The Fountainhead Part 16

"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 h.e.l.ler. 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 G.o.d 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 h.e.l.l, Howard."

Roark walked up the path to the top of the cliff where the steel hulk of the h.e.l.ler 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce. He looked at the materials before him, the k.n.o.bs 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 h.e.l.ler in Snyte's office, and Mike had never heard the news-or so he supposed.

"h.e.l.lo, Red," said Mike, much too casually, and added: "h.e.l.lo, boss."

"Mike, how did you ... ?"

"You're a h.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.l wants that kind of a house? Most likely we'll never collect from the crank afterwards. To h.e.l.l 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 pa.s.sed by. Mike said once: "Control yourself, Red. You're open like a book. G.o.d, 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 sh.o.r.e. 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 h.e.l.ler 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.

h.e.l.ler, 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 h.e.l.ler could not define. Within a week, h.e.l.ler knew that he had found the best friend he would ever have; and he knew that the friends.h.i.+p came from Roark's fundamental indifference. In the deeper reality of Roark's existence there was no consciousness of h.e.l.ler, no need for h.e.l.ler, no appeal, no demand. h.e.l.ler 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, h.e.l.ler 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 ma.s.ses was determined by the distribution of s.p.a.ce 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 facade 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."

"Do you know that that's what I've felt in a way? I've felt that when I move into this house, I'll have a new sort of existence, and even my simple daily routine will have a kind of honesty or dignity that I can't quite define. Don't be astonished if I tell you that I feel as if I'll have to live up to that house."

"I intended that," said Roark.

"And, incidentally, thank you for all the thought you seem to have taken about my comfort. There are so many things I notice that had never occurred to me before, but you've planned them as if you knew all my needs. For instance, my study is the room I'll need most and you've given it the dominant spot-and, incidentally, I see where you've made it the dominant ma.s.s from the outside, too. And then the way it connects with the library, and the living room well out of my way, and the guest rooms where I won't hear too much of them-and all that. You were very considerate of me."

"You know," said Roark, "I haven't thought of you at all. I thought of the house." He added: "Perhaps that's why I knew how to be considerate of you."

The h.e.l.ler house was completed in November of 1926.

In January of 1927 the Architectural Tribune Architectural Tribune published a survey of the best American homes erected during the past year. It devoted twelve large, glossy pages to photographs of the twenty-four houses its editors had selected as the worthiest architectural achievements. The h.e.l.ler house was not mentioned. published a survey of the best American homes erected during the past year. It devoted twelve large, glossy pages to photographs of the twenty-four houses its editors had selected as the worthiest architectural achievements. The h.e.l.ler house was not mentioned.

The real-estate sections of the New York papers presented, each Sunday, brief accounts of the notable new residences in the vicinity. There was no account of the h.e.l.ler house.

The year book of the Architects' Guild of America, which presented magnificent reproductions of what it chose as the best buildings of the country, under the t.i.tle "Looking Forward," gave no reference to the h.e.l.ler house.

There were many occasions when lecturers rose to platforms and addressed trim audiences on the subject of the progress of American architecture. No one spoke of the h.e.l.ler house.

In the club rooms of the A.G.A. some opinions were expressed.

"It's a disgrace to the country," said Ralston Holcombe, "that a thing like that h.e.l.ler house is allowed to be erected. It's a blot on the profession. There ought to be a law."

"That's what drives clients away," said John Erik Snyte. "They see a house like that and they think all architects are crazy."

"I see no cause for indignation," said Gordon L. Prescott. "I think it's screamingly funny. It looks like a cross between a filling station and a comic-strip idea of a rocket s.h.i.+p to the moon."

"You watch it in a couple of years," said Eugene Pettingill, "and see what happens. The thing'll collapse like a house of cards."

"Why speak in terms of years?" said Guy Francon. "Those modernistic stunts never last more than a season. The owner will get good and sick of it and he'll come running home to a good old early Colonial."

The h.e.l.ler house acquired fame throughout the countryside surrounding it. People drove out of their way to park on the road before it, to stare, point and giggle. Gas-station attendants snickered when h.e.l.ler's car drove past. h.e.l.ler's cook had to endure the derisive glances of shopkeepers when she went on her errands. The h.e.l.ler house was known in the neighborhood as "The b.o.o.by Hatch."

Peter Keating told his friends in the profession, with an indulgent smile: "Now, now, you shouldn't say that about him. I've known Howard Roark for a long time, and he's got quite a talent, quite. He's even worked for me once. He's just gone haywire on that house. He'll learn. He has a future.... Oh, you don't think he has? You really don't think he has?"

