Alvah Scarret read the story and liked it so much that he lost all caution. “Run it off, Alvah,” Sally Brent urged him, “just have a proof run off and leave it on his desk. He’ll okay it, see if he won’t.” That evening Sally Brent was fired. Her costly contract was bought off–it had three more years to run–and she was told never to enter the Banner Building again for any purpose whatsoever.
Scarret protested in panic: “Gail, you can’t fire Sally! Not Sally!”
“When I can’t fire anyone I wish on my paper, I’ll close it and blow up the God-damn building,” said Wynand calmly.
“But her public! We’ll lose her public!”
“To hell with her public.”
That night, at dinner, Wynand took from his pocket a crumpled wad of paper–the proof cut of the story–and threw it, without a word, at Dominique’s face across the table. It hit her cheek and fell to the floor. She picked it up, unrolled it, saw what it was and laughed aloud.
Sally Brent wrote an article on Gail Wynand’s love life. In a gay, intellectual manner, in the terms of sociological study, the article presented material such as no pulp magazine would have accepted. It was published in the New Frontiers.
Wynand bought Dominique a necklace designed at his special order. It was made of diamonds without visible settings, spaced wide apart in an irregular pattern, like a handful scattered accidentally, held together by platinum chains made under a microscope, barely noticeable. When he clasped it about her neck, it looked like drops of water fallen at random.
She stood before a mirror. She slipped her dressing gown off her shoulders and let the raindrops glitter on her skin. She said:
“That life story of the Bronx housewife who murdered her husband’s young mistress is pretty sordid, Gail. But I think there’s something dirtier–the curiosity of the people who like to read about it. And then there’s something dirtier still–the people who pander to that curiosity. Actually, it was that housewife–she has piano legs and such a baggy neck in her pictures–who made this necklace possible. It’s a beautiful necklace. I shall be proud to wear it.”
He smiled; the sudden brightness of his eyes had an odd quality of courage.
“That’s one way of looking at it,” he said. “There’s another. I like to think that I took the worst refuse of the human spirit–the mind of that housewife and the minds of the people who like to read about her–and I made of it this necklace on your shoulders. I like to think that I was an alchemist capable of performing so great a purification.”
She saw no apology, no regret, no resentment as he looked at her. It was a strange glance; she had noticed it before; a glance of simple worship. And it made her realize that there is a stage of worship which makes the worshiper himself an object of reverence.
She was sitting before her mirror when he entered her dressing room on the following night. He bent down, he pressed his lips to the back of her neck–and he saw a square of paper attached to the corner of her mirror. It was the decoded copy of the cablegram that had ended her career on the Banner. FIRE THE BITCH. G W
He lifted his shoulders, to stand erect behind her. He asked:
“How did you get that?”
“Ellsworth Toohey gave it to me. I thought it was worth preserving. Of course, I didn’t know it would ever become so appropriate.”
He inclined his head gravely, acknowledging the authorship, and said nothing else.
She expected to find the cablegram gone next morning. But he had not touched it. She would not remove it. It remained on display on the corner of her mirror. When he held her in his arms, she often saw his eyes move to that square of paper. She could not tell what he thought.
In the spring, a publishers’ convention took him away from New York for a week. It was their first separation. Dominique surprised him by coming to meet him at the airport when he returned. She was gay and gentle; her manner held a promise he had never expected, could not trust, and found himself trusting completely.
When he entered the drawing room of their penthouse and slumped down, half stretching on a couch, she knew that he wanted to lie still here, to feel the recaptured safety of his own world. She saw his eyes, open, delivered to her, without defense. She stood straight, ready. She said:
“You’d better dress, Gail. We’re going to the theater tonight.”
He lifted himself to a sitting posture. He smiled, the slanting ridges standing out on his forehead. She had a cold feeling of admiration for him: the control was perfect, all but these ridges. He said:
“Fine. Black tie or white?”
“White. I have tickets for No Skin Off Your Nose. They were very hard to get.”
