XI
IN DECEMBER THE COSMO-SLOTNICK BUILDING WAS OPENED WITH great ceremony. There were celebrities, flower horseshoes, newsreel cameras, revolving searchlights and three hours of speeches, all alike.
I should be happy, Peter Keating told himself—and wasn’t. He watched from a window the solid spread of faces filling Broadway from curb to curb. He tried to talk himself into joy. He felt nothing. He had to admit that he was bored. But he smiled and shook hands and let himself be photographed. The Cosmo-Slotnick Building rose ponderously over the street, like a big white bromide.
After the ceremonies Ellsworth Toohey took Keating away to the retreat of a pale-orchid booth in a quiet, expensive restaurant. Many brilliant parties were being given in honor of the opening, but Keating grasped Toohey’s offer and declined all the other invitations. Toohey watched him as he seized his drink and slumped in his seat.
“Wasn’t it grand?” said Toohey. “That, Peter, is the climax of what you can expect from life.” He lifted his glass delicately. “Here’s to the hope that you shall have many triumphs such as this. Such as tonight.”
“Thanks,” said Keating, and reached for his glass hastily, without looking, and lifted it, to find it empty.
“Don’t you feel proud, Peter?”
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
“That’s good. That’s how I like to see you. You looked extremely handsome tonight. You’ll be splendid in those newsreels.”
A flicker of interest snapped in Keating’s eyes. “Well, I sure hope so.”
“It’s too bad you’re not married, Peter. A wife would have been most decorative tonight. Goes well with the public. With the movie audiences, too.”
“Katie doesn’t photograph well.”
“Oh, that’s right, you’re engaged to Katie. So stupid of me. I keep forgetting it. No, Katie doesn’t photograph well at all. Also, for the life of me, I can’t imagine Katie being very effective at a social function. There are a great many nice adjectives one could use about Katie, but ‘poised’ and ‘distinguished’ are not among them. You must forgive me, Peter. I let my imagination run away with me. Dealing with art as much as I do, I’m inclined to see things purely from the viewpoint of artistic fitness. And looking at you tonight, I couldn’t help thinking of the woman who would have made such a perfect picture by your side.”
“Who?”
“Oh, don’t pay attention to me. It’s only an esthetic fancy. Life is never as perfect as that. People have too much to envy you for. You couldn’t add that to your other achievements.”
“Who?”
“Drop it, Peter. You can’t get her. Nobody can get her. You’re good, but you’re not good enough for that.”
“Who?”
“Dominique Francon, of course.”
Keating sat up straight and Toohey saw wariness in his eyes, rebellion, actual hostility. Toohey held his glance calmly. It was Keating who gave in; he slumped again and he said, pleading:
“Oh, God, Ellsworth, I don’t love her.”
“I never thought you did. But I do keep forgetting the exaggerated importance which the average man attaches to love—sexual love.”
“I’m not an average man,” said Keating wearily; it was an automatic protest—without fire.
“Sit up, Peter. You don’t look like a hero, slumped that way.”
Keating jerked himself up—anxious and angry. He said:
“I’ve always felt that you wanted me to marry Dominique. Why? What’s it to you?”
“You’ve answered your own question, Peter. What could it possibly be to me? But we were speaking of love. Sexual love, Peter, is a profoundly selfish emotion. And selfish emotions are not the ones that lead to happiness. Are they? Take tonight for instance. That was an evening to swell an egotist’s heart. Were you happy, Peter? Don’t bother, my dear, no answer is required. The point I wish to make is only that one must mistrust one’s most personal impulses. What one desires is actually of so little importance! One can’t expect to find happiness until one realizes this completely. Think of tonight for a moment. You, my dear Peter, were the least important person there. Which is as it should be. It is not the doer that counts but those for whom things are done. But you were not able to accept that—and so you didn’t feel the great elation that should have been yours.”
“That’s true,” whispered Keating. He would not have admitted it to anyone else.
“You missed the beautiful pride of utter selflessness. Only when you learn to deny your ego, completely, only when you learn to be amused by such piddling sentimentalities as your little sex urges—only then will you achieve the greatness which I have always expected of you.”
“You ... you believe that about me, Ellsworth? You really do?”
“I wouldn’t be sitting here if I didn’t. But to come back to love. Personal love, Peter, is a great evil—as everything personal. And it always leads to misery. Don’t you see why? Personal love is an act of discrimination, of preference. It is an act of injustice—to every human being on earth whom you rob of the affection arbitrarily granted to one. You must love all men equally. But you cannot achieve so noble an emotion if you don’t kill your selfish little choices. They are vicious and futile—since they contradict the first cosmic law—the basic equality of all men.”
“You mean,” said Keating, suddenly interested, “that in a ... in a philosophical way, deep down, I mean, we’re all equal? All of us?”
