VIII
THE BLINDS RAISED OVER THE WINDOWS OF HER LIVING ROOM, THE lights of the city rising to a black horizon halfway up the glass panes, Dominique sat at her desk, correcting the last sheets of an article, when she heard the doorbell. Guests did not disturb her without warning -and she looked up, the pencil held in mid-air, angry and curious. She heard the steps of the maid in the hall, then the maid came in, saying: “A gentleman to see you, madam,” a faint hostility in her voice explaining that the gentleman had refused to give his name.
A man with orange hair?—Dominique wanted to ask, but didn’t; the pencil jerked stiffly and she said: “Have him come in.”
Then the door opened; against the light of the hall she saw a long neck and sloping shoulders, like the silhouette of a bottle; a rich, creamy voice said, “Good evening, Dominique,” and she recognized Ellsworth Toohey whom she had never asked to her house.
She smiled. She said: “Good evening, Ellsworth. I haven’t seen you for such a long time.”
“You should have expected me now, don’t you think so?” He turned to the maid: “Cointreau, please, if you have it, and I’m sure you do.”
The maid glanced at Dominique, wide-eyed; Dominique nodded silently, and the maid went out, closing the door.
“Busy, of course?” said Toohey, glancing at the littered desk. “Very becoming, Dominique. Gets results, too. You’ve been writing much better lately.”
She let the pencil fall, and threw an arm over the back of her chair, half turning to him, watching him placidly. “What do you want, Ellsworth?”
He did not sit down, but stood examining the place with the unhurried curiosity of an expert.
“Not bad, Dominique. Just about as I’d expect you to have it. A little cold. You know, I wouldn’t have that ice-blue chair over there. Too obvious. Fits in too well. Just what people would expect in just that spot. I’d have it carrot red. An ugly, glaring, outrageous red. Like Mr. Howard Roark’s hair. That’s quite en passant—merely a convenient figure of speech—nothing personal at all. Just one touch of the wrong color would make the whole room. The sort of thing that gives a place elegance. Your flower arrangements are nice. The pictures, too—not bad.”
“All right, Ellsworth, all right, what is it?”
“But don’t you know that I’ve never been here before? Somehow, you’ve never asked me. I don’t know why.” He sat down comfortably, resting an ankle on a knee, one thin leg stretched horizontally across the other, the full length of a tight, gun-metal sock exposed under the trouser cuff, and a patch of skin showing above the sock, bluish-white with a few black hairs. “But then, you’ve been so unsociable. The past tense, my dear, the past tense. Did you say that we haven’t seen each other for a long time? That’s true. You’ve been so busy—in such an unusual way. Visits, dinners, speak-easies and giving tea parties. Haven’t you?”
“I have.”
“Tea parties—I though that was tops. This is a good room for parties -large-plenty of space to stuff people into—particularly if you’re not particular whom you stuff it with—and you’re not. Not now. What do you serve them? Anchovy paste and minced egg cut out like hearts?”
“Caviar and minced onion cut out like stars.”
“What about the old ladies?”
“Cream cheese and chopped walnuts—in spirals.”
“I’d like to have seen you taking care of things like that. It’s wonderful how thoughtful you’ve become of old ladies. Particularly the filthy rich—with sons-in-law in real estate. Though I don’t think that’s as bad as going to see Knock Me Flat with Commodore Higbee who has false teeth and a nice vacant lot on the corner of Broadway and Chambers.”
The maid came in with the tray. Toohey took a glass and held it delicately, inhaling, while the maid went out.
“Will you tell me why the secret service department—I won’t ask who—and why the detailed reports on my activities?” Dominique said indifferently.
“You can ask who. Anyone and everyone. Don’t you suppose people are talking about Miss Dominique Francon in the role of famous hostess -so suddenly? Miss Dominique Francon as a sort of second Kiki Holcombe, but much better—oh much!—much subtler, much abler, and then, just think, how much more beautiful. It’s about time you made some use of that superlative appearance of yours that any woman would cut your throat for. It’s still being wasted, of course, if one thinks of form in relation to its proper function, but at least some people are getting some good out of it. Your father, for instance. I’m sure he’s delighted with this new life of yours. Little Dominique being friendly to people. Little Dominique who’s become normal at last. He’s wrong, of course, but it’s nice to make him happy. A few others, too..Me, for instance. Though you’d never do anything just to make me happy, but then, you see, that’s my lucky faculty—to extract joy from what was not intended for me at all, in a purely selfless way.”
“You’re not answering my question.”
“But I am. You asked why the interest in your activities—and I answer: because they make me happy. Besides, look, one could be astonished—though shortsightedly—if I were gathering information on the activities of my enemies. But not to be informed about the actions of my own side—really, you know, you didn’t think I’d be so unskilled a general, and whatever else you might think of me, you’ve never thought me unskilled.”
“Your side, Ellsworth?”
“Look, Dominique, that’s the trouble with your written—and spoken —style: you use too many question marks. Bad, in any case. Particularly bad when unnecessary. Let’s drop the quiz technique—and just talk. Since we both understand and there aren’t any questions to be asked between us. If there were—you’d have thrown me out. Instead, you gave me a very expensive liqueur.”
He held the rim of the glass under his nose and inhaled with a loose kind of sensual relish, which, at a dinner table, would have been equivalent to a loud lip-smacking, vulgar there, superlatively elegant here, over a cut-crystal edge pressed to a neat little mustache.
“All right,” she said. “Talk.”
