The Fountainhead (35 page)

“Did he always want to be an architect?”

“He..,”

“What’s the matter, Peter?”

“Nothing. It just occurred to me how strange it is that I’ve never asked myself that about him before. Here’s what’s strange: you can’t ask that about him. He’s a maniac on the subject of architecture. It seems to mean so damn much to him that he’s lost all human perspective. He just has no sense of humor about himself at all—now there’s a man without a sense of humor, Ellsworth. You don’t ask what he’d do if he didn’t want to be an architect.”

“No,” said Toohey. “You ask what he’d do if he couldn’t be an architect.”

“He’d walk over corpses. Any and all of them. All of us. But he’d be an architect.”

Toohey folded his napkin, a crisp little square of cloth on his knee; he folded it accurately, once across each way, and he ran his fingernail along the edges to make a sharp crease.

“Do you remember our little youth group of architects, Peter?” he asked. “I’m making arrangements for a first meeting soon. I’ve spoken to many of our future members and you’d be flattered by what they said about you as our prospective chairman.”

They talked pleasantly for another half hour. When Keating rose to go, Toohey declared:

“Oh, yes. I did speak to Lois Cook about you. You’ll hear from her shortly.”

“Thank you so much, Ellsworth. By the way, I’m reading Clouds and Shrouds.”

“And?”

“Oh, it’s tremendous. You know, Ellsworth, it ... it makes you think so differently about everything you’ve thought before.”

“Yes,” said Toohey, “doesn’t it?”

He stood at the window, looking out at the last sunshine of a cold, bright afternoon. Then he turned and said:

“It’s a lovely day. Probably one of the last this year. Why don’t you take Catherine out for a little walk, Peter?”

“Oh, I’d love to!” said Catherine eagerly.

“Well, go ahead.” Toohey smiled gaily. “What’s the matter, Catherine? Do you have to wait for my permission?”

When they walked out together, when they were alone in the cold brilliance of streets flooded with late sunlight, Keating felt himself recapturing everything Catherine had always meant to him, the strange emotion that he could not keep in the presence of others. He closed his hand over hers. She withdrew her hand, took off her glove and slipped her fingers into his. And then he thought suddenly that hands did perspire when held too long, and he walked faster in irritation. He thought that they were walking there like Mickey and Minnie Mouse and that they probably appeared ridiculous to the passers-by. To shake himself free of these thoughts he glanced down at her face. She was looking straight ahead at the gold light, he saw her delicate profile and the faint crease of a smile in the corner of her mouth, a smile of quiet happiness. But he noticed that the edge of her eyelid was pale and he began to wonder whether she was anemic.

Lois Cook sat on the floor in the middle of her living room, her legs crossed Turkish fashion, showing large bare knees, gray stockings rolled over tight garters, and a piece of faded pink drawers. Peter Keating sat on the edge of a violet satin chaise longue. Never before had he felt uncomfortable at a first interview with a client.

Lois Cook was thirty-seven. She had stated insistently, in her publicity and in private conversation, that she was sixty-four. It was repeated as a whimsical joke and it created about her name a vague impression of eternal youth. She was tall, dry, narrow-shouldered and broad-hipped. She had a long, sallow face, and eyes set close together. Her hair hung about her ears in greasy strands. Her fingernails were broken. She looked offensively unkempt, with studied slovenliness as careful as grooming—and for the same purpose.

She talked incessantly, rocking back and forth on her haunches:

“... yes, on the Bowery. A private residence. The shrine on the Bowery. I have the site, I wanted it and I bought it, as simple as that, or my fool lawyer bought it for me, you must meet my lawyer, he has halitosis. I don’t know what you’ll cost me, but it’s unessential, money is commonplace. Cabbage is commonplace too. It must have three stories and a living room with a tile floor.”

“Miss Cook, I’ve read
Clouds and Shrouds
and it was a spiritual revelation to me. Allow me to include myself among the few who understand the courage and significance of what you’re achieving singlehanded while ...”

“Oh, can the crap,” said Lois Cook and winked at him.

“But I mean it!” he snapped angrily. “I loved your book. I ...”

She looked bored.

