“If that’s true, then you…”
“Then I become gentle and humble–to your great astonishment–because I’m the worst scoundrel living.”
“I don’t believe that, Gail.”
“No? I’m not the person before last any more?”
“Not any more.”
“Well, dearest, as a matter of fact, I am.”
“Why do you want to think that?”
“I don’t want to. But I like to be honest. That has been my only private luxury. Don’t change your mind about me. Go on seeing me as you saw me before we met.”
“Gail, that’s not what you want.”
“It doesn’t matter what I want. I don’t want anything–except to own you. Without any answer from you. It has to be without answer. If you begin to look at me too closely, you’ll see things you won’t like at all.”
“What things?”
“You’re so beautiful, Dominique. It’s such a lovely accident on God’s part that there’s one person who matches inside and out.”
“What things, Gail?”
“Do you know what you’re actually in love with? Integrity. The impossible. The clean, consistent, reasonable, self-faithful, the all-of-one-style, like a work of art. That’s the only field where it can be found–art. But you want it in the flesh. You’re in love with it. Well, you see, I’ve never had any integrity.”
“How sure are you of that, Gail?”
“Have you forgotten the Banner?”
“To hell with the Banner.”
“All right, to hell with the Banner. It’s nice to hear you say that. But the Banner’s not the major symptom. That I’ve never practiced any sort of integrity is not so important. What’s important is that I’ve never felt any need for it. I hate the conception of it. I hate the presumptuousness of the idea.”
“Dwight Carson…” she said. He heard the sound of disgust in her voice.
He laughed. “Yes, Dwight Carson. The man I bought. The individualist who’s become a mob-glorifier and, incidentally, a dipsomaniac. I did that. That was worse than the Banner, wasn’t it? You don’t like to be reminded of that?”
“No.”
“But surely you’ve heard enough screaming about it. All the giants of the spirit whom I’ve broken. I don’t think anybody ever realized how much I enjoyed doing it. It’s a kind of lust. I’m perfectly indifferent to slugs like Ellsworth Toohey or my friend Alvah, and quite willing to leave them in peace. But just let me see a man of slightly higher dimension–and I’ve got to make a sort of Toohey out of him. I’ve got to. It’s like a sex urge.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Incidentally, you misunderstand Ellsworth Toohey.”
“Possibly. You don’t expect me to waste mental effort to untangle that snail’s shell?”
“And you contradict yourself.”
“Where?”
“Why didn’t you set out to destroy me?”
“The exception-making, Dominique. I love you. I had to love you. God help you if you were a man.”
“Gail–why?”
“Why have I done all that?”
“Yes.”
“Power, Dominique. The only thing I ever wanted. To know that there’s not a man living whom I can’t force to do–anything. Anything I choose. The man I couldn’t break would destroy me. But I’ve spent years finding out how safe I am. They say I have no sense of honor, I’ve missed something in life. Well, I haven’t missed very much, have I? The thing I’ve missed–it doesn’t exist.”
He spoke in a normal tone of voice, but he noticed suddenly that she was listening with the intent concentration needed to hear a whisper of which one can afford to lose no syllable.
“What’s the matter, Dominique? What are you thinking about?”
“I’m listening to you, Gail.”
She did not say she was listening to his words and to the reason behind them. It was suddenly so clear to her that she heard it as an added clause to each sentence, even though he had no knowledge of what he was confessing.
“The worst thing about dishonest people is what they think of as honesty,” he said. “I know a woman who’s never held to one conviction for three days running, but when I told her she had no integrity, she got very tight-lipped and said her idea of integrity wasn’t mine; it seems she’d never stolen any money. Well, she’s one that’s in no danger from me whatever. I don’t hate her. I hate the impossible conception you love so passionately, Dominique.”
“Do you?”
“I’ve had a lot of fun proving it.”
She walked to him and sat down on the deck beside his chair, the planks smooth and hot under her bare legs. He wondered why she looked at him so gently. He frowned. She knew that some reflection of what she had understood remained in her eyes–and she looked away from him.
“Gail, why tell me all that? It’s not what you want me to think of you.”
“No. It isn’t. Why tell you now? Want the truth? Because it has to be told. Because I want to be honest with you. Only with you and with myself. But I wouldn’t have the courage to tell you anywhere else. Not at home. Not ashore. Only here–because here it doesn’t seem quite real. Does it?”
“No.”
“I think I hoped that here you’d accept it–and still think of me as you did when you spoke my name in that way I wanted to record.”
She put her head against his chair, her face pressed to his knees, her hand dropped, fingers half-curled, on the glistening planks of the deck. She did not want to show what she had actually heard him saying about himself today.
On a night of late fall they stood together at the roof-garden parapet, looking at the city. The long shafts made of lighted windows were like streams breaking out of the black sky, flowing down in single drops to feed the great pool of fire below.
“There they are, Dominique–the great buildings. The skyscrapers. Do you remember? They were the first link between us. We’re both in love with them, you and I.”
She thought she should resent his right to say it. But she felt no resentment.
“Yes, Gail. I’m in love with them.”
She looked at the vertical threads of light that were the Cord Building, she raised her fingers off the parapet, just enough to touch the place of its unseen form on the distant sky. She felt no reproach from it.
“I like to see a man standing at the foot of a skyscraper,” he said. “It makes him no bigger than an ant–isn’t that the correct bromide for the occasion? The God-damn fools! It’s man who made it–the whole incredible mass of stone and steel. It doesn’t dwarf him, it makes him greater than the structure. It reveals his true dimensions to the world. What we love about these buildings, Dominique, is the creative faculty, the heroic in man.”
“Do you love the heroic in man, Gail?”
“I love to think of it. I don’t believe it.”
She leaned against the parapet and watched the green lights stretched in a long straight line far below. She said:
“I wish I could understand you.”
“I thought I should be quite obvious. I’ve never hidden anything from you.”
He watched the electric signs that flashed in disciplined spasms over the black river. Then he pointed to a blurred light, far to the south, a faint reflection of blue.
“That’s the Banner Building. See, over there?–that blue light. I’ve done so many things, but I’ve missed one, the most important. There’s no Wynand Building in New York. Some day I’ll build a new home for the Banner. It will be the greatest structure of the city and it will bear my name. I started in a miserable dump, and the paper was called the Gazette. I was only a stooge for some very filthy people. But I thought, then, of the Wynand Building that would rise some day. I’ve thought of it all the years since.”
“Why haven’t you built it?”
“I wasn’t ready for it.”
“Why?”
“I’m not ready for it now. I don’t know why. I know only that it’s very important to me. It will be the final symbol. I’ll know the right time when it comes.”
He turned to look out to the west, to a path of dim scattered lights. He pointed:
“That’s where I was born. Hell’s Kitchen.” She listened attentively; he seldom spoke of his beginning. “I was sixteen when I stood on a roof and looked at the city, like tonight. And decided what I would be.”
The quality of his voice became a line underscoring the moment, saying: Take notice, this is important. Not looking at him, she thought this was what he had waited for, this should give her the answer, the key to him. Years ago, thinking of Gail Wynand, she had wondered how such a man faced his life and his work; she expected boasting and a hidden sense of shame, or impertinence flaunting its own guilt. She looked at him. His head lifted, his eyes level on the sky before him, he conveyed none of the things she had expected; he conveyed a quality incredible in this connection: a sense of gallantry.