Atlas Shrugged (192 page)

On the roof of a structure above the gate, he saw, as he came closer, the slim silhouette of a man who held a gun in each hand and, from behind the protection of a chimney, kept firing at intervals down into the mob, firing swiftly and, it seemed, in two directions at once, like a sentinel protecting the approaches to the gate. The confident skill of his movements, his manner of firing, with no time wasted to take aim, but with the kind of casual abruptness that never misses a target, made him look like a hero of Western legend—and Rearden watched him with detached, impersonal pleasure, as if the battle of the mills were not his any longer, but he could still enjoy the sight of the competence and certainty with which men of that distant age had once combatted evil.

The beam of a roving searchlight struck Rearden’s face, and when the light swept past he saw the man on the roof leaning down, as if peering in his direction. The man waved to someone to replace him, then vanished abruptly from his post.

Rearden hurried on through the short stretch of darkness ahead -but then, from the side, from the crack of an alley, he heard a drunken voice yell, “There he is!” and whirled to see two beefy figures advancing upon him. He saw a leering, mindless face with a mouth hung loose in a joyless chuckle, and a club in a rising fist—he heard the sound of running steps approaching from another direction, he attempted to turn his head, then the club crashed down on his skull from behind—and in the moment of splitting darkness, when he wavered, refusing to believe it, then felt himself going down, he felt a strong, protective arm seizing him and breaking his fall, he heard a gun exploding an inch above his ear, then another explosion from the same gun in the same second, but it seemed faint and distant, as if he had fallen down a shaft.

His first awareness, when he opened his eyes, was a sense of profound serenity. Then he saw that he was lying on a couch in a modern, sternly gracious room—then he realized that it was his office and that the two men standing beside him were the mills’ doctor and the superintendent. He felt a distant pain in his head, which would have been violent had he cared to notice it, and he felt a strip of tape across his hair, on the side of his head. The sense of serenity was the knowledge that he was free.

The meaning of his bandage and the meaning of his office were not to be accepted or to exist, together—it was not a combination for men to live with—this was not his battle any longer, nor his job, nor his business. .

“I think I’ll be all right, Doctor,” he said, raising his head.

“Yes, Mr. Rearden, fortunately.” The doctor was looking at him as if still unable to believe that this had happened to Hank Rearden inside his own mills; the doctor’s voice was tense with angry loyalty and indignation. “Nothing serious, just a scalp wound and a slight concussion. But you must take it easy and allow yourself to rest.”

“I will,” said Rearden firmly.

“It’s all over,” said the superintendent, waving at the mills beyond the window. “We’ve got the bastards beaten and on the run. You don’t have to worry, Mr. Rearden. It’s all over.”

“It is,” said Rearden. “There must be a lot of work left for you to do, Doctor.”

“Oh yes! I never thought I’d live to see the day when—”

“I know. Go ahead, take care of it. I’ll be all right.”

“Yes, Mr. Rearden.”

“I’ll take care of the place,” said the superintendent, as the doctor hurried out. “Everything’s under control, Mr. Rearden. But it was the dirtiest—”

“I know,” said Rearden. “Who was it that saved my life? Somebody grabbed me as I fell, and fired at the thugs.”

“Did he! Straight at their faces. Blew their heads off. That was that new furnace foreman of ours. Been here two months. Best man I’ve ever had. He’s the one who got wise to what the gravy boys were planning and warned me, this afternoon. Told me to arm our men, as many as we could. We got no help from the police or the state troopers, they dodged all over the place with the fanciest delays and excuses I ever heard of, it was all fixed in advance, the goons weren’t expecting any armed resistance. It was that furnace foreman—Frank Adams is his name—who organized our defense, ran the whole battle, and stood on a roof, picking off the scum that came too close to the gate. Boy, what a marksman! I shudder to think how many of our lives he saved tonight. Those bastards were out for blood, Mr. Rearden.”

“I’d like to see him.”

“He’s waiting somewhere outside. It’s he who brought you here, and he asked permission to speak to you, when possible.”

“Send him in. Then go back out there, take charge, finish the job.”

“Is there anything else I can do for you, Mr. Rearden?”

“No, nothing else.”

