The Early Ayn Rand (67 page)

Roark went to see the picture. It was still Vesta, as he had seen her last. She had lost nothing and learned nothing. She had not learned the proper camera angles, she had not learned the correct screen makeup; her mouth was too large, her cheeks too gaunt, her hair uncombed, her movements too jerky and angular. She was like nothing ever seen in a film before, she was a contradiction to all standards, she was awkward, crude, shocking, she was like a breath of fresh air. The studio had expected her to be hated; she was suddenly worshiped by the public. She was not pretty, nor gracious, nor gentle, nor sweet; she played the part of a young girl not as a tubercular flower, but as a steel knife. A reviewer said that she was a cross between a medieval pageboy and a gun moll. She achieved the incredible: she was the first woman who ever allowed herself to make strength attractive on the screen.

For a few moments after he left the theater, Roark almost wished to have her back. But he forgot it by the time he got home. Afterwards, he remembered, sometimes, that magnificent performance; he wondered whether he had been wrong and she would win her battle, after all; but he could no longer feel it as a thing too close to him.

In the daytime, Cameron’s feelings were not expressed in any way, save, perhaps, in the fact that he seldom called Roark by name. “Here, pokerface,” he would say, “get this done and step on it.” “Look, carrot-top, what in hell did you mean by this? Lost your senses, have you?” “That’s great. That’s splendid. Excellent. Now throw it in the wastebasket and do it over again, you damned icicle.” Loomis was baffled and Simpson scratched his head, wondering: a casual familiarity toward an employee was not a thing that Simpson had ever observed in his forty years of service with Cameron.

At night, when the work was done and the others had gone, Cameron asked Roark, sometimes, to remain. Then they sat together for hours in his dim office, and Cameron talked. The radiators of the building were usually out of order and Cameron had an old Franklin heater burning in the middle of the room. He would pull his chair to the heater, and Roark would sit on the floor, the bluish glow of the flame upon the knuckles of his hands clasping his knees. When he spoke, Cameron was no longer an old man starving slowly in an office near the Battery; nor was he a great architect scorning his vain competitors; he was the only builder in the world and he was reshaping the face of America. His words pressed down like the plunger of a fuse box setting off the explosion; and the explosion swept out the miles, the thousands of miles of houses upon which every sin of their owners stood written as a scar, as a sore running in crumbling plaster; the houses like mirrors, flaunting to the streets the naked soul of those within and the ugliness of it; the vanity, gathering soot upon twisted, flowered ledges, the ostentation, swelling like a goiter in bloated porches, the fear, the fear of the herd, cringing under columns stuck there because all the neighbors had them, the stupidity, choking in fetid air under the gables of garrets. After the explosion, his voice, his hands moving slowly as he spoke, like planes smoothing unseen walls, raised broad, clean streets and houses in the likeness of what those within should be and would be made to become by these houses: straight and simple and honest, wise and clear in their purpose, copying nothing, following nothing but the needs of those living within—and let the needs of no [one] living be those of his neighbor! To give them, Cameron was saying, what they want, but first to teach them to want—to want with their own eyes, their own brains, their own hearts. To teach them to dream—then give the dream to them in steel and mortar, and let them follow it with dreams in muscle and blood. To make them true, Howard, to make them true to themselves and give them the selves, to kill the slave in them, Howard, Howard, don’t you see?—the slaves of slaves served by slaves for the sake of slaves!

He was the only builder in the world, as he spoke, but even he was not there, in that room, nor the boy who sat, taut and silent, at his feet; only that thing, that truth trembling in his hard voice, was present; he spoke of that alone and, speaking of it, he made real, tangible in the dark room, his own being and that of the boy. The heater hissed softly, with little puffing, choked explosions. The two lines on Cameron’s face stood out like black gashes on the lighted patches of his cheeks, two patches floating upon the blackness that swallowed his forehead, his eyes, his beard. There was, turned up to him from the dark, a wedge of soft, living gold cut by the fringe of long lashes, then darkness again like a soft black stone and, rising upon it, a luminous vein in the stone cut as a cameo, a chin with a long mouth, a speck of fire trembling on the lower lip.

