The Fountainhead Part 67

I

THE LEAVES STREAMED DOWN, TREMBLING IN THE SUN. THEY were not green; only a few, scattered through the torrent, stood out in single drops of a green so bright and pure that it hurt the eyes; the rest were not a color, but a light, the substance of fire on metal, living sparks without edges. And it looked as if the forest were a spread of light boiling slowly to produce this color, this green rising in small bubbles, the condensed essence of spring. The trees met, bending over the road, and the spots of sun on the ground moved with the shifting of the branches, like a conscious caress. The young man hoped he would not have to die.

Not if the earth could look like this, he thought. Not if he could hear the hope and the promise like a voice, with leaves, tree trunks and rocks instead of words. But he knew that the earth looked like this only because he had seen no sign of men for hours; he was alone, riding his bicycle down a forgotten trail through the hills of Pennsylvania where he had never been before, where he could feel the fresh wonder of an untouched world.

He was a very young man. He had just graduated from college-in the spring of the year 1935-and he wanted to decide whether life was worth living. He did not know that this was the question in his mind. He did not think of dying. He thought only that he wished to find joy and reason and meaning in life-and that none had been offered to him anywhere.

He had not liked the things taught to him in college. He had been taught a great deal about social responsibility, about a life of service and self-sacrifice. Everybody had said it was beautiful and inspiring. Only he had not felt inspired. He had felt nothing at all.

He could not name the thing he wanted of life. He felt it here, in this wild loneliness. But he did not face nature with the joy of a healthy animal-as a proper and final setting; he faced it with the joy of a healthy man-as a challenge; as tools, means and material. So he felt anger that he should find exaltation only in the wilderness, that this great sense of hope had to be lost when he would return to men and men's work. He thought that this was not right; that man's work should be a higher step, an improvement on nature, not a degradation. He did not want to despise men; he wanted to love and admire them. But he dreaded the sight of the first house, poolroom and movie poster he would encounter on his way.

He had always wanted to write music, and he could give no other ident.i.ty to the thing he sought. If you want to know what it is, he told himself, listen to the first phrases of Tchaikovsky's First Concerto First Concerto-or the last movement of Rachmaninoff's Second. Second. Men have not found the words for it nor the deed nor the thought, but they have found the music. Let me see that in one single act of man on earth. Let me see it made real. Let me see the answer to the promise of that music. Not servants nor those served; not altars and immolations; but the final, the fulfilled, innocent of pain. Don't help me or serve me, but let me see it once, because I need it. Don't work for my happiness, my brothers-show me yours-show me that it is possible-show me your achievement-and the knowledge will give me courage for mine. Men have not found the words for it nor the deed nor the thought, but they have found the music. Let me see that in one single act of man on earth. Let me see it made real. Let me see the answer to the promise of that music. Not servants nor those served; not altars and immolations; but the final, the fulfilled, innocent of pain. Don't help me or serve me, but let me see it once, because I need it. Don't work for my happiness, my brothers-show me yours-show me that it is possible-show me your achievement-and the knowledge will give me courage for mine.

He saw a blue hole ahead, where the road ended on the crest of a ridge. The blue looked cool and clean like a film of water stretched in the frame of green branches. It would be funny, he thought, if I came to the edge and found nothing but that blue beyond; nothing but the sky ahead, above and below. He closed his eyes and went on, suspending the possible for a moment, granting himself a dream, a few instants of believing that he would reach the crest, open his eyes and see the blue radiance of the sky below.

His foot touched the ground, breaking his motion; he stopped and opened his eyes. He stood still.

In the broad valley, far below him, in the first sunlight of early morning, he saw a town. Only it was not a town. Towns did not look like that. He had to suspend the possible for a while longer, to seek no questions or explanations, only to look.

There were small houses on the ledges of the hill before him, flowing down to the bottom. He knew that the ledges had not been touched, that no artifice had altered the unplanned beauty of the graded steps. Yet some power had known how to build on these ledges in such a way that the houses became inevitable, and one could no longer imagine the hills as beautiful without them-as if the centuries and the series of chances that produced these ledges in the struggle of great blind forces had waited for their final expression, had been only a road to a goal-and the goal was these buildings, part of the hills, shaped by the hills, yet ruling them by giving them meaning.

