“What do you want me to work on, Howard?”
“I want you to work without asking anyone what he wants you to work on.”
Austen Heller heard about it from Mallory, and spoke of it to Roark in private.
“If you’re helping him, why don’t you let me help you?”
“I’d let you if you could,” said Roark. “But you can’t. All he needs is his time. He can work without clients. I can’t.”
“It’s amusing, Howard, to see you in the role of an altruist.”
“You don’t have to insult me. It’s not altruism. But I’ll tell you this: most people say they’re concerned with the suffering of others. I’m not. And yet there’s one thing I can’t understand. Most of them would not pass by if they saw a man bleeding in the road, mangled by a hit-and-run driver. And most of them would not turn their heads to look at Steven Mallory. But don’t they know that if suffering could be measured, there’s no suffering in Steven Mallory when he can’t do the work he wants to do, than in a whole field of victims mowed down by a tank? If one must relieve the pain of this world, isn’t Mallory the place to begin?…However, that’s not why I’m doing it.”
Roark had never seen the reconstructed Stoddard Temple. On an evening in November he went to see it. He did not know whether it was surrender to pain or victory over the fear of seeing it.
It was late and the garden of the Stoddard Home was deserted. The building was dark, a single light showed in a back window upstairs. Roark stood looking at the building for a long time.
The door under the Greek portico opened and a slight masculine figure came out. It hurried casually down the steps–and then stopped.
“Hello, Mr. Roark,” said Ellsworth Toohey quietly.
Roark looked at him without curiosity. “Hello,” said Roark.
“Please don’t run away.” The voice was not mocking, but earnest.
“I wasn’t going to.”
“I think I knew that you’d come here some day and I think I wanted to be here when you came. I’ve kept inventing excuses for myself to hang about this place.” There was no gloating in the voice; it sounded drained and simple.
“Well?”
“You shouldn’t mind speaking to me. You see, I understand your work. What I do about it is another matter.”
“You are free to do what you wish about it.”
“I understand your work better than any living person–with the possible exception of Dominique Francon. And, perhaps, better than she does. That’s a deal, isn’t it, Mr. Roark? You haven’t many people around you who can say that. It’s a greater bond than if I were your devoted, but blind supporter.”
“I knew you understood.”
“Then you won’t mind talking to me.”
“About what?”
In the darkness it sounded almost as if Toohey had sighed. After a while he pointed to the building and asked:
“Do you understand this?”
Roark did not answer.
Toohey went on softly: “What does it look like to you? Like a senseless mess? Like a chance collection of driftwood? Like an imbecile chaos? But is it, Mr. Roark? Do you see no method? You who know the language of structure and the meaning of form. Do you see no purpose here?”
“I see none in discussing it.”
“Mr. Roark, we’re alone here. Why don’t you tell me what you think of me? In any words you wish. No one will hear us.”
“But I don’t think of you.”
Toohey’s face had an expression of attentiveness, of listening quietly to something as simple as fate. He remained silent, and Roark asked:
“What did you want to say to me?”
Toohey looked at him, and then at the bare trees around them, at the river far below, at the great rise of the sky beyond the river.
“Nothing,” said Toohey.
He walked away, his steps creaking on the gravel in the silence, sharp and even, like the cracks of an engine’s pistons.
Roark stood alone in the empty driveway, looking at the building.
Part Three: GAIL WYNAND
1.
GAIL WYNAND raised a gun to his temple.
He felt the pressure of a metal ring against his skin–and nothing else. He might have been holding a lead pipe or a piece of jewelry; it was just a small circle without significance. “I am going to die,” he said aloud–and yawned.
He felt no relief, no despair, no fear. The moment of his end would not grant him even the dignity of seriousness. It was an anonymous moment; a few minutes ago, he had held a toothbrush in that hand; now he held a gun with the same casual indifference.
One does not die like this, he thought. One must feel a great joy or a healthy terror. One must salute one’s own end. Let me feel a spasm of dread and I’ll pull the trigger. He felt nothing.
He shrugged and lowered the gun. He stood tapping it against the palm of his left hand. People always speak of a black death or a red death, he thought; yours, Gail Wynand, will be a gray death. Why hasn’t anyone ever said that this is the ultimate horror? Not screams, pleas or convulsions. Not the indifference of a clean emptiness, disinfected by the fire of some great disaster. But this–a mean, smutty little horror, impotent even to frighten. You can’t do it like that, he told himself, smiling coldly; it would be in such bad taste.
He walked to the wall of his bedroom. His penthouse was built above the fifty-seventh floor of a great residential hotel which he owned, in the center of Manhattan; he could see the whole city below him. The bedroom was a glass cage on the roof of the penthouse, its walls and ceiling made of huge glass sheets. There were dust-blue suede curtains to be pulled across the walls and enclose the room when he wished; there was nothing to cover the ceiling. Lying in bed, he could study the stars over his head, or see flashes of lightning, or watch the rain smashed into furious, glittering sunbursts in mid-air above him, against the unseen protection. He liked to extinguish the lights and pull all the curtains open when he lay in bed with a woman. “We are fornicating in the sight of six million people,” he would tell her.
He was alone now. The curtains were open. He stood looking at the city. It was late and the great riot of lights below him was beginning to die down. He thought that he did not mind having to look at the city for many more years and he did not mind never seeing it again.
He leaned against the wall and felt the cold glass through the thin, dark silk of his pyjamas. A monogram was embroidered in white on his breast pocket: GW, reproduced from his handwriting, exactly as he signed his initials with a single imperial motion.
People said that Gail Wynand’s greatest deception, among many, was his appearance. He looked like the decadent, overperfected end product of a long line of exquisite breeding–and everybody knew that he came from the gutter. He was tall, too slender for physical beauty, as if all his flesh and muscle had been bred away. It was not necessary for him to stand erect in order to convey an impression of hardness. Like a piece of expensive steel, he bent, slouched and made people conscious, not of his pose, but of the ferocious spring that could snap him straight at any moment. This hint was all he needed; he seldom stood quite straight; he lounged about. Under any clothes he wore, it gave him an air of consummate elegance.
His face did not belong to modern civilization, but to ancient Rome; the face of an eternal patrician. His hair, streaked with gray, was swept smoothly back from a high forehead. His skin was pulled tight over the sharp bones of his face; his mouth was long and thin; his eyes, under slanting eyebrows, were pale blue and photographed like two sardonic white ovals. An artist had asked him once to sit for a painting of Mephistopheles; Wynand had laughed, refusing, and the artist had watched sadly, because the laughter made the face perfect for his purpose.
He slouched casually against the glass pane of his bedroom, the weight of a gun on his palm. Today, he thought; what was today? Did anything happen that would help me now and give meaning to this moment?
Today had been like so many other days behind him that particular features were hard to recognize. He was fifty-one years old, and it was the middle of October in the year 1932; he was certain of this much; the rest took an effort of memory.
He had awakened and dressed at six o’clock this morning; he had never slept more than four hours on any night of his adult life. He descended to his dining room where breakfast was served to him. His penthouse, a small structure, stood on the edge of a vast roof landscaped as a garden. The rooms were a superlative artistic achievement; their simplicity and beauty would have aroused gasps of admiration had this house belonged to anyone else; but people were shocked into silence when they thought that this was the home of the publisher of the New York Banner, the most vulgar newspaper in the country.