The Fountainhead

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 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 Ba

"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 ca

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 begi

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 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 Ba

The Ba

"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 Ba

The Ba

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 Ba

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 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.