The Fountainhead (24 page)

Mrs. Sanborn was pleased to learn, shortly afterward, that no reputable contractor would undertake the erection of the house. “You see?” she started triumphantly. Mr. Sanborn refused to see. He found an obscure firm that accepted the commission grudgingly and as a special favor to him. Mrs. Sanborn learned that she had an ally in the contractor, and she broke social precedent to the extent of inviting him for tea. She had long since lost all coherent ideas about the house; she merely hated Roark. Her contractor hated all architects on principle.

The construction of the Sanborn house proceeded through the months of summer and fall, each day bringing new battles. “But, of course, Mr. Roark, I told you I wanted three closets in my bedroom, I remember distinctly, it was on a Friday and we were sitting in the drawing room and Mr. Sanborn was sitting in the big chair by the window and I was ... What about the plans? What plans? How do you expect me to understand plans?” “Aunt Rosalie says she can’t possibly climb a circular stairway, Mr. Roark. What are we going to do? Select our guests to fit your house?” “Mr. Hulburt says that kind of a ceiling won’t hold.... Oh, yes, Mr. Hulburt knows a lot about architecture. He’s spent two summers in Venice.” “June, poor darling, says her room will be dark as a cellar.... Well, that’s the way she feels, Mr. Roark. Even if it isn’t dark, but if it makes her feel dark, it’s the same thing.” Roark stayed up nights, redrafting the plans for the alterations which he could not avoid. It meant days of tearing down floors, stairways, partitions already erected; it meant extras piling up on the contractor’s budget. The contractor shrugged and said: “I told you so. That’s what always happens when you get one of those fancy architects. You wait and see what this thing will cost you before he gets through.”

Then, as the house took shape, it was Roark who found that he wanted to make a change. The eastern wing had never quite satisfied him. Watching it rise, he saw the mistake he had made and the way to correct it; he knew it would bring the house into a more logical whole. He was making his first steps in building and they were his first experiments. He could admit it openly. But Mr. Sanborn refused to allow the change; it was his turn. Roark pleaded with him; once the picture of that new wing had become clear in Roark’s mind he could not bear to look at the house as it stood. “It’s not that I disagree with you,” Mr. Sanborn said coldly, “in fact, I do think you’re right. But we cannot afford it. Sorry.” “It will cost you less than the senseless changes Mrs. Sanborn has forced me to make.” “Don’t bring that up again.” “Mr. Sanborn,” Roark asked slowly, “will you sign a paper that you authorize this change provided it costs you nothing?” “Certainly. If you can conjure up a miracle to work that.”

He signed. The eastern wing was rebuilt. Roark paid for it himself. It cost him more than the fee he received. Mr. Sanborn hesitated: he wanted to repay it. Mrs. Sanborn stopped him. “It’s just a low trick,” she said, “just a form of high-pressure. He’s blackmailing you on your better feelings. He expects you to pay. Wait and see. He’ll ask for it. Don’t let him get away with that.” Roark did not ask for it. Mr. Sanborn never paid him.

When the house was completed, Mrs. Sanborn refused to live in it. Mr. Sanborn looked at it wistfully, too tired to admit that he loved it, that he had always wanted a home just like it. He surrendered. The house was not furnished. Mrs. Sanborn took herself, her husband and her daughter off to Florida for the winter, “where,” she said, “we have a house that’s a decent Spanish, thank God!—because we bought it ready-made. This is what happens when you venture to build for yourself, with some half-baked idiot of an architect!” Her son, to everybody’s amazement, exhibited a sudden burst of savage will power: he refused to go to Florida; he liked the new house, he would live nowhere else. So three of the rooms were furnished for him. The family left and he moved alone into the house on the Hudson. At night, one could see from the river a single rectangle of yellow, small and lost, among the windows of the huge, dead house.

The bulletin of the Architects’ Guild of America carried a small item:

“A curious incident, which would be amusing if it were not deplorable, is reported to us about a home recently built by Mr. Whitford Sanborn, noted industrialist. Designed by one Howard Roark and erected at a cost of well over $100,000, this house was found by the family to be uninhabitable. It stands now, abandoned, as an eloquent witness to professional incompetence.”

