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over the parapet, hatless, looking up at the building. It was an accidental,

unconscious moment. The young photographer glanced at Roark’s face--and thought

of something that had puzzled him for a long time: he had always wondered why

the sensations one felt in dreams were so much more intense than anything one

could experience in waking reality--why the horror was so total and the ecstasy

so complete--and what was that extra quality which could never be recaptured

afterward; the quality of what he felt when he walked down a path through

tangled green leaves in a dream, in an air full of expectation, of causeless,

utter rapture--and when he awakened he could not explain it, it had been just a

path through some woods. He thought of that because he saw that extra quality

for the first time in waking existence, he saw it in Roark’s face lifted to the

building. The photographer was a young boy, new to his job; he did not know much

about it; but he loved his work; he had been an amateur photographer since

childhood. So he snapped a picture of Roark in that one moment.

Later the Art Editor of the Banner saw the picture and barked: "What the hell’s

that?"

"Howard Roark," said the photographer. "Who’s Howard Roark?"

"The architect."

"Who the hell wants a picture of the architect?"

"Well, I only thought..."

"Besides, it’s crazy. What’s the matter with the man?" So the picture was thrown

into the morgue.

The Enright House rented promptly. The tenants who moved in were people who

wanted to live in sane comfort and cared about nothing else. They did not

discuss the value of the building; they merely liked living there. They were the

sort who lead useful, active private lives in public silence.

But others talked a great deal of the Enright House, for about three weeks. They

said that it was preposterous, exhibitionist and phony. They said: "My dear,

imagine inviting Mrs. Moreland if you lived in a place like that! And her home

is in such good taste!" A few were beginning to appear who said: "You know, I

rather like modern architecture, there are some mighty interesting things being

done that way nowadays, there’s quite a school of it in Germany that’s rather

remarkable--but this is not like it at all. This is a freak."

Ellsworth Toohey never mentioned the Enright House in his column. A reader of

the Banner wrote to him: "Dear Mr. Toohey: What do you think of this place they

call the Enright House? I have a friend who is an interior decorator and he

talks a lot about it and he says it’s lousy. Architecture and such various arts

being my hobby, I don’t know what to think. Will you tell us in your column?"

Ellsworth Toohey answered in a private letter: "Dear friend: There are so many

important buildings and great events going on in the world today that I cannot

devote my column to trivialities."

But people came to Roark--the few he wanted. That winter, he had received a

commission to build the Norris house, a modest country home. In May he signed

another contract--for his first office building, a fifty-story skyscraper in the

center of Manhattan. Anthony Cord, the owner, had come from nowhere and made a

fortune in Wall Street within a few brilliant, violent years. He wanted a

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building of his own and he went to Roark. Roark’s office had grown to four

rooms. His staff loved him. They did not realize it and would have been shocked

to apply such a term as love to their cold, unapproachable, inhuman boss. These

were the words they used to describe Roark, these were the words they had been

trained to use by all the standards and conceptions of their past; only, working

with him, they knew that he was none of these things, but they could not

explain, neither what he was nor what they felt for him.

He did not smile at his employees, he did not take them out for drinks, he never

inquired about their families, their love lives or their church attendance. He

responded only to the essence of a man: to his creative capacity. In this office

one had to be competent. There were no alternatives, no mitigating

considerations. But if a man worked well, he needed nothing else to win his

employer’s benevolence: it was granted, not as a gift, but as a debt. It was

granted, not as affection, but as recognition. It bred an immense feeling of

self-respect within every man in that office.

"Oh, but that’s not human," said somebody when one of Roark’s draftsmen tried to

explain this at home, "such a cold, intellectual approach!" One boy, a younger

sort of Peter Keating, tried to introduce the human in preference to the

intellectual in Roark’s office; he did not last two weeks. Roark made mistakes

in choosing his employees occasionally, not often; those whom he kept for a

month became his friends for life. They did not call themselves friends; they

did not praise him to outsiders; they did not talk about him. They knew only, in

a dim way, that it was not loyalty to him, but to the best within themselves.

#

Dominique remained in the city all summer. She remembered, with bitter pleasure,

her custom to travel; it made her angry to think that she could not go, could

not want to go. She enjoyed the anger; it drove her to his room. On the nights

which she did not spend with him she walked through the streets of the city. She

walked to the Enright House or to the Fargo Store, and stood looking at the

building for a long time. She drove alone out of town--to see the Heller house,

the Sanborn house, the Gowan Service Station. She never spoke to him about that.

Once, she took the Staten Island ferry at two o’clock in the morning; she rode

to the island, standing alone at the rail of an empty deck. She watched the city

moving away from her. In the vast emptiness of sky and ocean, the city was only

a small, jagged solid. It seemed condensed, pressed tight together, not a place

of streets and separate buildings, but a single sculptured form. A form of

irregular steps that rose and dropped without ordered continuity, long

ascensions and sudden drops, like the graph of a stubborn struggle. But it went

on mounting--toward a few points, toward the triumphant masts of skyscrapers

raised out of the struggle.

The boat went past the Statue of Liberty--a figure in a green light, with an arm

raised like the skyscrapers behind it.

She stood at the rail, while the city diminished, and she felt the motion of

growing distance as a growing tightness within her, the pull of a living cord

that could not be stretched too far. She stood in quiet excitement when the boat

sailed back and she saw the city growing again to meet her. She stretched her

arms wide. The city expanded, to her elbows, to her wrists, beyond her

fingertips. Then the skyscrapers rose over her head, and she was back.