He never spoke again of his past nor of Roark’s future. He never said why he talked to him thus through the long winter evenings, admitting no questions and no wonder upon it, not saying what necessity drove him to speak nor what granted Roark the right to listen. He never said whether he cared for Roark’s presence there or in the world, whether it mattered to him that Roark heard or existed. Only once did he say suddenly, at the end of a long speech: “. . . and, yes, it may seem strange to give a life for the sake of steel skeletons and windows, your life also—my dearest one—because it’s necessary. . . .” He had gone on to speak about windows, and he had never said it again.

But in the mornings, as Cameron entered his office sharply on the dot of nine, he would stop first at the door of the drafting room, throw a long, sharp glance at the men, then slam the door behind him. Loomis had said once, not suspecting the accuracy of what he thought to be a good joke, that Cameron had the look of a man who’d seen a miracle and wanted to make sure it hadn’t gone.

Then came the morning when Cameron was late. The clock on the wall of the drafting room was moving past the mark of ten, and Roark noticed that Loomis and Simpson were exchanging glances, silent, significant glances heavy with a secret he did not share. Loomis clucked his tongue once, looking at the clock, with a wet, bitter, mocking sound. Simpson sighed heavily and bent over his table, his old head bobbing softly up and down several times, in hopeless resignation.

At half past ten, Trager shuffled into the drafting room and stood on the threshold, seeing nobody.

“Mr. Darrow calling,” he said to no one at all, the sounds of his voice like a string of precision dancers, all stiff and all alike, “says something awful’s happened at the Huston Street job and he’s going down there and for Mr. Cameron to meet him there at once. I guess one of you guys will have to go.”

Darrow was the consulting structural engineer on the Huston Street job, and such a message from him went like a cold gust through the room. But it was the “I guess” that seemed to leap out of Trager’s words, weighted with the secret meaning of why he guessed so and of why he expected them to know it. Loomis and Simpson looked helplessly at one another, and Loomis chuckled. Roark said brusquely, not knowing what had put anger into his voice: “Mr. Cameron said yesterday that he was going to inspect the Huston Street job. That’s probably why he’s late. Tell Darrow that he’s on his way there now.”

Loomis whistled through his teeth, and it seemed to Roark that the sound was laughing, bursting like steam from under tons of pressure of contempt. Trager would not move, would not look at Roark, but glanced slowly at the others. The others had nothing to say.

“Okay,” said Trager, at last, to Roark, a flat, short sound concentrating within it a long sentence, saying that Trager would obey, because he didn’t give a damn, even though he hadn’t believed a single word of Roark’s, because Roark knew better, or should. Trager turned and shuffled back to his telephone.

Half an hour later, he returned.

“Mr. Darrow calling from Huston Street,” he said, his voice dull and even and sleepy, as if he were reporting on the amount of new pencils to be ordered, “he says to please send someone over and pour Mr. Cameron out of there, also to see what’s to be done.”

In the silence, Roark’s T-square clattered loudly to the floor. The three men looked at him, and Loomis grinned viciously, triumphantly. But there was nothing to be seen on Roark’s face. Roark turned to Trager slowly.

“I’m going there,” said Roark.

“No, I guess you can’t,” mumbled Simpson. “I guess I gotta go.”

“What can you do there?” Loomis snapped at Roark, more insolently than he had ever dared before. “What in hell do
you
know about construction? Let Simpson go.”

“
I’m
going,” said Roark.

He had his coat and cap on, he was out, before the others knew what to say; they knew also that they had better keep quiet.

Roark jumped into a cab, ordering: “Step on it! Fly, go through the lights!” He had in his pocket five dollars and forty-six cents, saved painstakingly from seven months of work. He hoped it would be enough to pay for the cab.

