Atlas Shrugged (85 page)

Through a gray drizzle of rain, the calendar above the roofs said: September 3, and a clock on another tower said: 10:40, as Rearden rode back to the Wayne-Falkland Hotel. The cab’s radio was spitting out shrilly the sounds of a panic-tinged voice announcing the crash of d.‘Anconia Copper.

Rearden leaned wearily against the seat: the disaster seemed to be no more than a stale news story read long ago. He felt nothing, except an uncomfortable sense of impropriety at finding himself out in the morning streets, dressed in evening clothes. He felt no desire to return from the world he had left to the world he saw drizzling past the windows of the taxi.

He turned the key in the door of his hotel suite, hoping to get back to a desk as fast as possible and have to see nothing around him.

They hit his consciousness together: the breakfast table—the door to his bedroom, open upon the sight of a bed that had been slept in—and Lillian’s voice saying, “Good morning, Henry.”

She sat in an armchair, wearing the suit she had worn yesterday, without the jacket or hat; her white blouse looked smugly crisp. There were remnants of a breakfast on the table. She was smoking a cigarette, with the air and pose of a long, patient vigil.

As he stood still, she took the time to cross her legs and settle down more comfortably, then asked, “Aren’t you going to say anything, Henry
^?
”

He stood like a man in military uniform at some official proceedings where emotions could not be permitted to exist. “It is for you to speak.”

“Aren’t you going to try to justify yourself?”

“No.”

“Aren’t you going to start begging my forgiveness?”

“There is no reason why you should forgive me. There is nothing for me to add. You know the truth. Now it is up to you.”

She chuckled, stretching, rubbing her shoulder blades against the chair’s back. “Didn’t you expect to be caught, sooner or later?” she asked. “If a man like you stays pure as a monk for over a year, didn’t you think that I might begin to suspect the reason? It’s funny, though, that that famous brain of yours didn’t prevent you from getting caught as simply as this.” She waved at the room, at the breakfast table. “I felt certain that you weren’t going to return here, last night. And it wasn’t difficult or expensive at all to find out from a hotel employee, this morning, that you haven’t spent a night in these rooms in the past year.”

He said nothing.

“The man of stainless steel!” She laughed. “The man of achievement and honor who’s so much better than the rest of us! Does she dance in the chorus or is she a manicurist in an exclusive barber shop patronized by millionaires?”

He remained silent.

“Who is she, Henry?”

“I won’t answer that.”

“I want to know.”

“You’re not going to.”

“Don’t you think it’s ridiculous, your playing the part of a gentleman who’s protecting the lady’s name—or of any sort of gentleman, from now on? Who is she?”

“I said I won’t answer.”

She shrugged. “I suppose it makes no difference. There’s only one standard type for the one standard purpose. I’ve always known that under that ascetic look of yours you were a plain, crude sensualist who sought nothing from a woman except an animal satisfaction which I pride myself on not having given you. I knew that your vaunted sense of honor would collapse some day and you would be drawn to the lowest, cheapest type of female, just like any other cheating husband.” She chuckled. “That great admirer of yours, Miss Dagny Taggart, was furious at me for the mere hint of a suggestion that her hero wasn’t as pure as his stainless, non-corrosive rail. And she was naive enough to imagine that I could suspect her of being the type men find attractive for a relationship in which what they seek is most notoriously
not
brains. I knew your real nature and inclinations. Didn’t I?” He said nothing. “Do you know what I think of you now?”

“You have the right to condemn me in any way you wish.”

She laughed. “The great man who was so contemptuous—in business—of weaklings who trimmed comers or fell by the wayside, because they couldn’t match his strength of character and steadfastness of purpose! How do you feel about it now?”

“My feelings need not concern you. You have the right to decide what you wish me to do. I will agree to any demand you make, except one: don’t ask me to give it up.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t ask you to give it up! I wouldn’t expect you to change your nature. This is your true level—under all that self-made grandeur of a knight of industry who rose by sheer genius from the ore mine gutters to finger bowls and white tie! It fits you well, that white tie, to come home in at eleven o.‘clock in the morning! You never rose out of the ore mines, that’s where you belong—all of you self-made princes of the cash register—in the corner saloon on Saturday night, with the traveling salesmen and the dance-hall girls!”

“Do you wish to divorce me?”

“Oh, wouldn’t you like that! Wouldn’t that be a smart trade to pull! Don’t you suppose I know that you’ve wanted to divorce me since the first month of our marriage?”

“If that is what you thought, why did you stay with me?”

She answered severely, “It’s a question you have lost the right to ask.”

“That’s true,” he said, thinking that only one conceivable reason, her love for him, could justify her answer.

“No, I’m not going to divorce you. Do you suppose that I will allow your romance with a floozie to deprive me of my home, my name, my social position? I shall preserve such pieces of my life as I can, whatever does not rest on so shoddy a foundation as your fidelity. Make no mistake about it: I shall never give you a divorce. Whether you like it or not, you’re married and you’ll stay married.”

“I will, if that is what you wish.”

“And furthermore, I will not consider—incidentally, why don’t you sit down?”

He remained standing. “Please say what you have to say.”

“I will not consider any unofficial divorce, such as a separation. You may continue your love idyll in the subways and basements where it belongs, but in the eyes of the world I will expect you to remember that I am Mrs. Henry Rearden. You have always proclaimed such an exaggerated devotion to honesty—now let me see you be condemned to the life of the hypocrite that you really are. I will expect you to maintain your residence at the home which is officially yours, but will now be mine.”

“If you wish.”

She leaned back loosely, in a manner of untidy relaxation, her legs spread apart, her arms resting in two strict parallels on the arms of the chair—like a judge who could permit himself to be sloppy.