Ellsworth M. Toohey, who let no stone spring from the ground of America without his comment, did not know that the h.e.l.ler house had been erected, as far as his column was concerned. He did not consider it necessary to inform his readers about it, if only to d.a.m.n it. He said nothing.

XII

A COLUMN ENt.i.tLED "OBSERVATIONS AND MEDITATIONS" BY ALVAH Scarret appeared daily on the front page of the New York Banner. It was a trusted guide, a source of inspiration and a molder of public philosophy in small towns throughout the country. In this column there had appeared, years ago, the famous statement: "We'd all be a heap sight better off if we'd forget the highfalutin notions of our fancy civilization and mind more what the savages knew long before us: to honor our mother." Alvah Scarret was a bachelor, had made two million dollars, played golf expertly and was editor-in-chief of the Wynand papers. COLUMN ENt.i.tLED "OBSERVATIONS AND MEDITATIONS" BY ALVAH Scarret appeared daily on the front page of the New York Banner. It was a trusted guide, a source of inspiration and a molder of public philosophy in small towns throughout the country. In this column there had appeared, years ago, the famous statement: "We'd all be a heap sight better off if we'd forget the highfalutin notions of our fancy civilization and mind more what the savages knew long before us: to honor our mother." Alvah Scarret was a bachelor, had made two million dollars, played golf expertly and was editor-in-chief of the Wynand papers.

It was Alvah Scarret who conceived the idea of the campaign against living conditions in the slums and "Landlord Sharks," which ran in the Banner for three weeks. This was material such as Alvah Scarret relished. It had human appeal and social implications. It lent itself to Sunday-supplement ill.u.s.trations of girls leaping into rivers, their skirts flaring well above their knees. It boosted circulation. It embarra.s.sed the sharks who owned a stretch of blocks by the East River, selected as the dire example of the campaign. The sharks had refused to sell these blocks to an obscure real-estate company; at the end of the campaign they surrendered and sold. No one could prove that the real-estate company was owned by a company owned by Gail Wynand.

The Wynand papers could not be left without a campaign for long. They had just concluded one on the subject of modern aviation. They had run scientific accounts of the history of aviation in the Sunday Family Magazine supplement, with pictures ranging from Leonardo da Vinci's drawings of flying machines to the latest bomber; with the added attraction of Icarus writhing in scarlet flames, his nude body blue-green, his wax wings yellow and the smoke purple; also of a leprous hag with flaming eyes and a crystal ball, who had predicted in the XIth century that man would fly; also of bats, vampires and werewolves.

They had run a model plane construction contest; it was open to all boys under the age of ten who wished to send in three new subscriptions to the Banner. Gail Wynand, who was a licensed pilot, had made a solo flight from Los Angeles to New York, establis.h.i.+ng a transcontinental speed record, in a small, specially built craft costing one hundred thousand dollars. He had made a slight miscalculation on reaching New York and had been forced to land in a rocky pasture; it had been a hair-raising landing, faultlessly executed; it had just so happened that a battery of photographers from the Banner Banner were present in the neighborhood. Gail Wynand had stepped out of the plane. An ace pilot would have been shaken by the experience. Gail Wynand had stood before the cameras, an immaculate gardenia in the lapel of his flying jacket, his hand raised with a cigarette held between two fingers that did not tremble. When questioned about his first wish on returning to earth, he had expressed the desire to kiss the most attractive woman present, had chosen the dowdiest old hag from the crowd and bent to kiss her gravely on the forehead, explaining that she reminded him of his mother. were present in the neighborhood. Gail Wynand had stepped out of the plane. An ace pilot would have been shaken by the experience. Gail Wynand had stood before the cameras, an immaculate gardenia in the lapel of his flying jacket, his hand raised with a cigarette held between two fingers that did not tremble. When questioned about his first wish on returning to earth, he had expressed the desire to kiss the most attractive woman present, had chosen the dowdiest old hag from the crowd and bent to kiss her gravely on the forehead, explaining that she reminded him of his mother.

Later, at the start of the slum campaign, Gail Wynand had said to Alvah Scarret: "Go ahead. Squeeze all you can out of the thing," and had departed on his yacht for a world cruise, accompanied by an enchanting aviatrix of twenty-four to whom he had made a present of his transcontinental plane.

