The Fountainhead (20 page)

It was a long time before silence came suddenly, as abrupt and shocking as the roar; the loud-speaker died, choking on a high note. Those in the lobby stood still. Then came the voice.

“My friends,” it said, simply and solemnly. “My brothers,” it added softly, involuntarily, both full of emotion and smiling apologetically at the emotion. “I am more touched by this reception than I should allow myself to be. I hope I shall be forgiven for a trace of the vain child which is in all of us. But I realize—and in that spirit I accept it—that this tribute was paid not to my person, but to a principle which chance has granted me to represent in all humility tonight.”

It was not a voice, it was a miracle. It unrolled as a velvet banner. It spoke English words, but the resonant clarity of each syllable made it sound like a new language spoken for the first time. It was the voice of a giant.

Keating stood, his mouth open. He did not hear what the voice was saying. He heard the beauty of the sounds without meaning. He felt no need to know the meaning; he could accept anything, he would be led blindly anywhere.

“... and so, my friends,” the voice was saying, “the lesson to be learned from our tragic struggle is the lesson of unity. We shall unite or we shall be defeated. Our will—the will of the disinherited, the forgotten, the oppressed—shall weld us into a solid bulwark, with a common faith and a common goal. This is the time for every man to renounce the thoughts of his petty little problems, of gain, of comfort, of self-gratification. This is the time to merge his self in a great current, in the rising tide which is approaching to sweep us all, willing or unwilling, into the future. History, my friends, does not ask questions or acquiescence. It is irrevocable, as the voice of the masses that determine it. Let us listen to the call. Let us organize, my brothers. Let us organize. Let us organize. Let us organize.”

Keating looked at Catherine. There was no Catherine; there was only a white face dissolving in the sounds of the loud-speaker. It was not that she heard her uncle; Keating could feel no jealousy of him; he wished he could. It was not affection. It was something cold and impersonal that left her empty, her will surrendered and no human will holding hers, but a nameless thing in which she was being swallowed.

“Let’s get out of here,” he whispered. His voice was savage. He was afraid.

She turned to him, as if she were emerging from unconsciousness. He knew that she was trying to recognize him and everything he implied. She whispered:

“Yes. Let’s get out.”

They walked through the streets, through the rain, without direction. It was cold, but they went on, to move, to feel the movement, to know the sensation of their own muscles moving.

“We’re getting drenched,” Keating said at last, as bluntly and naturally as he could; their silence frightened him; it proved that they both knew the same thing and that the thing had been real. “Let’s find some place where we can have a drink.”

“Yes,” said Catherine, “let’s. It’s so cold.... Isn’t it stupid of me? Now I’ve missed Uncle’s speech and I wanted so much to hear it.” It was all right. She had mentioned it. She had mentioned it quite naturally, with a healthy amount of proper regret. The thing was gone. “But I wanted to be with you, Peter ... I want to be with you always.” The thing gave a last jerk, not in the meaning of what she said, but in the reason that had prompted her to say it. Then it was gone, and Keating smiled; his fingers sought her bare wrist between her sleeve and glove, and her skin was warm against his....

Many days later Keating heard the story that was being told all over town. It was said that on the day after the mass meeting Gail Wynand had given Ellsworth Toohey a raise in salary. Toohey had been furious and had tried to refuse it. “You cannot bribe me, Mr. Wynand,” he had said. “I’m not bribing you,” Wynand had answered; “don’t flatter yourself.”

 

When the strike was settled, interrupted construction went forward with a spurt throughout the city, and Keating found himself spending days and nights at work, with new commissions pouring into the office. Francon smiled happily at everybody and gave a small party for his staff, to erase the memory of anything he might have said. The palatial residence of Mr. and Mrs. Dale Ainsworth on Riverside Drive, a pet project of Keating’s, done in Late Renaissance and gray granite, was completed at last. Mr. and Mrs. Dale Ainsworth gave a formal reception as a housewarming, to which Guy Francon and Peter Keating were invited, but Lucius N. Heyer was ignored, quite accidentally, as always happened to him of late. Francon enjoyed the reception, because every square foot of granite in the house reminded him of the stupendous payment received by a certain granite quarry in Connecticut. Keating enjoyed the reception, because the stately Mrs. Ainsworth said to him with a disarming smile: “But I was
certain
that you were Mr. Francon’s partner! It’s Francon and Heyer, of course! How perfectly careless of me! All I can offer by way of excuse is that if you aren’t his partner, one would certainly say you were
entitled
to be!” Life in the office rolled on smoothly, in one of those periods when everything seemed to go well.

