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Wynand indicated a chair and Toohey sat down. Wynand spoke, smiling:

"I never thought I would come to agree with some of your social theories, Mr.

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Toohey, but I find myself forced to do so. You have always denounced the

hypocrisy of the upper caste and preached the virtue of the masses. And now I

find that I regret the advantages I enjoyed in my former proletarian state. Were

I still in Hell’s Kitchen, I would have begun this interview by saying: Listen,

louse!--but since I am an inhibited capitalist, I shall not do so."

Toohey waited, he looked curious.

"I shall begin by saying: Listen, Mr. Toohey. I do not know what makes you tick.

I do not care to dissect your motives. I do not have the stomach required of

medical students. So I shall ask no questions and I wish to hear no

explanations. I shall merely tell you that from now on there is a name you will

never mention in your column again." He pointed to the photograph. "I could make

you reverse yourself publicly and I would enjoy it, but I prefer to forbid the

subject to you entirely. Not a word, Mr. Toohey. Not ever again. Now don’t

mention your contract or any particular clause of it. It would not be advisable.

Go on writing your column, but remember its title and devote it to commensurate

subjects. Keep it small, Mr. Toohey. Very small."

"Yes, Mr. Wynand," said Toohey easily. "I don’t have to write about Mr. Roark at

present."

"That’s all."

Toohey rose. "Yes, Mr. Wynand."

5.

GAIL WYNAND sat at his desk in his office and read the proofs of an editorial on

the moral value of raising large families. Sentences like used chewing gum,

chewed and rechewed, spat out and picked up again, passing from mouth to mouth

to pavement to shoe sole to mouth to brain....He thought of Howard Roark and

went on reading the Banner; it made things easier.

"Daintiness is a girl’s greatest asset. Be sure to launder your undies every

night, and learn to talk on some cultured subject, and you will have all the

dates you want." "Your horoscope for tomorrow shows a beneficent aspect.

Application and sincerity will bring rewards in the fields of engineering,

public accounting and romance." "Mrs. Huntington-Cole’s hobbies are gardening,

the opera and early American sugar-bowls. She divides her time between her

little son ’Kit’ and her numerous charitable activities." "I’m jus’ Millie, I’m

jus’ a orphan." "For the complete diet send ten cents and a self-addressed,

stamped envelope."...He turned the pages, thinking of Howard Roark.

He signed the advertising contract with Kream-O Pudding--for five years, on the

entire Wynand chain, two full pages in every paper every Sunday. The men before

his desk sat like triumphal arches in flesh, monuments to victory, to evenings

of patience and calculation, restaurant tables, glasses emptied into throats,

months of thought, his energy, his living energy flowing like the liquid in the

glasses into the opening of heavy lips, into stubby fingers, across a desk, into

two full pages every Sunday, into drawings of yellow molds trimmed with

strawberries and yellow molds trimmed with butterscotch sauce. He looked, over

the heads of the men, at the photograph on the wall of his office: the sky, the

river and a man’s face, lifted.

But it hurts me, he thought. It hurts me every time I think of him. It makes

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everything easier--the people, the editorials, the contracts--but easier because

it hurts so much. Pain is a stimulant also. I think I hate that name. I will go

on repeating it. It is a pain I wish to bear.

Then he sat facing Roark in the study of his penthouse--and he felt no pain;

only a desire to laugh without malice.

"Howard, everything you’ve done in your life is wrong according to the stated

ideals of mankind. And here you are. And somehow it seems a huge joke on the

whole world."

Roark sat in an armchair by the fireplace. The glow of the fire moved over the

study; the light seemed to curve with conscious pleasure about every object in

the room, proud to stress its beauty, stamping approval upon the taste of the

man who had achieved this setting for himself. They were alone. Dominique had

excused herself after dinner. She had known that they wanted to be alone.

