"That was your privilege. The condition on which you married me. To make me pay for the Banner."
"I don't want to make you pay for it."
"Why don't you want it any more?"
"It can't be paid for."
In the silence she listened to his steps pacing the room behind her.
"Dominique. What was it?"
"The pain that stops at a certain point? Nothing. Only that you had no right to say it. The men who have, pay for that right, a price you can't afford. But it doesn't matter now. Say it if you wish. I have no right to say it either."
"That wasn't all."
"I think we have a great deal in common, you and I. We've committed the same treason somewhere. No, that's a bad word ... Yes, I think it's the right word. It's the only one that has the feeling of what I mean."
"Dominique, you can't feel that." His voice sounded strange. She turned to him.
"Why?"
"Because that's what I felt tonight. Treason."
"Toward whom?"
"I don't know. If I were religious, I'd say 'God.' But I'm not religious."
"That's what I meant, Gail."
"Why should you feel it? The Banner is not your child."
"There are other forms of the same guilt."
Then he walked to her across the long room, he held her in his arms, he said:
"You don't know the meaning of the kind of words you use. We have a great deal in common, but not that. I'd rather you went on spitting at me than trying to share my offenses."
She let her hand rest against the length of his cheek, her fingertips at his temple.
He asked:
"Will you tell me — now — what it was?"
"Nothing. I undertook more than I could carry. You're tired, Gail. Why don't you go on upstairs? Leave me here for a little while. I just want to look at the city. Then I'll join you and I'll be all right."
9.
DOMINIQUE stood at the rail of the yacht, the deck warm under her flat sandals, the sun on her bare legs, the wind blowing her thin white dress. She looked at Wynand stretched in a deck chair before her.
She thought of the change she noticed in him again aboard ship. She had watched him through the months of their summer cruise. She had seen him once running down a companionway; the picture remained in her mind; a tall white figure thrown forward in a streak of speed and confidence; his hand grasped a railing, risking deliberately the danger of a sudden break, gaining a new propulsion. He was not the corrupt publisher of a popular empire. He was an aristocrat aboard a yacht. He looked, she thought, like what one believes aristocracy to be when one is young: a brilliant kind of gaiety without guilt.
She looked at him in the deck chair. She thought that relaxation was attractive only in those for whom it was an unnatural state; then even limpness acquired purpose. She wondered about him; Gail Wynand, famous for his extraordinary capacity; but this was not merely the force of an ambitious adventurer who had created a chain of newspapers; this — the quality she saw in him here — the thing stretched out under the sun like an answer — this was greater, a first cause, a faculty out of universal dynamics.
"Gail," she said suddenly, involuntarily.
He opened his eyes to look at her.
"I wish I had taken a recording of that," he said lazily. "You'd be startled to hear what it sounded like. Quite wasted here. I'd like to play it back in a bedroom."
"I'll repeat it there, if you wish."
"Thank you, dearest. And I promise not to exaggerate or presume too much. You're not in love with me. You've never loved anyone."
"Why do you think that?"
"If you loved a man, it wouldn't be just a matter of a circus wedding and an atrocious evening in the theater. You'd put him through total hell."
"How do you know that, Gail?"
"Why have you been staring at me ever since we met? Because I'm not the Gail Wynand you'd heard about. You see, I love you. And love is exception-making. If you were in love you'd want to be broken, trampled, ordered, dominated, because that's the impossible, the inconceivable for you in your relations with people. That would be the one gift, the great exception you'd want to offer the man you loved. But it wouldn't be easy for you."
"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."