The Fountainhead by Rand, Ayn

“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 opportunity. 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 post cards 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 Austin 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 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 own 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.”

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