“It is so commonplace,” she drawled, “to be understood by everybody.”

“But Mr. Toohey said ...”

“Ah, yes. Mr. Toohey.” Her eyes were alert now, insolently guilty, like the eyes of a child who has just perpetrated some nasty little joke. “Mr. Toohey. I’m chairman of a little youth group of writers in which Mr. Toohey is very interested.”

“You are?” he said happily. It seemed to be the first direct communication between them. “Isn’t that interesting! Mr. Toohey is getting together a little youth group of architects, too, and he’s kind enough to have me in mind for chairman.”

“Oh,” she said and winked. “One of us?”

“Of whom?”

He did not know what he had done, but he knew that he had disappointed her in some way. She began to laugh. She sat there, looking up at him, laughing deliberately in his face, laughing ungraciously and not gaily.

“What the ... !” He controlled himself. “What’s the matter, Miss Cook?”

“Oh my!” she said. “You’re such a sweet, sweet boy and so pretty!”

“Mr. Toohey is a great man,” he said angrily. “He’s the most ... the noblest personality I’ve ever ...”

“Oh, yes. Mr. Toohey is a wonderful man.” Her voice was strange by omission, it was flagrantly devoid of respect. “My best friend. The most wonderful man on earth. There’s the earth and there’s Mr. Toohey—a law of nature. Besides, think how nicely you can rhyme it: Toohey—gooey—phooey—hooey. Nevertheless, he’s a saint. That’s very rare. As rare as genius. I’m a genius. I want a living room without windows. No windows at all, remember that when you draw up the plans. No windows, a tile floor and a black ceiling. And no electricity. I want no electricity in my house, just kerosene lamps. Kerosene lamps with chimneys, and candles. To hell with Thomas Edison! Who was he anyway?”

Her words did not disturb him as much as her smile. It was not a smile, it was a permanent smirk raising the corners of her long mouth, making her look like a sly, vicious imp.

“And, Keating, I want the house to be
ugly.
Magnificently ugly. I want it to be the ugliest house in New York.”

“The ...
ugliest,
Miss Cook?”

“Sweetheart, the beautiful is so commonplace!”

“Yes, but ... but I ... well, I don’t see how I could permit myself to ...”

“Keating, where’s your courage? Aren’t you capable of a sublime gesture on occasion? They all work so hard and struggle and suffer, trying to achieve beauty, trying to surpass one another in beauty. Let’s surpass them all! Let’s throw their sweat in their face. Let’s destroy them at one stroke. Let’s be gods. Let’s be ugly.”

He accepted the commission. After a few weeks he stopped feeling uneasy about it. Wherever he mentioned this new job, he met a respectful curiosity. It was an amused curiosity, but it was respectful. The name of Lois Cook was well known in the best drawing rooms he visited. The titles of her books were flashed in conversation like the diamonds in the speaker’s intellectual crown. There was always a note of challenge in the voices pronouncing them. It sounded as if the speaker were being very brave. It was a satisfying bravery; it never aroused antagonism. For an author who did not sell, her name seemed strangely famous and honored. She was the standard-bearer of a vanguard of intellect and revolt. Only it was not quite clear to him just exactly what the revolt was against. Somehow, he preferred not to know.

He designed the house as she wished it. It was a three-floor edifice, part marble, part stucco, adorned with gargoyles and carriage lanterns. It looked like a structure from an amusement park.

His sketch of it was reproduced in more publications than any other drawing he had ever made, with the exception of the Cosmo-Slotnick Building. One commentator expressed the opinion that “Peter Keating is showing a promise of being more than just a bright young man with a knack for pleasing stuffy moguls of big business. He is venturing into the field of intellectual experimentation with a client such as Lois Cook.” Toohey referred to the house as “a cosmic joke.”

But a peculiar sensation remained in Keating’s mind: the feeling of an aftertaste. He would experience a dim flash of it while working on some important structure he liked; he would experience it in the moments when he felt proud of his work. He could not identify the quality of the feeling; but he knew that part of it was a sense of shame.

