XI
HOWARD ROARK OPENED HIS OWN OFFICE. It was one large room on the top of an old building, with a broad window high over the roofs. He could see the distant band of the Hudson at his window sill, with the small streaks of ships moving under his finger tips when he pressed them to the glass. He had a desk, two chairs, and a huge drafting table. The glass entrance door bore the words: “Howard Roark, Architect.” He stood in the hall for a long time, looking at the words. Then he went in, and slammed his door; he picked up a T-square from the table and flung it down again, as if throwing an anchor.
John Erik Snyte had objected. When Roark came to the office for his drawing instruments Snyte emerged into the reception room, shook his hand warmly and said: “Well, Roark! Well, how are you? Come in, come right in, I want to speak to you!”
And with Roark seated before his desk Snyte proceeded loudly:
“Look, fellow, I hope you’ve got sense enough not to hold it against me, anything that I might’ve said yesterday. You know how it is, I lost my head a little, and it wasn’t what you did, but that you had to go and do it on that sketch, that sketch ... well, never mind. No hard feelings?”
“No,” said Roark. “None at all.”
“Of course, you’re not fired. You didn’t take me seriously, did you? You can go right back to work here this very minute.”
“What for, Mr. Snyte?”
“What do you mean, what for? Oh, you’re thinking of the Heller house? But you’re not taking Heller seriously, are you? You saw how he is, that madman can change his mind sixty times a minute. He won’t really give you that commission, you know, it isn’t as simple as that, it isn’t being done that way.”
“We’ve signed the contract yesterday.”
“Oh, you have? Well, that’s splendid! Well, look, Roark, I’ll tell you what we’ll do: you bring the commission back to us and I’ll let you put your name on it with mine—‘John Erik Snyte & Howard Roark.’ And we’ll split the fee. That’s in addition to your salary—and you’re getting a raise, incidentally. Then we’ll have the same arrangement on any other commission you bring in. And ... Lord, man, what are you laughing at?”
“Excuse me, Mr. Snyte. I’m sorry.”
“I don’t believe you understand,” said Snyte, bewildered. “Don’t you see? It’s your insurance. You don’t want to break loose just yet. Commissions won’t fall into your lap like this. Then what will you do? This way, you’ll have a steady job and you’ll be building toward independent practice, if that’s what you’re after. In four or five years, you’ll be ready to take the leap. That’s the way everybody does it. You see?”
“Yes.”
“Then you agree?”
“No.”
“But, good Lord, man, you’ve lost your mind! To set up alone now? Without experience, without connections, without ... well, without anything at all! I never heard of such a thing. Ask anybody in the profession. See what they’ll tell you. It’s preposterous!”
“Probably.”
“Listen, Roark, won’t you please listen?”
“I’ll listen if you want me to, Mr. Snyte. But I think I should tell you now that nothing you can say will make any difference. If you don’t mind that, I don’t mind listening.”
Snyte went on speaking for a long time and Roark listened, without objecting, explaining or answering.
“Well, if that’s how you are, don’t expect me to take you back when you find yourself on the pavement.”
“I don’t expect it, Mr. Snyte.”
“Don’t expect anyone else in the profession to take you in, after they hear what you’ve done to me.”
“I don’t expect that either.”
For a few days Snyte thought of suing Roark and Heller. But he decided against it, because there was no precedent to follow under the circumstances; because Heller had paid him for his efforts, and the house had been actually designed by Roark; and because no one ever sued Austen Heller.
The first visitor to Roark’s office was Peter Keating.
He walked in, without warning, one noon, walked straight across the room and sat down on Roark’s desk, smiling gaily, spreading his arms wide in a sweeping gesture:
“Well, Howard!” he said. “Well, fancy that!”
He had not seen Roark for a year.
“Hello, Peter,” said Roark.
“You’re own office, your own name and everything! Already! Just imagine!”
“Who told you, Peter?”
“Oh, one hears things. You wouldn’t expect me not to keep track of your career, now would you? You know what I’ve always thought of you. And I don’t have to tell you that I congratulate you and wish you the very best.”
“No, you don’t have to.”
“Nice place you got here. Light and roomy. Not quite as imposing as it should be, perhaps, but what can one expect at the beginning? And then, the prospects are uncertain, aren’t they, Howard?”