“Of course,” said Toohey.
Keating wondered why the thought was so warmly pleasant to him. He did not mind that this made him the equal of every pickpocket in the crowd gathered to celebrate his building tonight; it occurred to him dimly—and left him undisturbed, even though it contradicted the passionate quest for superiority that had driven him all his life. The contradiction did not matter; he was not thinking of tonight nor of the crowd; he was thinking of a man who had not been there tonight.
“You know, Ellsworth,” he said, leaning forward, happy in an uneasy kind of way, “I ... I’d rather talk to you than do anything else, anything at all. I had so many places to go tonight—and I’m so much happier just sitting here with you. Sometimes I wonder how I’d ever go on without you.”
“That,” said Toohey, “is as it should be. Or else what are friends for?”
 
That winter the annual costume Arts Ball was an event of greater brilliance and orginality than usual. Athelstan Beasely, the leading spirit of its organization, had had what he called a stroke of genius: all the architects were invited to come dressed as their best buildings. It was a huge success.
Peter Keating was the star of the evening. He looked wonderful as the Cosmo-Slotnick Building. An exact papier-mâché replica of his famous structure covered him from head to knees; one could not see his face, but his bright eyes peered from behind the windows of the top floor, and the crowning pyramid of the roof rose over his head; the colonnade hit him somewhere about the diaphragm, and he wagged a finger through the portals of the great entrance door. His legs were free to move with his usual elegance, in faultless dress trousers and patent-leather pumps.
Guy Francon was very impressive as the Frink National Bank Building, although the structure looked a little squatter than in the original, in order to allow for Francon’s stomach; the Hadrian torch over his head had a real electric bulb lit by a miniature battery. Ralston Holcombe was magnificent as a state capitol, and Gordon L. Prescott was very masculine as a grain elevator. Eugene Pettingill waddled about on his skinny, ancient legs, small and bent, an imposing Park Avenue hotel, with horn-rimmed spectacles peering from under the majestic tower. Two wits engaged in a duel, butting each other in the belly with famous spires, great landmarks of the city that greet the ships approaching from across the ocean. Everybody had lots of fun.
Many of the architects, Athelstan Beasely in particular, commented resentfully on Howard Roark who had been invited and did not come. They had expected to see him dressed as the Enright House.
 
Dominique stopped in the hall and stood looking at the door, at the inscription: “HOWARD ROARK, ARCHITECT.”
She had never seen his office. She had fought against coming here for a long time. But she had to see the place where he worked.
The secretary in the reception room was startled when Dominique gave her name, but announced the visitor to Roark. “Go right in, Miss Francon,” she said.
Roark smiled when she entered his office; a faint smile without surprise.
“I knew you’d come here some day,” he said. “Want me to show you the place?”
“What’s that?” she asked.
His hands were smeared with clay; on a long table, among a litter of unfinished sketches, stood the clay model of a building, a rough study of angles and terraces.
“The Aquitania?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Do you always do that?”
“No. Not always. Sometimes. There’s a hard problem here. I like to play with it for a while. It will probably be my favorite building—it’s so difficult.”
“Go ahead. I want to watch you doing that. Do you mind?”
“Not at all.”
In a moment, he had forgotten her presence. She sat in a corner and watched his hands. She saw them molding walls. She saw them smash a part of the structure, and begin again, slowly, patiently, with a strange certainty even in his hesitation. She saw the palm of his hand smooth a long, straight plane, she saw an angle jerked across space in the motion of his hand before she saw it in clay.
She rose and walked to the window. The buildings of the city far below looked no bigger than the model on his table. It seemed to her that she could see his hands shaping the setbacks, the corners, the roofs of all the structures below, smashing and molding again. Her hand moved absently, following the form of a distant building in rising steps, feeling a physical sense of possession, feeling it for him.
She turned back to the table. A strand of hair hung down over his face bent attentively to the model; he was not looking at her, he was looking at the shape under his fingers. It was almost as if she were watching his hands moving over the body of another woman. She leaned against the wall, weak with a feeling of violent, physical pleasure.
 
At the beginning of January, while the first steel columns rose from the excavations that were to become the Cord Building and the Aquitania Hotel, Roark worked on the drawings for the Temple.
When the first sketches were finished, he said to his secretary:
“Get me Steven Mallory.”
“Mallory, Mr. Roark? Who ... Oh, yes, the shooting sculptor.”
“The what?”
“He took a shot at Ellsworth Toohey, didn’t he?”
“Did he? Yes, that’s right.”
“Is that the one you want, Mr. Roark?”
“That’s the one.”
For two days the secretary telephoned art dealers, galleries, architects, newspapers. No one could tell her what had become of Steven Mallory or where he could be found. On the third day she reported to Roark: “I’ve found an address, in the Village, which I’m told might be his. There’s no telephone.” Roark dictated a letter asking Mallory to telephone his office.