Once, he confessed it to Ellsworth Toohey. Toohey laughed. “That’s good for you, Peter. One must never allow oneself to acquire an exaggerated sense of one’s own importance. There’s no necessity to burden oneself with absolutes.”

V

D
OMINIQUE HAD RETURNED TO NEW YORK. SHE RETURNED WITHOUT purpose, merely because she could not stay in her country house longer than three days after her last visit to the quarry. She had to be in the city; it was a sudden necessity, irresistible and senseless. She expected nothing of the city. But she wanted the feeling of the streets and the buildings holding her there. In the morning, when she awakened and heard the muffled roar of traffic far below, the sound was a humiliation, a reminder of where she was and why. She stood at the window, her arms spread wide, holding on to each side of the frame; it was as if she held a piece of the city, all the streets and rooftops outlined on the glass between her two hands.

She went out alone for long walks. She walked fast, her hands in the pockets of an old coat, its collar raised. She had told herself that she was not hoping to meet him. She was not looking for him. But she had to be out in the streets, blank, purposeless, for hours at a time.

She had always hated the streets of a city. She saw the faces streaming past her, the faces made alike by fear—fear as a common denominator, fear of themselves, fear of all and of one another, fear making them ready to pounce upon whatever was held sacred by any single one they met. She could not define the nature or the reason of that fear. But she had always felt its presence. She had kept herself clean and free in a single passion—to touch nothing. She had liked facing them in the streets, she had liked the impotence of their hatred, because she offered them nothing to be hurt.

She was not free any longer. Each step through the streets hurt her now. She was tied to him—and he was tied to every part of the city. He was a nameless worker doing some nameless job, lost in these crowds, dependent on them, to be hurt by any one of them, to be shared by her with the whole city. She hated the thought of him on the sidewalks people had used. She hated the thought of a clerk handing to him a package of cigarettes across a counter. She hated the elbows touching his elbows in a subway train. She came home, after these walks, shaking with fever. She went out again the next day.

When the term of her vacation expired, she went to the office of the Banner in order to resign. Her work and her column did not seem amusing to her any longer. She stopped Alvah Scarret’s effusive greetings. She said: “I just came back to tell you that I’m quitting, Alvah.” He looked at her stupidly. He uttered only: “Why?”

It was the first sound from the outside world to reach her in a long time. She had always acted on the impulse of the moment, proud of the freedom to need no reasons for her actions. Now she had to face a “why?” that carried an answer she could not escape. She thought: Because of him, because she was letting him change the course of her life. It would be another violation; she could see him smiling as he had smiled on the path in the woods. She had no choice. Either course taken would be taken under compulsion: she could leave her work, because he had made her want to leave it, or she could remain, hating it, in order to keep her life unchanged, in defiance of him. The last was harder.

She raised her head. She said: “Just a joke, Alvah. Just wanted to see what you’d say. I’m not quitting.”

She had been back at work for a few days when Ellsworth Toohey walked into her office.

“Hello, Dominique,” he said. “Just heard you’re back.”

“Hello, Ellsworth.”

“I’m glad. You know, I’ve always had the feeling that you’ll walk out on us some morning without any reason.”

“The feeling, Ellsworth? Or the hope?”

He was looking at her, his eyes as kindly, his smile as charming as ever; but there was a tinge of self-mockery in the charm, as if he knew that she did not approve of it, and a tinge of assurance, as if he were showing that he would look kindly and charming just the same.

“You know, you’re wrong there,” he said, smiling peacefully. “You’ve always been wrong about that.”

“No. I don’t fit, Ellsworth. Do I?”

“I could, of course, ask: Into what? But supposing I don’t ask it. Supposing I just say that people who don’t fit have their uses also, as well as those who do? Would you like that better? Of course, the simplest thing to say is that I’ve always been a great admirer of yours and always will be.”

“That’s not a compliment.”

“Somehow, I don’t think we’ll ever be enemies, Dominique, if that’s what you’d like.”

“No, I don’t think we’ll ever be enemies, Ellsworth. You’re the most comforting person I know.”

“Of course.”

“In the sense I mean?”

“In any sense you wish.”

