The Fountainhead (83 page)

Toohey held the check with the tips of his fingers, like a soiled penny, bent his head to one side, pursing his lips in appreciation, and tossed the check on his desk.

“Very handsome of you, Peter. Very handsome indeed. What’s the occasion?”

“Ellsworth, you remember what you said once—that it doesn’t matter what we are or do, if we help others? That’s all that counts? That’s good, isn’t it? That’s clean?”

“I haven’t said it once. I’ve said it a million times.”

“And it’s really true?”

“Of course it’s true. If you have the courage to accept it.”

“You’re my friend, aren’t you? You’re the only friend I’ve got. I ... I’m not even friendly with myself, but you are. With me, I mean, aren’t you, Ellsworth?”

“But of course. Which is of more value than your own friendship with yourself—a rather queer conception, but quite valid.”

“You understand. Nobody else does. And you like me.”

“Devotedly. Whenever I have the time.”

“Ah?”

“Your sense of humor, Peter, where’s your sense of humor? What’s the matter? A bellyache? Or a soul-indigestion?”

“Ellsworth, I ...”

“Yes?”

“I can’t tell you. Even you.”

“You’re a coward, Peter.”

Keating stared helplessly: the voice had been severe and gentle, he did not know whether he should feel pain, insult or confidence.

“You come here to tell me that it doesn’t matter what you do—and then you go to pieces over something or other you’ve done. Come on, be a man and say it doesn’t matter. Say you’re not important. Mean it. Show some guts. Forget your little ego.”

“I’m not important, Ellsworth. I’m not important. Oh God, if only everybody’d say it like you do! I’m not important. I don’t want to be important.”

“Where did that money come from?”

“I sold Dominique.”

“What are you talking about? The cruise?”

“Only it seems as if it’s not Dominique that I sold.”

“What do you care if ...”

“She’s gone to Reno.”

He could not understand the violence of Toohey’s reaction, but he was too tired to wonder. He told everything, as it had happened to him; it had not taken long to happen or to tell.

“You damn fool! You shouldn’t have allowed it!”

“What could I do? Against Wynand?”

“But to let him
marry
her!”

“Why not, Ellsworth? It’s better than ...”

“I didn’t think he’d ever ... but ... Oh, God damn it, I’m a bigger fool than you are!”

“But it’s better for Dominique if ...”

“To hell with your Dominique! It’s Wynand I’m thinking about!”

“Ellsworth, what’s the matter with you? ... Why should you care?”

“Keep still, will you? Let me think.”

In a moment, Toohey shrugged, sat down beside Keating and slipped his arm about his shoulders.

“I’m sorry, Peter,” he said. “I apologize. I’ve been inexcusably rude to you. It was just the shock. But I understand how you feel. Only you mustn’t take it too seriously. It doesn’t matter.” He spoke automatically. His mind was far away. Keating did not notice that. He heard the words. They were the spring in the desert. “It doesn’t matter. You’re only human. That’s all you want to be. Who’s any better? Who has the right to cast the first stone? We’re all human. It doesn’t matter.”

 

“My God!” said Alvah Scarret. “He can’t! Not Dominique Francon!”

“He will,” said Toohey. “As soon as she returns.”

Scarret had been surprised that Toohey should invite him to lunch, but the news he heard wiped out the surprise in a greater and more painful one.

“I’m fond of Dominique,” said Scarret, pushing his plate aside, his appetite gone. “I’ve always been very fond of her. But to have her as Mrs. Gail Wynand!”

“These, exactly, are my own sentiments,” said Toohey.

“I’ve always advised him to marry. It helps. Lends an air. An insurance of respectability, sort of, and he could do with one. He’s always skated on pretty thin ice. Got away with it, so far. But Dominique!”

“Why do you find such a marriage unsuitable?”

“Well... well, it’s not ... Damn it, you know it’s not right!”

“I know it. Do you?”

“Look, she’s a dangerous kind of woman.”

“She is. That’s your minor premise. Your major premise, however, is: he’s a dangerous kind of man.”

“Well ... in some ways ... yes.”

