Keating followed him silently, amused, and said nothing when they were alone in the comfortable twilight of Francon’s car.
“Well?” Francon asked ominously.
Keating smiled. “You’re a pig, Guy. You don’t know how to appreciate what you’ve got. Why didn’t you tell me? She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”
“Oh, yes,” said Francon darkly. “Maybe that’s the trouble.”
“What trouble? Where do you see any trouble?”
“What do you really think of her, Peter? Forget the looks. You’ll see how quickly you’ll forget that. What do you think?”
“Well, I think she has a great deal of character.”
“Thanks for the understatement.”
Francon was gloomily silent, and then he said with an awkward little note of something like hope in his voice:
“You know, Peter, I was surprised. I watched you, and you had quite a long chat with her. That’s amazing. I fully expected her to chase you away with one nice, poisonous crack. Maybe you could get along with her, after all. I’ve concluded that you just can’t tell anything about her. Maybe…You know, Peter, what I wanted to tell you is this: Don’t pay any attention to what she said about my wanting you to be horrible with her.”
The heavy earnestness of that sentence was such a hint that Keating’s lips moved to shape a soft whistle, but he caught himself in time. Francon added heavily: “I don’t want you to be horrible with her at all.”
“You know, Guy,” said Keating, in a tone of patronizing reproach, “you shouldn’t have run away like that.”
“I never know how to speak to her.” He sighed. “I’ve never learned to. I can’t understand what in blazes is the matter with her, but something is. She just won’t behave like a human being. You know, she’s been expelled from two finishing schools. How she ever got through college I can’t imagine, but I can tell you that I dreaded to open my mail for four solid years, waiting for word of the inevitable. Then I thought, well, once she’s on her own I’m through and I don’t have to worry about it, but she’s worse than ever.”
“What do you find to worry about?”
“I don’t. I try not to. I’m glad when I don’t have to think of her at all. I can’t help it, I just wasn’t cut out for a father. But sometimes I get to feel that it’s my responsibility after all, though God knows I don’t want it, but still there it is, I should do something about it, there’s no one else to assume it.”
“You’ve let her frighten you, Guy, and really there’s nothing to be afraid of.”
“You don’t think so?”
“No.”
“Maybe you’re the man to handle her. I don’t regret your meeting her now, and you know that I didn’t want you to. Yes, I think you’re the one man who could handle her. You…you’re quite determined–aren’t you, Peter?–when you’re after something?”
“Well,” said Keating, throwing one hand up in a careless gesture, “I’m not afraid very often.”
Then he leaned back against the cushions, as if he were tired, as if he had heard nothing of importance, and he kept silent for the rest of the drive. Francon kept silent also.
“Boys,” said John Erik Snyte, “don’t spare yourselves on this. It’s the most important thing we’ve had this year. Not much money, you understand, but the prestige, the connections! If we do land it, won’t some of those great architects turn green! You see, Austen Heller has told me frankly that we’re the third firm he’s approached. He would have none of what those big fellows tried to sell him. So it’s up to us, boys. You know, something different, unusual, but in good taste, and you know, different. Now do your best.”
His five designers sat in a semicircle before him. “Gothic” looked bored and “Miscellaneous” looked discouraged in advance; “Renaissance” was following the course of a fly on the ceiling. Roark asked:
“What did he actually say, Mr. Snyte?”
Snyte shrugged and looked at Roark with amusement, as if he and Roark shared a shameful secret about the new client, not worth mentioning.
“Nothing that makes great sense–quite between us, boys,” said Snyte. “He was somewhat inarticulate, considering his great command of the English language in print. He admitted he knew nothing about architecture. He didn’t say whether he wanted it modernistic or period or what. He said something to the effect that he wanted a house of his own, but he’s hesitated for a long time about building one because all houses look alike to him and they all look like hell and he doesn’t see how anyone can become enthusiastic about any house, and yet he has the idea that he wants a building he could love. ‘A building that would mean something’ is what he said, though he added that he ‘didn’t know what or how.’ There. That’s about all he said. Not much to go on, and I wouldn’t have undertaken to submit sketches if it weren’t Austen Heller. But I grant you that it doesn’t make sense….What’s the matter, Roark?”
“Nothing,” said Roark.
This ended the first conference on the subject of a residence for Austen Heller.
Later that day Snyte crowded his five designers into a train, and they went to Connecticut to see the site Heller had chosen. They stood on a lonely, rocky stretch of shore, three miles beyond an unfashionable little town; they munched sandwiches and peanuts, and they looked at a cliff rising in broken ledges from the ground to end in a straight, brutal, naked drop over the sea, a vertical shaft of rock forming a cross with the long, pale horizontal of the sea.
“There,” said Snyte. “That’s it.” He twirled a pencil in his hand. “Damnable, eh?” He sighed. “I tried to suggest a more respectable location, but he didn’t take it so well so I had to shut up.” He twirled the pencil. “That’s where he wants the house, right on top of that rock.” He scratched the tip of his nose with the point of the pencil. “I tried to suggest setting it farther back from the shore and keeping the damn rock for a view, but that didn’t go so well either.” He bit the eraser between the tips of his teeth. “Just think of the blasting, the leveling one’s got to do on that top.” He cleaned his fingernail with the lead, leaving a black mark. “Well, that’s that….Observe the grade, and the quality of the stone. The approach will be difficult….I have all the surveys and the photographs in the office….Well…Who’s got a cigarette?…Well, I think that’s about all….I’ll help you with suggestions anytime….Well…What time is that damn train back?”
Thus the five designers were started on their task. Four of them proceeded immediately at their drawing boards. Roark returned alone to the site, many times.
Roark’s five months with Snyte stretched behind him like a blank. Had he wished to ask himself what he had felt, he would have found no answer, save in the fact that he remembered nothing of these months. He could remember each sketch he had made. He could, if he tried, remember what had happened to those sketches; he did not try.
But he had not loved any of them as he loved the house of Austen Heller. He stayed in the drafting room through evening after evening, alone with a sheet of paper and the thought of a cliff over the sea. No one saw his sketches until they were finished.
When they were finished, late one night, he sat at his table, with the sheets spread before him, sat for many hours, one hand propping his forehead, the other hanging by his side, blood gathering in the fingers, numbing them, while the street beyond the window became deep blue, then pale gray. He did not look at the sketches. He felt empty and very tired.
The house on the sketches had been designed not by Roark, but by the cliff on which it stood. It was as if the cliff had grown and completed itself and proclaimed the purpose for which it had been waiting. The house was broken into many levels, following the ledges of the rock, rising as it rose, in gradual masses, in planes flowing together up into one consummate harmony. The walls, of the same granite as the rock, continued its vertical lines upward; the wide, projecting terraces of concrete, silver as the sea, followed the line of the waves, of the straight horizon.
Roark was still sitting at his table when the men returned to begin their day in the drafting room. Then the sketches were sent to Snyte’s office.
Two days later, the final version of the house to be submitted to Austen Heller, the version chosen and edited by John Erik Snyte, executed by the Chinese artist, lay swathed in tissue paper on a table. It was Roark’s house. His competitors had been eliminated. It was Roark’s house, but its walls were now of red brick, its windows were cut to conventional size and equipped with green shutters, two of its projecting wings were omitted, the great cantilevered terrace over the sea was replaced by a little wrought-iron balcony, and the house was provided with an entrance of Ionic columns supporting a broken pediment, and with a little spire supporting a weather vane.