Keating was astonished, therefore, one morning shortly after the Ainsworth reception, to see Francon arrive at the office with a countenance of nervous irritation. “Oh, nothing,” he waved his hand at Keating impatiently, “nothing at all.” In the drafting room Keating noticed three draftsmen, their heads close together, bent over a section of the New York
Banner,
reading with a guilty kind of avid interest; he heard an unpleasant chuckle from one of them. When they saw him the paper disappeared, too quickly. He had no time to inquire into this; a contractor’s job runner was waiting for him in his office, also a stack of mail and drawings to be approved.

He had forgotten the incident three hours later in a rush of appointments. He felt light, clear-headed, exhilarated by his own energy. When he had to consult his library on a new drawing which he wished to compare with its best prototypes, he walked out of his office, whistling, swinging the drawing gaily.

His motion had propelled him halfway across the reception room, when he stopped short; the drawing swung forward and flapped back against his knees. He forgot that it was quite improper for him to pause there like that in the circumstances.

A young woman stood before the railing, speaking to the reception clerk. Her slender body seemed out of all scale in relation to a normal human body; its lines were so long, so fragile, so exaggerated that she looked like a stylized drawing of a woman and made the correct proportions of a normal being appear heavy and awkward beside her. She wore a plain gray suit; the contrast between its tailored severity and her appearance was deliberately exorbitant—and strangely elegant. She let the finger tips of one hand rest on the railing, a narrow hand ending the straight imperious line of her arm. She had gray eyes that were not ovals, but two long, rectangular cuts edged by parallel lines of lashes; she had an air of cold serenity and an exquisitely vicious mouth. Her face, her pale gold hair, her suit seemed to have no color, but only a hint, just on the verge of the reality of color, making the full reality seem vulgar. Keating stood still, because he understood for the first time what it was that artists spoke about when they spoke of beauty.

“I’ll see him now, if I see him at all,” she was saying to the reception clerk. “He asked me to come and this is the only time I have.” It was not a command; she spoke as if it were not necessary for her voice to assume the tones of commanding.

“Yes, but ...” A light buzzed on the clerk’s switchboard; she plugged the connection through, hastily. “Yes, Mr. Francon ...” She listened and nodded with relief. “Yes, Mr. Francon.” She turned to the visitor: “Will you go right in, please?”

The young woman turned and looked at Keating as she passed him on her way to the stairs. Her eyes went past him without stopping. Something ebbed from his stunned admiration. He had had time to see her eyes; they seemed weary and a little contemptuous, but they left him with a sense of cold cruelty.

He heard her walking up the stairs, and the feeling vanished, but the admiration remained. He approached the reception clerk eagerly.

“Who was that?” he asked.

The clerk shrugged:

“That’s the boss’s little girl.”

“Why, the lucky stiff!” said Keating. “He’s been holding out on me.”

“You misunderstood me,” the clerk said coldly. “It’s his daughter. It’s Dominique Francon.”

“Oh,” said Keating. “Oh, Lord!”

“Yeah?” the girl looked at him sarcastically. “Have you read this morning’s
Banner?”

“No. Why?”

“Read it.”

Her switchboard buzzed and she turned away from him.

