by Ayn Rand
"I think I know it ... But Cortlandt ..."
"Yes. Cortlandt. Well, I've told you all the things in which I don't believe, so that you'll understand what I want and what right I have to want it. I don't believe in government housing. I don't want to hear anything about its noble purposes. I don't think they're noble. But that, too, doesn't matter. That's not my first concern. Not who lives in the house nor who orders it built. Only the house itself. If it has to be built, it might as well be built right."
"You ... want to build it?"
"In all the years I've worked on this problem, I never hoped to see the results in practical application. I forced myself not to hope. I knew I couldn't expect a chance to show what could be done on a large scale. Your government housing, among other things, has made all building so expensive that private owners can't afford such projects, nor any type of low-rent construction. And I will never be given any job by any government. You've understood that much yourself. You said I couldn't get past Toohey. He's not the only one. I've never been given a job by any group, board, council or committee, public or private, unless some man fought for me, like Kent Lansing. There's a reason for that, but we don't have to discuss it now. I want you to know only that I realize in what manner I need you, so that what we'll do will be a fair exchange."
"You need me?"
"Peter, I love this work. I want to see it erected. I want to make it real, living, functioning, built. But every living thing is integrated. Do you know what that means? Whole, pure, complete, unbroken. Do you know what constitutes an integrating principle? A thought. The one thought, the single thought that created the thing and every part of it. The thought which no one can change or touch. I want to design Cortlandt. I want to see it built. I want to see it built exactly as I design it."
"Howard ... I won't say 'it's nothing.' "
"You understand?"
"Yes."
"I like to receive money for my work. But I can pass that up this time. I like to have people know my work is done by me. But I can pass that up. I like to have tenants made happy by my work. But that doesn't matter too much. The only thing that matters, my goal, my reward, my beginning, my end is the work itself. My work done my way. Peter, there's nothing in the world that you can offer me, except this. Offer me this and you can have anything I've got to give. My work done my way. A private, personal, selfish, egotistical motivation. That's the only way I function. That's all I am."
"Yes, Howard. I understand. With my whole mind."
"Then here's what I'm offering you: I'll design Cortlandt. You'll put your name on it. You'll keep all the fees. But you'll guarantee that it will be built exactly as I design it."
Keating looked at him and held the glance deliberately, quietly, for a moment.
"All right, Howard." He added: "I waited, to show you that I know exactly what you're asking and what I'm promising."
"You know it won't be easy?"
"I know it will be very terribly difficult."
"It will. Because it's such a large project. Most particularly because it's a government project. There will be so many people involved, each with authority, each wanting to exercise it in some way or another. You'll have a hard battle. You will have to have the courage of my convictions."
"I'll try to live up to that, Howard."
"You won't be able to, unless you understand that I'm giving you a trust which is more sacred--and nobler, if you like the word--than any altruistic purpose you could name. Unless you understand that this is not a favor, that I'm not doing it for you nor for the future tenants, but for myself, and that you have no right to it except on these terms."
"Yes, Howard."
"You'll have to devise your own way of accomplishing it. You'll have to get yourself an ironclad contract with your bosses and then fight every bureaucrat that comes along every five minutes for the next year or more. I will have no guarantee except your word. Wish to give it to me?"
"I give you my word."
Roark took two typewritten sheets of paper from his pocket and handed them to him.
"Sign it."
"What's that?"
"A contract between us, stating the terms of our agreement. A copy for each of us. It would probably have no legal validity whatever. But I can hold it over your head. I couldn't sue you. But I could make this public. If it's prestige you want, you can't allow this to become known. If your courage fails you at any point, remember that you'll lose everything by giving in. But if you'll keep your word--I give you mine--it's written there--that I'll never betray this to anyone. Cortlandt will be yours. On the day when it's finished, I'll send this paper back to you and you can burn it if you wish."
"All right, Howard."
Keating signed, handed the pen to him, and Roark signed.
Keating sat looking at him for a moment, then said slowly, as if trying to distinguish the dim form of some thought of his own:
"Everybody would say you're a fool.... Everybody would say I'm getting everything...."
"You'll get everything society can give a man. You'll keep all the money. You'll take any fame or honor anyone might want to grant. You'll accept such gratitude as the tenants might feel. And I--I'll take what nobody can give a man, except himself. I will have built Cortlandt."
"You're getting more than I am, Howard."
"Peter!" The voice was triumphant. "You understand that?"
"Yes...."
Roark leaned back against a table, and laughed softly; it was the happiest sound Keating had ever heard.
"This will work, Peter. It will work. It will be all right. You've done something wonderful. You haven't spoiled everything by thanking me."
Keating nodded silently.