On the desk before her lay the rotogravure section of the Sunday
Chronicle.
It was folded on the page that bore the drawing of the Enright House. She picked it up and held it out to him, her eyes narrowed in a silent question. He looked at the drawing, then his glance moved to her face and returned to the drawing. He let the paper drop back on the desk.

“As independent as an insult, isn’t it?” he said.

“You know, Ellsworth, I think the man who designed this should have committed suicide. A man who can conceive a thing as beautiful as this should never allow it to be erected. He should not want it to exist. But he will let it be built, so that women will hang diapers on his terraces, so that men will spit on his stairways and draw dirty pictures on his walls. He’s given it to them and he’s made it part of them, part of everything. He shouldn’t have offered it for men like you to look at. For men like you to talk about. He’s defiled his own work by the first word you’ll utter about it. He’s made himself worse than you are. You’ll be committing only a mean little indecency, but he’s committed a sacrilege. A man who knows what he must have known to produce this should not have been able to remain alive.”

“Going to write a piece about this?” he asked.

“No. That would be repeating his crime.”

“And talking to me about it?”

She looked at him. He was smiling pleasantly.

“Yes of course,” she said, “that’s part of the same crime also.”

“Let’s have dinner together one of these days, Dominique,” he said. “You really don’t let me see enough of you.”

“All right,” she said. “Any time you wish.”

At his trial for the assault on Ellsworth Toohey, Steven Mallory refused to disclose his motive. He made no statement. He seemed indifferent to any possible sentence. But Ellsworth Toohey created a minor sensation when he appeared, unsolicited, in Mallory’s defense. He pleaded with the judge for leniency; he explained that he had no desire to see Mallory’s future and career destroyed. Everybody in the courtroom was touched—except Steven Mallory. Steven Mallory listened and looked as if he were enduring some special process of cruelty. The judge gave him two years and suspended the sentence.

There was a great deal of comment on Toohey’s extraordinary generosity. Toohey dismissed all praise, gaily and modestly. “My friends,” was his remark—the one to appear in all the papers—“I refuse to be an accomplice in the manufacturing of martyrs.”

At the first meeting of the proposed organization of young architects Keating concluded that Toohey had a wonderful ability for choosing people who fitted well together. There was an air about the eighteen persons present which he could not define, but which gave him a sense of comfort, a security he had not experienced in solitude or in any other gathering; and part of the comfort was the knowledge that all the others felt the same way for the same unaccountable reason. It was a feeling of brotherhood, but somehow not of a sainted or noble brotherhood; yet this precisely was the comfort—that one felt, among them, no necessity for being sainted or noble.

Were it not for this kinship, Keating would have been disappointed in the gathering. Of the eighteen seated about Toohey’s living room, none was an architect of distinction, except himself and Gordon L. Prescott, who wore a beige turtle-neck sweater and looked faintly patronizing, but eager. Keating had never heard the names of the others. Most of them were beginners, young, poorly dressed and belligerent. Some were only draftsmen. There was one woman architect who had built a few small private homes, mainly for wealthy widows; she had an aggressive manner, a tight mouth and a fresh petunia in her hair. There was a boy with pure, innocent eyes. There was an obscure contractor with a fat, expressionless face. There was a tall, dry woman who was an interior decorator, and another woman of no definite occupation at all.

Keating could not understand what exactly was to be the purpose of the group, though there was a great deal of talk. None of the talk was too coherent, but all of it seemed to have the same undercurrent. He felt that the undercurrent was the one thing clear among all the vague generalities, even though nobody would mention it. It held him there, as it held the others, and he had no desire to define it.

The young men talked a great deal about injustice, unfairness, the cruelty of society toward youth, and suggested that everyone should have his future commissions guaranteed when he left college. The woman architect shrieked briefly something about the iniquity of the rich. The contractor barked that it was a hard world and that “fellows gotta help one another.” The boy with the innocent eyes pleaded that “we could do so much good ...” His voice had a note of desperate sincerity which seemed embarrassing and out of place. Gordon L. Prescott declared that the A.G.A. was a bunch of old fogies with no conception of social responsibility and not a drop of virile blood in the lot of them, and that it was time to kick them in the pants anyway. The woman of indefinite occupation spoke about ideals and causes, though nobody could gather just what these were.

