Mallory's cigarette went flying across the room.
"Hold it, Dominique!" he cried. "Hold it! Hold it!"
He was at his stand before the cigarette hit the ground. He worked, and Dominique stood without moving, and Roark stood facing her, leaning against the wall.
In April the walls of the Temple rose in broken lines over the ground. On moonlit nights they had a soft, smeared, underwater glow. The tall fence stood on guard around them.
After the day's work, four people would often remain at the site — Roark, Mallory, Dominique and Mike Donnigan. Mike had not missed employment on a single building of Roark's.
The four of them sat together in Mallory's shack, after all the others had left. A wet cloth covered the unfinished statue. The door of the shack stood open to the first warmth of a spring night. A tree branch hung outside, with three new leaves against the black sky, stars trembling like drops of water on the edges of the leaves. There were no chairs in the shack. Mallory stood at the cast-iron stove, fixing hot dogs and coffee. Mike sat on the model's stand, smoking a pipe. Roark lay stretched out on the floor, propped up on his elbows, Dominique sat on a kitchen stool, a thin silk robe wrapped about her, her bare feet on the planks of the floor.
They did not speak about their work. Mallory told outrageous stories and Dominique laughed like a child. They talked about nothing in particular, sentences that had meaning only in the sound of the voices, in the warm gaiety, in the ease of complete relaxation. They were simply four people who liked being there together. The walls rising in the darkness beyond the open door gave sanction to their rest, gave them the right to lightness, the building on which they had all worked together, the building that was like a low, audible harmony to the sound of their voices. Roark laughed as Dominique had never seen him laugh anywhere else, his mouth loose and young.
They stayed there late into the night. Mallory poured coffee into a mongrel assortment of cracked cups. The odor of coffee met the odor of the new leaves outside.
In May work was stopped on the construction of the Aquitania Hotel.
Two of the owners had been cleaned out in the stock market; a third got his funds attached by a lawsuit over an inheritance disputed by someone; a fourth embezzled somebody else's shares. The corporation blew up in a tangle of court cases that were to require years of untangling. The building had to wait, unfinished.
"I'll straighten it out, if I have to murder a few of them," Kent Lansing told Roark. "I'll get it out of their hands. We'll finish it some day, you and I. But it will take time. Probably a long time. I won't tell you to be patient. Men like you and me would not survive beyond their first fifteen years if they did not acquire the patience of a Chinese executioner. And the hide of a battleship."
Ellsworth Toohey laughed, sitting on the edge of Dominique's desk. "The Unfinished Symphony — thank God," he said.
Dominique used that in her column. "The Unfinished Symphony on Central Park South," she wrote. She did not say, "thank God." The nickname was repeated. Strangers noticed the odd sight of an expensive structure on an important street, left gaping with empty windows, half-covered walls, naked beams; when they asked what it was, people who had never heard of Roark or of the story behind the building, snickered and answered: "Oh, that's the Unfinished Symphony."
Late at night Roark would stand across the street, under the trees of the Park, and look at the black, dead shape among the glowing structures of the city's skyline. His hands would move as they had moved over the clay model; at that distance, a broken projection could be covered by the palm of his hand; but the instinctive completing motion met nothing but air.
He forced himself sometimes to walk through the building. He walked on shivering planks hung over emptiness, through rooms without ceilings and rooms without floors, to the open edges where girders stuck out like bones through a broken skin.
An old watchman lived in a cubbyhole at the back of the ground floor. He knew Roark and let him wander around. Once, he stopped Roark on the way out and said suddenly: "I had a son once — almost. He was born dead." Something had made him say that, and he looked at Roark, not quite certain of what he had wanted to say. But Roark smiled, his eyes closed, and his hand covered the old man's shoulder, like a handshake, and then he walked away.
It was only the first few weeks. Then he made himself forget the Aquitania.
On an evening in October Roark and Dominique walked together through the completed Temple. It was to be opened publicly in a week, the day after Stoddard's return. No one had seen it except those who had worked on its construction.
It was a clear, quiet evening. The site of the Temple lay empty and silent. The red of the sunset on the limestone walls was like the first light of morning.
They stood looking at the Temple, and then stood inside, before the marble figure, saying nothing to each other. The shadows in the molded space around them seemed shaped by the same hand that had shaped the walls. The ebbing motion of light flowed in controlled discipline, like the sentences of a speech giving voice to the changing facets of the walls.
"Roark ... "
"Yes, my dearest?"
"No ... nothing ... "
They walked back to the car together, his hand clasping her wrist.
12.
THE OPENING of the Stoddard Temple was announced for the afternoon of November first.
The press agent had done a good job. People talked about the event, about Howard Roark, about the architectural masterpiece which the city was to expect.
On the morning of October 31 Hopton Stoddard returned from his journey around the world. Ellsworth Toohey met him at the pier.
On the morning of November 1 Hopton Stoddard issued a brief statement announcing that there would be no opening. No explanation was given.
On the morning of November 2 the New York Banner came out with the column "One Small Voice" by Ellsworth M. Toohey subtitled "Sacrilege." It read as follows:
"It is not our function — paraphrasing a philosopher whom we do not like — to be a fly swatter, but when a fly acquires delusions of grandeur, the best of us must stoop to do a little job of extermination.
"There has been a great deal of talk lately about somebody named Howard Roark. Since freedom of speech is our sacred heritage and includes the freedom to waste one's time, there would have been no harm in such talk — beyond the fact that one could find so many endeavors more profitable than discussions of a man who seems to have nothing to his credit except a building that was begun and could not be completed. There would have been no harm, if the ludicrous had not become the tragic — and the fraudulent.
"Howard Roark — as most of you have not heard and are not likely to hear again — is an architect. A year ago he was entrusted with an assignment of extraordinary responsibility. He was commissioned to erect a great monument in the absence of the owner who believed in him and gave him complete freedom of action. If the terminology of our criminal law could be applied to the realm of art, we would have to say that what Mr. Roark delivered constitutes the equivalent of spiritual embezzlement.