The houses were of plain field stone-like the rocks jutting from the green hillsides-and of gla.s.s, great sheets of gla.s.s used as if the sun were invited to complete the structures, sunlight becoming part of the masonry. There were many houses, they were small, they were cut off from one another, and no two of them were alike. But they were like variations on a single theme, like a symphony played by an inexhaustible imagination, and one could still hear the laughter of the force that had been let loose on them, as if that force had run, unrestrained, challenging itself to be spent, but had never reached its end. Music, he thought, the promise of the music he had invoked, the sense of it made real-there it was before his eyes-he did not see it-he heard it in chords-he thought that there was a common language of thought, sight and sound-was it mathematics?-the discipline of reason-music was mathematics-and architecture was music in stone-he knew he was dizzy because this place below him could not be real.

He saw trees, lawns, walks twisting up the hillsides, steps cut in the stone, he saw fountains, swimming pools, tennis courts-and not a sign of life. The place was uninhabited.

It did not shock him, not as the sight of it had shocked him. In a way, it seemed proper; this was not part of known existence. For the moment he had no desire to know what it was.

After a long time he glanced about him-and then he saw that he was not alone. Some steps away from him a man sat on a boulder, looking down at the valley. The man seemed absorbed in the sight and had not heard his approach. The man was tall and gaunt and had orange hair.

He walked straight to the man, who turned his eyes to him; the eyes were gray and calm; the boy knew suddenly that they felt the same thing, and he could speak as he would not speak to a stranger anywhere else.

"That isn't real, is it?" the boy asked, pointing down.

"Why, yes, it is, now," the man answered.

"It's not a movie set or a trick of some kind?"

"No. It's a summer resort. It's just been completed. It will be opened in a few weeks."

"Who built it?"

"I did."

"What's your name?"

"Howard Roark."

"Thank you," said the boy. He knew that the steady eyes looking at him understood everything these two words had to cover. Howard Roark inclined his head, in acknowledgment.

Wheeling his bicycle by his side, the boy took the narrow path down the slope of the hill to the valley and the houses below. Roark looked after him. He had never seen the boy before and he would never see him again. He did not know that he had given someone the courage to face a lifetime.

Roark had never understood why he was chosen to build the summer resort at Monadnock Valley.

It had happened a year and a half ago, in the fall of 1933. He had heard of the project and gone to see Mr. Caleb Bradley, the head of some vast company that had purchased the valley and was doing a great deal of loud promotion. He went to see Bradley as a matter of duty, without hope, merely to add another refusal to his long list of refusals. He had built nothing in New York since the Stoddard Temple.

When he entered Bradley's office, he knew that he must forget Monadnock Valley because this man would never give it to him. Caleb Bradley was a short, pudgy person with a handsome face between rounded shoulders. The face looked wise and boyish, unpleasantly ageless; he could have been fifty or twenty; he had blank blue eyes, sly and bored.

But it was difficult for Roark to forget Monadnock Valley. So he spoke of it, forgetting that speech was useless here. Mr. Bradley listened, obviously interested, but obviously not in what Roark was saying. Roark could almost feel some third ent.i.ty present in the room. Mr. Bradley said little, beyond promising to consider it and to get in touch with him. But then he said a strange thing. He asked, in a voice devoid of all clue to the purpose of the question, neither in approval nor scorn: "You're the architect who built the Stoddard Temple, aren't you, Mr. Roark?" "Yes," said Roark. "Funny that I hadn't thought of you myself," said Mr. Bradley. Roark went away, thinking that it would have been funny if Mr. Bradley had thought of him.

Three days later, Bradley telephoned and invited him to his office. Roark came and met four other men-the Board of the Monadnock Valley Company. They were well-dressed men, and their faces were as closed as Mr. Bradley's. "Please tell these gentlemen what you told me, Mr. Roark," Bradley said pleasantly.