The letter was not returned, but a week passed without answer. Then Steven Mallory telephoned.
“Hello?” said Roark, when the secretary switched the call to him.
“Steven Mallory speaking,” said a young, hard voice, in a way that left an impatient, belligerent silence after the words.
“I should like to see you, Mr. Mallory. Can we make an appointment for you to come to my office?”
“What do you want to see me about?”
“About a commission, of course. I want you to do some work for a building of mine.”
There was a long silence.
“All right,” said Mallory; his voice sounded dead. He added: “Which building?”
“The Stoddard Temple. You may have heard ... ”
“Yeah, I heard. You’re doing it. Who hasn’t heard? Will you pay me as much as you’re paying your press agent?”
“I’m not paying the press agent. I’ll pay you whatever you wish to ask.”
“You know that can’t be much.”
“What time would it be convenient for you to come here?”
“Oh, hell, you name it. You know I’m not busy.”
“Two o’clock tomorrow afternoon?”
“All right.” He added: “I don’t like your voice.”
Roark laughed. “I like yours. Cut it out and be here tomorrow at two.”
“Okay.” Mallory hung up.
Roark dropped the receiver, grinning. But the grin vanished suddenly, and he sat looking at the telephone, his face grave.
Mallory did not keep the appointment. Three days passed without a word from him. Then Roark went to find him in person.
The rooming house where Mallory lived was a dilapidated brownstone in an unlighted street that smelled of a fish market. There was a laundry and a cobbler on the ground floor, at either side of a narrow entrance. A slatternly landlady said: “Mallory? Fifth floor rear,” and shuffled away indifferently. Roark climbed sagging wooden stairs lighted by bulbs stuck in a web of pipes. He knocked at a grimy door.
The door opened. A gaunt young man stood on the threshold; he had disheveled hair, a strong mouth with a square lower lip, and the most expressive eyes that Roark had ever seen.
“What do you want?” he snapped.
“Mr. Mallory?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m Howard Roark.”
Mallory laughed, leaning against the doorjamb, one arm stretched across the opening, with no intention of stepping aside. He was obviously drunk.
“Well, well!” he said. “In person.”
“May I come in?”
“What for?”
Roark sat down on the stair banister. “Why didn’t you keep your appointment?”
“Oh, the appointment? Oh, yes. Well, I’ll tell you,” Mallory said gravely. “It was like this: I really intended to keep it, I really did, and started out for your office, but on my way there I passed a movie theater that was showing Two Heads on a Pillow, so I went in. I just had to see Two Heads on a Pillow.” He grinned, sagging against his stretched arm.
“You’d better let me come in,” said Roark quietly.
“Oh what the hell, come in.”
The room was a narrow hole. There was an unmade bed in a corner, a litter of newspapers and old clothes, a gas ring, a framed landscape from the five-and-ten, representing some sort of sick brown meadows with sheep; there were no drawings or figures, no hints of the occupant’s profession.
Roark pushed some books and a skillet off the only chair, and sat down. Mallory stood before him, grinning, swaying a little.
“You’re doing it all wrong,” said Mallory. “That’s not the way it’s done. You must be pretty hard up to come running after a sculptor. The way it’s done is like this: You make me come to your office, and the first time I come you mustn’t be there. The second time you must keep me waiting for an hour and a half, then come out into the reception room and shake hands and ask me whether I know the Wilsons of Podunk and say how nice that we have mutual friends, but you’re in an awful hurry today and you’ll call me up for lunch soon and then we’ll talk business. Then you keep this up for two months. Then you give me the commission. Then you tell me that I’m no good and wasn’t any good in the first place, and you throw the thing into the ash can. Then you hire Valerian Bronson and he does the job. That’s the way it’s done. Only not this time.”
But his eyes were studying Roark intently, and his eyes had the certainty of a professional. As he spoke, his voice kept losing its swaggering gaiety, and it slipped to a dead flatness on the last sentences.
“No,” said Roark, “not this time.”
The boy stood looking at him silently.
“You’re Howard Roark?” he asked. “I like your buildings. That’s why I didn’t want to meet you. So I wouldn’t have to be sick every time I looked at them. I wanted to go on thinking that they had been done by somebody who matched them.”
“What if I do?”
“That doesn’t happen.”
But he sat down on the edge of the crumpled bed and slumped forward, his glance like a sensitive scale weighing Roark’s features, impertinent in its open action of appraisal.
“Listen,” said Roark, speaking clearly and very carefully, “I want you to do a statue for the Stoddard Temple. Give me a piece of paper and I’ll write you a contract right now, stating that I will owe you a million dollars damages if I hire another sculptor or if your work is not used.”
