The Fountainhead (90 page)

He saw that something had reached her; he could not tell whether it was an answer of surprise or of anger. He did not know how well she recognized these words. He went on:

“It did make me sick. But so have a great many things which the
Banner
has done. It was worse tonight, because there was a quality about it that went beyond the usual. A special kind of malice. But if this is popular with fools, it’s the
Banner’s
legitimate province. The
Banner
was created for the benefit of fools. What else do you want me to admit?”

“What you felt tonight.”

“A minor kind of hell. Because you sat there with me. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it? To make me feel the contrast. Still, you miscalculated. I looked at the stage and I thought, this is what people are like, such are their spirits, but I—I’ve found you, I have you—and the contrast was worth the pain. I did suffer tonight, as you wanted, but it was a pain that went only down to a certain point and then ...”

“Shut up!” she screamed. “Shut up, God damn you!”

They stood for a moment, both astonished. He moved first; he knew she needed his help; he grasped her shoulders. She tore herself away. She walked across the room, to the window; she stood looking at the city, at the great buildings spread in black and fire below her.

After a while she said, her voice toneless:

“I’m sorry, Gail.”

He did not answer.

“I had no right to say those things to you.” She did not turn, her arms raised, holding the frame of the window. “We’re even, Gail. I’m paid back, if that will make it better for you. I broke first.”

“I don’t want you to be paid back.” He spoke quietly. “Dominique, what was it?”

“Nothing.”

“What did I make you think of? It wasn’t what I said. It was something else. What did the words mean to you?”

“Nothing.”

“A pain that went only down to a certain point. It was that sentence. Why?” She was looking at the city. In the distance she could see the shaft of the Cord Building. “Dominique, I’ve seen what you can take. It must be something very terrible if it could do that to you. I must know. There’s nothing impossible. I can help you against it, whatever it is.” She did not answer. “At the theater, it was not just that fool play. There was something else for you tonight. I saw your face. And then it was the same thing again here. What is it?”

“Gail,” she said softly, “will you forgive me?”

He let a moment pass; he had not been prepared for that.

“What have I to forgive you?”

“Everything. And tonight.”

“That was your privilege. The condition on which you married me. To make me pay for the
Banner.”

“I don’t want to make you pay for it.”

“Why don’t you want it any more?”

“It can’t be paid for.”

In the silence she listened to his steps pacing the room behind her.

“Dominique. What was it?”

“The pain that stops at a certain point? Nothing. Only that you had no right to say it. The men who have, pay for that right, a price you can’t afford. But it doesn’t matter now. Say it if you wish. I have no right to say it either.”

“That wasn’t all.”

“I think we have a great deal in common, you and I. We’ve committed the same treason somewhere. No, that’s a bad word.... Yes, I think it’s the right word. It’s the only one that has the feeling of what I mean.”

“Dominique, you can’t feel that.” His voice sounded strange. She turned to him.

“Why?”

“Because that’s what I felt tonight. Treason.”

“Toward whom?”

“I don’t know. If I were religious, I’d say ‘God.’ But I’m not religious.”

“That’s what I meant, Gail.”

“Why should you feel it? The
Banner
is not your child.”

“There are other forms of the same guilt.”

Then he walked to her across the long room, he held her in his arms, he said:

“You don’t know the meaning of the kind of words you use. We have a great deal in common, but not that. I’d rather you went on spitting at me than trying to share my offenses.”

She let her hand rest against the length of his cheek, her finger tips at his temple.

He asked:

“Will you tell me—now—what it was?”

“Nothing. I undertook more than I could carry. You’re tired, Gail. Why don’t you go on upstairs? Leave me here for a little while. I just want to look at the city. Then I’ll join you and I’ll be all right.”

D
OMINIQUE STOOD AT THE RAIL OF THE YACHT, THE DECK WARM under her flat sandals, the sun on her bare legs, the wind blowing her thin white dress. She looked at Wynand stretched in a deck chair before her.

