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title "Looking Forward," gave no reference to the Heller house.

There were many occasions when lecturers rose to platforms and addressed trim

audiences on the subject of the progress of American architecture. No one spoke

of the Heller house.

In the club rooms of the A.G.A. some opinions were expressed.

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"It’s a disgrace to the country," said Ralston Holcombe, "that a thing like that

Heller house is allowed to be erected. It’s a blot on the profession. There

ought to be a law."

"That’s what drives clients away," said John Erik Snyte. "They see a house like

that and they think all architects are crazy."

"I see no cause for indignation," said Gordon L. Prescott. "I think it’s

screamingly funny. It looks like a cross between a filling station and a

comic-strip idea of a rocket ship to the moon."

"You watch it in a couple of years," said Eugene Pettingill, "and see what

happens. The thing’ll collapse like a house of cards."

"Why speak in terms of years?" said Guy Francon. "Those modernistic stunts never

last more than a season. The owner will get good and sick of it and he’ll come

running home to a good old early Colonial."

The Heller house acquired fame throughout the countryside surrounding it. People

drove out of their way to park on the road before it, to stare, point and

giggle. Gas-station attendants snickered when Heller’s car drove past. Heller’s

cook had to endure the derisive glances of shopkeepers when she went on her

errands. The Heller house was known in the neighborhood as "The Booby Hatch."

Peter Keating told his friends in the profession, with an indulgent smile: "Now,

now, you shouldn’t say that about him. I’ve known Howard Roark for a long time,

and he’s got quite a talent, quite. He’s even worked for me once. He’s just gone

haywire on that house. He’ll learn. He has a future....Oh, you don’t think he

has? You really don’t think he has?"

Ellsworth M. Toohey, who let no stone spring from the ground of America without

his comment, did not know that the Heller house had been erected, as far as his

column was concerned. He did not consider it necessary to inform his readers

about it, if only to damn it. He said nothing.

12.

A COLUMN entitled "Observations and Meditations" by Alvah Scarret appeared daily

on the front page of the New York Banner. It was a trusted guide, a source of

inspiration and a molder of public philosophy in small towns throughout the

country. In this column there had appeared, years ago, the famous statement:

"We’d all be a heap sight better off if we’d forget the highfalutin notions of

our fancy civilization and mind more what the savages knew long before us: to

honor our mother." Alvah Scarret was a bachelor, had made two millions dollars,

played golf expertly and was editor-in-chief of the Wynand papers.

It was Alvah Scarret who conceived the idea of the campaign against living

conditions in the slums and "Landlord Sharks," which ran in the Banner for three

weeks. This was material such as Alvah Scarret relished. It had human appeal and

social implications. It lent itself to Sunday-supplement illustrations of girls

leaping into rivers, their skirts flaring well above their knees. It boosted

circulation. It embarrassed the sharks who owned a stretch of blocks by the East

River, selected as the dire example of the campaign. The sharks had refused to

sell these blocks to an obscure real-estate company; at the end of the campaign

they surrendered and sold. No one could prove that the real-estate company was

owned by a company owned by Gail Wynand.

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The Wynand papers could not be left without a campaign for long. They had just

concluded one on the subject of modern aviation. They had run scientific

accounts of the history of aviation in the Sunday Family Magazine supplement,

with pictures ranging from Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of flying machines to

the latest bomber; with the added attraction of Icarus writhing in scarlet

flames, his nude body blue-green, his wax wings yellow and the smoke purple;

also of a leprous hag with flaming eyes and a crystal ball, who had predicted in

the XIth century that man would fly; also of bats, vampires and werewolves.

They had run a model plane construction contest; it was open to all boys under

the age of ten who wished to send in three new subscriptions to the Banner. Gail

Wynand, who was a licensed pilot, had made a solo flight from Los Angeles to New

York, establishing a transcontinental speed record, in a small, specially built

craft costing one hundred thousand dollars. He had made a slight miscalculation

on reaching New York and had been forced to land in a rocky pasture; it had been

a hair-raising landing, faultlessly executed; it had just so happened that a

battery of photographers from the Banner were present in the neighborhood. Gail

Wynand had stepped out of the plane. An ace pilot would have been shaken by the

experience. Gail Wynand had stood before the cameras, an immaculate gardenia in

the lapel of his flying jacket, his hand raised with a cigarette held between

two fingers that did not tremble. When questioned about his first wish on

returning to earth, he had expressed the desire to kiss the most attractive

woman present, had chosen the dowdiest old hag from the crowd and bent to kiss

her gravely on the forehead, explaining that she reminded him of his mother.

Later, at the start of the slum campaign, Gail Wynand had said to Alvah Scarret;

"Go ahead. Squeeze all you can out of the thing," and had departed on his yacht

for a world cruise, accompanied by an enchanting aviatrix of twenty-four to whom

he had made a present of his transcontinental plane.

Alvah Scarret went ahead. Among many other steps of his campaign he assigned

Dominique Francon to investigate the condition of homes in the slums and to

gather human material. Dominique Francon had just returned from a summer in

Biarritz; she always took a whole summer’s vacation and Alvah Scarret granted

it, because she was one of his favorite employees, because he was baffled by her

and because he knew that she could quit her job whenever she pleased.

Dominique Francon went to live for two weeks in the hall bedroom of an East-Side

tenement. The room had a skylight, but no windows; there were five flights of

stairs to climb and no running water. She cooked her own meals in the kitchen of

a numerous family on the floor below; she visited neighbors, she sat on the

landings of fire escapes in the evenings and went to dime movies with the girls

of the neighborhood.