“That’s what I’ve been doing. Which is considerate of me—since you’re not ready to talk. Not yet, for a while. Well, let’s talk—in a purely contemplative manner—about how interesting it is to see people welcoming you into their midst so eagerly, accepting you, flocking to you. Why is it, do you suppose? They do plenty of snubbing on their own, but just let someone who’s snubbed them all her life suddenly break down and turn gregarious—and they all come rolling on their backs with their paws folded, for you to rub their bellies. Why? There could be two explanations, I think. The nice one would be that they are generous and wish to honor you with their friendship. Only the nice explanations are never the true ones. The other one is that they know you’re degrading yourself by needing them, you’re coming down off a pinnacle—every loneliness is a pinnacle—and they’re delighted to drag you down through their friendship. Though, of course, none of them knows it consciously, except yourself. That’s why you go through agonies, doing it, and you’d never do it for a noble cause, you’d never do it except for the end you’ve chosen, an end viler than the means and making the means endurable.”
“You know, Ellsworth, you’ve said a sentence there you’d never use in your column.”
“Did I? Undoubtedly. I can say a great many things to you that I’d never use in my column. Which one?”
“Every loneliness is a pinnacle.”
“That? Yes, quite right. I wouldn’t. You’re welcome to it—though it’s not too good. Fairly crude. I’ll give you better ones some day, if you wish. Sorry, however, that that’s all you picked out of my little speech.”
“What did you want me to pick?”
“Well, my two explanations, for instance. There’s an interesting question there. What is kinder—to believe the best of people and burden them with a nobility beyond their endurance—or to see them as they are, and accept it because it makes them comfortable? Kindness being more important than justice, of course.”
“I don’t give a damn, Ellsworth.”
“Not in a mood for abstract speculation? Interested only in concrete results? All right. How many commissions have you landed for Peter Keating in the last three months?”
She rose, walked to the tray which the maid had left, poured herself a drink, and said: “Four,” raising the glass to her mouth. Then she turned to look at him, standing, glass in hand, and added: “And that was the famous Toohey technique. Never place your punch at the beginning of a column nor at the end. Sneak it in where it’s least expected. Fill a whole column with drivel, just to get in that one important line.”
He bowed courteously. “Quite. That’s why I like to talk to you. It’s such a waste to be subtle and vicious with people who don’t even know that you’re being subtle and vicious. But the drivel is never accidental, Dominique. Also, I didn’t know that the technique of my column was becoming obvious. I will have to think of a new one.”
“Don’t bother. They love it.”
“Of course. They’ll love anything I write. So it’s four? I missed one. I counted three.”
“I can’t understand why you had to come here if that’s all you wanted to know. You’re so fond of Peter Keating, and I’m helping him along beautifully, better than you could, so if you wanted to give me a pep talk about Petey—it wasn’t necessary, was it?”
“You’re wrong there twice in one sentence, Dominique. One honest error and one lie. The honest error is the assumption that I wish to help Petey Keating—and, incidentally, I can help him much better than you can, and I have and will, but that’s long-range contemplation. The lie is that I came here to talk about Peter Keating—you knew what I came here to talk about when you saw me enter. And—oh my!—you’d allow someone more obnoxious than myself to barge in on you, just to talk about that subject. Though I don’t know who could be more obnoxious to you than myself, at the moment.”
“Peter Keating,” she said.
He made a grimace, wrinkling his nose: “Oh, no. He’s not big enough for that. But let’s talk about Peter Keating. It’s such a convenient coincidence that he happens to be your father’s partner. You’re merely working your head off to procure commissions for your father, like a dutiful daughter, nothing more natural. You’ve done wonders for the firm of Francon & Keating in these last three months. Just by smiling at a few dowagers and wearing stunning models at some of our better gatherings. Wonder what you’d accomplish if you decided to go all the way and sell your matchless body for purposes other than esthetic contemplation—in exchange for commissions for Peter Keating.” He paused, she said nothing, and he added: “My compliments, Dominique, you’ve lived up to my best opinion of you—by not being shocked at this.”
“What was that intended for, Ellsworth? Shock value or hint value?”
“Oh, it could have been a number of things—a preliminary feeler, for instance. But, as a matter of fact, it was nothing at all. Just a touch of vulgarity. Also the Toohey technique—you know, I always advise the wrong touch at the right time. I am—essentially—such an earnest, single-toned Puritan that I must allow myself another color occasionally—to relieve the monotony.”
“Are you, Ellsworth? I wonder what you are—essentially. I don’t know.”
“I dare say nobody does,” he said pleasantly. “Although really, there’s no mystery about it at all. It’s very simple. All things are simple when you reduce them to fundamentals. You’d be surprised if you knew how few fundamentals there are. Only two, perhaps. To explain all of us. It’s the untangling, the reducing that’s dimcult—that’s why people don’t like to bother. I don’t think they’d like the results, either.”
“I don’t mind. I know what I am. Go ahead and say it. I’m just a bitch.”
“Don’t fool yourself, my dear. You’re much worse than a bitch. You’re a saint. Which shows why saints are dangerous and undesirable.”
“And you?”
“As a matter of fact, I know exactly what I am. That alone can explain a great deal about me. I’m giving you a helpful hint—if you care to use it. You don’t, of course. You might, though—in the future.”
“Why should I?” “You need me, Dominique. You might as well understand me a little. You see, I’m not afraid of being understood. Not by you.”
“I need you?”
“Oh, come on, show a little courage, too.”
She sat up and waited coldly, silently. He smiled, obviously with pleasure, making no effort to hide the pleasure.