She came ashore. She knew where she had to go, and wanted to get there fast, but

felt she must get there herself, like this, on her own feet. So she walked half

the length of Manhattan, through long, empty, echoing streets. It was

four-thirty when she knocked at his door. He had been asleep. She shook her

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head. "No," she said. "Go back to sleep. I just want to be here." She did not

touch him. She took off her hat and shoes, huddled into an armchair, and fell

asleep, her arm hanging over the chair’s side, her head on her arm. In the

morning he asked no questions. They fixed breakfast together, then he hurried

away to his office. Before leaving, he took her in his arms and kissed her. He

walked out, and she stood for a few moments, then left. They had not exchanged

twenty words.

There were week ends when they left the city together and drove in her car to

some obscure point on the coast. They stretched out in the sun, on the sand of a

deserted beach, they swam in the ocean. She liked to watch his body in the

water. She would remain behind and stand, the waves hitting her knees, and watch

him cutting a straight line through the breakers. She liked to lie with him at

the edge of the water; she would lie on her stomach, a few feet away from him,

facing the shore, her toes stretched to the waves; she would not touch him, but

she would feel the waves coming up behind them, breaking against their bodies,

and she would see the backwash running in mingled streams off her body and his.

They spent the nights at some country inn, taking a single room. They never

spoke of the things left behind them in the city. But it was the unstated that

gave meaning to the relaxed simplicity of these hours; their eyes laughed

silently at the preposterous contract whenever they looked at each other.

She tried to demonstrate her power over him. She stayed away from his house; she

waited for him to come to her. He spoiled it by coming too soon; by refusing her

the satisfaction of knowing that he waited and struggled against his desire; by

surrendering at once. She would say: "Kiss my hand, Roark." He would kneel and

kiss her ankle. He defeated her by admitting her power; she could not have the

gratification of enforcing it. He would lie at her feet, he would say: "Of

course I need you. I go insane when I see you. You can do almost anything you

wish with me. Is that what you want to hear? Almost, Dominique. And the things

you couldn’t make me do--you could put me through hell if you demanded them and

I had to refuse you, as I would. Through utter hell, Dominique. Does that please

you? Why do you want to know whether you own me? It’s so simple. Of course you

do. All of me that can be owned. You’ll never demand anything else. But you want

to know whether you could make me suffer. You could. What of it?" The words did

not sound like surrender, because they were not torn out of him, but admitted

simply and willingly. She felt no thrill of conquest; she felt herself owned

more than ever, by a man who could say these things, know of them to be true,

and still remain controlled and controlling--as she wanted him to remain.

#

Late in June a man named Kent Lansing came to see Roark. He was forty years old,

he was dressed like a fashion plate and looked like a prize fighter, though he

was not burly, muscular or tough: he was thin and angular. He merely made one

think of a boxer and of other things that did not fit his appearance: of a

battering ram, of a tank, of a submarine torpedo. He was a member of a

corporation formed for the purpose of erecting a luxurious hotel on Central Park

South. There were many wealthy men involved and the corporation was ruled by a

numerous board; they had purchased their site; they had not decided on an

architect. But Kent Lansing had made up his mind that it would be Roark.

"I won’t try to tell you how much I’d like to do it," Roark said to him at the

end of their first interview. "But there’s not a chance of my getting it. I can

get along with people--when they’re alone. I can do nothing with them in groups.

No board has ever hired me--and I don’t think one ever will."

Kent Lansing smiled. "Have you ever known a board to do. anything?"

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"What do you mean?"

"Just that: have you ever known a board to do anything at all?"

"Well, they seem to exist and function."

"Do they? You know, there was a time when everyone thought it self-evident that

the earth was flat. It would be entertaining to speculate upon the nature and

causes of humanity’s illusions. I’ll write a book about it some day. It won’t be

popular. I’ll have a chapter on boards of directors. You see, they don’t exist."

"I’d like to believe you, but what’s the gag?"

"No, you wouldn’t like to believe me. The causes of illusions are not pretty to

discover. They’re either vicious or tragic. This one is both. Mainly vicious.

And it’s not a gag. But we won’t go into that now. All I mean is that a board of

directors is one or two ambitious men--and a lot of ballast. I mean that groups

of men are vacuums. Great big empty nothings. They say we can’t visualize a

total nothing. Hell, sit at any committee meeting. The point is only who chooses

to fill that nothing. It’s a tough battle. The toughest. It’s simple enough to

fight any enemy, so long as he’s there to be fought. But when he isn’t...Don’t

look at me like that, as if I were crazy. You ought to know. You’ve fought a

vacuum all your life."

"I’m looking at you like that because I like you."

"Of course you like me. As I knew I’d like you. Men are brothers, you know, and

they have a great instinct for brotherhood--except in boards, unions,

corporations and other chain gangs. But I talk too much. That’s why I’m a good

salesman. However, I have nothing to sell you. You know. So we’ll just say that

you’re going to build the Aquitania--that’s the name of our hotel--and we’ll let

it go at that."

If the violence of the battles which people never hear about could be measured

in material statistics, the battle of Kent Lansing against the board of

directors of the Aquitania Corporation would have been listed among the greatest

carnages of history. But the things he fought were not solid enough to leave

anything as substantial as corpses on the battlefield.

He had to fight phenomena such as: "Listen, Palmer, Lansing’s talking about

somebody named Roark, how’re you going to vote, do the big boys approve of him

or not?"

"I’m not going to decide till I know who’s voted for or against."

"Lansing says...but on the other hand, Thorpe tells me..."Talbot’s putting up a

swank hotel on Fifth up in the sixties--and he’s got Francon & Keating." "Harper

swears by this young fellow--Gordon Prescott." "Listen, Betsy says we’re crazy."

"I don’t like Roark’s face--he doesn’t look co-operative." "I know, I feel it,

Roark’s the kind that don’t fit in. He’s not a regular fellow."

"What’s a regular fellow?"