"You know," said Roark, "I haven't thought of you at all. I thought of the house." He added: "Perhaps that's why I knew how to be considerate of you."
The Heller house was completed in November of 1926.
In January of 1927 the Architectural Tribune published a survey of the best American homes erected during the past year. It devoted twelve large, glossy pages to photographs of the twenty-four houses its editors had selected as the worthiest architectural achievements. The Heller house was not mentioned.
The real-estate sections of the New York papers presented, each Sunday, brief accounts of the notable new residences in the vicinity. There was no account of the Heller house.
The year book of the Architects' Guild of America, which presented magnificent reproductions of what it chose as the best buildings of the country, under the title "Looking Forward," gave no reference to the Heller house.
There were many occasions when lecturers rose to platforms and addressed trim audiences on the subject of the progress of American architecture. No one spoke of the Heller house.
In the club rooms of the A.G.A. some opinions were expressed.
"It's a disgrace to the country," said Ralston Holcombe, "that a thing like that Heller house is allowed to be erected. It's a blot on the profession. There ought to be a law."
"That's what drives clients away," said John Erik Snyte. "They see a house like that and they think all architects are crazy."
"I see no cause for indignation," said Gordon L. Prescott. "I think it's screamingly funny. It looks like a cross between a filling station and a comic-strip idea of a rocket ship to the moon."
"You watch it in a couple of years," said Eugene Pettingill, "and see what happens. The thing'll collapse like a house of cards."
"Why speak in terms of years?" said Guy Francon. "Those modernistic stunts never last more than a season. The owner will get good and sick of it and he'll come running home to a good old early Colonial."
The Heller house acquired fame throughout the countryside surrounding it. People drove out of their way to park on the road before it, to stare, point and giggle. Gas-station attendants snickered when Heller's car drove past. Heller's cook had to endure the derisive glances of shopkeepers when she went on her errands. The Heller house was known in the neighborhood as "The Booby Hatch."
Peter Keating told his friends in the profession, with an indulgent smile: "Now, now, you shouldn't say that about him. I've known Howard Roark for a long time, and he's got quite a talent, quite. He's even worked for me once. He's just gone haywire on that house. He'll learn. He has a future.... Oh, you don't think he has? You really don't think he has?"
Ellsworth M. Toohey, who let no stone spring from the ground of America without his comment, did not know that the Heller house had been erected, as far as his column was concerned. He did not consider it necessary to inform his readers about it, if only to damn it. He said nothing.
XII
A COLUMN ENTITLED "OBSERVATIONS AND MEDITATIONS" BY ALVAH Scarret appeared daily on the front page of the New York Banner. It was a trusted guide, a source of inspiration and a molder of public philosophy in small towns throughout the country. In this column there had appeared, years ago, the famous statement: "We'd all be a heap sight better off if we'd forget the highfalutin notions of our fancy civilization and mind more what the savages knew long before us: to honor our mother." Alvah Scarret was a bachelor, had made two million dollars, played golf expertly and was editor-in-chief of the Wynand papers.
It was Alvah Scarret who conceived the idea of the campaign against living conditions in the slums and "Landlord Sharks," which ran in the Banner for three weeks. This was material such as Alvah Scarret relished. It had human appeal and social implications. It lent itself to Sunday-supplement illustrations of girls leaping into rivers, their skirts flaring well above their knees. It boosted circulation. It embarrassed the sharks who owned a stretch of blocks by the East River, selected as the dire example of the campaign. The sharks had refused to sell these blocks to an obscure real-estate company; at the end of the campaign they surrendered and sold. No one could prove that the real-estate company was owned by a company owned by Gail Wynand.
The Wynand papers could not be left without a campaign for long. They had just concluded one on the subject of modern aviation. They had run scientific accounts of the history of aviation in the Sunday Family Magazine supplement, with pictures ranging from Leonardo da Vinci's drawings of flying machines to the latest bomber; with the added attraction of Icarus writhing in scarlet flames, his nude body blue-green, his wax wings yellow and the smoke purple; also of a leprous hag with flaming eyes and a crystal ball, who had predicted in the XIth century that man would fly; also of bats, vampires and werewolves.