"Now relax, Peter. Want a drink? We won't discuss any details tonight. Just sit here and get used to me. Stop being afraid of me. Forget everything you said yesterday. This wipes it off. We're starting from the beginning. We're partners now. You have your share to do. It's a legitimate share. This is my idea of co-operation, by the way. You'll handle people. I'll do the building. We'll each do the job we know best, as honestly as we can."
He walked to Keating and extended his hand.
Sitting still, not raising his head, Keating took the hand. His fingers tightened on it for a moment.
When Roark brought him a drink, Keating swallowed three long gulps and sat looking at the room. His fingers were closed firmly about the glass, his arm steady; but the ice tinkled in the liquid once in a while, without apparent motion.
His eyes moved heavily over the room, over Roark's body. He thought, it's not intentional, not just to hurt me, he can't help it, he doesn't even know it--but it's in his whole body, that look of a creature glad to be alive. And he realized he had never actually believed that any living thing could be glad of the gift of existence.
"You're ... so young, Howard.... You're so young ... Once I reproached you for being too old and serious ... Do you remember when you worked for me at Francon's?"
"Drop it, Peter. We've done so well without remembering."
"That's because you're kind. Wait, don't frown. Let me talk. I've got to talk about something. I know, this is what you didn't want to mention. God, I didn't want you to mention it! I had to steel myself against it, that night--against all the things you could throw at me. But you didn't. If it were reversed now and this were my home--can you imagine what I'd do or say? You're not conceited enough."
"Why, no. I'm too conceited. If you want to call it that. I don't make comparisons. I never think of myself in relation to anyone else. I just refuse to measure myself as part of anything. I'm an utter egotist."
"Yes. You are. But egotists are not kind. And you are. You're the most egotistical and the kindest man I know. And that doesn't make sense."
"Maybe the concepts don't make sense. Maybe they don't mean what people have been taught to think they mean. But let's drop that now. If you've got to talk of something, let's talk of what we're going to do." He leaned out to
look through the open window. "It will stand down there. That dark stretch--that's the site of Cortlandt. When it's done, I'll be able to see it from my window. Then it will be part of the city. Peter, have I ever told you how much I love this city?"
Keating swallowed the rest of the liquid in his glass.
"I think I'd rather go now, Howard. I'm ... no good tonight."
"I'll call you in a few days. We'd better meet here. Don't come to my office. You don't want to be seen there--somebody might guess. By the way, later, when my sketches are done, you'll have to copy them yourself, in your own manner. Some people would recognize my way of drawing."
"Yes.... All right...."
Keating rose and stood looking uncertainly at his briefcase for a moment, then picked it up. He mumbled some vague words of parting, he took his hat, he walked to the door, then stopped and looked down at his briefcase.
"Howard ... I brought something I wanted to show you."
He walked back into the room and put the briefcase on the table.
"I haven't shown it to anyone." His fingers fumbled, opening the straps. "Not to mother or Ellsworth Toohey ... I just want you to tell me if there's any ..."
He handed to Roark six of his canvases.
Roark looked at them, one after another. He took a longer time than he needed. When he could trust himself to lift his eyes, he shook his head in silent answer to the word Keating had not pronounced.
"It's too late, Peter," he said gently.
Keating nodded. "Guess I ... knew that."
When Keating had gone, Roark leaned against the door, closing his eyes. He was sick with pity.
He had never felt this before--not when Henry Cameron collapsed in the office at his feet, not when he saw Steven Mallory sobbing on a bed before him. Those moments had been clean. But this was pity--this complete awareness of a man without worth or hope, this sense of finality, of the not to be redeemed. There was shame in this feeling--his own shame that he should have to pronounce such judgment upon a man, that he should know an emotion which contained no shred of respect.
This is pity, he thought, and then he lifted his head in wonder. He thought that there must be something terribly wrong with a world in which this monstrous feeling is called a virtue.
IX
THEY SAT ON THE SHORE OF THE LAKE-WYNAND SLOUCHED ON A boulder--Roark stretched out on the ground--Dominique sitting straight, her body rising stiffly from the pale blue circle of her skirt on the grass.
The Wynand house stood on the hill above them. The earth spread out in terraced fields and rose gradually to make the elevation of the hill. The house was a shape of horizontal rectangles rising toward a slashing vertical projection; a group of diminishing setbacks, each a separate room, its size and form making the successive steps in a series of interlocking floor lines. It was as if from the wide living room on the first level a hand had moved slowly, shaping the next steps by a sustained touch, then had stopped, had continued in separate movements, each shorter, brusquer, and had ended, torn off, remaining somewhere in the sky. So that it seemed as if the slow rhythm of the rising fields had been picked up, stressed, accelerated and broken into the staccato chords of the finale.
