第 38 页

He thought it over for a long time. He said:

"Listen, Red, I won’t get you a job in town. I just can’t. It turns my stomach

to think of it. But I’ll get you something in the same line."

"All right. Anything. It doesn’t make any difference to me."

"I’ve worked for all of that bastard Francon’s pet contractors for so long I

know everybody ever worked for him. He’s got a granite quarry down in

Connecticut. One of the foremen’s a great pal of mine. He’s in town right now.

Ever worked in a quarry before?"

"Once. Long ago."

"Think you’ll like that?"

"Sure."

"I’ll go see him. We won’t be telling him who you are, just a friend of mine,

that’s all."

"Thanks, Mike."

Mike reached for his coat, and then his hands fell back, and he looked at the

floor.

"Red..."

"It will be all right, Mike."

Roark walked home. It was dark and the street was deserted. There was a strong

wind. He could feel the cold, whistling pressure strike his cheeks. It was the

only evidence of the flow ripping the air. Nothing moved in the stone corridor

about him. There was not a tree to stir, no curtains, no awnings; only naked

masses of stone, glass, asphalt and sharp corners. It was strange to feel that

fierce movement against his face. But in a trash basket on a corner a crumpled

sheet of newspaper was rustling, beating convulsively against the wire mesh. It

made the wind real.

#

In the evening, two days later, Roark left for Connecticut.

From the train, he looked back once at the skyline of the city as it flashed

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into sight and was held for some moments beyond the windows. The twilight had

washed off the details of the buildings. They rose in thin shafts of a soft,

porcelain blue, a color not of real things, but of evening and distance. They

rose in bare outlines, like empty molds waiting to be filled. The distance had

flattened the city. The single shafts stood immeasurably tall, out of scale to

the rest of the earth. They were of their own world, and they held up to the sky

the statement of what man had conceived and made possible. They were empty

molds. But man had come so far; he could go farther. The city on the edge of the

sky held a question--and a promise.

#

Little pinheads of light flared up about the peak of one famous tower, in the

windows of the Star Roof Restaurant. Then the train swerved around a bend and

the city vanished.

That evening, in the banquet hall of the Star Roof Restaurant, a dinner was held

to celebrate the admittance of Peter Keating to partnership in the firm to be

known henceforward as Francon & Keating.

At the long table that seemed covered, not with a tablecloth, but with a sheet

of light, sat Guy Francon. Somehow, tonight, he did not mind the streaks of

silver that appeared on his temples; they sparkled crisply against the black of

his hair and they gave him an air of cleanliness and elegance, like the rigid

white of his shirt against his black evening clothes. In the place of honor sat

Peter Keating. He leaned back, his shoulders straight, his hand closed about the

stem of a glass. His black curls glistened against his white forehead. In that

one moment of silence, the guests felt no envy, no resentment, no malice. There

was a grave feeling of brotherhood in the room, in the presence of the pale,

handsome boy who looked solemn as at his first communion. Ralston Holcombe had

risen to speak. He stood, his glass in hand. He had prepared his speech, but he

was astonished to hear himself saying something quite different, in a voice of

complete sincerity. He said:

"We are the guardians of a great human function. Perhaps of the greatest

function among the endeavors of man. We have achieved much and we have erred

often. But we are willing in all humility to make way for our heirs. We are only

men and we are only seekers. But we seek for truth with the best there is in our

hearts. We seek with what there is of the sublime granted to the race of men. It

is a great quest. To the future of American Architecture!"

Part Two: ELLSWORTH M. TOOHEY

1.

TO HOLD his fists closed tight, as if the skin of his palms had grown fast to

the steel he clasped--to keep his feet steady, pressed down hard, the flat rock

an upward thrust against his soles--not to feel the existence of his body, but

only a few clots of tension: his knees, his wrists, his shoulders and the drill

he held--to feel the drill trembling in a long convulsive shudder--to feel his

stomach trembling, his lungs trembling, the straight lines of the stone ledges

before him dissolving into jagged streaks of trembling--to feel the drill and

his body gathered into the single will of pressure, that a shaft of steel might

sink slowly into granite--this was all of life for Howard Roark, as it had been

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in the days of the two months behind him.

