The Fountainhead

by Ayn Rand

  He rose and reached for his coat. He threw his shoulders back, slipping the coat on; he felt pleasure in the jolt of his muscles.

  In the street outside, he took a taxi which he could not afford.

  The chairman of the board was waiting for him in his office, with Weidler and with the vice-president of the Manhattan Bank Company. There was a long conference table in the room, and Roark's drawings were spread upon it. Weidler rose when he entered and walked to meet him, his hand outstretched. It was in the air of the room, like an overture to the words Weidler uttered, and Roark was not certain of the moment when he heard them, because he thought he had heard them the instant he entered.

  "Well, Mr. Roark, the commission's yours," said Weidler.

  Roark bowed. It was best not to trust his voice for a few minutes.

  The chairman smiled amiably, inviting him to sit down. Roark sat down by the side of the table that supported his drawings. His hand rested on the table. The polished mahogany felt warm and living under his fingers; it was almost as if he were pressing his hand against the foundations of his building; his greatest building, fifty stories to rise in the center of Manhattan.

  "I must tell you," the chairman was saying, "that we've had a hell of a fight over that building of yours. Thank God it's over. Some of our members just couldn't swallow your radical innovations. You know how stupidly conservative some people are. But we've found a way to please them, and we got their consent. Mr. Weidler here was really magnificently convincing on your behalf."

  A great deal more was said by the three men. Roark barely heard it. He was thinking of the first bite of machine into earth that begins an excavation. Then he heard the chairman saying: "... and so it's yours, on one minor condition." He heard that and looked at the chairman.

  "It's a small compromise, and when you agree to it we can sign the contract. It's only an inconsequential matter of the building's appearance. I understand that you modernists attach no great importance to a mere facade, it's the plan that counts with you, quite rightly, and we wouldn't think of altering your plan in any way, it's the logic of the plan that sold us on the building. So I'm sure you won't mind."

  "What do you want?"

  "It's only a matter of a slight alteration in the facade. I'll show you. Our Mr. Parker's son is studying architecture and we had him draw us up a sketch, just a rough sketch to illustrate what we had in mind and to show the members of the board, because they couldn't have visualized the compromise we offered. Here it is."

  He pulled a sketch from under the drawings on the table and handed it to Roark.

  It was Roark's building on the sketch, very neatly drawn. It was his building, but it had a simplified Doric portico in front, a cornice on top, and his ornament was replaced by a stylized Greek ornament.

  Roark got up. He had to stand. He concentrated on the effort of standing. It made the rest easier. He leaned on one straight arm, his hand closed over the edge of the table, the tendons showing under the skin of his wrist.

  "You see the point?" said the chairman soothingly. "Our conservatives simply refused to accept a queer stark building like yours. And they claim that the public won't accept it either. So we hit upon a middle course. In this way, though it's not traditional architecture of course, it will give the public the impression of what they're accustomed to. It adds a certain air of sound, stable dignity--and that's what we want in a bank, isn't it? It does seem to be an unwritten law that a bank must have a Classic portico--and a bank is not exactly the right institution to parade law-breaking and rebellion. Undermines that intangible feeling of confidence, you know. People don't trust novelty. But this is the scheme that pleased everybody. Personally, I wouldn't insist on it, but I really don't see that it spoils anything. And that's what the board has decided. Of course, we don't mean that we want you to follow this sketch. But it gives you our general idea and you'll work it out yourself, make your own adaptation of the Classic motive to the facade."

  Then Roark answered. The men could not classify the tone of his voice; they could not decide whether it was too great a calm or too great an emotion. They concluded that it was calm, because the voice moved forward evenly, without stress, without color, each syllable spaced as by a machine; only the air in the room was not the air that vibrates to a calm voice.

  They concluded that there was nothing abnormal in the manner of the man who was speaking, except the fact that his right hand would not leave the edge of the table, and when he had to move the drawings, he did it with his left hand, like a man with one arm paralyzed.

