The fountainhead by Ayn Rand

Part Four: HOWARD ROARK
1.
THE LEAVES streamed down, trembling in the sun. They were not green; only a few,
scattered through the torrent, stood out in single drops of a green so bright
and pure that it hurt the eyes; the rest were not a color, but a light, the
substance of fire on metal, living sparks without edges. And it looked as if the
forest were a spread of light boiling slowly to produce this color, this green
rising in small bubbles, the condensed essence of spring. The trees met, bending
over the road, and the spots of sun on the ground moved with the shifting of the
branches, like a conscious caress. The young man hoped he would not have to die.
Not if the earth could look like this, he thought. Not if he could hear the hope
and the promise like a voice, with leaves, tree trunks and rocks instead of
words. But he knew that the earth looked like this only because he had seen no
sign of men for hours; he was alone, riding his bicycle down a forgotten trail
through the hills of Pennsylvania where he had never been before, where he could
feel the fresh wonder of an untouched world.
He was a very young man. He had just graduated from college--in this spring of
the year 1935--and he wanted to decide whether life was worth living. He did not
know that this was the question in his mind. He did not think of dying. He
thought only that he wished to find joy and reason and meaning in life--and that
none had been offered to him anywhere.
He had not liked the things taught to him in college. He had been taught a great
446

---

deal about social responsibility, about a life of service and self-sacrifice.
Everybody had said it was beautiful and inspiring. Only he had not felt
inspired. He had felt nothing at all.
He could not name the thing he wanted of life. He felt it here, in this wild
loneliness. But he did not face nature with the joy of a healthy animal--as a
proper and final setting; he faced it with the joy of a healthy man--as a
challenge; as tools, means and material. So he felt anger that he should find
exultation only in the wilderness, that this great sense of hope had to be lost
when he would return to men and men’s work. He thought that this was not right;
that man’s work should be a higher step, an improvement on nature, not a
degradation. He did not want to despise men; he wanted to love and admire them.
But he dreaded the sight of the first house, poolroom and movie poster he would
encounter on his way.
He had always wanted to write music, and he could give no other identity to the
thing he sought. If you want to know what it is, he told himself, listen to the
first phrases of Tchaikovsky’s First Concerto--or the last movement of
Rachmaninoff’s Second. Men have not found the words for it nor the deed nor the
thought, but they have found the music. Let me see that in one single act of man
on earth. Let me see it made real. Let me see the answer to the promise of that
music. Not servants nor those served; not altars and immolations; but the final,
the fulfilled, innocent of pain. Don’t help me or serve me, but let me see it
once, because I need it. Don’t work for my happiness, my brothers--show me
yours--show me that it is possible--show me your achievement--and the knowledge
will give me courage for mine.
He saw a blue hole ahead, where the road ended on the crest of a ridge. The blue
looked cool and clean like a film of water stretched in the frame of green
branches. It would be funny, he thought, if I came to the edge and found nothing
but that blue beyond; nothing but the sky ahead, above and below. He closed his
eyes and went on, suspending the possible for a moment, granting himself a
dream, a few instants of believing that he would reach the crest, open his eyes
and see the blue radiance of the sky below.
His foot touched the ground, breaking his motion; he stopped and opened his
eyes. He stood still.
In the broad valley, far below him, in the first sunlight of early morning, he
saw a town. Only it was not a town. Towns did not look like that. He had to
suspend the possible for a while longer, to seek no questions or explanations,
only to look.
There were small houses on the ledges of the hill before him, flowing down to
the bottom. He knew that the ledges had not been touched, that no artifice had
altered the unplanned beauty of the graded steps. Yet some power had known how
to build on these ledges in such a way that the houses became inevitable, and
one could no longer imagine the hills as beautiful without them--as if the
centuries and the series of chances that produced these ledges in the struggle
of great blind forces had waited for their final expression, had been only a
road to a goal--and the goal was these buildings, part of the hills, shaped by
the hills, yet ruling them by giving them meaning.
The houses were plain field stone--like the rocks jutting from the green
hillsides--and of glass, great sheets of glass used as if the sun were invited
to complete the structures, sunlight becoming part of the masonry. There were
many houses, they were small, they were cut off from one another, and no two of
them were alike. But they were like variations of a single theme, like a
symphony played by an inexhaustible imagination, and one could still hear the
447

