VII
WHEN DOMINIQUE STEPPED OFF THE TRAIN IN NEW YORK, Wynand was there to meet her. She had not written to him nor heard from him during the weeks of her residence in Reno; she had notified no one of her return. But his figure standing on the platform, standing calmly, with an air of finality, told her that he had kept in touch with her lawyers, had followed every step of the divorce proceedings, had known the date when the decree was granted, the hour when she took the train and the number of her compartment.
He did not move forward when he saw her. It was she who walked to him, because she knew that he wanted to see her walking, if only the short space between them. She did not smile, but her face had the lovely serenity that can become a smile without transition.
“Hello, Gail.”
“Hello, Dominique.”
She had not thought of him in his absence, not sharply, not with a personal feeling of his reality, but now she felt an immediate recognition, a sense of reunion with someone known and needed.
He said: “Give me your baggage checks, I’ll have it attended to later; my car is outside.”
She handed him the checks and he slipped them into his pocket. They knew they must turn and walk up the platform to the exit, but the decisions both had made in advance broke down in the same instant, because they did not turn, but remained standing, looking at each other.
He made the first effort to correct the breach. He smiled lightly.
“If I had the right to say it, I’d say that I couldn’t have endured the waiting had I known that you’d look as you do. But since I have no such right, I’m not going to say it.”
She laughed. “All right, Gail. That was a form of pretense, too—our being too casual. It makes things more important, not less, doesn’t it? Let’s say whatever we wish.”
“I love you,” he said, his voice expressionless, as if the words were a statement of pain and not addressed to her.
“I’m glad to be back with you, Gail. I didn’t know I would be, but I’m glad.”
“In what way, Dominique?”
“I don’t know. In a way of contagion from you, I think. In a way of finality and peace.”
Then they noticed that this was said in the middle of a crowded platform, with people and baggage racks hurrying past.
They walked out to the street, to his car. She did not ask where they were going; and did not care. She sat silently beside him. She felt divided, most of her swept by a wish not to resist, and a small part of her left to wonder about it. She felt a desire to let him carry her—a feeling of confidence without appraisal, not a happy confidence, but confidence. After a while, she noticed that her hand lay in his, the length of her gloved fingers held to the length of his, only the spot of her bare wrist pressed to his skin. She had not noticed him take her hand; it seemed so natural and what she had wanted from the moment of seeing him. But she would not allow herself to want it.
“Where are we going, Gail?” she asked.
“To get the license. Then to the judge’s office. To be married.”
She sat up slowly, turning to face him. She did not withdraw her hand, but her fingers became rigid, conscious, taken away from him.
“No,” she said.
She smiled and held the smile too long, in deliberate, fixed precision. He looked at her calmly.
“I want a real wedding, Gail. I want it at the most ostentatious hotel in town. I want engraved invitations, guests, mobs of guests, celebrities, flowers, flash bulbs and newsreel cameras. I want the kind of wedding the public expects of Gail Wynand.”
He released her fingers, simply, without resentment. He looked abstracted for a moment, as if he were calculating a problem in arithmetic, not too difficult. Then he said:
“All right. That will take a week to arrange. I could have it done tonight, but if it’s engraved invitations, we must give the guests a week’s notice at the least. Otherwise it would look abnormal and you want a normal Gail Wynand wedding. I’ll have to take you to a hotel now, where you can live for a week. I had not planned for this, so I’ve made no reservations. Where would you like to stay?”
“At your penthouse.”
“No.”
“The Nordland, then.”
He leaned forward and said to the chauffeur:
“The Nordland, John.”
In the lobby of the hotel, he said to her:
“I will see you a week from today, Tuesday, at the Noyes-Belmont, at four o’clock in the afternoon. The invitations will have to be in the name of your father. Let him know that I’ll get in touch with him. I’ll attend to the rest.”
He bowed, his manner unchanged, his calm still holding the same peculiar quality made of two things: the mature control of a man so certain of his capacity for control that it could seem casual, and a childlike simplicity of accepting events as if they were subject to no possible change.