“You can speak normal. I’m not drunk. Not all the way. I understand.”
“Well?”
“Why did you pick me?”
“Because you’re a good sculptor.”
“That’s not true.”
“That you’re good?”
“No. That it’s your reason. Who asked you to hire me?”
“Nobody.”
“Some woman I laid?”
“I don’t know any women you laid.”
“Stuck on your building budget?”
“No. The budget’s unlimited.”
“Feel sorry for me?”
“No. Why should I?”
“Want to get publicity out of that shooting-Toohey business?”
“Good God, no!”
“Well, what then?”
“Why do you fish for all that nonsense instead of the simplest reason?”
“Which?”
“That I like your work.”
“Sure. That’s what they all say. That’s what we’re all supposed to say and to believe. Imagine what would happen if somebody blew the lid off that one! So, all right, you like my work. What’s the real reason?”
“I like your work.”
Mallory spoke earnestly, his voice sober.
“You mean you saw the things I’ve done, and you liked them—you—yourself—alone—without anyone telling you that you should like them or why you should like them—and you decided that you wanted me, for that reason—only for that reason—without knowing anything about me or giving a damn—only because of the things I’ve done and ... and what you saw in them—only because of that, you decided to hire me, and you went to the bother of finding me, and coming here, and being insulted—only because you saw—and what you saw made me important to you, made you want me? Is that what you mean?”
“Just that,” said Roark.
The things that pulled Mallory’s eyes wide were frightening to see. Then he shook his head, and said very simply, in the tone of soothing himself:
“No.”
He leaned forward. His voice sounded dead and pleading.
“Listen, Mr. Roark. I won’t be mad at you. I just want to know. All right, I see that you’re set on having me work for you, and you know you can get me, for anything you say, you don’t have to sign any million-dollar contract, look at this room, you know you’ve got me, so why shouldn’t you tell me the truth? It won’t make any difference to you-and it’s very important to me.”
“What’s very important to you?”
“Not to ... not to ... Look. I didn’t think anybody’d ever want me again. But you do. All right. I’ll go through it again. Only I don’t want to think again that I’m working for somebody who ... who likes my work. That, I couldn’t go through any more. I’ll feel better if you tell me. I’ll ... I’ll feel calmer. Why should you put on an act for me? I’m nothing. I won’t think less of you, if that’s what you’re afraid of. Don’t you see? It’s much more decent to tell me the truth. Then it will be simple and honest. I’ll respect you more. Really, I will.”
“What’s the matter with you, kid? What have they done to you? Why do you want to say things like that?”
“Because ...” Mallory roared suddenly, and then his voice broke, and his head dropped, and he finished in a flat whisper: “because I’ve spent two years”—his hand circled limply indicating the room—“that’s how I’ve spent them—trying to get used to the fact that what you’re trying to tell me doesn’t exist....”
Roark walked over to him, lifted his chin, knocking it upward, and said:
“You’re a God-damn fool. You have no right to care what I think of your work, what I am or why I’m here. You’re too good for that. But if you want to know it—I think you’re the best sculptor we’ve got. I think it, because your figures are not what men are, but what men could be—and should be. Because you’ve gone beyond the probable and made us see what is possible, but possible only through you. Because your figures are more devoid of contempt for humanity than any work I’ve ever seen. Because you have a magnificent respect for the human being. Because your figures are the heroic in man. And so I didn’t come here to do you a favor or because I felt sorry for you or because you need a job pretty badly. I came for a simple, selfish reason—the same reason that makes a man choose the cleanest food he can find. It’s a law of survival, isn’t it?—to seek the best. I didn’t come for your sake. I came for mine.”
Mallory jerked himself away from him, and dropped face down on the bed, his two arms stretched out, one on each side of his head, hands closed into two fists. The thin trembling of the shirt cloth on his back showed that he was sobbing; the shirt cloth and the fists that twisted slowly, digging into the pillow. Roark knew that he was looking at a man who had never cried before. He sat down on the side of the bed and could not take his eyes off the twisting wrists, even though the sight was hard to bear.
After a while Mallory sat up. He looked at Roark and saw the calmest, kindest face—a face without a hint of pity. It did not look like the countenance of men who watch the agony of another with a secret pleasure, uplifted by the sight of a beggar who needs their compassion; it did not bear the cast of the hungry soul that feeds upon another’s humiliation. Roark’s face seemed tired, drawn at the temples, as if he had just taken a beating. But his eyes were serene and they looked at Mallory quietly, a hard, clean glance of understanding—and respect.
“Lie down now,” said Roark. “Lie still for a while.”
“How did they ever let you survive?”
“Lie down. Rest. We’ll talk afterward.”
Mallory got up. Roark took him by the shoulders, forced him down, lifted his legs off the floor, lowered his head on the pillow. The boy did not resist.
