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THE ENRIGHT HOUSE WAS OPENED IN JUNE OF 1929. There was no formal ceremony. But Roger Enright wanted to mark the moment for his own satisfaction. He invited a few people he liked and he unlocked the great glass entrance door, throwing it open to the sun-filled air. Some press photographers had arrived, because the story concerned Roger Enright and because Roger Enright did not want to have them there. He ignored them. He stood in the middle of the street, looking at the building, then he walked through the lobby, stopping short without reason and resuming his pacing. He said nothing. He frowned fiercely, as if he were about to scream with rage. His friends knew that Roger Enright was happy.
The building stood on the shore of the East River, a structure rapt as raised arms. The rock crystal forms mounted in such eloquent steps that the building did not seem stationary, but moving upward in a continuous flow—until one realized that it was only the movement of one’s glance and that one’s glance was forced to move in that particular rhythm. The walls of pale gray limestone looked silver against the sky, with the clean, dulled luster of metal, but a metal that had become a warm, living substance, carved by the most cutting of all instruments—a purposeful human will. It made the house alive in a strange, personal way of its own, so that in the minds of spectators five words ran dimly, without object or clear connection: “... in His image and likeness ...”
A young photographer from the Banner noticed Howard Roark standing alone across the street, at the parapet of the river. He was leaning back, his hands closed over the parapet, hatless, looking up at the building. It was an accidental, unconscious moment. The young photographer glanced at Roark’s face—and thought of something that had puzzled him for a long time: he had always wondered why the sensations one felt in dreams were so much more intense than anything one could experience in waking reality—why the horror was so total and the ecstasy so complete—and what was that extra quality which could never be recaptured afterward; the quality of what he felt when he walked down a path through tangled green leaves in a dream, in an air full of expectation, of causeless, utter rapture—and when he awakened he could not explain it, it had been just a path through some woods. He thought of that because he saw that extra quality for the first time in waking existence, he saw it in Roark’s face lifted to the building. The photographer was a young boy, new to his job; he did not know much about it; but he loved his work; he had been an amateur photographer since childhood. So he snapped a picture of Roark in that one moment.
Later the Art Editor of the Banner saw the picture and barked: “What the hell’s that?” “Howard Roark,” said the photographer. “Who’s Howard Roark?” “The architect.” “Who the hell wants a picture of the architect?” “Well, I only thought ...” “Besides, it’s crazy. What’s the matter with the man?” So the picture was thrown into the morgue.
The Enright House rented promptly. The tenants who moved in were people who wanted to live in sane comfort and cared about nothing else. They did not discuss the value of the building; they merely liked living there. They were the sort who lead useful, active private lives in public silence.
But others talked a great deal of the Enright House, for about three weeks. They said that it was preposterous, exhibitionist and phony. They said: “My dear, imagine inviting Mrs. Moreland if you lived in a place like that! And her home is in such good taste!” A few were beginning to appear who said: “You know, I rather like modern architecture, there are some mighty interesting things being done that way nowadays, there’s quite a school of it in Germany that’s rather remarkable—but this is not like it at all. This is a freak.”
Ellsworth Toohey never mentioned the Enright House in his column. A reader of the Banner wrote to him: “Dear Mr. Toohey: What do you think of this place they call the Enright House? I have a friend who is an interior decorator and he talks a lot about it and he says it’s lousy. Architecture and such various arts being my hobby, I don’t know what to think. Will you tell us in your column?” Ellsworth Toohey answered in a private letter: “Dear Friend: There are so many important buildings and great events going on in the world today that I cannot devote my column to trivialities.”
But people came to Roark—the few he wanted. That winter, he had received a commission to build the Norris house, a modest country home. In May he signed another contract—for his first office building, a fifty-story skyscraper in the center of Manhattan. Anthony Cord, the owner, had come from nowhere and made a fortune in Wall Street within a few brilliant, violent years. He wanted a building of his own and he went to Roark.
Roark’s office had grown to four rooms. His staff loved him. They did not realize it and would have been shocked to apply such a term as love to their cold, unapproachable, inhuman boss. These were the words they used to describe Roark, these were the words they had been trained to use by all the standards and conceptions of their past; only, working with him, they knew that he was none of these things, but they could not explain, neither what he was nor what they felt for him.
