The Early Ayn Rand

In the daytime, Cameron's feelings were not expressed in any way, save, perhaps, in the fact that he seldom called Roark by name. "Here, pokerface," he would say, "get this done and step on it." "Look, carrot-top, what in hell did you mean by this? Lost your senses, have you?" "That's great. That's splendid. Excellent. Now throw it in the wastebasket and do it over again, you damned icicle." Loomis was baffled and Simpson scratched his head, wondering: a casual familiarity toward an employee was not a thing that Simpson had ever observed in his forty years of service with Cameron.

At night, when the work was done and the others had gone, Cameron asked Roark, sometimes, to remain. Then they sat together for hours in his dim office, and Cameron talked. The radiators of the building were usually out of order and Cameron had an old Franklin heater burning in the middle of the room. He would pull his chair to the heater, and Roark would sit on the floor, the bluish glow of the flame upon the knuckles of his hands clasping his knees. When he spoke, Cameron was no longer an old man starving slowly in an office near the Battery; nor was he a great architect scorning his vain competitors; he was the only builder in the world and he was reshaping the face of America. His words pressed down like the plunger of a fuse box setting off the explosion; and the explosion swept out the miles, the thousands of miles of houses upon which every sin of their owners stood written as a scar, as a sore running in crumbling plaster; the houses like mirrors, flaunting to the streets the naked soul of those within and the ugliness of it; the vanity, gathering soot upon twisted, flowered ledges, the ostentation, swelling like a goiter in bloated porches, the fear, the fear of the herd, cringing under columns stuck there because all the neighbors had them, the stupidity, choking in fetid air under the gables of garrets. After the explosion, his voice, his hands moving slowly as he spoke, like planes smoothing unseen walls, raised broad, clean streets and houses in the likeness of what those within should be and would be made to become by these houses: straight and simple and honest, wise and clear in their purpose, copying nothing, following nothing but the needs of those living within — and let the needs of no [one] living be those of his neighbor! To give them, Cameron was saying, what they want, but first to teach them to want — to want with their own eyes, their own brains, their own hearts. To teach them to dream — then give the dream to them in steel and mortar, and let them follow it with dreams in muscle and blood. To make them true, Howard, to make them true to themselves and give them the selves, to kill the slave in them, Howard, Howard, don't you see? — the slaves of slaves served by slaves for the sake of slaves!

He was the only builder in the world, as he spoke, but even he was not there, in that room, nor the boy who sat, taut and silent, at his feet; only that thing, that truth trembling in his hard voice, was present; he spoke of that alone and, speaking of it, he made real, tangible in the dark room, his own being and that of the boy. The heater hissed softly, with little puffing, choked explosions. The two lines on Cameron's face stood out like black gashes on the lighted patches of his cheeks, two patches floating upon the blackness that swallowed his forehead, his eyes, his beard. There was, turned up to him from the dark, a wedge of soft, living gold cut by the fringe of long lashes, then darkness again like a soft black stone and, rising upon it, a luminous vein in the stone cut as a cameo, a chin with a long mouth, a speck of fire trembling on the lower lip.

He never spoke again of his past nor of Roark's future. He never said why he talked to him thus through the long winter evenings, admitting no questions and no wonder upon it, not saying what necessity drove him to speak nor what granted Roark the right to listen. He never said whether he cared for Roark's presence there or in the world, whether it mattered to him that Roark heard or existed. Only once did he say suddenly, at the end of a long speech: "... and, yes, it may seem strange to give a life for the sake of steel skeletons and windows, your life also — my dearest one — because it's necessary..." He had gone on to speak about windows, and he had never said it again.