The Fountainhead (71 page)

“I’ll try to explain. It’s very difficult. The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see. But if you’ll listen ...”

“I won’t listen. You’ll forgive me, but discussing the idea of Ellsworth Toohey as a threat to me is ridiculous. Discussing it seriously is offensive.”

“Gail, I ...”

“No. Darling, I don’t think you really understand much about the
Banner.
And I don’t want you to. I don’t want you to take any part in it. Forget it. Leave the
Banner
to me.”

“Is it a demand, Gail?”

“It’s an ultimatum.”

“All right.”

“Forget it. Don’t go acquiring horror complexes about anyone as big as Ellsworth Toohey. It’s not like you.”

“All right, Gail. Let’s go in. It’s too cold for you here without an overcoat.”

He chuckled softly—it was the kind of concern she had never shown for him before. He took her hand and kissed her palm, holding it against his face.

For many weeks, when left alone together, they spoke little and never about each other. But it was not a silence of resentment; it was the silence of an understanding too delicate to limit by words. They would be in a room together in the evening, saying nothing, content to feel each other’s presence. They would look at each other suddenly—and both would smile, the smile like hands clasped.

Then, one evening, she knew he would speak. She sat at her dressing-table. He came in and leaned against the wall beside her. He looked at her hands, at her naked shoulders, but she felt as if he did not see her; he was looking at something greater than the beauty of her body, greater than his love for her; he was looking at himself—and this, she knew, was the one incomparable tribute.

“I breathe for my own necessity, for the fuel of my body, for my survival ... I’ve given you, not my sacrifice or my pity, but my ego and my naked need ...” She heard Roark’s words, Roark’s voice speaking for Gail Wynand—and she felt no sense of treason to Roark in using the words of his love for the love of another man.

“Gail,” she said gently, “some day I’ll have to ask your forgiveness for having married you.”

He shook his head slowly, smiling. She said:

“I wanted you to be my chain to the world. You’ve become my defense, instead. And that makes my marriage dishonest.”

“No. I told you I would accept any reason you chose.”

“But you’ve changed everything for me. Or was it I that changed it? I don’t know. We’ve done something strange to each other. I’ve given you what I wanted to lose. That special sense of living I thought this marriage would destroy for me. The sense of life as exaltation. And you—you’ve done all the things I would have done. Do you know how much alike we are?”

“I knew that from the first.”

“But it should have been impossible. Gail, I want to remain with you now—for another reason. To wait for an answer. I think when I learn to understand what you are, I’ll understand myself. There is an answer. There is a name for the thing we have in common. I don’t know it. I know it’s very important.”

“Probably. I suppose I should want to understand it. But I don’t. I can’t care about anything now. I can’t even be afraid.”

She looked up at him and said very calmly:

“I am afraid, Gail.”

“Of what, dearest?”

“Of what I’m doing to you.”

“Why?”

“I don’t love you, Gail.”

“I can’t care even about that.”

She dropped her head and he looked down at the hair that was like a pale helmet of polished metal.

“Dominique.”

She raised her face to him obediently.

“I love you, Dominique. I love you so much that nothing can matter to me—not even you. Can you understand that? Only my love—not your answer. Not even your indifference. I’ve never taken much from the world. I haven’t wanted much. I’ve never really wanted anything. Not in the total, undivided way, not with the kind of desire that becomes an ultimatum, ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ and one can’t accept the ‘no’ without ceasing to exist. That’s what you are to me. But when one reaches that stage, it’s not the object that matters, it’s the desire. Not you, but I. The ability to desire like that. Nothing less is worth feeling or honoring. And I’ve never felt that before. Dominique, I’ve never known how to say ‘mine’ about anything. Not in the sense I say it about you. Mine. Did you call it a sense of life as exaltation? You said that. You understand. I can’t be afraid. I love you, Dominique—I love you—you’re letting me say it now—I love you.”

She reached over and took the cablegram off the mirror. She crumpled it, her fingers twisting slowly in a grinding motion against her palm. He stood listening to the crackle of the paper. She leaned forward, opened her hand over the wastebasket, and let the paper drop. Her hand remained still for a moment, the fingers extended, slanting down, as they had opened.

