“I…I have ideas, Ellsworth. I’ve watched the field…I’ve…studied new methods….I could…”
“If you can, it’s yours. If you can’t, all my friendship won’t help you. And God knows I’d like to help you. You look like an old hen in the rain. Here’s what I’ll do for you, Peter: come to my office tomorrow, I’ll give you all the dope, take it home and see if you wish to break your head over it. Take a chance, if you care to. Work me out a preliminary scheme. I can’t promise anything. But if you come anywhere near it, I’ll submit it to the right people and I’ll push it for all I’m worth. That’s all I can do for you. It’s not up to me. It’s really up to you.”
Keating sat looking at him. Keating’s eyes were anxious, eager and hopeless.
“Care to try, Peter?”
“Will you let me try?”
“Of course I’ll let you. Why shouldn’t I? I’d be delighted if you, of all people, turned out to be the one to turn the trick.”
“About the way I look, Ellsworth,” he said suddenly, “about the way I look…it’s not because I mind so much that I’m a failure…it’s because I can’t understand why I slipped like that…from the top…without any reason at all…”
“Well, Peter, that could be terrifying to contemplate. The inexplicable is always terrifying. But it wouldn’t be so frightening if you stopped to ask yourself whether there’s ever been any reason why you should have been at the top….Oh, come, Peter, smile, I’m only kidding. One loses everything when one loses one’s sense of humor.”
On the following morning Keating came to his office after a visit to Ellsworth Toohey’s cubbyhole in the Banner Building. He brought with him a briefcase containing the data on the Cortlandt Homes project. He spread the papers on a large table in his office and locked the door. He asked a draftsman to bring him a sandwich at noon, and he ordered another sandwich at dinner time. “Want me to help, Pete?” asked Neil Dumont. “We could consult and discuss it and…” Keating shook his head.
He sat at his table all night. After a while he stopped looking at the papers; he sat still, thinking. He was not thinking of the charts and figures spread before him. He had studied them. He had understood what he could not do.
When he noticed that it was daylight, when he heard steps behind his locked door, the movement of men returning to work, and knew that office hours had begun, here and everywhere else in the city–he rose, walked to his desk and reached for the telephone book. He dialed the number.
“This is Peter Keating speaking. I should like to make an appointment to see Mr. Roark.”
Dear God, he thought while waiting, don’t let him see me. Make him refuse. Dear God, make him refuse and I will have the right to hate him to the end of my days. Don’t let him see me.
“Will four o’clock tomorrow afternoon be convenient for you, Mr. Keating?” said the calm, gentle voice of the secretary. “Mr. Roark will see you then.”
8.
ROARK knew that he must not show the shock of his first glance at Peter Keating–and that it was too late: he saw a faint smile on Keating’s lips, terrible in its resigned acknowledgment of disintegration.
“Are you only two years younger than I am, Howard?” was the first thing Keating asked, looking at the face of the man he had not seen for six years.
“I don’t know, Peter, I think so. I’m thirty-seven.”
“I’m thirty-nine–that’s all.”
He moved to the chair in front of Roark’s desk, groping for it with his hand. He was blinded by the band of glass that made three walls of Roark’s office. He stared at the sky and the city. He had no feeling of height here, and the buildings seemed to lie under his toes, not a real city, but miniatures of famous landmarks, incongruously close and small; he felt he could bend and pick any one of them up in his hand. He saw the black dashes which were automobiles and they seemed to crawl, it took them so long to cover a block the size of his finger. He saw the stone and plaster of the city as a substance that had soaked up light and was throwing it back, row upon row of flat, vertical planes grilled with dots of windows, each plane a reflector, rose-colored, gold and purple–and jagged streaks of smoke-blue running among them, giving them shape, angles and distance. Light streamed from the buildings into the sky and made of the clear summer blue a humble second thought, a spread of pale water over living fire. My God, thought Keating, who are the men that made all this?–and then remembered that he had been one of them.
He saw Roark’s figure for an instant, straight and gaunt against the angle of two glass panes behind the desk, then Roark sat down facing him.
Keating thought of men lost in the desert and of men perishing at sea, when, in the presence of the silent eternity of the sky, they have to speak the truth. And now he had to speak the truth, because he was in the presence of the earth’s greatest city.
“Howard, is this the terrible thing they meant by turning the other cheek–your letting me come here?’
He did not think of his voice. He did not know that it had dignity.
Roark looked at him silently for a moment; this was a greater change than the swollen face.
“I don’t know, Peter. No, if they meant actual forgiveness. Had I been hurt, I’d never forgive it. Yes, if they meant what I’m doing. I don’t think a man can hurt another, not in any important way. Neither hurt him nor help him. I have really nothing to forgive you.”
“It would be better if you felt you had. It would be less cruel.”
“I suppose so.”
“You haven’t changed, Howard.”
“I guess not.”
“If this is the punishment I must take–I want you to know that I’m taking it and that I understand. At one time I would have thought I was getting off easy.”
“You have changed, Peter.”
“I know I have.”
“I’m sorry if it has to be punishment.”
“I know you are. I believe you. But it’s all right. It’s only the last of it. I really took it night before last.”
“When you decided to come here?”
“Yes.”
“Then don’t be afraid now. What is it?”
Keating sat straight, calm, not as he had sat facing a man in a dressing gown three days ago, but almost in confident repose. He spoke slowly and without pity:
“Howard, I’m a parasite. I’ve been a parasite all my life. You designed my best projects at Stanton. You designed the first house I ever built. You designed the Cosmo-Slotnick Building. I have fed on you and on all the men like you who lived before we were born. The men who designed the Parthenon, the Gothic cathedrals, the first skyscrapers. If they hadn’t existed, I wouldn’t have known how to put stone on stone. In the whole of my life, I haven’t added a new doorknob to what men have done before me. I have taken that which was not mine and given nothing in return. I had nothing to give. This is not an act, Howard, and I’m very conscious of what I’m saying. And I came here to ask you to save me again. If you wish to throw me out, do it now.”
Roark shook his head slowly, and moved one hand in silent permission to continue.
“I suppose you know that I’m finished as an architect. Oh, not actually finished, but near enough. Others could go on like this for quite a few years, but I can’t, because of what I’ve been. Or was thought to have been. People don’t forgive a man who’s slipping. I must live up to what they thought. I can do it only in the same way I’ve done everything else in my life. I need a prestige I don’t deserve for an achievement I didn’t accomplish to save a name I haven’t earned the right to bear. I’ve been given a last chance. I know it’s my last chance. I know I can’t do it. I won’t try to bring you a mess and ask you to correct it. I’m asking you to design it and let me put my name on it.”
“What’s the job?”
“Cortlandt Homes.”
“The housing project?”
“Yes. You’ve heard about it?”
“I know everything about it.”
“You’re interested in housing projects, Howard?”
“Who offered it to you? On what conditions?”
Keating explained, precisely, dispassionately, relating his conversation with Toohey as if it were the summary of a court transcript he had read long ago. He pulled the papers out of his briefcase, put them down on the desk and went on speaking, while Roark looked at them. Roark interrupted him once. “Wait a moment, Peter. Keep still.” He waited for a long time. He saw Roark’s hand moving the papers idly, but he knew that Roark was not looking at the papers. Roark said: “Go on,” and Keating continued obediently, allowing himself no questions.