by Ayn Rand
She had no consciousness of purpose. There was no goal to this journey, only the journey itself, only the motion and the metal sound of motion around her. She felt slack and empty, losing her identity in a painless ebb, content to vanish and let nothing remain defined save that particular earth in the window.
When she saw, in the slowing movement beyond the glass, the name "Clayton" on a faded board under the eaves of a station building, she knew what she had been expecting. She knew why she had taken this train, not a faster one, why she had looked carefully at the timetable of its stops--although it had been just a column of meaningless names to her then. She seized her suitcase, coat and hat. She ran. She could not take time to dress, afraid that the floor under her feet would carry her away from here. She ran down the narrow corridor of the car, down the steps. She leaped to the station platform, feeling the shock of winter cold on her bare throat. She stood looking at the station building. She heard the train moving behind her, clattering away.
Then she put on her coat and hat. She walked across the platform, into the waiting room, across a wooden floor studded with lumps of dry chewing gum, through the heavy billows of heat from an iron stove, to the square beyond the station.
She saw a last band of yellow in the sky above the low roof lines. She saw a pitted stretch of paving bricks, and small houses leaning against one another; a bare tree with twisted branches, skeletons of weeds at the doorless opening of an abandoned garage, dark shop fronts, a drugstore still open on a corner, its lighted window dim, low over the ground.
She had never been here before, but she felt this place proclaiming its ownership of her, closing in about her with ominous intimacy. It was as if every dark mass exercised a suction like the pull of the planets in space, prescribing her orbit. She put her hand on a fire hydrant and felt the cold seeping through her glove into her skin. This was the way the town held her, a direct penetration which neither her clothes nor her mind could stop. The peace of the inevitable remained. Only now she had to act, but the actions were simple, set in advance. She asked a passer-by: "Where is the site of the new building of Janer's Department Store?"
She walked patiently through the dark streets. She walked past desolate winter lawns and sagging porches; past vacant lots where weeds rustled against tin cans; past closed grocery stores and a steaming laundry; past an uncurtained window where a man in shirtsleeves sat by a fire, reading a paper. She turned corners and crossed streets, with the feel of cobblestones under the thin soles of her pumps. Rare passers-by looked, astonished, at her air of foreign elegance. She noticed it; she felt an answering wonder. She wanted to say: But don't you understand?--I belong here more than you do. She stopped, once in a while, closing her eyes; she found it difficult to breathe.
She came to Main Street and walked slower. There were a few lights, cars parked diagonally at the curb, a movie theater, a store window displaying pink underwear among kitchen utensils. She walked stiffly, looking ahead.
She saw a glare of light on the side of an old building, on a blind wall of yellow bricks showing the sooted floor lines of a neighboring structure that had been torn down. The light came from an excavation pit. She knew this was the site. She hoped it was not. If they worked late, he would be here. She did not want to see him tonight. She had wanted only to see the place and the building; she was not ready for more; she had wanted to see him tomorrow. But she could not stop now. She walked to the excavation. It lay on a corner, open to the street, without fence. She heard the grinding clatter of iron, she saw the arm of a derrick, the shadows of men on the slanting sides of fresh earth, yellow in the light. She could not see the planks that led up to the sidewalk, but she heard the sound of steps and then she saw Roark coming up to the street. He was hatless, he had a loose coat hanging open.
He stopped. He looked at her. She thought that she was standing straight; that it was simple and normal, she was seeing the gray eyes and the orange hair as she had always seen them. She was astonished that he moved toward her with a kind of urgent haste, that his hand closed over her elbow too firmly and he said: "You'd better sit down."
Then she knew she could not have stood up without that hand on her elbow. He took her suitcase. He led her across the dark side street and made her sit down on the steps of a vacant house. She leaned back against a closed door. He sat down beside her. He kept his hand tight on her elbow, not a caress, but an impersonal hold of control over both of them.
After a while he dropped his hand. She knew that she was safe now. She could speak.
"That's your new building?"
"Yes. You walked here from the station?"
"Yes."
"It's a long walk."
"I think it was."
She thought that they had not greeted each other and that it was right. This was not a reunion, but just one moment out of something that had never been interrupted. She thought how strange it would be if she ever said "Hello" to him; one did not greet oneself each morning.
"What time did you get up today?" she asked.
"At seven."
"I was in New York then. In a cab, going to Grand Central. Where did you have breakfast?"
"In a lunch wagon."
"The kind that stays open all night?"
"Yes. Mostly for truck drivers."
"Do you go there often?"
"Whenever I want a cup of coffee."
"And you sit at a counter? And there are people around, looking at you?"
"I sit at a counter when I have the time. There are people around. I don't think they look at me much."
"And afterward? You walk to work?"
"Yes."
"You walk every day? Down any of these streets? Past any window? So that if one just wanted to reach and open the window ..."
"People don't stare out of windows here."
