Atlas Shrugged (96 page)

“It’s going to be misquoted and misunderstood.”

“Was it true or not?”

“The public is too dumb to grapple with such issues.”

“Was it true or not?”

“It’s no time to boast about being rich—when the populace is starving. It’s just goading them on to seize everything.”

“But telling them that you have no right to your wealth, while
they
have—is what’s going to restrain them?”

“Well, I don’t know ...”

“I don’t like the things you said at your trial,” said another man. “In my opinion, I don’t agree with you at all. Personally, I’m proud to believe that I
am
working for the public good, not just for my own profit. I like to think that I have some goal higher than just earning my three meals a day and my Hammond limousine.”

“And I don’t like that idea about no directives and no controls,” said another. “I grant you they’re running hog-wild and overdoing it. But—no controls at all? I don’t go along with that. I think
some
controls are necessary. The ones which are for the public good.”

“I am sorry, gentlemen,” said Rearden, “that I will be obliged to save your goddamn necks along with mine.”

A group of businessmen headed by Mr. Mowen did not issue any statements about the trial. But a week later they announced, with an inordinate amount of publicity, that they were endowing the construction of a playground for the children of the unemployed.

Bertram Scudder did not mention the trial in his column. But ten days later, he wrote, among items of miscellaneous gossip: “Some idea of the public value of Mr. Hank Rearden may be gathered from the fact that of all social groups, he seems to be most unpopular with his own fellow businessmen. His old-fashioned brand of ruthlessness seems to be too much even for those predatory barons of profit.”

On an evening in December—when the street beyond his window was like a congested throat coughing with the horns of pre-Christmas tramc—Rearden sat in his room at the Wayne-Falkland Hotel, fighting an enemy more dangerous than weariness or fear: revulsion against the thought of having to deal with human beings.

He sat, unwilling to venture into the streets of the city, unwilling to move, as if he were chained to his chair and to this room. He had tried for hours to ignore an emotion that felt like the pull of homesickness : his awareness that the only man whom he longed to see, was here, in this hotel, just a few floors above him.

He had caught himself, in the past few weeks, wasting time in the lobby whenever he entered the hotel or left it, loitering unnecessarily at the mail counter or the newsstand, watching the hurried currents of people, hoping to see Francisco d.‘Anconia among them. He had caught himself eating solitary dinners in the restaurant of the Wayne-Falkland, with his eyes on the curtains of the entrance doorway. Now he caught himself sitting in his room, thinking that the distance was only a few floors.

He rose to his feet, with a chuckle of amused indignation; he was acting, he thought, like a woman who waits for a telephone call and fights against the temptation to end the torture by making the first move. There was no reason, he thought, why he could not go to Francisco d.‘Anconia, if that was what he wanted. Yet when he told himself that he would, he felt some dangerous element of surrender in the intensity of his own relief.

He made a step toward the phone, to call Francisco’s suite, but stopped. It was not what he wanted; what he wanted was simply to walk in, unannounced, as Francisco had walked into his office; it was this that seemed to state some unstated right between them.

On his way to the elevator, he thought: He won’t be in or, if he is, you’ll probably find him entertaining some floozie, which will serve you right. But the thought seemed unreal, he could not make it apply to the man he had seen at the mouth of the furnace—he stood confidently in the elevator, looking up—he walked confidently down the hall, feeling his bitterness relax into gaiety—he knocked at the door.

Francisco’s voice snapped, “Come in!” It had a brusque, absent-minded sound.

Rearden opened the door and stopped on the threshold. One of the hotel’s costliest satin-shaded lamps stood in the middle of the floor, throwing a circle of light on wide sheets of drafting paper. Francisco d‘Anconia, in shirt sleeves, a strand of hair hanging down over his face, lay stretched on the floor, on his stomach, propped up by his elbows, biting the end of a pencil in concentration upon some point of the intricate tracing before him. He did not look up, he seemed to have forgotten the knock. Rearden tried to distinguish the drawing: it looked like the section of a smelter. He stood watching in startled wonder; had he had the power to bring into reality his own image of Francisco d’.Anconia, this was the picture he would have seen: the figure of a purposeful young worker intent upon a difficult task.

In a moment, Francisco raised his head. In the next instant, he flung his body upward to a kneeling posture, looking at Rearden with a smile of incredulous pleasure. In the next, he seized the drawings and threw them aside too hastily, face down.

“What did I interrupt?” asked Rearden.

“Nothing much. Come in.” He was grinning happily. Rearden felt suddenly certain that Francisco had waited, too, had waited for this as for a victory which he had not quite hoped to achieve.

“What were you doing?” asked Rearden.

“Just amusing myself.”

“Let me see it.”

“No.” He rose and kicked the drawings aside.

Rearden noted that if he had resented as impertinence Francisco’s manner of proprietorship in his office, he himself was now guilty of the same attitude—because he offered no explanation for his visit, but crossed the room and sat down in an armchair, casually, as if he were at home.

“Why didn’t you come to continue what you had started?” he asked.

“You have been continuing it brilliantly without my help.”

“Do you mean, my trial?”

“I mean, your trial.”

“How do you know? You weren’t there.”

Francisco smiled, because the tone of the voice confessed an added sentence: I was looking for you. “Don’t you suppose I heard every word of it on the radio?”

“You did? Well, how did you like hearing your own lines come over the air, with me as your stooge?”

“You weren.‘t, Mr. Rearden. They weren’t my lines. Weren’t they the things you had always lived by?”

“Yes.”

“I only helped you to see that you should have been proud to live by them.”

“I am glad you heard it.”

“It was great, Mr. Rearden—and about three generations too late.”

“What do you mean?”

