The Fountainhead (51 page)

“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.”