Atlas Shrugged (91 page)

A young man with a look of chronic hurt and impertinence together, rushed up to him, crying, “I couldn’t help it, Mr. Rearden!” and launched into a speech of explanation. Rearden turned his back on him without a word. It was the assistant in charge of the pressure gauge of the furnace, a young man out of college.

Somewhere on the outer edge of Rearden’s consciousness, there was the thought that accidents of this nature were happening more frequently now, caused by the kind of ore he was using, but he had to use whatever ore he could find. There was the thought that his old workers had always been able to avert disaster; any of them would have seen the indications of a hang-up and known how to prevent it; but there were not many of them left, and he had to employ whatever men he could find. Through the swirling coils of steam around him, he observed that it was the older men who had rushed from all over the mills to fight the break-out and now stood in line, being given first aid by the medical staff. He wondered what was happening to the young men of the country. But the wonder was swallowed by the sight of the college boy’s face, which he could not bear to see, by a wave of contempt, by the wordless thought that if
this
was the enemy, there was nothing to fear. All these things came to him and vanished in the outer darkness; the sight blotting them out was Francisco d.‘Anconia.

He saw Francisco giving orders to the men around him. They did not know who he was or where he came from, but they listened: they knew he was a man who knew his job. Francisco broke off in the middle of a sentence, seeing Rearden approach and listen, and said, laughing, “Oh, I beg your pardon!” Rearden said, “Go right ahead. It’s all correct, so far.”

They said nothing to each other when they walked together through the darkness, on their way back to the office. Rearden felt an exultant laughter swelling within him, he felt that he wanted, in his turn, to wink at Francisco like a fellow conspirator who had learned a secret Francisco would not acknowledge. He glanced at his face once in a while, but Francisco would not look at him.

After a while, Francisco said, “You saved my life.” The “thank you” was in the way he said it.

Rearden chuckled. “You saved my furnace.”

They went on in silence. Rearden felt himself growing lighter with every step. Raising his face to the cold air, he saw the peaceful darkness of the sky and a single star above a smokestack with the vertical lettering : Rearden Steel. He felt how glad he was to be alive.

He did not expect the change he saw in Francisco’s face when he looked at it in the light of his office. The things he had seen by the glare of the furnace were gone. He had expected a look of triumph, of mockery at all the insults Francisco had heard from him, a look demanding the apology he was joyously eager to offer. Instead, he saw a face made lifeless by an odd dejection.

“Are you hurt?”

“No ... no, not at all.”

“Come here,” ordered Rearden, opening the door of his bathroom.

“Look at yourself.”

“Never mind. You come here.”

For the first time, Rearden felt that he was the older man; he felt the pleasure of taking Francisco in charge; he felt a confident, amused, paternal protectiveness. He washed the grime off Francisco’s face, he put disinfectants and adhesive bandages on his temple, his hands, his scorched elbows. Francisco obeyed him in silence.

Rearden asked, in the tone of the most eloquent salute he could offer, “Where did you learn to work like that?”

Francisco shrugged. “I was brought up around smelters of every kind,” he answered indifferently.

Rearden could not decipher the expression of his face: it was only a look of peculiar stillness, as if his eyes were fixed on some secret vision of his own that drew his mouth into a line of desolate, bitter, hurting self-mockery.

They did not speak until they were back in the office.

“You know,” said Rearden, “everything you said here was true. But that was only part of the story. The other part is what we’ve done tonight. Don’t you see? We’re able to act. They’re not. So it’s we who’ll win in the long run, no matter what they do to us.”

Francisco did not answer.

“Listen,” said Rearden, “I know what’s been the trouble with you. You’ve never cared to do a real day’s work in your life. I thought you were conceited enough, but I see that you have no idea of what you’ve got in you. Forget that fortune of yours for a while and come to work for me. I’ll start you as furnace foreman any time. You don’t know what it will do for you. In a few years, you’ll be ready to appreciate and to run d.‘Anconia Copper.”

He expected a burst of laughter and he was prepared to argue; instead, he saw Francisco shaking his head slowly, as if he could not trust his voice, as if he feared that were he to speak, he would accept. In a moment, he said, “Mr. Rearden ... I think I would give the rest of my life for one year as your furnace foreman. But I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t ask me. It’s ... a personal matter.”