She did not see him during that week. She found herself waiting impatiently.
She saw him again when she stood beside him, facing the judge who pronounced the words of the marriage ceremony over the silence of six hundred people in the floodlighted ballroom of the Noyes-Belmont Hotel.
The background she had wished was set so perfectly that it became its own caricature, not a specific society wedding, but an impersonal prototype of lavish, exquisite vulgarity. He had understood her wish and obeyed scrupulously; he had refused himself the relief of exaggeration, he had not staged the event crudely, but made it beautiful in the exact manner Gail Wynand, the publisher, would have chosen had he wished to be married in public. But Gail Wynand did not wish to be married in public.
He made himself fit the setting, as if he were part of the bargain, subject to the same style. When he entered, she saw him looking at the mob of guests as if he did not realize that such a mob was appropriate to a Grand Opera premiere or a royal rummage sale, not to the solemn climax of his life. He looked correct, incomparably distinguished.
Then she stood with him, the mob becoming a heavy silence and a gluttonous stare behind him, and they faced the judge together. She wore a long, black dress with a bouquet of fresh jasmine, his present, attached by a black band to her wrist. Her face in the halo of a black lace hat was raised to the judge who spoke slowly, letting his words hang one by one in the air.
She glanced at Wynand. He was not looking at her nor at the judge. Then she knew that he was alone in that room. He held this moment and he made of it, of the glare, of the vulgarity, a silent height of his own. He had not wished a religious ceremony, which he did not respect, and he could have less respect for the state’s functionary reciting a formula before him—but he made the rite an act of pure religion. She thought, if she were being married to Roark in such a setting, Roark would stand like this.
Afterward, the mockery of the monster reception that followed, left him immune. He posed with her for the battery of press cameras and he complied gracefully with all the demands of the reporters, a special, noisier mob within the mob. He stood with her in the receiving line, shaking an assembly belt of hands that unrolled past them for hours. He looked untouched by the lights, the haystacks of Easter lilies, the sounds of a string orchestra, the river of people flowing on and breaking into a delta when it reached the champagne; untouched by these guests who had come here driven by boredom, by an envious hatred, a reluctant submission to an invitation bearing his dangerous name, a scandal-hungry curiosity. He looked as if he did not know that they took his public immolation as their rightful due, that they considered their presence as the indispensable seal of sacrament upon the occasion, that of all the hundreds he and his bride were the only ones to whom the performance was hideous.
She watched him intently. She wanted to see him take pleasure in all this, if only for a moment. Let him accept and join, just once, she thought, let him show the soul of the New York Banner in its proper element. She saw no acceptance. She saw a hint of pain, at times; even the pain did not reach him completely. And she thought of the only other man she knew who had spoken about suffering that went down only to a certain point.
When the last congratulations had drifted past them, they were free to leave by the rules of the occasion. But he made no move to leave. She knew he was waiting for her decision. She walked away from him into the currents of guests; she smiled, bowed and listened to offensive nonsense, a glass of champagne in her hand.
She saw her father in the throng. He looked proud and wistful; he seemed bewildered. He had taken the announcement of her marriage quietly; he had said: “I want you to be happy, Dominique. I want it very much. I hope he’s the right man.” His tone had said that he was not certain.
She saw Ellsworth Toohey in the crowd. He noticed her looking at him and turned away quickly. She wanted to laugh aloud; but the matter of Ellsworth Toohey caught off guard did not seem important enough to laugh about now.
Alvah Scarret pushed his way toward her. He was making a poor effort at a suitable expression, but his face looked hurt and sullen. He muttered something rapid about his wishes for her happiness, but then he said distinctly and with a lively anger:
“But why, Dominique? Why?”
She could not quite believe that Alvah Scarret would permit himself the crudeness of what the question seemed to mean. She asked coldly:
“What are you talking about, Alvah?”
“The veto, of course.”
“What veto?”
“You know very well what veto. Now I ask you, with every sheet in the city here, every damn one of them, the lousiest tabloid included, and the wire services too—everything but the Banner! Everything but the Wynand papers! What am I to tell people? How am I to explain? Is that a thing for you to do to a former comrade of the trade?”