“Let’s see,” he said, studying the ceiling with casual attention, “those commissions you got for Peter Keating. The Cryson office building was mere nuisance value—Howard Roark never had a chance at that. The Lindsay home was better—Roark was definitely considered, I think he would have got it but for you. The Stonebrook Clubhouse also—he had a chance at that, which you ruined.” He looked at her and chuckled softly. “No comments on techniques and punches, Dominique?” The smile was like cold grease floating over the fluid sounds of his voice. “You slipped up on the Norris country house—he got that last week, you know. Well, you can’t be a hundred per cent successful. After all, the Enright House is a big job; it’s creating a lot of talk, and quite a few people are beginning to show interest in Mr. Howard Roark. But you’ve done remarkably well. My congratulations. Now don’t you think I’m being nice to you? Every artist needs appreciation—and there’s nobody to compliment you, since nobody knows what you’re doing, but Roark and me, and he won’t thank you. On second thought, I don’t think Roark knows what you’re doing, and that spoils the fun, doesn’t it?”
She asked: “How do you know what I’m doing?”—her voice tired.
“My dear, surely you haven’t forgotten that it was I who gave you the idea in the first place?”
“Oh, yes,” she said absently. “Yes.”
“And now you know why I came here. Now you know what I meant when I spoke about my side.”
“Yes,” she said. “Of course.”
“This is a pact, my dear. An alliance. Allies never trust each other, but that doesn’t spoil their effectiveness. Our motives might be quite opposite. In fact, they are. But it doesn’t matter. The result will be the same. It is not necessary to have a noble aim in common. It is necessary only to have a common enemy. We have.”
“Yes.”
“That’s why you need me. I’ve been helpful once.”
“Yes.”
“I can hurt your Mr. Roark much better than any tea party you’ll ever give.”
“What for?”
“Omit the what-fors, I don’t inquire into yours.”
“All right.”
“Then it’s to be understood between us? We’re allies in this?”
She looked at him, she slouched forward, attentive, her face empty. Then she said: “We’re allies.”
“Fine, my dear. Now listen. Stop mentioning him in your column every other day or so. I know, you take vicious cracks at him each time, but it’s too much. You’re keeping his name in print, and you don’t want to do that. Further: you’d better invite me to those parties of yours. There are things I can do which you can’t. Another tip: Mr. Gilbert Colton—you know, the California pottery Coltons—is planning a branch factory in the east. He’s thinking of a good modernist. In fact, he’s thinking of Mr. Roark. Don’t let Roark get it. It’s a huge job—with lots of publicity. Go and invent a new tea sandwich for Mrs. Colton. Do anything you wish. But don’t let Roark get it.”
She got up, dragged her feet to a table, her arms swinging loosely, and took a cigarette. She lighted it, turned to him, and said indifferently: “You can talk very briefly and to the point—when you want to.”
“When I find it necessary.”
She stood at the window, looking out over the city. She said: “You’ve never actually done anything against Roark. I didn’t know you cared quite so much.”
“Oh, my dear. Haven’t I?”
“You’ve never mentioned him in print.”
“That, my dear, is what I’ve done against Mr. Roark. So far.”
“When did you first hear of him?”
“When I saw drawings of the Heller house. You didn’t think I’d miss that, did you? And you?”
“When I saw drawings of the Enright House.”
“Not before?”
“Not before.”
She smoked in silence; then she said, without turning to him:
“Ellsworth, if one of us tried to repeat what we said here tonight, the other would deny it and it could never be proved. So it doesn’t matter if we’re sincere with each other, does it? It’s quite safe. Why do you hate him?”
“I never said I hated him.”
She shrugged.
“As for the rest,” he added, “I think you can answer that yourself.”
She nodded slowly to the bright little point of her cigarette’s reflection on the glass pane.
He got up, walked over to her, and stood looking at the lights of the city below them, at the angular shapes of buildings, at the dark walls made translucent by the glow of the windows, as if the walls were only a checkered veil of thin black gauze over a solid mass of radiance. And Ellsworth Toohey said softly:
“Look at it. A sublime achievement, isn’t it? A heroic achievement. Think of the thousands who worked to create this and of the millions who profit by it. And it is said that but for the spirit of a dozen men, here and there down the ages, but for a dozen men—less, perhaps—none of this would have been possible. And that might be true. If so, there are—again—two possible attitudes to take. We can say that these twelve were great benefactors, that we are all fed by the overflow of the magnificent wealth of their spirit, and that we are glad to accept it in gratitude and brotherhood. Or, we can say that by the splendor of their achievement which we can neither equal nor keep, these twelve have shown us what we are, that we do not want the free gifts of their grandeur, that a cave by an oozing swamp and a fire of sticks rubbed together are preferable to skyscrapers and neon lights—if the cave and the sticks are the limit of our own creative capacities. Of the two attitudes, Dominique, which would you call the truly humanitarian one? Because, you see, I’m a humanitarian.”
 
After a while Dominique found it easier to associate with people. She learned to accept self-torture as an endurance test, urged on by the curiosity to discover how much she could endure. She moved through formal receptions, theater parties, dinners, dances—gracious and smiling, a smile that made her face brighter and colder, like the sun on a winter day. She listened emptily to empty words uttered as if the speaker would be insulted by any sign of enthusiastic interest from his listener, as if oily boredom were the only bond possible between people, the only preservative of their precarious dignity. She nodded to everything and accepted everything.