“Quite.”
“It’s an awful chance you’ve taken.”
“Probably.”
“Are you really going to go through with it? I mean, on your own?”
“Looks that way, doesn’t it?”
“Well, it’s not too late, you know. I thought, when I heard the story, that you’d surely turn it over to Snyte and make a smart deal with him. ”
“I didn’t.”
“Aren’t you really going to?”
“No.”
Keating wondered why he should experience that sickening feeling of resentment; why he had come here hoping to find the story untrue, hoping to find Roark uncertain and willing to surrender. That feeling had haunted him ever since he’d heard the news about Roark; the sensation of something unpleasant that remained after he’d forgotten the cause. The feeling would come back to him, without reason, a blank wave of anger, and he would ask himself: now what the hell?—what was it I heard today? Then he would remember: Oh, yes, Roark—Roark’s opened his own office. He would ask himself impatiently: So what?—and know at the same time that the words were painful to face, and humiliating like an insult.
“You know, Howard, I admire your courage. Really, you know, I’ve had much more experience and I’ve got more of a standing in the profession, don’t mind saying it—I’m only speaking objectively—but I wouldn’t dare take such a step.”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
“So you’ve made the jump first. Well, well. Who would have thought it? ... I wish you all the luck in the world.”
“Thank you, Peter.”
“I know you’ll succeed. I’m sure of it.”
“Are you?”
“Of course! Of course, I am. Aren’t you?”
“I haven’t thought of it.”
“You haven’t thought of it?”
“Not much.”
“Then you’re not sure, Howard? You aren’t?”
“Why do you ask that so eagerly?”
“What? Why ... no, not eagerly, but of course, I’m concerned. Howard, it’s bad psychology not to be certain now, in your position. So you have doubts?”
“None at all.”
“But you said ...”
“I’m quite sure of things, Peter.”
“Have you thought about getting your registration?”
“I’ve applied for it.”
“You’ve got no college degree, you know. They’ll make it difficult for you at the examination.”
“Probably.”
“What are you going to do if you don’t get the license?”
“I’ll get it.”
“Well, I guess I’ll be seeing you now at the A.G.A., if you don’t go high hat on me, because you’ll be a full-fledged member and I’m only a junior.”
“I’m not joining the A.G.A.”
“What do you mean, you’re not joining? You’re eligible now.”
“Possibly.”
“You’ll be invited to join.”
“Tell them not to bother.”
“What!”
“You know, Peter, we had a conversation just like this seven years ago, when you tried to talk me into joining your fraternity at Stanton. Don’t start it again.”
“You won’t join the A.G.A. when you have a chance to?”
“I won’t join anything, Peter, at any time.”
“But don’t you realize how it helps?”
“In what?”
“In being an architect.”
“I don’t like to be helped in being an architect.”
“You’re just making things harder for yourself.”
“I am.”
“And it will be plenty hard, you know.”
“I know.”
“You’ll make enemies of them if you refuse such an invitation.”
“I’ll make enemies of them anyway.”
The first person to whom Roark had told the news was Henry Cameron. Roark went to New Jersey the day after he signed the contract with Heller. It had rained and he found Cameron in the garden, shuffling slowly down the damp paths, leaning heavily on a cane. In the past winter, Cameron had improved enough to walk a few hours each day. He walked with effort, his body bent. He looked at the first shoots of green on the earth under his feet. He lifted his cane, once in a while, bracing his legs to stand firm for a moment; with the tip of the cane, he touched a folded green cup and watched it spill a glistening drop in the twilight. He saw Roark coming up the hill, and frowned. He had seen Roark only a week ago, and because these visits meant too much to both of them, neither wished the occasions to be too frequent.
“Well?” Cameron asked gruffly. “What do you want here again?”
“I have something to tell you.”
“It can wait.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well?”
“I’m opening my own office. I’ve just signed for my first building.”
Cameron rotated his cane, the tip pressed into the earth, the shaft describing a wide circle, his two hands bearing down on the handle, the palm of one on the back of the other. His head nodded slowly, in rhythm with the motion, for a long time, his eyes closed. Then he looked at Roark and said:
“Well, don’t brag about it.”
