After others had seen the sketches Mr. Sanborn was not certain of this any longer. Mrs. Sanborn said that the house was awful. And the long evening arguments were resumed. “Now why, why can’t we add turrets there, on the corners?” Mrs. Sanborn asked. “There’s plenty of room on those flat roofs.” When she had been talked out of the turrets, she inquired: “Why can’t we have mullioned windows? What difference would that make? God knows, the windows are large enough–though why they have to be so large I fail to see, it gives one no privacy at all–but I’m willing to accept your windows, Mr. Roark, if you’re so stubborn about it, but why can’t you put mullions on the panes? It will soften things, and it gives a regal air, you know, a feudal sort of mood.”
The friends and relatives to whom Mrs. Sanborn hurried with the sketches did not like the house at all. Mrs. Walling called it preposterous, and Mrs. Hooper–crude. Mr. Melander said he wouldn’t have it as a present. Mrs. Applebee stated that it looked like a shoe factory. Miss Davitt glanced at the sketches and said with approval: “Oh, how very artistic, my dear! Who designed it?…Roark?…Roark?…Never heard of him….Well, frankly, Fanny, it looks like something phony.”
The two children of the family were divided on the question. June Sanborn, aged nineteen, had always thought that all architects were romantic, and she had been delighted to learn that they would have a very young architect; but she did not like Roark’s appearance and his indifference to her hints, so she declared that the house was hideous and she, for one, would refuse to live in it. Richard Sanborn, aged twenty-four, who had been a brilliant student in college and was now slowly drinking himself to death, startled his family by emerging from his usual lethargy and declaring that the house was magnificent. No one could tell whether it was esthetic appreciation or hatred of his mother or both.
Whitford Sanborn swayed with every new current. He would mutter: “Well, now, not mullions, of course, that’s utter rubbish, but couldn’t you give her a cornice, Mr. Roark, to keep peace in the family? Just a kind of a crenelated cornice, it wouldn’t spoil anything. Or would it?”
The arguments ended when Roark declared that he would not build the house unless Mr. Sanborn approved the sketches just as they were and signed his approval on every sheet of the drawings. Mr. Sanborn signed.
Mrs. Sanborn was pleased to learn, shortly afterward, that no reputable contractor would undertake the erection of the house. “You see?” she stated triumphantly. Mr. Sanborn refused to see. He found an obscure firm that accepted the commission, grudgingly and as a special favor to him. Mrs. Sanborn learned that she had an ally in the contractor, and she broke social precedent to the extent of inviting him for tea. She had long since lost all coherent ideas about the house; she merely hated Roark. Her contractor hated all architects on principle.
The construction of the Sanborn house proceeded through the months of summer and fall, each day bringing new battles. “But, of course, Mr. Roark, I told you I wanted three closets in my bedroom, I remember distinctly, it was on a Friday and we were sitting in the drawing room and Mr. Sanborn was sitting in the big chair by the window and I was…What about the plans? What plans? How do you expect me to understand plans?”
“Aunt Rosalie says she can’t possibly climb a circular stairway, Mr. Roark. What are we going to do? Select our guests to fit your house?”
“Mr. Hulburt says that kind of ceiling won’t hold….Oh yes, Mr. Hulburt knows a lot about architecture. He’s spent two summers in Venice.”
“June, poor darling, says her room will be dark as a cellar….Well, that’s the way she feels, Mr. Roark. Even if it isn’t dark, but if it makes her feel dark, it’s the same thing.” Roark stayed up nights, redrafting the plans for the alterations which he could not avoid. It meant days of tearing down floors, stairways, partitions already erected; it meant extras piling up on the contractor’s budget. The contractor shrugged and said: “I told you so. That’s what always happens when you get one of those fancy architects. You wait and see what this thing will cost you before he gets through.”
