The Fountainhead

Copy boys were sent out on reporter's beats. Most of the stuff they sent in was of such quality that Wynand was forced past despair into howls of laughter: he had never read such highbrow English; he could see the pride of the ambitious youth who was a journalist at last. He did not laugh when the stories appeared in the Ba

He tried to hire new men. He offered extravagant salaries. The people he wanted refused to work for him. A few men answered his call, and he wished they hadn't, though he hired them. They were men who had not been employed by a reputable newspaper for ten years; the kind who would not have been allowed, a month ago, into the lobby of his building. Some of them had to be thrown out in two days; others remained. They were drunk most of the time. Some acted as if they were granting Wynand a favor. "Don't you get huffy, Gail, old boy," said one — and was tossed bodily down two flights of stairs. He broke an ankle and sat on the bottom landing, looking up at Wynand with an air of complete astonishment. Others were subtler; they merely stalked about and looked at Wynand slyly, almost winking, implying that they were fellow criminals tied together in a dirty deal.

He appealed to schools of journalism. No one responded. One student body sent him a resolution signed by all its members: " ... Entering our careers with a high regard for the dignity of our profession, dedicating ourselves to uphold the honor of the press, we feel that none among us could preserve his self-respect and accept an offer such as yours."

The news editor had remained at his desk; the city editor had gone. Wynand filled in as city editor, managing editor, wire man, rewrite man, copy boy. He did not leave the building. He slept on a couch in his office — as he had done in the first years of the Ba

Alvah Scarret could not understand Wynand's calm. The brilliant machine — and that, thought Scarret, was really the word which had always stood for Wynand in his mind — had never functioned better. His words were brief, his orders rapid, his decisions immediate. In the confusion of machines, lead, grease, ink, waste paper, unswept offices, untenanted desks, glass crashing in sudden showers when a brick was hurled from the street below, Wynand moved like a figure in double-exposure, superimposed on his background, out of place and scale. He doesn't belong here, thought Scarret, because he doesn't look modern — that's what it is — he doesn't look modern, no matter what kind of pants he's wearing — he looks like something out of a Gothic cathedral. The patrician head, held level, the fleshless face that had shrunk tighter together. The captain of a ship known by all, save the captain, to be sinking.

Alvah Scarret had remained. He had not grasped that the events were real; he shuffled about in a stupor; he felt a fresh jolt of bewilderment each morning when he drove up to the building and saw the pickets. He suffered no injury beyond a few tomatoes hurled at his windshield. He tried to help Wynand; he tried to do his work and that of five other men, but he could not complete a normal day's task. He was going quietly to pieces, his joints wrenched loose by a question mark. He wasted everybody's time, interrupting anything to ask: "But why? Why? How, just like that all of a sudden?"

He saw a nurse in white uniform walking down the hall — an emergency first-aid station had been established on the ground floor. He saw her carrying a wastebasket to the incinerator, with wadded clumps of gauze, bloodstained. He turned away; he felt sick. It was not the sight, but the greater terror of an implication grasped by his instinct: this civilized building — secure in the neatness of waxed floors, respectable with the strict grooming of modern business, a place where one dealt in such rational matters as written words and trade contracts, where one accepted ads for baby garments and chatted about golf — had become, in the span of a few days, a place where one carried bloody refuse through the halls. Why? — thought Alvah Scarret.

"I can't understand it," he droned in an accentless monotone to anyone around him, "I can't understand how Ellsworth got so much power ... And Ellsworth's a man of culture, an idealist, not a dirty radical off a soapbox, he's so friendly and witty, and what an erudition! — a man who jokes all the time is not a man of violence — Ellsworth didn't mean this, he didn't know what it would lead to, he loves people, I'd stake my shirt on Ellsworth Toohey."

Once, in Wynand's office, he ventured to say:

"Gail, why don't you negotiate? Why don't you meet with them at least?"

"Shut up."

"But, Gail, there might be a bit of truth on their side, too. They're newspapermen. You know what they say, the freedom of the press ... "

Then he saw the fit of fury he had expected for days and had thought safely sidetracked — the blue irises vanishing in a white smear, the blind, luminous eyeballs in a face that was all cavities, the trembling hands. But in a moment, he saw what he had never witnessed before: he saw Wynand break the fit, without sound, without relief. He saw the sweat of the effort on the hollow temples, and the fists on the edge of the desk.

"Alvah ... if I had not sat on the stairs of the Gazette for a week ... where would be the press for them to be free on?"

There were policemen outside, and in the halls of the building. It helped, but not much. One night acid was thrown at the main entrance. It burned the big plate glass of the ground floor windows and left leprous spots on the walls. Sand in the bearings stopped one of the presses. An obscure delicatessen owner got his shop smashed for advertising in the Ba

Homer Slottern, in the name of a group who called themselves the liberal businessmen, sent Wynand a notice canceling their advertising contracts. "You may sue us if you wish. We feel we have a legitimate cause for cancellation. We signed to advertise in a reputable newspaper, not in a sheet that has become a public disgrace, brings pickets to our doors, ruins our business and is not being read by anybody." The group included most of the Ba

Gail Wynand stood at the window of his office and looked at his city.

"I have supported strikes at a time when it was dangerous to do so. I have fought Gail Wynand all my life. I had never expected to see the day or the issue when I would be forced to say — as I say now — that I stand on the side of Gail Wynand," wrote Austen Heller in the Chronicle.

Wynand sent him a note: "God damn you, I didn't ask you to defend me. G W

The New Frontiers described Austen Heller as "A reactionary who has sold himself to Big Business." Intellectual society ladies said that Austin Heller was old-fashioned.

Gail Wynand stood at a desk in the city room and wrote editorials as usual. His derelict staff saw no change in him; no haste, no outbursts of anger. There was nobody to notice that some of his actions were new: he would go to the pressroom and stand looking at the white stream shot out of the roaring giants, and listen to the sound. He would pick up a lead slug off the composing room floor, and finger it absently on the palm of his hand, like a piece of jade, and lay it carefully on a table, as if he did not want it to be wasted. He fought other forms of such waste, not noticing it, the gestures instinctive: he retrieved pencils, he spent a half-hour, while telephones shrieked unanswered, repairing a typewriter that had broken down. It was not a matter of economy; he signed checks without looking at the figures; Scarret was afraid to think of the amounts each passing day cost him. It was a matter of things that were part of the building where he loved every doorknob, things that belonged to the Ba