They had run a model plane construction contest; it was open to all boys under the age of ten who wished to send in three new subscriptions to the Banner. Gail Wynand, who was a licensed pilot, had made a solo flight from Los Angeles to New York, establishing a transcontinental speed record, in a small, specially built craft costing one hundred thousand dollars. He had made a slight miscalculation on reaching New York and had been forced to land in a rocky pasture; it had been a hair-raising landing, faultlessly executed; it had just so happened that a battery of photographers from the Banner were present in the neighborhood. Gail Wynand had stepped out of the plane. An ace pilot would have been shaken by the experience. Gail Wynand had stood before the cameras, an immaculate gardenia in the lapel of his flying jacket, his hand raised with a cigarette held between two fingers that did not tremble. When questioned about his first wish on returning to earth, he had expressed the desire to kiss the most attractive woman present, had chosen the dowdiest old hag from the crowd and bent to kiss her gravely on the forehead, explaining that she reminded him of his mother.
Later, at the start of the slum campaign, Gail Wynand had said to Alvah Scarret: "Go ahead. Squeeze all you can out of the thing," and had departed on his yacht for a world cruise, accompanied by an enchanting aviatrix of twenty-four to whom he had made a present of his transcontinental plane.
Alvah Scarret went ahead. Among many other steps of his campaign he assigned Dominique Francon to investigate the condition of homes in the slums and to gather human material. Dominique Francon had just returned from a summer in Biarritz; she always took a whole summer's vacation and Alvah Scarret granted it, because she was one of his favorite employees, because he was baffled by her and because he knew that she could quit her job whenever she pleased.
Dominique Francon went to live for two weeks in the hall bedroom of an East-Side tenement. The room had a skylight, but no windows; there were five flights of stairs to climb and no running water. She cooked her own meals in the kitchen of a numerous family on the floor below; she visited neighbors, she sat on the landings of fire escapes in the evenings and went to dime movies with the girls of the neighborhood.
She wore frayed skirts and blouses. The abnormal fragility of her normal appearance made her look exhausted with privation in these surroundings; the neighbors felt certain that she had T.B. But she moved as she had moved in the drawing room of Kiki Holcombe--with the same cold poise and confidence. She scrubbed the floor of her room, she peeled potatoes, she bathed in a tin pan of cold water. She had never done these things before; she did them expertly. She had a capacity for action, a competence that clashed incongruously with her appearance. She did not mind this new background; she was indifferent to the slums as she had been indifferent to the drawing rooms.
At the end of two weeks she returned to her penthouse apartment on the roof of a hotel over Central Park, and her articles on life in the slums appeared in the Banner. They were a merciless, brilliant account.
She heard baffled questions at a dinner party. "My dear, you didn't actually write those things?" "Dominique, you didn't really live in that place?" "Oh, yes," she answered. "The house you own on East Twelfth Street, Mrs. Palmer," she said, her hand circling lazily fr
om under the cuff of an emerald bracelet too broad and heavy for her thin wrist, "has a sewer that gets clogged every other day and runs over, all through the courtyard. It looks blue and purple in the sun, like a rainbow." "The block you control for the Claridge estate, Mr. Brooks, has the most attractive stalactites growing on all the ceilings," she said, her golden head leaning to her corsage of white gardenias with drops of water sparkling on the lusterless petals.
