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imperious, demanding intelligence. The ladies in charge of the Home chased them

away with angry exclamations about "little gangsters."

Once a month a delegation from the sponsors came to visit the Home. It was a

distinguished group whose names were in many exclusive registers, though no

personal achievement had ever put them there. It was a group of mink coats and

diamond clips; occasionally, there was a dollar cigar and a glossy derby from a

British shop among them. Ellsworth Toohey was always present to show them

through the Home. The inspection made the mink coats seem warmer and their

wearers’ rights to them incontestable, since it established superiority and

altruistic virtue together, in a demonstration more potent than a visit to a

morgue. On the way back from such an inspection Ellsworth Toohey received

humbled compliments on the wonderful work he was doing, and had no trouble in

obtaining checks for his other humanitarian activities, such as publications,

lecture courses, radio forums and the Workshop of Social Study.

Catherine Halsey was put in charge of the children’s occupational therapy, and

she moved into the Home as a permanent resident. She took up her work with a

fierce zeal. She spoke about it insistently to anyone who would listen. Her

voice was dry and arbitrary. When she spoke, the movements of her mouth hid the

two lines that had appeared recently, cut from her nostrils to her chin; people

preferred her not to remove her glasses; her eyes were not good to see. She

spoke belligerently about her work not being charity, but "human reclamation."

The most important time of her day was the hour assigned to the children’s art

activities, known as the "Creative Period." There was a special room for the

purpose--a room with a view of the distant city skyline--where the children were

given materials and encouraged to create freely, under the guidance of Catherine

who stood watch over them like an angel presiding at a birth.

She was elated on the day when Jackie, the least promising one of the lot,

achieved a completed work of imagination. Jackie picked up fistfuls of colored

felt scraps and a pot of glue, and carried them to a corner of the room. There

was, in the corner, a slanting ledge projecting from the wall-plastered over and

painted green--left from Roark’s modeling of the Temple interior that had once

controlled the recession of the light at sunset. Catherine walked over to Jackie

and saw, spread out on the ledge, the recognizable shape of a dog, brown, with

blue spots and five legs. Jackie wore an expression of pride. "Now you see, you

see?" Catherine said to her colleagues. "Isn’t it wonderful and moving! There’s

no telling how far the child will go with proper encouragement. Think of what

happens to their little souls if they are frustrated in their creative

instincts! It’s so important not to deny them a chance for self-expression. Did

you see Jackie’s face?"

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Dominique’s statue had been sold. No one knew who bought it. It had been bought

by Ellsworth Toohey.

#

Roark’s office had shrunk back to one room. After the completion of the Cord

Building he found no work. The depression had wrecked the building trade; there

was little work for anyone; it was said that the skyscraper was finished;

architects were closing their offices.

A few commissions still dribbled out occasionally, and a group of architects

hovered about them with the dignity of a bread line. There were men like Ralston

Holcombe among them, men who had never begged, but had demanded references

before they accepted a client. When Roark tried to get a commission, he was

rejected in a manner implying that if he had no more sense than that, politeness

would be a wasted effort. "Roark?" cautious businessmen said. "The tabloid hero?

Money’s too scarce nowadays to waste it on lawsuits afterwards."

He got a few jobs, remodeling rooming houses, an assignment that involved no

more than erecting partitions and rearranging the plumbing. "Don’t take it,

Howard," Austen Heller said angrily. "The infernal gall of offering you that

kind of work! After a skyscraper like the Cord Building. After the Enright

House."

"I’ll take anything," said Roark.

The Stoddard award had taken more than the amount of his fee for the Cord

Building. But he had saved enough to exist on for a while. He paid Mallory’s

rent and he paid for most of their frequent meals together.

Mallory had tried to object. "Shut up, Steve," Roark had said. "I’m not doing it

for you. At a time like this I owe myself a few luxuries. So I’m simply buying

the most valuable thing that can be bought--your time. I’m competing with a

whole country--and that’s quite a luxury, isn’t it? They want you to do baby

plaques and I don’t, and I like having my way against theirs."

