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Francon’s office with the glittering butterfly reflections. He thought of the

four years when that office had been his own.

He had known what was happening to his firm, in these last years; he had known

it quite well while men in overalls removed the stairway and closed the gap in

the ceiling. But it was that square under the white paint that made it real to

him, and final.

He had resigned himself to the process of going down, long ago. He had not

chosen to resign himself--that would have been a positive decision--it had

merely happened and he had let it happen. It had been simple and almost

painless, like drowsiness carrying one down to nothing more sinister than a

welcome sleep. The dull pain came from wishing to understand why it had

happened.

There was "The March of the Centuries" exposition, but that alone could not have

mattered. "The March of the Centuries" had opened in May. It was a flop. What’s

the use, thought Keating, why not say the right word? Flop. It was a ghastly

flop. "The title of this venture would be most appropriate," Ellsworth Toohey

had written, "if we assumed that the centuries had passed by on horseback."

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Everything else written about the architectural merits of the exposition had

been of the same order.

Keating thought, with wistful bitterness, of how conscientiously they had

worked, he and the seven other architects, designing those buildings. It was

true that he had pushed himself forward and hogged the publicity, but he

certainly had not done that as far as designing was concerned. They had worked

in harmony, through conference after conference, each giving in to the others,

in true collective spirit, none trying to impose his personal prejudices or

selfish ideas. Even Ralston Holcombe had forgotten Renaissance. They had made

the buildings modern, more modem than anything ever seen, more modern than the

show windows of Slottern’s Department Store. He did not think that the buildings

looked like "coils of toothpaste when somebody steps on the tube or stylized

versions of the lower intestine," as one critic had said. But the public seemed

to think it, if the public thought at all. He couldn’t tell. He knew only that

tickets to "The March of the Centuries" were being palmed off at Screeno games

in theaters, and that the sensation of the exposition, the financial savior, was

somebody named Juanita Fay who danced with a live peacock as sole garment.

But what if the Fair did flop? It had not hurt the other architects of its

council. Gordon L. Prescott was going stronger than ever. It wasn’t that,

thought Keating. It had begun before the Fair. He could not say when.

There could be so many explanations. The depression had hit them all; others had

recovered to some extent, Keating & Dumont had not. Something had gone out of

the firm and out of the circles from which it drew its clients, with the

retirement of Guy Francon. Keating realized that there had been art and skill

and its own kind of illogical energy in the career of Guy Francon, even if the

art consisted only of his social charm and the energy was directed at snaring

bewildered millionaires. There had been a twisted sort of sense in people’s

response to Guy Francon.

He could see no hint of rationality in the things to which people responded now.

The leader of the profession--on a mean scale, there was no grand scale left in

anything--was Gordon L. Prescott, Chairman of the Council of American Builders;

Gordon L. Prescott who lectured on the transcendental pragmatism of architecture

and social planning, who put his feet on tables in drawing rooms, attended

formal dinners in knickerbockers and criticized the soup aloud. Society people

said they liked an architect who was a liberal. The A.G.A. still existed, in

stiff, hurt dignity, but people referred to it as the Old Folks’ Home. The

Council of American Builders ruled the profession and talked about a closed

shop, though no one had yet devised a way of achieving that. Whenever an

architect’s name appeared in Ellsworth Toohey’s column, it was always that of

Augustus Webb. At thirty-nine, Keating heard himself described as old-fashioned.

He had given up trying to understand. He knew dimly that the explanation of the

change swallowing the world was of a nature he preferred not to know. In his

youth he had felt an amicable contempt for the works of Guy Francon or Ralston

Holcombe, and emulating them had seemed no more than innocent quackery. But he

knew that Gordon L. Prescott and Gus Webb represented so impertinent, so vicious

a fraud that to suspend the evidence of his eyes was beyond his elastic

capacity. He had believed that people found greatness in Holcombe and there had

been a reasonable satisfaction in borrowing his borrowed greatness. He knew that

no one saw anything whatever in Prescott. He felt something dark and leering in

the manner with which people spoke of Prescott’s genius; as if they were not

doing homage to Prescott, but spitting upon genius. For once, Keating could not

follow people; it was too clear, even to him, that public favor had ceased being

a recognition of merit, that it had become almost a brand of shame.

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He went on, driven by inertia. He could not afford his large floor of offices

and he did not use half the rooms, but he kept them and paid the deficit out of

his own pocket. He had to go on. He had lost a large part of his personal

fortune in careless stock speculation; but he had enough left to insure some

comfort for the rest of his life. This did not disturb him; money had ceased to

hold his attention as a major concern. It was inactivity he dreaded; it was the

question mark looming beyond, if the routine of his work were to be taken away

from him.

He walked slowly, his arms pressed to his body, his shoulders hunched, as if

drawn against a permanent chill. He was gaining weight. His face was swollen; he

kept it down, and the pleat of a second chin was flattened against the knot of

his necktie. A hint of his beauty remained and made him look worse; as if the

lines of his face had been drawn on a blotter and had spread, blurring. The gray

threads on his temples were becoming noticeable. He drank often, without joy.

He had asked his mother to come back to live with him. She had come back. They

sat through long evenings together in the living room, saying nothing; not in

resentment, but seeking reassurance from each other. Mrs. Keating offered no

suggestions, no reproaches. There was, instead, a new, panic-shaped tenderness

in her manner toward her son. She would cook his breakfast, even though they had

a maid; she would prepare his favorite dish--French pancakes, the kind he had

liked so much when he was nine years old and sick with the measles. If he

noticed her efforts and made some comment of pleasure, she nodded, blinking,

turning away, asking herself why it should make her so happy and if it did, why

should her eyes fill with tears.