Part 4

HOWARD ROARK

I

T
HE LEAVES STREAMED DOWN, TREMBLING IN THE SUN. THEY were not green; only a few, scattered through the torrent, stood out in single drops of a green so bright and pure that it hurt the eyes; the rest were not a color, but a light, the substance of fire on metal, living sparks without edges. And it looked as if the forest were a spread of light boiling slowly to produce this color, this green rising in small bubbles, the condensed essence of spring. The trees met, bending over the road, and the spots of sun on the ground moved with the shifting of the branches, like a conscious caress. The young man hoped he would not have to die.

Not if the earth could look like this, he thought. Not if he could hear the hope and the promise like a voice, with leaves, tree trunks and rocks instead of words. But he knew that the earth looked like this only because he had seen no sign of men for hours; he was alone, riding his bicycle down a forgotten trail through the hills of Pennsylvania where he had never been before, where he could feel the fresh wonder of an untouched world.

He was a very young man. He had just graduated from college—in the spring of the year 1935—and he wanted to decide whether life was worth living. He did not know that this was the question in his mind. He did not think of dying. He thought only that he wished to find joy and reason and meaning in life—and that none had been offered to him anywhere.

He had not liked the things taught to him in college. He had been taught a great deal about social responsibility, about a life of service and self-sacrifice. Everybody had said it was beautiful and inspiring. Only he had not felt inspired. He had felt nothing at all.

He could not name the thing he wanted of life. He felt it here, in this wild loneliness. But he did not face nature with the joy of a healthy animal—as a proper and final setting; he faced it with the joy of a healthy man—as a challenge; as tools, means and material. So he felt anger that he should find exaltation only in the wilderness, that this great sense of hope had to be lost when he would return to men and men’s work. He thought that this was not right; that man’s work should be a higher step, an improvement on nature, not a degradation. He did not want to despise men; he wanted to love and admire them. But he dreaded the sight of the first house, poolroom and movie poster he would encounter on his way.

He had always wanted to write music, and he could give no other identity to the thing he sought. If you want to know what it is, he told himself, listen to the first phrases of Tchaikovsky’s
First Concerto
—or the last movement of Rachmaninoff’s
Second.
Men have not found the words for it nor the deed nor the thought, but they have found the music. Let me see that in one single act of man on earth. Let me see it made real. Let me see the answer to the promise of that music. Not servants nor those served; not altars and immolations; but the final, the fulfilled, innocent of pain. Don’t help me or serve me, but let me see it once, because I need it. Don’t work for my happiness, my brothers—show me yours—show me that it is possible—show me your achievement—and the knowledge will give me courage for mine.

He saw a blue hole ahead, where the road ended on the crest of a ridge. The blue looked cool and clean like a film of water stretched in the frame of green branches. It would be funny, he thought, if I came to the edge and found nothing but that blue beyond; nothing but the sky ahead, above and below. He closed his eyes and went on, suspending the possible for a moment, granting himself a dream, a few instants of believing that he would reach the crest, open his eyes and see the blue radiance of the sky below.

His foot touched the ground, breaking his motion; he stopped and opened his eyes. He stood still.

In the broad valley, far below him, in the first sunlight of early morning, he saw a town. Only it was not a town. Towns did not look like that. He had to suspend the possible for a while longer, to seek no questions or explanations, only to look.

There were small houses on the ledges of the hill before him, flowing down to the bottom. He knew that the ledges had not been touched, that no artifice had altered the unplanned beauty of the graded steps. Yet some power had known how to build on these ledges in such a way that the houses became inevitable, and one could no longer imagine the hills as beautiful without them—as if the centuries and the series of chances that produced these ledges in the struggle of great blind forces had waited for their final expression, had been only a road to a goal—and the goal was these buildings, part of the hills, shaped by the hills, yet ruling them by giving them meaning.

