The Early Ayn Rand (62 page)

“Romantic Realism” applies equally to her style. The re-creation of concretes, the commitment to perceptual fact, the painstaking precision and clarity of the descriptions—this is Realism in a sense deeper than fidelity to the man on the street. It is fidelity to physical reality as such. The commitment to abstractions, to broader significance, to evaluation, drama, passion—this is the Romanticist element.

Ayn Rand’s writing (like everyone else’s) is made only of abstractions (words). Because of her method, however, she can make words convey at the same time the reality of a given event, its meaning, and its feeling. The reader experiences the material as a surge of power that reaches him on all levels: it reaches his senses and his mind, his mind and his emotions.

Although Ayn Rand’s writing is thoroughly conscious, it is not self-conscious; it is natural, economical, flowing. It does not strike one as literary pyrotechnics (although it is that). Like all great literature, it strikes one as a simple statement of the inevitable.

The above indicates my reasons for wanting to publish these scenes. Taken by themselves as pieces of writing, “Vesta Dunning” and “Roark and Cameron” are a fitting conclusion to this survey of Ayn Rand’s early work and development.

The following is what the author of “The Husband I Bought” was capable of twelve years later.

—L. P.

The snow fell in a thick curtain, as if a pillow were being shaken from the top windows of the tenement, and through the flakes sticking to his eyelashes, Roark could barely see the entrance of his home. He shook the iced drops from the upturned collar of his coat, a threadbare coat that served meagerly through the February storms of New York. He found the entrance and stopped in the dark hall, where a single yellow light bulb made a mosaic of glistening snakes in the melting slush on the floor, and he shook his cap out, gathering a tiny pool of cold, biting water in the palm of his hand. He swung into the black hole of the stairway, for the climb to the sixth floor.

It was long past the dinner hour, and only a faint odor of grease and onions remained in the stairshaft, floating from behind the closed, grimy doors on the landings. He had worked late. Three new commissions had come unexpectedly into the office, and Cameron had exhausted his stock of blasphemy, a bracing, joyous blasphemy ringing through the drafting room as a tonic. “Just like in the old days,” Simpson had said, and in the early dusk of the office, in the unhealthy light, in the freezing drafts from the snow piled on the window ledges there had reigned for days an air of morning and spring. Roark was tired tonight, and he went up the stairs closing his eyes often, pressing his lids down to let them rest from the strain of microscopically thin black lines that had had to be drawn unerringly all day long, lines that stood now as a white cobweb on dark red whenever he closed his eyes. But he went up swiftly, his body alive in a bright, exhilarating exhaustion, a weariness demanding action, not rest, to relieve it.

He had reached the fourth floor, and he stopped. High on the dark wall facing the smeared window, the red glow of a soda-biscuit sign across the river lighted the landing, and black dots of snowflakes’ shadows rolled, whirling, over the red patch. Two flights up, behind the closed door of his room, he heard a voice speaking.

He rose a few steps, and stood pressed to the wall, and listened. It was a woman’s voice, young, clear, resonant, and it was raised in full force, as if addressing a huge crowd. He heard, incredibly, this:

The voice was exultant, breaking under an emotion it could not control. It seemed to fail suddenly in the wrong places, speaking the words not as they should have been spoken on a stage, but as a person would fling them out in delirium, unable to hold them, choking upon them. It was the voice of a somnambulist, unconscious of its own sounds, knowing only the violence and the ecstasy of the dream from which it came.

Then it stopped and there was no sound in the room above. Roark went up swiftly and threw the door open.

A girl stood in the middle of the room, with her back to him. She whirled about, when she heard the door knock against the wall. His eyes could not catch the speed of her movement. He had not seen her turn. But there she was suddenly, facing him, as if she had sprung up from the floor and frozen for a second. Her short brown hair stood up wildly with the wind of the motion. Her thin body stood as it had stopped, twisted in loose, incredible angles, awkward, except for her long, slim legs that could not be awkward, even when planted firmly, stubbornly wide apart, as they were now.