She thought of the change she noticed in him again aboard ship. She had watched him through the months of their summer cruise. She had seen him once running down a companionway; the picture remained in her mind; a tall white figure thrown forward in a streak of speed and confidence; his hand grasped a railing, risking deliberately the danger of a sudden break, gaining a new propulsion. He was not the corrupt publisher of a popular empire. He was an aristocrat aboard a yacht. He looked, she thought, like what one believes aristocracy to be when one is young: a brilliant kind of gaiety without guilt.

She looked at him in the deck chair. She thought that relaxation was attractive only in those for whom it was an unnatural state; then even limpness acquired purpose. She wondered about him; Gail Wynand, famous for his extraordinary capacity; but this was not merely the force of an ambitious adventurer who had created a chain of newspapers; this—the quality she saw in him here—the thing stretched out under the sun, like an answer—this was greater, a first cause, a faculty out of universal dynamics.

“Gail,” she said suddenly, involuntarily.

He opened his eyes to look at her.

“I wish I had taken a recording of that,” he said lazily. “You’d be startled to hear what it sounded like. Quite wasted here. I’d like to play it back in a bedroom.”

“I’ll repeat it there if you wish.”

“Thank you, dearest. And I promise not to exaggerate or presume too much. You’re not in love with me. You’ve never loved anyone.”

“Why do you think that?”

“If you loved a man, it wouldn’t be just a matter of a circus wedding and an atrocious evening in the theater. You’d put him through total hell.”

“How do you know that, Gail?”

“Why have you been staring at me ever since we met? Because I’m not the Gail Wynand you’d heard about. You see, I love you. And love is exception-making. If you were in love you’d want to be broken, trampled, ordered, dominated, because that’s the impossible, the inconceivable for you in your relations with people. That would be the one gift, the great exception you’d want to offer the man you loved. But it wouldn’t be easy for you.”

“If that’s true, then you ...”

“Then I become gentle and humble—to your great astonishment—because I’m the worst scoundrel living.”

“I don’t believe that, Gail.”

“No? I’m not the person before last any more?”

“Not any more.”

“Well, dearest, as a matter of fact, I am.”

“Why do you want to think that?”

“I don’t want to. But I like to be honest. That has been my only private luxury. Don’t change your mind about me. Go on seeing me as you saw me before we met.”

“Gail, that’s not what you want.”

“It doesn’t matter what I want. I don’t want anything—except to own you. Without answer from you. It has to be without answer. If you begin to look at me too closely, you’ll see things you won’t like at all.”

“What things?”

“You’re so beautiful, Dominique. Its such a lovely accident on God’s part that there’s one person who matches inside and out.”

“What things, Gail?”

“Do you know what you’re actually in love with? Integrity. The impossible. The clean, consistent, reasonable, self-faithful, the all-of-one-style, like a work of art. That’s the only field where it can be found—art. But you want it in the flesh. You’re in love with it. Well, you see, I’ve never had any integrity.”

“How sure are you of that, Gail?”

“Have you forgotten the
Banner?”

“To hell with the
Banner.”

“All right, to hell with the
Banner.
It’s nice to hear you say that. But the
Banner’s
not the major symptom. That I’ve never practiced any sort of integrity is not so important. What’s important is that I’ve never felt any need for it. I hate the conception of it. I hate the presumptuousness of the idea.”

“Dwight Carson ...” she said. He heard the sound of disgust in her voice.

He laughed. “Yes, Dwight Carson. The man I bought. The individualist who’s become a mob-glorifier and, incidentally, a dipsomaniac. I did that. That was worse than the
Banner,
wasn’t it? You don’t like to be reminded of that?”

“No.”

