He sat looking at the letter on his desk. The degradation was that he could not think of those nights behind him, he could not think of the building that should have risen in Astoria and of the building that would now take its place; it was that he thought only of the bill unpaid to the electric company….
In these last two years Cameron had disappeared from his office for weeks at a time, and Roark had not found him at home, and had known what was happening, but could only wait, hoping for Cameron’s safe return. Then, Cameron had lost even the shame of his agony, and had come to his office reeling, recognizing no one, openly drunk and flaunting it before the walls of the only place on earth he had respected.
Roark learned to face his own landlord with the quiet statement that he could not pay him for another week; the landlord was afraid of him and did not insist. Peter Keating heard of it somehow, as he always heard everything he wanted to know. He came to Roark’s unheated room, one evening, and sat down, keeping his overcoat on. He produced a wallet, pulled out five ten-dollar bills, and handed them to Roark. “You need it, Howard. I know you need it. Don’t start protesting now. You can pay me back any time.” Roark looked at him, astonished, took the money, saying: “Yes, I need it. Thank you, Peter.” Then Keating said: “What in hell are you doing, wasting yourself on old Cameron? What do you want to live like this for? Chuck it, Howard, and come with us. All I have to do is say so. Francon’ll be delighted. We’ll start you at sixty a week.” Roark took the money out of his pocket and handed it back to him. “Oh, for God’s sake, Howard! I…I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“I didn’t either.”
“But please, Howard, keep it anyway.”
“Good night, Peter.”
Roark was thinking of that when Cameron entered the drafting room, the letter from the Security Trust Company in his hand. He gave the letter to Roark, said nothing, turned and walked back to his office. Roark read the letter and followed him. Whenever they lost another commission Roark knew that Cameron wanted to see him in the office, but not to speak of it; just to see him there, to talk of other things, to lean upon the reassurance of his presence.
On Cameron’s desk Roark saw a copy of the New York Banner.
It was the leading newspaper of the great Wynand chain. It was a paper he would have expected to find in a kitchen, in a barbershop, in a third-rate drawing room, in the subway; anywhere but in Cameron’s office. Cameron saw him looking at it and grinned.
“Picked it up this morning, on my way here. Funny, isn’t it? I didn’t know we’d…get that letter today. And yet it seems appropriate together–this paper and that letter. Don’t know what made me buy it. A sense of symbolism, I suppose. Look at it, Howard. It’s interesting.”
Roark glanced through the paper. The front page carried the picture of an unwed mother with thick glistening lips, who had shot her lover; the picture headed the first installment of her autobiography and a detailed account of her trial. The other pages ran a crusade against utility companies; a daily horoscope; extracts from church sermons; recipes for young brides; pictures of girls with beautiful legs; advice on how to hold a husband; a baby contest; a poem proclaiming that to wash dishes was nobler than to write a symphony; an article proving that a woman who had borne a child was automatically a saint.
“That’s our answer, Howard. That’s the answer given to you and to me. This paper. That it exists and that it’s liked. Can you fight that? Have you any words to be heard and understood by that? They shouldn’t have sent us the letter. They should have sent a copy of Wynand’s Banner. It would be simpler and clearer. Do you know that in a few years that incredible bastard, Gail Wynand, will rule the world? It will be a beautiful world. And perhaps he’s right.”
Cameron held the paper outstretched, weighing it on the palm of his hand.
“To give them what they want, Howard, and to let them worship you for it, for licking their feet–or…or what? What’s the use?…Only it doesn’t matter, nothing matters, not even that it doesn’t matter to me any more….” Then he looked at Roark. He added:
“If only I could hold on until I’ve started you on your own, Howard….”
“Don’t speak of that.”
“I want to speak of that…. It’s funny, Howard, next spring it will be three years that you’ve been here. Seems so much longer, doesn’t it? Well, have I taught you anything? I’ll tell you: I’ve taught you a great deal and nothing. No one can teach you anything, not at the core, at the source of it. What you’re doing–it’s yours, not mine, I can only teach you to do it better. I can give you the means, but the aim–the aim’s your own. You won’t be a little disciple putting up anemic little things in early Jacobean or late Cameron. What you’ll be…if only I could live to see it!”
“You’ll live to see it. And you know it now.” Cameron stood looking at the bare walls of his office, at the white piles of bills on his desk, at the sooty rain trickling slowly down the windowpanes.
“I have no answer to give them, Howard. I’m leaving you to face them. You’ll answer them. All of them, the Wynand papers and what makes the Wynand papers possible and what lies behind that. It’s a strange mission to give you. I don’t know what our answer is to be. I know only that there is an answer and that you’re holding it, that you’re the answer, Howard, and some day you’ll find the words for it.”
6.
SERMONS IN STONE by Ellsworth M. Toohey was published in January of the year 1925.
It had a fastidious jacket of midnight blue with plain silver letters and a silver pyramid in one corner. It was subtitled “Architecture for Everybody” and its success was sensational. It presented the entire history of architecture, from mud hut to skyscraper, in the terms of the man in the street, but it made these terms appear scientific. Its author stated in his preface that it was an attempt “to bring architecture where it belongs–to the people.” He stated further that he wished to see the average man “think and speak of architecture as he speaks of baseball.” He did not bore his readers with the technicalities of the Five Orders, the post and lintel, the flying buttress or reinforced concrete. He filled his pages with homey accounts of the daily life of the Egyptian housekeeper, the Roman shoe-cobbler, the mistress of Louis XIV, what they ate, how they washed, where they shopped and what effect their buildings had upon their existence. But he gave his readers the impression that they were learning all they had to know about the Five Orders and the reinforced concrete. He gave his readers the impression that there were no problems, no achievements, no reaches of thought beyond the common daily routine of people nameless in the past as they were in the present; that science had no goal and no expression beyond its influence on this routine; that merely by living through their own obscure days his readers were representing and achieving all the highest objectives of any civilization. His scientific precision was impeccable and his erudition astounding; no one could refute him on the cooking utensils of Babylon or the doormats of Byzantium. He wrote with the flash and the color of a first-hand observer. He did not plod laboriously through the centuries; he danced, said the critics, down the road of the ages, as a jester, a friend and a prophet.
He said that architecture was truly the greatest of the arts, because it was anonymous, as all greatness. He said that the world had many famous buildings, but few renowned builders, which was as it should be, since no one man had ever created anything of importance in architecture, or elsewhere, for that matter. The few whose names had lived were really impostors, expropriating the glory of the people as others expropriated its wealth. “When we gaze at the magnificence of an ancient monument and ascribe its achievement to one man, we are guilty of spiritual embezzlement. We forget the army of craftsmen, unknown and unsung, who preceded him in the darkness of the ages, who toiled humbly–all heroism is humble–each contributing his small share to the common treasure of his time. A great building is not the private invention of some genius or other. It is merely a condensation of the spirit of a people.”