He added: “Help me to sit down.” It was the first time Cameron had ever pronounced this sentence; his sister and Roark had long since learned that the one outrage forbidden in his presence was any intention of helping him to move.
Roark took his elbow and led him to a bench. Cameron asked harshly, staring ahead at the sunset:
“What? For whom? How much?”
He listened silently to Roark’s story. He looked for a long time at the sketch on cracked cardboard with the pencil lines over the water color. Then he asked many questions about the stone, the steel, the roads, the contractors, the costs. He offered no congratulations. He made no comment.
Only when Roark was leaving, Cameron said suddenly:
“Howard, when you open your office, take snapshots of it—and show them to me.”
Then he shook his head, looked away guiltily, and swore.
“I’m being senile. Forget it.”
Roark said nothing.
Three days later he came back. “You’re getting to be a nuisance,” said Cameron. Roark handed him an envelope, without a word. Cameron looked at the snapshots, at the one of the broad, bare office, of the wide window, of the entrance door. He dropped the others, and held the one of the entrance door for a long time.
“Well,” he said at last, “I did live to see it.”
He dropped the snapshot.
“Not quite exactly,” he added. “Not in the way I had wanted to, but I did. It’s like the shadows some say we’ll see of the earth in that other world. Maybe that’s how I’ll see the rest of it. I’m learning.”
He picked up the snapshot.
“Howard,” he said. “Look at it.”
He held it between them.
“It doesn’t say much. Only ‘Howard Roark, Architect.’ But it’s like those mottoes men carved over the entrance of a castle and died for. It’s a challenge in the face of something so vast and so dark, that all the pain on earth—and do you know how much suffering there is on earth?—al! the pain comes from that thing you are going to face. I don’t know what it is, I don’t know why it should be unleashed against you. I know only that it will be. And I know that if you carry these words through to the end, it will be a victory, Howard, not just for you, but for something that should win, that moves the world—and never wins acknowledgment. It will vindicate so many who have fallen before you, who have suffered as you will suffer. May God bless you—or whoever it is that is alone to see the best, the highest possible to human hearts. You’re on your way into hell, Howard.”
Roark walked up the path to the top of the cliff where the steel hulk of the Heller house rose into a blue sky. The skeleton was up and the concrete was being poured; the great mats of the terraces hung over the silver sheet of water quivering far below; plumbers and electricians had started laying their conduits.
He looked at the squares of sky delimited by the slender lines of girders and columns, the empty cubes of space he had torn out of the sky. His hands moved involuntarily, filling in the planes of walls to come, enfolding the future rooms. A stone clattered from under his feet and went bouncing down the hill, resonant drops of sound rolling in the sunny clarity of the summer air.
He stood on the summit, his legs planted wide apart, leaning back against space. He looked at the materials before him, the knobs of rivets in steel, the sparks in blocks of stone, the weaving spirals in fresh, yellow planks.
Then he saw a husky figure enmeshed in electric wires, a bulldog face spreading into a huge grin and china-blue eyes gloating in a kind of unholy triumph.
“Mike!” he said incredulously.
Mike had left for a big job in Philadelphia months ago, long before the appearance of Heller in Snyte’s office, and Mike had never heard the news—or so he supposed.
“Hello, Red,” said Mike, much too casually, and added: “Hello, boss.”
“Mike, how did you ... ?”
“You’re a hell of an architect. Neglecting the job like that. It’s my third day here, waiting for you to show up.”
“Mike, how did you get here? Why such a come-down?” He had never known Mike to bother with small private residences.
“Don’t play the sap. You know how I got here. You didn’t think I’d miss it, your first house, did you? And you think it’s a come-down? Well, maybe it is. And maybe it’s the other way around.”
Roark extended his hand and Mike’s grimy fingers closed about it ferociously, as if the smudges he left implanted in Roark’s skin said everything he wanted to say. And because he was afraid that he might say it, Mike growled:
“Run along, boss, run along. Don’t clog up the works like that.”
Roark walked through the house. There were moments when he could be precise, impersonal, and stop to give instructions as if this were not his house but only a mathematical problem; when he felt the existence of pipes and rivets, while his own person vanished.