Stepping back, Roark brushed against a table loaded with junk. Something clattered to the floor. Mallory jerked forward, trying to reach it first. Roark pushed his arm aside and picked up the object.
It was a small plaster plaque, the kind sold in cheap gift shops. It represented a baby sprawled on its stomach, dimpled rear forward, peeking coyly over its shoulder. A few lines, the structure of a few muscles showed a magnificent talent that could not be hidden, that broke fiercely through the rest; the rest was a deliberate attempt to be obvious, vulgar and trite, a clumsy effort, unconvincing and tortured. It was an object that belonged in a chamber of horrors.
Mallory saw Roark’s hand begin to shake. Then Roark’s arm went back and up, over his head, slowly, as if gathering the weight of air in the crook of his elbow; it was only a flash, but it seemed to last for minutes, the arm stood lifted and still—then it slashed forward, the plaque shot across the room and burst to pieces against the wall. It was the only time anyone had ever seen Roark murderously angry.
“Roark.”
“Yes?”
“Roark, I wish I’d met you before you had a job to give me.” He spoke without expression, his head lying back on the pillow, his eyes closed. “So that there would be no other reason mixed in. Because, you see, I’m very grateful to you. Not for giving me a job. Not for coming here. Not for anything that you’ll ever do for me. Just for what you are.”
Then he lay without moving, straight and limp, like a man long past the stage of suffering. Roark stood at the window, looking at the wretched room and at the boy on the bed. He wondered why he felt as if he were waiting. He was waiting for an explosion over their heads. It seemed senseless. Then he understood. He thought, This is how men feel, trapped in a shell hole; this room is not an accident of poverty, it’s the footprint of a war; it’s the devastation torn by explosives more vicious than any stored in the arsenals of the world. A war ... against? ... The enemy had no name and no face. But this boy was a comrade-in-arms, hurt in battle, and Roark stood over him, feeling a strange new thing, a desire to lift him in his arms and carry him to safety ... Only the hell and the safety had no known designations ... He kept thinking of Kent Lansing, trying to remember something Kent Lansing had said ...
Then Mallory opened his eyes, and lifted himself up on one elbow. Roark pulled the chair over to the bed and sat down.
“Now,” he said, “talk. Talk about the things you really want said. Don’t tell me about your family, your childhood, your friends or your feelings. Tell me about the things you think.”
Mallory looked at him incredulously and whispered:
“How did you know that?”
Roark smiled and said nothing. “How did you know what’s been killing me? Slowly, for years, driving me to hate people when I don’t want to hate.... Have you felt it, too? Have you seen how your best friends love everything about you—except the things that count? And your most important is nothing to them, nothing, not even a sound they can recognize. You mean, you want to hear? You want to know what I do and why I do it, you want to know what I think? It’s not boring to you? It’s important?”
“Go ahead,” said Roark.
Then he sat for hours, listening, while Mallory spoke of his work, of the thoughts behind his work, of the thoughts that shaped his life, spoke gluttonously, like a drowning man flung out to shore, getting drunk on huge, clean snatches of air.
 
Mallory came to Roark’s office on the following morning, and Roark showed him the sketches of the Temple. When he stood at a drafting table, with a problem to consider, Mallory changed; there was no uncertainty in him, no remembrance of pain; the gesture of his hand taking the drawing was sharp and sure, like that of a soldier on duty. The gesture said that nothing ever done to him could alter the function of the thing within him that was now called into action. He had an unyielding, impersonal confidence; he faced Roark as an equal.
He studied the drawings for a long time, then raised his head. Everything about his face was controlled, except his eyes.
“Like it?” Roark asked.
“Don’t use stupid words.”
He held one of the drawings, walked to the window, stood looking from the sketch to the street to Roark’s face and back again.
“It doesn’t seem possible,” he said. “Not this—and that.” He waved the sketch at the street.
There was a poolroom on the corner of the street below; a rooming house with a Corinthian portico; a billboard advertising a Broadway musical; a line of pink-gray underwear fluttering on a roof.
“Not in the same city. Not on the same earth,” said Mallory. “But you made it happen. It’s possible.... I’ll never be afraid again.”
“Of what?”
Mallory put the sketch down on the table, cautiously. He answered:
“You said something yesterday about a first law. A law demanding that man seek the best.... It was funny.... The unrecognized genius—that’s an old story. Have you ever thought of a much worse one—the genius recognized too well? ... That a great many men are poor fools who can’t see the best—that’s nothing. One can’t get angry at that. But do you understand about the men who see it and don’t want it?”
“No.”
“No. You wouldn’t. I spent all night thinking about you. I didn’t sleep at all. Do you know what your secret is? It’s your terrible innocence.”
Roark laughed aloud, looking at the boyish face.