She wore frayed skirts and blouses. The abnormal fragility of her normal

appearance made her look exhausted with privation in these surroundings; the

neighbors felt certain that she had TB. But she moved as she had moved in the

drawing room of Kiki Holcombe--with the same cold poise and confidence. She

scrubbed the floor of her room, she peeled potatoes, she bathed in a tin pan of

cold water. She had never done these things before; she did them expertly. She

had a capacity for action, a competence that clashed incongruously with her

appearance. She did not mind this new background; she was indifferent to the

slums as she had been indifferent to the drawing rooms.

At the end of two weeks she returned to her penthouse apartment on the roof of a

hotel over Central Park, and her articles on life in the slums appeared in the

Banner. They were a merciless, brilliant account.

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She heard baffled questions at a dinner party. "My dear, you didn’t actually

write those things?"

"Dominique, you didn’t really live in that place?"

"Oh, yes," she answered. "The house you own on East Twelfth Street, Mrs.

Palmer," she said, her hand circling lazily from under the cuff of an emerald

bracelet too broad and heavy for her thin wrist, "has a sewer that gets clogged

every other day and runs over, all through the courtyard. It looks blue and

purple in the sun, like a rainbow."

"The block you control for the Claridge estate, Mr. Brooks, has the most

attractive stalactites growing on all the ceilings," she said, her golden head

leaning to her corsage of white gardenias with drops of water sparkling on the

lusterless petals.

She was asked to speak at a meeting of social workers. It was an important

meeting, with a militant, radical mood, led by some of the most prominent women

in the field. Alvah Scarret was pleased and gave her his blessing. "Go to it,

kid," he said, "lay it on thick. We want the social workers." She stood in the

speaker’s pulpit of an unaired hall and looked at a flat sheet of faces, faces

lecherously eager with the sense of their own virtue. She spoke evenly, without

inflection. She said, among many other things: "The family on the first floor

rear do not bother to pay their rent, and the children cannot go to school for

lack of clothes. The father has a charge account at a corner speak-easy. He is

in good health and has a good job....The couple on the second floor have just

purchased a radio for sixty-nine dollars and ninety-five cents cash. In the

fourth floor front, the father of the family has not done a whole day’s work in

his life, and does not intend to. There are nine children, supported by the

local parish. There is a tenth one on its way..." When she finished there were a

few claps of angry applause. She raised her hand and said: "You don’t have to

applaud. I don’t expect it." She asked politely: "Are there any questions?"

There were no questions.

When she returned home she found Alvah Scarret waiting for her. He looked

incongruous in the drawing room of her penthouse, his huge bulk perched on the

edge of a delicate chair, a hunched gargoyle against the glowing spread of the

city beyond a solid wall of glass. The city was like a mural designed to

illuminate and complete the room: the fragile lines of spires on a black sky

continued the fragile lines of the furniture; the lights glittering in distant

windows threw reflections on the bare, lustrous floor; the cold precision of the

angular structures outside answered the cold, inflexible grace of every object

within. Alvah Scarret broke the harmony. He looked like a kindly country doctor

and like a cardsharp. His heavy face bore the benevolent, paternal smile that

had always been his passkey and his trademark. He had the knack of making the

kindliness of his smile add to, not detract from his solemn appearance of

dignity; his long, thin, hooked nose did detract from the kindliness, but it

added to the dignity; his stomach, cantilevered over his legs, did detract from

the dignity, but it added to the kindliness. He rose, beamed and held

Dominique’s hand. "Thought I’d drop in on my way home," he said. "I’ve got

something to tell you. How did it go, kid?"

"As I expected it."

She tore her hat off and threw it down on the first chair in sight. Her hair

slanted in a flat curve across her forehead and fell in a straight line to her

shoulders; it looked smooth and tight, like a bathing cap of pale, polished

metal. She walked to the window and stood looking out over the city. She asked

without turning: "What did you want to tell me?"

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Alvah Scarret watched her pleasurably. He had long since given up any attempts

beyond holding her hand when not necessary or patting her shoulder; he had

stopped thinking of the subject, but he had a dim, half-conscious feeling which

he summed up to himself in the words: You never can tell.

"I’ve got good news for you, child," he said. "I’ve been working out a little

scheme, just a bit of reorganization, and I’ve figured where I’ll consolidate a

few things together into a Women’s Welfare Department. You know, the schools,

the home economics, the care of babies, the juvenile delinquents and all the

rest of it--all to be under one head. And I see no better woman for the job than

my little girl."

"Do you mean me?" she asked, without turning.

"No one else but. Just as soon as Gail comes back, I’ll get his okay."

She turned and looked at him, her arms crossed, her hands holding her elbows.

She said:

"Thank you, Alvah. But I don’t want it."

"What do you mean, you don’t want it?"

"I mean that I don’t want it."

"For heaven’s sake, do you realize what an advance that would be?"

"Toward what?"

"Your career."

"I never said I was planning a career."

"But you don’t want to be running a dinky back-page column forever!"

"Not forever. Until I get bored with it."

"But think of what you could do in the real game! Think of what Gail could do

for you once you come to his attention!"

"I have no desire to come to his attention."

"But, Dominique, we need you. The women will be for you solid after tonight."

"I don’t think so."

"Why, I’ve ordered two columns held for a yarn on the meeting and your speech."

She reached for the telephone and handed the receiver to him. She said:

"You’d better tell them to kill it."

"Why?"

She searched through a litter of papers on a desk, found some typewritten sheets

and handed them to him. "Here’s the speech I made tonight," she said.

He glanced through it. He said nothing, but clasped his forehead once. Then he

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seized the telephone and gave orders to run as brief an account of the meeting

as possible, and not to mention the speaker by name.

"All right," said Dominique, when he dropped the receiver. "Am I fired?"

He shook his head dolefully. "Do you want to be?"

"Not necessarily."

"I’ll squash the business," he muttered. "I’ll keep it from Gail."