The Fountainhead (36 page)

“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!”

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.