The Fountainhead (100 page)

He drove to the foot of the hill and slammed the brakes on, startled, looking up. In his absence the house had taken shape; it could be recognized now—it looked like the drawing. He felt a moment of childish wonder that it had really come out just as on the sketch, as if he had never quite believed it. Rising against the pale blue sky, it still looked like a drawing, unfinished, the planes of masonry like spreads of water-color filled in, the naked scaffolding like pencil lines; a huge drawing on a pale blue sheet of paper.

He left the car and walked to the top of the hill. He saw Roark among the men. He stood outside and watched the way Roark walked through the structure, the way he turned his head or raised his hand, pointing. He noticed Roark’s manner of stopping: his legs apart, his arms straight at his sides, his head lifted; an instinctive pose of confidence, of energy held under effortless control, a moment that gave to his body the structural cleanliness of his own building. Structure, thought Wynand, is a solved problem of tension, of balance, of security in counterthrusts.

He thought: There’s no emotional significance in the act of erecting a building; it’s just a mechanical job, like laying sewers or making an automobile. And he wondered why he watched Roark, feeling what he felt in his art gallery. He belongs in an unfinished building, thought Wynand, more than in a completed one, more than at a drafting table, it’s his right setting, it’s becoming to him—as Dominique said a yacht was becoming to me.

Afterward Roark came out and they walked together along the crest of the hill, among the trees. They sat down on a fallen tree trunk, they saw the structure in the distance through the stems of the brushwood. The stems were dry and naked, but there was a quality of spring in the cheerful insolence of their upward thrust, the stirring of a self-assertive purpose.

Wynand asked:

“Howard, have you ever been in love?”

Roark turned to look straight at him and answer quietly:

“I still am.”

“But when you walk through a building, what you feel is greater than that?”

“Much greater, Gail.”

“I was thinking of people who say that happiness is impossible on earth. Look how hard they all try to find some joy in life. Look how they struggle for it. Why should any living creature exist in pain? By what conceivable right can anyone demand that a human being exist for anything but for his own joy? Every one of them wants it. Every part of him wants it. But they never find it. I wonder why. They whine and say they don’t understand the meaning of life. There’s a particular kind of people that I despise. Those who seek some sort of a higher purpose or ‘universal goal,’ who don’t know what to live for, who moan that they must ‘find themselves.’ You hear it all around us. That seems to be the official bromide of our century. Every book you open. Every drooling self-confession. It seems to be the noble thing to confess. I’d think it would be the most shameful one.”

“Look, Gail.” Roark got up, reached out, tore a thick branch off a tree, held it in both hands, one fist closed at each end; then, his wrists and knuckles tensed against the resistance, he bent the branch slowly into an arc. “Now I can make what I want of it: a bow, a spear, a cane, a railing. That’s the meaning of life.”

“Your strength?”

“Your work.” He tossed the branch aside. “The material the earth offers you and what you make of it ... What are you thinking of, Gail?”

“The photograph on the wall of my office.”

 

To remain controlled, as he wished, to be patient, to make of patience an active duty executed consciously each day, to stand before Roark and let her serenity tell him: “This is the hardest you could have demanded of me, but I’m glad, if it’s what you want”—such was the discipline of Dominique’s existence.

She stood by, as a quiet spectator of Roark and Wynand. She watched them silently. She had wanted to understand Wynand. This was the answer.

She accepted Roark’s visits to their house and the knowledge that in the hours of these evenings he was Wynand’s property, not hers. She met him as a gracious hostess, indifferent and smiling, not a person but an exquisite fixture of Wynand’s home, she presided at the dinner table, she left them in the study afterward.

She sat alone in the drawing room, with the lights turned off and the door open; she sat erect and quiet, her eyes on the slit of light under the door of the study across the hall. She thought: This is my task, even when alone, even in the darkness, within no knowledge but my own, to look at that door as I looked at him here, without complaint.... Roark, if it’s the punishment you chose for me, I’ll carry it completely, not as a part to play in your presence, but as a duty to perform alone—you know that violence is not hard for me to bear, only patience is, you chose the hardest, and I must perform it and offer it to you ... my ... dearest one...