“What do you want here?” she snapped ferociously.

“Well,” said Roark, “don’t you think that I should ask you that?”

She looked at him, at the room.

“Oh,” she said, something extinguishing itself in her voice, “I suppose it’s your room. I’m sorry.”

She made a brusque movement to go. But he stepped in front of the door.

“What were you doing here?” he asked.

“It’s your own fault. You should lock your room when you go out. Then you won’t have to be angry at people for coming in.”

“I’m not angry. And there’s nothing here to lock up.”

“Well,
I
am angry! You heard me here, didn’t you? Why didn’t you knock?”

But she was looking at him closely, her eyes widening, clearing slowly with the perception of his face; he could almost see each line of his face being imprinted, reflected upon hers; and suddenly she smiled, a wide, swift, irresistible smile that seemed to click like a windshield wiper and sweep everything else, the anger, the doubt, the wonder, off her face. He could not decide whether she was attractive or not; somehow, one couldn’t be aware of her face, but only of its expressions: changing, snapping, jerking expressions, like projections of a jolting film that unrolled somewhere beyond the muscles of her face. He noticed a wide mouth, a short, impertinent nose turned up, dark, greenish eyes. There was a certain quality for which he looked unconsciously upon every face that passed him; a quality of awareness, of will, of purpose, a quality hard and precise; lacking it, the faces passed him unnoticed; with its presence—and he found it rarely—they stopped his eyes for a brief, curious moment of wonder. He saw it now, undefinable and unmistakable, upon her face; he liked that face, coldly, impersonally, almost indifferently; but sharply and quite personally, he liked the thing in her voice which he had heard before he entered.

“I’m sorry you heard me,” she said, smiling, still with a hard little tone of reproach in her voice. “I don’t want anyone to hear that. . . . But then, it’s you,” she added. “So I guess it’s all right.”

“Why?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Do you?”

“Yes, I think so. It is all right. What were you reciting?”

“Joan d’Arc. It’s from an old German play I found. It’s of no interest to you or anyone.”

“Where are you going to do it?”

“I’m not doing it anywhere—yet. It’s never been produced here. What I’m doing is the part of Polly Mae—five sides—in
You’re Telling Me
at the Majestic. Opens February the nineteenth. Don’t come. I won’t give you any passes and I don’t want you to see it.”

“I don’t want to see it. But I want to know how you got here.”

“Oh. . . .” She laughed, suddenly at ease. “Well, sit down. . . . Oh, it’s really you who should invite me to sit down.” With which she was sitting on the edge of his table, her shoulders hunched, her legs flung out, sloppily contorted, one foot twisted, pointing in, and grotesquely graceful. “Don’t worry,” she said, “I haven’t touched anything here. It’s on account of Helen. She’s my roommate. I have nothing against her, except the eight-hour working day.”

“What?”

“I mean she’s got to be home at five. I wish someone’d exploit her good and hard for a change, but no, she gets off every single evening. She’s secretary to a warehouse around here. You have a marvelous room. Sloppy, but look at the space! You can’t appreciate what it means to live in a clothes closet—or have you seen the other rooms in this house? Anyway, mine’s on the fifth floor, just below you. And when I want to rehearse in the evenings, with Helen down there, I have to do it on the stairs. You see?”

“No.”

“Well, go out and see how cold it is on the stairs today. And I saw your door half open. So I couldn’t resist it. And then, it was too grand a chance up here to waste it on Polly Mae. Did you ever notice what space will do to your voice? I guess I forgot that someone would come here eventually. . . . My name’s Vesta Dunning. Yours is Howard Roark—it’s plastered here all over the place—you have a funny handwriting—and you’re an architect.”

“So you haven’t touched anything here?”

“Oh, I just looked at the drawings. There’s one—it’s crazy, but it’s marvelous!” She was up and across the room in a streak, and she stopped, as if she had applied brakes at full speed, at the shelf he had built for his drawings. She always stopped in jerks, as if the momentum of her every movement would carry her on forever and it took a conscious effort to end it. She had the inertia of motion; only stillness seemed to require the impulse of energy.