There were moments when something rose within him, not a thought nor a feeling, but a wave of some physical violence, and then he wanted to stop, to lean back, to feel the reality of his person heightened by the frame of steel that rose dimly about the bright, outstanding existence of his body as its center. He did not stop. He went on calmly. But his hands betrayed what he wanted to hide. His hands reached out, ran slowly down the beams and joints. The workers in the house had noticed it. They said: “That guy’s in love with the thing. He can’t keep his hands off.”
The workers liked him. The contractor’s superintendents did not. He had had trouble in finding a contractor to erect the house. Several of the better firms had refused the commission. “We don’t do that kinda stuff.” “Nah, we won’t bother. Too complicated for a small job like that.” “Who the hell wants that kind of a house? Most likely we’ll never collect from the crank afterwards. To hell with it.” “Never did anything like it. Wouldn’t know how to go about it. I’ll stick to construction that is construction.” One contractor had looked at the plans briefly and thrown them aside, declaring with finality: “It won’t stand.” “It will,” said Roark. The contractor drawled indifferently. “Yeah? And who are you to tell me, Mister?”
He had found a small firm that needed the work and undertook it, charging more than the job warranted—on the ground of the chance they were taking with a queer experiment. The construction went on, and the foremen obeyed sullenly, in disapproving silence, as if they were waiting for their predictions to come true and would be glad when the house collapsed about their heads.
Roark had bought an old Ford and drove down to the job more often than was necessary. It was difficult to sit at a desk in his office, to stand at a table, forcing himself to stay away from the construction site. At the site there were moments when he wished to forget his office and his drawing board, to seize the men’s tools and go to work on the actual erection of the house, as he had worked in his childhood, to build that house with his own hands.
He walked through the structure, stepping lightly over piles of planks and coils of wire, he made notes, he gave brief orders in a harsh voice. He avoided looking in Mike’s direction. But Mike was watching him, following his progress through the house. Mike winked at him in understanding, whenever he passed by. Mike said once:
“Control yourself, Red. You’re open like a book. God, it’s indecent to be so happy!”
Roark stood on the cliff, by the structure, and looked at the countryside, at the long, gray ribbon of the road twisting past along the shore. An open car drove by, fleeing into the country. The car was overfilled with people bound for a picnic. There was a jumble of bright sweaters, and scarfs fluttering in the wind; a jumble of voices shrieking without purpose over the roar of the motor, and overstressed hiccoughs of laughter; a girl sat sidewise, her legs flung over the side of the car; she wore a man’s straw hat slipping down to her nose and she yanked savagely at the strings of a ukelele, ejecting raucous sounds, yelling “Hey!” These people were enjoying a day of their existence; they were shrieking to the sky their release from the work and the burdens of the days behind them; they had worked and carried the burdens in order to reach a goal—and this was the goal.
He looked at the car as it streaked past. He thought that there was a difference, some important difference, between the consciousness of this day in him and in them. He thought that he should try to grasp it. But he forgot. He was looking at a truck panting up the hill, loaded with a glittering mound of cut granite.
Austen Heller came to look at the house frequently, and watched it grow, curious, still a little astonished. He studied Roark and the house with the same meticulous scrutiny; he felt as if he could not quite tell them apart.
Heller, the fighter against compulsion, was baffled by Roark, a man so impervious to compulsion that he became a kind of compulsion himself, an ultimatum against things Heller could not define. Within a week, Heller knew that he had found the best friend he would ever have; and he knew that the friendship came from Roark’s fundamental indifference. In the deeper reality of Roark’s existence there was no consciousness of Heller, no need for Heller, no appeal, no demand. Heller felt a line drawn, which he could not touch; beyond that line, Roark asked nothing of him and granted him nothing. But when Roark looked at him with approval, when Roark smiled, when Roark praised one of his articles, Heller felt the strangely clean joy of a sanction that was neither a bribe nor alms.
In the summer evenings they sat together on a ledge halfway up the hill, and talked while darkness mounted slowly up the beams of the house above them, the last sunrays retreating to the tips of the steel uprights.
“What is it that I like so much about the house you’re building for me, Howard?”
“A house can have integrity, just like a person,” said Roark, “and just as seldom.”
“In what way?”