“You’d better repeat that, Alvah.”
“You mean you didn’t know that Gail wouldn’t allow a single one of our boys here? That we won’t have any stories tomorrow, not a spread, not a picture, nothing but two lines on page eighteen?”
“No,” she said, “I didn’t know it.”
He wondered at the sudden jerk of her movement as she turned away from him. She handed the champagne glass to the first stranger in sight, whom she mistook for a waiter. She made her way through the crowd to Wynand.
“Let’s go, Gail.”
“Yes, my dear.”
She stood, incredulously, in the middle of the drawing room of his penthouse, thinking that this place was now her home and how right it looked to be her home.
He watched her. He showed no desire to speak or touch her, only to observe her here, in his house, brought here, lifted high over the city; as if the significance of the moment were not to be shared, not even with her.
She moved slowly across the room, took off her hat, leaned against the edge of a table. She wondered why her normal desire to say little, to hold things closed, broke down before him, why she felt compelled to simple frankness, such as she could offer no one else.
“You’ve had your way after all, Gail. You were married as you wanted to be married.
“Yes, I think so.”
“It was useless to try to torture you.”
“Actually, yes. But I didn’t mind it too much.”
“You didn’t?”
“No. If that’s what you wanted it was only a matter of keeping my promise.”
“But you hated it, Gail.”
“Utterly. What of it? Only the first moment was hard—when you said it in the car. Afterward, I was rather glad of it.” He spoke quietly, matching her frankness; she knew he would leave her the choice—he would follow her manner—he would keep silent or admit anything she wished to be admitted.
“Why?”
“Didn’t you notice your own mistake—if it was a mistake? You wouldn’t have wanted to make me suffer if you were completely indifferent to me.”
“No. It was not a mistake.”
“You’re a good loser, Dominique.”
“I think that’s also contagion from you, Gail. And there’s something I want to thank you for.”
“What?”
“That you barred our wedding from the Wynand papers.”
He looked at her, his eyes alert in a special way for a moment, then he smiled.
“It’s out of character—your thanking me for that.”
“It was out of character for you to do it.”
“I had to. But I thought you’d be angry.”
“I should have been. But I wasn’t. I’m not. I thank you.”
“Can one feel gratitude for gratitude? It’s a little hard to express, but that’s what I feel, Dominique.”
She looked at the soft light on the walls around her. That lighting was part of the room, giving the walls a special texture of more than material or color. She thought that there were other rooms beyond these walls, rooms she had never seen which were hers now. And she found that she wanted them to be hers.
“Gail, I haven’t asked what we are to do now. Are we going away? Are we having a honeymoon? Funny, I haven’t even wondered about it. I thought of the wedding and nothing beyond. As if it stopped there and you took over from then on. Also out of character, Gail.”
“But not in my favor, this time. Passivity is not a good sign. Not for you.”
“It might be—if I’m glad of it.”
“Might. Though it won’t last. No, we’re not going anywhere. Unless you wish to go.”
“No.”
“Then we stay here. Another peculiar manner of making an exception. The proper manner for you and me. Going away has always been running—for both of us. This time, we don’t run.”
“Yes, Gail.”
When he held her and kissed her, her arm lay bent, pressed between her body and his, her hand at her shoulder—and she felt her cheek touching the faded jasmine bouquet on her wrist, its perfume still intact, still a delicate suggestion of spring.
When she entered his bedroom, she found that it was not the place she had seen photographed in countless magazines. The glass cage had been demolished. The room built in its place was a solid vault without a single window. It was lighted and air-conditioned, but neither light nor air came from the outside.
She lay in his bed and she pressed her palms to the cold, smooth sheet at her sides, not to let her arms move and touch him. But her rigid indifference did not drive him to helpless anger. He understood. He laughed. She heard him say—his voice rough, without consideration, amused—“It won’t do, Dominique.” And she knew that this barrier would not be held between them, that she had no power to hold it. She felt the answer in her body, an answer of hunger, of acceptance, of pleasure. She thought that it was not a matter of desire, not even a matter of the sexual act, but only that man was the life force and woman could respond to nothing else; that this man had the will of life, the prime power, and this act was only its simplest statement, and she was responding not to the act nor to the man, but to that force within him.