“This one,” she said, picking out a sketch. “What on earth ever gave you an idea like that? When I’m a famous actress, I’ll hire you to build this for me.”

He was standing beside her; she felt his sleeve against her arm as he took the sketch from her, looked at it, put it back on the shelf.

“When you’re a famous actress,” he said, “you won’t want a house like that.”

“Why?” she asked. “Oh, you mean because of Polly Mae, don’t you?” Her voice was hard. “You’re a strange person. I didn’t think anyone would understand it like that, like I do. . . . But you’ve heard the other also.”

“Yes,” he said, looking at her.

“You’ve heard it. You know. You know what it will mean when I’m a famous actress.”

“Do you think your public will like it?”

“What?”

“Joan d’Arc.”

“I don’t care if they don’t. I’ll make them like it. I don’t want to give them what they ask for. I want to make them ask for what I want to give. What are you laughing at?”

“Nothing. I’m not laughing. Go on.”

“I know, you think it’s cheap and shabby, acting and all that. I do too. But not what I’m going to make of it. I don’t want to be a star with a permanent wave. I’m not good-looking anyway. That’s not what I’m after. I hate her—Polly Mae. But I’m not afraid of her. I’ve got to use her to go where I’m going. And where I’m going—it’s to the murder of Polly Mae. The end of her in all the minds that have been told to like her. Just to show them what else is possible, what can exist, but doesn’t, but will exist through me, to make it real when God failed to . . . Look, I’ve never spoken of it to anyone, why am I telling it to you? . . . Well, I don’t care if you hear this also, whether you understand it or not, and I think you understand, but what I want is . . .”

“. . . the weapon of that certainty I carry, unchangeable, untouched and unshared.”

“Don’t!” she screamed furiously. “Oh,” she said softly, “how did you remember it? You liked it, didn’t you?” She stood close to him, her face hard. “Didn’t you?”

“Yes,” he said. She was smiling. “Don’t be pleased,” he added. “It probably means that no one else will.”

She shrugged. “To hell with that.”

“How old are you?”

“Eighteen. Why?”

“Don’t people always ask you that when you speak of something that’s important to you? They always ask me.”

“Have you noticed that? What is it that happens to them when they grow older?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe we’ll never know, you and I.”

“Maybe.”

She saw a package of cigarettes in his coat pocket, extended her hand for it, took it out, calmly offered it to him, and took one for herself. She stood smoking, looking at him through the smoke.

“Do you know,” she said, “you’re terribly good-looking.”

“What?” He laughed. “It’s the first time I’ve ever heard that.”

“Well, you really aren’t. Only I like to look at your face. It’s so . . . untouchable. It makes me want to see you break down.”

“Well, you’re honest.”

“So are you. And terribly conceited.”

“Probably. Call it that. Why?”

“Because you didn’t seem to notice that I paid you a compliment.”

She was smiling at him openly, unconcerned and impersonal. There was no invitation, no coquetry in her face, only a cool, wondering interest. But, somehow, it was not the same face that had spoken of Joan d’Arc, and he frowned, remembering that he was tired.

“Don’t pay me any compliments,” he said, “if you want to come here again.”

“May I come here again?” she asked eagerly.

“Look, here’s what we’ll do. I’ll leave you my key in the mornings—I’d better lock the room from now on, I don’t want anyone else studying my handwriting around here—I’ll slip the key under your door. You can rehearse here all day long, but try to get out by seven. I don’t want visitors when I get home. Drop the key in my mailbox.”

She looked at him, her eyes radiant.

“It’s the nastiest way I’ve ever heard anyone offering the nicest thing,” she said. “All right, I won’t bother you again. But leave the key. It’s the third door down the hall, to the right.”

“You’ll have it tomorrow. Now run along. I have work to do.”