  He spoke for a long time. He explained why this structure could not have a Classic motive on its facade. He explained why an honest building, like an honest man, had to be of one piece and one faith; what constituted the life source, the idea in any existing thing or creature, and why--if one smallest part committed treason to that idea--the thing or the creature was dead; and why the good, the high and the noble on earth was only that which kept its integrity.

  The chairman interrupted him:

  "Mr. Roark, I agree with you. There's no answer to what you're saying. But unfortunately, in practical life, one can't always be so flawlessly consistent. There's always the incalculable human element of emotion. We can't fight that with cold logic. This discussion is actually superfluous. I can agree with you, but I can't help you. The matter is closed. It was the board's final decision--after more than usually prolonged consideration, as you know."

  "Will you let me appear before the board and speak to them?"

  "I'm sorry, Mr. Roark, but the board will not re-open the question for further debate. It was final. I can only ask you to state whether you agree to accept the commission on our terms or not. I must admit that the board has considered the possibility of your refusal. In which case, the name of another architect, one Gordon L. Prescott, has been mentioned most favorably as an alternative. But I told the board that I felt certain you would accept."

  He waited. Roark said nothing.

  "You understand the situation, Mr. Roark?"

  "Yes," said Roark. His eyes were lowered. He was looking down at the drawings.

  "Well?"

  Roark did not answer.

  "Yes or no, Mr. Roark?"

  Roark's head leaned back. He closed his eyes.

  "No," said Roark.

  After a while the chairman asked:

  "Do you realize what you're doing?"

  "Quite," said Roark.

  "Good God!" Weidler cried suddenly. "Don't you know how big a commission this is? You're a young man, you won't get another chance like this. And ... all right, damn it all, I'll say it! You need this! I know how badly you need it!"

  Roark gathered the drawings from the table, rolled them together and put them under his arm.

  "It's sheer insanity!" Weidler moaned. "I want you. We want your building. You need the commission. Do you have to be quite so fanatical and selfless about it?"

  "What?" Roark asked incredulously.

  "Fanatical and selfless."

  Roark smiled. He looked down at his drawings. His elbow moved a little, pressing them to his body. He said:

  "That was the most selfish thing you've ever seen a man do."

  He walked back to his office. He gathered his drawing instruments and the few things he had there. It made one package and he carried it under his arm. He locked the door and gave the key to the rental agent. He told the agent that he was closing his office. He walked home and left the package there. Then he went to Mike Donnigan's house.

  "No?" Mike asked, after one look at him.

  "No," said Roark.

  "What happened?"

  "I'll tell you some other time."

  "The bastards!"

  "Never mind that, Mike."

  "How about the office now?"

  "I've closed the office."

  "For good?"

  "For the time being."

  "God damn them all, Red! God damn them!"

  "Shut up. I need
a job, Mike. Can you help me?"

  "Me?"

  "I don't know anyone in those trades here. Not anyone that would want me. You know them all."

  "In what trades? What are you talking about?"

  "In the building trades. Structural work. As I've done before."

  "You mean--a plain workman's job?"

  "I mean a plain workman's job."

  "You're crazy, you God-damn fool!"

  "Cut it, Mike. Will you get me a job?"

  "But why in hell? You can get a decent job in an architect's office. You know you can."

  "I won't, Mike. Not ever again."

  "Why?"

  "I don't want to touch it. I don't want to see it. I don't want to help them do what they're doing."

  "You can get a nice clean job in some other line."

  "I would have to think on a nice clean job. I don't want to think. Not their way. It will have to be their way, no matter where I go. I want a job where I won't have to think."

  "Architects don't take workmen's jobs."

  "That's all this architect can do."

  "You can learn something in no time."

  "I don't want to learn anything."

  "You mean you want me to get you into a construction gang, here, in town?"

  "That's what I mean."

  "No, God damn you! I can't! I won't! I won't do it!"

  "Why?"