Roark explained his plan. If what they wished to build was an unusual summer resort for people of moderate incomes-as they had announced-then they should realize that the worst curse of poverty was the lack of privacy; only the very rich or the very poor of the city could enjoy their summer vacations; the very rich, because they had private estates; the very poor, because they did not mind the feel and smell of one another's flesh on public beaches and public dance floors; the people of good taste and small income had no place to go, if they found no rest or pleasure in herds. Why was it a.s.sumed that poverty gave one the instincts of cattle? Why not offer these people a place where, for a week or a month, at small cost, they could have what they wanted and needed? He had seen Monadnock Valley. It could be done. Don't touch those hillsides, don't blast and level them down. Not one huge ant pile of a hotel-but small houses hidden from one another, each a private estate, where people could meet or not, as they pleased. Not one fish-market tank of a swimming-pool-but many private swimming pools, as many as the company wished to afford-he could show them how it could be done cheaply. Not one stock-farm corral of tennis courts for exhibitionists-but many private tennis courts. Not a place where one went to meet "refined company" and land a husband in two weeks-but a resort for people who enjoyed their own presence well enough and sought only a place where they would be left free to enjoy it.

The men listened to him silently. He saw them exchanging glances once in a while. He felt certain that they were the kind of glances people exchange when they cannot laugh at the speaker aloud. But it could not have been that-because he signed a contract to build the Monadnock Valley summer resort, two days later.

He demanded Mr. Bradley's initials on every drawing that came out of his drafting room; he remembered the Stoddard Temple. Mr. Bradley initialed, signed, okayed; he agreed to everything; he approved everything. He seemed delighted to let Roark have his way. But this eager complaisance had a peculiar undertone-as if Mr. Bradley were humoring a child.

He could learn little about Mr. Bradley. It was said that the man had made a fortune in real estate, in the Florida boom. His present company seemed to command unlimited funds, and the names of many wealthy backers were mentioned as shareholders. Roark never met them. The four gentlemen of the Board did not appear again, except on short visits to the construction site, where they exhibited little interest. Mr. Bradley was in full charge of everything-but beyond a close watch over the budget he seemed to like nothing better than to leave Roark in full charge.

In the eighteen months that followed, Roark had no time to wonder about Mr. Bradley. Roark was building his greatest a.s.signment.

For the last year he lived at the construction site, in a shanty hastily thrown together on a bare hillside, a wooden enclosure with a bed, a stove and a large table. His old draftsmen came to work for him again, some abandoning better jobs in the city, to live in shacks and tents, to work in naked plank barracks that served as architect's office. There was so much to build that none of them thought of wasting structural effort on their own shelters. They did not realize, until much later, that they had lacked comforts; and then they did not believe it-because the year at Monadnock Valley remained in their minds as the strange time when the earth stopped turning and they lived through twelve months of spring. They did not think of the snow, the frozen clots of earth, wind whistling through the cracks of planking, thin blankets over army cots, stiff fingers stretched over coal stoves in the morning, before a pencil could be held steadily. They remembered only the feeling which is the meaning of spring-one's answer to the first blades of gra.s.s, the first buds on tree branches, the first blue of the sky-the singing answer, not to gra.s.s, trees and sky, but to the great sense of beginning, of triumphant progression, of certainty in an achievement that nothing will stop. Not from leaves and flowers, but from wooden scaffoldings, from steam shovels, from blocks of stone and sheets of gla.s.s rising out of the earth they received the sense of youth, motion, purpose, fulfillment.

They were an army and it was a crusade. But none of them thought of it in these words, except Steven Mallory. Steven Mallory did the fountains and all the sculpture work of Monadnock Valley. But he came to live at the site long before he was needed. Battle, thought Steven Mallory, is a vicious concept. There is no glory in war, and no beauty in crusades of men. But this was a battle, this was an army and a war-and the highest experience in the life of every man who took part in it. Why? Where was the root of the difference and the law to explain it?

He did not speak of it to anyone. But he saw the same feeling in Mike's face, when Mike arrived with the gang of electricians. Mike said nothing, but he winked at Mallory in cheerful understanding. "I told you not to worry," Mike said to him once, without preamble, "at the trial that was. He can't lose, quarries or no quarries, trials or no trials. They can't beat him, Steve, they just can't, not the whole G.o.dd.a.m.n world."

