The Fountainhead

by Ayn Rand

  Roark stayed at the station on the day of its opening. He drank coffee in a clean, white mug, at the counter of the diner, and he watched the cars stopping at the door. He left late at night. He looked back once, driving down the long, empty road. The lights of the station winked, flowing away from him. There it stood, at the crossing of two roads, and cars would be streaming past it day and night, cars coming from cities in which there was no room for buildings such as this, going to cities in which there would be no buildings such as this. He turned his face to the road before him, and he kept his eyes off the mirror which still held, glittering softly, dots of light that moved away far behind him....

  He drove back to months of idleness. He sat in his office each morning, because he knew that he had to sit there, looking at a door that never opened, his fingers forgotten on a telephone that never rang. The ash trays he emptied each day, before leaving, contained nothing but the stubs of his own cigarettes.

  "What are you doing about it, Howard?" Austen Heller asked him at dinner one evening.

  "Nothing."

  "But you must."

  "There's nothing I can do."

  "You must learn how to handle people."

  "I can't."

  "Why?"

  "I don't know how. I was born without some one particular sense."

  "It's something one acquires."

  "I have no organ to acquire it with. I don't know whether it's something I lack, or something extra I have that stops me. Besides, I don't like people who have to be handled."

  "But you can't sit still and do nothing now. You've got to go after commissions."

  "What can I tell people in order to get commissions? I can only show my work. If they don't hear that, they won't hear anything I say. I'm nothing to them, but my work--my work is all we have in common. And I have no desire to tell them anything else."

  "Then what are you going to do? You're not worried?"

  "No. I expected it. I'm waiting."

  "For what?"

  "My kind of people."

  "What kind is that?"

  "I don't know. Yes, I do know, but I can't explain it. I've often wished I could. There must be some one principle to cover it, but I don't know what it is."

  "Honesty?"

  "Yes ... no, only partly. Guy Francon is an honest man, but it isn't that. Courage? Ralston Holcombe has courage, in his own manner.... I don't know. I'm not that vague on other things. But I can tell my kind of people by their faces. By something in their faces. There will be thousands passing by your house and by the gas station. If out of those thousands, one stops and sees it--that's all I need."

  "Then you do need other people, after all, don't you, Howard?"

  "Of course. What are you laughing at?"

  "I've always thought that you were the most anti-social animal I've ever had the pleasure of meeting."

  "I need people to give me work. I'm not building mausoleums. Do you suppose I should need them in some other way? In a closer, more personal way?"

  "You don't need anyone in a very personal way."

  "No."

  "You're not even boasting about it."

  "Should I?"

  "You can't. You're too arrogant to boast."

  "Is that what I am?"

  "Don't you know what you are?"

  "No. Not as far as you're seeing me, or anyone else."

  Heller sat silently, his wrist describing circles with a cigarette. Then Heller laughed, and said:

  "That was typical."

  "What?"

  "That you didn't ask me to tell you what you are as I see you. Anybody else would have."

  "I'm sorry. It wasn't indifference. You're one of the few friends I want to keep. I just didn't think of asking."

  "I know you didn't. That's the point. You're a self-centered monster, Howard. The more monstrous because you're utterly innocent about it."

  "That's true."

  "You should show a little concern when you admit that."

  "Why?"

  "You know, there's a thing that stumps me. You're the coldest man I know. And I can't understand why--knowing that you're actually a fiend in your quiet sort of way--why I always feel, when I see you, that you're the most life-giving person I've ever met."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I don't know. Just that."

  The weeks went by, and Roark walked to his office each day, sat at his desk for eight hours, and read a great deal. At five o'clock, he walked home. He had moved to a better room, near the office; he spent little; he had enough money for a long time to come.