She would ask suddenly, after a silence: "it will be all right, Petey? Won’t

it?" And he would not ask what she meant, but answer quietly: "Yes, Mother, it

will be all right," putting the last of his capacity for pity into an effort to

make his voice sound convincing.

Once, she asked him: "You’re happy, Petey? Aren’t you?" He looked at her and saw

that she was not laughing at him; her eyes were wide and frightened. And as he

could not answer, she cried: "But you’ve got to be happy! Petey, you’ve got to!

Else what have I lived for?" He wanted to get up, gather her in his arms and

tell her that it was all right--and then he remembered Guy Francon saying to him

on his wedding day: "I want you to feel proud of me, Peter....I want to feel

that it had some meaning." Then he could not move. He felt himself in the

presence of something he must not grasp, must never allow into his mind. He

turned away from his mother.

One evening, she said without preamble. "Petey, I think you should get married.

I think it would be much better if you were married." He found no answer, and

while he groped for something gay to utter, she added: "Petey, why don’t

you...why don’t you marry Catherine Halsey?" He felt anger filling his eyes, he

felt pressure on his swollen lids, while he was turning slowly to his mother;

then he saw her squat little figure before him, stiff and defenseless, with a

kind of desperate pride, offering to take any blow he wished to deliver,

absolving him in advance--and he knew that it had been the bravest gesture she

had ever attempted. The anger went, because he felt her pain more sharply than

the shock of his own, and he lifted one hand, to let it fall limply, to let the

gesture cover everything, saying only: "Mother, don’t let’s ,.."

On weekends, not often, but once or twice a month, he vanished out of town. No

one knew where he went. Mrs. Keating worried about it, but asked no questions.

She suspected that there was a woman somewhere, and not a nice one, or he would

not be so glumly silent on the subject Mrs. Keating found herself hoping that he

had fallen into the clutches of the worst, greediest slut who would have sense

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enough to make him marry her.

He went to a shack he had rented in the hills of an obscure village. He kept

paints, brushes and canvas in the shack. He spent his days in the hills,

painting. He could not tell why he had remembered that unborn ambition of his

youth, which his mother had drained and switched into the channel of

architecture. He could not tell by what process the impulse had become

irresistible; but he had found the shack and tie liked going there.

He could not say that he liked to paint. It was neither pleasure nor relief, it

was self-torture, but somehow, that didn’t matter. He sat on a canvas stool

before a small easel and he looked at an empty sweep of hills, at the woods and

the sky. He had a quiet pain as sole conception of what he wanted to express, a

humble, unbearable tenderness for the sight of the earth around him--and

something tight, paralyzed, as sole means to express it. He went on. He tried.

He looked at his canvases and knew that nothing was captured in their childish

crudeness. It did not matter. No one was to see them. He stacked them carefully

in a corner of the shack, and he locked the door before he returned to town.

There was no pleasure in it, no pride, no solution; only--while he sat alone

before the easel--a sense of peace.

He tried not to think of Ellsworth Toohey. A dim instinct told him that he could

preserve a precarious security of spirit so long as he did not touch upon that

subject. There could be but one explanation of Toohey’s behavior toward him--and

he preferred not to formulate it.

Toohey had drifted away from him. The intervals between their meetings had grown

longer each year. He accepted it and told himself that Toohey was busy. Toohey’s

public silence about him was baffling. He told himself that Toohey had more

important things to write about. Toohey’s criticism of "The March of the

Centuries" had been a blow. He told himself that his work had deserved it. He

accepted any blame. He could afford to doubt himself. He could not afford to

doubt Ellsworth Toohey.

It was Neil Dumont who forced him to think of Toohey again. Neil spoke

petulantly about the state of the world, about crying over spilt milk, change as

a law of existence, adaptability, and the importance of getting in on the ground

floor. Keating gathered, from a long, confused speech, that business, as they

had known it, was finished, that government would take over whether they liked

it or not, that the building trade was dying and the government would soon be

the sole builder and they might as well get in now, if they wanted to get in at

all. "Look at Gordon Prescott," said Neil Dumont, "and what a sweet little

monopoly he’s got himself in housing projects and post offices. Look at Gus Webb

muscling in on the racket."

Keating did not answer. Neil Dumont was throwing his own unconfessed thoughts at

him; he had known that he would have to face this soon and he had tried to

postpone the moment.

He did not want to think of Cortlandt Homes.

Cortlandt Homes was a government housing project to be built in Astoria, on the

shore of the East River. It was planned as a gigantic experiment in low-rent

housing, to serve as model for the whole country; for the whole world. Keating

had heard architects talking about it for over a year. The appropriation had

been approved and the site chosen; but not the architect. Keating would not

admit to himself how desperately he wanted to get Cortlandt and how little

chance he had of getting it.

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"Listen, Pete, we might as well call a spade a spade," said Neil Dumont. "We’re

on the skids, pal, and you know it. All right, we’ll last another year or two,

coasting on your reputation. And then? It’s not our fault. It’s just that

private enterprise is dead and getting deader. It’s a historical process. The

wave of the future. So we might as well get our surfboard while we can. There’s

a good, sturdy one waiting for the boy who’s smart enough to grab it. Cortlandt

Homes."

Now he had heard it pronounced. Keating wondered why the name had sounded like

the muffled stroke of a bell; as if the sound had opened and closed a sequence

which he would not be able to stop.

"What do you mean, Neil?"

"Cortlandt Homes. Ellsworth Toohey. Now you know what I mean."

"Neil, I..."

"What’s the matter with you, Pete? Listen, everybody’s laughing about it.

Everybody’s saying that if they were Toohey’s special pet, like you are, they’d

get Cortlandt Homes like that"--he snapped his manicured fingers--"just like

that, and nobody can understand what you’re waiting for. You know it’s friend

Ellsworth who’s running this particular housing show."