The Fountainhead by Rand, Ayn

The man was toiling assiduously, bending conduits around a beam. It was a task for hours of strain and patience, in a space overfilled against all calculations. Roark stood, his hands in his pockets, watching the man’s slow, painful progress.

The man raised his head and turned to him abruptly. He had a big head and a face so ugly that it became fascinating; it was neither old nor flabby, but it was creased in deep gashes and the powerful jowls drooped like a bulldog’s; the eyes were startling–wide, round and china-blue.

“Well?” the man asked angrily, “what’s the matter, Brick-top?”

“You’re wasting your time,” said Roark.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t say!”

“It will take you hours to get your pipes around that beam.”

“Know a better way to do it?”

“Sure.”

“Run along, punk. We don’t like college smarties around here.”

“Cut a hole in that beam and put your pipes through.”

“What?”

“Cut a hole through the beam.”

“The hell I will!”

“The hell you won’t.”

“It ain’t done that way.”

“I’ve done it.”

“You?”

“It’s done everywhere.”

“It ain’t gonna be done here. Not by me.”

“Then I’ll do it for you.”

The man roared. “That’s rich! When did office boys learn to do a man’s work?”

“Give me your torch.”

“Look out, boy! It’ll burn your pretty pink toes!”

Roark took the man’s gloves and goggles, took the acetylene torch, knelt, and sent a thin jet of blue fire at the center of the beam. The man stood watching him. Roark’s arm was steady, holding the tense, hissing streak of flame in leash, shuddering faintly with its violence, but holding it aimed straight. There was no strain, no effort in the easy posture of his body, only in his arm. And it seemed as if the blue tension eating slowly through metal came not from the flame but from the hand holding it.

He finished, put the torch down, and rose.

“Jesus!” said the electrician. “Do you know how to handle a torch!”

“Looks like it, doesn’t it?” He removed the gloves, the goggles, and handed them back. “Do it that way from now on. Tell the foreman I said so.”

The electrician was staring reverently at the neat hole cut through the beam. He muttered: “Where did you learn to handle it like that, Red?”

Roark’s slow, amused smile acknowledged this concession of victory. “Oh, I’ve been an electrician, and a plumber, and a rivet catcher, and many other things.”

“And went to school besides?”

“Well, in a way.”

“Gonna be an architect?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you’ll be the first one that knows something besides pretty pictures and tea parties. You should see the teacher’s pets they send us down from the office.”

“If you’re apologizing, don’t. I don’t like them either. Go back to the pipes. So long.”

“So long, Red.”

The next time Roark appeared on that job, the blue-eyed electrician waved to him from afar, and called him over, and asked advice about his work which he did not need; he stated that his name was Mike and that he had missed Roark for several days. On the next visit the day shift was just leaving, and Mike waited outside for Roark to finish the inspection. “How about a glass of beer, Red?” he invited, when Roark came out. “Sure,” said Roark, “thanks.”

They sat together at a table in the corner of a basement speakeasy, and they drank beer, and Mike related his favorite tale of how he had fallen five stories when a scaffolding gave way under him, how he had broken three ribs but lived to tell it, and Roark spoke of his days in the building trades. Mike did have a real name, which was Sean Xavier Donnigan, but everyone had forgotten it long ago; he owned a set of tools and an ancient Ford, and existed for the sole purpose of traveling around the country from one big construction job to another. People meant very little to Mike, but their performance a great deal. He worshipped expertness of any kind. He loved his work passionately and had no tolerance for anything save for other single-track devotions. He was a master in his own field and he felt no sympathy except for mastery. His view of the world was simple: there were the able and there were the incompetent; he was not concerned with the latter. He loved buildings. He despised, however, all architects.

“There was one, Red,” he said earnestly, over his fifth beer, “one only and you’d be too young to know about him, but that was the only man that knew building. I worked for him when I was your age.”

“Who was that?”

“Henry Cameron was his name. He’s dead, I guess, these many years.”

Roark looked at him for a long time, then said: “He’s not dead, Mike,” and added: “I’ve worked for him.”