"I like to look at it from here," said Wynand. "I spent all day here yesterday, watching the light change on it. When you design a building, Howard, do you know exactly what the sun will do to it at any moment of the day from any angle? Do you control the sun?"
"Sure," said Roark without raising his head. "Unfortunately, I can't control it here. Move over, Gail. You're in my way. I like the sun on my back."
Wynand let himself flop down into the grass. Roark lay stretched on his stomach, his face buried on his arm, the orange hair on the white shirt sleeve, one hand extended before him, palm pressed to the ground. Dominique looked at the blades of grass between his fingers. The fingers moved once in a while, crushing the grass with lazy, sensuous pleasure.
The lake spread behind them, a flat sheet darkening at the edges, as if the distant trees were moving in to enclose it for the evening. The sun cut a glittering band across the water. Dominique looked up at the house and thought that she would like to stand there at a window and look down and see this one white figure stretched on a deserted shore, his hand on the ground, spent, emptied, at the foot of that hill.
She had lived in the house for a month. She had never thought she would. Then Roark had said: "The house will be ready for you in ten days, Mrs. Wynand," and she had answered: "Yes, Mr. Roark."
She accepted the house, the touch of the stair railings under her hand, the walls that enclosed the air she breathed. She accepted the light switches she pressed in the evening, and the light firm wires he had laid out through the walls; the water that ran when she turned a tap, from conduits he had planned; the warmth of an open fire on August evenings, before a fireplace built stone by stone from his drawing. She thought: Every moment ... every need of my existence ... She thought: Why not? It's the same with my body--lungs, blood vessels, nerves, brain--under the same control. She felt one with the house.
She accepted the nights when she lay in Wynand's arms and opened her eyes to see the shape of the bedroom Roark had designed, and she set her teeth against a racking pleasure that was part answer, part mockery of the unsatisfied hunger in her body, and surrendered to it, not knowing what man gave her this, which one of them, or both.
Wynand watched her as she walked across a room, as she descended the stairs, as she stood at a window. She had heard him saying to her: "I didn't know a house could be designed for a woman, like a dress. You can't see yourself here as I do, you can't see how completely this house is yours. Every angle, every part of every room is a setting for you. It's scaled to your height, to your body. Even the texture of the walls goes with the texture of your skin in an odd way. It's the Stoddard Temple, but built for a single person, and it's mine. This is what I wanted. The city can't touch you here. I've always felt that the city would take you away from me. It gave me everything I have. I don't know why I feel at times that it will demand payment some day. But here you're safe and you're mine." She wanted to cry: Gail, I belong to him here as I've never belonged to him.
Roark was the only guest Wynand allowed in their new home. She accepted Roark's visits to them on weekends. That was the hardest to accept. She knew he did not come to torture her, but simply because Wynand asked him and he liked being with Wynand. She remembered saying to him in the evening, her hand on the stair railing, on the steps of the stairs leading up to her bedroom: "Come down to breakfast whenever you wish, Mr. Roark. Just press the button in the dining room." "Thank you, Mrs. Wynand. Good night."
Once, she saw him alone, for a moment. It was early morning; she had not slept all night, thinking of him in a room across the hall; she had come out before the house was awake. She walked down the hill and she found relief in the unnatural stillness of the earth around her, the stillness of full light without sun, of leaves without motion, of a luminous, waiting silence. She heard steps behind her, she stopped, she leaned against a tree trunk. He had a bathing suit thrown over his shoulder, he was going down to swim in the lake. He stopped before her, and they stood still with the rest of the earth, looking at each other. He said nothing, turned, and went on. She remained leaning against the tree, and after a while she walked back to the house.
Now, sitting by the lake, she heard Wynand saying to him:
"You look like the laziest creature in the world, Howard."
"I am."
"I've never seen anyone relax like that."
"Try staying awake for three nights in succession."
"I told you to get here yesterday."
"Couldn't."
"Are you going to pass out right here?"
"I'd like to. This is wonderful." He lifted his head, his eyes laughing, as if he had not seen the building on the hill, as if he were not speaking of it. "This is the way I'd like to die, stretched out on some shore like this, just close my eyes and never c
ome back."
She thought: He thinks what I'm thinking--we still have that together --Gail wouldn't understand--not he and Gail, for this once--he and I.
Wynand said: "You damn fool. This is not like you, not even as a joke. You're killing yourself over something. What?"
"Ventilator shafts, at the moment. Very stubborn ventilator shafts."
"For whom?"
"Clients.... I have all sorts of clients right now."
"Do you have to work nights?"
"Yes--for these particular people. Very special work. Can't even bring it into the office."
"What are you talking about?"
"Nothing. Don't pay any attention. I'm half asleep."
She thought: This is the tribute to Gail, the confidence of surrender--he relaxes like a cat--and cats don't relax except with people they like.