"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 Washington 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."
11.
GAIL WYNAND looked at the shining wood of the yacht deck. The wood and a brass doorknob that had become a smear of fire gave him a sense of everything around him: the miles of space 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 space 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 nobody 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 sparse 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 cords 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 glass 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 space, his head lifted as Wynand had seen it lifted in an unfinished building. His hands clasped the rail. The short shirt 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 skyscrapers, 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 ownership? 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."