. I am.”
Toohey sighed. “You’re right, Gus,” he said.