  On a morning in February the telephone rang in his office. A brisk, emphatic feminine voice asked for an appointment with Mr. Roark, the architect. That afternoon, a brisk, small, dark-skinned woman entered the office; she wore a mink coat and exotic earrings that tinkled when she moved her head. She moved her head a great deal, in sharp little birdlike jerks. She was Mrs. Wayne Wilmot of Long Island and she wished to build a country house. She had selected Mr. Roark to build it, she explained, because he had designed the home of Austen Heller. She adored Austen Heller; he was, she stated, an oracle to all those pretending just the tiniest bit to the title of progressive intellectual, she thought--"don't you?"--and she followed Heller like a zealot, "yes, literally, like a zealot." Mr. Roark was very young, wasn't he?--but she didn't mind that, she was very liberal and glad to help youth. She wanted a large house, she had two children, she believed in expressing their individuality--"don't you?"--and each had to have a separate nursery, she had to have a library--"I read to distraction"--a music room, a conservatory--"we grow lilies-of-the-valley, my friends tell me it's my flower"--a den for her husband, who trusted her implicitly and let her plan the house--"because I'm so good at it, if I weren't a woman I'm sure I'd be an architect"--servants' rooms and all that, and a three-car garage. After an hour and a half of details and explanations, she said:

  "And of course, as to the style of the house, it will be English Tudor. I adore English Tudor."

  He looked at her. He asked slowly:

  "Have you seen Austen Heller's house?"

  "No, though I did want to see it, but how could I?--I've never met Mr. Heller, I'm only his fan, just that, a plain, ordinary fan, what is he like in person?--you must tell me, I'm dying to hear it--no, I haven't seen his house, it's somewhere up in Maine, isn't it?"

  Roark took photographs out of the desk drawer and handed them to her.

  "This," he said, "is the Heller house."

  She looked at the photographs, her glance like water skimming off their glossy surfaces, and threw them down on the desk.

  "Very interesting," she said. "Most unusual. Quite stunning. But, of course, that's not what I want. That kind of a house wouldn't express my personality. My friends tell me I have the Elizabethan personality."

  Quietly, patiently, he tried to explain to her why she should not build a Tudor house. She interrupted him in the middle of a sentence.

  "Look here, Mr. Roark, you're not trying to teach me something, are you? I'm quite sure that I have good taste, and I know a great deal about architecture, I've taken a special course at the club. My friends tell me that I know more than many architects. I've quite made up my mind that I shall have an English Tudor house. I do not care to argue about it."

  "You'll have to go to some other architect, Mrs. Wilmot."

  She stared at him incredulously.

  "You mean, you're refusing the commission?"

  "Yes."

  "You don't want my commission?"

  "No."

  "But why?"

  "I don't do this sort of thing."

  "But I thought architects ..."

  "Yes. Architects will build you anything you ask for. Any other architect in town will."

  "But I gave you first chance."

  "Will you do me a favor, Mrs. Wilmot? Will you tell me why you came to me if all you wanted was a Tudor house?"

  "Well, I certainly thought you'd appreciate the opp
ortunity. And then, I thought I could tell my friends that I had Austen Heller's architect."

  He tried to explain and to convince. He knew, while he spoke, that it was useless, because his words sounded as if they were hitting a vacuum. There was no such person as Mrs. Wayne Wilmot; there was only a shell containing the opinions of her friends, the picture postcards she had seen, the novels of country squires she had read; it was this that he had to address, this immateriality which could not hear him or answer, deaf and impersonal like a wad of cotton.

  "I'm sorry," said Mrs. Wayne Wilmot, "but I'm not accustomed to dealing with a person utterly incapable of reason. I'm quite sure I shall find plenty of bigger men who'll be glad to work for me. My husband was opposed to my idea of having you, in the first place, and I'm sorry to see that he was right. Good day, Mr. Roark."

  She walked out with dignity, but she slammed the door. He slipped the photographs back into the drawer of his desk.

  Mr. Robert L. Mundy, who came to Roark's office in March, had been sent by Austen Heller. Mr. Mundy's voice and hair were gray as steel, but his eyes were blue, gentle and wistful. He wanted to build a house in Connecticut, and he spoke of it tremulously, like a young bridegroom and like a man groping for his last, secret goal.