“My esteemed editor, you understand me quite well. But there are times when it’s helpful to formulate things. It tends toward future—cooperation. You and I have a great deal in common—though you have been somewhat reluctant to admit it. We are two variations on the same theme, shall we say? Or we play two ends against the same middle, if you prefer your own literary style. But our dear boss is quite another tune. A different leitmotif entirely—don’t you think so, Alvah? Our dear boss is an accident in our midst. Accidents are unreliable phenomena. You’ve been sitting on the edge of your seat for years—haven’t you? —watching Mr. Gail Wynand. So you know exactly what I’m talking about. You know also that Miss Dominique Francon is not our tune either. And you do not wish to see that particular influence enter the life of our boss. Do I have to state the issue any plainer?”

“You’re a smart man, Ellsworth,” said Scarret heavily.

“That’s been obvious for years.”

“I’ll talk to him. You’d better not—he hates your guts, if you’ll excuse me. But I don’t think I’d do much good either. Not if he’s made up his mind.”

“I don’t expect you to. You may try, if you wish, though it’s useless. We can’t stop that marriage. One of my good points is the fact that I admit defeat when it has to be admitted.”

“But then, why did you——”

“Tell you this? In the nature of a scoop, Alvah. Advance information.”

“I appreciate it, Ellsworth. I sure do.”

“It would be wise to go on appreciating it. The Wynand papers, Alvah, are not to be given up easily. In unity there is strength. Your style.”

“What do you mean?”

“Only that we’re in for a difficult time, my friend. So we’d do better to stick together.”

“Why, I’m with you, Ellsworth. I’ve always been.”

“Inaccurate, but we’ll let it pass. We’re concerned only with the present. And the future. As a token of mutual understanding, how about getting rid of Jimmy Kearns at the first opportunity?”

“I
thought
you’ve been driving at that for months! What’s the matter with Jimmy Kearns? He’s a bright kid. The best drama critic in town. He’s got a mind. Smart as a whip. Most promising.”

“He’s got a mind—of his own. I don’t think you want any whips around the place—except the one you hold. I think you want to be careful about what the promise promises.”

“Whom’ll I stick in his spot?”

“Jules Fougler.”

“Oh, hell, Ellsworth!”

“Why not?”

“That old son of a ... We can’t afford him.”

“You can if you want to. And look at the name he’s got.”

“But he’s the most impossible old ...”

“Well, you don’t have to take him. We’ll discuss it some other time. Just get rid of Jimmy Kearns.”

“Look, Ellsworth, I don’t play favorites; it’s all the same to me. I’ll give Jimmy the boot if you say so. Only I don’t see what difference it makes and what it’s got to do with what we were talking about.”

“You don’t,” said Toohey. “You will.”

 

“Gail, you know that I want you to be happy,” said Alvah Scarret, sitting in a comfortable armchair in the study of Wynand’s penthouse that evening. “You know that. I’m thinking of nothing else.”

Wynand lay stretched out on a couch, one leg bent, with the foot resting on the knee of the other. He smoked and listened silently.

“I’ve known Dominique for years,” said Scarret. “Long before you even heard of her. I love her. I love her, you might say, like a father. But you’ve got to admit that she’s not the kind of woman your public would expect to see as Mrs. Gail Wynand.”

Wynand said nothing.

“Your wife is a public figure, Gail. Just automatically. A public property. Your readers have a right to demand and expect certain things of her. A symbol value, if you know what I mean. Like the Queen of England, sort of. How do you expect Dominique to live up to that? How do you expect her to preserve any appearances at all? She’s the wildest person I know. She has a terrible reputation. But worst of all—think, Gail!—a divorcee! And here we spend tons of good print, standing for the sanctity of the home and the purity of womanhood! How are you going to make your public swallow that one? How am I going to sell your wife to them?”

“Don’t you think this conversation had better be stopped, Alvah?”

“Yes, Gail,” said Scarret meekly.

Scarret waited, with a heavy sense of aftermath, as if after a violent quarrel, anxious to make up.