Alvah Scarret went ahead. Among many other steps of his campaign he a.s.signed Dominique Francon to investigate the condition of homes in the slums and to gather human material. Dominique Francon had just returned from a summer in Biarritz; she always took a whole summer's vacation and Alvah Scarret granted it, because she was one of his favorite employees, because he was baffled by her and because he knew that she could quit her job whenever she pleased.

Dominique Francon went to live for two weeks in the hall bedroom of an East-Side tenement. The room had a skylight, but no windows; there were five flights of stairs to climb and no running water. She cooked her own meals in the kitchen of a numerous family on the floor below; she visited neighbors, she sat on the landings of fire escapes in the evenings and went to dime movies with the girls of the neighborhood.

She wore frayed skirts and blouses. The abnormal fragility of her normal appearance made her look exhausted with privation in these surroundings; the neighbors felt certain that she had T.B. But she moved as she had moved in the drawing room of Kiki Holcombe-with the same cold poise and confidence. She scrubbed the floor of her room, she peeled potatoes, she bathed in a tin pan of cold water. She had never done these things before; she did them expertly. She had a capacity for action, a competence that clashed incongruously with her appearance. She did not mind this new background; she was indifferent to the slums as she had been indifferent to the drawing rooms.

At the end of two weeks she returned to her penthouse apartment on the roof of a hotel over Central Park, and her articles on life in the slums appeared in the Banner. Banner. They were a merciless, brilliant account. They were a merciless, brilliant account.

She heard baffled questions at a dinner party. "My dear, you didn't actually write those things?" "Dominique, you didn't really live in that place?" "Oh, yes," she answered. "The house you own on East Twelfth Street, Mrs. Palmer," she said, her hand circling lazily from under the cuff of an emerald bracelet too broad and heavy for her thin wrist, "has a sewer that gets clogged every other day and runs over, all through the courtyard. It looks blue and purple in the sun, like a rainbow." "The block you control for the Claridge estate, Mr. Brooks, has the most attractive stalact.i.tes growing on all the ceilings," she said, her golden head leaning to her corsage of white gardenias with drops of water sparkling on the l.u.s.terless petals.

She was asked to speak at a meeting of social workers. It was an important meeting, with a militant, radical mood, led by some of the most prominent women in the field. Alvah Scarret was pleased and gave her his blessing. "Go to it, kid," he said, "lay it on thick. We want the social workers." She stood in the speaker's pulpit of an unaired hall and looked at a flat sheet of faces, faces lecherously eager with the sense of their own virtue. She spoke evenly, without inflection. She said, among many other things: "The family on the first floor rear do not bother to pay their rent, and the children cannot go to school for lack of clothes. The father has a charge account at a corner speak-easy. He is in good health and has a good job.... The couple on the second floor have just purchased a radio for sixty-nine dollars and ninety-five cents cash. In the fourth-floor front, the father of the family has not done a whole day's work in his life, and does not intend to. There are nine children, supported by the local parish. There is a tenth one on its way...." When she finished there were a few claps of angry applause. She raised her hand and said: "You don't have to applaud. I don't expect it." She asked politely: "Are there any questions?" There were no questions.

When she returned home she found Alvah Scarret waiting for her. He looked incongruous in the drawing room of her penthouse, his huge bulk perched on the edge of a delicate chair, a hunched gargoyle against the glowing spread of the city beyond a solid wall of gla.s.s. The city was like a mural designed to illuminate and complete the room: the fragile lines of spires on a black sky continued the fragile lines of the furniture; the lights glittering in distant windows threw reflections on the bare, l.u.s.trous floor; the cold precision of the angular structures outside answered the cold, inflexible grace of every object within. Alvah Scarret broke the harmony. He looked like a kindly country doctor and like a cardsharp. His heavy face bore the benevolent, paternal smile that had always been his pa.s.skey and his trademark. He had the knack of making the kindliness of his smile add to, not detract from his solemn appearance of dignity ; his long, thin, hooked nose did detract from the kindliness, but it added to the dignity; his stomach, cantilevered over his legs, did detract from the dignity, but it added to the kindliness.

He rose, beamed and held Dominique's hand.

"Thought I'd drop in on my way home," he said. "I've got something to tell you. How did it go, kid?"

"As I expected it."

She tore her hat off and threw it down on the first chair in sight. Her hair slanted in a flat curve across her forehead and fell in a straight line to her shoulders; it looked smooth and tight, like a bathing cap of pale, polished metal. She walked to the window and stood looking out over the city. She asked without turning: "What did you want to tell me?"