The Fountainhead (29 page)

“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

T
O 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.

Sometimes, not often, he sat up and did not move for a long time; then he smiled, the slow smile of an executioner watching a victim. He thought of his days going by, of the buildings he could have been doing, should have been doing and, perhaps, never would be doing again. He watched the pain’s unsummoned appearance with a cold, detached curiosity; he said to himself: Well, here it is again. He waited to see how long it would last. It gave him a strange, hard pleasure to watch his fight against it, and he could forget that it was his own suffering; he could smile in contempt, not realizing that he smiled at his own agony. Such moments were rare. But when they came, he felt as he did in the quarry: that he had to drill through granite, that he had to drive a wedge and blast the thing within him which persisted in calling to his pity.

Dominique Francon lived alone, that summer, in the great Colonial mansion of her father’s estate, three miles beyond the quarry town. She received no visitors. An old caretaker and his wife were the only human beings she saw, not too often and merely of necessity; they lived some distance from the mansion, near the stables; the caretaker attended to the grounds and the horses; his wife attended to the house and cooked Dominique’s meals.

The meals were served with the gracious severity the old woman had learned in the days when Dominique’s mother lived and presided over the guests in that great dining room. At night Dominique found her solitary place at the table laid out as for a formal banquet, the candles lighted, the tongues of yellow flame standing motionless like the shining metal spears of a guard of honor. The darkness stretched the room into a hall, the big windows rose like a flat colonnade of sentinels. A shallow crystal bowl stood in a pool of light in the center of the long table, with a single water lily spreading white petals about a heart yellow like a drop of candle fire.

The old woman served the meal in unobtrusive silence, and disappeared from the house as soon as she could afterward. When Dominique walked up the stairs to her bedroom, she found the fragile lace folds of her nightgown laid out on the bed. In the morning she entered her bathroom and found water in the sunken bathtub, the hyacinth odor of her bath salts, the aquamarine tiles polished, shining under her feet, the huge towels spread out like snowdrifts to swallow her body—yet she heard no steps and felt no living presence in the house. The old woman’s treatment of Dominique had the same reverent caution with which she handled the pieces of Venetian glass in the drawing-room cabinets.

Dominique had spent so many summers and winters, surrounding herself with people in order to feel alone, that the experiment of actual solitude was an enchantment to her and a betrayal into a weakness she had never allowed herself: the weakness of enjoying it. She stretched her arms and let them drop lazily, feeling a sweet, drowsy heaviness above her elbows, as after a first drink. She was conscious of her summer dresses, she felt her knees, her thighs encountering the faint resistance of cloth when she moved, and it made her conscious not of the cloth, but of her knees and thighs.

The house stood alone amidst vast grounds, and the woods stretched beyond; there were no neighbors for miles. She rode on horseback down long, deserted roads, down hidden paths leading nowhere. Leaves glittered in the sun and twigs snapped in the wind of her flying passage. She caught her breath at times from the sudden feeling that something magnificent and deadly would meet her beyond the next turn of the road; she could give no identity to what she expected, she could not say whether it was a sight, a person or an event; she knew only its quality—the sensation of a defiling pleasure.

Sometimes she started on foot from the house and walked for miles, setting herself no goal and no hour of return. Cars passed her on the road; the people of the quarry town knew her and bowed to her; she was considered the chatelaine of the countryside, as her mother had been long ago. She turned off the road into the woods and walked on, her arms swinging loosely, her head thrown back, watching the tree tops. She saw clouds swimming behind the leaves; it looked as if a giant tree before her were moving, slanting, ready to fall and crush her; she stopped, she waited, her head thrown back, her throat pulled tight; she felt as if she wanted to be crushed. Then she shrugged and went on. She flung thick branches impatiently out of her way and let them scratch her bare arms. She walked on long after she was exhausted, she drove herself forward against the weariness of her muscles. Then she fell down on her back and lay still, her arms and legs flung out like a cross on the ground, breathing in release, feeling empty and flattened, feeling the weight of the air like a pressure against her breasts.

Some mornings, when she awakened in her bedroom, she heard the explosions of blasting at the granite quarry. She stretched, her arms flung back above her head on the white silk pillow, and she listened. It was the sound of destruction and she liked it.