The vision of Francisco in Rearden’s mind, which he had resented and found irresistibly attractive, had been the figure of a man radiantly incapable of suffering. What he saw now in Francisco’s eyes was the look of a quiet, tightly controlled, patiently borne torture.

Francisco reached silently for his overcoat.

“You’re not leaving, are you?” asked Rearden.

“Yes.”

“Aren’t you going to finish what you had to tell me?”

“Not tonight.”

“You wanted me to answer a question. What was it?”

Francisco shook his head.

“You started asking me how can I ... How can I—what?”

Francisco’s smile was like a moan of pain, the only moan he would permit himself. “I won’t ask it, Mr. Rearden. I know it.”

CHAPTER IV

THE SANCTION OF THE VICTIM

The roast turkey had cost $30. The champagne had cost $25. The lace tablecloth, a cobweb of grapes and vine leaves iridescent in the candlelight, had cost $2,000. The dinner service, with an artist’s design burned in blue and gold into a translucent white china, had cost $2,500. The silverware, which bore the initials LR in Empire wreaths of laurels, had cost $3,000. But it was held to be unspiritual to think of money and of what that money represented.

A peasant’s wooden shoe, gilded, stood in the center of the table, filled with marigolds, grapes and carrots. The candles were stuck into pumpkins that were cut as open-mouthed faces drooling raisins, nuts and candy upon the tablecloth.

It was Thanksgiving dinner, and the three who faced Rearden about the table were his wife, his mother and his brother.

“This is the night to thank the Lord for our blessings,” said Rearden’s mother. “God has been kind to us. There are people all over the country who haven’t got any food in the house tonight, and some that haven’t even got a house, and more of them going jobless every day. Gives me the creeps to look around in the city. Why, only last week, who do you suppose I ran into but Lucie Judson—Henry, do you remember Lucie Judson? Used to live next door to us, up in Minnesota, when you were ten-twelve years old. Had a boy about your age. I lost track of Lucie when they moved to New York, must have been all of twenty years ago. Well, it gave me the creeps to see what she’s come to—just a toothless old hag, wrapped in a man’s overcoat, panhandling on a street corner. And I thought: That could’ve been me, but for the grace of God.”

“Well, if thanks are in order,” said Lillian gaily, “I think that we shouldn’t forget Gertrude, the new cook. She’s an artist.”

“Me, I’m just going to be old-fashioned,” said Philip. “I’m just going to thank the sweetest mother in the world.”

“Well, for the matter of that,” said Rearden’s mother, “we ought to thank Lillian for this dinner and for all the trouble she took to make it so pretty. She spent hours fixing the table. It’s real quaint and different.”

“It’s the wooden shoe that does it,” said Philip, bending his head sidewise to study it in a manner of critical appreciation. “That’s the real touch. Anybody can have candles, silverware and junk, that doesn’t take anything but money—but this shoe, that took thought.”

Rearden said nothing. The candlelight moved over his motionless face as over a portrait; the portrait bore an expression of impersonal courtesy.

“You haven’t touched your wine,” said his mother, looking at him. “What I think is you ought to drink a toast in gratitude to the people of this country who have given you so much.”

“Henry is not in the mood for it, Mother,” said Lillian. “I’m afraid Thanksgiving is a holiday only for those who have a clear conscience.” She raised her wine glass, but stopped it halfway to her lips and asked, “You’re not going to make some sort of stand at your trial tomorrow, are you, Henry?”

“I am.”

She put the glass down. “What are you going to do?”

“You’ll see it tomorrow.”

“You don’t really imagine that you can get away with it!”

“I don’t know what you have in mind as the object I’m to get away with.”

“Do you realize that the charge against you is extremely serious?”

“I do.”

“You’ve admitted that you sold the Metal to Ken Danagger.”

“I have.”

“They might send you to jail for ten years.”

“I don’t think they will, but it’s possible.”

“Have you been reading the newspapers, Henry?” asked Philip, with an odd kind of smile.