"A joke on all of us," said Wynand. "On every man in the street. I always look

at the men in the street. I used to ride in the subways just to see how many of

them carried the Banner. I used to hate them and, sometimes, to be afraid. But

now I look at every one of them and I want to say: ’Why, you poor fool!’ That’s

all."

He telephoned Roark’s office one morning. "Can you have lunch with me,

Howard?...Meet me at the Nordland in half an hour."

He shrugged, smiling, when he faced Roark across the restaurant table.

"Nothing at all, Howard. No special reason. Just spent a revolting half-hour and

wanted to take the taste of it out of my mouth."

"What revolting half-hour?"

"Had my pictures taken with Lancelot Clokey."

"Who’s Lancelot Clokey?"

Wynand laughed aloud, forgetting his controlled elegance, forgetting the

startled glance of the waiter.

"That’s it, Howard. That’s why I had to have lunch with you. Because you can say

things like that."

"Now what’s the matter?"

"Don’t you read books? Don’t you know that Lancelot Clokey is ’our most

sensitive observer of the international scene’? That’s what the critic said--in

my own Banner. Lancelot Clokey has just been chosen author of the year or

something by some organization or other. We’re running his biography in the

Sunday supplement, and I had to pose with my arm around his shoulders. He wears

silk shirts and smells of gin. His second book is about his childhood and how it

helped him to understand the international scene. It sold a hundred thousand

copies. But you’ve never heard of him. Go on, eat your lunch, Howard. I like to

see you eating. I wish you were broke, so that I could feed you this lunch and

know you really needed it."

At the end of a day, he would come, unannounced, to Roark’s office or to his

home. Roark had an apartment in the Enright House, one of the crystal-shaped

units over the East River: a workroom, a library, a bedroom. He had designed the

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furniture himself. Wynand could not understand for a long time why the place

gave him an impression of luxury, until he saw that one did not notice the

furniture at all: only a clean sweep of space and the luxury of an austerity

that had not been simple to achieve. In financial value it was the most modest

home that Wynand had entered as a guest in twenty-five years.

"We started in the same way, Howard," he said, glancing about Roark’s room.

"According to my judgment and experience, you should have remained in the

gutter. But you haven’t. I like this room. I like to sit here."

"I like to see you here."

"Howard, have you ever held power over a single human being?"

"No. And I wouldn’t take it if it were offered to me."

"I can’t believe that."

"It was offered to me once, Gail. I refused it."

Wynand looked at him with curiosity; it was the first time that he heard effort

in Roark’s voice.

"Why?"

"I had to."

"Out of respect for the man?"

"It was a woman."

"Oh, you damn fool! Out of respect for a woman?"

"Out of respect for myself."

"Don’t expect me to understand. We’re as opposite as two men can be."

"I thought that once. I wanted to think that."

"And now you don’t?"

"No."

"Don’t you despise every act I’ve ever committed?"

"Just about every one I know of."

"And you still like to see me here?"

"Yes. Gail, there was a man who considered you the symbol of the special evil

that destroyed him and would destroy me. He left me his hatred. And there was

another reason. I think I hated you, before I saw you."

"I knew you did. What made you change your mind?"

"I can’t explain that to you."

They drove together to the estate in Connecticut where the walls of the house

were rising out of the frozen ground. Wynand followed Roark through the future

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rooms, he stood aside and watched Roark giving instructions. Sometimes, Wynand

came alone. The workers saw the black roadster twisting up the road to the top

of the hill, saw Wynand’s figure standing at a distance, looking at the

structure. His figure always carried with it all the implications of his

position; the quiet elegance of his overcoat, the angle of his hat, the

confidence of his posture, tense and casual together, made one think of the

Wynand empire; of the presses thundering from ocean to ocean, of the papers, the

lustrous magazine covers, the light rays trembling through newsreels, the wires

coiling over the world, the power flowing into every palace, every capital,

every secret, crucial room, day and night, through every costly minute of this

man’s life. He stood still against a sky gray as laundry water, and snowflakes

fluttered lazily past the brim of his hat.