“You did?”

“For almost three years.”

They looked at each other silently, and that was the final seal on their friendship.

Weeks later, Mike stopped Roark, one day, at the building, his ugly face puzzled, and asked:

“Say, Red, I heard the super tell a guy from the contractor’s that you’re stuck-up and stubborn and the lousiest bastard he’s ever been up against. What did you do to him?”

“Nothing.”

“What the hell did he mean?”

“I don’t know,” said Roark. “Do you?”

Mike looked at him, shrugged and grinned.

“No,” said Mike.

8.

EARLY IN May, Peter Keating departed for Washington, to supervise the construction of a museum donated to the city by a great philanthropist easing his conscience. The museum building, Keating pointed out proudly, was to be decidedly different: it was not a reproduction of the Parthenon, but of the Maison Carrée at Nîmes.

Keating had been away for some time when an office boy approached Roark’s table and informed him that Mr. Francon wished to see him in his office. When Roark entered the sanctuary, Francon smiled from behind the desk and said cheerfully: “Sit down, my friend. Sit down….” but something in Roark’s eyes, which he had never seen at close range before, made Francon’s voice shrink and stop, and he added dryly: “Sit down.” Roark obeyed. Francon studied him for a second, but could reach no conclusion beyond deciding that the man had a most unpleasant face, yet looked quite correctly attentive.

“You’re the one who’s worked for Cameron, aren’t you?” Francon asked. “Yes,” said Roark.

“Mr. Keating has been telling me very nice things about you,” Francon tried pleasantly and stopped. It was wasted courtesy; Roark just sat looking at him, waiting. “Listen…what’s your name?”

“Roark.”

“Listen, Roark. We have a client who is a little…odd, but he’s an important man, a very important man, and we have to satisfy him. He’s given us a commission for an eight-million-dollar office building, but the trouble is that he has very definite ideas on what he wants it to look like. He wants it–” Francon shrugged apologetically, disclaiming all blame for the preposterous suggestion–“he wants it to look like this.” He handed Roark a photograph. It was a photograph of the Dana Building.

Roark sat quite still, the photograph hanging between his fingers. “Do you know that building?” asked Francon.

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s what he wants. And Mr. Keating’s away. I’ve had Bennett and Cooper and Williams make sketches, but he’s turned them down. So I thought I’d give you a chance.”

Francon looked at him, impressed by the magnanimity of his own offer. There was no reaction. There was only a man who still looked as if he’d been struck on the head.

“Of course,” said Francon, “it’s quite a jump for you, quite an assignment, but I thought I’d let you try. Don’t be afraid. Mr. Keating and I will go over it afterward. Just draw up the plans and a good sketch of it. You must have an idea of what the man wants. You know Cameron’s tricks. But of course, we can’t let a crude thing like this come out of our office. We must please him, but we must also preserve our reputation and not frighten all our other clients away. The point is to make it simple and in the general mood of this, but also artistic. You know, the more severe kind of Greek. You don’t have to use the Ionic order, use the Doric. Plain pediments and simple moldings, or something like that. Get the idea? Now take this along and show me what you can do. Bennett will give you all the particulars and…What’s the mat–”

Francon’s voice cut itself off.

“Mr. Francon, please let me design it the way the Dana Building was designed.”

“Huh?”

“Let me do it. Not copy the Dana Building, but design it as Henry Cameron would have wanted it done, as I will.”

“You mean modernistic?”

“I…well, call it that.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Mr. Francon, please listen to me.” Roark’s words were like the steps of a man walking a tightwire, slow, strained, groping for the only right spot, quivering over an abyss, but precise. “I don’t blame you for the things you’re doing. I’m Working for you, I’m taking your money, I have no right to express objections. But this time…this time the client is asking for it. You’re risking nothing. He wants it. Think of it, there’s a man, one man who sees and understands and wants it and has the power to build it. Are you going to fight a client for the first time in your life–and fight for what? To cheat him and to give him the same old trash, when you have so many others asking for it, and one, only one, who comes with a request like this?”

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