The Fountainhead (34 page)

It was only when Toohey had risen to escort Keating to the door—and Keating noted how precariously erect he stood on his very small feet—that Toohey paused suddenly to say:

“Incidentally, it seems to me as if I should remember some personal connection between us, though for the life of me I can’t quite place ... oh, yes, of course. My niece. Little Catherine.”

Keating felt his face tighten, and knew he must not allow this to be discussed, but smiled awkwardly instead of protesting.

“I understand you’re engaged to her?”

“Yes.”

“Charming,” said Toohey. “Very charming. Should enjoy being your uncle. You love her very much?”

“Yes,” said Keating. “Very much.”

The absence of stress in his voice made the answer solemn. It was, laid before Toohey, the first bit of sincerity and of importance within Keating’s being.

“How pretty,” said Toohey. “Young love. Spring and dawn and heaven and drugstore chocolates at a dollar and a quarter a box. The prerogative of the gods and of the movies.... Oh, I do approve, Peter. I think it’s lovely. You couldn’t have made a better choice than Catherine. She’s just the kind for whom the world is well lost—the world with all its problems and all its opportunities for greatness—oh, yes, well lost because she’s innocent and sweet and pretty and anemic.”

“If you’re going to ...” Keating began, but Toohey smiled with a luminous sort of kindliness.

“Oh, Peter, of course I understand. And I approve. I’m a realist. Man has always insisted on making an ass of himself. Oh, come now, we must never lose our sense of humor. Nothing’s really sacred but a sense of humor. Still, I’ve always loved the tale of Tristan and Isolde. It’s the most beautiful story ever told—next to that of Mickey and Minnie Mouse.”

IV

“... T
OOTHBRUSH IN THE JAW TOOTHBRUSH BRUSH BRUSH tooth jaw foam dome in the foam Roman dome come home home in the jaw Rome dome tooth toothbrush toothpick pickpocket socket rocket ...”

Peter Keating squinted his eyes, his glance unfocused as for a great distance, but put the book down. The book was thin and black, with scarlet letters forming:
Clouds and Shrouds by Lois Cook.
The jacket said that it was a record of Miss Cook’s travels around the world.

Keating leaned back with a sense of warmth and well-being. He liked this book. It had made the routine of his Sunday morning breakfast a profound spiritual experience; he was certain that it was profound, because he didn’t understand it.

Peter Keating had never felt the need to formulate abstract convictions. But he had a working substitute. “A thing is not high if one can reach it; it is not great if one can reason about it; it is not deep if one can see its bottom”—this had always been his credo, unstated and unquestioned. This spared him any attempt to reach, reason or see; and it cast a nice reflection of scorn on those who made the attempt. So he was able to enjoy the work of Lois Cook. He felt uplifted by the knowledge of his own capacity to respond to the abstract, the profound, the ideal. Toohey had said: “That’s just it, sound as sound, the poetry of words as words, style as a revolt against style. But only the finest spirit can appreciate it, Peter.” Keating thought he could talk of this book to his friends, and if they did not understand he would know that he was superior to them. He would not need to explain that superiority—that’s just it, “superiority as superiority”—automatically denied to those who asked for explanations. He loved the book.

He reached for another piece of toast. He saw, at the end of the table, left there for him by his mother, the heavy pile of the Sunday paper. He picked it up, feeling strong enough, in this moment, in the confidence of his secret spiritual grandeur, to face the whole world contained in that pile. He pulled out the rotogravure section. He stopped. He saw the reproduction of a drawing: the Enright House by Howard Roark.

He did not need to see the caption or the brusque signature in the comer of the sketch; he knew that no one else had conceived that house and he knew the manner of drawing, serene and violent at once, the pencil lines like high-tension wires on the paper, slender and innocent to see, but not to be touched. It was a structure on a broad space by the East River. He did not grasp it as a building, at first glance, but as a rising mass of rock crystal. There was the same severe, mathematical order holding together a free, fantastic growth; straight lines and clean angles, space slashed with a knife, yet in a harmony of formation as delicate as the work of a jeweler; an incredible variety of shapes, each separate unit unrepeated, but leading inevitably to the next one and to the whole; so that the future inhabitants were to have, not a square cage out of a square pile of cages, but each a single house held to the other houses like a single crystal to the side of a rock.

Keating looked at the sketch. He had known for a long time that Howard Roark had been chosen to build the Enright House. He had seen a few mentions of Roark’s name in the papers; not much, all of it to be summed up only as “some young architect chosen by Mr. Enright for some reason, probably an interesting young architect.” The caption under the drawing announced that the construction of the project was to begin at once. Well, thought Keating, and dropped the paper, so what? The paper fell beside the black and scarlet book. He looked at both. He felt dimly as if Lois Cook were his defense against Howard Roark.