He did not smile at his employees, he did not take them out for drinks, he never inquired about their families, their love lives or their church attendance. He responded only to the essence of a man: to his creative capacity. In this office one had to be competent. There were no alternatives, no mitigating considerations. But if a man worked well, he needed nothing else to win his employer’s benevolence: it was granted, not as a gift, but as a debt. It was granted, not as affection, but as recognition. It bred an immense feeling of self-respect within every man in that office.
“Oh, but that’s not human,” said somebody when one of Roark’s draftsmen tried to explain this at home, “such a cold, intellectual approach!” One boy, a younger sort of Peter Keating, tried to introduce the human in preference to the intellectual in Roark’s office; he did not last two weeks. Roark made mistakes in choosing his employees occasionally, not often; those whom he kept for a month became his friends for life. They did not call themselves friends; they did not praise him to outsiders; they did not talk about him. They knew only, in a dim way, that it was not loyalty to him, but to the best within themselves.
 
Dominique remained in the city all summer. She remembered, with bitter pleasure, her custom to travel; it made her angry to think that she could not go, could not want to go. She enjoyed the anger; it drove her to his room. On the nights which she did not spend with him she walked through the streets of the city. She walked to the Enright House or to the Fargo Store, and stood looking at the building for a long time. She drove alone out of town—to see the Heller house, the Sanborn house, the Gowan Service Station. She never spoke to him about that.
Once, she took the Staten Island ferry at two o’clock in the morning; she rode to the Island, standing alone at the rail of an empty deck. She watched the city moving away from her. In the vast emptiness of sky and ocean, the city was only a small, jagged solid. It seemed condensed, pressed tight together, not a place of streets and separate buildings, but a single sculptured form. A form of irregular steps that rose and dropped without ordered continuity, long ascensions and sudden drops, like the graph of a stubborn struggle. But it went on mounting—toward a few points, toward the triumphant masts of skyscrapers raised out of the struggle.
The boat went past the Statue of Liberty—a figure in a green light, with an arm raised like the skyscrapers behind it.
She stood at the rail, while the city diminished, and she felt the motion of growing distance as a growing tightness within her, the pull of a living cord that could not be stretched too far. She stood in quiet excitement, when the boat sailed back and she saw the city growing again to meet her. She stretched her arms wide. The city expanded, to her elbows, to her wrists, beyond her finger tips. Then the skyscrapers rose over her head, and she was back.
She came ashore. She knew where she had to go, and wanted to get there fast, but felt she must get there herself, like this, on her own feet. So she walked half the length of Manhattan, through long, empty, echoing streets. It was four-thirty when she knocked at his door. He had been asleep. She shook her head. “No,” she said. “Go back to sleep. I just want to be here.” She did not touch him. She took off her hat and shoes, huddled into an armchair, and fell asleep, her arm hanging over the chair’s side, her head on her arm. In the morning he asked no questions. They fixed breakfast together, then he hurried away to his office. Before leaving, he took her in his arms and kissed her. He walked out, and she stood for a few moments, then left. They had not exchanged twenty words.
There were weekends when they left the city together and drove in her car to some obscure point on the coast. They stretched out in the sun, on the sand of a deserted beach, they swam in the ocean. She liked to watch his body in the water. She would remain behind and stand, the waves hitting her knees, and watch him cutting a straight line through the breakers. She liked to lie with him at the edge of the water; she would lie on her stomach, a few feet away from him, facing the shore, her toes stretched to the waves; she would not touch him, but she would feel the waves coming up behind them, breaking against their bodies, and she would see the backwash running in mingled streams off her body and his.
They spent the night at some country inn, taking a single room. They never spoke of the things left behind them in the city. But it was the unstated that gave meaning to the relaxed simplicity of these hours; their eyes laughed silently at the preposterous contrast whenever they looked at each other.