“No,” said Mallory, “it’s not funny. I know what I’m talking about—and you don’t. You can’t know. It’s because of that absolute health of yours. You’re so healthy that you can’t conceive of disease. You know of it. But you don’t really believe it. I do. I’m wiser than you are about some things, because I’m weaker. I understand—the other side. That’s what did it to me ... what you saw yesterday.”
“That’s over.”
“Probably. But not quite. I’m not afraid any more. But I know that the terror exists. I know the kind of terror it is. You can’t conceive of that kind. Listen, what’s the most horrible experience you can imagine? To me—it’s being left, unarmed, in a sealed cell with a drooling beast of prey or a maniac who’s had some disease that’s eaten his brain out. You’d have nothing then but your voice—your voice and your thought. You’d scream to that creature why it should not touch you, you’d have the most eloquent words, the unanswerable words, you’d become the vessel of the absolute truth. And you’d see living eyes watching you and you’d know that the thing can’t hear you, that it can’t be reached, not reached, not in any way, yet it’s breathing and moving there before you with a purpose of its own. That’s horror. Well, that’s what’s hanging over the world, prowling somewhere through mankind, that same thing, something closed, mindless, utterly wanton, but something with an aim and a cunning of its own. I don’t think I’m a coward, but I’m afraid of it. And that’s all I know—only that it exists. I don’t know its purpose, I don’t know its nature.”
“The principle behind the Dean,” said Roark.
“What?”
“It’s something I wonder about once in a while.... Mallory, why did you try to shoot Ellsworth Toohey?” He saw the boy’s eyes, and he added: “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t like to talk about it.”
“I don’t like to talk about it,” said Mallory, his voice tight. “But it was the right question to ask.”
“Sit down,” said Roark. “We’ll talk about your commission.”
Then Mallory listened attentively while Roark spoke of the building and of what he wanted from the sculptor. He concluded:
“Just one figure. It will stand here.” He pointed to a sketch. “The place is built around it. The statue of a naked woman. If you understand the building, you understand what the figure must be. The human spirit. The heroic in man. The aspiration and the fulfillment, both. Uplifted in its quest—and uplifting by its own essence. Seeking God—and finding itself. Showing that there is no higher reach beyond its own form.... You’re the only one who can do it for me.”
“Yes.”
“You’ll work as I work for my clients. You know what I want—the rest is up to you. Do it any way you wish. I’d like to suggest the model, but if she doesn’t fit your purpose, choose anyone you prefer.”
“Who’s your choice?”
“Dominique Francon.”
“Oh, God!”
“Know her?”
“I’ve seen her. If I could have her ... Christ! there’s no other woman so right for this. She ...” He stopped. He added, deflated: “She won’t pose. Certainly not for you.”
“She will.”
Guy Francon tried to object when he heard of it.
“Listen, Dominique,” he said angrily, “there is a limit. There really is a limit—even for you. Why are you doing it? Why—for a building of Roark’s, of all things? After everything you’ve said and done against him—do you wonder people are talking? Nobody’d care or notice if it were anyone else. But you—and Roark! I can’t go anywhere without having somebody ask me about it. What am I to do?”
“Order yourself a reproduction of the statue, Father. It’s going to be beautiful.”
Peter Keating refused to discuss it. But he met Dominique at a party and he asked, having intended not to ask it:
“Is it true that you’re posing for a statue for Roark’s temple?”
“Yes.”
“Dominique, I don’t like it.”
“No?”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I know I have no right ... It’s only ... It’s only that of all people, I don’t want to see you being friendly with Roark. Not Roark. Anybody but Roark.”
She looked interested: “Why?”
“I don’t know.”
Her glance of curious study worried him.
“Maybe,” he muttered, “maybe it’s because it has never seemed right that you should have such contempt for his work. It made me very happy that you had, but ... but it never seemed right—for you.”
“It didn’t, Peter?”
“No. But you don’t like him as a person, do you?”
“No, I don’t like him as a person.”
Ellsworth Toohey was displeased. “It was most unwise of you, Dominique,” he said in the privacy of her office. His voice did not sound smooth.
“I know it was.”
“Can’t you change your mind and refuse?”
“I won’t change my mind, Ellsworth.”
He sat down, and shrugged; after a while he smiled. “All right, my dear, have it your own way.”
She ran a pencil through a line of copy and said nothing.
Toohey lighted a cigarette. “So he’s chosen Steven Mallory for the job,” he said.
“Yes. A funny coincidence, wasn’t it?”
“It’s no coincidence at all, my dear. Things like that are never a coincidence. There’s a basic law behind it. Though I’m sure he doesn’t know it and nobody helped him to choose.”
“I believe you approve?”
“Wholeheartedly. It makes everything just right. Better than ever.”
