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killed. The striking Union of Wynand Employees issued a protest against acts of

violence; the Union had not instigated them; most of its members did not know

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who had. The New Frontiers said something about regrettable excesses, but

ascribed them to "spontaneous outbursts of justifiable popular anger."

Homer Slottern, in the name of a group who called themselves the liberal

businessmen, sent Wynand a notice canceling their advertising contracts. "You

may sue us if you wish. We feel we have a legitimate cause for cancellation. We

signed to advertise in a reputable newspaper, not in a sheet that has become a

public disgrace, brings pickets to our doors, ruins our business and is not

being read by anybody." The group included most of the Banner’s wealthiest

advertisers.

Gail Wynand stood at the window of his office and looked at his city.

"I have supported strikes at a time when it was dangerous to do so. I have

fought Gail Wynand all my life. I had never expected to see the day or the issue

when I would be forced to say--as I say now--that I stand on the side of Gail

Wynand," wrote Austen Heller in the Chronicle.

Wynand sent him a note: "God damn you, I didn’t ask you to defend me. G W

The New Frontiers described Austen Heller as "A reactionary who has sold himself

to Big Business." Intellectual society ladies said that Austin Heller was

old-fashioned.

Gail Wynand stood at a desk in the city room and wrote editorials as usual. His

derelict staff saw no change in him; no haste, no outbursts of anger. There was

nobody to notice that some of his actions were new: he would go to the pressroom

and stand looking at the white stream shot out of the roaring giants, and listen

to the sound. He would pick up a lead slug off the composing room floor, and

finger it absently on the palm of his hand, like a piece of jade, and lay it

carefully on a table, as if he did not want it to be wasted. He fought other

forms of such waste, not noticing it, the gestures instinctive: he retrieved

pencils, he spent a half-hour, while telephones shrieked unanswered, repairing a

typewriter that had broken down. It was not a matter of economy; he signed

checks without looking at the figures; Scarret was afraid to think of the

amounts each passing day cost him. It was a matter of things that were part of

the building where he loved every doorknob, things that belonged to the Banner

that belonged to him.

Late each afternoon he telephoned Dominique in the country. "Fine. Everything

under control. Don’t listen to panic-mongers....No, to hell with it, you know I

don’t want to talk about the damn paper. Tell me what the garden looks

like....Did you go swimming today?...Tell me about the lake....What dress are

you wearing?...Listen to WLX tonight, at eight, they’ll have your

pet--Rachmaninoff’s Second Concerto....Of course I have time to keep informed

about everything....Oh, all right, I see one can’t fool an ex-newspaper woman, I

did go over the radio page....Of course we have plenty of help, it’s just that I

can’t quite trust some of the new boys and I had a moment to spare....Above all,

don’t come to town. You promised me that....Good night, dearest...."

He hung up and sat looking at the telephone, smiling. The thought of the

countryside was like the thought of a continent beyond an ocean that could not

be crossed; it gave him a sense of being locked in a besieged fortress and he

liked that--not the fact, but the feeling. His face looked like a throwback to

some distant ancestor who had fought on the ramparts of a castle.

One evening he went out to the restaurant across the street; he had not eaten a

complete meal for days. The streets were still light when he came back--the

placid brown haze of summer, as if dulled sunrays remained stretched too

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comfortably on the warm air to undertake a movement of withdrawal, even though

the sun had long since gone; it made the sky look fresh and the street dirty;

there were patches of brown and tired orange in the corners of old buildings. He

saw pickets pacing in front of the Banner’s entrance. There were eight of them

and they marched around and around in a long oval on the sidewalk. He recognized

one boy--a police reporter, he had never seen any of the others. They carried

signs: "Toohey, Harding, Alien, Falk..." "The Freedom of the Press..." "Gail

Wynand Tramples Human Rights..."

His eyes kept following one woman. Her hips began at her ankles, bulging over

the tight straps of her shoes; she had square shoulders and a long coat of cheap

brown tweed over a huge square body. She had small white hands, the kind that

would drop things all over the kitchen. She had an incision of a mouth, without

lips, and she waddled as she moved, but she moved with surprising briskness. Her

steps defied the whole world to hurt her, with a malicious slyness that seemed

to say she would like nothing better, because what a joke it would be on the

world if it tried to hurt her, just try it and see, just try it. Wynand knew she

had never been employed on the Banner; she never could be; it did not appear

likely that she could be taught to read; her steps seemed to add that she jolly

well didn’t have to. She carried a sign: "We demand..."

He thought of the nights when he had slept on the couch in the old Banner

Building, in the first years, because the new presses had to be paid for and the

Banner had to be on the streets before its competitors, and he coughed blood one

night and refused to see a doctor, but it turned out to be nothing, just

exhaustion.

He hurried into the building. The presses were rolling. He stood and listened

for a while.

At night the building was quiet. It seemed bigger, as if sound took space and

vacated it; there were panels of light at open doors, between long stretches of

dim hallways. A lone typewriter clicked somewhere, evenly, like a dripping

faucet. Wynand walked through the halls. He thought that men had been willing to

work for him when he plugged known crooks for municipal elections, when he

glamorized red-light districts, when he ruined reputations by scandalous libel,

when he sobbed over the mothers of gangsters. Talented men, respected men had

been eager to work for him. Now he was being honest for the first time in his

career. He was leading his greatest crusade--with the help of finks, drifters,

drunkards, and humble drudges too passive to quit. The guilt, he thought, was

not perhaps with those who now refused to work for him.

#

The sun hit the square crystal inkstand on his desk. It made Wynand think of a

cool drink on a lawn, white clothes, the feel of grass under bare elbows. He

tried not to look at the gay glitter and went on writing. It was a morning in

the second week of the strike. He had retreated to his office for an hour and

given orders not to be disturbed; he had an article to finish; he knew he wanted

the excuse, one hour of not seeing what went on in the building.

