The Fountainhead Part 80

Keating said: "A cup of coffee." He saw Catherine's eyes on him, and in a sudden panic of embarra.s.sment, feeling he must not confess that he couldn't swallow a bite of food now, feeling that the confession would anger her, he added: "A ham and swiss on rye, I guess."

"Peter, what ghastly food habits! Wait a minute, waitress. You don't want that, Peter. It's very bad for you. You should have a fresh salad. And coffee is bad at this time of the day. Americans drink too much coffee."

"All right," said Keating.

"Tea and a combination salad, waitress.... And-oh, waitress!-no bread with the salad-you're gaining weight, Peter-some diet crackers. Please."

Keating waited until the orchid uniform had moved away, and then he said, hopefully: "I have changed, haven't I, Katie? I do look pretty awful?" Even a disparaging comment would be a personal link.

"What? Oh, I guess so. It isn't healthy. But Americans know nothing whatever about the proper nutritional balance. Of course, men do make too much fuss over mere appearance. They're much vainer than women. It's really women who're taking charge of all productive work now, and women will build a better world."

"How does one build a better world, Katie?"

"Well, if you consider the determining factor, which is, of course, economic ..."

"No, I ... I didn't ask it that way.... Katie, I've been very unhappy."

"I'm sorry to hear that. One hears so many people say that nowadays. That's because it's a transition period and people feel rootless. But you've always had a bright disposition, Peter."

"Do you ... do you remember what I was like?"

"Goodness, Peter, you talk as if it had been sixty-five years ago."

"But so many things happened. I ..." He took the plunge; he had to take it; the crudest way seemed the easiest. "I was married. And divorced."

"Yes, I read about that. I was glad when you were divorced." She leaned forward. "If your wife was the kind of woman who could marry Gail Wynand, you were lucky to get rid of her."

The tone of chronic impatience that ran words together had not altered to p.r.o.nounce this. He had to believe it: this was all the subject meant to her.

"Katie, you're very tactful and kind ... but drop the act," he said, knowing in dread that it was not an act. "Drop it.... Tell me what you thought of me then.... Say everything.... I don't mind.... I want to hear it.... Don't you understand? I'll feel better if I hear it."

"Surely, Peter, you don't want me to start some sort of recriminations ? I'd say it was conceited of you, if it weren't so childish."

"What did you feel-that day-when I didn't come-and then you heard I was married?" He did not know what instinct drove him, through numbness, to be brutal as the only means left to him. "Katie, you suffered then?"

"Yes, of course I suffered. All young people do in such situations. It seems foolish afterward. I cried, and I screamed some dreadful things at Uncle Ellsworth, and he had to call a doctor to give me a sedative, and then weeks afterward I fainted on the street one day without any reason, which was really disgraceful. All the conventional things, I suppose, everybody goes through them, like measles. Why should I have expected to be exempt?-as Uncle Ellsworth said." He thought that he had not known there was something worse than a living memory of pain: a dead one. "And of course we knew it was for the best. I can't imagine myself married to you."

"You can't imagine it, Katie?"

"That is, nor to anyone else. It wouldn't have worked, Peter. I'm temperamentally unsuited to domesticity. It's too selfish and narrow. Of course, I understand what you feel just now and I appreciate it. It's only human that you should feel something like remorse, since you did what is known as jilted me." He winced. "You see how stupid those things sound. It's natural for you to be a little contrite-a normal reflex-but we must look at it objectively, we're grown-up, rational people, nothing is too serious, we can't really help what we do, we're conditioned that way, we just charge it off to experience and go on from there."

"Katie! You're not talking some fallen girl out of her problem. You're speaking about yourself."

"Is there any essential difference? Everybody's problems are the same, just like everybody's emotions."

He saw her nibbling a thin strip of bread with a smear of green, and noticed that his order had been served. He moved his fork about in his salad bowl, and he made himself bite into a gray piece of diet cracker. Then he discovered how strange it was when one lost the knack of eating automatically and had to do it by full conscious effort; the cracker seemed inexhaustible; he could not finish the process of chewing ; he moved his jaws without reducing the amount of gritty pulp in his mouth.