“Yes, Mr. Holt, I think Peter Keating is the man of the century—our century.”
“No, Mr. Inskip, not Howard Roark, you don’t want Howard Roark. ... A phony? Of course, he’s a phony—it takes your sensitive honesty to evaluate the integrity of a man.... Nothing much? No, Mr. Inskip, of course, Howard Roark is nothing much. It’s all a matter of size and distance—and distance.... No, I don’t drink very much, Mr. Inskip—I’m glad you like my eyes—yes, they always look like that when I’m enjoying myself—and it made me so happy to hear you say that Howard Roark is nothing much.”
“You’ve met Mr. Roark, Mrs. Jones? And you didn’t like him? ... Oh, he’s the type of man for whom one can feel no compassion? How true. Compassion is a wonderful thing. It’s what one feels when one looks at a squashed caterpillar. An elevating experience. One can let oneself go and spread—you know, like taking a girdle off. You don’t have to hold your stomach, your heart or your spirit up—when you feel compassion. All you have to do is look down. It’s much easier. When you look up, you get a pain in the neck. Compassion is the greatest virtue. It justifies suffering. There’s got to be suffering in the world, else how would we be virtuous and feel compassion? ... Oh, it has an antithesis—but such a hard, demanding one.... Admiration, Mrs. Jones, admiration. But that takes more than a girdle.... So I say that anyone for whom we can’t feel sorry is a vicious person. Like Howard Roark.”
Late at night, often, she came to Roark’s room. She came unannounced, certain of finding him there and alone. In his room, there was no necessity to spare, lie, agree and erase herself out of being. Here she was free to resist, to see her resistance welcomed by an adversary too strong to fear a contest, strong enough to need it; she found a will granting her the recognition of her own entity, untouched and not to be touched except in clean battle, to win or to be defeated, but to be preserved in victory or defeat, not ground into the meaningless pulp of the impersonal.
When they lay in bed together it was—as it had to be, as the nature of the act demanded—an act of violence. It was surrender, made the more complete by the force of their resistance. It was an act of tension, as the great things on earth are things of tension. It was tense as electricity, the force fed on resistance, rushing through wires of metal stretched tight; it was tense as water made into power by the restraining violence of a dam. The touch of his skin against hers was not a caress, but a wave of pain, it became pain by being wanted too much, by releasing in fulfillment all the past hours of desire and denial. It was an act of clenched teeth and hatred, it was the unendurable, the agony, an act of passion—the word born to mean sunering—it was the moment made of hatred, tension, pain—the moment that broke its own elements, inverted them, triumphed, swept into a denial of all suffering, into its antithesis, into ecstasy.
She came to his room from a party, wearing an evening gown expensive and fragile like a coating of ice over her body—and she leaned against the wall, feeling the rough plaster under her skin, glancing slowly at every object around her, at the crude kitchen table loaded with sheets of paper, at the steel rulers, at the towels smudged by the black prints of five fingers, at the bare boards of the floor—and she let her glance slide down the length of her shining satin, down to the small triangle of a silver sandal, thinking of how she would be undressed here. She liked to wander about the room, to throw her gloves down among a litter of pencils, rubber erasers and rags, to put her small silver bag on a stained, discarded shirt, to snap open the catch of a diamond bracelet and drop it on a plate with the remnant of a sandwich, by an unfinished drawing.
“Roark,” she said, standing behind his chair, her arms over his shoulders, her hand under his shirt, fingers spread and pressed flat against his chest, “I made Mr. Symons promise his job to Peter Keating today. Thirty-five floors, and anything he’ll wish to make it cost, money no object, just art, free art.” She heard the sound of his soft chuckle, but he did not turn to look at her, only his fingers closed over her wrist and he pushed her hand farther down under his shirt, pressing it hard against his skin. Then she pulled his head back, and she bent down to cover his mouth with hers.
She came in and found a copy of the Banner spread out on his table, open at the page bearing “Your House” by Dominique Francon. Her column contained the line: “Howard Roark is the Marquis de Sade of architecture. He’s in love with his buildings—and look at them.” She knew that he disliked the Banner, that he put it there only for her sake, that he watched her noticing it, with the half-smile she dreaded on his face. She was angry; she wanted him to read everything she wrote, yet she would have preferred to think that it hurt him enough to make him avoid it. Later, lying across the bed, with his mouth on her breast, she looked past the orange tangle of his head, at that sheet of newspaper on the table, and he felt her trembling with pleasure.
She sat on the floor, at his feet, her head pressed to his knees, holding his hand, closing her fist in turn over each of his fingers, closing it tight and letting it slide slowly down the length of his finger, feeling the hard, small stops at the joints, and she asked softly: “Roark, you wanted to get the Colton Factory? You wanted it very badly?” “Yes, very badly,” he answered, without smiling and without pain. Then she raised his hand to her lips and held it there for a long time.
She got out of bed in the darkness, and walked naked across his room to take a cigarette from the table. She bent to the light of a match, her flat stomach rounded faintly in the movement. He said: “Light one for me,” and she put a cigarette between his lips; then she wandered through the dark room, smoking, while he lay in bed, propped up on his elbow, watching her.
Once she came in and found him working at his table. He said: “I’ve got to finish this. Sit down. Wait.” He did not look at her again. She waited silently, huddled in a chair at the farthest end of the room. She watched the straight lines of his eyebrows drawn in concentration, the set of his mouth, the vein beating under the tight skin of his neck, the sharp, surgical assurance of his hand. He did not look like an artist, he looked like the quarry worker, like a wrecker demolishing walls, and like a monk. Then she did not want him to stop or glance at her, because she wanted to watch the ascetic purity of his person, the absence of all sensuality; to watch that—and to think of what she remembered.