He lay still, alone in the silence of his office. He knew that the meaning of his mills had ceased to exist, and the fullness of the knowledge left no room for the pain of regretting an illusion. He had seen, in a final image, the soul and essence of his enemies: the mindless face of the thug with the club. It was not the face itself that made him draw back in horror, but the professors, the philosophers, the moralists, the mystics who had released that face upon the world.

He felt a peculiar cleanliness. It was made of pride and of love for this earth, this earth which was his, not theirs. It was the feeling which had moved him through his life, the feeling which some among men know in their youth, then betray, but which
he
had never betrayed and had carried within him as a battered, attacked, unidentified, but living motor—the feeling which he could now experience in its full, uncontested purity: the sense of his own superlative value and the superlative value of his life. It was the final certainty that his life was his, to be lived with no bondage to evil, and that that bondage had never been necessary. It was the radiant serenity of knowing that he was free of fear, of pain, of guilt.

If it’s true, he thought, that there are avengers who are working for the deliverance of men like me, let them see me now, let them tell me their secret, let them claim me, let them—“Come in!” he said aloud, in answer to the knock on his door.

The door opened and he lay still. The man standing on the threshold, with disheveled hair, a soot-streaked face and furnace-smudged arms, dressed in scorched overalls and bloodstained shirt, standing as if he wore a cape waving behind him in the wind, was Francisco d.‘Anconia.

It seemed to Rearden that his consciousness shot forward ahead of his body, it was his body that refused to move, stunned by shock, while his mind was laughing, telling him that this was the most natural, the most-to-have-been-expected event in the world.

Francisco smiled, a smile of greeting to a childhood friend on a summer morning, as if nothing else had ever been possible between them-and Rearden found himself smiling in answer, some part of him feeling an incredulous wonder, yet knowing that it was irresistibly right.

“You’ve been torturing yourself for months,” said Francisco, approaching him, “wondering what words you’d use to ask my forgiveness and whether you had the right to ask it, if you ever saw me again -but now you see that it isn’t necessary, that there’s nothing to ask or to forgive.”

“Yes,” said Rearden, the word coming as an astonished whisper, but by the time he finished his sentence he knew that this was the greatest tribute he could offer, “yes, I know it.”

Francisco sat down on the couch beside him, and slowly moved his hand over Rearden’s forehead. It was like a healing touch that closed the past.

“There’s only one thing I want to tell you,” said Rearden. “I want you to hear it from me: you kept your oath, you
were
my friend.”

“I knew that you knew it. You knew it from the first. You knew it, no matter what you thought of my actions. You slapped me because you could not force yourself to doubt it.”

“That ...” whispered Rearden, staring at him, “
t
hat
was the thing I had no right to tell you... no right to claim as my excuse . . .”

“Didn’t you suppose I’d understand it?”

“I wanted to find you... I had no right to look for you... And all that time, you were—” He pointed at Francisco’s clothes, then his hand dropped helplessly and he closed his eyes.

“I was your furnace foreman,” said Francisco, grinning. “I didn’t think you’d mind that. You offered me the job yourself.”

“You’ve been here, as my bodyguard, for two months?”

.“Yes.”

“You’ve been here, ever since—” He stopped.

“That’s right. On the morning of the day when you were reading my farewell message over the roofs of New York, I was reporting here for my first shift as your furnace foreman.”

“Tell me,” said Rearden slowly, “that night, at James Taggart’s wedding, when you said that you were after your greatest conquest ... you meant me, didn’t you?”

“Of course.”

Francisco drew himself up a little, as if for a solemn task, his face earnest, the smile remaining only in his eyes. “I have a great deal to tell you,” he said. “But first, will you repeat a word you once offered me and I ... I had to reject, because I knew that I was not free to accept it?”

Rearden smiled. “What word,
Francisco?”

Francisco inclined his head in acceptance, and answered, “Thank you,
Hank.”
Then he raised his head. “Now I’ll tell you the things I had come to say, but did not finish, that night when I came here for the first time. I think you’re ready to hear it.”

“I am.”

The glare of steel being poured from a furnace shot to the sky beyond the window. A red glow went sweeping slowly over the walls of the office, over the empty desk, over Rearden’s face, as if in salute and farewell.

CHAPTER VII

“THIS IS JOHN GALT SPEAKING”

The doorbell was ringing like an alarm, in a long, demanding scream, broken by the impatient stabs of someone’s frantic finger.

