The Fountainhead (113 page)

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”—

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.’ ”