Then, as the house took shape, it was Roark who found that he wanted to make a change. The eastern wing had never quite satisfied him. Watching it rise, he saw the mistake he had made and the way to correct it; he knew it would bring the house into a more logical whole. He was making his first steps in building and they were his first experiments. He could admit it openly. But Mr. Sanborn refused to allow the change; it was his turn. Roark pleaded with him; once the picture of that new wing had become clear in Roark’s mind he could not bear to look at the house as it stood. “It’s not that I disagree with you,” Mr. Sanborn said coldly, “in fact, I do think you’re right. But we cannot afford it. Sorry.”
“It will cost you less than the senseless changes Mrs. Sanborn has forced me to make.”
“Don’t bring that up again.”
“Mr. Sanborn,” Roark asked slowly, “will you sign a paper that you authorize this change provided it costs you nothing?”
“Certainly. If you can conjure up a miracle to work that.”
He signed. The eastern wing was rebuilt. Roark paid for it himself. It cost him more than the fee he received. Mr. Sanborn hesitated: he wanted to repay it. Mrs. Sanborn stopped him. “It’s just a low trick,” she said, “just a form of high-pressure. He’s blackmailing you on your better feelings. He expects you to pay. Wait and see. He’ll ask for it. Don’t let him get away with that.” Roark did not ask for it. Mr. Sanborn never paid him.
When the house was completed, Mrs. Sanborn refused to live in it. Mr. Sanborn looked at it wistfully, too tired to admit that he loved it, that he had always wanted a house just like it. He surrendered. The house was not furnished. Mrs. Sanborn took herself, her husband and her daughter off to Florida for the winter, “where,” she said, “we have a house that’s a decent Spanish, thank God!–because we bought it ready-made. This is what happens when you venture to build for yourself, with some half-baked idiot of an architect!” Her son, to everybody’s amazement, exhibited a sudden burst of savage will power: he refused to go to Florida; he liked the new house, he would live nowhere else. So three of the rooms were furnished for him. The family left and he moved alone into the house on the Hudson. At night, one could see from the river a single rectangle of yellow, small and lost, among the windows of the huge, dead house.
The bulletin of the Architects’ Guild of America carried a small item:
“A curious incident, which would be amusing if it were not deplorable, is reported to us about a home recently built by Mr. Whitford Sanborn, noted industrialist. Designed by one Howard Roark and erected at a cost of well over $100,000, this house was found by the family to be uninhabitable. It stands now, abandoned, as an eloquent witness to professional incompetence.”
14.
LUCIUS N. Heyer stubbornly refused to die. He had recovered from the stroke and returned to his office, ignoring the objections of his doctor and the solicitous protests of Guy Francon. Francon offered to buy him out. Heyer refused, his pale, watering eyes staring obstinately at nothing at all. He came to his office every two or three days; he read the copies of correspondence left in his letter basket according to custom; he sat at his desk and drew flowers on a clean pad; then he went home. He walked, dragging his feet slowly; he held his elbows pressed to his sides and his forearms thrust forward, with the fingers half closed, like claws; the fingers shook; he could not use his left hand at all. He would not retire. He liked to see his name on the firm’s stationery.
He wondered dimly why he was no longer introduced to prominent clients, why he never saw the sketches of their new buildings, until they were half erected. If he mentioned this, Francon protested: “But, Lucius, I couldn’t think of bothering you in your condition. Any other man would have retired, long ago.”
Francon puzzled him mildly. Peter Keating baffled him. Keating barely bothered to greet him when they met, and then as an afterthought; Keating walked off in the middle of a sentence addressed to him; when Heyer issued some minor order to one of the draftsmen, it was not carried out and the draftsman informed him that the order had been countermanded by Mr. Keating. Heyer could not understand it; he always remembered Keating as the diffident boy who had talked to him so nicely about old porcelain. He excused Keating at first; then he tried to mollify him, humbly and clumsily; then he conceived an unreasoning fear of Keating. He complained to Francon. He said, petulantly, assuming the tone of an authority he could never have exercised: “That boy of yours, Guy, that Keating fellow, he’s getting to be impossible. He’s rude to me. You ought to get rid of him.”