She tried to demonstrate her power over him. She stayed away from his house; she waited for him to come to her. He spoiled it by coming too soon; by refusing her the satisfaction of knowing that he waited and struggled against his desire; by surrendering at once. She would say: “Kiss my hand, Roark.” He would kneel and kiss her ankle. He defeated her by admitting her power; she could not have the gratification of enforcing it. He would lie at her feet, he would say: “Of course I need you. I go insane when I see you. You can do almost anything you wish with me. Is that what you want to hear? Almost, Dominique. And the things you couldn’t make me do—you could put me through hell if you demanded them and I had to refuse you, as I would. Through utter hell, Dominique. Does that please you? Why do you want to know whether you own me? It’s so simple. Of course you do. All of me that can be owned. You’ll never demand anything else. But you want to know whether you could make me suffer. You could. What of it?” The words did not sound like surrender, because they were not torn out of him, but admitted simply and willingly. She felt no thrill of conquest; she felt herself owned more than ever, by a man who could say these things, know them to be true, and still remain controlled and controlling—as she wanted him to remain.
 
Late in June a man named Kent Lansing came to see Roark. He was forty years old, he was dressed like a fashion plate and looked like a prize fighter, though he was not burly, muscular or tough: he was thin and angular. He merely made one think of a boxer and of other things that did not fit his appearance: of a battering ram, of a tank, of a submarine torpedo. He was a member of a corporation formed for the purpose of erecting a luxurious hotel on Central Park South. There were many wealthy men involved and the corporation was ruled by a numerous board; they had purchased their site; they had not decided on an architect. But Kent Lansing had made up his mind that it would be Roark.
“I won’t try to tell you how much I’d like to do it,” Roark said to him at the end of their first interview. “But there’s not a chance of my getting it. I can get along with people—when they’re alone. I can do nothing with them in groups. No board has ever hired me—and I don’t think one ever will.”
Kent Lansing smiled. “Have you ever known a board to do anything?”
“What do you mean?”
“Just that: have you ever known a board to do anything at all?”
“Well, they seem to exist and function.”
“Do they? You know, there was a time when everyone thought it self-evident that the earth was flat. It would be entertaining to speculate upon the nature and causes of humanity’s illusions. I’ll write a book about it some day. It won’t be popular. I’ll have a chapter on boards of directors. You see, they don’t exist.”
“I’d like to believe you, but what’s the gag?”
“No, you wouldn’t like to believe me. The causes of illusions are not pretty to discover. They’re either vicious or tragic. This one is both. Mainly vicious. And it’s not a gag. But we won’t go into that now. All I mean is that a board of directors is one or two ambitious men—and a lot of ballast. I mean that groups of men are vacuums. Great big empty nothings. They say we can’t visualize a total nothing. Hell, sit at any committee meeting. The point is only who chooses to fill that nothing. It’s a tough battle. The toughest. It’s simple enough to fight any enemy, so long as he’s there to be fought. But when he isn’t ... Don’t look at me like that, as if I were crazy. You ought to know. You’ve fought a vacuum all your life.”
“I’m looking at you like that because I like you.”
“Of course you like me. As I knew I’d like you. Men are brothers, you know, and they have a great instinct for brotherhood—except in boards, unions, corporations and other chain gangs. But I talk too much. That’s why I’m a good salesman. However, I have nothing to sell you. You know. So we’ll just say that you’re going to build The Aquitania—that’s the name of our hotel—and we’ll let it go at that.”
If the violence of the battles which people never hear about could be measured in material statistics, the battle of Kent Lansing against the board of directors of the Aquitania Corporation would have been listed among the great carnages of history. But the things he fought were not solid enough to leave anything as substantial as corpses on the battlefield.
He had to fight phenomena such as: “Listen, Palmer, Lansing’s talking about somebody named Roark, how’re you going to vote, do the big boys approve of him or not?” “I’m not going to decide till I know who’s voted for or against.” “Lansing says ... but on the other hand, Thorpe tells me ...” “Talbot’s putting up a swank hotel on Fifth up in the sixties—and he’s got Francon & Keating.” “Harper swears by this young fellow—Gordon Prescott.” “Listen, Betsy says we’re crazy.” “I don’t like Roark’s face—he doesn’t look co-operative.” “I know, I feel it, Roark’s the kind that don’t fit in. He’s not a regular fellow.” “What’s a regular fellow?” “Aw hell, you know very well what I mean: regular.” “Thompson says that Mrs. Pritchett says that she knows for certain because Mr. Macy told her that if ...” “Well, boys, I don’t give a damn what anybody says, I make up my own mind, and I’m here to tell you that I think this Roark is lousy. I don’t like the Enright House.” “Why?” “I don’t know why. I just don’t like it, and that’s that. Haven’t I got a right to an opinion of my own?”
