XV
“THIS IS A TEST CASE. WHAT WE THINK OF IT WILL DETERMINE what we are. In the person of Howard Roark, we must crush the forces of selfishness and antisocial individualism—the curse of our modern world—here shown to us in ultimate consequences. As mentioned at the beginning of this column, the district attorney now has in his possession a piece of evidence—we cannot disclose its nature at this moment—which proves conclusively that Roark is guilty. We, the people, shall now demand justice.”
This appeared in “One Small Voice” on a morning late in May. Gail Wynand read it in his car, driving home from the airport. He had flown to Chicago in a last attempt to hold a national advertiser who had refused to renew a three-million dollar contract. Two days of skillful effort had failed; Wynand lost the advertiser. Stepping off the plane in Newark, he picked up the New York papers. His car was waiting to take him to his country house. Then he read “One Small Voice.”
He wondered for a moment what paper he held. He looked at the name on the top of the page. But it was the Banner, and the column was there, in its proper place, column one, first page, second section.
He leaned forward and told the chauffeur to drive to his office. He sat with the page spread open on his lap, until the car stopped before the Banner Building.
He noticed it at once, when he entered the building. In the eyes of two reporters who emerged from an elevator in the lobby; in the pose of the elevator man who fought a desire to turn and stare back at him; in the sudden immobility of all the men in his anteroom, in the break of a typewriter’s clicking on the desk of one secretary, in the lifted hand of another—he saw the waiting. Then he knew that all the implications of the unbelievable were understood by everyone on his paper.
He felt a first dim shock; because the waiting around him contained wonder, and something was wrong if there could be any wonder in anyone’s mind about the outcome of an issue between him and Ellsworth Toohey.
But he had no time to take notice of his own reactions. He had no attention to spare for anything except a sense of tightness, a pressure against the bones of his face, his teeth, his cheeks, the bridge of his nose—and he knew he must press back against that, keep it down, hold it.
He greeted no one and walked into his office. Alvah Scarret sat slumped in a chair before his desk. Scarret had a bandage of soiled white gauze on his throat, and his cheeks were flushed. Wynand stopped in the middle of the room. The people outside had felt relieved: Wynand’s face looked calm. Alvah Scarret knew better.
“Gail, I wasn’t here,” he gulped in a cracked whisper that was not a voice at all. “I haven’t been here for two days. Laryngitis, Gail. Ask my doctor. I wasn’t here. I just got out of bed, look at me, I’ve got a hundred and three, fever, I mean, the doctor didn’t want me to, but I ... to get up, I mean, Gail, I wasn’t here, I wasn’t here!”
He could not be certain that Wynand heard. But Wynand let him finish, then assumed the appearance of listening, as if the sounds were reaching him, delayed. After a moment, Wynand asked:
“Who was on the copy desk?”
“It ... it went through Allen and Falk.”
“Fire Harding, Allen, Falk and Toohey. Buy off Harding’s contract. But not Toohey’s. Have them all out of the building in fifteen minutes.”
Harding was the managing editor; Falk, a copyreader; Allen, the slot man, head of the copy desk; all had worked on the Banner for more than ten years. It was as if Scarret had heard a news flash announcing the impeachment of a President, the destruction of New York City by a meteor and the sinking of California into the Pacific Ocean.
“Gail!” he screamed. “We can’t!”
“Get out of here.”
Scarret got out.
Wynand pressed a switch on his desk and said in answer to the trembling voice of the woman outside:
“Don’t admit anyone.”
“Yes, Mr. Wynand.”
He pressed a button and spoke to the circulation manager.
“Stop every copy on the street.”
“Mr. Wynand, it’s too late! Most of them are ...”
“Stop them.”
“Yes, Mr. Wynand.”
He wanted to put his head down on the desk, lie still and rest, only the form of rest he needed did not exist, greater than sleep, greater than death, the rest of having never lived. The wish was like a secret taunt against himself, because he knew that the splitting pressure in his skull meant the opposite, an urge to action, so strong that he felt paralyzed. He fumbled for some sheets of clean paper, forgetting where he kept them. He had to write the editorial that would explain and counteract. He had to hurry. He felt no right to any minute that passed with the thing unwritten.
