They lay in bed together that night, and they did not know when they slept, the intervals of exhausted unconsciousness as intense an act of union as the convulsed meetings of their bodies.
In the morning, when they were dressed, she watched him move about the room. She saw the drained relaxation of his movements; she thought of what she had taken from him, and the heaviness of her wrists told her that her own strength was now in his nerves, as if they had exchanged their energy.
He was at the other end of the room, his back turned to her for a moment, when she said, “Roark,” her voice quiet and low.
He turned to her, as if he had expected it and, perhaps, guessed the rest.
She stood in the middle of the floor, as she had stood on her first night in this room, solemnly composed to the performance of a rite.
“I love you, Roark.”
She had said it for the first time.
She saw the reflection of her next words on his face before she had pronounced them.
“I was married yesterday. To Peter Keating.”
It would have been easy, if she had seen a man distorting his mouth to bite off sound, closing his fists and twisting them in defense against himself. But it was not easy, because she did not see him doing this, yet knew that this was being done, without the relief of a physical gesture.
“Roark…” she whispered, gently, frightened.
He said: “I’m all right.” Then he said: “Please wait a moment…All right. Go on.”
“Roark, before I met you, I had always been afraid of seeing someone like you, because I knew that I’d also have to see what I saw on the witness stand and I’d have to do what I did in that courtroom. I hated doing it, because it was an insult to you to defend you–and it was an insult to myself that you had to be defended….Roark, I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the halfway, the almost, the just-about, the in-between. They may have their justifications. I don’t know. I don’t care to inquire. I know that it is the one thing not given me to understand. When I think of what you are, I can’t accept any reality except a world of your kind. Or at least a world in which you have a fighting chance and a fight on your own terms. That does not exist. And I can’t live a life torn between that which exists–and you. It would mean to struggle against things and men who don’t deserve to be your opponents. Your fight, using their methods–and that’s too horrible a desecration. It would mean doing for you what I did for Peter Keating: lie, flatter, evade, compromise, pander to every ineptitude–in order to beg of them a chance for you, beg them to let you live, to let you function, to beg them, Roark, not to laugh at them, but to tremble because they hold the power to hurt you. Am I too weak because I can’t do this? I don’t know which is the greater strength: to accept all this for you–or to love you so much that the rest is beyond acceptance. I don’t know. I love you too much.”
He looked at her, waiting. She knew that he had understood this long ago, but that it had to be said.
“You’re not aware of them. I am. I can’t help it, I love you. The contrast is too great. Roark, you won’t win, they’ll destroy you, but I won’t be there to see it happen. I will have destroyed myself first. That’s the only gesture of protest open to me. What else could I offer you? The things people sacrifice are so little. I’ll give you my marriage to Peter Keating. I’ll refuse to permit myself happiness in their world. I’ll take suffering. That will be my answer to them, and my gift to you. I shall probably never see you again. I shall try not to. But I will live for you, through every minute and every shameful act I take, I will live for you in my own way, in the only way I can.”
He made a movement to speak, and she said:
“Wait. Let me finish. You could ask, why not kill myself then. Because I love you. Because you exist. That alone is so much that it won’t allow me to die. And since I must be alive in order to know that you are, I will live in the world as it is, in the manner of life it demands. Not halfway, but completely. Not pleading and running from it, but walking out to meet it, beating it to the pain and the ugliness, being first to choose the worst it can do to me. Not as the wife of some half-decent human being, but as the wife of Peter Keating. And only within my own mind, only where nothing can touch it, kept sacred by the protecting wall of my own degradation, there will be the thought of you and the knowledge of you, and I shall say ‘Howard Roark to myself once in a while, and I shall feel that I have deserved to say it.” She stood before him, her face raised; her lips were not drawn, but closed softly, yet the shape of her mouth was too definite on her face, a shape of pain and tenderness, and resignation.
In his face she saw suffering that was made old, as if it had been part of him for a long time, because it was accepted, and it looked not like a wound, but like a scar.
“Dominique, if I told you now to have that marriage annulled at once–to forget the world and my struggle–to feel no anger, no concern, no hope–just to exist for me, for my need of you–as my wife–as my property…?”
He saw in her face what she had seen in his when she told him of her marriage; but he was not frightened and he watched it calmly. After a while, she answered and the words did not come from her lips, but as if her lips were forced to gather the sounds from the outside: “I’d obey you.”
“Now you see why I won’t do it. I won’t try to stop you. I love you, Dominique.” She closed her eyes, and he said:
“You’d rather not hear it now? But I want you to hear it. We never need to say anything to each other when we’re together. This is–for the time when we won’t be together. I love you, Dominique. As selfishly as the fact that I exist. As selfishly as my lungs breathe air. I breathe for my own necessity, for the fuel of my body, for my survival. I’ve given you, not my sacrifice or my pity, but my ego and my naked need. This is the only way you can wish to be loved. This is the only way I can want you to love me. If you married me now, I would become your whole existence. But I would not want you then. You would not want yourself–and so you would not love me long. To say ‘I love you’ one must know first how to say the ‘I.’ The kind of surrender I could have from you now would give me nothing but an empty hulk. If I demanded it, I’d destroy you. That’s why I won’t stop you. I’ll let you go to your husband. I don’t know how I’ll live through tonight, but I will. I want you whole, as I am, as you’ll remain in the battle you’ve chosen. A battle is never selfless.”
She heard, in the measured tension of his words, that it was harder for him to speak them than for her to listen. So she listened.
“You must learn not to be afraid of the world. Not to be held by it as you are now. Never to be hurt by it as you were in that courtroom. I must let you learn it. I can’t help you. You must find your own way. When you have, you’ll come back to me. They won’t destroy me, Dominique. And they won’t destroy you. You’ll win, because you’ve chosen the hardest way of fighting for your freedom from the world. I’ll wait for you. I love you. I’m saying this now for all the years we’ll have to wait. I love you, Dominique.”
Then he kissed her and let her go.
15.
AT NINE O’CLOCK that morning Peter Keating was pacing the floor of his room, his door locked. He forgot that it was nine o’clock and that Catherine was waiting for him. He had made himself forget her and everything she implied.
The door of his room was locked to protect him from his mother. Last night, seeing his furious restlessness, she had forced him to tell her the truth. He had snapped that he was married to Dominique Francon, and he had added some sort of explanation about Dominique going out of town to announce the marriage to some old relative. His mother had been so busy with gasps of delight and questions, that he had been able to ‘answer nothing and to hide his panic; he was not certain that he had a wife and that she would come back to him in the morning.