The Fountainhead (48 page)

“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.”

“It didn’t, Peter?”

“No. But you don’t like him as a person, do you?”

“No, I don’t like him as a person.”

Ellsworth Toohey was displeased. “It was most unwise of you, Dominique,” he said in the privacy of her office. His voice did not sound smooth.

“I know it was.”

“Can’t you change your mind and refuse?”

“I won’t change my mind, Ellsworth.”

He sat down, and shrugged; after a while he smiled. “All right, my dear, have it your own way.”

She ran a pencil through a line of copy and said nothing.

Toohey lighted a cigarette. “So he’s chosen Steven Mallory for the job,” he said.

“Yes. A funny coincidence, wasn’t it?”

“It’s no coincidence at all, my dear. Things like that are never a coincidence. There’s a basic law behind it. Though I’m sure he doesn’t know it and nobody helped him to choose.”

“I believe you approve?”

“Wholeheartedly. It makes everything just right. Better than ever.”

“Ellsworth, why did Mallory try to kill you?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea. I don’t know. I think Mr. Roark does. Or should. Incidentally, who selected you to pose for that statue? Roark or Mallory?”

“That’s none of your business, Ellsworth.”

“I see. Roark.”

“Incidentally, I’ve told Roark that it was you who made Hopton Stoddard hire him.”

He stopped his cigarette in mid-air; then moved again and placed it in his mouth.

“You did? Why?”

“I saw the drawings of the temple.”

“That good?”

“Better, Ellsworth.”

“What did he say when you told him?”

“Nothing. He laughed.”

“He did? Nice of him. I daresay many people will join him after a while.”

Through the months of that winter Roark seldom slept more than three hours a night. There was a swinging sharpness in his movements, as if his body fed energy to all those around him. The energy ran through the walls of his office to three points of the city: to the Cord Building, in the center of Manhattan, a tower of copper and glass; to the Aquitania Hotel on Central Park South; and to the Temple on a rock over the Hudson, far north on Riverside Drive.

When they had time to meet, Austen Heller watched him, amused and pleased. “When these three are finished, Howard,” he said, “nobody will be able to stop you. Not ever again. I speculate occasionally upon how far you’ll go. You see, I’ve always had a weakness for astronomy.”

On an evening in March Roark stood within the tall enclosure that had been erected around the site of the Temple, according to Stoddard’s orders. The first blocks of stone, the base of future walls, rose above the ground. It was late and the workers had left. The place lay deserted, cut off from the world, dissolved in darkness; but the sky glowed, too luminous for the night below, as if the light had remained past the normal hour, in announcement of the coming spring. A ship’s siren cried out once, somewhere on the river, and the sound seemed to come from a distant countryside, through miles of silence. A light still burned in the wooden shack built as a studio for Steven Mallory, where Dominique posed for him.

The Temple was to be a small building of gray limestone. Its lines were horizontal, not the lines reaching to heaven, but the lines of the earth. It seemed to spread over the ground like arms outstretched at shoulder-height, palms down, in great, silent acceptance. It did not cling to the soil and it did not crouch under the sky. It seemed to lift the earth, and its few vertical shafts pulled the sky down. It was scaled to human height in such a manner that it did not dwarf man, but stood as a setting that made his figure the only absolute, the gauge of perfection by which all dimensions were to be judged. When a man entered this temple, he would feel space molded around him, for him, as if it had waited for his entrance, to be completed. It was a joyous place, with the joy of exaltation that must be quiet. It was a place where one would come to feel sinless and strong, to find the peace of spirit never granted save by one’s own glory.

There was no ornamentation inside, except the graded projections of the walls, and the vast windows. The place was not sealed under vaults, but thrown open to the earth around it, to the trees, the river, the sun—and to the skyline of the city in the distance, the skyscrapers, the shapes of man’s achievement on earth. At the end of the room, facing the entrance, with the city as background, stood the figure of a naked human body.

There was nothing before him now in the darkness except the first stones, but Roark thought of the finished building, feeling it in the joints of his fingers, still remembering the movements of his pencil that had drawn it. He stood thinking of it. Then he walked across the rough, torn earth to the studio shack.

“Just a moment,” said Mallory’s voice when he knocked.

Inside the shack Dominique stepped down from the stand and pulled a robe on. Then Mallory opened the door.

“Oh, it’s you?” he said. “We thought it was the watchman. What are you doing here so late?”

“Good evening, Miss Francon,” said Roark, and she nodded curtly. “Sorry to interrupt, Steve.”

“It’s all right. We haven’t been doing so well. Dominique can’t get quite what I want tonight. Sit down, Howard. What the hell time is it?”

“Nine-thirty. If you’re going to stay longer, want me to have some dinner sent up?”

“I don’t know. Let’s have a cigarette.”

The place had an unpainted wooden floor, bare wooden rafters, a cast-iron stove glowing in a corner. Mallory moved about like a feudal host, with smudges of clay on his forehead. He smoked nervously, pacing up and down.