“Divorce?” she said, chuckling coldly. “Did you think you’d get off as easily as that? Did you think you’d get by at the price of a few of your millions tossed off as alimony? You’re so used to purchasing whatever you wish by the simple means of your dollars, that you cannot conceive of things that are non-commercial, non-negotiable, non-subject to any kind of trade. You’re unable to believe that there may exist a person who feels no concern for money. You cannot imagine what that means. Well, I think you’re going to learn. Oh yes, of course you’ll agree to any demand I make, from now on. I want you to sit in that office of which you’re so proud, in those precious mills of yours, and play the hero who works eighteen hours a day, the giant of industry who keeps the whole country going, the genius who is above the common herd of whining, lying, chiseling humanity. Then I want you to come home and face the only person who knows you for what you really are, who knows the actual value of your word, of your honor, of your integrity, of your vaunted self-esteem. I want you to face, in your own home, the one person who despises you and has the right to do so. I want you to look at me whenever you build another furnace, or pour another record-breaking load of steel, or hear applause and admiration, whenever you feel proud of yourself, whenever you feel clean, whenever you feel drunk on the sense of your own greatness. I want you to look at me whenever you hear of some act of depravity, or feel anger at human corruption, or feel contempt for someone’s knavery, or are the victim of a new governmental extortion—to look and to know that you’re no better, that you’re superior to no one, that there’s nothing you have the right to condemn. I want you to look at me and to learn the fate of the man who tried to build a tower to the sky, or the man who wanted to reach the sun on wings made of wax—or you, the man who wanted to hold himself as perfect!”

Somewhere outside of him and apart, as if he were reading it in a brain not his own, he observed the thought that there was some flaw in the scheme of the punishment she wanted him to bear, something wrong by its own terms, aside from its propriety or justice, some practical miscalculation that would demolish it all if discovered. He did not attempt to discover it. The thought went by as a moment’s notation, made in cold curiosity, to be brought back in some distant future. There was nothing within him now with which to feel interest or to respond.

His own brain was numb with the effort to hold the last of his sense of justice against so overwhelming a tide of revulsion that it swamped Lillian out of human form, past all his pleas to himself that he had no right to feel it. If she was loathsome, he thought, it was he who had brought her to it; this was her way of taking pain—no one could prescribe the form of a human being’s attempt to bear suffering—no one could blame—above all, not he, who had caused it. But he saw no evidence of pain in her manner. Then perhaps the ugliness was the only means she could summon to hide it, he thought. Then he thought of nothing except of withstanding the revulsion for the length of the next moment and of the next.

When she stopped speaking, he asked, “Have you finished?”

“Yes, I believe so.”

“Then you had better take the train home now.”

When he undertook the motions necessary to remove his evening clothes, he discovered that his muscles felt as if he were at the end of a long day of physical labor. His starched shirt was limp with sweat. There was neither thought nor feeling left in him, nothing but a sense that merged the remnants of both, the sense of congratulation upon the greatest victory he had ever demanded of himself: that Lillian had walked out of the hotel suite alive.

Entering Rearden’s office, Dr. Floyd Ferris wore the expression of a man so certain of the success of his quest that he could afford a benevolent smile. He spoke with a smooth, cheerful assurance; Rearden had the impression that it was the assurance of a cardsharp who has spent a prodigious effort in memorizing every possible variation of the pattern, and is now safe in the knowledge that every card in the deck is marked.

“Well, Mr. Rearden,” he said, by way of greeting, “I didn’t know that even a hardened hound of public functions and shaker of famous hands, like myself, could still get a thrill out of meeting an eminent man, but that’s what I feel right now, believe it or not.”

“How do you do,” said Rearden.

Dr. Ferris sat down and made a few remarks about the colors of the leaves in the month of October, as he had observed them by the roadside on his long drive from Washington, undertaken specifically for the purpose of meeting Mr. Rearden in person. Rearden said nothing. Dr. Ferris looked out the window and commented on the inspiring sight of the Rearden mills which, he said, were one of the most valuable productive enterprises in the country.

“That is not what you thought of my product a year and a half ago,” said Rearden.

Dr. Ferris gave a brief frown, as if a dot of the pattern had slipped and almost cost him the game, then chuckled, as if he had recaptured it. “That was a year and a half ago, Mr. Rearden,” he said easily. “Times change, and people change with the times—the wise ones do. Wisdom lies in knowing when to remember and when to forget. Consistency is not a habit of mind which it is wise to practice or to expect of the human race.”

He then proceeded to discourse upon the foolishness of consistency in a world where nothing was absolute except the principle of compromise. He talked earnestly, but in a casual manner, as if they both understood that this was not the main subject of their interview; yet, oddly, he spoke not in the tone of a foreword, but in the tone of a postscript, as if the main subject had been settled long ago.

Rearden waited for the first “Don’t you think so?” and answered, “Please state the urgent matter for which you requested this appointment.”

Dr. Ferris looked astonished and blank for a moment, then said brightly, as if remembering an unimportant subject which could be disposed of without effort, “Oh, that? That was in regard to the dates of delivery of Rearden Metal to the State Science Institute. We should like to have five thousand tons by the first of December, and then we’ll be quite agreeable to waiting for the balance of the order until after the first of the year.”

Rearden sat looking at him silently for a long time; each passing moment had the effect of making the gay intonations of Dr. Ferris’ voice, still hanging in the air of the room, seem more foolish. When Dr. Ferris had begun to dread that he would not answer at all, Rearden answered, “Hasn’t the traffic cop with the leather leggings, whom you sent here, given you a report on his conversation with me?”