From the vantage of the high stoop they could see the excavation across the street, the earth, the workmen, the rising steel columns in a glare of harsh light. She thought it was strange to see fresh earth in the midst of pavements and cobblestones; as if a piece had been torn from the clothing of a town, showing naked flesh. She said:
"You've done two country homes in the last two years."
"Yes. One in Pennsylvania and one near Boston."
"They were unimportant houses."
"Inexpensive, if that's what you mean. But very interesting to do."
"How long will you remain here?"
"Another month."
"Why do you work at night?"
"It's a rush job."
Across the street the derrick was moving, balancing a long girder in the air. She saw him watching it, and she knew he was not thinking of it, but there was the instinctive response in his eyes, something physically personal, intimacy with any action taken for his building.
"Roark ..."
They had not pronounced each other's names. It had the sensuous pleasure of a surrender long delayed--to pronounce the name and to have him hear it.
"Roark, it's the quarry again."
He smiled. "If you wish. Only it isn't."
"After the Enright House? After the Cord Building?"
"I don't think of it that way."
"How do you think of it?"
"I love doing it. Every building is like a person. Single and unrepeatable."
He was looking across the street. He had not changed. There was the old sense of lightness in him, of ease in motion, in action, in thought. She said, her sentence without beginning or end:
"... doing five-story buildings for the rest of your life ..."
"If necessary. But I don't think it will be like that."
"What are you waiting for?"
"I'm not waiting."
She closed her eyes, but she could not hide her mouth; her mouth held bitterness, anger and pain.
"Roark, if you'd been in the city, I wouldn't have come to see you."
"I know it."
"But it was you--in another place--in some nameless hole
of a place like this. I had to see it. I had to see the place."
"When are you going back?"
"You know I haven't come to remain?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"You're still afraid of lunch wagons and windows."
"I'm not going back to New York. Not at once."
"No?"
"You haven't asked me anything, Roark. Only whether I walked from the station."
"What do you want me to ask you?"
"I got off the train when I saw the name of the station," she said, her voice dull. "I didn't intend coming here. I was on my way to Reno."
"And after that?"
"I will marry again."
"Do I know your fiance?"
"You've heard of him. His name is Gail Wynand."
She saw his eyes. She thought she should want to laugh; she had brought him at last to a shock she had never expected to achieve. But she did not laugh. He thought of Henry Cameron; of Cameron saying: "I have no answer to give them, Howard. I'm leaving you to face them. You'll answer them. All of them, the Wynand papers and what makes the Wynand papers possible and what lies behind that."
"Roark."
He didn't answer.
"That's worse than Peter Keating, isn't it?" she asked.
"Much worse."
"Do you want to stop me?"
"No."
He had not touched her since he had released her elbow, and that had been only a touch proper in an ambulance. She moved her hand and let it rest against his. He did not withdraw his fingers and he did not pretend indifference. She bent over, holding his hand, not raising it from his knee, and she pressed her lips to his hand. Her hat fell off, he saw the blond head at his knees, he felt her mouth kissing his hand again and again. His fingers held hers, answering, but that was the only answer.
She raised her head and looked at the street. A lighted window hung in the distance, behind a grillwork of bare branches. Small houses stretched off into the darkness, and trees stood by the narrow sidewalks.
She noticed her hat on the steps below and bent to pick it up. She leaned with her bare hand flat against the steps. The stone was old, worn smooth, icy. She felt comfort in the touch. She sat for a moment, bent over, palm pressed to the stone; to feel these steps--no matter how many feet had used them--to feel them as she had felt the fire hydrant.
"Roark, where do you live?"
"In a rooming house."
"What kind of room?"
"Just a room."
"What's in it? What kind of walls?"
"Some sort of wallpaper. Faded."
"What furniture?"
"A table, chairs, a bed."
"No, tell me in detail."
"There's a clothes closet, then a chest of drawers, the bed in the corner by the window, a large table at the other side----"
"By the wall?"
"No, I put it across the corner, to the window--I work there. Then there's a straight chair, an armchair with a bridge lamp and a magazine rack I never use. I think that's all."
"No rugs? Or curtains?"
"I think there's something at the window and some kind of rug. The floor is nicely polished, it's beautiful old wood."
"I want to think of your room tonight--on the train."
He sat looking across the street. She said:
"Roark, let me stay with you tonight."
"No."
She let her glance follow his to the grinding machinery below. After a while she asked:
"How did you get this store to design?"
"The owner saw my buildings in New York and liked them."
A man in overalls stepped out of the excavation pit, peered into the darkness at them and called: "Is that you up there, boss?"
"Yes," Roark called back.
"Come here a minute, will you?"