The pressure disappeared with the first word he put on paper. He thought—while his hand moved rapidly—what a power there was in words; later, for those who heard them, but first for the one who found them; a healing power, a solution, like the breaking of a barrier. He thought, perhaps the basic secret the scientists have never discovered, the first fount of life, is that which happens when a thought takes shape in words.
He heard the rumble, the vibration in the walls of his office, in the floor. The presses were running off his afternoon paper, a small tabloid, the Clarion. He smiled at the sound. His hand went faster, as if the sound were energy pumped into his fingers.
He had dropped his usual editorial “we.” He wrote: “... And if my readers or my enemies wish to laugh at me over this incident, I shall accept it and consider it the payment of a debt incurred. I have deserved it. ”
He thought: It’s the heart of this building, beating—what time is it?—do I really hear it or is it my own heart?—once, a doctor put the ends of his stethoscope into my ears and let me hear my own heartbeats -it sounded just like this—he said I was a healthy animal and good for many years—for many ... years ...
“I have foisted upon my readers a contemptible blackguard whose spiritual stature is my only excuse. I had not reached a degree of contempt for society such as would have permitted me to consider him dangerous. I am still holding on to a respect for my fellow men sufficient to let me say that Ellsworth Toohey cannot be a menace.”
They say sound never dies, but travels on in space—what happens to a man’s heartbeats?—so many of them in fifty-six years—could they be gathered again, in some sort of condenser, and put to use once more? If they were re-broadcast, would the result be the beating of those presses?
“But I have sponsored him under the masthead of my paper, and if public penance is a strange, humiliating act to perform in our modern age, such is the punishment I impose upon myself hereby.”
Not fifty-six years of those soft little drops of sound a man never hears, each single and final, not like a comma, but like a period, a long string of periods on a page, gathered to feed those presses—not fifty-six, but thirty-one, the other twenty-five went to make me ready—I was twenty-five when I raised the new masthead over the door—Publishers don’t change the name of a paper—This one does—The New York Banner—Gail Wynand’s Banner ...
“I ask the forgiveness of every man who has ever read this paper.”
A healthy animal—and that which comes from me is healthy—I must bring that doctor here and have him listen to those presses—he’ll grin in his good, smug, satisfied way, doctors like a specimen of perfect health occasionally, it’s rare enough—I must give him a treat—the healthiest sound he ever heard—and he’ll say the Banner is good for many years....
The door of his office opened and Ellsworth Toohey came in.
Wynand let him cross the room and approach the desk, without a gesture of protest. Wynand thought that what he felt was curiosity—if curiosity could be blown into the dimensions of a thing from the abyss -like those drawings of beetles the size of a house advancing upon human figures in the pages of the Banner’s Sunday supplement—curiosity, because Ellsworth Toohey was still in the building, because Toohey had gained admittance past the orders given, and because Toohey was laughing.
“I came to take my leave of absence, Mr. Wynand,” said Toohey. His face was composed; it expressed no gloating; the face of an artist who knew that overdoing was defeat and achieved the supreme of offensive-ness by remaining normal. “And to tell you that I’ll be back. On this job, on this column, in this building. In the interval you will have seen the nature of the mistake you’ve made. Do forgive me, I know this is in utterly bad taste, but I’ve waited for it for thirteen years and I think I can permit myself five minutes as a reward. So you were a possessive man, Mr. Wynand, and you loved your sense of property? Did you ever stop to think what it rested upon? Did you stop to secure the foundations? No, because you were a practical man. Practical men deal in bank accounts, real estate, advertising contracts and gilt-edged securities. They leave to the impractical intellectuals, like me, the amusements of putting the gilt edges through a chemical analysis to learn a few things about the nature and the source of gold. They hang on to Kream-O Pudding, and leave us such trivia as the theater, the movies, the radio, the schools, the book reviews and the criticism of architecture. Just a sop to keep us quiet if we care to waste our time playing with the inconsequentials of life, while you’re making money. Money is power. Is it, Mr. Wynand? So you were after power, Mr. Wynand? Power over men? You poor amateur! You never discovered the nature of your own ambition or you’d have known that you weren’t fit for it. You couldn’t use the methods required and you wouldn’t want the results. You’ve never been enough of a scoundrel. I don’t mind handing you that, because I don’t know which is worse: to be a great scoundrel or a gigantic fool. That’s why I’ll be back. And when I am, I’ll run this paper.”