“No.”

“Oh, you should!”

“Should I? Why?”

“You ought to see the names they call you!”

“That’s interesting,” said Rearden; he said it about the fact that Philip’s smile was one of pleasure.

“I don’t understand it,” said his mother. “Jail? Did you say jail, Lillian? Henry, are you going to be sent to jail?”

“I might be.”

“But that’s ridiculous! Do something about it.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. I don’t understand any of it. Respectable people don’t go to jail. Do something. You’ve always known what to do about business.”

“Not this kind of business.”

“I don’t believe it.” Her voice had the tone of a frightened, spoiled child. “You’re saying it just to be mean.”

“He’s playing the hero, Mother,” said Lillian. She smiled coldly, turning to Rearden. “Don’t you think that your attitude is perfectly futile?”

“No.”

“You know that cases of this kind are not ... intended ever to come to trial. There are ways to avoid it, to get things settled amicably -if one knows the right people.”

“I don’t know the right people.”

“Look at Orren Boyle. He’s done much more and much worse than your little Sing at the black market, but he’s smart enough to keep himself out of courtrooms.”

“Then I’m not smart enough.”

“Don’t you think it’s time you made an effort to adjust yourself to the conditions of our age?”

“No.”

“Well, then I don’t see how you can pretend that you’re some sort of victim. If you go to jail, it will be your own fault.”

“What pretense are you talking about, Lillian?”

“Oh, I know that you think you’re fighting for some sort of principle —but actually it’s only a matter of your incredible conceit. You’re doing it for no better reason than because you think you’re right.”

“Do you think they’re right?”

She shrugged. “That’s the conceit I’m talking about—the idea that it matters who’s right or wrong. It’s the most insufferable form of vanity, this insistence on always doing right. How do you know what’s right? How can anyone ever know it? It’s nothing but a delusion to flatter your own ego and to hurt other people by flaunting your superiority over them.”

He was looking at her with attentive interest. “Why should it hurt other people, if it’s nothing but a delusion?”

“Is it necessary for me to point out that in
your
case it’s nothing but hypocrisy? That is why I find your attitude preposterous. Questions of right have no bearing on human existence. And you’re certainly nothing but human—aren’t you, Henry? You’re no better than any of the men you’re going to face tomorrow. I think you should remember that it’s not for you to make a stand on any sort of principle. Maybe you’re a victim in this particular mess, maybe they’re pulling a rotten trick on you, but what of it? They’re doing it because they’re weak; they couldn’t resist the temptation to grab your Metal and to muscle in on your profits, because they had no other way of ever getting rich. Why should you blame them? It’s only a question of different strains, but it’s the same shoddy human fabric that gives way just as quickly. You wouldn’t be tempted by money, because it’s so easy for you to make it. But you wouldn’t withstand other pressures and you’d fall just as ignominiously. Wouldn’t you? So you have no right to any righteous indignation against them. You have no moral superiority to assert or to defend. And if you haven.‘t, then what is the point of fighting a battle that you can’t win? I suppose that one might find some satisfaction in being a martyr, if one is above reproach. But you—who are you to cast the first stone?”

She paused to observe the effect. There was none, except that his look of attentive interest seemed intensified; he listened as if he were held by some impersonal, scientific curiosity. It was not the response she had expected.

“I believe you understand me,” she said.

“No,” he answered quietly, “I don’t.”

“I think you should abandon the illusion of your own perfection, which you know full well to be an illusion. I think you should learn to get along with other people. The day of the hero is past. This is the day of humanity, in a much deeper sense than you imagine. Human beings are no longer expected to be saints nor to be punished for their sins. Nobody is right or wrong, we’re all in it together, we’re all human—and the human is the imperfect. You’ll gain nothing tomorrow by proving that they’re wrong. You ought to give in with good grace, simply because it’s the practical thing to do. You ought to keep silent, precisely because they’re wrong. They’ll appreciate it. Make concessions for others and they’ll make concessions for you. Live and let live. Give and take. Give in and take in. That’s the policy of our age—and it’s time you accepted it. Don’t tell me you’re too good for it. You know that you’re not. You know that I know it.”