He appealed to Ellsworth Toohey, but Toohey was not interested. He was busy with other matters and he had no desire to provoke a bureaucratic quarrel. In all truth, he had not prompted his protégés to their artistic endeavor, but he saw no reason for attempting to stop them. He was amused by the whole thing. "But it's awful, Ellsworth! You know it's awful!" "Oh, I suppose so. What do you care, Peter? Your poor but unwashed tenants won't be able to appreciate the finer points of architectural art. See that the plumbing works."
"But what for? What for? What for?" Keating cried to his associate designers. "Well, why shouldn't we have any say at all?" asked Gordon L. Prescott. "We want to express our individuality too."
When Keating invoked his contract, he was told: "All right, go ahead, try to sue the government. Try it." At times, he felt a desire to kill. There was no one to kill. Had he been granted the privilege, he could not have chosen a victim. Nobody was responsible. There was no purpose and no cause. It had just happened.
Keating came to Roark's house on the evening after Roark's return. He had not been summoned. Roark opened the door and said: "Good evening, Peter," but Keating could not answer. They walked silently into the work room. Roark sat down, but Keating remained standing in the middle of the floor and asked his voice dulclass="underline"
"What are you going to do?"
"You must leave that up to me now."
"I couldn't help it, Howard ... I couldn't help it!"
"I suppose not."
"What can you do now? You can't sue the government."
"No."
Keating thought that he should sit down, but the distance to a chair seemed too great. He felt he would be too conspicuous if he moved.
"What are you going to do to me, Howard?"
"Nothing."
"Want me to confess the truth to them? To everybody?"
"No."
After a while Keating whispered:
"Will you let me give you the fee ... everything ... and ... "
Roark smiled.
"I'm sorry ... " Keating whispered, looking away.
He waited, and then the plea he knew he must not utter came out as:
"I'm scared, Howard ... "
Roark shook his head.
"Whatever I do, it won't be to hurt you, Peter. I'm guilty, too. We both are."
"You're guilty?"
"It's I who've destroyed you, Peter. From the beginning. By helping you. There are matters in which one must not ask for help nor give it. I shouldn't have done your projects at Stanton. I shouldn't have done the Cosmo-Slotnick Building. Nor Cortlandt. I loaded you with more than you could carry. It's like an electric current too strong for the circuit. It blows the fuse. Now we'll both pay for it. It will be hard on you, but it will be harder on me."
"You'd rather ... I went home now, Howard?"
"Yes."
At the door Keating said:
"Howard! They didn't do it on purpose."
"That's what makes it worse."
Dominique heard the sound of the car rising up the hill road. She thought it was Wynand coming home. He had worked late in the city every night of the two weeks since his return.
The motor filled the spring silence of the countryside. There was no sound in the house; only the small rustle of her hair as she leaned her head back against a chair cushion. In a moment she was not conscious of hearing the car's approach, it was so familiar at this hour, part of the loneliness and privacy outside.
She heard the car stop at the door. The door was never locked; there were no neighbors or guests to expect. She heard the door opening, and steps in the hall downstairs. The steps did not pause, but walked with familiar certainty up the stairs. A hand turned the knob of her door.
It was Roark. She thought, while she was rising to her feet, that he had never entered her room before; but he knew every part of this house; as he knew everything about her body. She felt no moment of shock, only the memory of one, a shock in the past tense, the thought: I must have been shocked when I saw him, but not now. Now, by the time she was standing before him, it seemed very simple.
She thought: The most important never has to be said between us. It has always been said like this. He did not want to see me alone. Now he's here. I waited and I'm ready.
"Good evening, Dominique."
She heard the name pronounced to fill the space of five years. She said quietly:
"Good evening, Roark."
"I want you to help me."
She was standing on the station platform of Clayton, Ohio, on the witness stand of the Stoddard trial, on the ledge of a quarry, to let herself — as she had been then — share this sentence she heard now.
"Yes, Roark."
He walked across the room he had designed for her, he sat down, facing her, the width of the room between them. She found herself seated too, not conscious of her own movements, only of his, as if his body contained two sets of nerves, his own and hers.
"Next Monday night, Dominique, exactly at eleven-thirty, I want you to drive up to the site of Cortlandt Homes."
She noticed that she was conscious of her eyelids; not painfully, but just conscious; as if they had tightened and would not move again. She had seen the first building of Cortlandt. She knew what she was about to hear.
"You must be alone in your car and you must be on your way home from some place where you had an appointment to visit, made in advance. A place that can be reached from here only by driving past Cortlandt. You must be able to prove that afterward. I want your car to run out of gas in front of Cortlandt, at eleven-thirty. Honk your horn. There's an old night watchman there. He will come out. Ask him to help you and send him to the nearest garage, which is a mile away."
She said steadily, "Yes, Roark."
"When he's gone, get out of your car. There's a big stretch of vacant land by the road, across from the building, and a kind of trench beyond. Walk to that trench as fast as you can, get to the bottom and lie down on the ground. Lie flat. After a while, you can come back to the car. You will know when to come back. See that you're found in the car and that your condition matches its condition — approximately."
"Yes, Roark."
"Have you understood?"
"Yes."
"Everything?"
"Yes. Everything."
They were standing. She saw only his eyes and that he was smiling.
She heard him say: "Good night, Dominique," he walked out and she heard his car driving away. She thought of his smile.
She knew that he did not need her help for the thing he was going to do, he could find other means to get rid of the watchman; that he had let her have a part in this, because she would not survive what was to follow if he hadn't; that this had been the test.
He had not wanted to name it; he had wanted her to understand and show no fear. She had not been able to accept the Stoddard trial, she had run from the dread of seeing him hurt by the world, but she had agreed to help him in this. Had agreed in complete serenity. She was free and he knew it.
The road ran flat across the dark stretches of Long Island, but Dominique felt as if she were driving uphill. That was the only abnormal sensation: the sensation of rising, as if her car were speeding vertically. She kept her eyes on the road, but the dashboard on the rim of her vision looked like the panel of an airplane. The clock on the dashboard said 11:10.
She was amused, thinking: I've never learned to fly a plane and now I know how it feels; just like this, the unobstructed space and no effort. And no weight. That's supposed to happen in the stratosphere — or is it the interplanetary space? — where one begins to float and there's no law of gravity. No law of any kind of gravity at all. She heard herself laughing aloud.