The door of his office opened without announcement, and Dominique came in. She

had not been allowed to enter the Banner Building since their marriage.

He got up, a kind of quiet obedience in his movement, permitting himself no

questions. She wore a coral linen suit, she stood as if the lake were behind her

and the sunlight rose from the surface to the folds of her clothes. She said:

"Gail, I’ve come for my old job on the Banner."

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He stood looking at her silently; then he smiled; it was a smile of

convalescence.

He turned to the desk, picked up the sheets he had written, handed them to her

and said:

"Take this to the back room. Pick up the wire flimsies and bring them to me.

Then report to Manning at the city desk."

The impossible, the not to be achieved in word, glance or gesture, the complete

union of two beings in complete understanding, was done by a small stack of

paper passing from his hand to hers. Their fingers did not touch. She turned and

walked out of the office.

Within two days, it was as if she had never left the staff of the Banner. Only

now she did not write a column on houses, but kept busy wherever a competent

hand was needed to fill a gap. "It’s quite all right, Alvah," she said to

Scarret, "it’s a proper feminine job to be a seamstress. I’m here to slap on

patches where necessary--and boy! is this cloth ripping fast! Just call me when

one of your new journalists runs amuck more than usual."

Scarret could not understand her tone, her manner or her presence. "You’re a

lifesaver, Dominique," he mumbled sadly. "It’s like the old days, seeing you

here--and oh! how I wish it were the old days! Only I can’t understand. Gail

wouldn’t allow a photo of you in the place, when it was a decent, respectable

place--and now when it’s practically as safe as a penitentiary during a convict

riot, he lets you work here!"

"Can the commentaries, Alvah. We haven’t the time."

She wrote a brilliant review of a movie she hadn’t seen. She dashed off a report

on a convention she hadn’t attended. She batted out a string of recipes for the

"Daily Dishes" column, when the lady in charge failed to show up one morning. "I

didn’t know you could cook," said Scarret. "I didn’t either," said Dominique.

She went out one night to cover a dock fire, when it was found that the only man

on duty had passed out on the floor of the men’s room. "Good job," Wynand told

her when he read the story, "but try that again and you’ll get fired. If you

want to stay, you’re not to step out of the building."

This was his only comment on her presence. He spoke to her when necessary,

briefly and simply, as to any other employee. He gave orders. There were days

when they did not have time to see each other. She slept on a couch in the

library. Occasionally, in the evening, she would come to his office, for a short

rest, when they could take it, and then they talked, about nothing in

particular, about small events of the day’s work, gaily, like any married couple

gossiping about the normal routine of their common life.

They did not speak of Roark or Cortlandt. She had noticed Roark’s picture on the

wall of his office and asked: "When did you hang that up?"

"Over a year ago." It had been their only reference to Roark. They did not

discuss the growing public fury against the Banner. They did not speculate on

the future. They felt relief in forgetting the question beyond the walls of the

building; it could be forgotten because it stood no longer as a question between

them; it was solved and answered; what remained was the peace of the simplified:

they had a job to do--the job of keeping a newspaper going--and they were doing

it together.

She would come in, unsummoned, in the middle of the night, with a cup of hot

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coffee, and he would snatch it gratefully, not pausing in his work. He would

find fresh sandwiches left on his desk when he needed them badly. He had no time

to wonder where she got things. Then he discovered that she had established an

electric plate and a stock of supplies in a closet. She cooked breakfast for

him, when he had to work all night, she came in carrying dishes on a piece of

cardboard for a tray, with the silence of empty streets beyond the windows and

the first light of morning on the rooftops.

Once he found her, broom in hand, sweeping an office; the maintenance department

had fallen apart, charwomen appeared and disappeared, no one had time to notice.

"Is that what I’m paying you for?" he asked.

"Well, we can’t work in a pigsty. I haven’t asked you what you’re paying me, but

I want a raise."

"Drop this thing, for God’s sake! It’s ridiculous."

"What’s ridiculous? It’s clean now. It didn’t take me long. Is it a good job?"

"It’s a good job."

She leaned on the broom handle and laughed. "I believe you thought, like

everybody else, that I’m just a kind of luxury object, a high-class type of kept

woman, didn’t you, Gail?"

"Is this the way you can keep going when you want to?"

"This is the way I’ve wanted to keep going all my life--if I could find a reason

for it."

He learned that her endurance was greater than his. She never showed a sign of

exhaustion. He supposed that she slept, but he could not discover when.

At any time, in any part of the building, not seeing him for hours, she was

aware of him, she knew when he needed her most. Once, he fell asleep, slumped

across his desk. He awakened and found her looking at him. She had turned off

the lights, she sat on a chair by the window, in the moonlight, her face turned

to him, calm, watching. Her face was the first thing he saw. Lifting his head

painfully from his arm, in the first moment, before he could return fully to

control and reality, he felt a sudden wrench of anger, helplessness and

desperate protest, not remembering what had brought them here, to this,

remembering only that they were both caught in some vast, slow process of

torture and that he loved her.

She had seen it in his face, before he had completed the movement of

straightening his body. She walked to him, she stood by his chair, she took his

head and let it rest against her, she held him, and he did not resist, slumped

in her arms, she kissed his hair, she whispered: "It will be all right, Gail, it

will be all right."

At the end of three weeks Wynand walked out of the building one evening, not

caring whether there would be anything left of it when he returned, and went to

see Roark.

He had not telephoned Roark since the beginning of the siege. Roark telephoned

him often; Wynand answered, quietly, just answering, originating no statement,

refusing to prolong the conversation. He had warned Roark at the beginning:

"Don’t try to come here. I’ve given orders. You won’t be admitted." He had to