"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."
"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 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 snarclass="underline" "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!"