  "It's not just a house, Mr. Roark," he said with timid diffidence, as if he were speaking to a man older and more prominent than himself, "it's like ... like a symbol to me. It's what I've been waiting and working for all these years. It's so many years now.... I must tell you this, so you'll understand. I have a great deal of money now, more than I care to think about. I didn't always have it. Maybe it came too late. I don't know. Young people think that you forget what happens on the way when you get there. But you don't. Something stays. I'll always remember how I was a boy--in a little place down in Georgia, that was--and how I ran errands for the harness maker, and the kids laughed when carriages drove by and splashed mud all over my pants. That's how long ago I decided that some day I'd have a house of my own, the kind of a house that carriages stop before. After that, no matter how hard it got to be at times, I'd always think of that house, and it helped. Afterward, there were years when I was afraid of it--I could have built it, but I was afraid. Well, now the time has come. Do you understand, Mr. Roark? Austen said you'd be just the man who'd understand."

  "Yes," said Roark eagerly, "I do."

  "There was a place," said Mr. Mundy, "down there, near my home town. The mansion of the whole county. The Randolph place. An old plantation house, as they don't build them any more. I used to deliver things there sometimes, at the back door. That's the house I want, Mr. Roark. Just like it. But not back there in Georgia. I don't want to go back. Right here, near the city. I've bought the land. You must help me to have it landscaped just like the Randolph place. We'll plant trees and shrubs, the kind they have in Georgia, the flowers and everything. We'll find a way to make them grow. I don't care how much it costs. Of course, we'll have electric lights and garages now, not carriages. But I want the electric lights made like candles and I want the garages to look like the stables. Everything, just as it was. I have photographs of the Randolph place. And I've bought some of their old furniture."

  When Roark began to speak Mr. Mundy listened, in polite astonishment. He did not seem to resent the words. They did not penetrate.

  "Don't you see?" Roark was saying. "It's a monument you want to build, but not to yourself. Not to your life or your own achievement. To other people. To their supremacy over you. You're not challenging that supremacy. You're immortalizing it. You haven't thrown it off--you're putting it up forever. Will you be happy if you seal yourself for the rest of your life in that borrowed shape? Or if you strike free, for once, and build a new house, your own? You don't want the Randolph place. You want what it stood for. But what it stood for is what you've fought all your life."

  Mr. Mundy listened blankly. And Roark felt again a bewildered helplessness before unreality: there was no such person as Mr. Mundy; there were only the remnants, long dead, of the people who had inhabited the Randolph place; one could not plead with remnants or convince them.

  "No," said Mr. Mundy, at last. "No. You may be right, but that's not what I want at all. I don't say you haven't got your reasons, and they sound like good reasons, but I like the Randolph place."

  "Why?"

  "Just because I like it. Just because that's what I like."

  When Roark told him that he would have to select another architect, Mr. Mundy said unexpectedly:

  "But I like you. Why can't you build it for me? What difference would it make to you?"

  Roark did not explain.

  Later, Austen Heller said to him: "I expected it. I was afraid you'd turn him down. I'm not blaming you, Howard. Only he's so rich. It could have helped you so much. And, after all, you've got to live."

  "Not that way," said Roark.

  In April Mr. Nathaniel Janss, of the Janss-Stuart Real Estate Company, called Roark to his office. Mr. Janss was frank and blunt. He stated that his company was planning the erection of a small office building--thirty stories--on lower Broadway, and that he was not sold on Roark as the architect, in fact he was more or less opposed to him, but his friend Austen Heller had insisted that he should meet Roark and talk to him about it; Mr. Janss did not think very much of Roark's stuff, but Heller had simply bullied him and he would listen to Roark before deciding on anyone, and what did Roark have to say on the subject?