“Well, look at it. Every piece of it is there because the house needs it—and for no other reason. You see it from here as it is inside. The rooms in which you’ll live made the shape. The relation of masses was determined by the distribution of space within. The ornament was determined by the method of construction, an emphasis of the principle that makes it stand. You can see each stress, each support that meets it. Your own eyes go through a structural process when you look at the house, you can follow each step, you see it rise, you know what made it and why it stands. But you’ve seen buildings with columns that support nothing, with purposeless cornices, with pilasters, mouldings, false arches, false windows. You’ve seen buildings that look as if they contained a single large hall, they have solid columns and single, solid windows six floors high. But you enter and find six stories inside. Or buildings that contain a single hall, but with a façade cut up into floor lines, band courses, tiers of windows. Do you understand the difference? Your house is made by its own needs. Those others are made by the need to impress. The determining motive of your house is in the house. The determining motive of the other is in the audience.”
“Do you know that that’s what I’ve felt in a way? I’ve felt that when I move into this house, I’ll have a new sort of existence, and even my simple daily routine will have a kind of honesty or dignity that I can’t quite define. Don’t be astonished if I tell you that I feel as if I’ll have to live up to that house.”
“I intended that,” said Roark.
“And, incidentally, thank you for all the thought you seem to have taken about my comfort. There are so many things I notice that had never occurred to me before, but you’ve planned them as if you knew all my needs. For instance, my study is the room I’ll need most and you’ve given it the dominant spot—and, incidentally, I see where you’ve made it the dominant mass from the outside, too. And then the way it connects with the library, and the living room well out of my way, and the guest rooms where I won’t hear too much of them—and all that. You were very considerate of me.”
“You know,” said Roark, “I haven’t thought of you at all. I thought of the house.” He added: “Perhaps that’s why I knew how to be considerate of you.”
The Heller house was completed in November of 1926.
In January of 1927 the Architectural Tribune published a survey of the best American homes erected during the past year. It devoted twelve large, glossy pages to photographs of the twenty-four houses its editors had selected as the worthiest architectural achievements. The Heller house was not mentioned.
The real-estate sections of the New York papers presented, each Sunday, brief accounts of the notable new residences in the vicinity. There was no account of the Heller house.
The year book of the Architects’ Guild of America, which presented magnificent reproductions of what it chose as the best buildings of the country, under the title “Looking Forward,” gave no reference to the Heller house.
There were many occasions when lecturers rose to platforms and addressed trim audiences on the subject of the progress of American architecture. No one spoke of the Heller house.
In the club rooms of the A.G.A. some opinions were expressed.
“It’s a disgrace to the country,” said Ralston Holcombe, “that a thing like that Heller house is allowed to be erected. It’s a blot on the profession. There ought to be a law.”
“That’s what drives clients away,” said John Erik Snyte. “They see a house like that and they think all architects are crazy.”
“I see no cause for indignation,” said Gordon L. Prescott. “I think it’s screamingly funny. It looks like a cross between a filling station and a comic-strip idea of a rocket ship to the moon.”
“You watch it in a couple of years,” said Eugene Pettingill, “and see what happens. The thing’ll collapse like a house of cards.”
“Why speak in terms of years?” said Guy Francon. “Those modernistic stunts never last more than a season. The owner will get good and sick of it and he’ll come running home to a good old early Colonial.”
The Heller house acquired fame throughout the countryside surrounding it. People drove out of their way to park on the road before it, to stare, point and giggle. Gas-station attendants snickered when Heller’s car drove past. Heller’s cook had to endure the derisive glances of shopkeepers when she went on her errands. The Heller house was known in the neighborhood as “The Booby Hatch.”
Peter Keating told his friends in the profession, with an indulgent smile: “Now, now, you shouldn’t say that about him. I’ve known Howard Roark for a long time, and he’s got quite a talent, quite. He’s even worked for me once. He’s just gone haywire on that house. He’ll learn. He has a future.... Oh, you don’t think he has? You really don’t think he has?”
Ellsworth M. Toohey, who let no stone spring from the ground of America without his comment, did not know that the Heller house had been erected, as far as his column was concerned. He did not consider it necessary to inform his readers about it, if only to damn it. He said nothing.