The houses were of plain field stone—like the rocks jutting from the green hillsides—and of glass, great sheets of glass used as if the sun were invited to complete the structures, sunlight becoming part of the masonry. There were many houses, they were small, they were cut off from one another, and no two of them were alike. But they were like variations on a single theme, like a symphony played by an inexhaustible imagination, and one could still hear the laughter of the force that had been let loose on them, as if that force had run, unrestrained, challenging itself to be spent, but had never reached its end. Music, he thought, the promise of the music he had invoked, the sense of it made real—there it was before his eyes—he did not see it—he heard it in chords—he thought that there was a common language of thought, sight and sound—was it mathematics?—the discipline of reason—music was mathematics—and architecture was music in stone—he knew he was dizzy because this place below him could not be real.

He saw trees, lawns, walks twisting up the hillsides, steps cut in the stone, he saw fountains, swimming pools, tennis courts—and not a sign of life. The place was uninhabited.

It did not shock him, not as the sight of it had shocked him. In a way, it seemed proper; this was not part of known existence. For the moment he had no desire to know what it was.

After a long time he glanced about him—and then he saw that he was not alone. Some steps away from him a man sat on a boulder, looking down at the valley. The man seemed absorbed in the sight and had not heard his approach. The man was tall and gaunt and had orange hair.

He walked straight to the man, who turned his eyes to him; the eyes were gray and calm; the boy knew suddenly that they felt the same thing, and he could speak as he would not speak to a stranger anywhere else.

“That isn’t real, is it?” the boy asked, pointing down.

“Why, yes, it is, now,” the man answered.

“It’s not a movie set or a trick of some kind?”

“No. It’s a summer resort. It’s just been completed. It will be opened in a few weeks.”

“Who built it?”

“I did.”

“What’s your name?”

“Howard Roark.”

“Thank you,” said the boy. He knew that the steady eyes looking at him understood everything these two words had to cover. Howard Roark inclined his head, in acknowledgment.

Wheeling his bicycle by his side, the boy took the narrow path down the slope of the hill to the valley and the houses below. Roark looked after him. He had never seen the boy before and he would never see him again. He did not know that he had given someone the courage to face a lifetime.

Roark had never understood why he was chosen to build the summer resort at Monadnock Valley.

It had happened a year and a half ago, in the fall of 1933. He had heard of the project and gone to see Mr. Caleb Bradley, the head of some vast company that had purchased the valley and was doing a great deal of loud promotion. He went to see Bradley as a matter of duty, without hope, merely to add another refusal to his long list of refusals. He had built nothing in New York since the Stoddard Temple.

When he entered Bradley’s office, he knew that he must forget Monadnock Valley because this man would never give it to him. Caleb Bradley was a short, pudgy person with a handsome face between rounded shoulders. The face looked wise and boyish, unpleasantly ageless; he could have been fifty or twenty; he had blank blue eyes, sly and bored.

But it was difficult for Roark to forget Monadnock Valley. So he spoke of it, forgetting that speech was useless here. Mr. Bradley listened, obviously interested, but obviously not in what Roark was saying. Roark could almost feel some third entity present in the room. Mr. Bradley said little, beyond promising to consider it and to get in touch with him. But then he said a strange thing. He asked, in a voice devoid of all clue to the purpose of the question, neither in approval nor scorn: “You’re the architect who built the Stoddard Temple, aren’t you, Mr. Roark?” “Yes,” said Roark. “Funny that I hadn’t thought of you myself,” said Mr. Bradley. Roark went away, thinking that it would have been funny if Mr. Bradley had thought of him.

Three days later, Bradley telephoned and invited him to his office. Roark came and met four other men—the Board of the Monadnock Valley Company. They were well-dressed men, and their faces were as closed as Mr. Bradley’s. “Please tell these gentlemen what you told me, Mr. Roark,” Bradley said pleasantly.

