"Thank you."
"You've been forging straight ahead, haven't you? Had three commissions already?"
"Four."
"Oh, yes, of course, four. Pretty good. I hear you've been having a little trouble with the Sanborns."
"I have."
"Well, it's not all smooth sailing, not all of it, you know. No new commissions since? Nothing?"
"No. Nothing."
"Well, it will come. I've always said that architects don't have to cut one another's throat, there's plenty of work for all of us, we must develop a spirit of professional unity and co-operation. For instance, take that competition — have you sent your entry in already?"
"What competition?"
"Why, the competition. The Cosmo-Slotnick competition."
"I'm not sending any entry."
"You're ... not? Not at all?"
"No."
"Why?"
"I don't enter competitions."
"Why, for heaven's sake?"
"Come on, Peter. You didn't come here to discuss that."
"As a matter of fact I did think I'd show you my own entry, you understand I'm not asking you to help me, I just want your reaction, just a general opinion."
He hastened to open the folder.
Roark studied the sketches. Keating snapped: "Well? Is it all right?"
"No. It's rotten. And you know it."
Then, for hours, while Keating watched and the sky darkened and lights flared up in the windows of the city, Roark talked, explained, slashed lines through the plans, untangled the labyrinth of the theater's exits out windows, unraveled halls, smashed useless arches, straightened stairways. Keating stammered once: "Jesus, Howard! Why don't you enter the competition, if you can do it like this?" Roark answered: "Because I can't. I couldn't if I tried. I dry up. I go blank. I can't give them what they want. But I can straighten someone else's damn mess when I see it:"
It was morning when he pushed the plans aside. Keating whispered:
"And the elevation?"
"Oh, to hell with your elevation! I don't want to look at your damn Renaissance elevations!" But he looked. He could not prevent his hand from cutting lines across the perspective. "All right, damn you, give them good Renaissance if you must and if there is such a thing! Only I can't do that for you. Figure it out yourself. Something like this. Simpler. Peter, simpler, more direct, as honest as you can make of a dishonest thing. Now go home and try to work out something on this order."
Keating went home. He copied Roark's plans. He worked out Roark's hasty sketch of the elevation into a neat, finished perspective. Then the drawings were mailed, properly addressed to:
"The Most Beautiful Building in the World" Competition
Cosmo-Slotnick Pictures, Inc.
New York City.
The envelope, accompanying the entry, contained the names: "Francon & Heyer, architects, Peter Keating, associated designer."
Through the months of that winter Roark found no other chances, no offers, no prospects of commissions. He sat at his desk and forgot, at times, to turn on the lights in the early dusk. It was as if the heavy immobility of all the hours that had flowed through the office, of its door, of its air were beginning to seep into his muscles. He would rise and fling a book at the wall, to feel his arm move, to hear the burst of sound. He smiled, amused, picked up the book, and laid it neatly back on the desk. He turned on the desk lamp. Then he stopped, before he had withdrawn his hands from the cone of light under the lamp, and he looked at his hands; he spread his fingers out slowly. Then he remembered what Cameron had said to him long ago. He jerked his hands away. He reached for his coat, turned the lights off, locked the door and went home.
As spring approached he knew that his money would not last much longer. He paid the rent on his office promptly on the first of each month. He wanted the feeling of thirty days ahead, during which he would still own the office. He entered it calmly each morning. He found only that he did not want to look at the calendar when it began to grow dark and he knew that another day of the thirty had gone. When he noticed this, he made himself look at the calendar. It was a race he was running now, a race between his rent money and ... he did not know the name of the other contestant. Perhaps it was every man whom he passed on the street.
When he went up to his office, the elevator operators looked at him in a queer, lazy, curious sort of way; when he spoke, they answered, not insolently, but in an indifferent drawl that seemed to say it would become insolent in a moment. They did not know what he was doing or why; they knew only that he was a man to whom no clients ever came. He attended, because Austen Heller asked him to attend, the few parties Heller gave occasionally; he was asked by guests: "Oh, you're an architect? You'll forgive me, I haven't kept up with architecture — what have you built?" When he answered, he heard them say: "Oh, yes, indeed," and he saw the conscious politeness of their manner tell him that he was an architect by presumption. They had never seen his buildings; they did not know whether his buildings were good or worthless; they knew only that they had never heard of these buildings.
It was a war in which he was invited to fight nothing, yet he was pushed forward to fight, he had to fight, he had no choice — and no adversary.
He passed by buildings under construction. He stopped to look at the steel cages. He felt at times as if the beams and girders were shaping themselves not into a house, but into a barricade to stop him; and the few steps on the sidewalk that separated him from the wooden fence enclosing the construction were the steps he would never be able to take. It was pain, but it was a blunted, unpenetrating pain. It's true, he would tell himself; it's not, his body would answer, the strange, untouchable healthiness of his body.
The Fargo Store had opened. But one building could not save a neighborhood; Fargo's competitors had been right, the tide had turned, was flowing uptown, his customers were deserting him. Remarks were made openly on the decline of John Fargo, who had topped his poor business judgment by an investment in a preposterous kind of a building; which proved, it was stated, that the public would not accept these architectural innovations. It was not stated that the store was the cleanest and brightest in the city; that the skill of its plan made its operation easier than had ever been possible; that the neighborhood had been doomed before its erection. The building took the blame.
Athelstan Beasely, the wit of the architectural profession, the court jester of the A.G.A., who never seemed to be building anything, but organized all the charity balls, wrote in his column entitled "Quips and Quirks" in the A.G.A. Bulletin:
"Well, lads and lassies, here's a fairy tale with a moraclass="underline" seems there was, once upon a time, a little boy with hair the color of a Hallowe'en pumpkin, who thought that he was better than all you common boys and girls. So to prove it, he up and built a house, which is a very nice house, except that nobody can live in it, and a store, which is a very lovely store, except that it's going bankrupt. He also erected a very eminent structure, to wit: a dogcart on a mud road. This last is reported to be doing very well indeed, which, perhaps, is the right field of endeavor for that little boy."
At the end of March Roark read in the papers about Roger Enright. Roger Enright possessed millions, an oil concern and no sense of restraint. This made his name appear in the papers frequently. He aroused a half-admiring, half-derisive awe by the incoherent variety of his sudden ventures. The latest was a project for a new type of residential development — an apartment building, with each unit complete and isolated like an expensive private home. It was to be known as the Enright House. Enright had declared that he did not want it to look like anything anywhere else. He had approached and rejected several of the best architects in town.