The battle lasted for weeks. Everybody had his say, except Roark. Lansing told him: “It’s all right. Lay off. Don’t do anything. Let me do the talking. There’s nothing you can do. When facing society, the man most concerned, the man who is to do the most and contribute the most, has the least say. It’s taken for granted that he has no voice and the reasons he could offer are rejected in advance as prejudiced—since no speech is ever considered, but only the speaker. It’s so much easier to pass judgment on a man than on an idea. Though how in hell one passes judgment on a man without considering the content of his brain is more than I’ll ever understand. However, that’s how it’s done. You see, reasons require scales to weigh them. And scales are not made of cotton. And cotton is what the human spirit is made of—you know, the stuff that keeps no shape and offers no resistance and can be twisted forward and backward and into a pretzel. You could tell them why they should hire you so very much better than I could. But they won’t listen to you and they’ll listen to me. Because I’m the middleman. The shortest distance between two points is not a straight line—it’s a middleman. And the more middlemen, the shorter. Such is the psychology of a pretzel.”
“Why are you fighting for me like that?” Roark asked.
“Why are you a good architect? Because you have certain standards of what is good, and they’re your own, and you stand by them. I want a good hotel, and I have certain standards of what is good, and they’re my own, and you’re the one who can give me what I want. And when I fight for you, I’m doing—on my side of it—just what you’re doing when you design a building. Do you think integrity is the monopoly of the artist? And what, incidentally, do you think integrity is? The ability not to pick a watch out of your neighbor’s pocket? No, it’s not as easy as that. If that were all, I’d say ninety-five percent of humanity were honest, upright men. Only, as you can see, they aren’t. Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea. That presupposes the ability to think. Thinking is something one doesn’t borrow or pawn. And yet, if I were asked to choose a symbol for humanity as we know it, I wouldn’t choose a cross nor an eagle nor a lion and unicorn. I’d choose three gilded balls.”
And as Roark looked at him, he added: “Don’t worry. They’re all against me. But I have one advantage: they don’t know what they want. I do.”
At the end of July, Roark signed a contract to build the Aquitania.
 
Ellsworth Toohey sat in his office, looking at a newspaper spread out on his desk, at the item announcing the Aquitania contract. He smoked, holding the cigarette propped in the corner of his mouth, supported by two straight fingers; one finger tapped against the cigarette, slowly, rhythmically, for a long time.
He heard the sound of his door thrown open, and he glanced up to see Dominique standing there, leaning against the doorjamb, her arms crossed on her chest. Her face looked interested, nothing more, but it was alarming to see an expression of actual interest on her face.
“My dear,” he said, rising, “this is the first time you’ve taken the trouble to enter my office—in the four years that we’ve worked in the same building. This is really an occasion.”
She said nothing, but smiled gently, which was still more alarming. He added, his voice pleasant: “My little speech, of course, was the equivalent of a question. Or don’t we understand each other any longer?”
“I suppose we don’t—if you find it necessary to ask what brought me here. But you know it, Ellsworth, you know it; there it is on your desk.” She walked to the desk and flipped a corner of the newspaper. She laughed. “Do you wish you had it hidden somewhere? Of course you didn’t expect me to come. Not that it makes any difference. But I just like to see you being obvious for once. Right on your desk, like that. Open at the real-estate page, too.”
“You sound as if that little piece of news had made you happy.”
“It did, Ellsworth. It does.”
“I thought you had worked hard to prevent that contract.”
“I had.”
“If you think this is an act you’re putting on right now, Dominique, you’re fooling yourself. This isn’t an act.”
“No, Ellsworth. This isn’t.”
“You’re happy that Roark got it?”
“I’m so happy, I could sleep with this Kent Lansing, whoever he is, if I ever met him and if he asked me.”
“Then the pact is off?”
“By no means. I shall try to stop any job that comes his way. I shall continue trying. It’s not going to be so easy as it was, though. The Enright House, the Cord Building—and this. Not so easy for me—and for you. He’s beating you, Ellsworth. Ellsworth, what if we were wrong about the world, you and I?”