Roark walked to him across the street. She could not hear their conversation, but she heard Roark saying gaily: "That's easy," and then they both walked down the planks to the bottom. The man stood talking, pointing up, explaining. Roark threw his head back, to glance up at the rising steel frame; the light was full on his face, and she saw his look of concentration, not a smile, but an expression that gave her a joyous feeling of competence, of disciplined reason in action. He bent, picked up a piece of board, took a pencil from his pocket. He stood with one foot on a pile of planks, the board propped on his knee, and drew rapidly, explaining something to the man who nodded, pleased. She could not hear the words, but she felt the quality of Roark's relation to that man, to all the other men in that pit, an odd sense of loyalty and of brotherhood, but not the kind she had ever heard named by these words. He finished, handed the board to the man, and they both laughed at something. Then he came back and sat down on the steps beside her.
"Roark," she said, "I want to remain here with you for all the years we might have."
He looked at her, attentively, waiting.
"I want to live here." Her voice had the sound of pressure against a dam. "I want to live as you live. Not to touch my money--I'll give it away, to anyone, to Steve Mallory, if you wish, or to one of Toohey's organizations, it doesn't matter. We'll take a house here--like one of these--and I'll keep it for you--don't laugh, I can--I'll cook, I'll wash your clothes, I'll scrub the floor. And you'll give up architecture."
He had not laughed. She saw nothing but an unmoving attention prepared to listen on.
"Roark, try to understand, please try to understand. I can't bear to see what they're doing to you, what they're going to do. It's too great--you and building and what you feel about it. You can't go on like that for long. It won't last. They won't let you. You're moving to some terrible kind of disaster. It can't end any other way. Give it up. Take some meaningless job--like the quarry. We'll live here. We'll have little and we'll give nothing. We'll live only for what we are and for what we know."
He laughed. She heard, in the sound of it, a surprising touch of consideration for her--the attempt not to laugh; but he couldn't stop it.
"Dominique." The way he pronounced the name remained with her and made it easier to hear the words that followed: "I wish I could tell you that it was a temptation, at least for a moment. But it wasn't." He added: "If I were very cruel, I'd accept it. Just to see how soon you'd beg me to go back to building."
"Yes ... Probably ..."
"Marry Wynand and stay married to him. It will be better than what you're doing to yourself right now."
"Do you mind ... if we just sit here for a little while longer ... and not talk about that ... but just talk, as if everything were right ... just an armistice for half an hour out of years.... Tell me what you've done every day you've been here, everything you can remember...."
Then they talked, as if the stoop of the vacant house were an airplane hanging in space, without sight of earth or sky; he did not look across the street.
Then he glanced at his wrist watch and said:
"There's a train for the West in an hour. Shall I go with you to the station?"
"Do you mind if we walk there?"
"All right."
She stood up. She asked:
"Until--when, Roark?"
His hand moved over the streets. "Until you stop hating all this, stop being afraid of it, learn not to notice it."
They walked together to the station. She listened to the sound of his steps with hers in the empty streets. She let her glance drag along the walls they passed, like a clinging touch. She loved this place, this town and everything that was part of it.
They were walking past a vacant lot. The wind blew an old sheet of newspaper against her legs. It clung to her with a tight insistence that seemed conscious, like the peremptory caress of a cat. She thought, anything of this town had that intimate right to her. She bent, picked up the paper and began folding it, to keep it.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
"Something to read on the train," she said stupidly.
He snatched the paper from her, crumpled
it and flung it away into the weeds. She said nothing and they walked on.
A single light bulb hung over the empty station platform. They waited. He stood looking up the tracks, where the train was to appear. When the tracks rang, shuddering, when the white ball of a headlight spurted out of the distance and stood still in the sky, not approaching, only widening, growing in furious speed, he did not move or turn to her. The rushing beam flung his shadow across the platform, made it sweep over the planks and vanish. For an instant she saw the tall, straight line of his body against the glare. The engine passed them and the cars rattled, slowing down. He looked at the windows rolling past. She could not see his face, only the outline of his cheekbone.
When the train stopped, he turned to her. They did not shake hands, they did not speak. They stood straight, facing each other for a moment, as if at attention; it was almost like a military salute. Then she picked up her suitcase and went aboard the train. The train started moving a minute later.
VI
CHUCK: AND WHY NOT A MUSKRAT? WHY SHOULD MAN IMAGINE himself superior to a muskrat? Life beats in all the small creatures of field and wood. Life singing of eternal sorrow. An old sorrow. The Song of Songs. We don't understand--but who cares about understanding? Only public accountants and chiropodists. Also mailmen. We only love. The Sweet Mystery of Love. That's all there is to it. Give me love and shove all your philosophers up your stovepipe. When Mary took the homeless muskrat, her heart broke open and life and love rushed in. Muskrats make good imitation mink coats, but that's not the point. Life is the point.
"Jake: (rushing in) Say, folks, who's got a stamp with a picture of George Washington on it?
"Curtain."
Ike slammed his manuscript shut and took a long swig of air. His voice was hoarse after two hours of reading aloud and he had read the climax of his play on a single long breath. He looked at his audience, his mouth smiling in self-mockery, his eyebrows raised insolently, but his eyes pleading.