第 54 页

she bent down to cover his mouth with hers.

She came in and found a copy of the Banner spread out on his table, open at the

page bearing "Your House" by Dominique Francon. Her column contained the line:

"Howard Roark is the Marquis de Sade of architecture. He’s in love with his

buildings--and look at them." She knew that he disliked the Banner, that he put

it there only for her sake, that he watched her noticing it, with the half-smile

she dreaded on his face. She was angry; she wanted him to read everything she

wrote, yet she would have preferred to think that it hurt him enough to make him

avoid it. Later, lying across the bed, with his mouth on her breast, she looked

past the orange tangle of his head, at that sheet of newspaper on the table, and

he felt her trembling with pleasure.

She sat on the floor, at his feet, her head pressed to his knees, holding his

hand, closing her fist in turn over each of his fingers, closing it tight and

letting it slide slowly down the length of his finger, feeling the hard, small

stops at the joints, and she asked softly: "Roark, you wanted to get the Colton

factory? You wanted it very badly?"

"Yes, very badly," he answered, without smiling and without pain. Then she

raised his hand to her lips and held it there for a long time.

She got out of bed in the darkness, and walked naked across his room to take a

cigarette from the table. She bent to the light of a match, her flat stomach

rounded faintly in the movement. He said: "Light one for me," and she put a

cigarette between his lips; then she wandered through the dark room, smoking,

while he lay in bed, propped up on his elbow, watching her.

Once she came in and found him working at his table. He said: "I’ve got to

finish this. Sit down. Wait." He did not look at her again. She waited silently,

huddled in a chair at the farthest end of the room. She watched the straight

lines of his eyebrows drawn in concentration, the set of his mouth, the vein

beating under the tight skin of his neck, the sharp, surgical assurance of his

hand. He did not look like an artist, he looked like the quarry worker, like a

wrecker demolishing walls, and like a monk. Then she did not want him to stop or

glance at her, because she wanted to watch the ascetic purity of his person, the

absence of all sensuality; to watch that--and to think of what she remembered.

There were nights when he came to her apartment, as she came to his, without

warning. If she had guests, he said: "Get rid of them," and walked into the

bedroom while she obeyed. They had a silent agreement, understood without

mention, never to be seen together. Her bedroom was an exquisite place of glass

and pale ice-green. He liked to come in wearing clothes stained by a day spent

on the construction site. He liked to throw back the covers of her bed, then to

sit talking quietly for an hour or two, not looking at the bed, not mentioning

her writing or buildings or the latest commission she had obtained for Peter

Keating, the simplicity of being at ease, here, like this, making the hours more

sensual than the moments they delayed.

There were evenings when they sat together in her living room, at the huge

246

window high over the city. She liked to see him at that window. He would stand,

half turned to her, smoking, looking at the city below. She would move away from

him and sit down on the floor in the middle of the room and watch him.

Once, when he got out of bed, she switched the light on and saw him standing

there, naked; she looked at him, then she said, her voice quiet and desperate

with the simple despair of complete sincerity: "Roark, everything I’ve done all

my life is because it’s the kind of a world that made you work in a quarry last

summer."

"I know that."

He sat down at the foot of the bed. She moved over, she pressed her face against

his thigh, curled up, her feet on the pillow, her arm hanging down, letting her

palm move slowly up the length of his leg, from the ankle to the knee and back

again. She said: "But, of course, if it had been up to me, last spring, when you

were broke and jobless, I would have sent you precisely to that kind of a job in

that particular quarry."

"I know that too. But maybe you wouldn’t have. Maybe you’d have had me as

washroom attendant in the clubhouse of the A.G.A."

"Yes. Possibly. Put your hand on my back, Roark. Just hold it there. Like that."

She lay still, her face buried against his knees, her arm hanging down over the

side of the bed, not moving, as if nothing in her were alive but the skin

between her shoulder blades under his hand.

In the drawing rooms she visited, in the restaurants, in the offices of the

A.G.A. people talked about the dislike of Miss Dominique Francon of the Banner

for Howard Roark, that architectural freak of Roger Enright’s. It gave him a

sort of scandalous fame. It was said: "Roark? You know, the guy Dominique

Francon can’t stand the guts of."

"The Francon girl knows her architecture all right, and if she says he’s no

good, he must be worse than I thought he was."

"God, but these two must hate each other! Though I understand they haven’t even

met." She liked to hear these things. It pleased her when Athelstan Beasely

wrote in his column in the A.G.A. Bulletin, discussing the architecture of

medieval castles: "To understand the grim ferocity of these structures, we must

remember that the wars between feudal lords were a savage business--something

like the feud between Miss Dominique Francon and Mr. Howard Roark."

Austen Heller, who had been her friend, spoke to her about it. He was angrier

than she had ever seen him; his face lost all the charm of his usual sarcastic

poise.

"What in hell do you think you’re doing, Dominique?" he snapped. "This is the

greatest exhibition of journalistic hooliganism I’ve ever seen swilled out in

public print. Why don’t you leave that sort of thing to Ellsworth Toohey?"

"Ellsworth is good, isn’t he?" she said.

"At least, he’s had the decency to keep his unsanitary trap shut about

Roark--though, of course, that too is an indecency. But what’s happened to you?

Do you realize who and what you’re talking about? It was all right when you

amused yourself by praising some horrible abortion of Grandpaw Holcombe’s or

panning the pants off your own father and that pretty butcher’s-calendar boy

that he’s got himself for a partner. It didn’t matter one way or another. But to

247

bring that same intellectual manner to the appraisal of someone like

Roark....You know, I really thought you had integrity and judgment--if ever

given a chance to exercise them. In fact, I thought you were behaving like a

tramp only to emphasize the mediocrity of the saps whose works you had to write

about. I didn’t think that you were just an irresponsible bitch."