  "Red, to be putting yourself up like a show for all the bastards in this town to see? For all the sons of bitches to know they brought you down like that? For all of them to gloat?"

  Roark laughed.

  "I don't give a damn about that, Mike. Why should you?"

  "Well, I'm not letting you. I'm not giving the sons of bitches that kinda treat."

  "Mike," Roark said softly, "there's nothing else for me to do."

  "Hell, yes, there is. I told you before. You'll be listening to reason now. I got all the dough you need until ..."

  "I'll tell you what I've told Austen Heller: If you ever offer me money again, that'll be the end between us."

  "But why?"

  "Don't argue, Mike."

  "But ..."

  "I'm asking you to do me a bigger favor. I want that job. You don't have to feel sorry for me. I don't."

  "But ... but what'll happen to you, Red?"

  "Where?"

  "I mean ... your future?"

  "I'll save enough money and I'll come back. Or maybe someone will send for me before then."

  Mike looked at him. He saw something in Roark's eyes which he knew Roark did not want to be there.

  "Okay, Red," said Mike softly.

  He thought it over for a long time. He said:

  "Listen, Red, I won't get you a job in town. I just can't. It turns my stomach to think of it. But I'll get you something in the same line."

  "All right. Anything. It doesn't make any difference to me."

  "I've worked for all of that bastard Francon's pet contractors for so long I know everybody ever worked for him. He's got a granite quarry down in Connecticut. One of the foremen's a great pal of mine. He's in town right now. Ever worked in a quarry before?"

  "Once. Long ago."

  "Think you'll like that?"

  "Sure."

  "I'll go see him. We won't be telling him who you are, just a friend of mine, that's all."

  "Thanks, Mike."

  Mike reached for his coat, and then his hands fell back, and he looked at the floor.

  "Red ..."

  "It will be all right, Mike."

  Roark walked home. It was dark and the street was deserted. There was a strong wind. He could feel the cold, whistling pressure strike his cheeks. It was the only evidence of the flow ripping the air. Nothing moved in the stone corridor about him. There was not a tree to stir, no curtains, no awnings; only naked masses of stone, glass, asphalt and sharp corners. It was strange to feel that fierce movement against his face. But in a trash basket on a corner a crumpled sheet of newspaper was rustling, beating convulsively against the wire mesh. It made the wind real.

  In the evening, two days later, Roark left for Connecticut.

  From the train, he looked back once at the skyline of the city as it flashed into sight and was held for some moments beyond the windows. The twilight had washed off the details of the buildings. They rose in thin shafts of a soft, porcelain blue, a color not of real things, but of evening and distance. They rose in bare outlines, like empty molds waiting to be filled. The distance had flattened the city. The single shafts stood immeasurably tall, out of scale to the rest of the earth. They were of their own world, and they held up to the sky the statement of what man had conceived and made possible. They were empty molds. But man had come so far; he could go farther. The city on the edge of the sky held a question--and a promise.

  Little pinheads of light flared up about the peak of one famous tower, in the windows of the Star Roof Restaurant. Then the train swerved around a bend and the city vanished.

  That evening, in the banquet hall of the Star Roof Restaurant, a dinner was held to celebrate the admittance of Peter Keating to partnership in the firm to be known henceforward as Francon & Keating.

  At the long table that seemed covered, not with a tablecloth, but with a sheet of light, sat Guy Francon. Somehow, tonight, he did not mind the streaks of silver that appeared on his temples; they sparkled crisply against the black of his hair and they gave him an air of cleanliness and elegance, like the rigid white of his shirt against his black evening clothes. In the place of honor sat Peter Keating. He leaned back, his shoulders straight, his hand closed about the stem of a glass. His black curls glistened against his white forehead. In that one moment of silence, the guests felt no envy, no resentment, no malice. There was a grave feeling of brotherhood in the room, in the presence of the pale, handsome boy who looked solemn as at his first communion. Ralston Holcombe had risen to speak. He stood, his glass in hand. He had prepared his speech, but he was astonished to hear himself saying something quite different, in a voice of complete sincerity. He said:

  "We are the guardians of a great human function. Perhaps of the greatest function among the endeavors of man. We have achieved much and we have erred often. But we are willing in all humility to make way for our heirs. We are only men and we are only seekers. But we seek for truth with the best there is in our hearts. We seek with what there is of the sublime granted to the race of men. It is a great quest. To the future of American Architecture!"