On a day in April he drove alone to Connecticut after an absence of many weeks.

The roadster flew across the countryside, not an object, but a long streak of

speed. He felt no jolting motion inside his small cube of glass and leather; it

seemed to him that his car stood still, suspended over the ground, while the

control of his hands on the wheel made the earth fly past him, and he merely had

to wait until the place he desired came rolling to him. He loved the wheel of a

car as he loved his desk in the office of the Banner: both gave him the same

sense of a dangerous monster let loose under the expert direction of his

fingers.

Something tore past across his vision, and he was a mile away before he thought

how strange it was that he should have noticed it, because it had been only a

clump of weeds by the road; a mile later he realized that it was stranger still:

the weeds were green. Not in the middle of winter, he thought, and then he

understood, surprised, that it was not winter any longer. He had been very busy

in the last few weeks; he had not had time to notice. Now he saw it, hanging

over the fields around him, a hint of green, like a whisper. He heard three

statements in his mind, in precise succession, like interlocking gears: It’s

spring--I wonder if I have many left to see--I am fifty-five years old.

They were statements, not emotions; he felt nothing, neither eagerness nor fear.

But he knew it was strange that he should experience a sense of time; he had

never thought of his age in relation to any measure, he had never defined his

position on a limited course, he had not thought of a course nor of limits. He

had been Gail Wynand and he had stood still, like this car, and the years had

sped past him, like this earth, and the motor within him had controlled the

flight of the years.

No, he thought, I regret nothing. There have been things I missed, but I ask no

questions, because I have loved it, such as it has been, even the moments of

emptiness, even the unanswered--and that I loved it, that is the unanswered in

my life. But I loved it.

If it were true, that old legend about appearing before a supreme judge and

naming one’s record, I would offer, with all my pride, not any act I committed,

but one thing I have never done on this earth: that I never sought an outside

sanction. I would stand and say: I am Gail Wynand, the man who has committed

every crime except the foremost one: that of ascribing futility to the wonderful

fact of existence and seeking justification beyond myself. This is my pride:

that now, thinking of the end, I do not cry like all the men of my age: but what

was the use and the meaning? I was the use and meaning, I, Gail Wynand. That I

lived and that I acted.

He drove to the foot of the hill and slammed the brakes on, startled, looking

up. In his absence the house had taken shape; it could be recognized now--it

looked like the drawing. He felt a moment of childish wonder that it had really

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come out just as on the sketch, as if he had never quite believed it. Rising

against the pale blue sky, it still looked like a drawing, unfinished, the

planes of masonry like spreads of watercolor filled in, the naked scaffolding

like pencil lines; a huge drawing on a pale blue sheet of paper.

He left the car and walked to the top of the hill. He saw Roark among the men.

He stood outside and watched the way Roark walked through the structure, the way

he turned his head or raised his hand, pointing. He noticed Roark’s manner of

stopping: his legs apart, his arms straight at his sides, his head lifted; an

instinctive pose of confidence, of energy held under effortless control a moment

that gave to his body the structural cleanliness of his own building. Structure,

thought Wynand, is a solved problem of tension, of balance, of security in

counterthrusts.

He thought: There’s no emotional significance in the act of erecting a building;

it’s just a mechanical job, like laying sewers or making an automobile. And he

wondered why he watched Roark, feeling what he felt in his art gallery. He

belongs in an unfinished building, thought Wynand, more than in a completed one,

more than at a drafting table, it’s his right setting; it’s becoming to him--as

Dominique said a yacht was becoming to me.

Afterward Roark came out and they walked together along the crest of the hill,

among the trees. They sat down on a fallen tree trunk, they saw the structure in

the distance through the stems of the brushwood. The stems were dry and naked,

but there was a quality of spring in the cheerful insolence of their upward

thrust, the stirring of a self-assertive purpose.