Wynand said quietly:
“When you are. Now get out of here.”
 
The city room of the Banner walked out on strike.
The Union of Wynand Employees walked out in a body. A great many others, non-members, joined them. The typographical staff remained.
Wynand had never given a thought to the Union. He paid higher wages than any other publisher and no economic demands had ever been made upon him. If his employees wished to amuse themselves by listening to speeches, he saw no reason to worry about it. Dominique had tried to warn him once: “Gail, if people want to organize for wages, hours or practical demands, it’s their proper right. But when there’s no tangible purpose, you’d better watch closely.” “Darling, how many times do I have to ask you? Keep off the Banner.”
He had never taken the trouble to learn who belonged to the Union. He found now that the membership was small—and crucial; it included all his key men, not the big executives, but the rank below, expertly chosen, the active ones, the small, indispensable spark plugs: the best leg men, the general assignment men, the rewrite men, the assistant editors. He looked up their records: most of them had been hired in the last eight years; recommended by Mr. Toohey.
Non-members walked out for various reasons: some, because they hated Wynand; others, because they were afraid to remain and it seemed easier than to analyze the issue. One man, a timid little fellow, met Wynand in the hall and stopped to shriek: “We’ll be back, sweetheart, and then it’ll be a different tune!” Some left, avoiding the sight of Wynand. Others played safe. “Mr. Wynand, I hate to do it, I hate it like hell, I had nothing to do with that Union, but a strike’s a strike and I can’t permit myself to be a scab.” “Honest, Mr. Wynand, I don’t know who’s right or wrong, I do think Ellsworth pulled a dirty trick and Harding had no business letting him get away with it, but how can one be sure who’s right about anything nowadays? And one thing I won’t do is I won’t cross a picket line. No, sir. The way I feel is, pickets right or wrong.”
The strikers presented two demands: the reinstatement of the four men who had been discharged; a reversal of the Banner’s stand on the Cortlandt case.
Harding, the managing editor, wrote an article explaining his position; it was published in the New Frontiers. “I did ignore Mr. Wynand’s orders in a matter of policy, perhaps an unprecedented action for a managing editor to take. I did so with full realization of the responsibility involved. Mr. Toohey, Allen, Falk and I wished to save the Banner for the sake of its employees, its stockholders and its readers. We wished to bring Mr. Wynand to reason by peaceful means. We hoped he would give in with good grace, once he had seen the Banner committed to the stand shared by most of the press of the country. We knew the arbitrary, unpredictable and unscrupulous character of our employer, but we took the chance, willing to sacrifice ourselves to our professional duty. While we recognize an owner’s right to dictate the policy of his paper on political, sociological or economic issues, we believe that a situation has gone past the limits of decency when an employer expects self-respecting men to espouse the cause of a common criminal. We wish Mr. Wynand to realize that the day of dictatorial one-man rule is past. We must have some say in the running of the place where we make our living. It is a fight for the freedom of the press.”
Mr. Harding was sixty years old, owned an estate on Long Island, and divided his spare time between skeet-shooting and breeding pheasants. His childless wife was a member of the Board of Directors of the Workshop for Social Study; Toohey, its star lecturer, had introduced her to the Workshop. She had written her husband’s article.
The two men off the copy desk were not members of Toohey’s Union. Allen’s daughter was a beautiful young actress starred in all of Ike’s plays. Falk’s brother was secretary to Lancelot Clokey.