There were nights when he came to her apartment, as she came to his, without warning. If she had guests, he said: “Get rid of them,” and walked into the bedroom while she obeyed. They had a silent agreement, understood without mention, never to be seen together. Her bedroom was an exquisite place of glass and pale ice-green. He liked to come in wearing clothes stained by a day spent on the construction site. He liked to throw back the covers of her bed, then to sit talking quietly for an hour or two, not looking at the bed, not mentioning her writing or buildings or the latest commission she had obtained for Peter Keating, the simplicity of being at ease, here, like this, making the hours more sensual than the moments they delayed.
There were evenings when they sat together in her living room, at the huge window high over the city. She liked to see him at that window. He would stand, half turned to her, smoking, looking at the city below. She would move away from him and sit down on the floor in the middle of the room and watch him.
Once, when he got out of bed, she switched the light on and saw him standing there, naked; she looked at him, then she said, her voice quiet and desperate with the simple despair of complete sincerity: “Roark, everything I’ve done all my life is because it’s the kind of a world that made you work in a quarry last summer.”
“I know that.”
He sat down at the foot of the bed. She moved over, she pressed her face against his thigh, curled up, her feet on the pillow, her arm hanging down, letting her palm move slowly up the length of his leg, from the ankle to the knee and back again. She said: “But, of course, if it had been up to me, last spring, when you were broke and jobless, I would have sent you precisely to that kind of a job in that particular quarry.”
“I know that too. But maybe you wouldn’t have. Maybe you’d have had me as washroom attendant in the clubhouse of the A.G.A.”
“Yes. Possibly. Put your hand on my back, Roark. Just hold it there. Like that.” She lay still, her face buried against his knees, her arm hanging down over the side of the bed, not moving, as if nothing in her were alive but the skin between her shoulder blades under his hand.
In the drawing rooms she visited, in the restaurants, in the offices of the A.G.A. people talked about the dislike of Miss Dominique Francon of the Banner for Howard Roark, that architectural freak of Roger Enright’s. It gave him a sort of scandalous fame. It was said: “Roark? You know, the guy Dominique Francon can’t stand the guts of.” “The Francon girl knows her architecture all right, and if she says he’s no good, he must be worse than I thought he was.” “God, but these two must hate each other! Though I understand they haven’t even met.” She liked to hear these things. It pleased her when Athelstan Beasely wrote in his column in the A.G.A. Bulletin, discussing the architecture of medieval castles: “To understand the grim ferocity of these structures, we must remember that the wars between feudal lords were a savage business—something like the feud between Miss Dominique Francon and Mr. Howard Roark.”
Austen Heller, who had been her friend, spoke to her about it. He was angrier than she had ever seen him; his face lost all the charm of his usual sarcastic poise.
“What in hell do you think you’re doing, Dominique?” he snapped. “This is the greatest exhibition of journalistic hooliganism I’ve ever seen swilled out in public print. Why don’t you leave that sort of thing to Ellsworth Toohey?”
“Ellsworth is good, isn’t he?” she said.
“At least, he’s had the decency to keep his unsanitary trap shut about Roark—though, of course, that too is an indecency. But what’s happened to you? Do you realize who and what you’re talking about? It was all right when you amused yourself by praising some horrible abortion of Grandpaw Holcombe’s or panning the pants off your own father and that pretty butcher’s-calendar boy that he’s got himself for a partner. It didn’t matter one way or another. But to bring that same intellectual manner to the appraisal of someone like Roark.... You know, I really thought you had integrity and judgment—if ever given a chance to exercise them. In fact, I thought you were behaving like a tramp only to emphasize the mediocrity of the saps whose works you had to write about. I didn’t think that you were just an irresponsible bitch.”
“You were wrong,” she said.
Roger Enright entered her office, one morning, and said, without greeting: “Get your hat. You’re coming to see it with me.”
“Good morning, Roger,” she said. “To see what?”
“The Enright House. As much of it as we’ve got put up.”
“Why, certainly, Roger,” she smiled, rising, “I’d love to see the Enright House.”
On their way, she asked: “What’s the matter, Roger? Trying to bribe me?”
He sat stiffly on the vast, gray cushions of his limousine, not looking at her. He answered: “I can understand stupid malice. I can understand ignorant malice. I can’t understand deliberate rottenness. You are free, of course, to write anything you wish—afterward. But it won’t be stupidity and it won’t be ignorance.”
“You overestimate me, Roger,” she shrugged, and said nothing else for the rest of the ride.
They walked together past the wooden fence, into the jungle of naked steel and planks that was to be the Enright House. Her high heels stepped lightly over lime-spattered boards and she walked, leaning back, in careless, insolent elegance. She stopped and looked at the sky held in a frame of steel, the sky that seemed more distant than usual, thrust back by the sweeping length of beams. She looked at the steel cages of future projections, at the insolent angles, at the incredible complexity of this shape coming to life as a simple, logical whole, a naked skeleton with planes of air to form the walls, a naked skeleton on a cold winter day, with a sense of birth and promise, like a bare tree with a first touch of green.
“Oh, Roger!”
He looked at her and saw the kind of face one should expect to see in church at Easter.
“I didn’t underestimate either one,” he said dryly. “Neither you nor the building.”
“Good morning,” said a low, hard voice beside them.
