It was not malice. It was not a judgment passed upon his merit. They did not think he was worthless. They simply did not care to find out whether he was good. Sometimes, he was asked to show his sketches; he extended them across a desk, feeling a contraction of shame in the muscles of his hand; it was like having the clothes torn off his body, and the shame was not, that his body was exposed, but that it was exposed to indifferent eyes. Once in a while he made a trip to New Jersey, to see Cameron. They sat together on the porch of a house on a hill, Cameron in a wheel chair, his hands on an old blanket spread over his knees. “How is it, Howard? Pretty hard?”
“No.”
“Want me to give you a letter to one of the bastards?”
“No.”
Then Cameron would not speak of it any more, he did not want to speak of it, he did not want the thought of Roark rejected by their city to become real. When Roark came to him, Cameron spoke of architecture with the simple confidence of a private possession. They sat together, looking at he city in the distance, on the edge of the sky, beyond the river. The sky was growing dark and luminous as blue-green glass; the buildings looked like clouds condensed on the glass, gray-blue clouds frozen for an instant in straight angles and vertical shafts, with the sunset caught in the spires….
As the summer months passed, as his list was exhausted and he returned again to the places that had refused him once, Roark found that a few things were known about him and he heard the same words–spoken bluntly or timidly or angrily or apologetically–“You were kicked out of Stanton. You were kicked out of Francon’s office.” All the different voices saying it had one note in common: a note of relief in the certainty that the decision had been made for them.
He sat on the window sill, in the evening, smoking, his hand spread on the pane, the city under his fingers, the glass cold against his skin.
In September, he read an article entitled “Make Way For Tomorrow” by Gordon L. Prescott, A.G.A. in the Architectural Tribune. The article stated that the tragedy of the profession was the hardships placed in the way of its talented beginners; that great gifts had been lost in the struggle, unnoticed; that architecture was perishing from a lack of new blood and new thought, a lack of originality, vision and courage; that the author of the article made it his aim to search for promising beginners, to encourage them, develop them and give them the chance they deserved. Roark had never heard of Gordon L. Prescott, but there was a tone of honest conviction in the article. He allowed himself to start for Prescott’s office with the first hint of hope.
The reception room of Gordon L. Prescott’s office was done in gray, black and scarlet; it was correct, restrained and daring all at once. A young and very pretty secretary informed Roark that one could not see Mr. Prescott without an appointment, but that she would be very glad to make an appointment for next Wednesday at two-fifteen. On Wednesday at two-fifteen, the secretary smiled at Roark and asked him please to be seated for just a moment. At four forty-five he was admitted into Gordon L. Prescott’s office. Gordon L. Prescott wore a brown checkered tweed jacket and a white turtle-neck sweater of angora wool. He was tall, athletic and thirty-five, but his face combined a crisp air of sophisticated wisdom with the soft skin, the button nose, the small, puffed mouth of a college hero. His face was sun-scorched, his blond hair clipped short, in a military Prussian haircut. He was frankly masculine, frankly unconcerned about elegance and frankly conscious of the effect.
He listened to Roark silently, and his eyes were like a stop watch registering each separate second consumed by each separate word of Roark’s. He let the first sentence go by; on the second he interrupted to say curtly: “Let me see your drawings,” as if to make it clear that anything Roark might say was quite well known to him already.
He held the drawings in his bronzed hands. Before he looked down at them, he said: “Ah, yes, so many young men come to me for advice, so many.” He glanced at the first sketch, but raised his head before he had seen it. “Of course, it’s the combination of the practical and the transcendental that is so hard for beginners to grasp.” He slipped the sketch to the bottom of the pile. “Architecture is primarily a utilitarian conception, and the problem is to elevate the principle of pragmatism into the realm of esthetic abstraction. All else is nonsense.” He glanced at two sketches and slipped them to the bottom. “I have no patience with visionaries who see a holy crusade in architecture for architecture’s sake. The great dynamic principle is the common principle of the human equation.” He glanced at a sketch and slipped it under. “The public taste and the public heart are the final criteria of the artist. The genius is the one who knows how to express the general. The exception is to tap the unexceptional.” He
weighed the pile of sketches in his hand, noted that he had gone through half of them and dropped them down on the desk.
“Ah, yes,” he said, “your work. Very interesting. But not practical. Not mature. Unfocused and undisciplined. Adolescent. Originality for originality’s sake. Not at all in the spirit of the present day. If you want an idea of the sort of thing for which there is a crying need–here–let me show you.” He took a sketch out of a drawer of the desk. “Here’s a young man who came to me totally unrecommended, a beginner who had never worked before. When you can produce stuff like this, you won’t find it necessary to look for a job. I saw this one sketch of his and I took him on at once, started him at twenty-five a week, too. There’s no question but that he is a potential genius.” He extended the sketch to Roark. The sketch represented a house in the shape of a grain silo incredibly merged with the simplified, emaciated shadow of the Parthenon.
“That,” said Gordon L. Prescott, “is originality, the new in the eternal. Try toward something like this. I can’t really say that I predict a great deal for your future. We must be frank, I wouldn’t want to give you illusions based on my authority. You have a great deal to learn. I couldn’t venture a guess on what talent you might possess or develop later. But with hard work, perhaps…Architecture is a difficult profession, however, and the competition is stiff, you know, very stiff…And now, if you’ll excuse me, my secretary has an appointment waiting for me….”
Roark walked home late on an evening in October. It had been another of the many days that stretched into months behind him, and he could not tell what had taken place in the hours of that day, whom he had seen, what form the words of refusal had taken. He concentrated fiercely on the few minutes at hand, when he was in an office, forgetting everything else; he forgot these minutes when he left the office; it had to be done, it had been done, it concerned him no longer. He was free once more on his way home.
A long street stretched before him, its high banks, coming close together ahead, so narrow that he felt as if he could spread his arms, seize the spires and push them apart. He walked swiftly, the pavements as a springboard throwing his steps forward.
He saw a lighted triangle of concrete suspended somewhere hundreds of feet above the ground. He could not see what stood below, supporting it; he was free to think of what he’d want to see there, what he would have made to be seen. Then he thought suddenly that now, in this moment, according to the city, according to everyone save that hard certainty within him, he would never build again, never–before he had begun. He shrugged. Those things happening to him, in those offices of strangers, were only a kind of sub-reality, unsubstantial incidents in the path of a substance they could not reach or touch.
He turned into side streets leading to the East River. A lonely traffic light hung far ahead, a spot of red in a bleak darkness. The old houses crouched low to the ground, hunched under the weight of the sky. The street was empty and hollow, echoing to his footsteps. He went on, his collar raised, his hands in his pockets. His shadow rose from under his heels, when he passed a light, and brushed a wall in a long black arc, like the sweep of a windshield wiper.