The Fountainhead (24 page)

“No, you wouldn’t.”

“So you’ve made the jump first. Well, well. Who would have thought it? ... I wish you all the luck in the world.”

“Thank you, Peter.”

“I know you’ll succeed. I’m sure of it.”

“Are you?”

“Of course! Of course, I am. Aren’t you?”

“I haven’t thought of it.”

“You haven’t thought of it?”

“Not much.”

“Then you’re not sure, Howard? You aren’t?”

“Why do you ask that so eagerly?”

“What? Why ... no, not eagerly, but of course, I’m concerned. Howard, it’s bad psychology not to be certain now, in your position. So you have doubts?”

“None at all.”

“But you said ...”

“I’m quite sure of things, Peter.”

“Have you thought about getting your registration?”

“I’ve applied for it.”

“You’ve got no college degree, you know. They’ll make it difficult for you at the examination.”

“Probably.”

“What are you going to do if you don’t get the license?”

“I’ll get it.”

“Well, I guess I’ll be seeing you now at the A.G.A., if you don’t go high hat on me, because you’ll be a full-fledged member and I’m only a junior.”

“I’m not joining the A.G.A.”

“What do you mean, you’re not joining? You’re eligible now.”

“Possibly.”

“You’ll be invited to join.”

“Tell them not to bother.”

“What!”

“You know, Peter, we had a conversation just like this seven years ago, when you tried to talk me into joining your fraternity at Stanton. Don’t start it again.”

“You won’t join the A.G.A. when you have a chance to?”

“I won’t join anything, Peter, at any time.”

“But don’t you realize how it helps?”

“In what?”

“In being an architect.”

“I don’t like to be helped in being an architect.”

“You’re just making things harder for yourself.”

“I am.”

“And it will be plenty hard, you know.”

“I know.”

“You’ll make enemies of them if you refuse such an invitation.”

“I’ll make enemies of them anyway.”

The first person to whom Roark had told the news was Henry Cameron. Roark went to New Jersey the day after he signed the contract with Heller. It had rained and he found Cameron in the garden, shuffling slowly down the damp paths, leaning heavily on a cane. In the past winter, Cameron had improved enough to walk a few hours each day. He walked with effort, his body bent. He looked at the first shoots of green on the earth under his feet. He lifted his cane, once in a while, bracing his legs to stand firm for a moment; with the tip of the cane, he touched a folded green cup and watched it spill a glistening drop in the twilight. He saw Roark coming up the hill, and frowned. He had seen Roark only a week ago, and because these visits meant too much to both of them, neither wished the occasions to be too frequent.

“Well?” Cameron asked gruffly. “What do you want here again?”

“I have something to tell you.”

“It can wait.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well?”

“I’m opening my own office. I’ve just signed for my first building.”

Cameron rotated his cane, the tip pressed into the earth, the shaft describing a wide circle, his two hands bearing down on the handle, the palm of one on the back of the other. His head nodded slowly, in rhythm with the motion, for a long time, his eyes closed. Then he looked at Roark and said:

“Well, don’t brag about it.”

He added: “Help me to sit down.” It was the first time Cameron had ever pronounced this sentence; his sister and Roark had long since learned that the one outrage forbidden in his presence was any intention of helping him to move.

Roark took his elbow and led him to a bench. Cameron asked harshly, staring ahead at the sunset:

“What? For whom? How much?”

He listened silently to Roark’s story. He looked for a long time at the sketch on cracked cardboard with the pencil lines over the water color. Then he asked many questions about the stone, the steel, the roads, the contractors, the costs. He offered no congratulations. He made no comment.

Only when Roark was leaving, Cameron said suddenly:

“Howard, when you open your office, take snapshots of it—and show them to me.”

Then he shook his head, looked away guiltily, and swore.

“I’m being senile. Forget it.”

Roark said nothing.

Three days later he came back. “You’re getting to be a nuisance,” said Cameron. Roark handed him an envelope, without a word. Cameron looked at the snapshots, at the one of the broad, bare office, of the wide window, of the entrance door. He dropped the others, and held the one of the entrance door for a long time.

