“Doesn’t he remind you of Dwight Carson?”
“Oh, forget Dwight Carson!”
Wynand’s voice, refusing earnestness, refusing guilt, had sounded exactly like the voice that had said: “Forget the Stoddard Temple.”
The secretary in the reception room looked, startled, at the patrician gentleman whose face she had seen so often in the papers.
“Gail Wynand,” he said, inclining his head in self-introduction. “I should like to see Mr. Roark. If he is not busy. Please do not disturb him if he is. I had no appointment.”
She had never expected Wynand to come to an office unannounced and to ask admittance in that tone of grave deference.
She announced the visitor. Roark came out into the reception room, smiling, as if he found nothing unusual in this call.
“Hello, Gail. Come in.”
“Hello, Howard.”
He followed Roark to the office. Beyond the broad windows the darkness of late afternoon dissolved the city; it was snowing; black specks whirled furiously across the lights.
“I don’t want to interrupt if you’re busy, Howard. This is not important.” He had not seen Roark for five days, since the dinner.
“I’m not busy. Take your coat off. Shall I have the drawings
brought in?”
“No. I don’t want to talk about the house. Actually, I came without any reason at all. I was down at my office all day, got slightly sick of it, and felt like coming here. What are you grinning about?”
“Nothing. Only you said that it wasn’t important.”
Wynand looked at him, smiled and nodded.
He sat down on the edge of Roark’s desk, with an ease which he had never felt in his own office, his hands in his pockets, one leg swinging.
“It’s almost useless to talk to you, Howard. I always feel as if I were reading to you a carbon copy of myself and you’ve already seen the original. You seem to hear everything I say a minute in advance. We’re unsynchronized.”
“You call that unsynchronized?”
“All right. Too well synchronized.” His eyes were moving slowly over the room. “If we own the things to which we say ‘Yes,’ then I own this office?”
“Then you own it.”
“You know what I feel here? No, I won’t say I feel at home–I don’t think I’ve ever felt at home anywhere. And I won’t say I feel as I did in the palaces I’ve visited or in the great European cathedrals. I feel as I did when I was still in Hell’s Kitchen–in the best days I had there–there weren’t many. But sometimes–when I sat like this–only it was some piece of broken wall by the wharf–and there were a lot of stars above and dump heaps around me and the river smelt of rotting shells….Howard, when you look back, does it seem to you as if all your days had rolled forward evenly, like a sort of typing exercise, all alike? Or were there stops-points reached–and then the typing rolled on again?”
“There were stops.”
“Did you know them at the time–did you know that that’s what they were?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t. I knew afterward. But I never knew the reasons. There was one moment–I was twelve and I stood behind a wall, waiting to be killed. Only I knew I wouldn’t be killed. Not what I did afterward, not the fight I had, but just that one moment when I waited. I don’t know why that was a stop to be remembered or why I feel proud of it. I don’t know why I have to think of it here.”
“Don’t look for the reason.”
“Do you know it?”
“I said don’t look for it.”
“I have been thinking about my past–ever since I met you. And I had gone for years without thinking of it. No, no secret conclusions for you to draw from that. It doesn’t hurt me to look back this way, and it doesn’t give me pleasure. It’s just looking. Not a quest, not even a journey. Just a kind of walk at random, like wandering through the countryside in the evening, when one’s a little tired….If there’s any connection to you at all, it’s only one thought that keeps coming back to me. I keep thinking that you and I started in the same way. From the same point. From nothing. I just think that. Without any comment. I don’t seem to find any particular meaning in it at all. Just ‘we started in the same way’…Want to tell me what it means?”
“No.”
Wynand glanced about the room–and noticed a newspaper on top of a filing cabinet.
“Who the hell reads the Banner around here?”
“I do.”
“Since when?”
“Since about a month ago.”
“Sadism?”
“No. Just curiosity.”
Wynand rose, picked up the paper and glanced through the pages. He stopped at one and chuckled. He held it up: the page that bore photographed drawings of the buildings for “The March of the Centuries” exposition.
“Awful, isn’t it?” said Wynand. “It’s disgusting that we have to plug that stuff. But I feel better about it when I think of what you did to those eminent civic leaders.” He chuckled happily. “You told them you don’t co-operate or collaborate.”
“But it wasn’t a gesture, Gail. It was plain common sense. One can’t collaborate on one’s own job. I can co-operate, if that’s what they call it, with the workers who erect my buildings. But I can’t help them to lay bricks and they can’t help me to design the house.”
“It was the kind of gesture I’d like to make. I’m forced to give those civic leaders free space in my papers. But it’s all right. You’ve slapped their faces for me.” He tossed the paper aside, without anger. “It’s like that luncheon I had to attend today. A national convention of advertisers. I must give them publicity–all wiggling, wriggling and drooling. I got so sick of it I thought I’d run amuck and bash somebody’s skull. And then I thought of you. I thought that you weren’t touched by any of it. Not in any way. The national convention of advertisers doesn’t exist as far as you’re concerned. It’s in some sort of fourth dimension that can never establish any communication with you at all. I thought of that–and I felt a peculiar kind of relief.”
He leaned against the filing cabinet, letting his feet slide forward, his arms crossed, and he spoke softly:
“Howard I had a kitten once. The damn thing attached itself to me–a flea-bitten little beast from the gutter, just fur, mud and bones–followed me home, I fed it and kicked it out, but the next day there it was again, and finally I kept it. I was seventeen then, working for the Gazette, just learning to work in the special way I had to learn for life. I could take it all right, but not all of it. There were times when it was pretty bad. Evenings, usually. Once I wanted to kill myself. Not anger–anger made me work harder. Not fear. But disgust, Howard. The kind of disgust that made it seem as if the whole world were under water and the water stood still, water that had backed up out of the sewers and ate into everything, even the sky, even my brain. And then I looked at that kitten. And I thought that it didn’t know the things I loathed, it could never know. It was clean–clean in the absolute sense, because it had no capacity to conceive of the world’s ugliness. I can’t tell you what relief there was in trying to imagine the state of consciousness inside that little brain, trying to share it, a living consciousness, but clean and free. I would lie down on the floor and put my face on that cat’s belly, and hear the beast purring. And then I would feel better….There, Howard. I’ve called your office a rotting wharf and yourself an alley cat. That’s my way of paying homage.”
Roark smiled. Wynand saw that the smile was grateful. “Keep still,” Wynand said sharply. “Don’t say anything.” He walked to a window and stood looking out. “I don’t know why in hell I should speak like that. These are the first happy years of my life. I met you because I wanted to build a monument to my happiness. I come here to find rest, and I find it, and yet these are the things I talk about….Well, never mind….Look, at the filthy weather. Are you through with your work here? Can you call it a day?”
“Yes. Just about.”
“Let’s go and have dinner together somewhere close by.”
“All right.”
“May I use your phone? I’ll tell Dominique not to expect me for dinner.”
He dialed the number. Roark moved to the door of the drafting room–he had orders to give before leaving. But he stopped at the door. He had to stop and hear it.
“Hello, Dominique?…Yes….Tired?…No, you just sounded like it….I won’t be home for dinner, will you excuse me, dearest?…I don’t know, it might be late….I’m eating downtown….No. I’m having dinner with Howard Roark….Hello, Dominique?…Yes….What?…I’m calling from his office….So long, dear.” He replaced the receiver.