She was asked to speak at a meeting of social workers. It was an important meeting, with a militant, radical mood, led by some of the most prominent women in the field. Alvah Scarret was pleased and gave her his blessing. "Go to it, kid," he said, "lay it on thick. We want the social workers." She stood in the speaker's pulpit of an unaired hall and looked at a flat sheet of faces, faces lecherously eager with the sense of their own virtue. She spoke evenly, without inflection. She said, among many other things: "The family on the first floor rear do not bother to pay their rent, and the children cannot go to school for lack of clothes. The father has a charge account at a corner speak-easy. He is in good health and has a good job.... The couple on the second floor have just purchased a radio for sixty-nine dollars and ninety-five cents cash. In the fourth-floor front, the father of the family has not done a whole day's work in his life, and does not intend to. There are nine children, supported by the local parish. There is a tenth one on its way...." When she finished there were a few claps of angry applause. She raised her hand and said: "You don't have to applaud. I don't expect it." She asked politely: "Are there any questions?" There were no questions.
When she returned home she found Alvah Scarret waiting for her. He looked incongruous in the drawing room of her penthouse, his huge bulk perched on the edge of a delicate chair, a hunched gargoyle against the glowing spread of the city beyond a solid wall of glass. The city was like a mural designed to illuminate and complete the room: the fragile lines of spires on a black sky continued the fragile lines of the furniture; the lights glittering in distant windows threw reflections on the bare, lustrous floor; the cold precision of the angular structures outside answered the cold, inflexible grace of every object within. Alvah Scarret broke the harmony. He looked like a kindly country doctor and like a cardsharp. His heavy face bore the benevolent, paternal smile that had always been his passkey and his trademark. He had the knack of making the kindliness of his smile add to, not detract from his solemn appearance of dignity ; his long, thin, hooked nose did detract from the kindliness, but it added to the dignity; his stomach, cantilevered over his legs, did detract from the dignity, but it added to the kindliness.
He rose, beamed and held Dominique's hand.
"Thought I'd drop in on my way home," he said. "I've got something to tell you. How did it go, kid?"
"As I expected it."
She tore her hat off and threw it down on the first chair in sight. Her hair slanted in a flat curve across her forehead and fell in a straight line to her shoulders; it looked smooth and tight, like a bathing cap of pale, polished metal. She walked to the window and stood looking out over the city. She asked without turning: "What did you want to tell me?"
Alvah Scarret watched her pleasurably. He had long since given up any attempts beyond holding her hand when not necessary or patting her shoulder; he had stopped thinking of the subject, but he had a dim, half-conscious feeling which he summed up to himself in the words: You never can tell.
"I've got good news for you, child," he said. "I've been working out a little scheme, just a bit of reorganization, and I've figured where I'll consolidate a few things together into a Women's Welfare Department. You know, the schools, the home economics, the care of babies, the juvenile delinquents and all the rest of it--all to be under one head. And I see no better woman for the job than my little girl."
"Do you mean me?" she asked, without turning.
"No one else but. Just as soon as Gail comes back, I'll get his okay."
She turned and looked at him, her arms crossed, her hands holding her elbows. She said:
"Thank you, Alvah. But I don't want it."
"What do you mean, you don't want it?"
"I mean that I don't want it."
"For heaven's sake, do you realize what an advance that would be?"
"Toward what?"
"Your career."
"I never said I was planning a career."
"But you don't want to be running a dinky back-page column forever!"
"Not forever. Until I get bored with it."
"But think of what you could do in the real game! Think of what Gail could do for you once you come to his attention!"
"I have no desire to come to his attention."
"But, Dominique, we need you. The women will be for you solid after tonight."
"I don't think so."
"Why, I've ordered two columns held for a yarn on the meeting and your speech."
She reached for the telephone and handed the receiver to him. She said:
"You'd better tell them to kill it."
"Why?"
She searched through a litter of papers on a desk, found some typewritten sheets and handed them to him. "Here's the speech I made tonight," she said.
He glanced through it. He said nothing, but clasped his forehead once. Then he seized the telephone and gave orders to run as brief an account of the meeting as possible, and not to mention the speaker by name.
"All right," said Dominique, when he dropped the receiver. "Am I fired?"
He shook his head dolefully. "Do you want to be?"