---

laughter of the force that had been let loose on them, as if that force had run,
unrestrained, challenging itself to be spent, but had never reached its end.
Music, he thought, the promise of the music he had invoked, the sense of it made
real--there it was before his eyes--he did not see it--he heard it in chords--he
thought that there was a common language of thought, sight and sound--was it
mathematics?--the discipline of reason--music was mathematics--and architecture
was music in stone--he knew he was dizzy because this place below him could not
be real.
He saw trees, lawns, walks twisting up the hillsides, steps cut in the stone, he
saw fountains, swimming pools, tennis courts--and not a sign of life. The place
was uninhabited.
It did not shock him, not as the sight of it had shocked him. In a way, it
seemed proper; this was not part of known existence. For the moment he had no
desire to know what it was.
After a long time he glanced about him--and then he saw that he was not alone.
Some steps away from him a man sat on a boulder, looking down at the valley. The
man seemed absorbed in the sight and had not heard his approach. The man was
tall and gaunt and had orange hair.
He walked straight to the man, who turned his eyes to him; the eyes were gray
and calm; the boy knew suddenly that they felt the same thing, and he could
speak as he would not speak to a stranger anywhere else.
"That isn’t real, is it?" the boy asked, pointing down.
"Why, yes, it is, now," the man answered.
"It’s not a movie set or a trick of some kind?"
"No. It’s a summer resort. It’s just been completed. It will be opened in a few
weeks."
"Who built it?"
"I did."
"What’s your name?"
"Howard Roark."
"Thank you," said the boy. He knew that the steady eyes looking at him
understood everything these two words had to cover. Howard Roark inclined his
head, in acknowledgment.
Wheeling his bicycle by his side, the boy took the narrow path down the slope of
the hill to the valley and the houses below. Roark looked after him. He had
never seen that boy before and he would never see him again. He did not know
that he had given someone the courage to face a lifetime.
#
Roark had never understood why he was chosen to build the summer resort at
Monadnock Valley.
It had happened a year and a half ago, in the fall of 1933. He had heard of the
project and gone to see Mr. Caleb Bradley, the head of some vast company that
had purchased the valley and was doing a great deal of loud promotion. He went
448

