She went out alone for long walks. She walked fast, her hands in the pockets of an old coat, its collar raised. She had told herself that she was not hoping to meet him. She was not looking for him. But she had to be out in the streets, blank, purposeless, for hours at a time.
She had always hated the streets of a city. She saw the faces streaming past her, the faces made alike by fear–fear as a common denominator, fear of themselves, fear of all and of one another, fear making them ready to pounce upon whatever was held sacred by any single one they met. She could not define the nature or the reason of that fear. But she had always felt its presence. She had kept herself clean and free in a single passion–to touch nothing. She had liked facing them in the streets, she had liked the impotence of their hatred, because she offered them nothing to be hurt.
She was not free any longer. Each step through the streets hurt her now. She was tied to him–as he was tied to every part of the city. He was a nameless worker doing some nameless job, lost in these crowds, dependent on them, to be hurt by any one of them, to be shared by her with the whole city. She hated the thought of him on the sidewalks people had used. She hated the thought of a clerk handing to him a package of cigarettes across a counter. She hated the elbows touching his elbows in a subway train. She came home, after these walks, shaking with fever. She went out again the next day.
When the term of her vacation expired, she went to the office of the Banner in order to resign. Her work and her column did not seem amusing to her any longer. She stopped Alvah Scarret’s effusive greetings. She said: “I just came back to tell you that I’m quitting, Alvah.” He looked at her stupidly. He uttered only: “Why?”
It was the first sound from the outside world to reach her in a long time. She had always acted on the impulse of the moment, proud of the freedom to need no reasons for her actions. Now she had to face a “why?” that carried an answer she could not escape. She thought: Because of him, because she was letting him change the course of her life. It would be another violation; she could see him smiling as he had smiled on the path in the woods. She had no choice. Either course taken would be taken under compulsion: she could leave her work, because he had made her want to leave it, or she could remain, hating it, in order to keep her life unchanged, in defiance of him. The last was harder.
She raised her head. She said: “Just a joke, Alvah. Just wanted to see what you’d say. I’m not quitting.”
She had been back at work for a few days when Ellsworth Toohey walked into her office.
“Hello, Dominique,” he said. “Just heard you’re back.”
“Hello, Ellsworth.”
“I’m glad. You know, I’ve always had the feeling that you’ll walk out on us some morning without any reason.”
“The feeling, Ellsworth? Or the hope?”
He was looking at her, his eyes as kindly, his smile as charming as ever; but there was a tinge of self-mockery in the charm, as if he knew that she did not approve of it, and a tinge of assurance, as if he were showing that he would look kindly and charming just the same.
“You know, you’re wrong there,” he said, smiling peacefully. “You’ve always been wrong about that.”
“No. I don’t fit, Ellsworth. Do I?”
“I could, of course, ask: Into what? But supposing I don’t ask it. Supposing I just say that people who don’t fit have their uses also, as well as those who do? Would you like that better? Of course, the simplest thing to say is that I’ve always been a great admirer of yours and always will be.”
“That’s not a compliment.”
“Somehow, I don’t think we’ll ever be enemies, Dominique, if that’s what you’d like.”
“No, I don’t think we’ll ever be enemies, Ellsworth. You’re the most comforting person I know.”
“Of course.”
“In the sense I mean?”
“In any sense you wish.”
On the desk before her lay the rotogravure section of the Sunday Chronicle. It was folded on the page that bore the drawing of the Enright House. She picked it up and held it out to him, her eyes narrowed in a silent question. He looked at the drawing, then his glance moved to her face and returned to the drawing. He let the paper drop back on the desk.
“As independent as an insult, isn’t it?” he said.
“You know, Ellsworth, I think the man who designed this should have committed suicide. A man who can conceive a thing as beautiful as this should never allow it to be erected. He should not want to exist. But he will let it be built, so that women will hang out diapers on his terraces, so that men will spit on his stairways and draw dirty pictures on his walls. He’s given it to them and he’s made it part of them, part of everything. He shouldn’t have offered it for men like you to look at. For men like you to talk about. He’s defiled his own work by the first word you’ll utter about it. He’s made himself worse than you are. You’ll be committing only a mean little indecency, but he’s committed a sacrilege. A man who knows what he must have known to produce this should not have been able to remain alive.”
“Going to write a piece about this?” he asked.
“No. That would be repeating his crime.”
“And talking to me about it?”
She looked at him. He was smiling pleasantly.
“Yes of course,” she said, “that’s part of the same crime also.”
“Let’s have dinner together one of these days, Dominique,” he said. “You really don’t let me see enough of you.”
“All right,” she said. “Anytime you wish.”
At his trial for the assault on Ellsworth Toohey, Steven Mallory refused to disclose his motive. He made no statement. He seemed indifferent to any possible sentence. But Ellsworth Toohey created a minor sensation when he appeared, unsolicited, in Mallory’s defense. He pleaded with the judge for leniency; he explained that he had no desire to see Mallory’s future and career destroyed. Everybody in the courtroom was touched–except Steven Mallory. Steven Mallory listened and looked as if he were enduring some special process of cruelty. The judge gave him two years and suspended the sentence.
There was a great deal of comment on Toohey’s extraordinary generosity. Toohey dismissed all praise, gaily and modestly. “My friends,” was his remark–the one to appear in all the papers–“I refuse to be an accomplice in the manufacturing of martyrs.”
At the first meeting of the proposed organization of young architects Keating concluded that Toohey had a wonderful ability for choosing people who fitted well together. There was an air about the eighteen persons present which he could not define, but which gave him a sense of comfort, a security he had not experienced in solitude or in any other gathering; and part of the comfort was the knowledge that all the others felt the same way for the same unaccountable reason. It was a feeling of brotherhood, but somehow not of a sainted or noble brotherhood; yet this precisely was the comfort–that one felt, among them, no necessity for being sainted or noble.
Were it not for this kinship, Keating would have been disappointed in the gathering. Of the eighteen seated about Toohey’s living room, none was an architect of distinction, except himself and Gordon L. Prescott, who wore a beige turtle-neck sweater and looked faintly patronizing, but eager. Keating had never heard the names of the others. Most of them were beginners, young, poorly dressed and belligerent. Some were only draftsmen. There was one woman architect who had built a few small private homes, mainly for wealthy widows; she had an aggressive manner, a tight mouth and a fresh petunia in her hair. There was a boy with pure, innocent eyes. There was an obscure contractor with a fat, expressionless face. There was a tall, dry woman who was an interior decorator, and another woman of no definite occupation at all.
Keating could not understand what exactly was to be the purpose of the group, though there was a great deal of talk. None of the talk was too coherent, but all of it seemed to have the same undercurrent. He felt that the undercurrent was the one thing clear among all the vague generalities, even though nobody would mention it. It held him there, as it held the others, and he had no desire to define it.