The Fountainhead (72 page)

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 grass 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 glass scattered through the darkness below; they caught reflections from somewhere and looked like phosphorescent, 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—snatching 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 damn 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.

“God damn 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 damn fools think of as horror? Wars, murders, fires, earthquakes? To hell 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 bastards 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—God damn 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 damned 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 Heller 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 Heller’s usual quiet words—they were a ferocious cry of admiration and of anger. “And may we be damned 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 pronounce 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
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 glass—next to the room where they’ve got Gordon L. Prescott. And still—I’m glad.”

Kent Lansing said, one evening: “Heller 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 Heller, 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 bastard!” 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.