Gail Wynand sat at the desk in his office and looked down at a pile of paper. He had many things to do, but one picture kept coming back to him and he could not get rid of it and the sense of it clung to all his actions—the picture of a ragged boy standing before the desk of an editor: “Can you spell cat?”—“Can you spell anthropomorphology?” The identities cracked and became mixed, it seemed to him that the boy stood here, at his desk, waiting, and once he said aloud: “Go away!” He caught himself in anger, he thought: You’re cracking, you fool, now’s not the time. He did not speak aloud again, but the conversation went on silently while he read, checked and signed papers: “Go away! We have no jobs here.” “I’ll hang around. Use me when you want to. You don’t have to pay me.” “They’re paying you, don’t you understand, you little fool? They’re paying you.” Aloud, his voice normal, he said into a telephone: “Tell Manning that we’ll have to fill in with mat stuff.... Send up the proofs as soon as you can.... Send up a sandwich. Any kind.”
A few had remained with him: the old men and the copy boys. They came in, in the morning, often with cuts on their faces and blood on their collars; one stumbled in, his skull open, and had to be sent away in an ambulance. It was neither courage nor loyalty; it was inertia; they had lived too long with the thought that the world would end if they lost their jobs on the Banner. The old ones did not understand. The young ones did not care.
Copy boys were sent out on reporters’ beats. Most of the stuff they sent in was of such quality that Wynand was forced past despair into howls of laughter: he had never read such highbrow English; he could see the pride of the ambitious youth who was a journalist at last. He did not laugh when the stories appeared in the Banner as written; there were not enough rewrite men.
He tried to hire new men. He offered extravagant salaries. The people he wanted refused to work for him. A few men answered his call, and he wished they hadn’t, though he hired them. They were men who had not been employed by a reputable newspaper for ten years; the kind who would not have been allowed, a month ago, into the lobby of his building. Some of them had to be thrown out in two days; others remained. They were drunk most of the time. Some acted as if they were granting Wynand a favor. “Don’t you get huffy, Gail, old boy,” said one—and was tossed bodily down two flights of stairs. He broke an ankle and sat on the bottom landing, looking up at Wynand with an air of complete astonishment. Others were subtler; they merely stalked about and looked at Wynand slyly, almost winking, implying that they were fellow criminals tied together in a dirty deal.
He appealed to schools of journalism. No one responded. One student body sent him a resolution signed by all its members: “... Entering our careers with a high regard for the dignity of our profession, dedicating ourselves to uphold the honor of the press, we feel that none among us could preserve his self-respect and accept an offer such as yours.”
The news editor had remained at his desk; the city editor had gone. Wynand filled in as city editor, managing editor, wire man, rewrite man, copy boy. He did not leave the building. He slept on a couch in his office—as he had done in the first years of the Banner’s existence. Coatless, tieless, his shirt collar torn open, he ran up and down the stairs, his steps like the rattle of a machine gun. Two elevator boys had remained; the others had vanished, no one knew just when or why, whether prompted by sympathy for the strike, fear or plain discouragement.
Alvah Scarret could not understand Wynand’s calm. The brilliant machine—and that, thought Scarret, was really the word which had always stood for Wynand in his mind—had never functioned better. His words were brief, his orders rapid, his decisions immediate. In the confusion of machines, lead, grease, ink, waste paper, unswept offices, untenanted desks, glass crashing in sudden showers when a brick was hurled from the street below, Wynand moved like a figure in double-exposure, superimposed on his background, out of place and scale. He doesn’t belong here, thought Scarret, because he doesn’t look modern—that’s what it is—he doesn’t look modern, no matter what kind of pants he’s wearing—he looks like something out of a Gothic cathedral. The patrician head, held level, the fleshless face that had shrunk tighter together. The captain of a ship known by all, save the captain, to be sinking.
Alvah Scarret had remained. He had not grasped that the events were real; he shuffled about in a stupor; he felt a fresh jolt of bewilderment each morning when he drove up to the building and saw the pickets. He suffered no injury beyond a few tomatoes hurled at his windshield. He tried to help Wynand; he tried to do his work and that of five other men, but he could not complete a normal day’s task. He was going quietly to pieces, his joints wrenched loose by a question mark. He wasted everybody’s time, interrupting anything to ask: “But why? Why? How, just like that all of a sudden?”