He stood on the hot stone in the sun. His face was scorched to bronze. His shirt

stuck in long, damp patches to his back. The quarry rose about him in flat

shelves breaking against one another. It was a world without curves, grass or

soil, a simplified world of stone planes, sharp edges and angles. The stone had

not been made by patient centuries welding the sediment of winds and tides; it

had come from a molten mass cooling slowly at unknown depth; it had been flung,

forced out of the earth, and it still held the shape of violence against the

violence of the men on its ledges.

The straight planes stood witness to the force of each cut; the drive of each

blow had run in an unswerving line; the stone had cracked open in unbending

resistance. Drills bored forward with a low, continuous drone, the tension of

the sound cutting through nerves, through skulls, as if the quivering tools were

shattering slowly both the stone and the men who held them.

He liked the work. He felt at times as if it were a match of wrestling between

his muscles and the granite. He was very tired at night. He liked the emptiness

of his body’s exhaustion.

Each evening he walked the two miles from the quarry to the little town where

the workers lived. The earth of the woods he crossed was soft and warm under his

feet; it was strange, after a day spent on the granite ridges; he smiled as at a

new pleasure, each evening, and looked down to watch his feet crushing a surface

that responded, gave way and conceded faint prints to be left behind.

There was a bathroom in the garret of the house where he roomed; the paint had

peeled off the floor long ago and the naked boards were gray-white. He lay in

the tub for a long time and let the cool water soak the stone dust out of his

skin. He let his head hang back, on the edge of the tub, his eyes closed. The

greatness of the weariness was its own relief: it allowed no sensation but the

slow pleasure of the tension leaving his muscles.

He ate his dinner in a kitchen, with other quarry workers. He sat alone at a

table in a corner; the fumes of the grease, crackling eternally on the vast gas

range, hid the rest of the room in a sticky haze. He ate little. He drank a

great deal of water; the cold, glittering liquid in a clean glass was

intoxicating.

He slept in a small wooden cube under the roof. The boards of the ceiling

slanted down over his bed. When it rained, he could hear the burst of each drop

against the roof, and it took an effort to realize why he did not feel the rain

beating against his body.

Sometimes, after dinner, he would walk into the woods that began behind the

house. He would stretch down on the ground, on his stomach, his elbows planted

before him, his hands propping his chin, and he would watch the patterns of

veins on the green blades of grass under his face; he would blow at them and

watch the blades tremble then stop again. He would roll over on his back and lie

still, feeling the warmth of the earth under him. Far above, the leaves were

still green, but it was a thick, compressed green, as if the color were

condensed in one last effort before the dusk coming to dissolve it. The leaves

hung without motion against a sky of polished lemon yellow; its luminous pallor

emphasized that its light was failing. He pressed his hips, his back into the

earth under him; the earth resisted, but it gave way; it was a silent victory;

he felt a dim, sensuous pleasure in the muscles of his legs.

Sometimes, not often, he sat up and did not move for a long time; then he

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smiled, the slow smile of an executioner watching a victim. He thought of his

days going by, of the buildings he could have been doing, should have been doing

and, perhaps, never would be doing again. He watched the pain’s unsummoned

appearance with a cold, detached curiosity; he said to himself: Well, here it is

again. He waited to see how long it would last. It gave him a strange, hard

pleasure to watch his fight against it, and he could forget that it was his own

suffering; he could smile in contempt, not realizing that he smiled at his own

agony. Such moments were rare. But when they came, he felt as he did in the

quarry: that he had to drill through granite, that he had to drive a wedge and

blast the thing within him which persisted in calling to his pity.

