The Fountainhead by Rand, Ayn

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.”

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 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 keep out of his mind the actual form which the issue of his battle could take; he had to forget the fact of Roark’s physical existence; because the thought of Roark’s person brought the thought of the county jail.

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