“Of course,” said Toohey.
Keating wondered why the thought was so warmly pleasant to him. He did not mind that this made him the equal of every pickpocket in the crowd gathered to celebrate his building tonight; it occurred to him dimly–and left him undisturbed, even though it contradicted the passionate quest for superiority that had driven him all his life. The contradiction did not matter; he was not thinking of tonight nor of the crowd; he was thinking of a man who had not been there tonight.
“You know, Ellsworth,” he said, leaning forward, happy in an uneasy kind of way, “I…I’d rather talk to you than do anything else, anything at all. I had so many places to go tonight–and I’m so much happier just sitting here with you. Sometimes I wonder how I’d ever go on without you.”
“That,” said Toohey, “is as it should be. Or else what are friends for?”
That winter the annual costume Arts Ball was an event of greater brilliance and originality than usual. Athelstan Beasely, the leading spirit of its organization, had had what he called a stroke of genius: all the architects were invited to come dressed as their best buildings. It was a huge success.
Peter Keating was the star of the evening. He looked wonderful as the Cosmo-Slotnick Building. An exact papier-mâché replica of his famous structure covered him from head to knees; one could not see his face, but his bright eyes peered from behind the windows of the top floor, and the crowning pyramid of the roof rose over his head; the colonnade hit him somewhere about the diaphragm, and he wagged a finger through the portals of the great entrance door. His legs were free to move with his usual elegance, in faultless dress trousers and patent-leather pumps.
Guy Francon was very impressive as the Frink National Bank Building, although the structure looked a little squatter than in the original, in order to allow for Francon’s stomach; the Hadrian torch over his head had a real electric bulb lit by a miniature battery. Ralston Holcombe was magnificent as a state capitol, and Gordon L. Prescott was very masculine as a grain elevator. Eugene Pettingill waddled about on his skinny, ancient legs, small and bent, an imposing Park Avenue hotel, with horn-rimmed spectacles peering from under the majestic tower. Two wits engaged in a duel, butting each other in the belly with famous spires, great landmarks of the city that greet the ships approaching from across the ocean. Everybody had lots of fun.
Many of the architects, Athelstan Beasely in particular, commented resentfully on Howard Roark who had been invited and did not come. They had expected to see him dressed as the Enright House.
Dominique stopped in the hall and stood looking at the door, at the inscription: “HOWARD ROARK, ARCHITECT.”
She had never seen his office. She had fought against coming here for a long time. But she had to see the place where he worked.
The secretary in the reception room was startled when Dominique gave her name, but announced the visitor to Roark. “Go right in, Miss Francon,” she said.
Roark smiled when she entered his office; a faint smile without surprise.
“I knew you’d come here some day,” he said. “Want me to show you the place?”
“What’s that?” she asked.
His hands were smeared with clay; on a long table, among a litter of unfinished sketches, stood the clay model of a building, a rough study of angles and terraces.
“The Aquitania?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Do you always do that?”
“No. Not always. Sometimes. There’s a hard problem here. I like to play with it for a while. It will probably be my favorite building–it’s so difficult.”
“Go ahead. I want to watch you doing that. Do you mind?”
“Not at all.”
In a moment, he had forgotten her presence. She sat in a corner and watched his hands. She saw them molding walls. She saw them smash a part of the structure, and begin again, slowly, patiently, with a strange certainty even in his hesitation. She saw the palm of his hand smooth a long, straight plane, she saw an angle jerked across the space in the motion of his hand before she saw it in clay.
She rose and walked to the window. The buildings of the city far below looked no bigger than the model on his table. It seemed to her that she could see his hands shaping the setbacks, the corners, the roofs of all the structures below, smashing and molding again. Her hand moved absently, following the form of a distant building in rising steps, feeling a physical sense of possession, feeling it for him.