“Ellsworth, why did Mallory try to kill you?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea. I don’t know. I think Mr. Roark does. Or should. Incidentally, who selected you to pose for that statue? Roark or Mallory?”
“That’s none of your business, Ellsworth.”
“I see. Roark.”
“Incidentally, I’ve told Roark that it was you who made Hopton Stoddard hire him.”
He stopped his cigarette in mid-air; then moved again and placed it in his mouth.
“You did? Why?”
“I saw the drawings of the temple.”
“That good?”
“Better, Ellsworth.”
“What did he say when you told him?”
“Nothing. He laughed.”
“He did? Nice of him. I daresay many people will join him after a while.”
 
Through the months of that winter Roark seldom slept more than three hours a night. There was a swinging sharpness in his movements, as if his body fed energy to all those around him. The energy ran through the walls of his office to three points of the city: to the Cord Building, in the center of Manhattan, a tower of copper and glass; to the Aquitania Hotel on Central Park South; and to the Temple on a rock over the Hudson, far north on Riverside Drive.
When they had time to meet, Austen Heller watched him, amused and pleased. “When these three are finished, Howard,” he said, “nobody will be able to stop you. Not ever again. I speculate occasionally upon how far you’ll go. You see, I’ve always had a weakness for astronomy.”
On an evening in March Roark stood within the tall enclosure that had been erected around the site of the Temple, according to Stoddard’s orders. The first blocks of stone, the base of future walls, rose above the ground. It was late and the workers had left. The place lay deserted, cut off from the world, dissolved in darkness; but the sky glowed, too luminous for the night below, as if the light had remained past the normal hour, in announcement of the coming spring. A ship’s siren cried out once, somewhere on the river, and the sound seemed to come from a distant countryside, through miles of silence. A light still burned in the wooden shack built as a studio for Steven Mallory, where Dominique posed for him.
The Temple was to be a small building of gray limestone. Its lines were horizontal, not the lines reaching to heaven, but the lines of the earth. It seemed to spread over the ground like arms outstretched at shoulder-height, palms down, in great, silent acceptance. It did not cling to the soil and it did not crouch under the sky. It seemed to lift the earth, and its few vertical shafts pulled the sky down. It was scaled to human height in such a manner that it did not dwarf man, but stood as a setting that made his figure the only absolute, the gauge of perfection by which all dimensions were to be judged. When a man entered this temple, he would feel space molded around him, for him, as if it had waited for his entrance, to be completed. It was a joyous place, with the joy of exaltation that must be quiet. It was a place where one would come to feel sinless and strong, to find the peace of spirit never granted save by one’s own glory.
There was no ornamentation inside, except the graded projections of the walls, and the vast windows. The place was not sealed under vaults, but thrown open to the earth around it, to the trees, the river, the sun—and to the skyline of the city in the distance, the skyscrapers, the shapes of man’s achievement on earth. At the end of the room, facing the entrance, with the city as background, stood the figure of a naked human body.
There was nothing before him now in the darkness except the first stones, but Roark thought of the finished building, feeling it in the joints of his fingers, still remembering the movements of his pencil that had drawn it. He stood thinking of it. Then he walked across the rough, torn earth to the studio shack.
“Just a moment,” said Mallory’s voice when he knocked.
Inside the shack Dominique stepped down from the stand and pulled a robe on. Then Mallory opened the door.
“Oh, it’s you?” he said. “We thought it was the watchman. What are you doing here so late?”
“Good evening, Miss Francon,” said Roark, and she nodded curtly. “Sorry to interrupt, Steve.”
“It’s all right. We haven’t been doing so well. Dominique can’t get quite what I want tonight. Sit down, Howard. What the hell time is it?”
“Nine-thirty. If you’re going to stay longer, want me to have some dinner sent up?”
“I don’t know. Let’s have a cigarette.”
The place had an unpainted wooden floor, bare wooden rafters, a cast-iron stove glowing in a corner. Mallory moved about like a feudal host, with smudges of clay on his forehead. He smoked nervously, pacing up and down.
“Want to get dressed, Dominique?” he asked. “I don’t think we’ll do much more tonight.” She didn’t answer. She stood looking at Roark. Mallory reached the end of the room, whirled around, smiled at Roark: “Why haven’t you ever come in before, Howard? Of course, if I’d been really busy, I’d have thrown you out. What, by the way, are you doing here at this hour?’ ’
“I just wanted to see the place tonight. Couldn’t get here earlier.”
“Is this what you want, Steve?” Dominique asked suddenly. She took her robe off and walked naked to the stand. Mallory looked from her to Roark and back again. Then he saw what he had been struggling to see all day. He saw her body standing before him, straight and tense, her head thrown back, her arms at her sides, palms out, as she had stood for many days; but now her body was alive, so still that it seemed to tremble, saying what he had wanted to hear: a proud, reverent, enraptured surrender to a vision of her own, the right moment, the moment before the figure would sway and break, the moment touched by the reflection of what she saw.