"Katie ... for six years ... I thought of how I'd ask your forgiveness some day. And now I have the chance, but I won't ask it. It seems ... it seems beside the point. I know it's horrible to say that, but that's how it seems to me. It was the worst thing I ever did in my life-but not because I hurt you. I did hurt you, Katie, and maybe more than you know yourself. But that's not my worst guilt.... Katie, I wanted to marry you. It was the only thing I ever really wanted. And that's the sin that can't be forgiven-that I hadn't done what I wanted. It feels so dirty and pointless and monstrous, as one feels about insanity, because there's no sense to it, no dignity, nothing but pain-and wasted pain.... Katie, why do they always teach us that it's easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It's the hardest thing in the world-to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want. As I wanted to marry you. Not as I want to sleep with some woman or get drunk or get my name in the papers. Those things-they're not even desires-they're things people do to escape from desires-because it's such a big responsibility, really to want something."

"Peter, what you're saying is very ugly and selfish."

"Maybe. I don't know. I've always had to tell you the truth. About everything. Even if you didn't ask. I had to."

"Yes. You did. It was a commendable trait. You were a charming boy, Peter."

It was the bowl of sugar-coated almonds on the counter that hurt him, he thought in dull anger. The almonds were green and white; they had no business being green and white at this time of the year; the colors of St. Patrick's Day-then there was always candy like that in all the store windows-and St. Patrick's Day meant spring-no, better than spring, that moment of wonderful antic.i.p.ation just before spring is to begin.

"Katie, I won't say that I'm still in love with you. I don't know whether I am or not. I've never asked myself. It wouldn't matter now. I'm not saying this because I hope for anything or think of trying or ... I know only that I loved you, Katie, I loved you, whatever I made of it, even if this is how I've got to say it for the last time, I loved you, Katie."

She looked at him-and she seemed pleased. Not stirred, not happy, not pitying; but pleased in a casual way. He thought: If she were completely the spinster, the frustrated social worker, as people think of those women, the kind who would scorn s.e.x in the haughty conceit of her own virtue, that would still be recognition, if only in hostility. But this-this amused tolerance seemed to admit that romance was only human, one had to take it, like everybody else, it was a popular weakness of no great consequence-she was gratified as she would have been gratified by the same words from any other man-it was like that red-enamel Mexican on her lapel, a contemptuous concession to people's demand of vanity.

"Katie ... Katie, let's say that this doesn't count-this, now-it's past counting anyway, isn't it? This can't touch what it was like, can it, Katie? ... People always regret that the past is so final, that nothing can change it-but I'm glad it's so. We can't spoil it. We can think of the past, can't we? Why shouldn't we? I mean, as you said, like grown-up people, not fooling ourselves, not trying to hope, but only to look back at it.... Do you remember when I came to your house in New York for the first time? You looked so thin and small, and your hair hung every which way. I told you I would never love anyone else. I held you on my lap, you didn't weigh anything at all, and I told you I would never love anyone else. And you said you knew it."

"I remember."

"When we were together ... Katie, I'm ashamed of so many things, but not of one moment when we were together. When I asked you to marry me-no, I never asked you to marry me-I just said we were engaged-and you said 'yes'-it was on a park bench-it was snowing ..."

"Yes."

"You had funny woolen gloves. Like mittens. I remember-there were drops of water in the fuzz-round-like crystal-they nashed-it was because a car pa.s.sed by."

"Yes, I think it's agreeable to look back occasionally. But one's perspective widens. One grows richer spiritually with the years."

He kept silent for a long time. Then he said, his voice flat: "I'm sorry."

"Why? You're very sweet, Peter. I've always said men are the sentimentalists."

He thought: It's not an act-one can't put on an act like that-unless it's an act inside, for oneself, and then there is no limit, no way out, no reality....

She went on talking to him, and after a while it was about Was.h.i.+ngton again. He answered when it was necessary.

He thought that he had believed it was a simple sequence, the past and the present, and if there was loss in the past one was compensated by pain in the present, and pain gave it a form of immortality-but he had not known that one could destroy like this, kill retroactively-so that to her it had never existed.

She glanced at her wrist watch and gave a little gasp of impatience.

"I'm late already. I must run along."

He said heavily: "Do you mind if I don't go with you, Katie? It's not rudeness. I just think it's better."

"But of course. Not at all. I'm quite able to find my way in the streets and there's no need for formalities among old friends." She added, gathering her bag and gloves, crumpling a paper napkin into a ball, dropping it neatly into her teacup: "I'll give you a ring next time I'm in town and we'll have a bite together again. Though I can't promise when that will be. I'm so busy, I have to go so many places, last month it was Detroit and next week I'm flying to St. Louis, but when they shoot me out to New York again, I'll ring you up, so long, Peter, it was ever so nice."

