The fountainhead by Ayn Rand

parties; they were treated with tender, curious solicitude, like survivors of
disaster. They said that they could not understand what possible motive Roark
could have had, and they demanded justice.
Peter Keating went nowhere. He refused to see the press. He refused to see
anyone. But he issued a written statement that he believed Roark was not guilty.
His statement contained one curious sentence, the last. It said: "Leave him
alone, please can’t you leave him alone?"
Pickets from the Council of American Builders paced in front of the Cord
Building. It served no purpose, because there was no work in Roark’s office. The
commissions he was to start had been canceled.
This was solidarity. The debutante having her toenails pedicured--the housewife
buying carrots from a pushcart--the bookkeeper who had wanted to be a pianist,
but had the excuse of a sister to support--the businessman who hated his
business--the worker who hated his work--the intellectual who hated
everybody--all were united as brothers in the luxury of common anger that cured
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boredom and took them out of themselves, and they knew well enough what a
blessing it was to be taken out of themselves. The readers were unanimous. The
press was unanimous.
Gail Wynand went against the current.
"Gail!" Alvah Scarret had gasped. "We can’t defend a dynamiter!"
"Keep still, Alvah," Wynand had said, "before I bash your teeth in."
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