“What’s that, Petey?” his mother’s voice asked behind him.

He handed the paper to her over his shoulder. The paper fell past him back to the table in a second.

“Oh,” shrugged Mrs. Keating. “Huh ...”

She stood beside him. Her trim silk dress was fitted too tightly, revealing the solid rigidity of her corset; a small pin glittered at her throat, small enough to display ostentatiously that it was made of real diamonds. She was like the new apartment into which they had moved: conspicuously expensive. The apartment’s decoration had been Keating’s first professional job for himself. It had been furnished in fresh, new mid-Victorian. It was conservative and stately. Over the fireplace in the drawing room hung a large old painting of what was not but looked like an illustrious ancestor.

“Petey sweetheart, I do hate to rush you on a Sunday morning, but isn’t it time to dress up? I’ve got to run now and I’d hate you to forget the time and be late, it’s so nice of Mr. Toohey asking you to his house!”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Any famous guests coming too?”

“No. No guests. But there will be one other person there. Not famous.” She looked at him expectantly. He added: “Katie will be there.”

The name seemed to have no effect on her whatever. A strange assurance had coated her lately, like a layer of fat through which that particular question could penetrate no longer.

“Just a family tea,” he emphasized. “That’s what he said.”

“Very nice of him. I’m sure Mr. Toohey is a very intelligent man.”

“Yes, Mother.”

He rose impatiently and went to his room.

It was Keating’s first visit to the distinguished residential hotel where Catherine and her uncle had moved recently. He did not notice much about the apartment, beyond remembering that it was simple, very clean and smartly modest, that it contained a great number of books and very few pictures, but these authentic and precious. One never remembered the apartment of Ellsworth Toohey, only its host. The host, on this Sunday afternoon, wore a dark gray suit, correct as a uniform, and bedroom slippers of black patent leather trimmed with red; the slippers mocked the severe elegance of the suit, yet completed the elegance as an audacious anti-climax. He sat in a broad, low chair and his face wore an expression of cautious gentleness, so cautious that Keating and Catherine felt, at times, as if they were insignificant soap bubbles.

Keating did not like the way Catherine sat on the edge of a chair, hunched, her legs drawn awkwardly together. He wished she would not wear the same suit for the third season, but she did. She kept her eyes on one point somewhere in the middle of the carpet. She seldom looked at Keating. She never looked at her uncle. Keating found no trace of that joyous admiration with which she had always spoken of Toohey, which he had expected to see her display in his presence. There was something heavy and colorless about Catherine, and very tired.

Toohey’s valet brought in the tea tray.

“You will pour, won’t you please, my dear?” said Toohey to Catherine. “Ah, there’s nothing like tea in the afternoon. When the British Empire collapses, historians will find that it had made but two invaluable contributions to civilization—this tea ritual and the detective novel. Catherine, my dear, do you have to grasp that pot handle as if it were a meat axe? But never mind, it’s charming, it’s really what we love you for, Peter and I, we wouldn’t love you if you were graceful as a duchess -who wants a duchess nowadays?”

Catherine poured the tea and spilled it on the glass table top, which she had never done before.

“I did want to see you two together for once,” said Toohey, holding a delicate cup balanced nonchalantly. “Perfectly silly of me, isn’t it? There’s really nothing to make an occasion of, but then I’m silly and sentimental at times, like all of us. My compliments on your choice, Catherine. I owe you an apology, I never suspected you of such good taste. You and Peter make a wonderful couple. You’ll do a great deal for him. You’ll cook his Cream of Wheat, launder his handkerchiefs and bear his children, though of course the children will all have measles at one time or another, which is a nuisance.”

“But, after all, you ... you do approve of it?” Keating asked anxiously.

“Approve of it? Of what, Peter?”

“Of our marriage ... eventually.”

“What a superfluous question, Peter! Of course, I approve of it. But how young you are! That’s the way of young people—they make an issue where none exists. You asked that as if the whole thing were important enough to disapprove of.”

“Katie and I met seven years ago,” said Keating defensively.

“And it was love at first sight of course!”

“Yes,” said Keating and felt himself being ridiculous.

“It must have been spring,” said Toohey. “It usually is. There’s always a dark movie theater, and two people lost to the world, their hands clasped together—but hands do perspire when held too long, don’t they? Still, it’s beautiful to be in love. The sweetest story ever told—and the tritest. Don’t turn away like that, Catherine. We must never allow ourselves to lose our sense of humor.”