Because the sun was too hot, that morning, and she knew it would be hotter at the granite quarry, because she wanted to see no one and knew she would face a gang of workers, Dominique walked to the quarry. The thought of seeing it on that blazing day was revolting; she enjoyed the prospect.

When she came out of the woods to the edge of the great stone bowl, she felt as if she were thrust into an execution chamber filled with scalding steam. The heat did not come from the sun, but from that broken cut in the earth, from the reflectors of flat ridges. Her shoulders, her head, her back, exposed to the sky, seemed cool while she felt the hot breath of the stone rising up her legs, to her chin, to her nostrils. The air shimmered below, sparks of fire shot through the granite; she thought the stone was stirring, melting, running in white trickles of lava. Drills and hammers cracked the still weight of the air. It was obscene to see men on the shelves of the furnace. They did not look like workers, they looked like a chain gang serving an unspeakable penance for some unspeakable crime. She could not turn away.

She stood, as an insult to the place below. Her dress—the color of water, a pale green-blue, too simple and expensive, its pleats exact like edges of glass—her thin heels planted wide apart on the boulders, the smooth helmet of her hair, the exaggerated fragility of her body against the sky—flaunted the fastidious coolness of the gardens and drawing rooms from which she came.

She looked down. Her eyes stopped on the orange hair of a man who raised his head and looked at her.

She stood very still, because her first perception was not of sight, but of touch: the consciousness, not of a visual presence, but of a slap in the face. She held one hand awkwardly away from her body, the fingers spread wide on the air, as against a wall. She knew that she could not move until he permitted her to.

She saw his mouth and the silent contempt in the shape of his mouth; the planes of his gaunt, hollow cheeks; the cold, pure brilliance of the eyes that had no trace of pity. She knew it was the most beautiful face she would ever see, because it was the abstraction of strength made visible. She felt a convulsion of anger, of protest, of resistance—and of pleasure. He stood looking up at her; it was not a glance, but an act of ownership. She thought she must let her face give him the answer he deserved. But she was looking, instead, at the stone dust on his burned arms, the wet shirt clinging to his ribs, the lines of his long legs. She was thinking of those statues of men she had always sought; she was wondering what he would look like naked. She saw him looking at her as if he knew that. She thought she had found an aim in life—a sudden, sweeping hatred for that man.

She was first to move. She turned and walked away from him. She saw the superintendent of the quarry on the path ahead, and she waved. The superintendent rushed forward to meet her. “Why, Miss Francon!” he cried. “Why, how do you do, Miss Francon!”

She hoped the words were heard by the man below. For the first time in her life, she was glad of being Miss Francon, glad of her father’s position and possessions, which she had always despised. She thought suddenly that the man below was only a common worker, owned by the owner of this place, and she was almost the owner of this place.

The superintendent stood before her respectfully. She smiled and said:

“I suppose I’ll inherit the quarry some day, so I thought I should show some interest in it once in a while.”

The superintendent preceded her down the path, displayed his domain to her, explained the work. She followed him far to the other side of the quarry; she descended to the dusty green dell of the work sheds; she inspected the bewildering machinery. She allowed a convincingly sufficient time to elapse. Then she walked back, alone, down the edge of the granite bowl.

She saw him from a distance as she approached. He was working. She saw one strand of red hair that fell over his face and swayed with the trembling of the drill. She thought—hopefully—that the vibrations of the drill hurt him, hurt his body, everything inside his body.

When she was on the rocks above him, he raised his head and looked at her; she had not caught him noticing her approach; he looked up as if he expected her to be there, as if he knew she would be back. She saw the hint of a smile, more insulting than words. He sustained the insolence of looking straight at her, he would not move, he would not grant the concession of turning away—of acknowledging that he had no right to look at her in such manner. He had not merely taken that right, he was saying silently that she had given it to him.

She turned sharply and walked on, down the rocky slope, away from the quarry.

It was not his eyes, not his mouth that she remembered, but his hands. The meaning of that day seemed held in a single picture she had noted: the simple instant of his one hand resting against granite. She saw it again: his finger tips pressed to the stone, his long fingers continuing the straight lines of the tendons that spread in a fan from his wrist to his knuckles. She thought of him, but the vision present through all her thoughts was the picture of that hand on the granite. It frightened her; she could not understand it.