“You’ve always been, my dear. Do forgive me. I should have known better than to be astonished. It would make you happy, of course, that he got it. I don’t even mind admitting that it doesn’t make me happy at all. There, you see? Now your visit to my office has been a complete success. So we shall just write the Aquitania off as a major defeat, forget all about it and continue as we were.”
“Certainly, Ellsworth. Just as we were. I’m cinching a beautiful new hospital for Peter Keating at a dinner party tonight.”
Ellsworth Toohey went home and spent the evening thinking about Hopton Stoddard.
Hopton Stoddard was a little man worth twenty million dollars. Three inheritances had contributed to that sum, and seventy-two years of a busy life devoted to the purpose of making money. Hopton Stoddard had a genius for investment; he invested in everything—houses of ill fame, Broadway spectacles on the grand scale, preferably of a religious nature, factories, farm mortgages and contraceptives. He was small and bent. His face was not disfigured; people merely thought it was, because it had a single expression: he smiled. His little mouth was shaped like a v in eternal good cheer; his eyebrows were tiny v’s inverted over round, blue eyes; his hair, rich, white and waved, looked like a wig, but was real.
Toohey had known Hopton Stoddard for many years and exercised a strong influence upon him. Hopton Stoddard had never married, had no relatives and no friends; he distrusted people, believing that they were always after his money. But he felt a tremendous respect for Ellsworth Toohey, because Toohey represented the exact opposite of his own life; Toohey had no concern whatever for worldly wealth; by the mere fact of this contrast, he considered Toohey the personification of virtue; what this estimate implied in regard to his own life never quite occurred to him. He was not easy in his mind about his life, and the uneasiness grew with the years, with the certainty of an approaching end. He found relief in religion—in the form of a bribe. He experimented with several different creeds, attended services, donated large sums and switched to another faith. As the years passed, the tempo of his quest accelerated; it had the tone of panic.
Toohey’s indifference to religion was the only flaw that disturbed him in the person of his friend and mentor. But everything Toohey preached seemed in line with God’s law: charity, sacrifice, help to the poor. Hopton Stoddard felt safe whenever he followed Toohey’s advice. He donated handsomely to the institutions recommended by Toohey, without much prompting. In matters of the spirit he regarded Toohey upon earth somewhat as he expected to regard God in heaven.
But this summer Toohey met defeat with Hopton Stoddard for the first time.
Hopton Stoddard decided to realize a dream which he had been planning slyly and cautiously, like all his other investments, for several years: he decided to build a temple. It was not to be the temple of any particular creed, but an interdenominational, non-sectarian monument to religion, a cathedral of faith, open to all. Hopton Stoddard wanted to play safe.
He felt crushed when Ellsworth Toohey advised him against the project. Toohey wanted a building to house a new home for subnormal children; he had an organization set up, a distinguished committee of sponsors, an endowment for operating expenses—but no building and no funds to erect one. If Hopton Stoddard wished a worthy memorial to his name, a grand climax of his generosity, to what nobler purpose could he dedicate his money than to the Hopton Stoddard Home for Subnormal Children, Toohey pointed out to him emphatically; to the poor little blighted ones for whom nobody cared. But Hopton Stoddard could not be aroused to any enthusiasm for a Home nor for any mundane institution. It had to be “The Hopton Stoddard Temple of the Human Spirit.”
He could offer no arguments against Toohey’s brilliant array; he could say nothing except: “No, Ellsworth, no, it’s not right, not right.” The matter was left unsettled. Hopton Stoddard would not budge, but Toohey’s disapproval made him uncomfortable and he postponed his decision from day to day. He knew only that he would have to decide by the end of summer, because in the fall he was to depart on a long journey, a world tour of the holy shrines of all faiths, from Lourdes to Jerusalem to Mecca to Benares.
A few days after the announcement of the Aquitania contract Toohey came to see Hopton Stoddard, in the evening, in the privacy of Stoddard’s vast, overstuffed apartment on Riverside Drive.
“Hopton,” he said cheerfully, “I was wrong. You were right about that temple.”
“No!” said Hopton Stoddard, aghast.
“Yes,” said Toohey, “you were right. Nothing else would be quite fitting. You must build a temple. A Temple of the Human Spirit.”