But they had really forgotten the world, thought Mallory. This was a new earth, their own. The hills rose to the sky around them, as a wall of protection. And they had another protection-the architect who walked among them, down the snow or the gra.s.s of the hillsides, over the boulders and the piled planks, to the drafting tables, to the derricks, to the tops of rising walls-the man who had made this possible-the thought in the mind of that man-and not the content of that thought, nor the result, not the vision that had created Monadnock Valley, nor the will that had made it real-but the method of his thought, the rule of its function-the method and rule which were not like those of the world beyond the hills. That stood on guard over the valley and over the crusaders within it.

And then he saw Mr. Bradley come to visit the site, to smile blandly and depart again. Then Mallory felt anger without reason-and fear.

"Howard," Mallory said one night, when they sat together at a fire of dry branches on the hillside over the camp, "it's the Stoddard Temple again."

"Yes," said Roark, "I think so. But I can't figure out in just what way or what they're after."

He rolled over on his stomach and looked down at the panes of gla.s.s scattered through the darkness below; they caught reflections from somewhere and looked like phosph.o.r.escent, self-generated springs of light rising out of the ground. He said: "It doesn't matter, Steve, does it? Not what they do about it nor who comes to live here. Only that we've made it. Would you have missed this, no matter what price they make you pay for it afterward?"

"No," said Mallory.

Roark had wanted to rent one of the houses for himself and spend the summer there, the first summer of Monadnock Valley's existence. But before the resort was open, he received a wire from New York: "I told you I would, didn't I? It took five years to get rid of my friends and brothers, but the Aquitania is now mine-and yours. Come to finish it. Kent Lansing."

So he went back to New York-to see the rubble and cement dust cleared away from the hulk of the Unfinished Symphony, to see derricks swing girders high over Central Park, to see the gaps of windows filled, the broad decks spread over the roofs of the city, the Aquitania Hotel completed, glowing at night in the Park's skyline.

He had been very busy in the last two years. Monadnock Valley had not been his only commission. From different states, from unexpected parts of the country, calls had come for him: private homes, small office buildings, modest shops. He had built them-s.n.a.t.c.hing a few hours of sleep on trains and planes that carried him from Monadnock Valley to distant small towns. The story of every commission he received was the same: "I was in New York and I liked the Enright House." "I saw the Cord Building." "I saw a picture of that temple they tore down." It was as if an underground stream flowed through the country and broke out in sudden springs that shot to the surface at random, in unpredictable places. They were small, inexpensive jobs-but he was kept working.

That summer, with Monadnock Valley completed, he had no time to worry about its future fate. But Steven Mallory worried about it. "Why don't they advertise it, Howard? Why the sudden silence? Have you noticed? There was so much talk about their grand project, so many little items in print-before they started. There was less and less while we were doing it. And now? Mr. Bradley and company have gone deaf-mute. Now, when you'd expect them to stage a press agent's orgy. Why?"

"I wouldn't know," said Roark. "I'm an architect, not a rental agent. Why should you worry? We've done our job, let them do theirs in their own way."

"It's a d.a.m.n queer way. Did you see their ads-the few they've let dribble out? They say all the things you told them, about rest, peace and privacy-but how they say it! Do you know what those ads amount to in effect? 'Come to Monadnock Valley and be bored to death.' It sounds-it actually sounds as if they were trying to keep people away."

"I don't read ads, Steve."

But within a month of its opening every house in Monadnock Valley was rented. The people who came were a strange mixture: society men and women who could have afforded more fashionable resorts, young writers and unknown artists, engineers and newspapermen and factory workers. Suddenly, spontaneously, people were talking about Monadnock Valley. There was a need for that kind of a resort, a need no one had tried to satisfy. The place became news, but it was private news; the papers had not discovered it. Mr. Bradley had no press agents; Mr. Bradley and his company had vanished from public life. One magazine, unsolicited, printed four pages of photographs of Monadnock Valley, and sent a man to interview Howard Roark. By the end of summer the houses were leased in advance for the following year.

In October, early one morning, the door of Roark's reception room flew open and Steven Mallory rushed in, making straight for Roark's office. The secretary tried to stop him; Roark was working and no interruptions were allowed. But Mallory shoved her aside and tore into the office, slamming the door behind. She noticed that he held a newspaper in his hand.