XI

GAIL WYNAND LOOKED AT THE s.h.i.+NING WOOD OF THE YACHT DECK. The wood and a bra.s.s doork.n.o.b that had become a smear of fire gave him a sense of everything around him: the miles of s.p.a.ce filled with sun, between the burning spreads of sky and ocean. It was February, and the yacht lay still, her engines idle, in the southern Pacific.

He leaned on the rail and looked down at Roark in the water. Roark floated on his back, his body stretched into a straight line, arms spread, eyes closed. The tan of his skin implied a month of days such as this. Wynand thought that this was the way he liked to apprehend s.p.a.ce and time: through the power of his yacht, through the tan of Roark's skin or the sunbrown of his own arms folded before him on the rail.

He had not sailed his yacht for several years. This time he had wanted Roark to be his only guest. Dominique was left behind.

Wynand had said: "You're killing yourself, Howard. You've been going at a pace n.o.body can stand for long. Ever since Monadnock, isn't it? Think you'd have the courage to perform the feat most difficult for you-to rest?"

He was astonished when Roark accepted without argument. Roark laughed: "I'm not running away from my work, if that's what surprises you. I know when to stop-and I can't stop, unless it's completely. I know I've overdone it. I've been wasting too much paper lately and doing awful stuff."

"Do you ever do awful stuff?"

"Probably more of it than any other architect and with less excuse. The only distinction I can claim is that my botches end up in my own wastebasket."

"I warn you, we'll be away for months. If you begin to regret it and cry for your drafting table in a week, like all men who've never learned to loaf, I won't take you back. I'm the worst kind of dictator aboard my yacht. You'll have everything you can imagine, except paper or pencils. I won't even leave you any freedom of speech. No mention of girders, plastics or reinforced concrete once you step on board. I'll teach you to eat, sleep and exist like the most worthless millionaire."

"I'd like to try that."

The work in the office did not require Roark's presence for the next few months. His current jobs were being completed. Two new commissions were not to be started until spring.

He had made all the sketches Keating needed for Cortlandt. The construction was about to begin. Before sailing, on a day in late December, Roark went to take a last look at the site of Cortlandt. An anonymous spectator in a group of the idle curious, he stood and watched the steam shovels biting the earth, breaking the way for future foundations. The East River was a broad band of sluggish black water; and beyond, in a spa.r.s.e haze of snowflakes, the towers of the city stood softened, half suggested in watercolors of orchid and blue.

Dominique did not protest when Wynand told her that he wanted to sail on a long cruise with Roark. "Dearest, you understand that it's not running away from you? I just need some time taken out of everything. Being with Howard is like being alone with myself, only more at peace."

"Of course, Gail. I don't mind."

But he looked at her, and suddenly he laughed, incredulously pleased. "Dominique, I believe you're jealous. It's wonderful, I'm more grateful to him than ever-if it could make you jealous of me."

She could not tell him that she was jealous or of whom.

The yacht sailed at the end of December. Roark watched, grinning, Wynand's disappointment when Wynand found that he needed to enforce no discipline. Roark did not speak of buildings, lay for hours stretched out on deck in the sun, and loafed like an expert. They spoke little. There were days when Wynand could not remember what sentences they had exchanged. It would have seemed possible to him that they had not spoken at all. Their serenity was their best means of communication.

Today they had dived together to swim and Wynand had climbed back first. As he stood at the rail, watching Roark in the water, he thought of the power he held in this moment: he could order the yacht to start moving, sail away and leave that redheaded body to sun and ocean. The thought gave him pleasure: the sense of power and the sense of surrender to Roark in the knowledge that no conceivable force could make him exercise that power. Every physical instrumentality was on his side: a few contractions of his vocal chords giving the order and someone's hand opening a valve-and the obedient machine would move away. He thought: It's not just a moral issue, not the mere horror of the act, one could conceivably abandon a man if the fate of a continent depended on it. But nothing would enable him to abandon this man. He, Gail Wynand, was the helpless one in this moment, with the solid planking of the deck under his feet. Roark, floating like a piece of driftwood, held a power greater than that of the engine in the belly of the yacht. Wynand thought: Because that is the power from which the engine has come.

Roark climbed back on deck; Wynand looked at Roark's body, at the threads of water running down the angular planes. He said: "You made a mistake on the Stoddard Temple, Howard. That statue should have been, not of Dominique, but of you."

"No. I'm too egotistical for that."

"Egotistical? An egotist would have loved it. You use words in the strangest way."

"In the exact way. I don't wish to be the symbol of anything. I'm only myself."

