The Fountainhead (81 page)

“I used to travel a great deal. I always felt just like that. I’ve been told it’s because I’m a hater of mankind.”

“You’re not foolish enough to believe that, are you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Surely you’ve seen through that particular stupidity. I mean the one that claims the pig is the symbol of love for humanity—the creature that accepts anything. As a matter of fact, the person who loves everybody and feels at home everywhere is the true hater of mankind. He expects nothing of men, so no form of depravity can outrage him.”

“You mean the person who says that there’s some good in the worst of us?”

“I mean the person who has the filthy insolence to claim that he loves equally the man who made that statue of you and the man who makes a Mickey Mouse balloon to sell on street corners. I mean the person who loves the men who prefer the Mickey Mouse to your statue—and there are many of that kind. I mean the person who loves Joan of Arc and the salesgirls in dress shops on Broadway—with an equal fervor. I mean the person who loves your beauty and the women he sees in a subway—the kind that can’t cross their knees and show flesh hanging publicly over their garters—with the same sense of exaltation. I mean the person who loves the clean, steady, unfrightened eyes of man looking through a telescope and the white stare of an imbecile—equally. I mean quite a large, generous, magnanimous company. Is it you who hate mankind, Mrs. Keating?”

“You’re saying all the things that—since I can remember—since I began to see and think—have been ...” She stopped.

“Have been torturing you. Of course. One can’t love man without hating most of the creatures who pretend to bear his name. It’s one or the other. One doesn’t love God and sacrilege impartially. Except when one doesn’t know that sacrilege has been committed. Because one doesn’t know God.”

“What will you say if I give you the answer people usually give me—that love is forgiveness?”

“I’ll say it’s an indecency of which you’re not capable—even though you think you’re an expert in such matters.”

“Or that love is pity.”

“Oh, keep still. It’s bad enough to hear things like that. To hear them from you is revolting—even as a joke.”

“What’s your answer?”

“That love is reverence, and worship, and glory, and the upward glance. Not a bandage for dirty sores. But they don’t know it. Those who speak of love most promiscuously are the ones who’ve never felt it. They make some sort of feeble stew out of sympathy, compassion, contempt and general indifference, and they call it love. Once you’ve felt what it means to love as you and I know it—the total passion for the total height—you’re incapable of anything less.”

“As—you and I—know it?”

“It’s what we feel when we look at a thing like your statue. There’s no forgiveness in that, and no pity. And I’d want to kill the man who claims that there should be. But, you see, when he looks at your statue—he feels nothing. That—or a dog with a broken paw—it’s all the same to him. He even feels that he’s done something nobler by bandaging the dog’s paw than by looking at your statue. So if you seek a glimpse of greatness, if you want exaltation, if you ask for God and refuse to accept the washing of wounds as substitute—you’re called a hater of humanity, Mrs. Keating, because you’ve committed the crime of knowing a love humanity has not learned to deserve.”

“Mr. Wynand, have you read what I got fired for?”

“No. I didn’t then. I don’t dare to now.”

“Why?”

He ignored the question. He said, smiling: “And so, you came to me and said ‘You’re the vilest person on earth—take me so that I’ll learn self-contempt. I lack that which most people live by. They find life endurable, while I can’t.’ Do you see now what you’ve shown?”

“I didn’t expect it to be seen.”

“No. Not by the publisher of the New York
Banner,
of course. That’s all right. I expected a beautiful slut who was a friend of Ellsworth Toohey.”

They laughed together. She thought it was strange that they could talk without strain—as if he had forgotten the purpose of this journey. His calm had become a contagious sense of peace between them.

She watched the unobtrusively gracious way their dinner was served, she looked at the white tablecloth against the deep red of the mahogany walls. Everything on the yacht had an air that made her think it was the first truly luxurious place she had ever entered: the luxury was secondary, a background so proper to him that it could be ignored. The man humbled his own wealth. She had seen people of wealth, stiff and awed before that which represented their ultimate goal. The splendor of this place was not the aim, not the final achievement of the man who leaned casually across the table. She wondered what his aim had been.

“This ship is becoming to you,” she said.

She saw a look of pleasure in his eyes—and of gratitude.

“Thank you.... Is the art gallery?”

“Yes. Only that’s less excusable.”

“I don’t want you to make excuses for me.” He said it simply, without reproach.

They had finished dinner. She waited for the inevitable invitation. It did not come. He sat smoking, talking about the yacht and the ocean.

Her hand came to rest accidentally on the tablecloth, close to his. She saw him looking at it. She wanted to jerk her hand away, but forced herself to let it lie still. Now, she thought.

He got up. “Let’s go on deck,” he said.

They stood at the rail and looked at a black void. Space was not to be seen, only felt by the quality of the air against their faces. A few stars gave reality to the empty sky. A few sparks of white fire in the water gave life to the ocean.

He stood, slouched carelessly, one arm raised, grasping a stanchion. She saw the sparks flowing, forming the edges of waves, framed by the curve of his body. That, too, was becoming to him.

She said:

“May I name another vicious bromide you’ve never felt?”

“Which one?”

“You’ve never felt how small you were when looking at the ocean.”

He laughed. “Never. Nor looking at the planets. Nor at mountain peaks. Nor at the Grand Canyon. Why should I? When I look at the ocean, I feel the greatness of man. I think of man’s magnificent capacity that created this ship to conquer all that senseless space. When I look at mountain peaks, I think of tunnels and dynamite. When I look at the planets, I think of airplanes.”

“Yes. And that particular sense of sacred rapture men say they experience in contemplating nature—I’ve never received it from nature, only from ...” She stopped.

“From what?”

“Buildings,” she whispered. “Skyscrapers.”

