“Roark.”
“Yes?”
“Roark, I wish I’d met you before you had a job to give me.” He spoke without expression, his head lying back on the pillow, his eyes closed. “So that there would be no other reason mixed in. Because, you see, I’m very grateful to you. Not for giving me a job. Not for coming here. Not for anything you’ll ever do for me. Just for what you are.”
Then he lay without moving, straight and limp, like a man long past the stage of suffering. Roark stood at the window, looking at the wrenched room and at the boy on the bed. He wondered why he felt as if he were waiting. He was waiting for an explosion over their heads. It seemed senseless. Then he understood. He thought, this is how men feel, trapped in a shell hole; this room is not an accident of poverty, it’s the footprint of a war; it’s the devastation torn by explosives more vicious than any stored in the arsenals of the world. A war…against?…The enemy had no name and no face. But this boy was a comrade-in-arms, hurt in battle, and Roark stood over him, feeling a strange new thing, a desire to lift him in his arms and carry him to safety…Only the hell and the safety had no known designations…He kept thinking of Kent Lansing, trying to remember something Kent Lansing had said…
Then Mallory opened his eyes, and lifted himself up on one elbow. Roark pulled the chair over to the bed and sat down.
“Now,” he said, “talk. Talk about the things you really want said. Don’t tell me about your family, your childhood, your friends or your feelings. Tell me about the things you think.”
Mallory looked at him incredulously and whispered:
“How did you know that?”
Roark smiled and said nothing.
“How did you know what’s been killing me? Slowly, for years, driving me to hate people when I don’t want to hate….Have you felt it, too? Have you seen how your best friends love everything about you–except the things that count? And your most important is nothing to them, nothing, not even a sound they can recognize. You mean, you want to hear? You want to know what I do and why I do it, you want to know what I think! It’s not boring to you? It’s important?”
“Go ahead,” said Roark.
Then he sat for hours, listening, while Mallory spoke of his work, of the thoughts behind his work, of the thoughts that shaped his life, spoke gluttonously, like a drowning man flung out to shore, getting drunk on huge, clean snatches of air.
Mallory came to Roark’s office on the following morning, and Roark showed him the sketches of the Temple. When he stood at a drafting table, with a problem to consider, Mallory changed; there was no uncertainty in him, no remembrance of pain; the gesture of his hand taking the drawing was sharp and sure, like that of a soldier on duty. The gesture said that nothing ever done to him could alter the function of the thing within him that was now called into action. He had an unyielding, impersonal confidence; he faced Roark as an equal.
He studied the drawings for a long time, then raised his head. Everything about his face was controlled, except his eyes.
“Like it?” Roark asked.
“Don’t use stupid words.”
He held one of the drawings, walked to the window, stood looking down the sketch to the street to Roark’s face and back again.
“It doesn’t seem possible,” he said. “Not this–and that.” He waved the sketch at the street.
There was a poolroom on the corner of the street below; a rooming house with a Corinthian portico; a billboard advertising a Broadway musical; a line of pink-gray underwear fluttering on a roof.
“Not in the same city. Not on the same earth,” said Mallory. “But you made it happen. It’s possible….I’ll never be afraid again.”
“Of what?”
Mallory put the sketch down on the table, cautiously. He answered:
“You said something yesterday about a first law. A law demanding that man seek the best….It was funny….The unrecognized genius–that’s an old story. Have you ever thought of a much worse one–the genius recognized too well?…That a great many men are poor fools who can’t see the best–that’s nothing. One can’t get angry at that. But do you understand about the men who see it and don’t want it?”
“No.”
“No. You wouldn’t. I spent all night thinking about you. I didn’t sleep at all. Do you know what your secret is? It’s your terrible innocence.”
Roark laughed aloud, looking at the boyish face.
“No,” said Mallory, “it’s not funny. I know what I’m talking about–and you don’t. You can’t know. It’s because of that absolute health of yours. You’re so healthy that you can’t conceive of disease. You know of it. But you don’t really believe it. I do. I’m wiser than you are about some things, because I’m weaker. I understand–the other side. That’s what did it to me…what you saw yesterday.”
“That’s over.”
“Probably. But not quite. I’m not afraid any more. But I know that the terror exists. I know the kind of terror it is. You can’t conceive of that kind. Listen, what’s the most horrible experience you can imagine? To me–it’s being left, unarmed, in a sealed cell with a drooling beast of prey or a maniac who’s had some disease that’s eaten his brain out. You’d have nothing then but your voice–your voice and your thought. You’d scream to that creature why it should not touch you, you’d have the most eloquent words, the unanswerable words, you’d become the vessel of the absolute truth. And you’d see living eyes watching you and you’d know that the thing can’t hear you, that it can’t be reached, not reached, not in any way, yet it’s breathing and moving there before you with a purpose of its own. That’s horror. Well, that’s what’s hanging over the world, prowling somewhere through mankind, that same thing, something closed, mindless, utterly wanton, but something with an aim and a cunning of its own. I don’t think I’m a coward, but I’m afraid of it. And that’s all I know–only that it exists. I don’t know its purpose, I don’t know its nature.”
“The principle behind the Dean,” said Roark.
“What?”
“It’s something I wonder about once in a while….Mallory, why did you try to shoot Ellsworth Toohey?” He saw the boy’s eyes, and he added: “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t like to talk about it.”
“I don’t like to talk about it,” said Mallory, his voice tight. “But it was the right question to ask.”
“Sit down,” said Roark. “We’ll talk about your commission.”
Then Mallory listened attentively while Roark spoke of the building and of what he wanted from the sculptor. He concluded:
“Just one figure. It will stand here.” He pointed to a sketch. “The place is built around it. The statue of a naked woman. If you understand the building, you understand what the figure must be. The human spirit. The heroic in man. The aspiration and the fulfillment, both. Uplifted in its quest–and uplifting by its own essence. Seeking God–and finding itself. Showing that there is no higher reach beyond its own form….You’re the only one who can do it for me.”
“Yes.”
“You’ll work as I work for my clients. You know what I want–the rest is up to you. Do it any way you wish. I’d like to suggest the model, but if she doesn’t fit your purpose, choose anyone you prefer.”
“Who’s your choice?”
“Dominique Francon.”
“Oh, God!”
“Know her?”
“I’ve seen her. If I could have her…Christ! there’s no other woman so right, for this. She…” He stopped. He added, deflated: “She won’t pose. Certainly not for you.”
“She will.”
Guy Francon tried to object when he heard of it.
“Listen, Dominique,” he said angrily, “there is a limit. There really is a limit–even for you. Why are you doing it? Why–for a building of Roark’s of all things? After everything you’ve said and done against him–do you wonder people are talking? Nobody’d care or notice if it were anyone else. But you–and Roark! I can’t go anywhere without having somebody ask me about it. What am I to do?”
“Order yourself a reproduction of the statue, Father. It’s going to be beautiful.”
Peter Keating refused to discuss it. But he met Dominique at a party and he asked, having intended not to ask it:
“Is it true that you’re posing for a statue for Roark’s temple?”
“Yes.”
“Dominique, I don’t like it.”
“No?”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I know I have no right…It’s only…It’s only that of all people, I don’t want to see you being friendly with Roark. Not Roark. Anybody but Roark.”
She looked interested: “Why?”
“I don’t know.”
Her glance of curious study worried him.
“Maybe,” he muttered, “maybe it’s because it has never seemed right that you should have such contempt for his work. It made me very happy that you had, but…but it never seemed right–for you.”