"What do you want me to work on, Howard?"

"I want you to work without asking anyone what he wants you to work on."

Austen Heller heard about it from Mallory, and spoke of it to Roark in private.

"If you’re helping him, why don’t you let me help you?"

"I’d let you if you could," said Roark. "But you can’t. All he needs is his

time. He can work without clients. I can’t."

"It’s amusing, Howard, to see you in the role of an altruist."

"You don’t have to insult me. It’s not altruism. But I’ll tell you this: most

people say they’re concerned with the suffering of others. I’m not. And yet

there’s one thing I can’t understand. Most of them would not pass by if they saw

a man bleeding in the road, mangled by a hit-and-run driver. And most of them

would not turn their heads to look at Steven Mallory. But don’t they know that

if suffering could be measured, there’s no suffering in Steven Mallory when he

can’t do the work he wants to do, than in a whole field of victims mowed down by

a tank? If one must relieve the pain of this world, isn’t Mallory the place to

begin?...However, that’s not why I’m doing it."

#

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Roark had never seen the reconstructed Stoddard Temple. On an evening in

November he went to see it. He did not know whether it was surrender to pain or

victory over the fear of seeing it.

It was late and the garden of the Stoddard Home was deserted. The building was

dark, a single light showed in a back window upstairs. Roark stood looking at

the building for a long time.

The door under the Greek portico opened and a slight masculine figure came out.

It hurried casually down the steps--and then stopped.

"Hello, Mr. Roark," said Ellsworth Toohey quietly.

Roark looked at him without curiosity. "Hello," said Roark.

"Please don’t run away." The voice was not mocking, but earnest.

"I wasn’t going to."

"I think I knew that you’d come here some day and I think I wanted to be here

when you came. I’ve kept inventing excuses for myself to hang about this place."

There was no gloating in the voice; it sounded drained and simple.

"Well?"

"You shouldn’t mind speaking to me. You see, I understand your work. What I do

about it is another matter."

"You are free to do what you wish about it."

"I understand your work better than any living person--with the possible

exception of Dominique Francon. And, perhaps, better than she does. That’s a

deal, isn’t it, Mr. Roark? You haven’t many people around you who can say that.

It’s a greater bond than if I were your devoted, but blind supporter."

"I knew you understood."

"Then you won’t mind talking to me."

"About what?"

In the darkness it sounded almost as if Toohey had sighed. After a while he

pointed to the building and asked:

"Do you understand this?"

Roark did not answer.

Toohey went on softly: "What does it look like to you? Like a senseless mess?

Like a chance collection of driftwood? Like an imbecile chaos? But is it, Mr.

Roark? Do you see no method? You who know the language of structure and the

meaning of form. Do you see no purpose here?"

"I see none in discussing it."

"Mr. Roark, we’re alone here. Why don’t you tell me what you think of me? In any

words you wish. No one will hear us."

338

"But I don’t think of you."

Toohey’s face had an expression of attentiveness, of listening quietly to

something as simple as fate. He remained silent, and Roark asked:

"What did you want to say to me?"

Toohey looked at him, and then at the bare trees around them, at the river far

below, at the great rise of the sky beyond the river.

"Nothing," said Toohey.

He walked away, his steps creaking on the gravel in the silence, sharp and even,

like the cracks of an engine’s pistons.

Roark stood alone in the empty driveway, looking at the building.

Part Three: GAIL WYNAND

1.

GAIL WYNAND raised a gun to his temple.

He felt the pressure of a metal ring against his skin--and nothing else. He

might have been holding a lead pipe or a piece of jewelry; it was just a small

circle without significance. "I am going to die," he said aloud--and yawned.