She was not shocked to see Roark. She had not heard him approaching, but it would have been unnatural to think of this building without him. She felt that he simply was there, that he had been there from the moment she crossed the outside fence, that this structure was he, in a manner more personal than his body. He stood before them, his hands thrust into the pockets of a loose coat, his hair hatless in the cold.
“Miss Francon—Mr. Roark,” said Enright.
“We have met once,” she said, “at the Holcombes. If Mr. Roark remembers.”
“Of course, Miss Francon,” said Roark.
“I wanted Miss Francon to see it,” said Enright.
“Shall I show you around?” Roark asked him.
“Yes, do, please,” she answered first.
The three of them walked together through the structure, and the workers stared curiously at Dominique. Roark explained the layout of future rooms, the system of elevators, the heating plant, the arrangement of windows—as he would have explained it to a contractor’s assistant. She asked questions and he answered. “How many cubic feet of space, Mr. Roark?” “How many tons of steel?” “Be careful of these pipes, Miss Francon. Step this way.” Enright walked along, his eyes on the ground, looking at nothing. But then he asked: “How’s it going, Howard?” and Roark smiled, answering: “Two days ahead of schedule,” and they stood talking about the job, like brothers, forgetting her for a moment, the clanging roar of machines around them drowning out their words.
She thought, standing there in the heart of the building, that if she had nothing of him, nothing but his body, here it was, offered to her, the rest of him, to be seen and touched, open to all; the girders and the conduits and the sweeping reaches of space were his and could not have been anyone else’s in the world; his, as his face, as his soul; here was the shape he had made and the thing within him which had caused him to make it, the end and the cause together, the motive power eloquent in every line of steel, a man’s self, hers for this moment, hers by grace of her seeing it and understanding.
“Are you tired, Miss Francon?” asked Roark, looking at her face.
“No,” she said, “no, not at all. I have been thinking—what kind of plumbing fixtures are you going to use here, Mr. Roark?”
A few days later, in his room, sitting on the edge of his drafting table, she looked at a newspaper, at her column and the lines: “I have visited the Enright construction site. I wish that in some future air raid a bomb would blast this house out of existence. It would be a worthy ending. So much better than to see it growing old and soot-stained, degraded by the family photographs, the dirty socks, the cocktail shakers and the grapefruit rinds of its inhabitants. There is not a person in New York City who should be allowed to live in this building.”
Roark came to stand beside her, close to her, his legs pressed to her knees, and he looked down at the paper, smiling.
“You have Roger completely bewildered by this,” he said.
“Has he read it?”
“I was in his office this morning when he read it. At first, he called you some names I’d never heard before. Then he said, Wait a moment, and he read it again, he looked up, very puzzled, but not angry at all, and he said, if you read it one way ... but on the other hand ...”
“What did you say?”
“Nothing. You know, Dominique, I’m very grateful, but when are you going to stop handing me all that extravagant praise? Someone else might see it. And you won’t like that.”
“Someone else?”
“You knew that I got it, from that first article of yours about the Enright House. You wanted me to get it. But don’t you think someone else might understand your way of doing things?”
“Oh yes. But the effect—for you—will be worse than if they didn’t. They’ll like you the less for it. However, I don’t know who’ll even bother to understand. Unless it’s ... Roark, what do you think of Ellsworth Toohey?”
“Good God, why should anyone think of Ellsworth Toohey?”
She liked the rare occasions when she met Roark at some gathering where Heller or Enright had brought him. She liked the polite, impersonal “Miss Francon” pronounced by his voice. She enjoyed the nervous concern of the hostess and her efforts not to let them come together. She knew that the people around them expected some explosion, some shocking sign of hostility which never came. She did not seek Roark out and she did not avoid him. They spoke to each other if they happened to be included in the same group, as they would have spoken to anyone else. It required no effort; it was real and right; it made everything right, even this gathering. She found a deep sense of fitness in the fact that here, among people, they should be strangers; strangers and enemies. She thought, these people can think of many things he and I are to each other—except what we are. It made the moments she remembered greater, the moments not touched by the sight of others, by the words of others, not even by their knowledge. She thought, it has no existence here, except in me and in him. She felt a sense of possession, such as she could feel nowhere else. She could never own him as she owned him in a room among strangers when she seldom looked in his direction.
If she glanced at him across the room and saw him in conversation with blank, indifferent faces, she turned away, unconcerned; if the faces were hostile, she watched for a second, pleased; she was angry when she saw a smile, a sign of warmth or approval on a face turned to him. It was not jealousy; she did not care whether the face was a man’s or a woman’s; she resented the approval as an impertinence.
She was tortured by peculiar things: by the street where he lived, by the doorstep of his house, by the cars that turned the corner of his block. She resented the cars in particular; she wished she could make them drive on to the next street. She looked at the garbage pail by the stoop next door, and she wondered whether it had stood there when he passed by, on his way to his office this morning, whether he had looked at that crumpled cigarette package on top. Once, in the lobby of his house, she saw a man stepping out of the elevator; she was shocked for a second; she had always felt as if he were the only inhabitant of that house. When she rode up in the small, self-operating elevator, she stood leaning against the wall, her arms crossed over her breast, her hands hugging her shoulders, feeling huddled and intimate, as in a stall under a warm shower.
She thought of that, while some gentleman was telling her about the latest show on Broadway, while Roark was sipping a cocktail at the other end of the room, while she heard the hostess whispering to somebody: “My Lord, I didn’t think Gordon would bring Dominique—I know Austen will be furious at me, because of his friend Roark being here, you know.”