Roark explained his plan. If what they wished to build was an unusual summer resort for people of moderate incomes—as they had announced—then they should realize that the worst curse of poverty was the lack of privacy; only the very rich or the very poor of the city could enjoy their summer vacations; the very rich, because they had private estates; the very poor, because they did not mind the feel and smell of one another’s flesh on public beaches and public dance floors; the people of good taste and small income had no place to go, if they found no rest or pleasure in herds. Why was it assumed that poverty gave one the instincts of cattle? Why not offer these people a place where, for a week or a month, at small cost, they could have what they wanted and needed? He had seen Monadnock Valley. It could be done. Don’t touch those hillsides, don’t blast and level them down. Not one huge ant pile of a hotel—but small houses hidden from one another, each a private estate, where people could meet or not, as they pleased. Not one fish-market tank of a swimming-pool-but many private swimming pools, as many as the company wished to afford—he could show them how it could be done cheaply. Not one stock-farm corral of tennis courts for exhibitionists—but many private tennis courts. Not a place where one went to meet “refined company” and land a husband in two weeks—but a resort for people who enjoyed their own presence well enough and sought only a place where they would be left free to enjoy it.

The men listened to him silently. He saw them exchanging glances once in a while. He felt certain that they were the kind of glances people exchange when they cannot laugh at the speaker aloud. But it could not have been that—because he signed a contract to build the Monadnock Valley summer resort, two days later.

He demanded Mr. Bradley’s initials on every drawing that came out of his drafting room; he remembered the Stoddard Temple. Mr. Bradley initialed, signed, okayed; he agreed to everything; he approved everything. He seemed delighted to let Roark have his way. But this eager complaisance had a peculiar undertone—as if Mr. Bradley were humoring a child.

He could learn little about Mr. Bradley. It was said that the man had made a fortune in real estate, in the Florida boom. His present company seemed to command unlimited funds, and the names of many wealthy backers were mentioned as shareholders. Roark never met them. The four gentlemen of the Board did not appear again, except on short visits to the construction site, where they exhibited little interest. Mr. Bradley was in full charge of everything—but beyond a close watch over the budget he seemed to like nothing better than to leave Roark in full charge.

In the eighteen months that followed, Roark had no time to wonder about Mr. Bradley. Roark was building his greatest assignment.

For the last year he lived at the construction site, in a shanty hastily thrown together on a bare hillside, a wooden enclosure with a bed, a stove and a large table. His old draftsmen came to work for him again, some abandoning better jobs in the city, to live in shacks and tents, to work in naked plank barracks that served as architect’s office. There was so much to build that none of them thought of wasting structural effort on their own shelters. They did not realize, until much later, that they had lacked comforts; and then they did not believe it—because the year at Monadnock Valley remained in their minds as the strange time when the earth stopped turning and they lived through twelve months of spring. They did not think of the snow, the frozen clots of earth, wind whistling through the cracks of planking, thin blankets over army cots, stiff fingers stretched over coal stoves in the morning, before a pencil could be held steadily. They remembered only the feeling which is the meaning of spring—one’s answer to the first blades of grass, the first buds on tree branches, the first blue of the sky—the singing answer, not to grass, trees and sky, but to the great sense of beginning, of triumphant progression, of certainty in an achievement that nothing will stop. Not from leaves and flowers, but from wooden scaffoldings, from steam shovels, from blocks of stone and sheets of glass rising out of the earth they received the sense of youth, motion, purpose, fulfillment.

They were an army and it was a crusade. But none of them thought of it in these words, except Steven Mallory. Steven Mallory did the fountains and all the sculpture work of Monadnock Valley. But he came to live at the site long before he was needed. Battle, thought Steven Mallory, is a vicious concept. There is no glory in war, and no beauty in crusades of men. But this was a battle, this was an army and a war—and the highest experience in the life of every man who took part in it. Why? Where was the root of the difference and the law to explain it?

He did not speak of it to anyone. But he saw the same feeling in Mike’s face, when Mike arrived with the gang of electricians. Mike said nothing, but he winked at Mallory in cheerful understanding. “I told you not to worry,” Mike said to him once, without preamble, “at the trial that was. He can’t lose, quarries or no quarries, trials or no trials. They can’t beat him, Steve, they just can’t, not the whole goddamn world.”