  Roark had a great deal to say. He said it calmly, and this was difficult, at first, because he wanted that building, because what he felt was the desire to wrench that building out of Mr. Janss at the point of a gun, if he'd had one. But after a few minutes, it became simple and easy, the thought of the gun vanished, and even his desire for the building; it was not a commission to get and he was not there to get it; he was only speaking of buildings.

  "Mr. Janss, when you buy an automobile, you don't want it to have rose garlands about the windows, a lion on each fender and an angel sitting on the roof. Why don't you?"

  "That would be silly," stated Mr. Janss.

  "Why would it be silly? Now I think it would be beautiful. Besides, Louis the Fourteenth had a carriage like that and what was good enough for Louis is good enough for us. We shouldn't go in for rash innovations and we shouldn't break with tradition."

  "Now you know damn well you don't believe anything of the sort!"

  "I know I don't. But that's what you believe, isn't it? Now take a human body. Why wouldn't you like to see a human body with a curling tail with a crest of ostrich feathers at the end? And with ears shaped like acanthus leaves? It would be ornamental, you know, instead of the stark, bare ugliness we have now. Well, why don't you like the idea? Because it would be useless and pointless. Because the beauty of the human body is that it hasn't a single muscle which doesn't serve its purpose; that there's not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man. Will you tell me why, when it comes to a building, you don't want it to look as if it had any sense or purpose, you want to choke it with trimmings, you want to sacrifice its purpose to its envelope--not knowing even why you want that kind of an envelope? You want it to look like a hybrid beast produced by crossing the bastards of ten different species until you get a creature without guts, without heart or brain, a creature all pelt, tail, claws and feathers? Why? You must tell me, because I've never been able to understand it."

  "Well," said Mr. Janss, "I've never thought of it that way." He added, without great conviction: "But we want our building to have dignity, you know, and beauty, what they call real beauty."

  "What who calls what beauty?"

  "Well-1-1 ..."

  "Tell me, Mr. Janss, do you really think that Greek columns and fruit baskets are beautiful on a modern, steel office building?"

  "I don't know that I've ever thought anything about why a building was beautiful, one way or another," Mr. Janss confessed, "but I guess that's what the public wants." />
  "Why do you suppose they want it?"

  "I don't know."

  "Then why should you care what they want?"

  "You've got to consider the public."

  "Don't you know that most people take most things because that's what's given them, and they have no opinion whatever? Do you wish to be guided by what they expect you to think they think or by your own judgment?"

  "You can't force it down their throats."

  "You don't have to. You must only be patient. Because on your side you have reason--oh, I know, it's something no one really wants to have on his side--and against you, you have just a vague, fat, blind inertia."

  "Why do you think that I don't want reason on my side?"

  "It's not you, Mr. Janss. It's the way most people feel. They have to take a chance, everything they do is taking a chance, but they feel so much safer when they take it on something they know to be ugly, vain and stupid."

  "That's true, you know," said Mr. Janss.

  At the conclusion of the interview, Mr. Janss said thoughtfully:

  "I can't say that it doesn't make sense, Mr. Roark. Let me think it over. You'll hear from me shortly."

  Mr. Janss called him a week later. "It's the Board of Directors that will have to decide. Are you willing to try, Roark? Draw up the plans and some preliminary sketches. I'll submit them to the Board. I can't promise anything. But I'm for you and I'll fight them on it."

  Roark worked on the plans for two weeks of days and nights. The plans were submitted. Then he was called before the board of directors of the Janss-Stuart Real Estate Company. He stood at the side of a long table and he spoke, his eyes moving slowly from face to face. He tried not to look down at the table, but on the lower rim of his vision there remained the white spot of his drawings spread before the twelve men. He was asked a great many questions. Mr. Janss jumped up at times to answer instead, to pound the table with his fist, to snarl: "Don't you see? Isn't it clear? ... What of it, Mr. Grant? What if no one has ever built anything like it? ... Gothic, Mr. Hubbard? Why must we have Gothic? ... I've a jolly good mind to resign if you turn this down!"