He saw a nurse in white uniform walking down the hall—an emergency first-aid station had been established on the ground floor. He saw her carrying a wastebasket to the incinerator, with wadded clumps of gauze, bloodstained. He turned away; he felt sick. It was not the sight, but the greater terror of an implication grasped by his instinct: this civilized building—secure in the neatness of waxed floors, respectable with the strict grooming of modern business, a place where one dealt in such rational matters as written words and trade contracts, where one accepted ads for baby garments and chatted about golf—had become, in the span of a few days, a place where one carried bloody refuse through the halls. Why?—thought Alvah Scarret.
“I can’t understand it,” he droned in an accentless monotone to anyone around him, “I can’t understand how Ellsworth got so much power. ... And Ellsworth’s a man of culture, an idealist, not a dirty radical off a soapbox, he’s so friendly and witty, and what an erudition!—a man who jokes all the time is not a man of violence—Ellsworth didn’t mean this, he didn’t know what it would lead to, he loves people, I’d stake my shirt on Ellsworth Toohey.”
Once, in Wynand’s office, he ventured to say:
“Gail, why don’t you negotiate? Why don’t you meet with them at least?”
“Shut up.”
“But, Gail, there might be a bit of truth on their side, too. They’re newspapermen. You know what they say, the freedom of the press ...”
Then he saw the fit of fury he had expected for days and had thought safely sidetracked—the blue irises vanishing in a white smear, the blind, luminous eyeballs in a face that was all cavities, the trembling hands. But in a moment, he saw what he had never witnessed before: he saw Wynand break the fit, without sound, without relief. He saw the sweat of the effort on the hollow temples, and the fists on the edge of the desk.
“Alvah ... if I had not sat on the stairs of the Gazette for a week ... where would be the press for them to be free on?”
There were policemen outside, and in the halls of the building. It helped, but not much. One night acid was thrown at the main entrance. It burned the big plate glass of the ground floor windows and left leprous spots on the walls. Sand in the bearings stopped one of the presses. An obscure delicatessen owner got his shop smashed for advertising in the Banner. A great many small advertisers withdrew. Wynand delivery trucks were wrecked. One driver was killed. The striking Union of Wynand Employees issued a protest against acts of violence; the Union had not instigated them; most of its members did not know who had. The New Frontiers said something about regrettable excesses, but ascribed them to “spontaneous outbursts of justifiable popular anger.”
Homer Slottern, in the name of a group who called themselves the liberal businessmen, sent Wynand a notice canceling their advertising contracts. “You may sue us if you wish. We feel we have a legitimate cause for cancellation. We signed to advertise in a reputable newspaper, not in a sheet that has become a public disgrace, brings pickets to our doors, ruins our business and is not being read by anybody.” The group included most of the Banner’s wealthiest advertisers.
Gail Wynand stood at the window of his office and looked at his city.
“I have supported strikes at a time when it was dangerous to do so. I have fought Gail Wynand all my life. I had never expected to see the day or the issue when I would be forced to say—as I say now—that I stand on the side of Gail Wynand,” wrote Austen Heller in the Chronicle.
Wynand sent him a note: “God damn you, I didn’t ask you to defend me. G W”
The New Frontiers described Austen Heller as “a reactionary who has sold himself to Big Business.” Intellectual society ladies said that Austen Heller was old-fashioned.
Gail Wynand stood at a desk in the city room and wrote editorials as usual. His derelict staff saw no change in him; no haste, no outbursts of anger. There was nobody to notice that some of his actions were new: he would go to the pressroom and stand looking at the white stream shot out of the roaring giants, and listen to the sound. He would pick up a lead slug off the composing room floor, and finger it absently on the palm of his hand, like a piece of jade, and lay it carefully on a table, as if he did not want it to be wasted. He fought other forms of such waste, not noticing it, the gestures instinctive: he retrieved pencils, he spent a half-hour, while telephones shrieked unanswered, repairing a typewriter that had broken down. It was not a matter of economy; he signed checks without looking at the figures; Scarret was afraid to think of the amounts each passing day cost him. It was a matter of things that were part of the building where he loved every doorknob, things that belonged to the Banner that belonged to him.