When Roark looked at her, there was no denial of memory in his eyes. The glance said simply that nothing had changed and nothing was needed to state it. She felt as if she heard him saying: Why are you shocked? Have we ever been parted? Your drawing room, your husband and the city you dread beyond the windows, are they real now, Dominique? Do you understand? Are you beginning to understand? “Yes,” she would say suddenly, aloud, trusting that the word would fit the conversation of the moment, knowing that Roark would hear it as his answer.

It was not a punishment he had chosen for her. It was a discipline imposed on both of them, the last test. She understood his purpose when she found that she could feel her love for him proved by the room, by Wynand, even by his love for Wynand and hers, by the impossible situation, by her enforced silence—the barriers proving to her that no barriers could exist.

She did not see him alone. She waited.

She would not visit the site of construction. She had said to Wynand: “I’ll see the house when it’s finished.” She never questioned him about Roark. She let her hands lie in sight on the arms of her chair, so that the relief of any violent motion would be denied her, her hands as her private barometer of endurance, when Wynand came home late at night and told her that he had spent the evening at Roark’s apartment, the apartment she had never seen.

Once she broke enough to ask:

“What is this, Gail? An obsession?”

“I suppose so.” He added: “It’s strange that you don’t like him.”

“I haven’t said that.”

“I can see it. I’m not really surprised. It’s your way. You would dislike him—precisely because he’s the type of man you should like.... Don’t resent my obsession.”

“I don’t resent it.”

“Dominique, would you understand it if I told you that I love you more since I’ve met him? Even—I want to say this—even when you lie in my arms, it’s more than it was. I feel a greater right to you.”

He spoke with the simple confidence they had given each other in the last three years. She sat looking at him as she always did; her glance had tenderness without scorn and sadness without pity.

“I understand, Gail.”

After a moment she asked:

“What is he to you, Gail? In the nature of a shrine?”

“In the nature of a hair shirt,” said Wynand.

When she had gone upstairs, he walked to a window and stood looking up at the sky. His head thrown back, he felt the pull of his throat muscles and he wondered whether the peculiar solemnity of looking at the sky comes, not from what one contemplates, but from that uplift of one’s head.

“T
HE BASIC TROUBLE WITH THE MODERN WORLD,” SAID ELLSWORTH Toohey, ”is the intellectual fallacy that freedom and compulsion are opposites. To solve the gigantic problems crushing the world today, we must clarify our mental confusion. We must acquire a philosophical perspective. In essence, freedom and compulsion are one. Let me give you a simple illustration. Traffic lights restrain your freedom to cross a street whenever you wish. But this restraint gives you the freedom from being run over by a truck. If you were assigned to a job and prohibited from leaving it, it would restrain the freedom of your career. But it would give you freedom from the fear of unemployment. Whenever a new compulsion is imposed upon us, we automatically gain a new freedom. The two are inseparable. Only by accepting total compulsion can we achieve total freedom.

“That’s right!” shrieked Mitchell Layton.

It was an actual shriek, thin and high. It had come with the startling suddenness of a fire siren. His guests looked at Mitchell Layton.

He sat in a tapestry armchair of his drawing room, half lying, legs and stomach forward, like an obnoxious child flaunting his bad posture. Everything about the person of Mitchell Layton was almost and not quite, just short of succeeding: his body had started out to be tall, but changed its mind, leaving him with a long torso above short, stocky legs; his face had delicate bones, but the flesh had played a joke on them, puffing out, not enough to achieve obesity, just enough to suggest permanent mumps. Mitchell Layton pouted. It was not a temporary expression nor a matter of facial arrangement. It was a chronic attribute, pervading his entire person. He pouted with his whole body.

Mitchell Layton had inherited a quarter of a billion dollars and had spent the thirty-three years of his life trying to make amends for it.

Ellsworth Toohey, in dinner clothes, stood lounging against a cabinet. His nonchalance had an air of gracious informality and a touch of impertinence, as if the people around him did not deserve the preservation of rigid good manners.

