“I think I’d almost give my life for it–only then I couldn’t build it. Is that what you wanted to hear?”
“Something like that. I won’t demand your life. But it’s nice to shock the breath out of you for once. Thank you for being shocked. It means you understood what the Wynand Building implies. The highest structure in the city. And the greatest.”
“I know that’s what you’d want.”
“I won’t build it yet. But I’ve waited for it all these years. And now you’ll wait with me. Do you know that I really like to torture you, in a way? That I always want to?”
“I know.”
“I brought you here only to tell you that it will be yours when I build it. I have waited, because I felt I was not ready for it. Since I met you, I knew I was ready–and I don’t mean because you’re an architect. But we’ll have to wait a little longer, just another year or two, till the country gets back on its feet. This is the wrong time for building. Of course, everybody says that the day of the skyscraper is past. That it’s obsolete. I don’t give a damn about that. I’ll make it pay for itself. The Wynand Enterprises have offices scattered all over town. I want them all in one building. And I hold enough over the heads of enough important people to force them to rent all the rest of the space. Perhaps, it will be the last skyscraper built in New York. So much the better. The greatest and the last.”
Roark sat looking across the street, at the streaked ruins.
“To be torn down, Howard. All of it. Razed off. The place where I did not run things. To be supplanted by a park and the Wynand Building….The best structures of New York are wasted because they can’t be seen, squeezed against one another in blocks. My building will be seen. It will reclaim the whole neighborhood. Let the others follow. Not the right location, they’ll say? Who makes right locations? They’ll see. This might become the new center of the city–when the city starts living again. I planned it when the Banner was nothing but a fourth-rate rag. I haven’t miscalculated, have I? I knew what I would become…A monument to my life, Howard. Remember what you said when you came to my office for the first time? A statement of my life. There were things in my past which I have not liked. But all the things of which I was proud will remain. After I am gone that building will be Gail Wynand….I knew I’d find the right architect when the time came. I didn’t know he would be much more than just an architect I hired. I’m glad it happened this way. It’s a kind of reward. It’s as if I had been forgiven. My last and greatest achievement will also be your greatest. It will be not only my monument but the best gift I could offer to the man who means most to me on earth. Don’t frown, you know that’s what you are to me. Look at that horror across the street. I want to sit here and watch you looking at it. That’s what we’re going to destroy–you and I. That’s what it will rise from–the Wynand Building by Howard Roark. I’ve waited for it from the day I was born. From the day you were born, you’ve waited for your one great chance. There it is, Howard, across the street. Yours–from me.”
10.
IT HAD stopped raining, but Peter Keating wished it would start again. The pavements glistened, there were dark blotches on the walls of buildings, and since it did not come from the sky, it looked as if the city were bathed in cold sweat. The air was heavy with untimely darkness, disquieting like premature old age, and there were yellow puddles of light in windows. Keating had missed the rain, but he felt wet, from his bones out.
He had left his office early, and he walked home. The office seemed unreal to him, as it had for a long time. He could find reality only in the evenings, when he slipped furtively up to Roark’s apartment. He did not slip and it was not furtive, he told himself angrily–and knew that it was; even though he walked through the lobby of the Enright House and rode up in an elevator, like any man on a legitimate errand. It was the vague anxiety,’ the impulse to glance around at every face, the fear of being recognized; it was a load of anonymous guilt, not toward any person, but the more frightening sense of guilt without a victim.
He took from Roark rough sketches for every detail of Cortlandt–to have them translated into working drawings by his own staff. He listened to Roark’s instructions. He memorized arguments to offer his employers against every possible objection. He absorbed like a recording machine. Afterward, when he gave explanations to his draftsmen, his voice sounded like a disk being played. He did not mind. He questioned nothing.
Now he walked slowly, through the streets full of rain that would not come. He looked up and saw empty space where the towers of familiar buildings had been; it did not look like fog or clouds, but like a solid spread of gray sky that had worked a gigantic, soundless destruction. That sight of buildings vanishing through the sky had always made him uneasy. He walked on, looking down.
It was the shoes that he noticed first. He knew that he must have seen the woman’s face, that the instinct of self-preservation had jerked his glance away from it and let his conscious perception begin with the shoes. They were flat, brown oxfords, offensively competent, too well shined on the muddy pavement, contemptuous of rain and of beauty. His eyes went to the brown skirt, to the tailored jacket, costly and cold like a uniform, to the hand with a hole in the finger of an expensive glove, to the lapel that bore a preposterous ornament–a bow-legged Mexican with red-enameled pants–stuck there in a clumsy attempt at pertness; to the thin lips, to the glasses, to the eyes.
“Katie,” he said.
She stood by the window of a bookstore; her glance hesitated halfway between recognition and a book title she had been examining; then, with recognition evident in the beginning of a smile, the glance went back to the book title, to finish and make an efficient note of it. Then her eyes returned to Keating. Her smile was pleasant; not as an effort over bitterness, and not as welcome; just pleasant.
“Why, Peter Keating,” she said. “Hello, Peter.”
“Katie…” He could not extend his hand or move closer to her.
“Yes, imagine running into you like this, why, New York is just like any small town, though I suppose without the better features.” There was no strain in her voice.
“What are you doing here? I thought…I heard…” He knew she had a good job in Washington and had moved there two years ago.
“Just a business trip. Have to dash right back tomorrow. Can’t say that I mind it, either. New York seems so dead, so slow.”
“Well, I’m glad you like your job…if you mean…isn’t that what you mean?”
“Like my job? What a silly thing to say. Washington is the only grownup place in the country. I don’t see how people can live anywhere else. What have you been doing, Peter? I saw your name in the paper the other day, it was something important.”
“I…I’m working….You haven’t changed much, Katie, not really, have you?–I mean, your face–you look like you used to–in a way…”
“It’s the only face I’ve got. Why do people always have to talk about changes if they haven’t seen each other for a year or two? I ran into Grace Parker yesterday and she had to go into an inventory of my appearance. I could just hear every word before she said it–‘You look so nice–not a day older, really, Catherine.’ People are provincial.”
“But…you do look nice….It’s…it’s nice to see you…”
“I’m glad to see you, too. How is the building industry?”
“I don’t know….What you read about must have been Cortlandt…I’m doing Cortlandt Homes, a housing…”
“Yes, of course. That was it. I think it’s very good for you, Peter. To do a job, not just for private profit and a fat fee, but with a social purpose. I think architects should stop money grubbing and give a little time to government work and broader objectives.”
“Why, most of them would grab it if they could get it, it’s one of the hardest rackets to break into, it’s a closed…”
“Yes, yes, I know. It’s simply impossible to make the laymen understand our methods of working, and that’s why all we hear are all those stupid, boring complaints. You mustn’t read the Wynand papers, Peter.”