“Well,” he said at last, “I did live to see it.”

He dropped the snapshot.

“Not quite exactly,” he added. “Not in the way I had wanted to, but I did. It’s like the shadows some say we’ll see of the earth in that other world. Maybe that’s how I’ll see the rest of it. I’m learning.”

He picked up the snapshot.

“Howard,” he said. “Look at it.”

He held it between them.

“It doesn’t say much. Only ‘Howard Roark, Architect.’ But it’s like those mottoes men carved over the entrance of a castle and died for. It’s a challenge in the face of something so vast and so dark, that all the pain on earth—and do you know how much suffering there is on earth?—al! the pain comes from that thing you are going to face. I don’t know what it is, I don’t know why it should be unleashed against you. I know only that it will be. And I know that if you carry these words through to the end, it will be a victory, Howard, not just for you, but for something that should win, that moves the world—and never wins acknowledgment. It will vindicate so many who have fallen before you, who have suffered as you will suffer. May God bless you—or whoever it is that is alone to see the best, the highest possible to human hearts. You’re on your way into hell, Howard.”

 

Roark walked up the path to the top of the cliff where the steel hulk of the Heller house rose into a blue sky. The skeleton was up and the concrete was being poured; the great mats of the terraces hung over the silver sheet of water quivering far below; plumbers and electricians had started laying their conduits.

He looked at the squares of sky delimited by the slender lines of girders and columns, the empty cubes of space he had torn out of the sky. His hands moved involuntarily, filling in the planes of walls to come, enfolding the future rooms. A stone clattered from under his feet and went bouncing down the hill, resonant drops of sound rolling in the sunny clarity of the summer air.

He stood on the summit, his legs planted wide apart, leaning back against space. He looked at the materials before him, the knobs of rivets in steel, the sparks in blocks of stone, the weaving spirals in fresh, yellow planks.

Then he saw a husky figure enmeshed in electric wires, a bulldog face spreading into a huge grin and china-blue eyes gloating in a kind of unholy triumph.

“Mike!” he said incredulously.

Mike had left for a big job in Philadelphia months ago, long before the appearance of Heller in Snyte’s office, and Mike had never heard the news—or so he supposed.

“Hello, Red,” said Mike, much too casually, and added: “Hello, boss.”

“Mike, how did you ... ?”

“You’re a hell of an architect. Neglecting the job like that. It’s my third day here, waiting for you to show up.”

“Mike, how did you get here? Why such a come-down?” He had never known Mike to bother with small private residences.

“Don’t play the sap. You know how I got here. You didn’t think I’d miss it, your first house, did you? And you think it’s a come-down? Well, maybe it is. And maybe it’s the other way around.”

Roark extended his hand and Mike’s grimy fingers closed about it ferociously, as if the smudges he left implanted in Roark’s skin said everything he wanted to say. And because he was afraid that he might say it, Mike growled:

“Run along, boss, run along. Don’t clog up the works like that.”

Roark walked through the house. There were moments when he could be precise, impersonal, and stop to give instructions as if this were not his house but only a mathematical problem; when he felt the existence of pipes and rivets, while his own person vanished.

There were moments when something rose within him, not a thought nor a feeling, but a wave of some physical violence, and then he wanted to stop, to lean back, to feel the reality of his person heightened by the frame of steel that rose dimly about the bright, outstanding existence of his body as its center. He did not stop. He went on calmly. But his hands betrayed what he wanted to hide. His hands reached out, ran slowly down the beams and joints. The workers in the house had noticed it. They said: “That guy’s in love with the thing. He can’t keep his hands off.”

The workers liked him. The contractor’s superintendents did not. He had had trouble in finding a contractor to erect the house. Several of the better firms had refused the commission. “We don’t do that kinda stuff.” “Nah, we won’t bother. Too complicated for a small job like that.” “Who the hell wants that kind of a house? Most likely we’ll never collect from the crank afterwards. To hell with it.” “Never did anything like it. Wouldn’t know how to go about it. I’ll stick to construction that is construction.” One contractor had looked at the plans briefly and thrown them aside, declaring with finality: “It won’t stand.” “It will,” said Roark. The contractor drawled indifferently. “Yeah? And who are you to tell me, Mister?”

