“I’m looking at you like that because I like you.”
“Of course you like me. As I knew I’d like you. Men are brothers, you know, and they have a great instinct for brotherhood–except in boards, unions, corporations and other chain gangs. But I talk too much. That’s why I’m a good salesman. However, I have nothing to sell you. You know. So we’ll just say that you’re going to build the Aquitania–that’s the name of our hotel–and we’ll let it go at that.”
If the violence of the battles which people never hear about could be measured in material statistics, the battle of Kent Lansing against the board of directors of the Aquitania Corporation would have been listed among the greatest carnages of history. But the things he fought were not solid enough to leave anything as substantial as corpses on the battlefield.
He had to fight phenomena such as: “Listen, Palmer, Lansing’s talking about somebody named Roark, how’re you going to vote, do the big boys approve of him or not?”
“I’m not going to decide till I know who’s voted for or against.”
“Lansing says…but on the other hand, Thorpe tells me…”Talbot’s putting up a swank hotel on Fifth up in the sixties–and he’s got Francon & Keating.” “Harper swears by this young fellow–Gordon Prescott.” “Listen, Betsy says we’re crazy.” “I don’t like Roark’s face–he doesn’t look co-operative.” “I know, I feel it, Roark’s the kind that don’t fit in. He’s not a regular fellow.”
“What’s a regular fellow?”
“Aw hell, you know very well what I mean: regular.”
“Thompson says that Mrs. Pritchett says that she knows for certain because Mr. Macy told her that if…”
“Well, boys, I don’t give a damn what anybody says, I make up my own mind, and I’m here to tell you that I think this Roark is lousy. I don’t like the Enright House.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know why. I just don’t like it, and that’s that. Haven’t I got a right to an opinion of my own?”
The battle lasted for weeks. Everybody had his say, except Roark. Lansing told him: “It’s all right. Lay off. Don’t do anything. Let me do the talking. There’s nothing you can do. When facing society, the man most concerned, the man who is to do the most and contribute the most, has the least say. It’s taken for granted that he has no voice and the reasons he could offer are rejected in advance as prejudiced–since no speech is ever considered, but only the speaker. It’s so much easier to pass judgment on a man than on an idea. Though how in hell one passes judgment on a man without considering the content of his brain is more than I’ll ever understand. However, that’s how it’s done. You see, reasons require scales to weigh them. And scales are not made of cotton. And cotton is what the human spirit is made of–you know, the stuff that keeps no shape and offers no resistance and can be twisted forward and backward and into a pretzel. You could tell them why they should hire you so very much better than I could. But they won’t listen to you and they’ll listen to me. Because I’m the middleman. The shortest distance between two points is not a straight line–it’s a middleman. And the more middlemen, the shorter. Such is the psychology of a pretzel.”
“Why are you fighting for me like that?” Roark asked.
“Why are you a good architect? Because you have certain standards of what is good, and they’re your own, and you stand by them. I want a good hotel, and I have certain standards of what is good, and they’re my own, and you’re the one who can give me what I want. And when I fight for you, I’m doing–on my side of it–just what you’re doing when you design a building. Do you think integrity is the monopoly of the artist? And what, incidentally, do you think integrity is? The ability not to pick a watch out of your neighbor’s pocket? No, it’s not as easy as that. If that were all, I’d say ninety-five percent of humanity were honest, upright men. Only, as you can see, they aren’t. Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea. That presupposes the ability to think. Thinking is something one doesn’t borrow or pawn. And yet, if I were asked to choose a symbol for humanity as we know it, I wouldn’t choose a cross nor an eagle nor a lion and unicorn. I’d choose three gilded balls.”
And as Roark looked at him, he added: “Don’t worry. They’re all against me. But I have one advantage: they don’t know what they want. I do.”
At the end of July, Roark signed a contract to build the Aquitania.
Ellsworth Toohey sat in his office, looking at a newspaper spread out on his desk, at the item announcing the Aquitania contract. He smoked, holding a cigarette propped in the corner of his mouth, supported by two straight fingers; one finger tapped against the cigarette, slowly, rhythmically, for a long time.
He heard the sound of his door thrown open, and he glanced up to see Dominique standing there, leaning against the doorjamb, her arms crossed on her chest. Her face looked interested, nothing more, but it was alarming to see an expression of actual interest on her face.
“My dear,” he said, rising, “this is the first time you’ve taken the trouble to enter my office–in the four years that we’ve worked in the same building. This is really an occasion.”
She said nothing, but smiled gently, which was still more alarming. He added, his voice pleasant: “My little speech, of course, was the equivalent of a question. Or don’t we understand each other any longer?”
“I suppose we don’t–if you find it necessary to ask what brought me here. But you know it, Ellsworth, you know it; there it is on your desk.” She walked to the desk and flipped a comer of the newspaper. She laughed. “Do you wish you had it hidden somewhere? Of course you didn’t expect me to come. Not that it makes any difference. But I just like to see you being obvious for once. Right on your desk, like that. Open at the real-estate page, too.”
“You sound as if that little piece of news had made you happy.”
“It did, Ellsworth. It does.”
“I thought you had worked hard to prevent that contract.”
“I had.”
“If you think this is an act you’re putting on right now, Dominique, you’re fooling yourself. This isn’t an act.”
“No, Ellsworth. This isn’t.”
“You’re happy that Roark got it?”
“I’m so happy. I could sleep with this Kent Lansing, whoever he is, if I ever met him and if he asked me.”
“Then the pact is off?”
“By no means. I shall try to stop any job that comes his way. I shall continue trying. It’s not going to be so easy as it was, though. The Enright House, the Cord Building–and this. Not so easy for me–and for you. He’s beating you, Ellsworth. Ellsworth, what if we were wrong about the world, you and I?”
“You’ve always been, my dear. Do forgive me. I should have known better than to be astonished. It would make you happy, of course, that he got it. I don’t even mind admitting that it doesn’t make me happy at all. There, you see? Now your visit to my office has been a complete success. So we shall just write the Aquitania off as a major defeat, forget all about it and continue as we were.”
“Certainly, Ellsworth. Just as we were. I’m cinching a beautiful new hospital for Peter Keating at a dinner party tonight.”
Ellsworth Toohey went home and spent the evening thinking about Hopton Stoddard.
Hopton Stoddard was a little man worth twenty million dollars. Three inheritances had contributed to that sum, and seventy-two years of a busy life devoted to the purpose of making money. Hopton Stoddard had a genius for investment; he invested in everything–houses of ill fame, Broadway spectacles on the grand scale, preferably of a religious nature, factories, farm mortgages and contraceptives. He was small and bent. His face was not disfigured; people merely thought it was, because it had a single expression: he smiled. His little mouth was shaped like a v in eternal good cheer; his eyebrows were tiny v’s inverted over round, blue eyes; his hair, rich, white and waved, looked like a wig, but was real.
Toohey had known Hopton Stoddard for many years and exercised a strong influence upon him. Hopton Stoddard had never married, had no relatives and no friends; he distrusted people, believing that they were always after his money. But he felt a tremendous respect for Ellsworth Toohey, because Toohey represented the exact opposite of his own life; Toohey had no concern whatever for worldly wealth; by the mere fact of this contrast, he considered Toohey the personification of virtue; what this estimate implied in regard to his own life never quite occurred to him. He was not easy in his mind about his life, and the uneasiness grew with the years, with the certainty of an approaching end. He found relief in religion–in the form of a bribe. He experimented with several different creeds, attended services, donated large sums and switched to another faith. As the years passed, the tempo of his quest accelerated; it had the tone of panic.