“All right.”
“Want to get up early? Let’s go for a swim before sunrise.”
“Mr. Roark is tired, Gail,” said Dominique, her voice sharp.
Roark raised himself on an elbow to look at her. She saw his eyes, direct, understanding.
“You’re acquiring the bad habits of all commuters, Gail,” she said, “imposing your country hours on guests from the city who are not used to them.” She thought: Let it be mine–that one moment when you were walking to the lake–don’t let Gail take that also, like everything else. “You can’t order Mr. Roark around as if he were an employee of the Banner.”
“I don’t know anyone on earth I’d rather order around than Mr. Roark,” said Wynand gaily, “whenever I can get away with it.”
“You’re getting away with it.”
“I don’t mind taking orders, Mrs. Wynand,” said Roark. “Not from a man as capable as Gail.”
Let me win this time, she thought, please let me win this time–it means nothing to you–it’s senseless and it means nothing at all–but refuse him, refuse him for the sake of the memory of a moment’s pause that had not belonged to him.
“I think you should rest, Mr. Roark. You should sleep late tomorrow. I’ll tell the servants not to disturb you.”
“Why, no, thanks, I’ll be all right in a few hours, Mrs. Wynand. I like to swim before breakfast. Knock at the door when you’re ready, Gail, and we’ll go down together.”
She looked over the spread of lake and hills, with not a sign of men, not another house anywhere, just water, trees and sun, a world of their own, and she thought he was right–they belonged together–the three of them.
The drawings of Cortlandt Homes presented six buildings, fifteen stories high, each made in the shape of an irregular star with arms extending from a central shaft. The shafts contained elevators, stairways, heating systems and all the utilities. The apartments radiated from the center in the form of extended triangles. The space between the arms allowed light and air from three sides. The ceilings were pre-cast; the inner walls were of plastic tile that required no painting or plastering; all pipes and wires were laid out in metal ducts at the edge of the floors, to be opened and replaced, when necessary, without costly demolition; the kitchens and bathrooms were prefabricated as complete units; the inner partitions were of light metal that could be folded into the walls to provide one large room or pulled out to divide it; there were few halls or lobbies to clean, a minimum of cost and labor required for the maintenance of the place. The entire plan was a composition in triangles. The buildings, of poured concrete, were a complex modeling of simple structural features; there was no ornament; none was needed; the shapes had the beauty of sculpture.
Ellsworth Toohey did not look at the plans which Keating had spread out on his desk. He stared at the perspective drawings. He stared, his mouth open.
Then he threw his head back and howled with laughter.
“Peter,” he said, “you’re a genius.”
He added: “I think you know exactly what I mean.” Keating looked at him blankly, without curiosity. “You’ve succeeded in what I’ve spent a lifetime trying to achieve, in what centuries of men and bloody battles behind us have tried to achieve. I take my hat off to you, Peter, in awe and admiration.”
“Look at the plans,” said Keating listlessly. “It will rent for ten dollars a unit.”
“I haven’t the slightest doubt that it will. I don’t have to look. Oh yes, Peter, this will go through. Don’t worry. This will be accepted. My congratulations, Peter.”
“You God-damn fool!” said Gail Wynand. “What are you up to?”
He threw to Roark a copy of the Banner, folded at an inside page. The page bore a photograph captioned: “Architects’ drawing of Cortlandt Homes, the $15,000,000 Federal Housing Project to be built in Astoria, L. I., Keating & Dumont, architects.”
Roark glanced at the photograph and asked: “What do you mean?”
“You know damn well what I mean. Do you think I picked the things in my art gallery by their signatures? If Peter Keating designed this, I’ll eat every copy of today’s Banner.”
“Peter Keating designed this, Gail.”
“You fool. What are you after?”
“If I don’t want to understand what you’re talking about, I won’t understand it, no matter what you say.”