He had found a small firm that needed the work and undertook it, charging more than the job warranted—on the ground of the chance they were taking with a queer experiment. The construction went on, and the foremen obeyed sullenly, in disapproving silence, as if they were waiting for their predictions to come true and would be glad when the house collapsed about their heads.

Roark had bought an old Ford and drove down to the job more often than was necessary. It was difficult to sit at a desk in his office, to stand at a table, forcing himself to stay away from the construction site. At the site there were moments when he wished to forget his office and his drawing board, to seize the men’s tools and go to work on the actual erection of the house, as he had worked in his childhood, to build that house with his own hands.

He walked through the structure, stepping lightly over piles of planks and coils of wire, he made notes, he gave brief orders in a harsh voice. He avoided looking in Mike’s direction. But Mike was watching him, following his progress through the house. Mike winked at him in understanding, whenever he passed by. Mike said once:

“Control yourself, Red. You’re open like a book. God, it’s indecent to be so happy!”

Roark stood on the cliff, by the structure, and looked at the countryside, at the long, gray ribbon of the road twisting past along the shore. An open car drove by, fleeing into the country. The car was overfilled with people bound for a picnic. There was a jumble of bright sweaters, and scarfs fluttering in the wind; a jumble of voices shrieking without purpose over the roar of the motor, and overstressed hiccoughs of laughter; a girl sat sidewise, her legs flung over the side of the car; she wore a man’s straw hat slipping down to her nose and she yanked savagely at the strings of a ukelele, ejecting raucous sounds, yelling “Hey!” These people were enjoying a day of their existence; they were shrieking to the sky their release from the work and the burdens of the days behind them; they had worked and carried the burdens in order to reach a goal—and this was the goal.

He looked at the car as it streaked past. He thought that there was a difference, some important difference, between the consciousness of this day in him and in them. He thought that he should try to grasp it. But he forgot. He was looking at a truck panting up the hill, loaded with a glittering mound of cut granite.

 

Austen Heller came to look at the house frequently, and watched it grow, curious, still a little astonished. He studied Roark and the house with the same meticulous scrutiny; he felt as if he could not quite tell them apart.

Heller, the fighter against compulsion, was baffled by Roark, a man so impervious to compulsion that he became a kind of compulsion himself, an ultimatum against things Heller could not define. Within a week, Heller knew that he had found the best friend he would ever have; and he knew that the friendship came from Roark’s fundamental indifference. In the deeper reality of Roark’s existence there was no consciousness of Heller, no need for Heller, no appeal, no demand. Heller felt a line drawn, which he could not touch; beyond that line, Roark asked nothing of him and granted him nothing. But when Roark looked at him with approval, when Roark smiled, when Roark praised one of his articles, Heller felt the strangely clean joy of a sanction that was neither a bribe nor alms.

In the summer evenings they sat together on a ledge halfway up the hill, and talked while darkness mounted slowly up the beams of the house above them, the last sunrays retreating to the tips of the steel uprights.

“What is it that I like so much about the house you’re building for me, Howard?”

“A house can have integrity, just like a person,” said Roark, “and just as seldom.”

“In what way?”

“Well, look at it. Every piece of it is there because the house needs it—and for no other reason. You see it from here as it is inside. The rooms in which you’ll live made the shape. The relation of masses was determined by the distribution of space within. The ornament was determined by the method of construction, an emphasis of the principle that makes it stand. You can see each stress, each support that meets it. Your own eyes go through a structural process when you look at the house, you can follow each step, you see it rise, you know what made it and why it stands. But you’ve seen buildings with columns that support nothing, with purposeless cornices, with pilasters, mouldings, false arches, false windows. You’ve seen buildings that look as if they contained a single large hall, they have solid columns and single, solid windows six floors high. But you enter and find six stories inside. Or buildings that contain a single hall, but with a façade cut up into floor lines, band courses, tiers of windows. Do you understand the difference? Your house is made by its own needs. Those others are made by the need to impress. The determining motive of your house is in the house. The determining motive of the other is in the audience.”