Stretched in a deck chair, Wynand glanced up with satisfaction at the lantern, a disk of frosted gla.s.s on the bulkhead behind him: it cut off the black void of the ocean and gave him privacy within solid walls of light. He heard the sound of the yacht's motion, he felt the warm night air on his face, he saw nothing but the stretch of deck around him, enclosed and final.

Roark stood before him at the rail; a tall white figure leaning back against black s.p.a.ce, his head lifted as Wynand had seen it lifted in an unfinished building. His hands clasped the rail. The short s.h.i.+rt sleeves left his arms in the light; vertical ridges of shadow stressed the tensed muscles of his arms and the tendons of his neck. Wynand thought of the yacht's engine, of skysc.r.a.pers, of transatlantic cables, of everything man had made.

"Howard, this is what I wanted. To have you here with me."

"I know."

"Do you know what it really is? Avarice. I'm a miser about two things on earth: you and Dominique. I'm a millionaire who's never owned anything. Do you remember what you said about owners.h.i.+p? I'm like a savage who's discovered the idea of private property and run amuck on it. It's funny. Think of Ellsworth Toohey."

"Why Ellsworth Toohey?"

"I mean, the things he preaches. I've been wondering lately whether he really understands what he's advocating. Selflessness in the absolute sense? Why, that's what I've been. Does he know that I'm the embodiment of his ideal? Of course, he wouldn't approve of my motive, but motives never alter facts. If it's true selflessness he's after, in the philosophical sense-and Mr. Toohey is a philosopher-in a sense much beyond matters of money, why, let him look at me. I've never owned anything. I've never wanted anything. I didn't give a d.a.m.n-in the most cosmic way Toohey could ever hope for. I made myself into a barometer subject to the pressure of the whole world. The voice of his ma.s.ses pushed me up and down. Of course, I collected a fortune in the process. Does that change the intrinsic reality of the picture? Suppose I gave away every penny of it. Suppose I had never wished to take any money at all, but had set out in pure altruism to serve the people. What would I have to do? Exactly what I've done. Give the greatest pleasure to the greatest number. Express the opinions, the desires, the tastes of the majority. The majority that voted me its approval and support freely, in the shape of a three-cent ballot dropped at the corner newsstand every morning. The Wynand papers? For thirty-one years they have represented everybody except Gail Wynand. I erased my ego out of existence in a way never achieved by any saint in a cloister. Yet people call me corrupt. Why? The saint in a cloister sacrifices only material things. It's a small price to pay for the glory of his soul. He h.o.a.rds his soul and gives up the world. But I-I took automobiles, silk pyjamas, a penthouse, and gave the world my soul in exchange. Who's sacrificed more -if sacrifice is the test of virtue? Who's the actual saint?"

"Gail ... I didn't think you'd ever admit that to yourself."

"Why not? I knew what I was doing. I wanted power over a collective soul and I got it. A collective soul. It's a messy kind of concept, but if anyone wishes to visualize it concretely, let him pick up a copy of the New York Banner." Banner."

"Yes..."

"Of course, Toohey would tell me that this is not what he means by altruism. He means I shouldn't leave it up to the people to decide what they want. I should decide it. I should determine, not what I like nor what they like, but what I think they should like, and then ram it down their throats. It would have to be rammed, since their voluntary choice is the Banner. Banner. Well, there are several such altruists in the world today." Well, there are several such altruists in the world today."

"You realize that?"

"Of course. What else can one do if one must serve the people? If one must live for others? Either pander to everybody's wishes and be called corrupt; or impose on everybody by force your own idea of everybody's good. Can you think of any other way?"

"No."

"What's left then? Where does decency start? What begins where altruism ends? Do you see what I'm in love with?"

"Yes, Gail." Wynand had noticed that Roark's voice had a reluctance that sounded almost like sadness.

"What's the matter with you? Why do you sound like that?"

"I'm sorry. Forgive me. It's just something I thought. I've been thinking of this for a long time. And particularly all these days when you've made me lie on deck and loaf."

"Thinking about me?"

"About you-among many other things."

"What have you decided?"

"I'm not an altruist, Gail. I don't decide for others."

"You don't have to worry about me. I've sold myself, but I've held no illusions about it. I've never become an Alvah Scarret. He really believes whatever the public believes. I despise the public. That's my only vindication. I've sold my life, but I got a good price. Power. I've never used it. I couldn't afford a personal desire. But now I'm free. Now I can use it for what I want. For what I believe. For Dominique. For you."

Roark turned away. When he looked back at Wynand, he said only: "I hope so, Gail."

"What have you been thinking about, these past weeks?"

"The principle behind the dean who fired me from Stanton."