“Howard…I brought something I wanted to show you.”
He walked back into the room and put the briefcase on the table.
“I haven’t shown it to anyone.” His fingers fumbled, opening the straps. “Not to Mother or Ellsworth Toohey…I just want you to tell me if there’s any…”
He handed to Roark six of his canvases.
Roark looked at them, one after another. He took a longer time than he needed. When he could trust himself to lift his eyes, he shook his head in silent answer to the word Keating had not pronounced.
“It’s too late, Peter,” he said gently.
Keating nodded. “Guess I…knew that.”
When Keating had gone, Roark leaned against the door, closing his eyes. He was sick with pity.
He had never felt this before–not when Henry Cameron collapsed in the office at his feet, not when he saw Steven Mallory sobbing on a bed before him. Those moments had been clean. But this was pity–this complete awareness of a man without worth or hope, this sense of finality, of the not to be redeemed. There was shame in this feeling–his own shame that he should have to pronounce such judgment upon a man, that he should know an emotion which contained no shred of respect.
This is pity, he thought, and then he lifted his head in wonder. He thought that there must be something terribly wrong with a world in which this monstrous feeling is called a virtue.
9.
THEY sat on the shore of the lake–Wynand slouched on a boulder–Roark stretched out on the ground–Dominique sitting straight, her body rising stiffly from the pale blue circle of her skirt on the grass.
The Wynand house stood on the hill above them. The earth spread out in terraced fields and rose gradually to make the elevation of the hill. The house was a shape of horizontal rectangles rising toward a slashing vertical projection; a group of diminishing setbacks, each a separate room, its size and form making the successive steps in a series of interlocking floor lines. It was as if from the wide living room on the first level a hand had moved slowly, shaping the next steps by a sustained touch, then had stopped, had continued in separate movements, each shorter, brusquer, and had ended, torn off, remaining somewhere in the sky. So that it seemed as if the slow rhythm of the rising fields had been picked up, stressed, accelerated and broken into the staccato chords of the finale.
“I like to look at it from here,” said Wynand. “I spent all day here yesterday, watching the light change on it. When you design a building, Howard, do you know exactly what the sun will do to it at any moment of the day from any angle? Do you control the sun?”
“Sure,” said Roark without raising his head. “Unfortunately, I can’t control it here. Move over, Gail. You’re in my way. I like the sun on my back.”
Wynand let himself flop down into the grass. Roark lay stretched on his stomach, his face buried on his arm, the orange hair on the white shirt sleeve, one hand extended before him, palm pressed to the ground. Dominique looked at the blades of grass between his fingers. The fingers moved once in a while, crushing the grass with lazy, sensuous pleasure.
The lake spread behind them, a flat sheet darkening at the edges, as if the distant trees were moving in to enclose it for the evening. The sun cut a glittering band across the water. Dominique looked up at the house and thought that she would like to stand there at a window and look down and see this one white figure stretched on a deserted shore, his hand on the ground, spent, emptied, at the foot of that hill.
She had lived in the house for a month. She had never thought she would. Then Roark had said: “The house will be ready for you in ten days, Mrs. Wynand,” and she had answered: “Yes, Mr. Roark.”
She accepted the house, the touch of the stair railings under her hand, the walls that enclosed the air she breathed. She accepted the light switches she pressed in the evening, and the light firm wires he had laid out through the walls; the water that ran when she turned a tap, from conduits he had planned; the warmth of an open fire on August evenings, before a fireplace built stone by stone from his drawing. She thought: Every moment…every need of my existence…She thought: Why not? It’s the same with my body–lungs, blood vessels, nerves, brain–under the same control. She felt one with the house.
She accepted the nights when she lay in Wynand’s arms and opened her eyes to see the shape of the bedroom Roark had designed, and she set her teeth against a racking pleasure that was part answer, part mockery of the unsatisfied hunger in her body, and surrendered to it, not knowing what man gave her this, which one of them, or both.
Wynand watched her as she walked across a room, as she descended the stairs, as she stood at a window. She had heard him saying to her: “I didn’t know a house could be designed for a woman, like a dress. You can’t see yourself here as I do, you can’t see how completely this house is yours. Every angle, every part of every room is a setting for you. It’s scaled to your height, to your body. Even the texture of the walls goes with the texture of your skin in an odd way. It’s the Stoddard Temple, but built for a single person, and it’s mine. This is what I wanted. The city can’t touch you here. I’ve always felt that the city would take you away from me. It gave me everything I have. I don’t know why I feel at times that it will demand payment some day. But here you’re safe and you’re mine.” She wanted to cry: Gail, I belong to him here as I’ve never belonged to him.
Roark was the only guest Wynand allowed in their new home. She accepted Roark’s visits to them on week ends. That was the hardest to accept. She knew he did not come to torture her, but simply because Wynand asked him and he liked being with Wynand. She remembered saying to him in the evening, her hand on the stair railing, on the steps of the stairs leading up to her bedroom: “Come down to breakfast whenever you wish, Mr. Roark. Just press the button in the dining room.”
“Thank you. Mrs. Wynand. Good night.”
Once, she saw him alone, for a moment. It was early morning; she had not slept all night, thinking of him in a room across the hall; she had come out before the house was awake. She walked down the hill and she found relief in the unnatural stillness of the earth around her, the stillness of full light without sun, of leaves without motion, of a luminous, waiting silence. She heard steps behind her, she stopped, she leaned against a tree trunk. He had a bathing suit thrown over his shoulder, he was going down to swim in the lake. He stopped before her, and they stood still with the rest of the earth, looking at each other. He said nothing, turned, and went on. She remained leaning against the tree, and after a while she walked back to the house.
Now, sitting by the lake, she heard Wynand saying to him:
“You look like the laziest creature in the world, Howard.”
“I am.”
“I’ve never seen anyone relax like that.”
“Try staying awake for three nights in succession.”
“I told you to get here yesterday.”
“Couldn’t.”
“Are you going to pass out right here?”
“I’d like to. This is wonderful.” He lifted his head, his eyes laughing, as if he had not seen the building on the hill, as if he were not speaking of it. “This is the way I’d like to die, stretched out on some shore like this, just close my eyes and never come back.”
She thought: He thinks what I’m thinking–we still have that together–Gail wouldn’t understand–not he and Gail, for this once–he and I.
Wynand said: “You damn fool. This is not like you, not even as a joke. You’re killing yourself over something. What?”
“Ventilator shafts, at the moment. Very stubborn ventilator shafts.”
“For whom?”
“Clients….I have all sorts of clients right now.”
“Do you have to work nights?”
“Yes–for these particular people. Very special work. Can’t even bring it into the office.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Nothing. Don’t pay any attention. I’m half asleep.”
She thought: This is the tribute to Gail, the confidence of surrender–he relaxes like a cat–and cats don’t relax except with people they like.
“I’ll kick you upstairs after dinner and lock the door,” said Wynand, “and leave you there to sleep twelve hours.”