She accepted Roark’s visits to their house and the knowledge that in the hours of these evenings he was Wynand’s property, not hers. She met him as a gracious hostess, indifferent and smiling, not a person but an exquisite fixture of Wynand’s home, she presided at the dinner table, she left them in the study afterward.
She sat alone in the drawing room, with the lights turned off and the door open; she sat erect and quiet, her eyes on the slit of light under the door of the study across the hall. She thought: This is my task, even when alone, even in the darkness, within no knowledge but my own, to look at that door as I looked at him here, without complaint….Roark, if it’s the punishment you chose for me, I’ll carry it completely, not as a part to play in your presence, but as a duty to perform alone–you know that violence is not hard for me to bear, only patience is, you chose the hardest, and I must perform it and offer it to you…my…dearest one…
When Roark looked at her, there was no denial of memory in his eyes. The glance said simply that nothing had changed and nothing was needed to state it. She felt as if she heard him saying: Why are you shocked? Have we ever been parted? Your drawing room, your husband and the city you dread beyond the windows, are they real now, Dominique? Do you understand? Are you beginning to understand? “Yes,” she would say suddenly, aloud, trusting that the word would fit the conversation of the moment, knowing that Roark would hear it as his answer.
It was not a punishment he had chosen for her. It was a discipline imposed on both of them, the last test. She understood his purpose when she found that she could feel her love for him proved by the room, by Wynand, even by his love for Wynand and hers, by the impossible situation, by her enforced silence–the barriers proving to her that no barriers could exist.
She did not see him alone. She waited.
She would not visit the site of construction. She had said to Wynand: “I’ll see the house when it’s finished.” She never questioned him about Roark. She let her hands lie in sight on the arms of her chair, so that the relief of any violent motion would be denied her, her hands as her private barometer of endurance, when Wynand came home late at night and told her that he had spent the evening at Roark’s apartment, the apartment she had never seen.
Once she broke enough to ask:
“What is this, Gail? An obsession?”
“I suppose so.” He added: “It’s strange that you don’t like him.”
“I haven’t said that.”
“I can see it. I’m not really surprised. It’s your way. You would dislike him–precisely because he’s the type of man you should like….Don’t resent my obsession.”
“I don’t resent it.”
“Dominique, would you understand it if I told you that I love you more since I’ve met him? Even–I want to say this–even when you lie in my arms, it’s more than it was. I feel a greater right to you.”
He spoke with the simple confidence they had given each other in the last three years. She sat looking at him as she always did; her glance had tenderness without scorn and sadness without pity.
“I understand, Gail.”
After a moment she asked:
“What is he to you, Gail? In the nature of a shrine?”
“In the nature of a hair shirt,” said Wynand.
When she had gone upstairs, he walked to a window and stood looking up at the sky. His head thrown back, he felt the pull of his throat muscles and he wondered whether the peculiar solemnity of looking at the sky comes, not from what one contemplates, but from that uplift of one’s head.
6.
“THE BASIC trouble with the modern world,” said Ellsworth Toohey, “is the intellectual fallacy that freedom and compulsion are opposites. To solve the gigantic problems crushing the world today, we must clarify our mental confusion. We must acquire a philosophical perspective. In essence, freedom and compulsion are one. Let me give you a simple illustration. Traffic lights restrain your freedom to cross a street whenever you wish. But this restraint gives you the freedom from being run over by a truck. If you were assigned to a job and prohibited from leaving it, it would restrain the freedom of your career. But it would give you freedom from the fear of unemployment. Whenever a new compulsion is imposed upon us, we automatically gain a new freedom. The two are inseparable. Only by accepting total compulsion can we achieve total freedom.”
“That’s right!” shrieked Mitchell Layton.
It was an actual shriek, thin and high. It had come with the startling suddenness of a fire siren. His guests looked at Mitchell Layton.
He sat in a tapestry armchair of his drawing room, half lying, legs and stomach forward, like an obnoxious child flaunting his bad posture. Everything about the person of Mitchell Layton was almost and not quite, just short of succeeding: his body had started out to be tall, but changed its mind, leaving him with a long torso above short, stocky legs; his face had delicate bones, but the flesh had played a joke on them, puffing out, not enough to achieve obesity, just enough to suggest permanent mumps. Mitchell Layton pouted. It was not a temporary expression nor a matter of facial arrangement. It was a chronic attribute, pervading his entire person. He pouted with his whole body.
Mitchell Layton had inherited a quarter of a billion dollars and had spent the thirty-three years of his life trying to make amends for it.
Ellsworth Toohey, in dinner clothes, stood lounging against a cabinet. His nonchalance had an air of gracious informality and a touch of impertinence, as if the people around him did not deserve the preservation of rigid good manners.
His eyes moved about the room. The room was not exactly modern, not quite Colonial and just a little short of French Empire; the furnishings presented straight planes and swan-neck supports, black mirrors and electric hurricane lamps, chromium and tapestry; there was unity in a single attribute: in the expensiveness of everything.
“That’s right,” said Mitchell Layton belligerently, as if he expected everyone to disagree and was insulting them in advance. “People make too damn much fuss about freedom. What I mean is it’s a vague, overabused word. I’m not even sure it’s such a God-damn blessing. I think people would be much happier in a regulated society that had a definite pattern and a unified form–like a folk dance. You know how beautiful a folk dance is. And rhythmic too. That’s because it took generations to work it out and they don’t let just any chance fool come along to change it. That’s what we need. Pattern, I mean, and rhythm. Also beauty.”
“That’s an apt comparison, Mitch,” said Ellsworth Toohey. “I’ve always told you that you had a creative mind.”
“What I mean is, what makes people unhappy is not too little choice, but too much,” said Mitchell Layton. “Having to decide, always to decide, torn every which way all of the time. Now in a society of pattern, a man could feel safe. Nobody would come to him all the time pestering him to do something. Nobody would have to do anything. What I mean is, of course, except working for the common good.”
“It’s spiritual values that count,” said Homer Slottern. “Got to be up to date and keep up with the world. This is a spiritual century.”
Homer Slottern had a big face with drowsy eyes. His shirt studs were made of rubies and emeralds combined, like gobs of salad dripping down his starched white shirt front. He owned three department stores.
“There ought to be a law to make everybody study the mystical secrets of the ages,” said Mitchell Layton. “It’s all been written out in the pyramids in Egypt.”
“That’s true, Mitch,” Homer Slottern agreed. “There’s a lot to be said for mysticism. On the one hand. On the other hand, dialectic materialism…”
“It’s not a contradiction,” Mitchell Layton drawled contemptuously. “The world of the future will combine both.”
“As a matter of fact,” said Ellsworth Toohey, “the two are superficially varied manifestations of the same thing. Of the same intention.” His eyeglasses gave a spark, as if lighted from within; he seemed to relish his particular statement in his own way.
“All I know is, unselfishness is the only moral principle,” said Jessica Pratt, “the noblest principle and a sacred duty and much more important than freedom. Unselfishness is the only way to happiness. I would have everybody who refused to be unselfish shot. To put them out of their misery. They can’t be happy anyway.
Jessica Pratt spoke wistfully. She had a gentle, aging face; her powdery skin, innocent of make-up, gave the impression that a finger touching it would be left with a spot of white dust.