第 119 页

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 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 feelings? 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

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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 man 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 on 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

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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

fingertips. She could allow herself nothing else. She turned and went on to her

bedroom, and heard him closing the guestroom 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 schoolhouse 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

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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 question 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.’"

"The position taken by the Wynand press," wrote a quiet, conservative newspaper,

"is inexplicable and disgraceful."

The circulation of the Banner dropped week by week, the speed accelerating in

the descent, like an elevator out of control. Stickers and buttons inscribed "We

Don’t Read Wynand" grew on walls, subway posts, windshields and coat lapels.

Wynand newsreels were booed off the theater screens. The Banner vanished from

corner newsstands; the news vendors had to carry it, but they hid it under their

counters and produced it grudgingly, only upon request. The ground had been

prepared, the pillars eaten through long ago; the Cortlandt case provided the

final impact.

Roark was almost forgotten in the storm of indignation against Gail Wynand. The

angriest protests came from Wynand’s own public: from the Women’s Clubs, the

ministers, the mothers, the small shopkeepers. Alvah Scarret had to be kept away

from the room where hampers of letters to the editor were being filled each day;

he started by reading the letters--and his friends on the staff undertook to

prevent a repetition of the experience, fearing a stroke.

The staff of the Banner worked in silence. There were no furtive glances, no

whispered cuss words, no gossip in washrooms any longer. A few men resigned. The

rest worked on, slowly, heavily, in the manner of men with life belts buckled,

waiting for the inevitable.

Gail Wynand noticed a kind of lingering tempo in every action around him. When

he entered the Banner Building, his employees stopped at sight of him; when he

nodded to them, their greeting came a second too late; when he walked on and

turned, he found them staring after him. The "Yes, Mr. Wynand," that had always

answered his orders without a moment’s cut between the last syllable of his

voice and the first letter of the answer, now came late, and the pause had a

tangible shape, so that the answer sounded like a sentence not followed but

preceded by a question mark.

"One Small Voice" kept silent about the Cortlandt case. Wynand had summoned

Toohey to his office, the day after the explosion, and had said: "Listen, you.

Not a word in your column. Understand? What you do or yell outside is none of my

business--for the time being. But if you yell too much, I’ll take care of you

when this is over."

"Yes, Mr. Wynand."

"As far as your column is concerned, you’re deaf, dumb and blind. You’ve never

heard of any explosion. You’ve never heard of anyone named Roark. You don’t know

what the word Cortlandt means. So long as you’re in this building."

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"Yes, Mr. Wynand."

"And don’t let me see too much of you around here."

"Yes, Mr. Wynand."

Wynand’s lawyer, an old friend who had served him for years, tried to stop him.

"Gail, what’s the matter? You’re acting like a child. Like a green amateur. Pull

yourself together, man."

"Shut up," said Wynand.