#

Dominique Francon lived alone, that summer, in the great Colonial mansion of her

father’s estate, three miles beyond the quarry town. She received no visitors.

An old caretaker and his wife were the only human beings she saw, not too often

and merely of necessity; they lived some distance from the mansion, near the

stables; the caretaker attended to the grounds and the horses; his wife attended

to the house and cooked Dominique’s meals.

The meals were served with the gracious severity the old woman had learned in

the days when Dominique’s mother lived and presided over the guests in that

great dining room. At night Dominique found her solitary place at the table laid

out as for a formal banquet, the candles lighted, the tongues of yellow flame

standing motionless like the shining metal spears of a guard of honor. The

darkness stretched the room into a hall, the big windows rose like a flat

colonnade of sentinels. A shallow crystal bowl stood in a pool of light in the

center of the long table, with a single water lily spreading white petals about

a heart yellow like a drop of candle fire.

The old woman served the meal in unobtrusive silence, and disappeared from the

house as soon as she could afterward. When Dominique walked up the stairs to her

bedroom, she found the fragile lace folds of her nightgown laid out on the bed.

In the morning she entered her bathroom and found water in the sunken bathtub,

the hyacinth odor of her bath sails, the aquamarine tiles polished, shining

under her feet, her huge towels spread out like snowdrifts to swallow her

body--yet she heard no steps and felt no living presence in the house. The old

woman’s treatment of Dominique had the same reverent caution with which she

handled the pieces of Venetian glass in the drawing-room cabinets. Dominique had

spent so many summers and winters, surrounding herself with people in order to

feel alone, that the experiment of actual solitude was an enchantment to her and

a betrayal into a weakness she had never allowed herself: the weakness of

enjoying it. She stretched her arms and let them drop lazily, feeling a sweet,

drowsy heaviness above her elbows, as after a first drink. She was conscious of

her summer dresses, she felt her knees, her thighs encountering the faint

resistance of cloth when she moved, and it made her conscious not of the cloth,

but of her knees and thighs.

The house stood alone amidst vast grounds, and the woods stretched beyond; there

were no neighbors for miles. She rode on horseback down long, deserted roads,

down hidden paths leading nowhere. Leaves glittered in the sun and twigs snapped

in the wind of her flying passage. She caught her breath at times from the

sudden feeling that something magnificent and deadly would meet her beyond the

next turn of the road; she could give no identity to what she expected, she

could not say whether it was a sight, a person or an event; she knew only its

quality--the sensation of a defiling pleasure.

Sometimes she started on foot from the house and walked for miles, setting

herself no goal and no hour of return. Cars passed her on the road; the people

of the quarry town knew her and bowed to her; she was considered the chatelaine

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of the countryside, as her mother had been long ago. She turned off the road

into the woods and walked on, her arms swinging loosely, her head thrown back,

watching the tree tops. She saw clouds swimming behind the leaves; it looked as

if a giant tree before her were moving, slanting, ready to fall and crush her;

she stopped; she waited, her head thrown back, her throat pulled tight; she felt

as if she wanted to be crushed. Then she shrugged and went on. She flung thick

branches impatiently out of her way and let them scratch her bare arms. She

walked on long after she was exhausted, she drove herself forward against the

weariness of her muscles. Then she fell down on her back and lay still, her arms

and legs flung out like a cross on the ground, breathing in release, feeling

empty and flattened, feeling the weight of the air like a pressure against her

breasts.

Some mornings, when she awakened in her bedroom, she heard the explosions of

blasting at the granite quarry. She stretched, her arms flung back above her

head on the white silk pillow, and she listened. It was the sound of destruction

and she liked it.

#

Because the sun was too hot, that morning, and she knew it would be hotter at

the granite quarry, because she wanted to see no one and knew she would face a

gang of workers, Dominique walked to the quarry. The thought of seeing it on

that blazing day was revolting; she enjoyed the prospect.

When she came out of the woods to the edge of the great stone bowl, she felt as