The Fountainhead (53 page)

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....”

E
LLSWORTH MONKTON TOOHEY WAS SEVEN YEARS OLD WHEN HE turned the hose upon Johnny Stokes, as Johnny was passing by the Toohey lawn, dressed in his best Sunday suit. Johnny had waited for that suit a year and a half, his mother being very poor. Ellsworth did not sneak or hide, but committed his act openly, with systematic deliberation: he walked to the tap, turned it on, stood in the middle of the lawn and directed the hose at Johnny, his aim faultless—with Johnny’s mother just a few steps behind him down the street, with his own mother and father and the visiting minister in full view on the Toohey porch. Johnny Stokes was a bright kid with dimples and golden curls; people always turned to look at Johnny Stokes. Nobody had ever turned to look at Ellsworth Toohey.

The shock and amazement of the grownups present were such that nobody rushed to stop Ellsworth for a long moment. He stood, bracing his thin little body against the violence of the nozzle jerking in his hands, never allowing it to leave its objective until he felt satisfied; then he let it drop, the water hissing through the grass, and made two steps toward the porch, and stopped, waiting, his head high, delivering himself for punishment. The punishment would have come from Johnny if Mrs. Stokes had not seized her boy and held him. Ellsworth did not turn to the Stokeses behind him, but said, slowly, distinctly, looking at his mother and the minister: “Johnny is a dirty bully. He beats up all the boys in school.” This was true.

The question of punishment became an ethical problem. It was difficult to punish Ellsworth under any circumstances, because of his fragile body and delicate health; besides, it seemed wrong to chastise a boy who had sacrificed himself to avenge injustice, and done it bravely, in the open, ignoring his own physical weakness; somehow, he looked like a martyr. Ellsworth did not say so; he said nothing further; but his mother said it. The minister was inclined to agree with her. Ellsworth was sent to his room without supper. He did not complain. He remained there meekly—refused the food his mother sneaked up to him, late at night, disobeying her husband. Mr. Toohey insisted on paying Mrs. Stokes for Johnny’s suit. Mrs. Toohey let him do it, sullenly; she did not like Mrs. Stokes.

Ellsworth’s father managed the Boston branch of a national chain of shoe stores. He earned a modest, comfortable salary and owned a modest, comfortable home in an undistinguished suburb of Boston. The secret sorrow of his life was that he did not head a business of his own. But he was a quiet, conscientious, unimaginative man, and an early marriage had ended all his ambition.

Ellsworth’s mother was a thin, restless woman who adopted and discarded five religions in nine years. She had delicate features, the kind that made her look beautiful for a few years of her life, at the one period of full flower, never before and never afterward. Ellsworth was her idol. His sister Helen, five years older, was a good-natured, unremarkable girl, not beautiful but pretty and healthy; she presented no problem. Ellsworth, however, had been born puny in health. His mother adored him from the moment the doctor pronounced him unfit to survive; it made her grow in spiritual stature—to know the extent of her own magnanimity in her love for so uninspiring an object; the bluer and uglier baby Ellsworth looked, the more passionate grew her love for him. She was almost disappointed when he survived without becoming an actual cripple. She took little interest in Helen; there was no martyrdom in loving Helen. The girl was so obviously more deserving of love that it seemed just to deny it to her.

Mr. Toohey, for reasons which he could not explain, was not too fond of his son. Ellsworth, however, was the ruler of the household, by a tacit, voluntary submission of both parents, though his father could never understand the cause of his own share in that submission.

In the evenings, under the lamp of the family sitting room, Mrs. Toohey would begin, in a tense, challenging voice, angry and defeated in advance: “Horace, I want a bicycle. A bicycle for Ellsworth. All the boys his age have them, Willie Lovett just got a new one the other day, Horace. Horace, I want a bicycle for Ellsworth.”

“Not right now, Mary,” Mr. Toohey would answer wearily. “Maybe next summer.... Just now we can’t afford ...”

Mrs. Toohey would argue, her voice rising in jerks toward a shriek.

“Mother, what for?” said Ellsworth, his voice soft, rich and clear, lower than the voices of his parents, yet cutting across them, commanding, strangely persuasive. “There’s many things we need more than a bicycle. What do you care about Willie Lovett? I don’t like Willie. Willie’s a dumbbell. Willie can afford it, because his pa’s got his own drygoods store. His pa’s a show-off. I don’t want a bicycle.”

Every word of this was true, and Ellsworth did not want a bicycle. But Mr. Toohey looked at him strangely, wondering what had made him say that. He saw his son’s eyes looking at him blankly from behind the small glasses; the eyes were not ostentatiously sweet, not reproachful, not malicious; just blank. Mr. Toohey felt that he should be grateful for his son’s understanding—and wished to hell the boy had not mentioned that part about the private store.

Ellsworth did not get the bicycle. But he got a polite attention in the house, a respectful solicitude—tender and guilty, from his mother, uneasy and suspicious from his father. Mr. Toohey would do anything rather than be forced into a conversation with Ellsworth—feeling, at the same time, foolish and angry at himself for his fear.

“Horace, I want a new suit. A new suit for Ellsworth. I saw one in a window today and I’ve ...”

“Mother, I’ve got four suits. What do I need another one for? I don’t want to look silly like Pat Noonan who changes them every day. That’s because his pa’s got his own ice-cream parlor. Pat’s stuck up like a girl about his clothes. I don’t want to be a sissy.”