He felt no relief, no despair, no fear. The moment of his end would not grant

him even the dignity of seriousness. It was an anonymous moment; a few minutes

ago, he had held a toothbrush in that hand; now he held a gun with the same

casual indifference.

One does not die like this, he thought. One must feel a great joy or a healthy

terror. One must salute one’s own end. Let me feel a spasm of dread and I’ll

pull the trigger. He felt nothing.

He shrugged and lowered the gun. He stood tapping it against the palm of his

left hand. People always speak of a black death or a red death, he thought;

yours, Gail Wynand, will be a gray death. Why hasn’t anyone ever said that this

is the ultimate horror? Not screams, pleas or convulsions. Not the indifference

of a clean emptiness, disinfected by the fire of some great disaster. But

this--a mean, smutty little horror, impotent even to frighten. You can’t do it

like that, he told himself, smiling coldly; it would be in such bad taste.

He walked to the wall of his bedroom. His penthouse was built above the

fifty-seventh floor of a great residential hotel which he owned, in the center

of Manhattan; he could see the whole city below him. The bedroom was a glass

cage on the roof of the penthouse, its walls and ceiling made of huge glass

sheets. There were dust-blue suede curtains to be pulled across the walls and

enclose the room when he wished; there was nothing to cover the ceiling. Lying

in bed, he could study the stars over his head, or see flashes of lightning, or

watch the rain smashed into furious, glittering sunbursts in mid-air above him,

339

against the unseen protection. He liked to extinguish the lights and pull all

the curtains open when he lay in bed with a woman. "We are fornicating in the

sight of six million people," he would tell her.

He was alone now. The curtains were open. He stood looking at the city. It was

late and the great riot of lights below him was beginning to die down. He

thought that he did not mind having to look at the city for many more years and

he did not mind never seeing it again.

He leaned against the wall and felt the cold glass through the thin, dark silk

of his pyjamas. A monogram was embroidered in white on his breast pocket: GW,

reproduced from his handwriting, exactly as he signed his initials with a single

imperial motion.

People said that Gail Wynand’s greatest deception, among many, was his

appearance. He looked like the decadent, overperfected end product of a long

line of exquisite breeding--and everybody knew that he came from the gutter. He

was tall, too slender for physical beauty, as if all his flesh and muscle had

been bred away. It was not necessary for him to stand erect in order to convey

an impression of hardness. Like a piece of expensive steel, he bent, slouched

and made people conscious, not of his pose, but of the ferocious spring that

could snap him straight at any moment. This hint was all he needed; he seldom

stood quite straight; he lounged about. Under any clothes he wore, it gave him

an air of consummate elegance.

His face did not belong to modern civilization, but to ancient Rome; the face of

an eternal patrician. His hair, streaked with gray, was swept smoothly back from

a high forehead. His skin was pulled tight over the sharp bones of his face; his

mouth was long and thin; his eyes, under slanting eyebrows, were pale blue and

photographed like two sardonic white ovals. An artist had asked him once to sit

for a painting of Mephistopheles; Wynand had laughed, refusing, and the artist

had watched sadly, because the laughter made the face perfect for his purpose.

He slouched casually against the glass pane of his bedroom, the weight of a gun

on his palm. Today, he thought; what was today? Did anything happen that would

help me now and give meaning to this moment?

Today had been like so many other days behind him that particular features were

hard to recognize. He was fifty-one years old, and it was the middle of October

in the year 1932; he was certain of this much; the rest took an effort of

memory.

He had awakened and dressed at six o’clock this morning; he had never slept more

than four hours on any night of his adult life. He descended to his dining room

where breakfast was served to him. His penthouse, a small structure, stood on

the edge of a vast roof landscaped as a garden. The rooms were a superlative

artistic achievement; their simplicity and beauty would have aroused gasps of

admiration had this house belonged to anyone else; but people were shocked into

silence when they thought that this was the home of the publisher of the New

York Banner, the most vulgar newspaper in the country.