His eyes moved about the room. The room was not exactly modern, not quite Colonial and just a little short of French Empire; the furnishings presented straight planes and swan-neck supports, black mirrors and electric hurricane lamps, chromium and tapestry; there was unity in a single attribute: in the expensiveness of everything.

“That’s right,” said Mitchell Layton belligerently, as if he expected everyone to disagree and was insulting them in advance. “People make too damn much fuss about freedom. What I mean is it’s a vague, over-abused word. I’m not even sure it’s such a God-damn blessing.
I
think people would be much happier in a regulated society that had a definite pattern and a unified form—like a folk dance. You know how beautiful a folk dance is. And rhythmic too. That’s because it took generations to work it out and they don’t let just any chance fool come along to change it. That’s what we need. Pattern, I mean, and rhythm. Also beauty.”

“That’s an apt comparison, Mitch,” said Ellsworth Toohey. “I’ve always told you that you had a creative mind.”

“What I mean is, what makes people unhappy is not too little choice, but too much,” said Mitchell Layton. “Having to decide, always to decide, torn every which way all of the time. Now in a society of pattern, a man could feel safe. Nobody would come to him all the time pestering him to do something. Nobody would have to do anything. What I mean is, of course, except working for the common good.”

“It’s spiritual values that count,” said Homer Slottern. “Got to be up to date and keep up with the world. This is a spiritual century.”

Homer Slottern had a big face with drowsy eyes. His shirt studs were made of rubies and emeralds combined, like gobs of salad dripping down his starched white shirt front. He owned three department stores.

“There ought to be a law to make everybody study the mystical secrets of the ages,” said Mitchell Layton. “It’s all been written out in the pyramids in Egypt.”

“That’s true, Mitch,” Homer Slottern agreed. “There’s a lot to be said for mysticism. On the one hand. On the other hand, dialectic materialism ...”

“It’s not a contradiction,” Mitchell Layton drawled contemptuously. “The world of the future will combine both.”

“As a matter of fact,” said Ellsworth Toohey, “the two are superficially varied manifestations of the same thing. Of the same intention.” His eyeglasses gave a spark, as if lighted from within; he seemed to relish this particular statement in his own way.

“All I know is, unselfishness is the only moral principle,” said Jessica Pratt, “the noblest principle and a sacred duty and much more important than freedom. Unselfishness is the only way to happiness. I would have everybody who refused to be unselfish shot. To put them out of their misery. They can’t be happy anyway.”

Jessica Pratt spoke wistfully. She had a gentle, aging face; her powdery skin, innocent of make-up, gave the impression that a finger touching it would be left with a spot of white dust.

Jessica Pratt had an old family name, no money, and a great passion: her love for her younger sister Renée. They had been left orphaned at an early age, and she had dedicated her life to Renée’s upbringing. She had sacrificed everything; she had never married; she had struggled, plotted, schemed, defrauded through the years—and achieved the triumph of Renée’s marriage to Homer Slottern.

Renée Slottern sat curled up on a footstool, munching peanuts. Once in a while she reached up to the crystal dish on a side table and took another. She exhibited no further exertion. Her pale eyes stared placidly out of her pale face.

“That’s going too far, Jess,” said Homer Slottern. “You can’t expect everybody to be a saint.”

“I don’t expect anything,” said Jessica Pratt meekly. “I’ve given up expecting long ago. But it’s education that we all need. Now I think Mr. Toohey understands. If everybody were compelled to have the proper kind of education, we’d have a better world. If we force people to do good, they will be free to be happy.”

“This is a perfectly useless discussion,” said Eve Layton. “No intelligent person believes in freedom nowadays. It’s dated. The future belongs to social planning. Compulsion is a law of nature. That’s that. It’s self-evident.”

Eve Layton was beautiful. She stood under the light of a chandelier, her smooth black hair clinging to her skull, the pale green satin of her gown alive like water about to stream off and expose the rest of her soft, tanned skin. She had the special faculty of making satin and perfume appear as modern as an aluminum table top. She was Venus rising out of a submarine hatch.