Later, lying across his bed, her eyes closed, her cheeks flushed, her lips wet, losing the sense of the rules she herself had imposed, losing the sense of her words, she whispered: “Roark, there was a man talking to you out there today, and he was smiling at you, the fool, the terrible fool, last week he was looking at a pair of movie comedians and loving them, I wanted to tell that man: don’t look at him, you’ll have no right to want to look at anything else, don’t like him, you’ll have to hate the rest of the world, it’s like that, you damn fool, one or the other, not together, not with the same eyes, don’t look at him, don’t like him, don’t approve, that’s what I wanted to tell him, not you and the rest of it, I can’t bear to see that, I can’t stand it, anything to take you away from it, from their world, from all of them, anything, Roark ...” She did not hear herself saying it, she did not see him smiling, she did not recognize the full understanding in his face, she saw only his face close over hers, and she had nothing to hide from him, nothing to keep unstated, everything was granted, answered, found.
 
Peter Keating was bewildered. Dominique’s sudden devotion to his career seemed dazzling, flattering, enormously profitable; everybody told him so; but there were moments when he did not feel dazzled or flattered; he felt uneasy.
He tried to avoid Guy Francon. “How did you do it, Peter? How did you do it?” Francon would ask. “She must be crazy about you! Who’d ever think that Dominique of all people would ...? And who’d think she could? She’d have made me a millionaire if she’d done her stuff five years ago. But then, of course, a father is not the same inspiration as a ...” He caught an ominous look on Keating’s face and changed the end of his sentence to: “as her man, shall we say?”
“Listen, Guy,” Keating began, and stopped, sighing, and muttered: “Please, Guy, we mustn’t ...”
“I know, I know, I know. We mustn’t be premature. But hell, Peter, entre nous, isn’t it all as public as an engagement? More so. And louder.” Then the smile vanished, and Francon’s face looked earnest, peaceful, frankly aged, in one of his rare flashes of genuine dignity. “And I’m glad, Peter,” he said simply. “That’s what I wanted to happen. I guess I always did love Dominique, after all. It makes me happy. I know I’ll be leaving her in good hands. Her and everything else eventually ...”
“Look, old man, will you forgive me? I’m so terribly rushed—had two hours sleep last night, the Colton factory, you know, Jesus, what a job!—thanks to Dominique—it’s a killer, but wait till you see it! Wait till you see the check, too!”
“Isn’t she wonderful? Will you tell me, why is she doing it? I’ve asked her and I can’t make head or tail of what she says, she gives me the craziest gibberish, you know how she talks.”
“Oh well, we should worry, so long as she’s doing it!”
He could not tell Francon that he had no answer; he couldn’t admit that he had not seen Dominique alone for months; that she refused to see him.
He remembered his last private conversation with her—in the cab on their way from Toohey’s meeting. He remembered the indifferent calm of her insults to him—the utter contempt of insults delivered without anger. He could have expected anything after that—except to see her turn into his champion, his press agent, almost—his pimp. That’s what’s wrong, he thought, that I can think of words like that when I think about it.
He had seen her often since she started on her unrequested campaign; he had been invited to her parties—and introduced to his future clients; he had never been allowed a moment alone with her. He had tried to thank her and to question her. But he could not force a conversation she did not want continued, with a curious mob of guests pressing all around them. So he went on smiling blandly—her hand resting casually on the black sleeve of his dinner jacket, her thigh against his as she stood beside him, her pose possessive and intimate, made flagrantly intimate by her air of not noticing it, while she told an admiring circle what she thought of the Cosmo-Slotnick Building. He heard envious comments from all his friends. He was, he thought bitterly, the only man in New York City who did not think that Dominique Francon was in love with him.
But he knew the dangerous instability of her whims, and this was too valuable a whim to disturb. He stayed away from her and sent her flowers; he rode along and tried not to think of it; the little edge remained—a thin edge of uneasiness.
One day, he met her by chance in a restaurant. He saw her lunching alone and grasped the opportunity. He walked straight to her table, determined to act like an old friend who remembered nothing but her incredible benevolence. After many bright comments on his luck, he asked: “Dominique, why have you been refusing to see me?”
“What should I have wanted to see you for?”
“But good Lord Almighty! ...” That came out involuntarily, with too sharp a sound of long-suppressed anger, and he corrected it hastily, smiling: “Well, don’t you think you owed me a chance to thank you?”
“You’ve thanked me. Many times.”
“Yes, but didn’t you think we really had to meet alone? Didn’t you think that I’d be a little ... bewildered?”
“I haven’t thought of it. Yes, I suppose you could be.”
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“What is it all about?”
“About ... fifty thousand dollars by now, I think.”
“You’re being nasty.”
“Want me to stop?”
“Oh no! That is, not ...”
“Not the commissions. Fine. I won’t stop them. You see? What was there for us to talk about? I’m doing things for you and you’re glad to have me do them—so we’re in perfect agreement.”
“You do say the funniest things! In perfect agreement. That’s sort of a redundancy and an understatement at the same time, isn’t it? What else could we be under the circumstances? You wouldn’t expect me to object to what you’re doing, would you?”
“No. I wouldn’t.”
“But agreeing is not the word for what I feel. I’m so terribly grateful to you that I’m simply dizzy—I was bowled over—don’t let me get silly now—I know you don’t like that—but I’m so grateful I don’t know what to do with myself.”
“Fine, Peter. Now you’ve thanked me.”