Late each afternoon he telephoned Dominique in the country. “Fine. Everything under control. Don’t listen to panic-mongers.... No, to hell with it, you know I don’t want to talk about the damn paper. Tell me what the garden looks like.... Did you go swimming today? ... Tell me about the lake.... What dress are you wearing? ... Listen to WLX tonight, at eight, they’ll have your pet—Rachmaninoff’s Second Concerto.... Of course I have time to keep informed about everything.... Oh, all right, I see one can’t fool an ex-newspaper woman, I did go over the radio page.... Of course we have plenty of help, it’s just that I can’t quite trust some of the new boys and I had a moment to spare.... Above all, don’t come to town. You promised me that.... Good night, dearest....”
He hung up and sat looking at the telephone, smiling. The thought of the countryside was like the thought of a continent beyond an ocean that could not be crossed; it gave him a sense of being locked in a besieged fortress and he liked that—not the fact, but the feeling. His face looked like a throwback to some distant ancestor who had fought on the ramparts of a castle.
One evening he went out to the restaurant across the street; he had not eaten a complete meal for days. The streets were still light when he came back—the placid brown haze of summer, as if dulled sunrays remained stretched too comfortably on the warm air to undertake a movement of withdrawal, even though the sun had long since gone; it made the sky look fresh and the street dirty; there were patches of brown and tired orange in the corners of old buildings. He saw pickets pacing in front of the Banner’s entrance. There were eight of them and they marched around and around in a long oval on the sidewalk. He recognized one boy—a police reporter; he had never seen any of the others. They carried signs: “Toohey, Harding, Allen, Falk ...” “The Freedom of the Press ...” “Gail Wynand Tramples Human Rights ...”
His eyes kept following one woman. Her hips began at her ankles, bulging over the tight straps of her shoes; she had square shoulders and a long coat of cheap brown tweed over a huge square body. She had small white hands, the kind that would drop things all over the kitchen. She had an incision of a mouth, without lips, and she waddled as she moved, but she moved with surprising briskness. Her steps defied the whole world to hurt her, with a malicious slyness that seemed to say she would like nothing better, because what a joke it would be on the world if it tried to hurt her, just try it and see, just try it. Wynand knew she had never been employed on the Banner; she never could be; it did not appear likely that she could be taught to read; her steps seemed to add that she jolly well didn’t have to. She carried a sign: “We demand ...”
He thought of the nights when he had slept on the couch in the old Banner Building, in the first years, because the new presses had to be paid for and the Banner had to be on the streets before its competitors, and he coughed blood one night and refused to see a doctor, but it turned out to be nothing, just exhaustion.
He hurried into the building. The presses were rolling. He stood and listened for a while.
At night the building was quiet. It seemed bigger, as if sound took space and vacated it; there were panels of light at open doors, between long stretches of dim hallways. A lone typewriter clicked somewhere, evenly, like a dripping faucet. Wynand walked through the halls. He thought that men had been willing to work for him when he plugged known crooks for municipal elections, when he glamorized red-light districts, when he ruined reputations by scandalous libel, when he sobbed over the mothers of gangsters. Talented men, respected men had been eager to work for him. Now he was being honest for the first time in his career. He was leading his greatest crusade—with the help of finks, drifters, drunkards, and humble drudges too passive to quit. The guilt, he thought, was not perhaps with those who now refused to work for him.
 
The sun hit the square crystal inkstand on his desk. It made Wynand think of a cool drink on a lawn, white clothes, the feel of grass under bare elbows. He tried not to look at the gay glitter and went on writing. It was a morning in the second week of the strike. He had retreated to his office for an hour and given orders not to be disturbed; he had an article to finish; he knew he wanted the excuse, one hour of not seeing what went on in the building.
The door of his office opened without announcement, and Dominique came in. She had not been allowed to enter the Banner Building since their marriage.
He got up, a kind of quiet obedience in his movement, permitting himself no questions. She wore a coral linen suit, she stood as if the lake were behind her and the sunlight rose from the surface to the folds of her clothes. She said:
“Gail, I’ve come for my old job on the Banner.”
He stood looking at her silently; then he smiled; it was a smile of convalescence.
He turned to the desk, picked up the sheets he had written, handed them to her and said:
“Take this to the back room. Pick up the wire flimsies and bring them to me. Then report to Manning at the city desk.”