He smiled. The kindliness of his smile embraced them both. The kindliness was so great that it made their love seem small and mean, because only something contemptible could evoke such immensity of compassion. He asked:

“Incidentally, Peter, when do you intend to get married?”

“Oh, well ... we’ve never really set a definite date, you know how it’s been, all the things happening to me and now Katie has this work of hers and ... And, by the way,” he added sharply, because that matter of Katie’s work irritated him without reason, “when we’re married, Katie will have to give that up. I don’t approve of it.”

“But of course,” said Toohey, “I don’t approve of it either, if Catherine doesn’t like it.”

Catherine was working as day nursery attendant at the Clifford Settlement House. It had been her own idea. She had visited the settlement often with her uncle, who conducted classes in economics there, and she had become interested in the work.

“But I do like it!” she said with sudden excitement. “I don’t see why you resent it, Peter!” There was a harsh little note in her voice, defiant and unpleasant. “I’ve never enjoyed anything so much in my life. Helping people who’re helpless and unhappy. I went there this morning—I didn’t
have
to, but I
wanted
to—and then I rushed so on my way home, I didn’t have time to change my clothes, but that doesn’t matter, who cares what I look like? And”—the harsh note was gone, she was speaking eagerly and very fast—“Uncle Ellsworth, imagine! little Billy Hansen had a sore throat—you remember Billy? And the nurse wasn’t there, and I had to swab his throat with Argyrol, the poor thing! He had the most awful white mucous patches down in his throat!”

Her voice seemed to shine, as if she were speaking of great beauty. She looked at her uncle. For the first time Keating saw the affection he had expected. She went on speaking about her work, the children, the settlement. Toohey listened gravely. He said nothing. But the earnest attention in his eyes changed him, his mocking gaiety vanished and he forgot his own advice, he was being serious, very serious indeed. When he noticed that Catherine’s plate was empty, he offered her the sandwich tray with a simple gesture and made it, somehow, a gracious gesture of respect.

Keating waited impatiently till she paused for an instant. He wanted to change the subject. He glanced about the room and saw the Sunday papers. This was a question he had wanted to ask for a long time. He asked cautiously:

“Ellsworth ... what do you think of Roark?”

“Roark? Roark?” asked Toohey. “Who is Roark?”

The too innocent, too trifling manner in which he repeated the name, with the faint, contemptuous question mark quite audible at the end, made Keating certain that Toohey knew the name well. One did not stress total ignorance of a subject if one were in total ignorance of it. Keating said:

“Howard Roark. You know, the architect. The one who’s doing the Enright House.”

“Oh? Oh, yes, someone’s doing that Enright House at last, isn’t he?”

“There’s a picture of it in the
Chronicle
today.”

“Is there? I did glance through the
Chronicle.”

“And ... what do you think of that building?”

“If it were important, I should have remembered it.”

“Of course!” Keating’s syllables danced, as if his breath caught at each one in passing: “It’s an awful, crazy thing! Like nothing you ever saw or want to see!”

He felt a sense of deliverance. It was as if he had spent his life believing that he carried a congenital disease, and suddenly the words of the greatest specialist on earth had pronounced him healthy. He wanted to laugh, freely, stupidly, without dignity. He wanted to talk.

“Howard’s a friend of mine,” he said happily.

“A friend of yours? You know him?”

“Do I know him! Why we went to school together—Stanton, you know—why, he lived at our house for three years, I can tell you the color of his underwear and how he takes a shower—I’ve seen him!”

“He lived at your house in Stanton?” Toohey repeated. Toohey spoke with a kind of cautious precision. The sounds of his voice were small and dry and final, like the cracks of matches being broken.

It was very peculiar, thought Keating. Toohey was asking him a great many questions about Howard Roark. But the questions did not make sense. They were not about buildings, they were not about architecture at all. They were pointless personal questions—strange to ask about a man of whom he had never heard before.

“Does he laugh often?”

“Very rarely.”

“Does he seem unhappy?”

“Never.”

“Did he have many friends at Stanton?”

“He’s never had any friends anywhere.”

“The boys didn’t like him?”

“Nobody can like him.”

“Why?”

“He makes you feel it would be an impertinence to like him.”

“Did he go out, drink, have a good time?”

“Never.”

“Does he like money?”

“No.”

“Does he like to be admired?”

“No.”

“Does he believe in God?”

“No.”

“Does he talk much?”

“Very little.”

“Does he listen if others discuss any ... idea with him?”

“He listens. It would be better if he didn’t.”

“Why?”

“It would be less insulting—if you know what I mean, when a man listens like that and you know it hasn’t made the slightest bit of difference to him.”