Hopton Stoddard swallowed, and his blue eyes became moist. He felt that he must have progressed far upon the path of righteousness if he had been able to teach a point of virtue to his teacher. After that, nothing else mattered; he sat, like a meek, wrinkled baby, listening to Ellsworth Toohey, nodding, agreeing to everything.
“It’s an ambitious undertaking, Hopton, and if you do it, you must do it right. It’s a little presumptuous, you know—offering a present to God—and unless you do it in the best way possible, it will be offensive, not reverent.”
“Yes, of course. It must be right. It must be right. It must be the best. You’ll help me, won’t you, Ellsworth? You know all about buildings and art and everything—it must be right.”
“I’ll be glad to help you, if you really want me to.”
“If I want you to! What do you mean—if I want ... ! Goodness gracious, what would I do without you? I don’t know anything about ... about anything like that. And it must be right.”
“If you want it right, will you do exactly as I say?”
“Yes, Yes. Yes, of course.”
“First of all, the architect. That’s very important.”
“Yes, indeed.”
“You don’t want one of those satin-lined commercial boys with the dollar sign all over them. You want a man who believes in his work as—as you believe in God.”
“That’s right. That’s absolutely right.”
“You must take the one I name.”
“Certainly. Who’s that?”
“Howard Roark.”
“Huh?” Hopton Stoddard looked blank. “Who’s he?”
“He’s the man who’s going to build the Temple of the Human Spirit.”
“Is he any good?”
Ellsworth Toohey turned and looked straight into his eyes.
“By my immortal soul, Hopton,” he said slowly, “he’s the best there is.”
“Oh! ...”
“But he’s difficult to get. He doesn’t work except on certain conditions. You must observe them scrupulously. You must give him complete freedom. Tell him what you want and how much you want to spend, and leave the rest up to him. Let him design it and build it as he wishes. He won’t work otherwise. Just tell him frankly that you know nothing about architecture and that you chose him because you felt he was the only one who could be trusted to do it right without advice or interference.”
“Okay, if you vouch for him.”
“I vouch for him.”
“That’s fine. And I don’t care how much it costs me.”
“But you must be careful about approaching him. I think he will refuse to do it, at first. He will tell you that he doesn’t believe in God.”
“What!”
“Don’t believe him. He’s a profoundly religious man—in his own way. You can see that in his buildings.”
“Oh.”
“But he doesn’t belong to any established church. So you won’t appear partial. You won’t offend anyone.”
“That’s good.”
“Now, when you deal in matters of faith, you must be the first one to have faith. Is that right?”
“That’s right.”
“Don’t wait to see his drawings. They will take some time—and you mustn’t delay your trip. Just hire him—don’t sign a contract, it’s not necessary—make arrangements for your bank to take care of the financial end and let him do the rest. You don’t have to pay him his fee until you return. In a year or so, when you come back after seeing all those great temples, you’ll have a better one of your own, waiting here for you.”
“That’s just what I wanted.”
“But you must think of the proper unveiling to the public, the proper dedication, the right publicity.”
“Of course ... That is, publicity?”
“Certainly. Do you know of any great event that’s not accompanied by a good publicity campaign? One that isn’t, can’t be much. If you skimp on that, it will be downright disrespectful.”
“That’s true.”
“Now if you want the proper publicity, you must plan it carefully, well in advance. What you want, when you unveil it, is one grand fanfare, like an opera overture, like a blast on Gabriel’s horn.”
“That’s beautiful, the way you put it.”
“Well, to do that you mustn’t allow a lot of newspaper punks to dissipate your effect by dribbling out premature stories. Don’t release the drawings of the temple. Keep them secret. Tell Roark that you want them kept secret. He won’t object to that. Have the contractor put up a solid fence all around the site while it’s being built. No one’s to know what it’s like until you come back and preside at the unveiling in person. Then—pictures in every damn paper in the country!”
“Ellsworth!”
“I beg your pardon.”
“The idea’s right. That’s how we put over The Legend of the Virgin, ten years ago that was, with a cast of ninety-seven.”