“You see, I’ve never flattered myself by thinking that you thought very much of my work or cared or took any notice. And then you ... That’s what makes me so happy and ... Dominique,” he asked, and his voice jerked a little, because the question was like a hook pulling at a line, long and hidden, and he knew that this was the core of his uneasiness, “do you really think that I’m a great architect?”
She smiled slowly. She said: “Peter, if people heard you asking that, they’d laugh. Particularly, asking that of me.”
“Yes, I know, but ... but do you really mean them, all those things you say about me?”
“They work.”
“Yes, but is that why you picked me? Because you think I’m good?”
“You sell like hot cakes. Isn’t that the proof?”
“Yes ... No ... I mean ... in a different way ... I mean ... Dominique, I’d like to hear you say once, just once, that I ...”
“Listen, Peter, I’ll have to run along in a moment, but before I go I must tell you that you’ll probably hear from Mrs. Lonsdale tomorrow or the next day. Now remember that she’s a prohibitionist, loves dogs, hates women who smoke, and believes in reincarnation. She wants her house to be better than Mrs. Purdee‘s—Holcombe did Purdee’s—so if you tell her that Mrs. Purdee’s house looks ostentatious and that true simplicity costs much more money, you’ll get along fine. You might discuss petit point, too. That’s her hobby.”
He went away, thinking happily about Mrs. Lonsdale’s house, and he forgot his question. Later, he remembered it resentfully, and shrugged, and told himself that the best part of Dominique’s help was her desire not to see him.
As a compensation, he found pleasure in attending the meetings of Toohey’s Council of American Builders. He did not know why he should think of it as compensation, but he did and it was comforting. He listened attentively when Gordon L. Prescott made a speech on the meaning of architecture.
“And thus the intrinsic significance of our craft lies in the philosophical fact that we deal in nothing. We create emptiness through which certain physical bodies are to move—we shall designate them for convenience as humans. By emptiness I mean what is commonly known as rooms. Thus it is only the crass layman who thinks that we put up stone walls. We do nothing of the kind. We put up emptiness, as I have proved. This leads us to a corollary of astronomical importance: to the unconditional acceptance of the premise that ‘absence’ is superior to ‘presence.’ That is, to the acceptance of non-acceptance. I shall state this in simpler terms—for the sake of clarity: ‘nothing’ is superior to ‘something.’ Thus it is clear that the architect is more than a bricklayer -since the fact of bricks is a secondary illusion anyway. The architect is a metaphysical priest dealing in basic essentials, who has the courage to face the primal conception of reality as nonreality—since there is nothing and he creates nothingness. If this sounds like a contradiction, it is not a proof of bad logic, but of a higher logic, the dialectics of all life and art. Should you wish to make the inevitable deductions from this basic conception, you may come to conclusions of vast sociological importance. You may see that a beautiful woman is inferior to a non-beautiful one, that the literate is inferior to the illiterate, that the rich is inferior to the poor, and the able to the incompetent. The architect is the concrete illustration of a cosmic paradox. Let us be modest in the vast pride of this realization. Everything else is twaddle.”
One could not worry about one’s value or greatness when listening to this. It made self-respect unnecessary.
Keating listened in thick contentment. He glanced at the others. There was an attentive silence in the audience; they all liked it as he liked it. He saw a boy chewing gum, a man cleaning his fingernails with the corner of a match folder, a youth stretched out loutishly. That, too, pleased Keating; it was as if they said: We are glad to listen to the sublime, but it’s not necessary to be too damn reverent about the sublime.
The Council of American Builders met once a month and engaged in no tangible activity, beyond listening to speeches and sipping an inferior brand of root beer. Its membership did not grow fast, either in quantity or in quality. There were no concrete results achieved.
The meetings of the Council were held in a huge, empty room over a garage on the West Side. A long, narrow, unventilated stairway led to a door bearing the Council’s name; there were folding chairs inside, a table for the chairman, and a wastebasket. The A.G.A. considered the Council of American Builders a silly joke. “What do you want to waste time on those cranks for?” Francon asked Keating in the rose-lit, satin-stuffed rooms of the A.G.A., wrinkling his nose with fastidious amusement. “Damned if I know,” Keating answered gaily. “I like them.” Ellsworth Toohey attended every meeting of the Council, but did not speak. He sat in a corner and listened.
One night Keating and Toohey walked home together after the meeting, down the dark, shabby streets of the West Side, and stopped for a cup of coffee at a seedy drugstore. “Why not a drugstore?” Toohey laughed when Keating reminded him of the distinguished restaurants made famous by Toohey’s patronage. “At least, no one will recognize us here and bother us.”
He sent a jet of smoke from his Egyptian cigarette at a faded Coca-Cola sign over their booth, he ordered a sandwich, he nibbled daintily a slice of pickle which was not flyspecked but looked it, and he talked to Keating. He talked at random. What he said did not matter, at first; it was his voice, the matchless voice of Ellsworth Toohey. Keating felt as if he were standing in the middle of a vast plain, under the stars, held and owned, in assurance, in security.
“Kindness, Peter,” said the voice softly, “kindness. That is the first commandment, perhaps the only one. That is why I had to pan that new play, in my column yesterday. That play lacked essential kindness. We must be kind, Peter, to everybody around us. We must accept and forgive—there is so much to be forgiven in each one of us. If you learn to love everything, the humblest, the least, the meanest, then the meanest in you will be loved. Then we’ll find the sense of universal equality, the great peace of brotherhood, a new world, Peter, a beautiful new world....”