 
“Well?” asked Ellsworth Toohey. “Now do you get the point?”
He stood leaning informally against the back of Scarret’s chair, and Scarret sat staring down at a hamper full of mail by the side of his desk.
“Thousands,” sighed Scarret, “thousands, Ellsworth. You ought to see what they call him. Why didn’t he print the story of his wedding? What’s he ashamed of? What’s he got to hide? Why didn’t he get married in church, like any decent man. How could he marry a divorcee? That’s what they’re all asking. Thousands. And he won’t even look at the letters. Gail Wynand, the man they called the seismograph of public opinion.”
“That’s right,” said Toohey. “That kind of a man.”
“Here’s a sample,” Scarret picked up a letter from his desk and read aloud: “ ‘I’m a respectable woman and mother of five children and I certainly don’t think I want to bring up my children with your newspaper. Have taken same for fourteen years, but now that you show that you’re the kind of man that has no decency and making a mockery of the holy institution of marriage which is to commit adultery with a fallen woman also another man’s wife who gets married in a black dress as she jolly well ought to, I won’t read your newspaper any more as you’re not a man fit for children, and I’m certainly disappointed in you. Very truly yours. Mrs. Thomas Parker.’ I read it to him. He just laughed.”
“Uh-huh,” said Toohey.
“What’s got into him?”
“It’s nothing that got into him, Alvah. It’s something that got out at last.”
“By the way, did you know that many papers dug up their old pictures of Dominique’s nude statue from that goddamn temple and ran it right with the wedding story—to show Mrs. Wynand’s interest in art, the bastards! Are they glad to get back at Gail! Are they giving it to him, the lice! Wonder who reminded them of that one.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Well, of course, it’s just one of those storms in a teacup. They’ll forget all about it in a few weeks. I don’t think it will do much harm.”
“No. Not this incident alone. Not by itself.”
“Huh? Are you predicting something?”
“Those letters predict it, Alvah. Not the letters as such. But that he wouldn’t read them.”
“Oh, it’s no use getting too silly either. Gail knows where to stop and when. Don’t make a mountain out of a mo——” He glanced up at Toohey and his voice switched to: “Christ, yes, Ellsworth, you’re right. What are we going to do?”
“Nothing, my friend, nothing. Not for a long time yet.”
Toohey sat down on the edge of Scarret’s desk and let the tip of his pointed shoe play among the envelopes in the hamper, tossing them up, making them rustle. He had acquired a pleasant habit of dropping in and out of Scarret’s office at all hours. Scarret had come to depend on him.
“Say, Ellsworth,” Scarret asked suddenly, “are you really loyal to the Banner?”
“Alvah, don’t talk in dialect. Nobody’s really that stuffy.”
“No, I mean it.... Well, you know what I mean.”
“Haven’t the faintest idea. Who’s ever disloyal to his bread and butter?”
“Yeah, that’s so.... Still, you know, Ellsworth, I like you a lot, only I’m never sure when you’re just talking my language or when it’s really yours.”
“Don’t go getting yourself into psychological complexities. You’ll get all tangled up. What’s on your mind?”
“Why do you still write for the New Frontiers?”
“For money.”
“Oh, come, that’s chicken feed to you.”
“Well, it’s a prestige magazine. Why shouldn’t I write for them? You haven’t got an exclusive on me.”
“No, and I don’t care who you write for on the side. But the New Frontiers has been damn funny lately.”
“About what?”
“About Gail Wynand.”
“Oh, rubbish, Alvah!”
“No sir, this isn’t rubbish. You just haven’t noticed, guess you don’t read it close enough, but I’ve got an instinct about things like that and I know. I know when it’s just some smart young punk taking pot-shots or when a magazine means business.”