Mallory’s cigarette went flying across the room.
“Hold it, Dominique!” he cried. “Hold it! Hold it!”
He was at his stand before the cigarette hit the ground.
He worked, and Dominique stood without moving, and Roark stood facing her, leaning against the wall.
 
In April the walls of the Temple rose in broken lines over the ground. On moonlit nights they had a soft, smeared, underwater glow. The tall fence stood on guard around them.
After the day’s work, four people would often remain at the site—Roark, Mallory, Dominique and Mike Donnigan. Mike had not missed employment on a single building of Roark’s.
The four of them sat together in Mallory’s shack, after all the others had left. A wet cloth covered the unfinished statue. The door of the shack stood open to the first warmth of a spring night. A tree branch hung outside, with three new leaves against the black sky, stars trembling like drops of water on the edges of the leaves. There were no chairs in the shack. Mallory stood at the cast-iron stove, fixing hot dogs and coffee. Mike sat on the model’s stand, smoking a pipe. Roark lay stretched out on the floor, propped up on his elbows. Dominique sat on a kitchen stool, a thin silk robe wrapped about her, her bare feet on the planks of the floor.
They did not speak about their work. Mallory told outrageous stories and Dominique laughed like a child. They talked about nothing in particular, sentences that had meaning only in the sound of the voices, in the warm gaiety, in the ease of complete relaxation. They were simply four people who liked being there together. The walls rising in the darkness beyond the open door gave sanction to their rest, gave them the right to lightness, the building on which they had all worked together, the building that was like a low, audible harmony to the sound of their voices. Roark laughed as Dominique had never seen him laugh anywhere else, his mouth loose and young.
They stayed there late into the night. Mallory poured coffee into a mongrel assortment of cracked cups. The odor of coffee met the odor of the new leaves outside.
 
In May work was stopped on the construction of the Aquitania Hotel.
Two of the owners had been cleaned out in the stock market; a third got his funds attached by a lawsuit over an inheritance disputed by someone; a fourth embezzled somebody else’s shares. The corporation blew up in a tangle of court cases that were to require years of untangling. The building had to wait, unfinished.
“I’ll straighten it out, if I have to murder a few of them,” Kent Lansing told Roark. “I’ll get it out of their hands. We’ll finish it some day, you and 1. But it will take time. Probably a long time. I won’t tell you to be patient. Men like you and me would not survive beyond their first fifteen years if they did not acquire the patience of a Chinese executioner. And the hide of a battleship.”
Ellsworth Toohey laughed, sitting on the edge of Dominique’s desk. “The Unfinished Symphony—thank God,” he said.
Dominique used that in her column. “The Unfinished Symphony on Central Park South,” she wrote. She did not say, “thank God.” The nickname was repeated. Strangers noticed the odd sight of an expensive structure on an important street, left gaping with empty windows, half-covered walls, naked beams; when they asked what it was, people who had never heard of Roark or of the story behind the building, snickered and answered: “Oh, that’s the Unfinished Symphony.”
Late at night Roark would stand across the street, under the trees of the Park, and look at the black, dead shape among the glowing structures of the city’s skyline. His hands would move as they had moved over the clay model; at that distance, a broken projection could be covered by the palm of his hand; but the instinctive completing motion met nothing but air.
He forced himself sometimes to walk through the building. He walked on shivering planks hung over emptiness, through rooms without ceilings and rooms without floors, to the open edges where girders stuck out like bones through a broken skin.
An old watchman lived in a cubbyhole at the back of the ground floor. He knew Roark and let him wander around. Once, he stopped Roark on the way out and said suddenly: “I had a son once—almost. He was born dead.” Something had made him say that, and he looked at Roark, not quite certain of what he had wanted to say. But Roark smiled, his eyes closed, and his hand covered the old man’s shoulder, like a handshake, and then he walked away.
It was only the first few weeks. Then he made himself forget the Aquitania.
 
On an evening in October Roark and Dominique walked together through the completed Temple. It was to be opened publicly in a week, the day after Stoddard’s return. No one had seen it except those who had worked on its construction.
It was a clear, quiet evening. The site of the Temple lay empty and silent. The red of the sunset on the limestone walls was like the first light of morning.
They stood looking at the Temple, and then stood inside, before the marble figure, saying nothing to each other. The shadows in the molded space around them seemed shaped by the same hand that had shaped the walls. The ebbing motion of light flowed in controlled discipline, like the sentences of a speech giving voice to the changing facets of the walls.
“Roark ...”
“Yes, my dearest?”
“No ... nothing ...”
They walked back to the car together, his hand clasping her wrist.