  Part 2

  ELLSWORTH M. TOOHEY

  I

  TO HOLD HIS FISTS CLOSED TIGHT, AS IF THE SKIN OF HIS PALMS had grown fast to the steel he clasped--to keep his feet steady, pressed down hard, the flat rock an upward thrust against his soles--not to feel the existence of his body, but only a few clots of tension: his knees, his wrists, his shoulders and the drill he held--to feel the drill trembling in a long convulsive shudder--to feel his stomach trembling, his lungs trembling, the straight lines of the stone ledges before him dissolving into jagged streaks of trembling--to feel the drill and his body gathered into the single will of pressure, that a shaft of steel might sink slowly into granite--this was all of life for Howard Roark, as it had been in the days of the two months behind him.

  He stood on the hot stone in the sun. His face was scorched to bronze. His shirt stuck in long, damp patches to his back. The quarry rose about him in flat shelves breaking against one another. It was a world without curves, grass or soil, a simplified world of stone planes, sharp edges and angles. The stone had not been made by patient centuries welding the sediment of winds and tides; it had come from a molten mass cooling slowly at unknown depth; it had been flung, forced out of the earth, and it still held the shape of violence against the violence of the men on its ledges.

  The straight planes stood witness to the force of each cut; the drive of each blow had run in an unswerving line; the stone had cracked open in unbending resistance. Drills bored forward with a low, continuous drone, the tension of
the sound cutting through nerves, through skulls, as if the quivering tools were shattering slowly both the stone and the men who held them.

  He liked the work. He felt at times as if it were a match of wrestling between his muscles and the granite. He was very tired at night. He liked the emptiness of his body's exhaustion.

  Each evening he walked the two miles from the quarry to the little town where the workers lived. The earth of the woods he crossed was soft and warm under his feet; it was strange, after a day spent on the granite ridges; he smiled as at a new pleasure, each evening, and looked down to watch his feet crushing a surface that responded, gave way and conceded faint prints to be left behind.

  There was a bathroom in the garret of the house where he roomed; the paint had peeled off the floor long ago and the naked boards were gray-white. He lay in the tub for a long time and let the cool water soak the stone dust out of his skin. He let his head hang back, on the edge of the tub, his eyes closed. The greatness of the weariness was its own relief: it allowed no sensation but the slow pleasure of the tension leaving his muscles.

  He ate his dinner in a kitchen, with other quarry workers. He sat alone at a table in a corner; the fumes of the grease, crackling eternally on the vast gas range, hid the rest of the room in a sticky haze. He ate little. He drank a great deal of water; the cold, glittering liquid in a clean glass was intoxicating.

  He slept in a small wooden cube under the roof. The boards of the ceiling slanted down over his bed. When it rained, he could hear the burst of each drop against the roof, and it took an effort to realize why he did not feel the rain beating against his body.

  Sometimes, after dinner, he would walk into the woods that began behind the house. He would stretch down on the ground, on his stomach, his elbows planted before him, his hands propping his chin, and he would watch the patterns of veins on the green blades of grass under his face; he would blow at them and watch the blades tremble then stop again. He would roll over on his back and lie still, feeling the warmth of the earth under him. Far above, the leaves were still green, but it was a thick, compressed green, as if the color were condensed in one last effort before the dusk coming to dissolve it. The leaves hung without motion against a sky of polished lemon yellow; its luminous pallor emphasized that its light was failing. He pressed his hips, his back into the earth under him; the earth resisted, but it gave way; it was a silent victory; he felt a dim, sensuous pleasure in the muscles of his legs.