She turned back to the table. A strand of hair hung down over his face bent attentively to the model; he was not looking at her, he was looking at the shape under his fingers. It was almost as if she were watching his hands moving over the body of another woman. She leaned against the wall, weak with a feeling of violent, physical pleasure.
At the beginning of January, while the first steel columns rose from the excavations that were to become the Cord Building and the Aquitania Hotel, Roark worked on the drawings for the Temple.
When the first sketches were finished, he said to his secretary:
“Get me Steve Mallory.”
“Mallory, Mr. Roark? Who…Oh, yes, the shooting sculptor.”
“The what?”
“He took a shot at Ellsworth Toohey, didn’t he?”
“Did he? Yes, that’s right.”
“Is that the one you want, Mr. Roark?”
“That’s the one.”
For two days the secretary telephoned art dealers, galleries, architects, newspapers. No one could tell her what had become of Steven Mallory or where he could be found. On the third day she reported to Roark: “I’ve found an address, in the Village, which I’m told might be his. There’s no telephone.” Roark dictated a letter asking Mallory to telephone his office.
The letter was not returned, but a week passed without answer. Then Steven Mallory telephoned.
“Hello?” said Roark, when the secretary switched the call to him.
“Steven Mallory speaking,” said a young, hard voice, in a way that left an impatient, belligerent silence after the words.
“I should like to see you, Mr. Mallory. Can we make an appointment for you to come to my office?”
“What do you want to see me about?”
“About a commission, of course. I want you to do some work for a building of mine.” There was a long silence.
“All right,” said Mallory; his voice sounded dead. He added: “Which building?”
“The Stoddard Temple. You may have heard…”
“Yeah, I heard. You’re doing it. Who hasn’t heard? Will you pay me as much as you’re paying your press agent?”
“I’m not paying the press agent. I’ll pay you whatever you wish to ask.”
“You know that can’t be much.”
“What time would it be convenient for you to come here?”
“Oh, hell, you name it. You know I’m not busy.”
“Two o’clock tomorrow afternoon?”
“All right.” He added: “I don’t like your voice.” Roark laughed. “I like yours. Cut it out and be here tomorrow at two.”
“Okay.” Mallory hung up.
Roark dropped the receiver, grinning. But the grin vanished suddenly, and he sat looking at the telephone, his face grave.
Mallory did not keep the appointment. Three days passed without a word from him. Then Roark went to find him in person.
The rooming house where Mallory lived was a dilapidated brownstone in an unlighted street that smelled of a fish market. There was a laundry and a cobbler on the ground floor, at either side of a narrow entrance. A slatternly landlady said: “Mallory? Fifth floor rear,” and shuffled away indifferently. Roark climbed sagging wooden stairs lighted by bulbs stuck in a web of pipes. He knocked at a grimy door.
The door opened. A gaunt young man stood on the threshold; he had disheveled hair, a strong mouth with a square lower lip, and the most expressive eyes that Roark had ever seen. “What do you want?” he snapped. “Mr. Mallory?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m Howard Roark.”
Mallory laughed, leaning against the doorjamb, one arm stretched across the opening, with no intention of stepping aside. He was obviously drunk. “Well, well!” he said. “In person.”
“May I come in?”
“What for?”
Roark sat down on the stair banister. “Why didn’t you keep your appointment?”
“Oh, the appointment? Oh, yes. Well, I’ll tell you,” Mallory said gravely. “It was like this: I really intended to keep it, I really did, and I started out for your office, but on my way there I passed a movie theater that was showing Two Heads on a Pillow, so I went in. I just had to see Two Heads on a Pillow.” He grinned, sagging against his stretched arm. “You’d better let me come in,” said Roark quietly. “Oh, what the hell, come in.”
The room was a narrow hole. There was an unmade bed in a corner, a litter of newspapers and old clothes, a gas ring, a framed landscape from the five-and-ten, representing some sort of sick brown meadows with sheep; there were no drawings or figures, no hints of the occupant’s profession.