Roark glanced up at him, from the drafting table, and dropped his pencil. He knew that this was the way Mallory's face had looked when he shot at Ellsworth Toohey.

"Well, Howard? Do you want to know why you got Monadnock Valley?"

He threw the newspaper down on the table. Roark saw the heading of a story on the third page: "Caleb Bradley arrested."

"It's all there," said Mallory. "Don't read it. It will make you sick."

"All right, Steve, what is it?"

"They sold two hundred percent of it."

"Who did? Of what?"

"Bradley and his gang. Of Monadnock Valley." Mallory spoke with a forced, vicious, self-torturing precision. "They thought it was worthless -from the first. They got the land practically for nothing-they thought it was no place for a resort at all-out of the way, with no bus lines or movie theaters around-they thought the time wasn't right and the public wouldn't go for it. They made a lot of noise and sold shares to a lot of wealthy suckers-it was just a huge fraud. They sold two hundred percent of the place. They got twice what it cost them to build it. They were certain it would fail. They wanted it to fail. They expected no profits to distribute. They had a nice scheme ready for how to get out of it when the place went bankrupt. They were prepared for anything-except for seeing it turn into the kind of success it is. And they couldn't go on-because now they'd have to pay their backers twice the amount the place earned each year. And it's earning plenty. And they thought they had arranged for certain failure. Howard, don't you understand? They chose you as the worst architect they could find!"

Roark threw his head back and laughed.

"G.o.d d.a.m.n you, Howard! It's not funny!"

"Sit down, Steve. Stop shaking. You look as if you'd just seen a whole field of butchered bodies."

"I have. I've seen worse. I've seen the root. I've seen what makes such fields possible. What do the d.a.m.n fools think of as horror? Wars, murders, fires, earthquakes? To h.e.l.l with that! This is horror-that story in the paper. That's what men should dread and fight and scream about and call the worst shame on their record. Howard, I'm thinking of all the explanations of evil and all the remedies offered for it through the centuries. None of them worked. None of them explained or cured anything. But the root of evil-my drooling beast-it's there, Howard, in that story. In that-and in the souls of the smug b.a.s.t.a.r.ds who'll read it and say: 'Oh well, genius must always struggle, it's good for 'em'-and then go and look for some village idiot to help, to teach him how to weave baskets. That's the drooling beast in action. Howard, think of Monadnock. Close your eyes and see it. And then think that the men who ordered it, believed it was the worst thing they could build! Howard, there's something wrong, something very terribly wrong in the world if you were given your greatest job-as a filthy joke!"

"When will you stop thinking about that? About the world and me? When will you learn to forget it? When will Dominique ..."

He stopped. They had not mentioned that name in each other's presence for five years. He saw Mallory's eyes, intent and shocked. Mallory realized that his words had hurt Roark, hurt him enough to force this admission. But Roark turned to him and said deliberately: "Dominique used to think just as you do."

Mallory had never spoken of what he guessed about Roark's past. Their silence had always implied that Mallory understood, that Roark knew it, and that it was not to be discussed. But now Mallory asked: "Are you still waiting for her to come back? Mrs. Gail Wynand-G.o.d d.a.m.n her!"

Roark said without emphasis: "Shut up, Steve."

Mallory whispered: "I'm sorry."

Roark walked to his table and said, his voice normal again: "Go home, Steve, and forget about Bradley. They'll all be suing one another now, but we won't be dragged in and they won't destroy Monadnock. Forget it, and get out, I have to work."

He brushed the newspaper off the table, with his elbow, and bent over the sheets of drafting paper.

There was a scandal over the revelations of the financing methods behind Monadnock Valley, there was a trial, a few gentlemen sentenced to the penitentiary, and a new management taking Monadnock over for the shareholders. Roark was not involved. He was busy, and he forgot to read the accounts of the trial in the papers. Mr. Bradley admitted-in apology to his partners-that he would be d.a.m.ned if he could have expected a resort built on a crazy, unsociable plan ever to become successful. "I did all I could-I chose the worst fool I could find."