The impossible, the not to be achieved in word, glance or gesture, the complete union of two beings in complete understanding, was done by a small stack of paper passing from his hand to hers. Their fingers did not touch. She turned and walked out of the office.
Within two days, it was as if she had never left the staff of the Banner. Only now she did not write a column on houses, but kept busy wherever a competent hand was needed to fill a gap. “It’s quite all right, Alvah,” she said to Scarret, “it’s a proper feminine job to be a seamstress. I’m here to slap on patches where necessary—and boy! is this cloth ripping fast! Just call me when one of your new journalists runs amuck more than usual.”
Scarret could not understand her tone, her manner or her presence. “You’re a lifesaver, Dominique,” he mumbled sadly. “It’s like the old days, seeing you here—and oh! how I wish it were the old days! Only I can’t understand. Gail wouldn’t allow a photo of you in the place, when it was a decent, respectable place—and now when it’s practically as safe as a penitentiary during a convict riot, he lets you work here!”
“Can the commentaries, Alvah. We haven’t the time.”
She wrote a brilliant review of a movie she hadn’t seen. She dashed off a report on a convention she hadn’t attended. She batted out a string of recipes for the “Daily Dishes” column, when the lady in charge failed to show up one morning. “I didn’t know you could cook,” said Scarret. “I didn’t either,” said Dominique. She went out one night to cover a dock fire, when it was found that the only man on duty had passed out on the floor of the men’s room. “Good job,” Wynand told her when he read the story, “but try that again and you’ll get fired. If you want to stay, you’re not to step out of the building.”
This was his only comment on her presence. He spoke to her when necessary, briefly and simply, as to any other employee. He gave orders. There were days when they did not have time to see each other. She slept on a couch in the library. Occasionally, in the evening, she would come to his office, for a short rest, when they could take it, and then they talked, about nothing in particular, about small events of the day’s work, gaily, like any married couple gossiping about the normal routine of their common life.
They did not speak of Roark or Cortlandt. She had noticed Roark’s picture on the wall of his office and asked: “When did you hang that up?” “Over a year ago.” It had been their only reference to Roark. They did not discuss the growing public fury against the Banner. They did not speculate on the future. They felt relief in forgetting the question beyond the walls of the building; it could be forgotten because it stood no longer as a question between them; it was solved and answered; what remained was the peace of the simplified: they had a job to do—the job of keeping a newspaper going—and they were doing it together.
She would come in, unsummoned, in the middle of the night, with a cup of hot coffee, and he would snatch it gratefully, not pausing in his work. He would find fresh sandwiches left on his desk when he needed them badly. He had no time to wonder where she got things. Then he discovered that she had established an electric plate and a stock of supplies in a closet. She cooked breakfast for him, when he had to work all night, she came in carrying dishes on a piece of cardboard for a tray, with the silence of empty streets beyond the windows and the first light of morning on the rooftops.
Once he found her, broom in hand, sweeping an office; the maintenance department had fallen apart, charwomen appeared and disappeared, no one had time to notice.
“Is that what I’m paying you for?” he asked.
“Well, we can’t work in a pigsty. I haven’t asked you what you’re paying me, but I want a raise.”
“Drop this thing, for God’s sake! It’s ridiculous.”
“What’s ridiculous? It’s clean now. It didn’t take me long. Is it a good job?”
“It’s a good job.”
She leaned on the broom handle and laughed. “I believe you thought, like everybody else, that I’m just a kind of luxury object, a high-class type of kept woman, didn’t you, Gail?”
“Is this the way you can keep going when you want to?”
“This is the way I’ve wanted to keep going all my life—if I could find a reason for it.”
He learned that her endurance was greater than his. She never showed a sign of exhaustion. He supposed that she slept, but he could not discover when.
At any time, in any part of the building, not seeing him for hours, she was aware of him, she knew when he needed her most. Once, he fell asleep, slumped across his desk. He awakened and found her looking at him. She had turned off the lights, she sat on a chair by the window, in the moonlight, her face turned to him, calm, watching. Her face was the first thing he saw. Lifting his head painfully from his arm, in the first moment, before he could return fully to control and reality, he felt a sudden wrench of anger, helplessness and desperate protest, not remembering what had brought them here, to this, remembering only that they were both caught in some vast, slow process of torture and that he loved her.