“But surely you’ve heard enough screaming about it. All the giants of the spirit whom I’ve broken. I don’t think anybody ever realized how much I enjoyed doing it. It’s a kind of lust. I’m perfectly indifferent to slugs like Ellsworth Toohey or my friend Alvah, and quite willing to leave them in peace. But just let me see a man of a slightly higher dimension—and I’ve got to make a sort of Toohey out of him. I’ve got to. It’s like a sex urge.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Incidentally, you misunderstand Ellsworth Toohey.”

“Possibly. You don’t expect me to waste mental effort to untangle that snail’s shell?”

“And you contradict yourself.”

“Where?”

“Why didn’t you set out to destroy me?”

“The exception-making, Dominique. I love you. I had to love you. God help you if you were a man.”

“Gail—why?”

“Why have I done all that?”

“Yes.”

“Power, Dominique. The only thing I ever wanted. To know that there’s not a man living whom I can’t force to do—anything. Anything I choose. The man I couldn’t break would destroy me. But I’ve spent years finding out how safe I am. They say I have no sense of honor, I’ve missed something in life. Well, I haven’t missed very much, have I? The thing I’ve missed—it doesn’t exist.”

He spoke in a normal tone of voice, but he noticed suddenly that she was listening with the intent concentration needed to hear a whisper of which one can afford to lose no syllable.

“What’s the matter, Dominique? What are you thinking about?”

“I’m listening to you, Gail.”

She did not say she was listening to his words and to the reason behind them. It was suddenly so clear to her that she heard it as an added clause to each sentence, even though he had no knowledge of what he was confessing.

“The worst thing about dishonest people is what they think of as honesty,” he said. “I know a woman who’s never held to one conviction for three days running, but when I told her she had no integrity, she got very tight-lipped and said her idea of integrity wasn’t mine; it seems she’d never stolen any money. Well, she’s one that’s in no danger from me whatever. I don’t hate her. I hate the impossible conception you love so passionately, Dominique.”

“Do you?”

“I’ve had a lot of fun proving it.”

She walked to him and sat down on the deck beside his chair, the planks smooth and hot under her bare legs. He wondered why she looked at him so gently. He frowned. She knew that some reflection of what she had understood remained in her eyes—and she looked away from him.

“Gail, why tell me all that? It’s not what you want me to think of you.”

“No. It isn’t. Why tell you now? Want the truth? Because it has to be told. Because I wanted to be honest with you. Only with you and with myself. But I wouldn’t have the courage to tell you anywhere else. Not at home. Not ashore. Only here—because here it doesn’t seem quite real. Does it?”

“No.”

“I think I hoped that here you’d accept it—and still think of me as you did when you spoke my name in that way I wanted to record.”

She put her head against his chair, her face pressed to his knees, her hands dropped, fingers half-curled, on the glistening planks of the deck. She did not want to show what she had actually heard him saying about himself today.

 

On a night of late fall they stood together at the roof-garden parapet, looking at the city. The long shafts made of lighted windows were like streams breaking out of the black sky, flowing down in single drops to feed the great pools of fire below.

“There they are, Dominique—the great buildings. The skyscrapers. Do you remember? They were the first link between us. We’re both in love with them, you and I.”

She thought she should resent his right to say it. But she felt no resentment.”

“Yes, Gail. I’m in love with them.”

She looked at the vertical threads of light that were the Cord Building, she raised her fingers off the parapet, just enough to touch the place of its unseen form on the distant sky. She felt no reproach from it.

“I like to see a man standing at the foot of a skyscraper,” he said. “It makes him no bigger than an ant—isn’t that the correct bromide for the occasion? The God-damn fools! It’s man who made it—the whole incredible mass of stone and steel. It doesn’t dwarf him, it makes him greater than the structure. It reveals his true dimensions to the world. What we love about these buildings, Dominique, is the creative faculty, the heroic in man.”

“Do you love the heroic in man, Gail?”

“I love to think of it. I don’t believe it.”

She leaned against the parapet and watched the green lights stretched in a long straight line far below. She said:

“I wish I could understand you.”

“I thought I should be quite obvious. I’ve never hidden anything from you.”