Peter Keating was elected chairman, unanimously. Gordon L. Prescott was elected vice-chairman and treasurer. Toohey declined all nominations. He declared that he would act only as an unofficial advisor. It was decided that the organization would be named the “Council of American Builders.” It was decided that membership would not be restricted to architects, but would be open to “allied crafts” and to “all those holding the interests of the great profession of building at heart.”

Then Toohey spoke. He spoke at some length, standing up, leaning on the knuckles of one hand against a table. His great voice was soft and persuasive. It filled the room, but it made his listeners realize that it could have filled a Roman amphitheater; there was something subtly flattering in this realization, in the sound of the powerful voice being held in check for their benefit.

“... and thus, my friends, what the architectural profession lacks is an understanding of its own social importance. This lack is due to a double cause: to the anti-social nature of our entire society and to your own inherent modesty. You have been conditioned to think of yourselves merely as breadwinners with no higher purpose than to earn your fees and the means of your own existence. Isn’t it time, my friends, to pause and to redefine your position in society? Of all the crafts, yours is the most important. Important, not in the amount of money you might make, not in the degree of artistic skill you might exhibit, but in the service you render to your fellow men. You are those who provide mankind’s shelter. Remember this and then look at our cities, at our slums, to realize the gigantic task awaiting you. But to meet this challenge you must be armed with a broader vision of yourselves and of your work. You are not hired lackeys of the rich. You are crusaders in the cause of the underprivileged and the unsheltered. Not by what we are shall we be judged, but by those we serve. Let us stand united in this spirit. Let us—in all matters—be faithful to this new, broader, higher perspective. Let us organize—well, my friends, shall I say—a nobler dream?”

Keating listened avidly. He had always thought of himself as a bread-winner bent upon earning his fees, in a profession he had chosen because his mother had wanted him to choose it. It was gratifying to discover that he was much more than this; that his daily activity carried a nobler significance. It was pleasant and it was drugging. He knew that all the others in the room felt it also.

“... and when our system of society collapses, the craft of builders will not be swept under, it will be swept up to greater prominence and greater recognition ...”

The doorbell rang. Then Toohey’s valet appeared for an instant, holding the door of the living room open to admit Dominique Francon.

By the manner in which Toohey stopped, on a half-uttered word, Keating knew that Dominique had not been invited or expected. She smiled at Toohey, shook her head and moved one hand in a gesture telling him to continue. He managed a faint bow in her direction, barely more than a movement of his eyebrows, and went on with his speech. It was a pleasant greeting and its informality included the guest in the intimate brotherhood of the occasion, but it seemed to Keating that it had come just one beat too late. He had never before seen Toohey miss the right moment.

Dominique sat down in a corner, behind the others. Keating forgot to listen for a while, trying to attract her attention. He had to wait until her eyes had traveled thoughtfully about the room, from face to face, and stopped on his. He bowed and nodded vigorously, with the smile of greeting a private possession. She inclined her head, he saw her lashes touching her cheeks for an instant as her eyes closed, and then she looked at him again. She sat looking at him for a long moment, without smiling, as if she were rediscovering something in his face. He had not seen her since spring. He thought that she looked a little tired and lovelier than his memory of her.

Then he turned to Ellsworth Toohey once more and he listened. The words he heard were as stirring as ever, but his pleasure in them had an edge of uneasiness. He looked at Dominique. She did not belong in this room, at this meeting. He could not say why, but the certainty of it was enormous and oppressive. It was not her beauty, it was not her insolent elegance. But something made her an outsider. It was as if they had all been comfortably naked, and a person had entered fully clothed, suddenly making them self-conscious and indecent. Yet she did nothing. She sat listening attentively. Once, she leaned back, crossing her legs, and lighted a cigarette. She shook the flame off the match with a brusque little jerk of her wrist and she dropped the match into an ash tray on a table beside her. He saw her drop the match into the ash tray; he felt as if that movement of her wrist had tossed the match into all their faces. He thought that he was being preposterous. But he noticed that Ellsworth Toohey never looked at her as he spoke.