She had seen it in his face, before he had completed the movement of straightening his body. She walked to him, she stood by his chair, she took his head and let it rest against her, she held him, and he did not resist, slumped in her arms, she kissed his hair, she whispered: “It will be all right, Gail, it will be all right.”
 
At the end of three weeks Wynand walked out of the building one evening, not caring whether there would be anything left of it when he returned, and went to see Roark.
He had not telephoned Roark since the beginning of the siege. Roark telephoned him often; Wynand answered, quietly, just answering, originating no statement, refusing to prolong the conversation. He had warned Roark at the beginning: “Don’t try to come here. I’ve given orders. You won’t be admitted.” He had to keep out of his mind the actual form which the issue of his battle could take; he had to forget the fact of Roark’s physical existence; because the thought of Roark’s person brought the thought of the county jail.
He walked the long distance to the Enright House; walking made the distance longer and safer; a ride in a cab would pull Roark too close to the Banner Building. He kept his glance slanted toward a point six feet ahead of him on the sidewalk; he did not want to look at the city.
“Good evening, Gail,” Roark said calmly when he came in.
“I don’t know what’s a more conspicuous form of bad discipline,” said Wynand, throwing his hat down on a table by the door, “to blurt things right out or to ignore them blatantly. I look like hell. Say it.”
“You do look like hell. Sit down, rest and don’t talk. Then I’ll run you a hot bath—no, you don’t look that dirty, but it will be good for you for a change. Then we’ll talk.”
Wynand shook his head and remained standing at the door.
“Howard, the Banner is not helping you. It’s ruining you.”
It had taken him eight weeks to prepare himself to say that.
“Of course,” said Roark. “What of it?”
Wynand would not advance into the room.
“Gail, it doesn’t matter, as far as I’m concerned. I’m not counting on public opinion, one way or the other.”
“You want me to give in?”
“I want you to hold out if it takes everything you own.”
He saw that Wynand understood, that it was the thing Wynand had tried not to face, and that Wynand wanted him to speak.
“I don’t expect you to save me. I think I have a chance to win. The strike won’t make it better or worse. Don’t worry about me. And don’t give in. If you stick to the end—you won’t need me any longer.”
He saw the look of anger, protest—and agreement. He added:
“You know what I’m saying. We’ll be better friends than ever—and you’ll come to visit me in jail, if necessary. Don’t wince, and don’t make me say too much. Not now. I’m glad of this strike. I knew that something like that had to happen, when I saw you for the first time. You knew it long before that.”
“Two months ago, I promised you ... the one promise I wanted to keep ...”
“You’re keeping it.”
“Don’t you really want to despise me? I wish you’d say it now. I came here to hear it.”
“All right. Listen. You have been the one encounter in my life that can never be repeated. There was Henry Cameron who died for my own cause. And you’re the publisher of filthy tabloids. But I couldn’t say this to him, and I’m saying it to you. There’s Steve Mallory who’s never compromised with his soul. And you’ve done nothing but sell yours in every known way. But I couldn’t say this to him and I’m saying it to you. Is that what you’ve always wanted to hear from me? But don’t give in.”
He turned away, and added: “That’s all. We won’t talk about your damn strike again. Sit down, I’ll get you a drink. Rest, get yourself out of looking like hell.”
Wynand returned to the Banner late at night. He took a cab. It did not matter. He did not notice the distance.
Dominique said: “You’ve seen Roark.”
“Yes. How do you know?”
“Here’s the Sunday makeup. It’s fairly lousy, but it’ll have to do. I sent Manning home for a few hours—he was going to collapse. Jackson quit, but we can do without him. Alvah’s column was a mess—he can’t even keep his grammar straight any more—I rewrote it, but don’t tell him, tell him you did.”
“Go to sleep. I’ll take Manning’s place. I’m good for hours.”
They went on, and the days passed, and in the mailing room the piles of returns grew, running over into the corridor, white stacks of paper like marble slabs. Fewer copies of the Banner were run off with every edition, but the stacks kept growing. The days passed, days of heroic effort to put out a newspaper that came back unbought and unread.