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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.

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"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.

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"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."

"Well," said Mr. Janss, "I’ve never thought of it that way." He added, without

great conviction: "But we want our building to have dignity, you know, and

beauty, what they call real beauty."

"What who calls what beauty?"

"Well-l-l..."

"Tell me, Mr. Janss, do you really think that Greek columns and fruit baskets

are beautiful on a modern, steel office building?"

"I don’t know that I’ve ever thought anything about why a building was

beautiful, one way or another," Mr. Janss confessed, "but I guess that’s what

the public wants."

"Why do you suppose they want it?"

"I don’t know."

"Then why should you care what they want?"

"You’ve got to consider the public."

"Don’t you know that most people take most things because that’s what’s given

them, and they have no opinion whatever? Do you wish to be guided by what they

expect you to think they think or by your own judgment?"

"You can’t force it down their throats."

"You don’t have to. You must only be patient. Because on your side you have

reason--oh, I know, it’s something no one really wants to have on his side--and

against you, you have just a vague, fat, blind inertia."

"Why do you think that I don’t want reason on my side?"

"It’s not you, Mr. Janss. It’s the way most people feel. They have to take a

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chance, everything they do is taking a chance, but they feel so much safer when

they take it on something they know to be ugly, vain and stupid."

"That’s true, you know," said Mr. Janss.

At the conclusion of the interview, Mr. Janss said thoughtfully: "I can’t say

that it doesn’t make sense, Mr. Roark. Let me think it over. You’ll hear from me

shortly."

Mr. Janss called him a week later. "It’s the board of directors that will have

to decide. Are you willing to try, Roark? Draw up the plans and some preliminary

sketches. I’ll submit them to the board. I can’t promise anything. But I’m for

you and I’ll fight them on it."

Roark worked on the plans for two weeks of days and nights. The plans were

submitted. Then he was called before the board of directors of the Janss-Stuart

Real Estate Company. He stood at the side of a long table and he spoke, his eyes

moving slowly from face to face. He tried not to look down at the table, but on

the lower rim of his vision there remained the white spot of his drawings spread

before the twelve men. He was asked a great many questions. Mr. Janss jumped up

at times to answer instead, to pound the table with his fist, to snarl: "Don’t

you see? Isn’t it clear?...What of it, Mr. Grant? What if no one has ever built

anything like it?...Gothic, Mr. Hubbard? Why must we have Gothic?...I’ve a jolly

good mind to resign if you turn this down!"

Roark spoke quietly. He was the only man in the room who felt certain of his own

words. He felt also that he had no hope. The twelve faces before him had a

variety of countenances, but there was something, neither color nor feature,

upon all of them, as a common denominator, something that dissolved their

expressions, so that they were not faces any longer but only empty ovals of

flesh. He was addressing everyone. He was addressing no one. He felt no answer,

not even the echo of his own words striking against the membrane of an eardrum.

His words were falling down a well, hitting stone salients on their way, and

each salient refused to stop them, threw them farther, tossed them from one

another, sent them to seek a bottom that did not exist.

He was told that he would be informed of the board’s decision. He knew that

decision in advance. When he received the letter, he read it without feeling.

The letter was from Mr. Janss and it began: "Dear Mr. Roark, I am sorry to

inform you that our board of directors find themselves unable to grant you the

commission for..." There was a plea in the letter’s brutal, offensive formality:

the plea of a man who could not face him.

#

John Fargo had started in life as a pushcart peddler. At fifty he owned a modest

fortune and a prosperous department store on lower Sixth Avenue. For years he

had fought successfully against a large store across the street, one of many

inherited by a numerous family. In the fall of last year the family had moved

that particular branch to new quarters, farther uptown. They were convinced that

the center of the city’s retail business was shifting north and they had decided

to hasten the downfall of their former neighborhood by leaving their old store

vacant, a grim reminder and embarrassment to their competitor across the street.

John Fargo had answered by announcing that he would build a new store of his

own, on the very same spot, next door to his old one; a store newer and smarter

than any the city had seen; he would, he declared, keep the prestige of his old

neighborhood.

When he called Roark to his office he did not say that he would have to decide

later or think things over. He said: "You’re the architect." He sat, his feet on

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his desk, smoking a pipe, snapping out words and puffs of smoke together. "I’ll

tell you what space I need and how much I want to spend. If you need more--say

so. The rest is up to you. I don’t know much about buildings. But I know a man

who knows when I see him. Go ahead."

Fargo had chosen Roark because Fargo had driven, one day, past Gowan’s Service

Station, and stopped, and gone in, and asked a few questions. After that, he

bribed Heller’s cook to show him through the house in Heller’s absence. Fargo

needed no further argument.

#

Late in May, when the drafting table in Roark’s office was buried deep in

sketches for the Fargo store, he received another commission.

Mr. Whitford Sanborn, the client, owned an office building that had been built

for him many years ago by Henry Cameron. When Mr. Sanborn decided that he needed

a new country residence he rejected his wife’s suggestions of other architects;

he wrote to Henry Cameron. Cameron wrote a ten-page letter in answer; the first

three lines of the letter stated that he had retired from practice; the rest of

it was about Howard Roark. Roark never learned what had been said in that

letter; Sanborn would not show it to him and Cameron would not tell him. But

Sanborn signed him to build the country residence, in spite of Mrs. Sanborn’s

violent objections.

Mrs. Sanborn was the president of many charity organizations and this had given

her an addiction to autocracy such as no other avocation could develop. Mrs.

Sanborn wished a French chateau built upon their new estate on the Hudson. She

wished it to look stately and ancient, as if it had always belonged to the

family; of course, she admitted, people would know that it hadn’t, but it would

appear as if it had.

Mr. Sanborn signed the contract after Roark had explained to him in detail the

kind of a house he was to expect; Mr. Sanborn had agreed to it readily, had not

wished even to wait for sketches. "But of course, Fanny," Mr. Sanborn said

wearily, "I want a modern house. I told you that long ago. That’s what Cameron

would have designed."

"What in heaven’s name does Cameron mean now?" she asked. "I don’t know, Fanny.

I know only that there’s no building in New York like the one he did for me."

The arguments continued for many long evenings in the dark, cluttered, polished

mahogany splendor of the Sanborns’ Victorian drawing room. Mr. Sanborn wavered.

Roark asked, his arm sweeping out at the room around them: "Is this what you

want?"

"Well, if you’re going to be impertinent..." Mrs. Sanborn began, but Mr. Sanborn

exploded: "Christ, Fanny! He’s right! That’s just what I don’t want! That’s just

what I’m sick of!"

Roark saw no one until his sketches were ready. The house--of plain fieldstone,

with great windows and many terraces--stood in the gardens over the river, as

spacious as the spread of water, as open as the gardens, and one had to follow

its lines attentively to find the exact steps by which it was tied to the sweep

of the gardens, so gradual was the rise of the terraces, the approach to and the

full reality of the walls; it seemed only that the trees flowed into the house