Then Austen h.e.l.ler wrote an article about Howard Roark and Monadnock Valley. He spoke of all the buildings Roark had designed, and he put into words the things Roark had said in structure. Only they were not Austen h.e.l.ler's usual quiet words-they were a ferocious cry of admiration and of anger. "And may we be d.a.m.ned if greatness must reach us through fraud!"

The article started a violent controversy in art circles.

"Howard," Mallory said one day, some months later, "you're famous."

"Yes," said Roark, "I suppose so."

"Three-quarters of them don't know what it's all about, but they've heard the other one-quarter fighting over your name and so now they feel they must p.r.o.nounce it with respect. Of the fighting quarter, four-tenths are those who hate you, three-tenths are those who feel they must express an opinion in any controversy, two-tenths are those who play safe and herald any 'discovery,' and one-tenth are those who understand. But they've all found out suddenly that there is a Howard Roark and that he's an architect. The A.G.A. Bulletin A.G.A. Bulletin refers to you as a great but unruly talent-and the Museum of the Future has hung up photographs of Monadnock, the Enright House, the Cord Building and the Aquitania, under beautiful gla.s.s-next to the room where they've got Gordon L. Prescott. And still-I'm glad." refers to you as a great but unruly talent-and the Museum of the Future has hung up photographs of Monadnock, the Enright House, the Cord Building and the Aquitania, under beautiful gla.s.s-next to the room where they've got Gordon L. Prescott. And still-I'm glad."

Kent Lansing said, one evening: "h.e.l.ler did a grand job. Do you remember, Howard, what I told you once about the psychology of a pretzel? Don't despise the middleman. He's necessary. Someone had to tell them. It takes two to make every great career: the man who is great, and the man-almost rarer-who is great enough to see greatness and say so."

Ellsworth Toohey wrote: "The paradox in all this preposterous noise is the fact that Mr. Caleb Bradley is the victim of a grave injustice. His ethics are open to censure, but his esthetics were unimpeachable. He exhibited sounder judgment in matters of architectural merit than Mr. Austen h.e.l.ler, the outmoded reactionary who has suddenly turned art critic. Mr. Caleb Bradley was martyred by the bad taste of his tenants. In the opinion of this column his sentence should have been commuted in recognition of his artistic discrimination. Monadnock Valley is a fraud -but not merely a financial one."

There was little response to Roark's fame among the solid gentlemen of wealth who were the steadiest source of architectural commissions. The men who had said: "Roark? Never heard of him," now said: "Roark? He's too sensational."

But there were men who were impressed by the simple fact that Roark had built a place which made money for owners who didn't want to make money; this was more convincing than abstract artistic discussions. And there was the one-tenth who understood. In the year after Monadnock Valley Roark built two private homes in Connecticut, a movie theater in Chicago, a hotel in Philadelphia.

In the spring of 1936 a western city completed plans for a World's Fair to be held next year, an international exposition to be known as "The March of the Centuries." The committee of distinguished civic leaders in charge of the project chose a council of the country's best architects to design the fair. The civic leaders wished to be conspicuously progressive. Howard Roark was one of the eight architects chosen.

When he received the invitation, Roark appeared before the committee and explained that he would be glad to design the fair-alone.

"But you can't be serious, Mr. Roark," the chairman declared. "After all, with a stupendous undertaking of this nature, we want the best that can be had. I mean, two heads are better than one, you know, and eight heads ... why, you can see for yourself-the best talents of the country, the brightest names-you know, friendly consultation, co-operation and collaboration-you know what makes great achievements."

"I do."

"Then you realize ..."

"If you want me, you'll have to let me do it all, alone. I don't work with councils."

"You wish to reject an opportunity like this, a spot in history, a chance of world fame, practically a chance of immortality ..."

"I don't work with collectives. I don't consult, I don't co-operate, I don't collaborate."

There was a great deal of angry comment on Roark's refusal, in architectural circles. People said: "The conceited b.a.s.t.a.r.d!" The indignation was too sharp and raw for a mere piece of professional gossip; each man took it as a personal insult; each felt himself qualified to alter, advise and improve the work of any man living.

"The incident ill.u.s.trates to perfection," wrote Ellsworth Toohey, "the antisocial nature of Mr. Howard Roark's egotism, the arrogance of the unbridled individualism which he has always personified."