“You’re nervous, Alvah, and you’re exaggerating. The New Frontiers is a liberal magazine and they’ve always sniped at Gail Wynand. Everybody has. He’s never been any too popular in the trade, you know. Hasn’t hurt him, though, has it?”
“This is different. I don’t like it when there’s a system behind it, a kind of special purpose, like a lot of little trickles dribbling along, all innocently, and pretty soon they make a little stream, and it all fits pat, and pretty soon ...”
“Getting a persecution mania, Alvah?”
“I don’t like it. It was all right when people took cracks at his yachts and women and a few municipal election scandals—which were never proved,” he added hastily. “But I don’t like it when it’s that new intelligentsia slang that people seem to be going for nowadays: Gail Wynand, the exploiter, Gail Wynand, the pirate of capitalism, Gail Wynand, the disease of an era. It’s still crap, Ellsworth, only there’s dynamite in that kind of crap.”
“It’s just the modern way of saying the same old things, nothing more. Besides, I can’t be responsible for the policy of a magazine just because I sell them an article once in a while.”
“Yeah, but ... That’s not what I hear.”
“What do you hear?”
“I hear you’re financing the damn thing.”
“Who, me? With what?”
“Well, not you yourself exactly. But I hear it was you who got young Ronny Pickering, the booze hound, to give them a shot in the arm to the tune of one hundred thousand smackers, just about when New Frontiers was going the way of all frontiers.”
“Hell, that was just to save Ronny from the town’s more expensive gutters. The kid was going to the dogs. Gave him a sort of higher purpose in life. And put one hundred thousand smackers to better use than the chorus cuties who’d have got it out of him anyway.”
“Yeah, but you could’ve attached a little string to the gift, slipped word to the editors that they’d better lay off Gail or else.”
“The New Frontiers is not the Banner, Alvah. It’s a magazine of principles. One doesn’t attach strings to its editors and one doesn’t tell them ‘or else.’ ”
“In this game, Ellsworth? Whom are you kidding?”
“Well, if it will set your mind at rest, I’ll tell you something you haven’t heard. It’s not supposed to be known—it was done through a lot of proxies. Did you know that I got Mitchell Layton to buy a nice fat chunk of the Banner?”
“No!”
“Yes.”
“Christ, Ellsworth, that’s great! Mitchell Layton? We can use a reservoir like that and ... Wait a minute. Mitchell Layton?”
“Yes. What’s wrong with Mitchell Layton?”
“Isn’t he the little boy who couldn’t digest grandpaw’s money?”
“Grandpaw left him an awful lot of money.”
“Yeah, but he’s a crackpot. He’s the one who’s been a Yogi, then a vegetarian, then a Unitarian, then a nudist—and now he’s gone to build a palace of the proletariat in Moscow.”
“So what?”
“But Jesus!—a Red among our stockholders?”
“Mitch isn’t a Red. How can one be a Red with a quarter of a billion dollars? He’s just a pale tea-rose. Mostly yellow. But a nice kid at heart.”
“But—on the Banner!”
“Alvah, you’re an ass. Don’t you see? I’ve made him put some dough into a good, solid, conservative paper. That’ll cure him of his pink notions and set him in the right direction. Besides, what harm can he do? Your dear Gail controls his papers, doesn’t he?”
“Does Gail know about this?”
“No. Dear Gail hasn’t been as watchful in the last five years as he used to be. And you’d better not tell him. You see the way Gail’s going. He’ll need a little pressure. And you’ll need the dough. Be nice to Mitch Layton. He can come in handy.”
“That’s so.”
“It is. You see? My heart’s in the right place. I’ve helped a puny little liberal mag like the New Frontiers, but I’ve also brought a much more substantial hunk of cash to a big stronghold of arch-conservatism such as the New York Banner.”
“So you have. Damn decent of you, too, considering that you’re a kind of radical yourself.”
“Now are you going to talk about any disloyalty?”
“Guess not. Guess you’ll stand by the old Banner.”
“Of course I will. Why, I love the Banner. I’d do anything for it. Why, I’d give my life for the New York Banner.”