“He’s got a mind–of his own. I don’t think you want any whips around the place–except the one you hold. I think you want to be careful about what the promise promises.”
“Whom’ll I stick in his spot?”
“Jules Fougler.”
“Oh, hell, Ellsworth!”
“Why not?”
“That old son of a…We can’t afford him.”
“You can if you want to. And look at the name he’s got.”
“But he’s the most impossible old…”
“Well, you don’t have to take him. We’ll discuss it some other time. Just get rid of Jimmy Kearns.”
“Look, Ellsworth, I don’t play favorites; it’s all the same to me. I’ll give Jimmy the boot if you say so. Only I don’t see what difference it makes and what it’s got to do with what we were talking about.”
“You don’t,” said Toohey. “You will.”
“Gail, you know that I want you to be happy,” said Alvah Scarret, sitting in a comfortable armchair in the study of Wynand’s penthouse that evening. “You know that. I’m thinking of nothing else.”
Wynand lay stretched out on a couch, one leg bent, with the foot resting on the knee of the other. He smoked and listened silently.
“I’ve known Dominique for years,” said Scarret. “Long before you ever heard of her. I love her. I love her, you might say, like a father. But you’ve got to admit that she’s not the kind of woman your public would expect to see as Mrs. Gail Wynand.”
Wynand said nothing.
“Your wife is a public figure, Gail. Just automatically. A public property. Your readers have a right to demand and expect certain things of her. A symbol value, if you know what I mean. Like the Queen of England, sort of. How do you expect Dominique to live up to that? How do you expect her to preserve any appearances at all? She’s the wildest person I know. She has a terrible reputation. But worst of all–think Gail!–a divorcee! And here we spend tons of good print, standing for the sanctity of the home and the purity of womanhood! How are you going to make your public swallow that one? How am I going to sell your wife to them?”
“Don’t you think this conversation had better be stopped, Alvah?”
“Yes, Gail,” said Scarret meekly.
Scarret waited, with a heavy sense of aftermath, as if after a violent quarrel, anxious to make up.
“I know, Gail!” he cried happily. “I know what we can do. We’ll put Dominique back on the paper and we’ll have her write a column–a different one–a syndicated column on the home. You know, household hints, kitchen, babies and all that. It’ll take the curse off. Show what a good little homebody she really is, her youthful mistakes notwithstanding. Make the women forgive her. We’ll have a special department–‘Mrs. Gail Wynand’s recipes.’ A few pictures of her will help–you know, gingham dresses and aprons and her hair done up in a more conventional way.”
“Shut up, Alvah, before I slap your face,” said Wynand without raising his voice.
“Yes, Gail.”
Scarret made a move to get up.
“Sit still. I haven’t finished.”
Scarret waited obediently.
“Tomorrow morning,” said Wynand, “you will send a memo to every one of our papers. You will tell them to look through their files and find any pictures of Dominique Francon they might have in connection with her old column. You will tell them to destroy the pictures. You will tell them that henceforward any mention of her name or the use of her picture in any of my papers will cost the job of the entire editorial staff responsible. When the proper time comes, you will have an announcement of my marriage appear in all our papers. That cannot be avoided. The briefest announcement you can compose. No commentaries. No stories. No pictures. Pass the word around and make sure it’s understood. It’s any man’s job, yours included, if this is disobeyed.”
“No stories–when you marry her?”
“No stories, Alvah.”
“But good God! That’s news! The other papers…”
“I don’t care what the other papers do about it.”
“But–why, Gail?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
Dominique sat at the window, listening to the train wheels under the floor. She looked at the countryside of Ohio flying past in the fading daylight. Her head lay back against the seat and her hands lay limply at each side of her on the seat cushion. She was one with the structure of the car, she was carried forward just as the window frame, the floor, the walls of the compartment were carried forward. The corners blurred, gathering darkness; the window remained luminous, evening light rising from the earth. She let herself rest in that faint illumination; it entered the car and ruled it, so long as she did not turn on the light to shut it out.
She had no consciousness of purpose. There was no goal to this journey, only the journey itself, only the motion and the metal sound of motion around her. She felt slack and empty, losing her identity in a painless ebb, content to vanish and let nothing remain defined save that particular earth in the window.
When she saw, in the slowing movement beyond the glass, the name “Clayton” on a faded board under the eaves of a station building, she knew what she had been expecting. She knew why she had taken this train, not a faster one, why she had looked carefully at the timetable of its stops–although it had been just a column of meaningless names to her then. She seized her suitcase, coat and hat. She ran. She could not take time to dress, afraid that the floor under her feet would carry her away from here. She ran down the narrow corridor of the car, down the steps. She leaped to the station platform, feeling the shock of winter cold on her bare throat. She stood looking at the station building. She heard the train moving behind her, clattering away.
Then she put on her coat and hat. She walked across the platform, into the waiting room, across a wooden floor studded with lumps of dry chewing gum, through the heavy billows of heat from an iron stove, to the square beyond the station.
She saw a last band of yellow in the sky above the low roof lines. She saw a pitted stretch of paving bricks, and small houses leaning against one another; a bare tree with twisted branches, skeletons of weeds at the doorless opening of an abandoned garage, dark shop fronts, a drugstore still open on a corner, its lighted window dim, low over the ground.
She had never been here before, but she felt this place proclaiming its ownership of her, closing in about her with ominous intimacy. It was as if every dark mass exercised a suction like the pull of the planets in space, prescribing her orbit. She put her hand on a fire hydrant and felt the cold seeping through her glove into her skin. This was the way the town told her, a direct penetration which neither her clothes nor her mind could stop. The peace of the inevitable remained. Only now she had to act, but the actions were simple, set in advance. She asked a passer-by: “Where is the site of the new building of Janer’s Department Store?”
She walked patiently through the dark streets. She walked past desolate winter lawns and sagging porches; past vacant lots where weeds rustled against tin cans; past closed grocery stores and a steaming laundry; past an uncurtained window where a man in shirt sleeves sat by a fire, reading a paper. She turned corners and crossed streets, with the feel of cobblestones under the thin soles of her pumps. Rare passersby looked, astonished, at her air of foreign elegance. She noticed it; she felt an answering wonder. She wanted to say: But don’t you understand?–I belong here more than you do. She stopped, once in a while, closing her eyes; she found it difficult to breathe.
She came to Main Street and walked slower. There were a few lights, cars parked diagonally at the curb, a movie theater, a store window displaying pink underwear among kitchen utensils. She walked stiffly, looking ahead.
She saw a glare of light on the side of an old building, on a blind wall of yellow bricks showing the sooted floor lines of the neighboring structure that had been torn down. The light came from an excavation pit. She knew this was the site. She hoped it was not. If they worked late, he would be here. She did not want to see him tonight. She had wanted only to see the place and the building; she was not ready for more; she had wanted to see him tomorrow. But she could not stop now. She walked to the excavation. It lay on a corner, open to the street, without fence. She heard the grinding clatter of iron, she saw the arm of a derrick, the shadows of men on the slanting sides of fresh earth, yellow in the light. She could not see the planks that led up to the sidewalk, but she heard the sound of steps and then she saw Roark coming up to the street. He was hatless, he had a loose coat hanging open.