“Why didn’t you want to say that?”

“I ... don’t know.”

“I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York’s skyline. Particularly when one can’t see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window—no, I don’t feel how small I am—but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would like to throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.”

“Gail, I don’t know whether I’m listening to you or to myself.”

“Did you hear yourself just now?”

She smiled. “Actually not. But I won’t take it back, Gail.”

“Thank you—Dominique.” His voice was soft and amused. “But we weren’t talking about you or me. We were talking about other people.” He leaned with both forearms on the rail, he spoke watching the sparks in the water. “It’s interesting to speculate on the reasons that make men so anxious to debase themselves. As in that idea of feeling small before nature. It’s not a bromide, it’s practically an institution. Have you noticed how self-righteous a man sounds when he tells you about it? Look, he seems to say, I’m so glad to be a pigmy, that’s how virtuous I am. Have you heard with what delight people quote some great celebrity who’s proclaimed that he’s not so great when he looks at Niagara Falls? It’s as if they were smacking their lips in sheer glee that their best is dust before the brute force of an earthquake. As if they were sprawling on all fours, rubbing their foreheads in the mud to the majesty of a hurricane. But that’s not the spirit that leashed fire, steam, electricity, that crossed oceans in sailing sloops, that built airplanes and dams ... and skyscrapers. What is it they fear? What is it they hate so much, those who love to crawl? And why?”

“When I find the answer to that,” she said, “I’ll make my peace with the world.”

He went on talking—of his travels, of the continents beyond the darkness around them, the darkness that made of space a soft curtain pressed against their eyelids. She waited. She stopped answering. She gave him a chance to use the brief silences for ending this, for saying the words she expected. He would not say them.

“Are you tired, my dear?” he asked.

“No.”

“I’ll get you a deck chair, if you want to sit down.”

“No, I like standing here.”

“It’s a little cold. But by tomorrow we’ll be far south and then you’ll see the ocean on fire, at night. It’s very beautiful.”

He was silent. She heard the ship’s speed in the sound of the water, the rustling moan of protest against the thing that cut a long wound across the water’s surface.

“When are we going below?” she asked.

“We’re not going below.”

He had said it quietly, with an odd kind of simplicity, as if he were standing helpless before a fact he could not alter.

“Will you marry me?” he asked.

She could not hide the shock; he had seen it in advance, he was smiling quietly, understanding.

“It would be best to say nothing else.” He spoke carefully. “But you prefer to hear it stated—because that kind of silence between us is more than I have a right to expect. You don’t want to tell me much, but I’ve spoken for you tonight, so let me speak for you again. You’ve chosen me as the symbol of your contempt for men. You don’t love me. You wish to grant me nothing. I’m only your tool of self-destruction. I know all that, I accept it and I want you to marry me. If you wish to commit an unspeakable act as your revenge against the world, such an act is not to sell yourself to your enemy, but to marry him. Not to match your worst against his worst, but your worst against his best. You’ve tried that once, but your victim wasn’t worthy of your purpose. You see, I’m pleading my case in your own terms. What mine are, what I want to find in that marriage is of no importance to you and I shall regard it in that manner. You don’t have to know about it. You don’t have to consider it. I exact no promises and impose no obligations on you. You’ll be free to leave me whenever you wish. Incidentally—since it is of no concern to you—I love you.”

She stood, one arm stretched behind her, finger tips pressed to the rail. She said:

“I did not want that.”

“I know. But if you’re curious about it, I’ll tell you that you’ve made a mistake. You let me see the cleanest person I’ve ever seen.”

“Isn’t that ridiculous, after the way we met?”

“Dominique, I’ve spent my life pulling the strings of the world. I’ve seen all of it. Do you think I could believe any purity—unless it came to me twisted in some such dreadful shape as the one you chose? But what I feel must not affect your decision.”

She stood looking at him, looking incredulously at all the hours past. Her mouth had the shape of gentleness. He saw it. She thought that every word he said today had been of her language, that this offer and the form he gave it were of her own world—and that he had destroyed his purpose by it, taken away from her the motive he suggested, made it impossible to seek degradation with a man who spoke as he did. She wanted suddenly to reach for him, to tell him everything, to find a moment’s release in his understanding, then ask him never to see her again.

Then she remembered.

He noticed the movement of her hand. Her fingers were not leaning tensely against the rail, betraying a need of support, giving importance to the moment; they relaxed and closed about the rail; as if she had taken hold of some reins, carelessly, because the occasion required no earnest effort any longer.

She remembered the Stoddard Temple. She thought of the man before her, who spoke about the total passion for the total height and about protecting skyscrapers with his body—and she saw a picture on a page of the New York
Banner,
the picture of Howard Roark looking up at the Enright House, and the caption: “Are you happy, Mr. Superman?”

She raised her face to him. She asked:

“To marry you? To become Mrs. Wynand-Papers?”

She heard the effort in his voice as he answered: “If you wish to call it that—yes.”

“I will marry you.”

“Thank you, Dominique.”

She waited indifferently.

When he turned to her, he spoke as he had spoken all day, a calm voice with an edge of gaiety.

“We’ll cut the cruise short. We’ll take just a week—I want to have you here for a while. You’ll leave for Reno the day after we return. I’ll take care of your husband. He can have Stoneridge and anything else he wants and may God damn him. We’ll be married the day you come back.”

“Yes, Gail. Now let’s go below.”

“Do you want it?”

“No. But I don’t want our marriage to be important.”

“I want it to be important, Dominique. That’s why I won’t touch you tonight. Not until we’re married. I know it’s a senseless gesture. I know that a wedding ceremony has no significance for either one of us. But to be conventional is the only abnormality possible between us. That’s why I want it. I have no other way of making an exception.”