"Not necessarily."
"I'll squash the business," he muttered. "I'll keep it from Gail."
"If you wish. I really don't care one way or the other."
"Listen, Dominque--oh I know, I'm not to ask any questions--only why on earth are you always doing things like that?"
"For no reason on earth."
"Look, you know, I've heard about that swank dinner where you made certain remarks on this same subject. And then you go and say things like these at a radical meeting."
"They're true, though, both sides of it, aren't they?"
"Oh, sure, but couldn't you have reversed the occasions when you chose to express them?"
"There wouldn't have been any point in that."
"Was there any in what you've done?"
"No. None at all. But it amused me."
"I can't figure you out, Dominique. You've done it before. You go along so beautifully, you do brilliant work and just when you're about to make a real step forward--you spoil it by pulling something like this. Why?"
"Perhaps that is precisely why."
"Will you tell me--as a friend, because I like you and I'm interested in you--what are you really after?"
"I should think that's obvious. I'm after nothing at all."
He spread his hands open, shrugging helplessly.
She smiled gaily.
"What is there to look so mournful about? I like you, too, Alvah, and I'm interested in you. I even like to talk to you, which is better. Now sit still and relax and I'll get you a drink. You need a drink, Alvah."
She brought him a frosted glass with ice cubes ringing in the silence. "You're just a nice child, Dominique," he said.
"Of course. That's what I am."
She sat down on the edge of a table, her hands flat behind her, leaning back on two straight arms, swinging her legs slowly. She said:
"You know, Alvah, it would be terrible if I had a job I really wanted."
"Well, of all things! Well, of all fool things to say! What do you mean?"
"Just that. That it would be terrible to have a job I enjoyed and did not want to lose."
"Why?"
"Because I would have to depend on you--you're a wonderful person, Alvah, but not exactly inspiring and I don't think it would be beautiful to cringe before a whip in your hand--oh, don't protest, it would be such a polite little whip, and that's what would make it uglier. I would have to depend on our boss Gail--he's a great man, I
'm sure, only I'd just as soon never set eyes on him."
"Whatever gives you such a crazy attitude? When you know that Gail and I would do anything for you, and I personally ..."
"It's not only that, Alvah. It's not you alone. If I found a job, a project, an idea or a person I wanted--I'd have to depend on the whole world. Everything has strings leading to everything else. We're all so tied together. We're all in a net, the net is waiting, and we're pushed into it by one single desire. You want a thing and it's precious to you. Do you know who is standing ready to tear it out of your hands? You can't know, it may be so involved and so far away, but someone is ready, and you're afraid of them all. And you cringe and you crawl and you beg and you accept them--just so they'll let you keep it. And look at whom you come to accept."
"If I'm correct in gathering that you're criticizing mankind in general ..."
"You know, it's such a peculiar thing--our idea of mankind in general. We all have a sort of vague, glowing picture when we say that, something solemn, big and important. But actually all we know of it is the people we meet in our lifetime. Look at them. Do you know any you'd feel big and solemn about? There's nothing but housewives haggling at pushcarts, drooling brats who write dirty words on the sidewalks, and drunken debutantes. Or their spiritual equivalents. As a matter of fact, one can feel some respect for people when they suffer. They have a certain dignity. But have you ever looked at them when they're enjoying themselves? That's when you see the truth. Look at those who spend the money they've slaved for--at amusement parks and side shows. Look at those who're rich and have the whole world open to them. Observe what they pick out for enjoyment. Watch them in the smarter speak-easies. That's your mankind in general. I don't want to touch it."
"But hell! That's not the way to look at it. That's not the whole picture. There's some good in the worst of us. There's always a redeeming feature."
"So much the worse. Is it an inspiring sight to see a man commit a heroic gesture, and then learn that he goes to vaudeville shows for relaxation? Or see a man who's painted a magnificent canvas--and learn that he spends his time sleeping with every slut he meets?"