XIV

L
ICIUS N. HEYER STUBBORNLY REFUSED TO DIE. HE HAD RECOVERED from the stroke and returned to his office, ignoring the objections of his doctor and the solicitous protests of Guy Francon. Francon offered to buy him out. Heyer refused, his pale, watering eyes staring obstinately at nothing at all. He came to his office every two or three days; he read the copies of correspondence left in his letter basket according to custom; he sat at his desk and drew flowers on a clean pad; then he went home. He walked, dragging his feet slowly; he held his elbows pressed to his sides and his forearms thrust forward, with the fingers half closed, like claws; the fingers shook; he could not use his left hand at all. He would not retire. He liked to see his name on the firm’s stationery.

He wondered dimly why he was no longer introduced to prominent clients, why he never saw the sketches of their new buildings, until they were half erected. If he mentioned this, Francon protested: “But Lucius, I couldn’t think of bothering you in your condition. Any other man would have retired, long ago.”

Francon puzzled him mildly. Peter Keating baffled him. Keating barely bothered to greet him when they met, and then as an afterthought; Keating walked off in the middle of a sentence addressed to him; when Heyer issued some minor order to one of the draftsmen, it was not carried out and the draftsman informed him that the order had been countermanded by Mr. Keating. Heyer could not understand it; he always remembered Keating as the diffident boy who had talked to him so nicely about old porcelain. He excused Keating at first; then he tried to mollify him, humbly and clumsily; then he conceived an unreasoning fear of Keating. He complained to Francon. He said, petulantly, assuming the tone of an authority he could never have exercised: “That boy of yours, Guy, that Keating fellow, he’s getting to be impossible. He’s rude to me. You ought to get rid of him.” “Now you see, Lucius,” Francon answered dryly, “why I say that you should retire. You’re overstraining your nerves and you’re beginning to imagine things.”

Then came the competition for the Cosmo-Slotnick Building.

Cosmo-Slotnick Pictures of Hollywood, California, had decided to erect a stupendous home office in New York, a skyscraper to house a motion-picture theater and forty floors of offices. A world-wide competition for the selection of the architect had been announced a year in advance. It was stated that Cosmo-Slotnick were not merely the leaders in the art of the motion picture, but embraced all the arts, since all contributed to the creation of the films; and architecture being a lofty, though neglected, branch of esthetics, Cosmo-Slotnick were ready to put it on the map.

With the latest news of the casting of
I’ll Take a Sailor
and the shooting of
Wives for Sale,
came stories about the Parthenon and the Pantheon. Miss Sally O’Dawn was photographed on the steps of the Rheims Cathedral—in a bathing suit, and Mr. Pratt (“Pardner”) Purcell gave an interview, stating that he had always dreamed of being a master builder, if he hadn’t been a movie actor. Ralston Holcombe, Guy Francon and Gordon L. Prescott were quoted on the future of American architecture—in an article written by Miss Dimples Williams, and an imaginary interview quoted what Sir Christopher Wren would have said about the motion picture. In the Sunday supplements there were photographs of Cosmo-Slotnick starlets in shorts and sweaters, holding T-squares and slide-rules, standing before drawing boards that bore the legend: “Cosmo-Slotnick Building” over a huge question mark.

The competition was open to all architects of all countries; the building was to rise on Broadway and to cost ten million dollars; it was to symbolize the genius of modern technology and the spirit of the American people; it was announced in advance as “the most beautiful building in the world.” The jury of award consisted of Mr. Shupe, representing Cosmo, Mr. Slotnick, representing Slotnick, Professor Peterkin of the Stanton Institute of Technology, the Mayor of the City of New York, Ralston Holcombe, president of the A.G.A., and Ellsworth M. Toohey.

“Go to it, Peter!” Francon told Keating enthusiastically. “Do your best. Give me all you’ve got. This is your great chance. You’ll be known the world over if you win. And here’s what we’ll do: we’ll put your name on our entry, along with the firm’s. If we win, you’ll get one fifth of the prize. The grand prize is sixty thousand dollars, you know.”

“Heyer will object,” said Keating cautiously.