He sent a boy for a copy of the
Banner
and turned anxiously to the column, “Your House,” by Dominique Francon. He had heard that she’d been quite successful lately with descriptions of the homes of prominent New Yorkers. Her field was confined to home decoration, but she ventured occasionally into architectural criticism. Today her subject was the new residence of Mr. and Mrs. Dale Ainsworth on Riverside Drive. He read, among many other things, the following:

“You enter a magnificent lobby of golden marble and you think that this is the City Hall or the Main Post Office, but it isn’t. It has, however, everything: the mezzanine with the colonnade and the stairway with a goitre and the cartouches in the form of looped leather belts. Only it’s not leather, it’s marble. The dining room has a splendid bronze gate, placed by mistake on the ceiling, in the shape of a trellis entwined with fresh bronze grapes. There are dead ducks and rabbits hanging on the wall panels, in bouquets of carrots, petunias and string beans. I do not think these would have been very attractive if real, but since they are bad plaster imitations, it is all right.... The bedroom windows face a brick wall, not a very neat wall, but nobody needs to see the bedrooms. ... The front windows are large enough and admit plenty of light, as well as the feet of the marble cupids that roost on the outside. The cupids are well fed and present a pretty picture to the street, against the severe granite of the façade; they are quite commendable, unless you just can’t stand to look at dimpled soles every time you glance out to see whether it’s raining. If you get tired of it, you can always look out of the central windows of the third floor, and into the cast-iron rump of Mercury who sits on top of the pediment over the entrance. It’s a very beautiful entrance. Tomorrow, we shall visit the home of Mr. and Mrs. Smythe-Pickering.”

Keating had designed the house. But he could not help chuckling through his fury when he thought of what Francon must have felt reading this, and of how Francon was going to face Mrs. Dale Ainsworth. Then he forgot the house and the article. He remembered only the girl who had written it.

He picked three sketches at random from his table and started for Francon’s office to ask his approval of the sketches, which he did not need.

On the stair landing outside Francon’s closed door he stopped. He heard Francon’s voice behind the door, loud, angry and helpless, the voice he always heard when Francon was beaten.

“... to expect such an outrage! From my own daughter! I’m used to anything from you, but this beats it all. What am I going to do? How am I going to explain? Do you have any kind of a vague idea of my position?”

Then Keating heard her laughing; it was a sound so gay and so cold that he knew it was best not to go in. He knew he did not want to go in, because he was afraid again, as he had been when he’d seen her eyes.

He turned and descended the stairs. When he had reached the floor below, he was thinking that he would meet her, that he would meet her soon and that Francon would not be able to prevent it now. He thought of it eagerly, laughing in relief at the picture of Francon’s daughter as he had imagined her for years, revising his vision of his future; even though he felt dimly that it would be better if he never met her again.

R
ALSTON HOLCOMBE HAD NO VISIBLE NECK, BUT HIS CHIN TOOK care of that. His chin and jaws formed an unbroken arc, resting on his chest. His cheeks were pink, soft to the touch, with the irresilient softness of age, like the skin of a peach that has been scalded. His rich white hair rose over his forehead and fell to his shoulders in the sweep of a medieval mane. It left dandruff on the back of his collar.

He walked through the streets of New York, wearing a broad-brimmed hat, a dark business suit, a pale green satin shirt, a vest of white brocade, a huge black bow emerging from under his chin, and he carried a staff, not a cane, but a tall ebony staff surmounted by a bulb of solid gold. It was as if his huge body were resigned to the conventions of a prosaic civilization and to its drab garments, but the oval of his chest and stomach sallied forth, flying the colors of his inner soul.

These things were permitted to him, because he was a genius. He was also president of the Architects’ Guild of America.

Ralston Holcombe did not subscribe to the views of his colleagues in the organization. He was not a grubbing builder nor a businessman. He was, he stated firmly, a man of ideals.

He denounced the deplorable state of American architecture and the unprincipled eclecticism of its practitioners. In any period of history, he declared, architects built in the spirit of their own time, and did not pick designs from the past; we could be true to history only in heeding her law, which demanded that we plant the roots of our art firmly in the reality of our own life. He decried the stupidity of erecting buildings that were Greek, Gothic or Romanesque; let us, he begged, be modern and build in the style that belongs to our days. He had found that style. It was Renaissance.

He stated his reasons clearly. Inasmuch, he pointed out, as nothing of great historical importance had happened in the world since the Renaissance, we should consider ourselves still living in that period; and all the outward forms of our existence should remain faithful to the examples of the great masters of the sixteenth century.