“Yes. But in the meantime, keep the public interested. Get yourself a good press agent and tell him how you want it handled. I’ll give you the name of an excellent one. See to it that there’s something about the mysterious Stoddard Temple in the papers every other week or so. Keep ‘em guessing. Keep ’em waiting. They’ll be good and ready when the time comes.”
“Right.”
“But, above all, don’t let Roark know that I recommended him. Don’t breathe a word to anyone about my having anything to do with it. Not to a soul. Swear it.”
“But why?”
“Because I have too many friends who are architects, and it’s such an important commission, and I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings.”
“Yes. That’s true.”
“Swear it.”
“Oh, Ellsworth!”
“Swear it. By the salvation of your soul.”
“I swear it. By ... that.”
“All right. Now you’ve never dealt with architects, and he’s an unusual kind of architect, and you don’t want to muff it. So I’ll tell you exactly what you’re to say to him.”
On the following day Toohey walked into Dominique’s office. He stood at her desk, smiled and said, his voice unsmiling:
“Do you remember Hopton Stoddard and that temple of all faith that he’s been talking about for six years?”
“Vaguely.”
“He’s going to build it.”
“Is he?”
“He’s giving the job to Howard Roark.”
“Not really!”
“Really.”
“Well, of all the incredible ... Not Hopton!”
“Hopton.”
“Oh, all right. I’ll go to work on him.”
“No. You’ll lay off. I told him to give it to Roark.”
She sat still, exactly as the words caught her, the amusement gone from her face. He added:
“I wanted you to know that I did it, so there won’t be any tactical contradictions. No one else knows it or is to know it. I trust you to remember that.”
“She asked, her lips moving tightly: “What are you after?”
He smiled. He said:
“I’m going to make him famous.”
 
Roark sat in Hopton Stoddard’s office and listened, stupefied. Hopton Stoddard spoke slowly; it sounded earnest and impressive, but was due to the fact that he had memorized his speeches almost verbatim. His baby eyes looked at Roark with an ingratiating plea. For once, Roark almost forgot architecture and placed the human element first; he wanted to get up and get out of the office; he could not stand the man. But the words he heard held him; the words did not match the man’s face or voice.
“So you see, Mr. Roark, though it is to be a religious edifice, it is also more than that. You notice that we call it the Temple of the Human Spirit. We want to capture—in stone, as others capture in music—not some narrow creed, but the essence of all religion. And what is the essence of religion? The great aspiration of the human spirit toward the highest, the noblest, the best. The human spirit as the creator and the conqueror of the ideal. The great life-giving force of the universe. The heroic human spirit. That is your assignment, Mr. Roark.”
Roark rubbed the back of his hand against his eyes, helplessly. It was not possible. It simply was not possible. That could not be what the man wanted; not that man. It seemed horrible to hear him say that.
“Mr. Stoddard, I’m afraid you’ve made a mistake,” he said, his voice slow and tired. “I don’t think I’m the man you want. I don’t think it would be right for me to undertake it. I don’t believe in God.”
He was astonished to see Hopton Stoddard’s expression of delight and triumph. Hopton Stoddard glowed in appreciation—in appreciation of the clairvoyant wisdom of Ellsworth Toohey who was always right. He drew himself up with new confidence, and he said firmly, for the first time in the tone of an old man addressing a youth, wise and gently patronizing:
“That doesn’t matter. You’re a profoundly religious man, Mr. Roark -in your own way. I can see that in your buildings.”
He wondered why Roark stared at him like that, without moving, for such a long time.
“That’s true,” said Roark. It was almost a whisper.
That he should learn something about himself, about his buildings, from this man who had seen it and known it before he knew it, that this man should say it with that air of tolerant confidence implying full understanding—removed Roark’s doubts. He told himself that he did not really understand people; that an impression could be deceptive; that Hopton Stoddard would be far on another continent anyway; that nothing mattered in the face of such an assignment; that nothing could matter when a human voice—even Hopton Stoddard’s—was going on, saying:
“I wish to call it God. You may choose any other name. But what I want in that building is your spirit. Your spirit, Mr. Roark. Give me the best of that—and you will have done your job, as I shall have done mine. Do not worry about the meaning I wish conveyed. Let it be your spirit in the shape of a building—and it will have that meaning, whether you know it or not.”
And so Roark agreed to build the Stoddard Temple of the Human Spirit.