"Okay, pal, okay," said the policeman. "Run along. We all take one too many once in a while."
7.
IT WAS only when the last painter had departed that Peter Keating felt a sense of desolation and a numb weakness in the crook of his elbows. He stood in the hall, looking up at the ceiling. Under the harsh gloss of paint he could still see the outline of the square where the stairway had been removed and the opening closed over. Guy Francon's old office was gone. The firm Keating & Dumont had a single floor left now.
He thought of the stairway and how he had walked up its red-plushed steps for the first time, carrying a drawing on the tips of his fingers. He thought of Guy Francon's office with the glittering butterfly reflections. He thought of the four years when that office had been his own.
He had known what was happening to his firm, in these last years; he had known it quite well while men in overalls removed the stairway and closed the gap in the ceiling. But it was that square under the white paint that made it real to him, and final.
He had resigned himself to the process of going down, long ago. He had not chosen to resign himself — that would have been a positive decision — it had merely happened and he had let it happen. It had been simple and almost painless, like drowsiness carrying one down to nothing more sinister than a welcome sleep. The dull pain came from wishing to understand why it had happened.
There was "The March of the Centuries" exposition, but that alone could not have mattered. "The March of the Centuries" had opened in May. It was a flop. What's the use, thought Keating, why not say the right word? Flop. It was a ghastly flop. "The title of this venture would be most appropriate," Ellsworth Toohey had written, "if we assumed that the centuries had passed by on horseback." Everything else written about the architectural merits of the exposition had been of the same order.
Keating thought, with wistful bitterness, of how conscientiously they had worked, he and the seven other architects, designing those buildings. It was true that he had pushed himself forward and hogged the publicity, but he certainly had not done that as far as designing was concerned. They had worked in harmony, through conference after conference, each giving in to the others, in true collective spirit, none trying to impose his personal prejudices or selfish ideas. Even Ralston Holcombe had forgotten Renaissance. They had made the buildings modern, more modem than anything ever seen, more modern than the show windows of Slottern's Department Store. He did not think that the buildings looked like "coils of toothpaste when somebody steps on the tube or stylized versions of the lower intestine," as one critic had said. But the public seemed to think it, if the public thought at all. He couldn't tell. He knew only that tickets to "The March of the Centuries" were being palmed off at Screeno games in theaters, and that the sensation of the exposition, the financial savior, was somebody named Juanita Fay who danced with a live peacock as sole garment.
But what if the Fair did flop? It had not hurt the other architects of its council. Gordon L. Prescott was going stronger than ever. It wasn't that, thought Keating. It had begun before the Fair. He could not say when.
There could be so many explanations. The depression had hit them all; others had recovered to some extent, Keating & Dumont had not. Something had gone out of the firm and out of the circles from which it drew its clients, with the retirement of Guy Francon. Keating realized that there had been art and skill and its own kind of illogical energy in the career of Guy Francon, even if the art consisted only of his social charm and the energy was directed at snaring bewildered millionaires. There had been a twisted sort of sense in people's response to Guy Francon.
He could see no hint of rationality in the things to which people responded now. The leader of the profession — on a mean scale, there was no grand scale left in anything — was Gordon L. Prescott, Chairman of the Council of American Builders; Gordon L. Prescott who lectured on the transcendental pragmatism of architecture and social planning, who put his feet on tables in drawing rooms, attended formal dinners in knickerbockers and criticized the soup aloud. Society people said they liked an architect who was a liberal. The A.G.A. still existed, in stiff, hurt dignity, but people referred to it as the Old Folks' Home. The Council of American Builders ruled the profession and talked about a closed shop, though no one had yet devised a way of achieving that. Whenever an architect's name appeared in Ellsworth Toohey's column, it was always that of Augustus Webb. At thirty-nine, Keating heard himself described as old-fashioned.
He had given up trying to understand. He knew dimly that the explanation of the change swallowing the world was of a nature he preferred not to know. In his youth he had felt an amicable contempt for the works of Guy Francon or Ralston Holcombe, and emulating them had seemed no more than innocent quackery. But he knew that Gordon L. Prescott and Gus Webb represented so impertinent, so vicious a fraud that to suspend the evidence of his eyes was beyond his elastic capacity. He had believed that people found greatness in Holcombe and there had been a reasonable satisfaction in borrowing his borrowed greatness. He knew that no one saw anything whatever in Prescott. He felt something dark and leering in the manner with which people spoke of Prescott's genius; as if they were not doing homage to Prescott, but spitting upon genius. For once, Keating could not follow people; it was too clear, even to him, that public favor had ceased being a recognition of merit, that it had become almost a brand of shame.
He went on, driven by inertia. He could not afford his large floor of offices and he did not use half the rooms, but he kept them and paid the deficit out of his own pocket. He had to go on. He had lost a large part of his personal fortune in careless stock speculation; but he had enough left to insure some comfort for the rest of his life. This did not disturb him; money had ceased to hold his attention as a major concern. It was inactivity he dreaded; it was the question mark looming beyond, if the routine of his work were to be taken away from him.
He walked slowly, his arms pressed to his body, his shoulders hunched, as if drawn against a permanent chill. He was gaining weight. His face was swollen; he kept it down, and the pleat of a second chin was flattened against the knot of his necktie. A hint of his beauty remained and made him look worse; as if the lines of his face had been drawn on a blotter and had spread, blurring. The gray threads on his temples were becoming noticeable. He drank often, without joy.
He had asked his mother to come back to live with him. She had come back. They sat through long evenings together in the living room, saying nothing; not in resentment, but seeking reassurance from each other. Mrs. Keating offered no suggestions, no reproaches. There was, instead, a new, panic-shaped tenderness in her manner toward her son. She would cook his breakfast, even though they had a maid; she would prepare his favorite dish — French pancakes, the kind he had liked so much when he was nine years old and sick with the measles. If he noticed her efforts and made some comment of pleasure, she nodded, blinking, turning away, asking herself why it should make her so happy and if it did, why should her eyes fill with tears.
She would ask suddenly, after a silence: "it will be all right, Petey? Won't it?" And he would not ask what she meant, but answer quietly: "Yes, Mother, it will be all right," putting the last of his capacity for pity into an effort to make his voice sound convincing.
Once, she asked him: "You're happy, Petey? Aren't you?" He looked at her and saw that she was not laughing at him; her eyes were wide and frightened. And as he could not answer, she cried: "But you've got to be happy! Petey, you've got to! Else what have I lived for?" He wanted to get up, gather her in his arms and tell her that it was all right — and then he remembered Guy Francon saying to him on his wedding day: "I want you to feel proud of me, Peter ... I want to feel that it had some meaning." Then he could not move. He felt himself in the presence of something he must not grasp, must never allow into his mind. He turned away from his mother.