"You were wrong," she said.

Roger Enright entered her office, one morning, and said, without greeting: "Get

your hat. You’re coming to see it with me."

"Good morning, Roger," she said. "To see what?"

"The Enright House. As much of it as we’ve got put up."

"Why, certainly, Roger," she smiled, rising, "I’d love to see the Enright

House."

On their way, she asked: "What’s the matter, Roger? Trying to bribe me?"

He sat stiffly on the vast, gray cushions of his limousine, not looking at her.

He answered: "I can understand stupid malice. I can understand ignorant malice.

I can’t understand deliberate rottenness. You are free, of course, to write

anything you wish--afterward. But it won’t be stupidity and it won’t be

ignorance."

"You overestimate me, Roger," she shrugged, and said nothing else for the rest

of the ride.

They walked together past the wooden fence, into the jungle of naked steel and

planks that was to be the Enright House. Her high heels stepped lightly over

lime-spattered boards and she walked, leaning back, in careless, insolent

elegance. She stopped and looked at the sky held in a frame of steel, the sky

that seemed more distant than usual, thrust back by the sweeping length of

beams. She looked at the steel cages of future projections, at the insolent

angles, at the incredible complexity of this shape coming to life as a simple,

logical whole, a naked skeleton with planes of air to form the walls, a naked

skeleton on a cold winter day, with a sense of birth and promise, like a bare

tree with a first touch of green.

"Oh, Roger!"

He looked at her and saw the kind of face one should expect to see in church at

Easter.

"I didn’t underestimate either one," he said dryly. "Neither you nor the

building."

"Good morning," said a low, hard voice beside them.

She was not shocked to see Roark. She had not heard him approaching, but it

would have been unnatural to think of this building without him. She felt that

he simply was there, that he had been there from the moment she crossed the

outside fence, that this structure was he, in a manner more personal than his

body. He stood before them, his hand thrust into the pockets of a loose coat,

his hair hatless in the cold.

"Miss Francon--Mr. Roark," said Enright.

248

"We have met once," she said, "at the Holcombes. If Mr. Roark remembers."

"Of course, Miss Francon," said Roark.

"I wanted Miss Francon to see it," said Enright.

"Shall I show you around?" Roark asked him.

"Yes, do please," she answered first.

The three of them walked together through the structure, and the workers stared

curiously at Dominique. Roark explained the layout of future rooms, the system

of elevators, the heating plant, the arrangement of windows--as he would have

explained it to a contractor’s assistant. She asked questions and he answered.

"How many cubic feet of space, Mr. Roark?"

"How many tons of steel?"

"Be careful of these pipes, Miss Francon. Step this way." Enright walked along,

his eyes on the ground, looking at nothing. But then he asked: "How’s it going,

Howard?" and Roark smiled, answering: "Two days ahead of schedule," and they

stood talking about the job, like brothers, forgetting her for a moment, the

clanging roar of machines around them drowning out their words.

She thought, standing here in the heart of the building, that if she had nothing

of him, nothing but his body, here it was, offered to her, the rest of him, to

be seen and touched, open to all; the girders and the conduits and the sweeping

reaches of space were his and could not have been anyone else’s in the world;

his, as his face, as his soul; here was the shape he had made and the thing

within him which had caused him to make it, the end and the cause together, the

motive power eloquent in every line of steel, a man’s self, hers for this

moment, hers by grace of her seeing it and understanding.

"Are you tired, Miss Francon?" asked Roark, looking at her face.

"No," she said, "no, not at all. I have been thinking--what kind of plumbing

fixtures are you going to use here, Mr. Roark?"

A few days later, in his room, sitting on the edge of his drafting table, she

looked at a newspaper, at her column and the lines: "I have visited the Enright

construction site. I wish that in some future air raid a bomb would blast this

house out of existence. It would be a worthy ending. So much better than to see

it growing old and soot-stained, degraded by the family photographs, the dirty

socks, the cocktail shakers and the grapefruit rinds of its inhabitants. There

is not a person in New York City who should be allowed to live in this

building."

Roark came to stand beside her, his legs pressed to her knees, and he looked

down at the paper, smiling.

"You have Roger completely bewildered by this," he said.

"Has he read it?"

"I was in his office this morning when he read it. At first, he called you some

names I’d never heard before. Then he said, Wait a minute, and he read it again,

he looked up, very puzzled, but not angry at all, and he said, if you read it

one way...but on the other hand..."

249

"What did you say?"

"Nothing. You know, Dominique, I’m very grateful, but when are you going to stop

handing me all that extravagant praise? Someone else might see it. And you won’t

like that."

"Someone else?"

"You know that I got it, from that first article of yours about the Enright

House. You wanted me to get it. But don’t you think someone else might

understand your way of doing things?"

"Oh yes. But the effect--for you--will be worse than if they didn’t. They’ll

like you the less for it. However, I don’t know who’ll even bother to

understand. Unless it’s...Roark, what do you think of Ellsworth Toohey?"

"Good God, why should anyone think of Ellsworth Toohey?"

She liked the rare occasions when she met Roark at some gathering where Heller

or Enright had brought him. She liked the polite, impersonal "Miss Francon"

pronounced by his voice. She enjoyed the nervous concern of the hostess and her

efforts not to let them come together. She knew that the people around them

expected some explosion, some shocking sign of hostility which never came. She

did not seek Roark out and she did not avoid him. They spoke to each other if

they happened to be included in the same group, as they would have spoken to

anyone else. It required no effort; it was real and right; it made everything

right, even this gathering. She found a deep sense of fitness in the fact that

here, among people, they should be strangers; strangers and enemies. She

thought, these people can think of many things he and I are to each