“Oh, you might, if I run a story to the effect that a certain housing project was designed by Howard Roark, which would make a swell exclusive story and a joke on one Mr. Toohey who’s the boy behind the boys on most of those damn projects.”
“You publish that and I’ll sue hell out of you.”
“You really would?”
“I would. Drop it, Gail. Don’t you see I don’t want to discuss it?”
Later, Wynand showed the picture to Dominique and asked:
“Who designed this?”
She looked at it. “Of course,” was all she answered.
“What kind of ‘changing world,’ Alvah? Changing to what? From what? Who’s doing the changing?”
Parts of Alvah Scarret’s face looked anxious, but most of it was impatient, as he glanced at the proofs of his editorial on “Motherhood in a Changing World,” which lay on Wynand’s desk.
“What the hell, Gail,” he muttered indifferently.
“That’s what I want to know–what the hell?” He picked up the proof and read aloud: “‘The world we have known is gone and done for and it’s no use kidding ourselves about it. We cannot go back, we must go forward. The mothers of today must set the example by broadening their own emotional view and raising their selfish love for their own children to a higher plane, to include everybody’s little children. Mothers must love every kid in their block, in their street, in their city, county, state, nation and the whole wide, wide world–just exactly as much as their own little Mary or Johnny.'” Wynand wrinkled his nose fastidiously. “Alvah?…It’s all right to dish out crap. But–this kind of crap?”
Alvah Scarret would not look at him.
“You’re out of step with the times, Gail,” he said. His voice was low; it had a tone of warning–as of something baring its teeth, tentatively, just for future reference.
This was so odd a behavior for Alvah Scarret that Wynand lost all desire to pursue the conversation. He drew a line across the editorial, but the blue pencil stroke seemed tired and ended in a blur. He said: “Go and bat out something else, Alvah.”
Scarret rose, picked up the strip of paper, turned and left the room without a word.
Wynand looked after him, puzzled, amused and slightly sick.
He had known for several years the trend which his paper had embraced gradually, imperceptibly, without any directive from him. He had noticed the cautious “slanting” of news stories, the half-hints, the vague allusions, the peculiar adjectives peculiarly placed, the stressing of certain themes, the insertion of political conclusions where none was needed. If a story concerned a dispute between employer and employee, the employer was made to appear guilty, simply through wording, no matter what the facts presented. If a sentence referred to the past, it was always “our dark past” or “our dead past.” If a statement involved someone’s personal motive, it was always “goaded by selfishness” or “egged by greed.” A crossword puzzle gave the definition of “obsolescent individuals” and the word came out as “capitalists.”
Wynand had shrugged about it, contemptuously amused. His staff, he thought, was well trained: if this was the popular slang of the day, his boys assumed it automatically. It meant nothing at all. He kept it off the editorial page and the rest did not matter. It was no more than a fashion of the moment–and he had survived many changing fashions.
He felt no concern over the “We Don’t Read Wynand” campaign. He obtained one of their men’s-room stickers, pasted it on the windshield of his own Lincoln, added the words: “We don’t either,” and kept it there long enough to be discovered and snapped by a photographer from a neutral paper. In the course of his career he had been fought, damned, denounced by the greatest publishers of his time, by the shrewdest coalitions of financial power. He could not summon any apprehension over the activities of somebody named Gus Webb.
He knew that the Banner was losing some of its popularity. “A temporary fad,” he told Scarret, shrugging. He would run a limerick contest, or a series of coupons for victrola records, see a slight spurt of circulation and promptly forget the matter.
He could not rouse himself to full action. He had never felt a greater desire to work. He entered his office each morning with important eagerness. But within an hour he found himself studying the joints of the paneling on the walls and reciting nursery rhymes in his mind. It was not boredom, not the satisfaction of a yawn, but more like the gnawing pull of wishing to yawn and not quite making it. He could not say that he disliked his work. It had merely become distasteful; not enough to force a decision; not enough to make him clench his fists; just enough to contract his nostrils.