“Let him object. That’s why I’m doing it. He might get it through his head what’s the decent thing for him to do. And I ... well, you know how I feel, Peter. I think of you as my partner already. I owe it to you. You’ve earned it. This might be your key to it.”

Keating redrew his project five times. He hated it. He hated every girder of that building before it was born. He worked, his hand trembling. He did not think of the drawing under his hand. He thought of all the other contestants, of the man who might win and be proclaimed publicly as his superior. He wondered what that other one would do, how the other would solve the problem and surpass him. He had to beat that man; nothing else mattered; there was no Peter Keating, there was only a suction chamber, like the kind of tropical plant he’d heard about, a plant that drew an insect into its vacuum and sucked it dry and thus acquired its own substance.

He felt nothing but immense uncertainty when his sketches were ready and the delicate perspective of a white marble edifice lay, neatly finished, before him. It looked like a Renaissance palace made of rubber and stretched to the height of forty stories. He had chosen the style of the Renaissance because he knew the unwritten law that all architectural juries liked columns, and because he remembered Ralston Holcombe on the jury. He had borrowed from all of Holcombe’s favorite Italian palaces. It looked good ... it might be good... he was not sure. He had no one to ask.

He heard these words in his own mind and he felt a wave of blind fury. He felt it before he knew the reason, but he knew the reason almost in the same instant: there was someone whom he could ask. He did not want to think of that name; he would not go to him; the anger rose to his face and he felt the hot, tight patches under his eyes. He knew that he would go.

He pushed the thought out of his mind. He was not going anywhere. When the time came, he slipped his drawings into a folder and went to Roark’s office.

He found Roark alone, sitting at the desk in the large room that bore no signs of activity.

“Hello, Howard!” he said brightly. “How are you? I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”

“Hello, Peter,” said Roark. “You aren’t.”

“Not awfully busy, are you?”

“No.”

“Mind if I sit down for a few minutes?”

“Sit down.”

“Well, Howard, you’ve been doing great work. I’ve seen the Fargo Store. It’s splendid. My congratulations.”

“Thank you.”

“You’ve been forging straight ahead, haven’t you? Had three commissions already?”

“Four.”

“Oh, yes, of course, four. Pretty good. I hear you’ve been having a little trouble with the Sanborns.”

“I have.”

“Well, it’s not all smooth sailing, not all of it, you know.... No new commissions since? Nothing?”

“No. Nothing.”

“Well, it will come. I’ve always said that architects don’t have to cut one another’s throat, there’s plenty of work for all of us, we must develop a spirit of professional unity and co-operation. For instance, take that competition—have you sent your entry in already?”

“What competition?”

“Why,
the
competition. The Cosmo-Slotnick competition.”

“I’m not sending any entry.”

“You’re ... not? Not at all?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I don’t enter competitions.”

“Why, for heaven’s sake?”

“Come on, Peter. You didn’t come here to discuss that.”

“As a matter of fact I did think I’d show you my own entry, you understand I’m not asking you to help me, I just want your reaction, just a general opinion.”

He hastened to open the folder.

Roark studied the sketches. Keating snapped: “Well? Is it all right?”

“No. It’s rotten. And you know it.”

Then, for hours, while Keating watched and the sky darkened and lights flared up in the windows of the city, Roark talked, explained, slashed lines through the plans, untangled the labyrinth of the theater’s exits, cut windows, unraveled halls, smashed useless arches, straightened stairways. Keating stammered once: “Jesus, Howard! Why don’t you enter the competition, if you can do it like this?” Roark answered: “Because I can’t. I couldn’t if I tried. I dry up. I go blank. I can’t give them what they want. But I can straighten someone else’s damn mess when I see it.”

It was morning when he pushed the plans aside. Keating whispered:

“And the elevation?”

“Oh, to hell with your elevation! I don’t want to look at your damn Renaissance elevations!” But he looked. He could not prevent his hand from cutting lines across the perspective. “All right, damn you, give them good Renaissance if you must and if there is such a thing! Only I can’t do that for you. Figure it out yourself. Something like this. Simpler, Peter, simpler, more direct, as honest as you can make of a dishonest thing. Now go home and try to work out something on this order.”