It was too much; it seemed too ludicrous to be part of this moment’s contest between them. He broke down by laughing frankly, in helpless disgust.
“Good God, Dominique, not that one!”
“Why, Gail, it’s the biggest hit in town. Your own critic, Jules Fougler”–he stopped laughing. He understood–“said it was the great play of our age. Ellsworth Toohey said it was the fresh voice of the coming new world. Alvah Scarret said it was not written in ink, but in the milk of human kindness. Sally Brent–before you fired her–said it made her laugh with a lump in her throat. Why, it’s the godchild of the Banner. I thought you would certainly want to see it.”
“Yes, of course,” he said.
He got up and went to dress.
No Skin Off Your Nose had been running for many months. Ellsworth Toohey had mentioned regretfully in his column that the title of the play had had to be changed slightly–“as a concession to the stuffy prudery of the middle class which still controls our theater. It is a crying example of interference with the freedom of the artist. Now don’t let’s hear any more of that old twaddle about ours being a free society. Originally, the title of this beautiful play was an authentic line drawn from the language of the people, with the brave, simple eloquence of folk expression.”
Wynand and Dominique sat in the center of the fourth row, not looking at each other, listening to the play. The things being done on the stage were merely trite and crass; but the undercurrent made them frightening. There was an air about the ponderous inanities spoken, which the actors had absorbed like an infection; it was in their smirking faces, in the slyness of their voices; in their untidy gestures. It was an air of inanities uttered as revelations and insolently demanding acceptance as such; an air, not of innocent presumption, but of conscious effrontery; as if the author knew the nature of his work and boasted of his power to make it appear sublime in the minds of his audience and thus destroy the capacity for the sublime within them. The work justified the verdict of its sponsors: it brought laughs, it was amusing; it was an indecent joke, acted out not on the stage but in the audience. It was a pedestal from which a god had been torn, and in his place there stood, not Satan with a sword, but a corner lout sipping a bottle of Coca-Cola.
There was silence in the audience, puzzled and humble. When someone laughed, the rest joined in, with relief, glad to learn that they were enjoying themselves. Jules Fougler had not tried to influence anybody; he had merely made clear–well in advance and through many channels–that anyone unable to enjoy this play was, basically, a worthless human being. “It’s no use asking for explanations,” he had said. “Either you’re fine enough to like it or you aren’t.”
In the intermission Wynand heard a stout woman saying: “It’s wonderful. I don’t understand it, but I have the feeling that it’s something very important.” Dominique asked him: “Do you wish to go, Gail?” He said: “No. We’ll stay to the end.”
He was silent in the car on their way home. When they entered their drawing room, he stood waiting, ready to hear and accept anything. For a moment she felt the desire to spare him. She felt empty and very tired. She did not want to hurt him; she wanted to seek his help.
Then she thought again what she had thought in the theater. She thought that this play was the creation of the Banner, this was what the Banner had forced into life, had fed, upheld, made to triumph. And it was the Banner that had begun and ended the destruction of the Stoddard Temple….The New York Banner, November 2, 1930–“One Small Voice”–“Sacrilege” by Ellsworth M. Toohey–“The Churches of our Childhood” by Alvah Scarret–“Are you happy, Mr. Superman?”…And now that destruction was not an event long since past–this was not a comparison between two mutually unmeasurable entities, a building and a play–it was not an accident, nor a matter of persons, of Ike, Fougler, Toohey, herself…and Roark. It was a contest without time, a struggle of two abstractions, the thing that had created the building against the things that made the play possible–two forces, suddenly naked to her in their simple statement–two forces that had fought since the world began–and every religion had known of them–and there had always been a God and a Devil–only men had been so mistaken about the shapes of their Devil–he was not single and big, he was many and smutty and small. The Banner had destroyed the Stoddard Temple in order to make room for this play–it could not do otherwise–there was no middle choice, no escape, no neutrality–it was one or the other–it had always been–and the contest had many symbols, but no name and no statement….Roark, she heard herself screaming inside, Roark…Roark…Roark…