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"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 watercolor. 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."

111

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?--all 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.

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"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."

"Nan, we won’t bother. Too complicated for a small job like that."

"Who the hell wants that kind of 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

113

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 scarves 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 ukulele, 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?"

114

"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, moldings, 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 facade 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 others 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