The Huston Street job was a twenty-story office building in a squalid block of lofts. It was the most important commission that Cameron had had for a long time. He had said nothing about it, but Roark knew that it was precious to the old master as a newborn child, as a first son. Once again, Cameron thought, he had a chance to show the indifferent city what he could do, how cheaply, how efficiently he could do it. Cameron, the bitter, the cynical, the hater of all men, had never lost the expectation of a miracle. He kept waiting, saying to himself always, “Next time,” next time someone would see, next time the men who spent fortunes on grocery displays of marble vegetables and cursed the twisted, botched space within would realize the simplicity, the economy, the wisdom of his work, would come to him if he gave them but one more example. The example was granted to him again. And Cameron, who cursed all builders and owners, who laughed in their faces, prayed now that nothing would go wrong with the Huston Street job. Everything had gone wrong with it from the beginning.

The structure was owned by two brothers. It was the younger one who had insisted upon choosing Cameron as the architect, because he had seen Cameron’s old buildings and a glimmer of sense had settled itself stubbornly within his brain; it was the older who had resented it, while giving in, had doubted the choice, and had selected as contractor for the building an old friend of his, who had little reputation but much contempt for architects. It had been a silent, vicious war from the beginning, with the contractor disregarding Cameron’s orders, botching instructions, ignoring specifications, then running to the owners with complaints against ignorant architects whom he intended to teach a thing or two about building. The owners always took the side of the contractor, who was, they felt certain, protecting their interests against malignant strangers. There had been delays. There had been strikes among the building workers, due to unfair, planless, purposeless management. The delays cost money. It was not Cameron’s fault, but there was no court before which he could prove it. The court that passed judgment upon him would be the spreading whispers: “Oh, yeah, Cameron. He starts with a budget of four hundred thousand and it’s six hundred before the steel’s up. Have you heard what that building of his down in Huston Street has cost?”

Roark thought of that as the cab whirled into Huston Street. Then he forgot it for a moment, forgot Cameron, forgot everything else. He was looking at a cage of steel rising in a gash between streaked, sooted brick walls. There it was, steel columns pointing at the sky, gray arches of floors mounting like even shelves, tangled in wires, in ropes and cables and grimy planks, with scaffoldings clinging to its empty flanks, gray overalls burrowing through its bowels, derricks like fountains of iron flung up from its veins. It was only a raw chaos of beams to those passing it in the street, but Roark thought that those on the street had the narrow, dissecting eyes of the X-ray marking nothing save bones, while he saw the whole body completed, the shape of living flesh, the walls, the angles, the windows. He could never look at the structure of a building, which he had seen born in lines and dots and squares upon a piece of paper, without feeling his throat tighten, his breath plunge to his stomach, and the silly desire, dim and real in his hand, to take his hat off. His fingers tightened on the edge of the cab window. When the car stopped, he got out supplely, he walked to the building swiftly, confidently, his head high and light as if he were coming home, as if the steel hulk were gathering assurance from him and he—from its naked beams. Then, he stopped.

Cameron stood leaning against the boards of the superintendent’s shanty. Cameron was erect, with an air of self-possessed, utter, terrifying dignity. Only his eyes, dun, swimming, unfocused, were blinking at Roark with a heavy, offensive persistence.

“Who are you?” asked Cameron.

The voice, thick, blurred, spongy, was not one that Roark had ever heard.

Cameron lunged towards him, swayed, stretched an arm to hold on to the wall, stood uncertainly, the weight of his short, thick body sagging suspended to his arm, with five stubby fingers spread on the planks, like leeches sucking into wood.

“Hey, you,” he said to Roark softly, waving a limp finger in his face, “I’ll tell you something. I’ve got something to tell you. It’s on account of the drill. You know the drill? It drills a little hole, so softly, it purrs like a bee in springtime, it drills right down through your throat, through your stomach, through the earth below, there’s no bottom to that hole, no end, no stopping. There’s a hole in the earth and it widens all the time and things whirl in it, spirals, widening. It hurts so very terribly . . . I know a fellow who’s hurt so much that I hear him screaming all the time. But I don’t know him very well. . . . That’s why I’ve got something to tell you. If you’re looking at this thing here behind us, go and get a good laugh. It’s wonderful what they’ve done to it. But walk carefully, there’s spirals in the ground, widening . . . you see? . . .”