Keating went home. He copied Roark’s plans. He worked out Roark’s hasty sketch of the elevation into a neat, finished perspective. Then the drawings were mailed, properly addressed, to:

“The Most Beautiful Building in the World” Competition
Cosmo-Slotnick Pictures, Inc.
New York City.

The envelope, accompanying the entry, contained the names: “Francon & Heyer, architects, Peter Keating, associated designer.”

Through the months of that winter Roark found no other chances, no offers, no prospects of commissions. He sat at his desk and forgot, at times, to turn on the lights in the early dusk. It was as if the heavy immobility of all the hours that had flowed through the office, of its door, of its air, were beginning to seep into his muscles. He would rise and fling a book at the wall, to feel his arm move, to hear the burst of sound. He smiled, amused, picked up the book, and laid it neatly back on the desk. He turned on the desk lamp. Then he stopped, before he had withdrawn his hands from the cone of light under the lamp, and he looked at his hands; he spread his fingers out slowly. Then he remembered what Cameron had said to him long ago. He jerked his hands away. He reached for his coat, turned the lights off, locked the door and went home.

As spring approached he knew that his money would not last much longer. He paid the rent on his office promptly on the first of each month. He wanted the feeling of thirty days ahead, during which he would still own the office. He entered it calmly each morning. He found only that he did not want to look at the calendar when it began to grow dark and he knew that another day of the thirty had gone. When he noticed this, he made himself look at the calendar. It was a race he was running now, a race between his rent money and... he did not know the name of the other contestant. Perhaps it was every man whom he passed on the street.

When he went up to his office, the elvator operators looked at him in a queer, lazy, curious sort of way; when he spoke, they answered, not insolently, but in an indifferent drawl that seemed to say it would become insolent in a moment. They did not know what he was doing or why; they knew only that he was a man to whom no clients ever came. He attended, because Austen Heller asked him to attend, the few parties Heller gave occasionally; he was asked by guests: “Oh, you’re an architect? You’ll forgive me, I haven’t kept up with architecture—what have you built?” When he answered, he heard them say: “Oh, yes, indeed,” and he saw the conscious politeness of their manner tell him that he was an architect by presumption. They had never seen his buildings; they did not know whether his buildings were good or worthless; they knew only that they had never heard of these buildings.

It was a war in which he was invited to fight nothing, yet he was pushed forward to fight, he had to fight, he had no choice—and no adversary.

He passed by buildings under construction. He stopped to look at the steel cages. He felt at times as if the beams and girders were shaping themselves not into a house, but into a barricade to stop him; and the few steps on the sidewalk that separated him from the wooden fence enclosing the construction were the steps he would never be able to take. It was pain, but it was a blunted, unpenetrating pain. It’s true, he would tell himself; it’s not, his body would answer, the strange, untouchable healthiness of his body.

The Fargo Store had opened. But one building could not save a neighborhood; Fargo’s competitors had been right, the tide had turned, was flowing uptown, his customers were deserting him. Remarks were made openly on the decline of John Fargo, who had topped his poor business judgment by an investment in a preposterous kind of a building; which proved, it was stated, that the public would not accept these architectural innovations. It was not stated that the store was the cleanest and brightest in the city; that the skill of its plan made its operation easier than had ever been possible; that the neighborhood had been doomed before its erection. The building took the blame.

Athelstan Beasely, the wit of the architectural profession, the court jester of the A.G.A., who never seemed to be building anything, but organized all the charity balls, wrote in his column entitled “Quips and Quirks” in the A.G.A.
Bulletin:

“Well, lads and lassies, here’s a fairy tale with a moral: seems there was, once upon a time, a little boy with hair the color of a Hallowe’en pumpkin, who thought that he was better than all you common boys and girls. So to prove it, he up and built a house, which is a very nice house, except that nobody can live in it, and a store, which is a very lovely store, except that it’s going bankrupt. He also erected a very eminent structure, to wit: a dogcart on a mud road. This last is reported to be doing very well indeed, which, perhaps, is the right field of endeavor for that little boy.”