Then he worked for hours, sometimes all night, while Keating sat and watched. He forgot Keating's presence. He saw only a building and his chance to shape it. He knew that the shape would be changed, torn, distorted. Still, some order and reason would remain in its plan. It would be a better building than it would have been if he refused.
Sometimes, looking at the sketch of a structure simpler, cleaner, more honest than the others, Roark would say: "That's not so bad, Peter. You're improving." And Keating would feel an odd little jolt inside, something quiet, private and precious, such as he never felt from the compliments of Guy Francon, of his clients, of all others. Then he would forget it and feel much more substantially pleased when a wealthy lady murmured over a teacup: "You're the coming architect of America, Mr. Keating," though she had never seen his buildings.
He found compensations for his submission to Roark. He would enter the drafting room in the morning, throw a tracing boy's assignment down on Roark's table and say: "Howard, do this up for me, will you? — and make it fast." In the middle of the day, he would send a boy to Roark's table to say loudly: "Mr. Keating wishes to see you in his office at once." He would come out of the office and walk in Roark's direction and say to the room at large: "Where the hell are those Twelfth Street plumbing specifications? Oh, Howard, will you look through the files and dig them up for me?"
At first, he was afraid of Roark's reaction. When he saw no reaction, only a silent obedience, he could restrain himself no longer. He felt a sensual pleasure in giving orders to Roark; and he felt also a fury of resentment at Roark's passive compliance. He continued, knowing that he could continue only so long as Roark exhibited no anger, yet wishing desperately to break him down to an explosion. No explosion came.
Roark liked the days when he was sent out to inspect buildings in construction. He walked through the steel hulks of buildings more naturally than on pavements. The workers observed with curiosity that he walked on narrow planks, on naked beams hanging over empty space, as easily as the best of them.
It was a day in March, and the sky was a faint green with the first hint of spring. In Central Park, five hundred feet below, the earth caught the tone of the sky in a shade of brown that promised to become green, and the lakes lay like splinters of glass under the cobwebs of bare branches. Roark walked through the shell of what was to be a gigantic apartment hotel, and stopped before an electrician at work.
The man was toiling assiduously, bending conduits around a beam. It was a task for hours of strain and patience, in a space overfilled against all calculations. Roark stood, his hands in his pockets, watching the man's slow, painful progress.
The man raised his head and turned to him abruptly. He had a big head and a face so ugly that it became fascinating; it was neither old nor flabby, but it was creased in deep gashes and the powerful jowls drooped like a bulldog's; the eyes were startling — wide, round and china-blue.
"Well?" the man asked angrily, "what's the matter, Brick-top?"
"You're wasting your time," said Roark.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"You don't say!"
"It will take you hours to get your pipes around that beam."
"Know a better way to do it?"
"Sure."
"Run along, punk. We don't like college smarties around here."
"Cut a hole in that beam and put your pipes through."
"What?"
"Cut a hole through the beam."
"The hell I will!"
"The hell you won't."
"It ain't done that way."
"I've done it."
"You?"
"It's done everywhere."
"It ain't gonna be done here. Not by me."
"Then I'll do it for you."
The man roared. "That's rich! When did office boys learn to do a man's work?"
"Give me your torch."
"Look out, boy! It'll burn your pretty pink toes!"
Roark took the man's gloves and goggles, took the acetylene torch, knelt, and sent a thin jet of blue fire at the center of the beam. The man stood watching him. Roark's arm was steady, holding the tense, hissing streak of flame in leash, shuddering faintly with its violence, but holding it aimed straight. There was no strain, no effort in the easy posture of his body, only in his arm. And it seemed as if the blue tension eating slowly through metal came not from the flame but from the hand holding it.
He finished, put the torch down, and rose.
"Jesus!" said the electrician. "Do you know how to handle a torch!"
"Looks like it, doesn't it?" He removed the gloves, the goggles, and handed them back. "Do it that way from now on. Tell the foreman I said so."
The electrician was staring reverently at the neat hole cut through the beam. He muttered: "Where did you learn to handle it like that, Red?"
Roark's slow, amused smile acknowledged this concession of victory. "Oh, I've been an electrician, and a plumber, and a rivet catcher, and many other things."
"And went to school besides?"
"Well, in a way."
"Gonna be an architect?"
"Yes."
"Well, you'll be the first one that knows something besides pretty pictures and tea parties. You should see the teacher's pets they send us down from the office."
"If you're apologizing, don't. I don't like them either. Go back to the pipes. So long."
"So long, Red."
The next time Roark appeared on that job, the blue-eyed electrician waved to him from afar, and called him over, and asked advice about his work which he did not need; he stated that his name was Mike and that he had missed Roark for several days. On the next visit the day shift was just leaving, and Mike waited outside for Roark to finish the inspection. "How about a glass of beer, Red?" he invited, when Roark came out. "Sure," said Roark, "thanks."
They sat together at a table in the corner of a basement speakeasy, and they drank beer, and Mike related his favorite tale of how he had fallen five stories when a scaffolding gave way under him, how he had broken three ribs but lived to tell it, and Roark spoke of his days in the building trades. Mike did have a real name, which was Sean Xavier Donnigan, but everyone had forgotten it long ago; he owned a set of tools and an ancient Ford, and existed for the sole purpose of traveling around the country from one big construction job to another. People meant very little to Mike, but their performance a great deal. He worshipped expertness of any kind. He loved his work passionately and had no tolerance for anything save for other single-track devotions. He was a master in his own field and he felt no sympathy except for mastery. His view of the world was simple: there were the able and there were the incompetent; he was not concerned with the latter. He loved buildings. He despised, however, all architects.
"There was one, Red," he said earnestly, over his fifth beer, "one only and you'd be too young to know about him, but that was the only man that knew building. I worked for him when I was your age."
"Who was that?"
"Henry Cameron was his name. He's dead, I guess, these many years."
Roark looked at him for a long time, then said: "He's not dead, Mike," and added: "I've worked for him."
"You did?"
"For almost three years."
They looked at each other silently, and that was the final seal on their friendship.
Weeks later, Mike stopped Roark, one day, at the building, his ugly face puzzled, and asked:
"Say, Red, I heard the super tell a guy from the contractor's that you're stuck-up and stubborn and the lousiest bastard he's ever been up against. What did you do to him?"
"Nothing."
"What the hell did he mean?"
"I don't know," said Roark. "Do you?"