“If one single businessman had had the courage, then, to say that he worked for nothing but his own pront—and to say it proudly—he would have saved the world.”

“I haven’t given up the world as lost.”

“It isn’t. It never can be. But oh God!—what he would have spared us!”

“Well, I guess we have to fight, no matter what era we’re caught in.”

“Yes ... You know, Mr. Rearden, I would suggest that you get a transcript of your trial and read what you said. Then see whether you are practicing it fully and consistently—or not.”

“You mean that I’m not?”

“See for yourself.”

“I know that you had a great deal to tell me, when we were interrupted, that night at the mills. Why don’t you finish what you had to say?”

“No. It’s too soon.”

Francisco acted as if there were nothing unusual about this visit, as if he took it as a matter of natural course—as he had always acted in Rearden’s presence. But Rearden noted that he was not so calm as he wished to appear; he was pacing the room, in a manner that seemed a release for an emotion he did not want to confess; he had forgotten the lamp and it still stood on the floor as the room’s sole illumination.

“You’ve been taking an awful beating in the way of discoveries, haven’t you?” said Francisco. “How did you like the behavior of your fellow businessmen?”

“I suppose it was to be expected.”

His voice tense with the anger of compassion, Francisco said, “It’s been twelve years and yet I’m still unable to see it indifferently!” The sentence sounded involuntary, as if, trying to suppress the sound of emotion, he had uttered suppressed words.

“Twelve years—since what?” asked Rearden.

There was an instant’s pause, but Francisco answered calmly, “Since I understood what those men were doing.” He added, “I know what you’re going through right now ... and what’s still ahead.”

“Thanks,” said Rearden.

“For what?”

“For what you’re trying so hard not to show. But don’t worry about me. I’m still able to stand it.... You know, I didn’t come here because I wanted to talk about myself or even about the trial.”

“I’ll agree to any subject you choose—in order to have you here.” He said it in the tone of a courteous joke; but the tone could not disguise it; he meant it. “What did you want to talk about?”

“You.”

Francisco stopped. He looked at Rearden for a moment, then answered quietly, “All right.”

If that which Rearden felt could have gone directly into words, past the barrier of his will, he would have cried: Don’t let me down-I need you—I am fighting all of them, I have fought to my limit and am condemned to fight beyond it—and, as sole ammunition possible to me, I need the knowledge of one single man whom I can trust, respect and admire.

Instead, he said calmly, very simply—and the only note of a personal bond between them was that tone of sincerity which comes with a direct, unqualifiedly rational statement and implies the same honesty of mind in the listener—“You know, I think that the only real moral crime that one man can commit against another is the attempt to create, by his words or actions, an impression of the contradictory, the impossible, the irrational, and thus shake the concept of rationality in his victim.”

“That’s true.”

“If I say that that is the dilemma you’ve put me in, would you help me by answering a personal question?”

“I will try.”

“I don’t have to tell you—I think you know it—that you are the man of the highest mind I have ever met. I am coming to accept, not as right, but at least as possible, the fact that you refuse to exercise your great ability in the world of today. But what a man does out of despair, is not necessarily a key to his character. I have always thought that the real key is in that which he seeks for his enjoyment. And this is what I find inconceivable: no matter what you’ve given up, so long as you chose to remain alive, how can you find any pleasure in spending a life as valuable as yours on running after cheap women and on an imbecile’s idea of diversions?”

Francisco looked at him with a fine smile of amusement, as if saying : No? You didn’t want to talk about yourself? And what is it that you’re confessing but the desperate loneliness which makes the question of my character more important to you than any other question right now?

The smile merged into a soft, good-natured chuckle, as if the question involved no problem for him, no painful secret to reveal. “There’s a way to solve every dilemma of that kind, Mr. Rearden. Check your premises.” He sat down on the floor, settling himself gaily, informally, for a conversation he would enjoy. “Is it your own first-hand conclusion that I am a man of high mind?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know of your own first-hand knowledge that I spend my life running after women?”

“You’ve never denied it.”

“Denied it? I’ve gone to a lot of trouble to create that impression.”

“Do you mean to say that it isn’t true?”

“Do I strike you as a man with a miserable inferiority complex?”

“Good God, no!”

“Only that kind of man spends his life running after women.”

.“What do you mean?”

“Do you remember what I said about money and about the men who seek to reverse the law of cause and effect? The men who try to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind? Well, the man who despises himself tries to gain self-esteem from sexual adventures —which can’t be done, because sex is not the cause, but an effect and an expression of a man’s sense of his own value.”

“You’d better explain that.”

“Did it ever occur to you that it’s the same issue? The men who think that wealth comes from material resources and has no intellectual root or meaning, are the men who think—for the same reason—that sex is a physical capacity which functions independently of one’s mind, choice or code of values. They think that your body creates a desire and makes a choice for you—just about in some such way as if iron ore transformed itself into railroad rails of its own volition. Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, in fact, a man’s sexual choice is the result and the sum of his fundamental convictions. Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself. No matter what corruption he’s taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which he cannot perform for any motive but his own enjoyment—just try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity?-an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exaltation, only in the confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire. It is an act that forces him to stand naked in spirit, as well as in body, and to accept his real ego as his standard of value. He will always be attracted to the woman who reflects his deepest vision of himself, the woman whose surrender permits him to experience—or to fake—a sense of self-esteem. The man who is proudly certain of his own value, will want the highest type of woman he can find, the woman he admires, the strongest, the hardest to conquer—because only the possession of a heroine will give him the sense of an achievement, not the possession of a brainless slut. He does not seek to ... What’s the matter?” he asked, seeing the look on Rearden’s face, a look of intensity much beyond mere interest in an abstract discussion.