Leaping out of bed, Dagny noticed the cold, pale sunlight of late morning and a clock on a distant spire marking the hour of ten. She had worked at the office till four A.M. and had left word not to expect her till noon.

The white face ungroomed by panic, that confronted her when she threw the door open, was James Taggart.

“He’s gone!” he cried.

“Who?”

“Hank Rearden! He’s gone, quit, vanished, disappeared!”

She stood still for a moment, holding the belt of the dressing gown she had been tying; then, as the full knowledge reached her, her hands jerked the belt tight—as if snapping her body in two at the waistline—while she burst out laughing. It was a sound of triumph.

He stared at her in bewilderment. “What’s the matter with you?” he gasped. “Haven’t you understood?”

“Come in, Jim,” she said, turning contemptuously, walking into the living room. “Oh yes, I’ve understood.”

“He’s quit! Gone! Gone like all the others! Left his mills, his bank accounts, his property, everything! Just vanished! Took some clothing and whatever he had in the safe in his apartment—they found a safe left open in his bedroom, open and empty—that’s all! No word, no note, no explanation! They called me from Washington, but it’s all over town! The news, I mean, the story! They can’t keep it quiet! They’ve tried to, but ... Nobody knows how it got out, but it went through the mills like one of those furnace break-outs, the word that he’d gone, and then . . . before anyone could stop it, a whole bunch of them vanished! The superintendent, the chief metallurgist, the chief engineer, Rearden’s secretary, even the hospital doctor! And God knows how many others! Deserting, the bastards! Deserting us, in spite of all the penalties we’ve set up! He’s quit and the rest are quitting and those mills are just left there, standing still! Do you understand what that means?”

“Do
you
?” she asked.

He had thrown his story at her, sentence by sentence, as if trying to knock the smile off her face, an odd, unmoving smile of bitterness and triumph; he had failed. “It’s a national catastrophe! What’s the matter with you? Don’t you see that it’s a fatal blow? It will break the last of the country’s morale and economy! We can’t let him vanish! You’ve got to bring him back!”

Her smile disappeared.

“You
can!” he cried. “You’re the only one who can! He’s your lover, isn’t he? ... Oh, don’t look like that! It’s no time for squeamishness! It’s no time for anything except that we’ve got to have him! You must know where he is! You can find him! You must reach him and bring him back!”

The way she now looked at him was worse than her smile—she looked as if she were seeing him naked and would not endure the sight much longer. “I can’t bring him back,” she said, not raising her voice. “And I wouldn.‘t, if I could. Now get out of here.”

“But the national catastrophe—”

“Get out.”

She did not notice his exit. She stood alone in the middle of her living room, her head dropping, her shoulders sagging, while she was smiling, a smile of pain, of tenderness, of greeting to Hank Rearden. She wondered dimly why she should feel so glad that he had found liberation, so certain that he was right, and yet refuse herself the same deliverance. Two sentences were beating in her mind; one was the triumphant sweep of: He’s free, he’s out of their reach!—the other was like a prayer of dedication: There’s still a chance to win, but let me be the only victim....

It was strange—she thought, in the days that followed, looking at the men around her—that catastrophe had made them aware of Hank Rearden with an intensity that his achievements had not aroused, as if the paths of their consciousness were open to disaster, but not to value. Some spoke of him in shrill curses—others whispered, with a look of guilt and terror, as if a nameless retribution were now to descend upon them—some tried, with hysterical evasiveness, to act as if nothing had happened.

The newspapers, like puppets on tangled strings, were shouting with the same belligerence and on the same dates: “It is social treason to ascribe too much importance to Hank Rearden’s desertion and to undermine public morale by the old-fashioned belief that an individual can be of any significance to society.” “It is social treason to spread rumors about the disappearance of Hank Rearden. Mr. Rearden has not disappeared, he is in his office, running his mills, as usual, and there has been no trouble at Rearden Steel, except a minor disturbance, a private scuffle among some workers.” “It is social treason to cast an unpatriotic light upon the tragic loss of Hank Rearden. Mr. Rearden has not deserted, he was killed in an automobile accident on his way to work, and his grief-stricken family has insisted on a private funeral.”