When Francon glanced at the list of his employees' salaries, he noticed that his most expensive draftsman was the man least needed in the office.
When Tim Davis lost his job, no one in the drafting room was surprised but Tim Davis. He could not understand it. He set his lips defiantly in bitterness against a world he would hate forever. He felt he had no friend on earth save Peter Keating.
Keating consoled him, cursed Francon, cursed the injustice of humanity, spent six dollars in a speak-easy, entertaining the secretary of an obscure architect of his acquaintance and arranged a new job for Tim Davis.
Whenever he thought of Davis afterward, Keating felt a warm pleasure; he had influenced the course of a human being, had thrown him off one path and pushed him into another; a human being — it was not Tim Davis to him any longer, it was a living frame and a mind, a conscious mind — why had he always feared that mysterious entity of consciousness within others? — and he had twisted that frame and that mind to his own will. By a unanimous decision of Francon, Heyer and the chief draftsman, Tim's table, position and salary were given to Peter Keating. But this was only part of his satisfaction; there was another sense of it, warmer and less real — and more dangerous. He said brightly and often: 'Tim Davis? Oh yes, I got him his present job."
He wrote to his mother about it. She said to her friends: "Petey is such an unselfish boy."
He wrote to her dutifully each week; his letters were short and respectful; hers, long, detailed and full of advice which he seldom finished reading.
He saw Catherine Halsey occasionally. He had not gone to her on that following evening, as he had promised. He had awakened in the morning and remembered the things he had said to her, and hated her for his having said them. But he had gone to her again, a week later; she had not reproached him and they had not mentioned her uncle. He saw her after that every month or two; he was happy when he saw her, but he never spoke to her of his career.
He tried to speak of it to Howard Roark; the attempt failed. He called on Roark twice; he climbed, indignantly, the five flights of stairs to Roark's room. He greeted Roark eagerly; he waited for reassurance, not knowing what sort of reassurance he needed nor why it could come only from Roark. He spoke of his job and he questioned Roark, with sincere concern, about Cameron's office. Roark listened to him, answered all his questions willingly, but Keating felt that he was knocking against a sheet of iron in Roark's unmoving eyes, and that they were not speaking about the same things at all. Before the visit was over, Keating was taking notice of Roark's frayed cuffs, of his shoes, of the patch on the knee of his trousers, and he felt satisfied. He went away chuckling, but he went away miserably uneasy, and wondered why, and swore never to see Roark again, and wondered why he knew that he would have to see him.
"Well," said Keating, "I couldn't quite work it to ask her to lunch, but she's coming to Mawson's exhibition with me day after tomorrow. Now what?"
He sat on the floor, his head resting against the edge of a couch, his bare feet stretched out, a pair of Guy Francon's chartreuse pyjamas floating loosely about his limbs.
Through the open door of the bathroom he saw Francon standing at the washstand, his stomach pressed to its shining edge, brushing his teeth.
"That's splendid," said Francon, munching through a thick foam of toothpaste. "That'll do just as well. Don't you see?"
"No."
"Lord, Pete, I explained it to you yesterday before we started. Mrs. Dunlop's husband's planning to build a home for her."
"Oh, yeah," said Keating weakly, brushing the matted black curls off his face. "Oh, yeah ... I remember now ... Jesus, Guy, I got a head on me! ... "
He remembered vaguely the party to which Francon had taken him the night before, he remembered the caviar in a hollow iceberg, the black net evening gown and the pretty face of Mrs. Dunlop, but he could not remember how he had come to end up in Francon's apartment. He shrugged; he had attended many parties with Francon in the past year and had often been brought here like this.
"It's not a very large house," Francon was saying, holding the toothbrush in his mouth; it made a lump on his cheek and its green handle stuck out. "Fifty thousand or so, I understand. They're small fry anyway. But Mrs. Dunlop's brother-in-law is Quimby — you know, the big real estate fellow. Won't hurt to get a little wedge into that family, won't hurt at all. You're to see where that commission ends up, Pete. Can I count on you, Pete?"
"Sure," said Keating, his head drooping. "You can always count on me, Guy ... "
He sat still, watching his bare toes and thinking of Stengel, Francon's designer. He did not want to think, but his mind leaped to Stengel automatically, as it always did, because Stengel represented his next step.
Stengel was impregnable to friendship. For two years, Keating's attempts had broken against the ice of Stengel's glasses. What Stengel thought of him was whispered in the drafting rooms, but few dared to repeat it save in quotes; Stengel said it aloud, even though he knew that the corrections his sketches bore, when they returned to him from Francon's office, were made by Keating's hand. But Stengel had a vulnerable point: he had been planning for some time to leave Francon and open an office of his own. He had selected a partner, a young architect of no talent but of great inherited wealth. Stengel was waiting only for a chance. Keating had thought about this a great deal He could think of nothing else. He thought of it again, sitting there on the floor of Francon's bedroom.
Two days later, when he escorted Mrs. Dunlop through the gallery exhibiting the paintings of one Frederic Mawson, his course of action was set. He piloted her through the sparse crowd, his fingers closing over her elbow once in a while, letting her catch his eyes directed at her young face more often than at the paintings.
"Yes," he said as she stared obediently at a landscape featuring an auto dump and tried to compose her face into the look of admiration expected of her; "magnificent work. Note the colors, Mrs. Dunlop ... They say this fellow Mawson had a terribly hard time. It's an old story — trying to get recognition. Old and heartbreaking. It's the same in all the arts. My own profession included."
"Oh, indeed?" said Mrs. Dunlop, who quite seemed to prefer architecture at the moment.
"Now this," said Keating, stopping before the depiction of an old hag picking at her bare toes on a street curb, "this is art as a social document. It takes a person of courage to appreciate this."
"It's simply wonderful," said Mrs. Dunlop.
"Ah, yes, courage. It's a rare quality ... They say Mawson was starving in a garret when Mrs. Stuyvesant discovered him. It's glorious to be able to help young talent on its way."
"It must be wonderful," agreed Mrs. Dunlop.
"If I were rich," said Keating wistfully, "I'd make it my hobby: to arrange an exhibition for a new artist, to finance the concert of a new pianist, to have a house built by a new architect ... "
"Do you know, Mr. Keating? — my husband and I are planning to build a little home on Long Island."
"Oh, are you? How very charming of you, Mrs. Dunlop, to confess such a thing to me. You're so young, if you'll forgive my saying this. Don't you know that you run the danger of my becoming a nuisance and trying to interest you in my firm? Or are you safe and have chosen an architect already?"
"No, I'm not safe at all," said Mrs. Dunlop prettily, "and I wouldn't mind the danger really. I've thought a great deal about the firm of Francon & Heyer in these last few days. And I've heard they are so terribly good."