---

to see Bradley as a matter of duty, without hope, merely to add another refusal
to his long list of refusals. He had built nothing in New York since the
Stoddard Temple.
When he entered Bradley’s office, he knew that he must forget Monadnock Valley
because this man would never give it to him. Caleb Bradley was a short, pudgy
person with a handsome face between rounded shoulders. The face looked wise and
boyish, unpleasantly ageless; he could have been fifty or twenty; he had blank
blue eyes, sly and bored.
But it was difficult for Roark to forget Monadnock Valley. So he spoke of it,
forgetting that speech was useless here. Mr. Bradley listened, obviously
interested, but obviously not in what Roark was saying. Roark could almost feel
some third entity present in the room. Mr. Bradley said little, beyond promising
to consider it and to get in touch with him. But then he said a strange thing.
He asked, in a voice devoid of all clue to the purpose of the question, neither
in approval nor scorn: "You’re the architect who built the Stoddard Temple,
aren’t you, Mr. Roark?" "Yes," said Roark. "Funny that I hadn’t thought of you
myself," said Mr. Bradley. Roark went away, thinking that it would have been
funny if Mr. Bradley had thought of him.
Three days later, Bradley telephoned and invited him to his office. Roark came
and met four other men--the Board of the Monadnock Valley Company. They were
well-dressed men, and their faces were as closed as Mr. Bradley’s. "Please tell
these gentlemen what you told me, Mr. Roark," Bradley said pleasantly.
Roark explained his plan. If what they wished to build was an unusual summer
resort for people of moderate incomes--as they had announced--then they should
realize that the worst curse of poverty was the lack of privacy; only the very
rich or the very poor of the city could enjoy their summer vacations; the very
rich, because they had private estates; the very poor, because they did not mind
the feel and smell of one another’s flesh on public beaches and public dance
floors; the people of good taste and small income had no place to go, if they
found no rest or pleasure in herds. Why was it assumed that poverty gave one the
instincts of cattle? Why not offer these people a place where, for a week or a
month, at small cost, they could have what they wanted and needed? He had seen
Monadnock Valley. It could be done. Don’t touch those hillsides, don’t blast and
level them down. Not one huge ant pile of a hotel--but small houses hidden from
one another, each a private estate, where people could meet or not, as they
pleased. Not one fish-market tank of a swimming pool--but many private swimming
pools, as many as the company wished to afford--he could show them how it could
be done cheaply. Not one stock-farm corral of tennis courts for
exhibitionists--but many private tennis courts. Not a place where one went to
meet "refined company" and land a husband in two weeks--but a resort for people
who enjoyed their own presence well enough and sought only a place where they
would be left free to enjoy it.
The men listened to him silently. He saw them exchanging glances once in a
while. He felt certain that they were the kind of glances people exchange when
they cannot laugh at the speaker aloud. But it could not have been that--because
he signed a contract to build the Monadnock Valley summer resort, two days
later.
He demanded Mr. Bradley’s initials on every drawing that came out of his
drafting rooms; he remembered the Stoddard Temple. Mr. Bradley initialed,
signed, okayed; he agreed to everything; he approved everything. He seemed
delighted to let Roark have his way. But this eager complaisance had a peculiar
undertone--as if Mr. Bradley were humoring a child.
449

---

He could learn little about Mr. Bradley. It was said that the man had made a
fortune in real estate, in the Florida boom. His present company seemed to
command unlimited funds, and the names of many wealthy backers were mentioned as
shareholders. Roark never met them. The four gentlemen of the Board did not
appear again, except on short visits to the construction site, where they
exhibited little interest. Mr. Bradley was in full charge of everything--but
beyond a close watch over the budget he seemed to like nothing better than to
leave Roark in full charge.
In the eighteen months that followed, Roark had no time to wonder about Mr.
Bradley. Roark was building his greatest assignment.
For the last year he lived at the construction site, in a shanty hastily thrown
together on a bare hillside, a wooden enclosure with a bed, a stove and a large
table. His old draftsmen came to work for him again, some abandoning better jobs
in the city, to live in shacks and tents, to work in naked plank barracks that
served as architect’s office. There was so much to build that none of them
thought of wasting structural effort on their own shelters. They did not
realize, until much later, that they had lacked comforts; and then they did not
believe it--because the year at Monadnock Valley remained in their minds as the
strange time when the earth stopped turning and they lived through twelve months
of spring. They did not think of the snow, the frozen clots of earth, wind
whistling through the cracks of planking, thin blankets over army cots, stiff
fingers stretched over coal stoves in the morning, before a pencil could be held
steadily. They remembered only the feeling which is the meaning of spring--one’s
answer to the first blades of grass, the first buds on tree branches, the first
blue of the sky--the singing answer, not to grass, trees and sky, but to the
great sense of beginning, of triumphant progression, of certainty in an
achievement that nothing will stop. Not from leaves and flowers, but from wooden
scaffoldings, from steam shovels, from blocks of stone and sheets of glass
rising out of the earth they received the sense of youth, motion, purpose,
fulfillment.
They were an army and it was a crusade. But none of them thought of it in these
words, except Steven Mallory. Steven Mallory did the fountains and all the
sculpture work of Monadnock Valley. But he came to live at the site long before
he was needed. Battle, thought Steven Mallory, is a vicious concept. There is no
glory in war, and no beauty in crusades of men. But this was a battle, this was
an army and a war--and the highest experience in the life of every man who took