“I know, Gail!” he cried happily. “I know what we can do. We’ll put Dominique back on the paper and we’ll have her write a column—a different one—a syndicated column on the home. You know, household hints, kitchen, babies and all that. It’ll take the curse off. Show what a good little homebody she really is, her youthful mistakes notwithstanding. Make the women forgive her. We’ll have a special department—‘Mrs. Gail Wynand’s recipes.’ A few pictures of her will help—you know, gingham dresses and aprons and her hair done up in a more conventional way.”

“Shut up, Alvah, before I slap your face,” said Wynand without raising his voice.

“Yes, Gail.”

Scarret made a move to get up.

“Sit still. I haven’t finished.”

Scarret waited obediently.

“Tomorrow morning,” said Wynand, “you will send a memo to every one of our papers. You will tell them to look through their files and find any pictures of Dominique Francon they might have in connection with her old column. You will tell them to destroy the pictures. You will tell them that henceforward any mention of her name or the use of her picture in any of my papers will cost the job of the entire editorial staff responsible. When the proper time comes, you will have an announcement of my marriage appear in all our papers. That cannot be avoided. The briefest announcement you can compose. No commentaries. No stories. No pictures. Pass the word around and make sure it’s understood. It’s any man’s job, yours included, if this is disobeyed.”

“No stories—when you marry her?”

“No stories, Alvah.”

“But good God! That’s news! The other papers ...”

“I don’t care what the other papers do about it.”

“
But
—why,
Gail?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

 

Dominique sat at the window, listening to the train wheels under the floor. She looked at the countryside of Ohio flying past in the fading daylight. Her head lay back against the seat and her hands lay limply at each side of her on the seat cushion. She was one with the structure of the car, she was carried forward just as the window frame, the floor, the walls of the compartment were carried forward. The corners blurred, gathering darkness; the window remained luminous, evening light rising from the earth. She let herself rest in that faint illumination; it entered the car and ruled it, so long as she did not turn on the light to shut it out.

She had no consciousness of purpose. There was no goal to this journey, only the journey itself, only the motion and the metal sound of motion around her. She felt slack and empty, losing her identity in a painless ebb, content to vanish and let nothing remain defined save that particular earth in the window.

When she saw, in the slowing movement beyond the glass, the name “Clayton” on a faded board under the eaves of a station building, she knew what she had been expecting. She knew why she had taken this train, not a faster one, why she had looked carefully at the timetable of its stops—although it had been just a column of meaningless names to her then. She seized her suitcase, coat and hat. She ran. She could not take time to dress, afraid that the floor under her feet would carry her away from here. She ran down the narrow corridor of the car, down the steps. She leaped to the station platform, feeling the shock of winter cold on her bare throat. She stood looking at the station building. She heard the train moving behind her, clattering away.

Then she put on her coat and hat. She walked across the platform, into the waiting room, across a wooden floor studded with lumps of dry chewing gum, through the heavy billows of heat from an iron stove, to the square beyond the station.

She saw a last band of yellow in the sky above the low roof lines. She saw a pitted stretch of paving bricks, and small houses leaning against one another; a bare tree with twisted branches, skeletons of weeds at the doorless opening of an abandoned garage, dark shop fronts, a drugstore still open on a corner, its lighted window dim, low over the ground.

She had never been here before, but she felt this place proclaiming its ownership of her, closing in about her with ominous intimacy. It was as if every dark mass exercised a suction like the pull of the planets in space, prescribing her orbit. She put her hand on a fire hydrant and felt the cold seeping through her glove into her skin. This was the way the town held her, a direct penetration which neither her clothes nor her mind could stop. The peace of the inevitable remained. Only now she had to act, but the actions were simple, set in advance. She asked a passer-by: “Where is the site of the new building of Janer’s Department Store?”

She walked patiently through the dark streets. She walked past desolate winter lawns and sagging porches; past vacant lots where weeds rustled against tin cans; past closed grocery stores and a steaming laundry; past an uncurtained window where a man in shirtsleeves sat by a fire, reading a paper. She turned corners and crossed streets, with the feel of cobblestones under the thin soles of her pumps. Rare passers-by looked, astonished, at her air of foreign elegance. She noticed it; she felt an answering wonder. She wanted to say: But don’t you understand?—I belong here more than you do. She stopped, once in a while, closing her eyes; she found it difficult to breathe.