“Want to get dressed, Dominique?” he asked. “I don’t think we’ll do much more tonight.” She didn’t answer. She stood looking at Roark. Mallory reached the end of the room, whirled around, smiled at Roark: “Why haven’t you ever come in before, Howard? Of course, if I’d been really busy, I’d have thrown you out. What, by the way, are you doing here at this hour?’ ’

“I just wanted to see the place tonight. Couldn’t get here earlier.”

“Is this what you want, Steve?” Dominique asked suddenly. She took her robe off and walked naked to the stand. Mallory looked from her to Roark and back again. Then he saw what he had been struggling to see all day. He saw her body standing before him, straight and tense, her head thrown back, her arms at her sides, palms out, as she had stood for many days; but now her body was alive, so still that it seemed to tremble, saying what he had wanted to hear: a proud, reverent, enraptured surrender to a vision of her own, the right moment, the moment before the figure would sway and break, the moment touched by the reflection of what she saw.

Mallory’s cigarette went flying across the room.

“Hold it, Dominique!” he cried. “Hold it! Hold it!”

He was at his stand before the cigarette hit the ground.

He worked, and Dominique stood without moving, and Roark stood facing her, leaning against the wall.

In April the walls of the Temple rose in broken lines over the ground. On moonlit nights they had a soft, smeared, underwater glow. The tall fence stood on guard around them.

After the day’s work, four people would often remain at the site—Roark, Mallory, Dominique and Mike Donnigan. Mike had not missed employment on a single building of Roark’s.

The four of them sat together in Mallory’s shack, after all the others had left. A wet cloth covered the unfinished statue. The door of the shack stood open to the first warmth of a spring night. A tree branch hung outside, with three new leaves against the black sky, stars trembling like drops of water on the edges of the leaves. There were no chairs in the shack. Mallory stood at the cast-iron stove, fixing hot dogs and coffee. Mike sat on the model’s stand, smoking a pipe. Roark lay stretched out on the floor, propped up on his elbows. Dominique sat on a kitchen stool, a thin silk robe wrapped about her, her bare feet on the planks of the floor.

They did not speak about their work. Mallory told outrageous stories and Dominique laughed like a child. They talked about nothing in particular, sentences that had meaning only in the sound of the voices, in the warm gaiety, in the ease of complete relaxation. They were simply four people who liked being there together. The walls rising in the darkness beyond the open door gave sanction to their rest, gave them the right to lightness, the building on which they had all worked together, the building that was like a low, audible harmony to the sound of their voices. Roark laughed as Dominique had never seen him laugh anywhere else, his mouth loose and young.

They stayed there late into the night. Mallory poured coffee into a mongrel assortment of cracked cups. The odor of coffee met the odor of the new leaves outside.

In May work was stopped on the construction of the Aquitania Hotel.

Two of the owners had been cleaned out in the stock market; a third got his funds attached by a lawsuit over an inheritance disputed by someone; a fourth embezzled somebody else’s shares. The corporation blew up in a tangle of court cases that were to require years of untangling. The building had to wait, unfinished.

“I’ll straighten it out, if I have to murder a few of them,” Kent Lansing told Roark. “I’ll get it out of their hands. We’ll finish it some day, you and 1. But it will take time. Probably a long time. I won’t tell you to be patient. Men like you and me would not survive beyond their first fifteen years if they did not acquire the patience of a Chinese executioner. And the hide of a battleship.”

Ellsworth Toohey laughed, sitting on the edge of Dominique’s desk. “The Unfinished Symphony—thank God,” he said.

Dominique used that in her column. “The Unfinished Symphony on Central Park South,” she wrote. She did not say, “thank God.” The nickname was repeated. Strangers noticed the odd sight of an expensive structure on an important street, left gaping with empty windows, half-covered walls, naked beams; when they asked what it was, people who had never heard of Roark or of the story behind the building, snickered and answered: “Oh, that’s the Unfinished Symphony.”

Late at night Roark would stand across the street, under the trees of the Park, and look at the black, dead shape among the glowing structures of the city’s skyline. His hands would move as they had moved over the clay model; at that distance, a broken projection could be covered by the palm of his hand; but the instinctive completing motion met nothing but air.

He forced himself sometimes to walk through the building. He walked on shivering planks hung over emptiness, through rooms without ceilings and rooms without floors, to the open edges where girders stuck out like bones through a broken skin.

An old watchman lived in a cubbyhole at the back of the ground floor. He knew Roark and let him wander around. Once, he stopped Roark on the way out and said suddenly: “I had a son once—almost. He was born dead.” Something had made him say that, and he looked at Roark, not quite certain of what he had wanted to say. But Roark smiled, his eyes closed, and his hand covered the old man’s shoulder, like a handshake, and then he walked away.

It was only the first few weeks. Then he made himself forget the Aquitania.

On an evening in October Roark and Dominique walked together through the completed Temple. It was to be opened publicly in a week, the day after Stoddard’s return. No one had seen it except those who had worked on its construction.