Atlas Shrugged (26 page)

“And that’s not all they didn’t know,” he said. “They’re in for some more knowledge. There’s that housing settlement for the workers of San Sebastián. It cost eight million dollars. Steel-frame houses, with plumbing, electricity and refrigeration. Also a school, a church, a hospital and a movie theater. A settlement built for people who had lived in hovels made of driftwood and stray tin cans. My reward for building it was to be the privilege of escaping with my skin, a special concession due to the accident of my not being a native of the People’s State of Mexico. That workers’ settlement was also part of their plans. A model example of progressive State housing. Well, those steel-frame houses are mainly cardboard, with a coating of good imitation shellac. They won’t stand another year. The plumbing pipes—as well as most of our mining equipment—were purchased from the dealers whose main source of supply are the city dumps of Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro. I’d give those pipes another five months, and the electric system about six. The wonderful roads we graded up four thousand feet of rock for the People’s State of Mexico, will not last beyond a couple of winters: they’re cheap cement without foundation, and the bracing at the bad turns is just painted clapboard. Wait for one good mountain slide. The church, I think, will stand. They’ll need it.”

“Francisco,” she whispered, “did you do it on purpose?”

He raised his head; she was startled to see that his face had a look of infinite weariness. “Whether I did it on purpose,” he said, “or through neglect, or through stupidity, don’t you understand that that doesn’t make any difference? The same element was missing.”

She was trembling. Against all her decisions and control, she cried, “Francisco! If you see what’s happening in the world, if you understand all the things you said, you can’t laugh about it! You, of all men, you should fight them!”

“Whom?”

“The looters, and those who make world-looting possible. The Mexican planners and their kind.”

His smile had a dangerous edge. “No, my dear. It’s you that I have to fight.”

She looked at him blankly. “What are you trying to say?”

“I am saying that the workers’ settlement of San Sebastián cost eight million dollars,” he answered with slow emphasis, his voice hard. “The price paid for those cardboard houses was the price that could have bought steel structures. So was the price paid for every other item. That money went to men who grow rich by such methods. Such men do not remain rich for long. The money will go into channels which will carry it, not to the most productive, but to the most corrupt. By the standards of our time, the man who has the least to offer is the man who wins. That money will vanish in projects such as the San Sebastián Mines.”

She asked with effort, “Is that what you’re after?”

“Yes.”

“Is that what you find amusing?”

“Yes.”

“I am thinking of your name,” she said, while another part of her mind was crying to her that reproaches were useless. “It was a tradition of your family that a d‘Anconia always left a fortune greater than the one he received.”

“Oh yes, my ancestors had a remarkable ability for doing the right thing at the right time—and for making the right investments. Of course, ‘investment’ is a relative term. It depends on what you wish to accomplish. For instance, look at San Sebastián. It cost me fifteen million dollars, but these fifteen million wiped out forty million belonging to Taggart Transcontinental, thirty-five million belonging to stockholders such as James Taggart and Orren Boyle, and hundreds of millions which will be lost in secondary consequences. That’s not a bad return on an investment, is it, Dagny?”

She was sitting straight. “Do you realize what you’re saying?”

“Oh, fully! Shall I beat you to it and name the consequences you were going to reproach me for? First, I don’t think that Taggart Transcontinental will recover from its loss on that preposterous San Sebastián Line. You think it will, but it won’t. Second, the San Sebastián helped your brother James to destroy the Phoenix-Durango, which was about the only good railroad left anywhere.”

“You realize all that?”

“And a great deal more.”

“Do you”—she did not know why she had to say it, except that the memory of the face with the dark, violent eyes seemed to stare at her—“do you know Ellis Wyatt?”

“Sure.”

“Do you know what this might do to him?”

“Yes. He’s the one who’s going to be wiped out next.”

“Do you ... find that ... amusing?”

“Much more amusing than the ruin of the Mexican planners.”

She stood up. She had called him corrupt for years; she had feared it, she had thought about it, she had tried to forget it and never think of it again; but she had never suspected how far the corruption had gone.

She was not looking at him; she did not know that she was saying it aloud, quoting his words of the past: “... who’ll do greater honor, you—to Nat Taggart, or I—to Sebastián d‘Anconia ...”

“But didn’t you realize that I named those mines in honor of my great ancestor? I think it was a tribute which he would have liked.”

It took her a moment to recover her eyesight; she had never known what was meant by blasphemy or what one felt on encountering it; she knew it now.

He had risen and stood courteously, smiling down at her; it was a cold smile, impersonal and unrevealing.

She was trembling, but it did not matter. She did not care what he saw or guessed or laughed at.

“I came here because I wanted to know the reason for what you’ve done with your life,” she said tonelessly, without anger.

“I have told you the reason,” he answered gravely, “but you don’t want to believe it.”

“I kept seeing you as you were. I couldn’t forget it. And that you should have become what you are—
that
does not belong in a rational universe.”

“No? And the world as you see it around you, does?”

“You were not the kind of man who gets broken by any kind of world.”

“True.”

“Then—why?”

He shrugged. “Who is John Galt?”

“Oh, don’t use gutter language!”

He glanced at her. His lips held the hint of a smile, but his eyes were still, earnest and, for an instant, disturbingly perceptive.

“Why?” she repeated.

He answered, as he had answered in the night, in this hotel, ten years ago, “You’re not ready to hear it.”

He did not follow her to the door. She had put her hand on the doorknob when she turned—and stopped. He stood across the room, looking at her; it was a glance directed at her whole person; she knew its meaning and it held her motionless.

“I still want to sleep with you,” he said. “But I am not a man who is happy enough to do it.”

“Not happy enough?” she repeated in complete bewilderment.

He laughed. “Is it proper that that should be the first thing you’d answer?” He waited, but she remained silent. “You want it, too, don’t you?”

She was about to answer “No,” but realized that the truth was worse than that. “Yes,” she answered coldly, “but it doesn’t matter to me that I want it.”

He smiled, in open appreciation, acknowledging the strength she had needed to say it.

But he was not smiling when he said, as she opened the door to leave, “You have a great deal of courage, Dagny. Some day, you’ll have enough of it.”

“Of what? Courage?”

But he did not answer.

CHAPTER VI

THE NON-COMMERCIAL

Rearden pressed his forehead to the mirror and tried not to think.

That was the only way he could go through with it, he told himself. He concentrated on the relief of the mirror’s cooling touch, wondering how one went about forcing one’s mind into blankness, particularly after a lifetime lived on the axiom that the constant, clearest, most ruthless function of his rational faculty was his foremost duty. He wondered why no effort had ever seemed beyond his capacity, yet now he could not scrape up the strength to stick a few black pearl studs into his starched white shirt front.

This was his wedding anniversary and he had known for three months that the party would take place tonight, as Lillian wished. He had promised it to her, safe in the knowledge that the party was a long way off and that he would attend to it, when the time came, as he attended to every duty on his overloaded schedule. Then, during three months of eighteen-hour workdays, he had forgotten it happily—until half an hour ago, when, long past dinner time, his secretary had entered his office and said firmly, “Your party, Mr. Rearden.” He had cried, “Good God!” leaping to his feet; he had hurried home, rushed up the stairs, started tearing his clothes off and gone through the routine of dressing, conscious only of the need to hurry, not of the purpose. When the full realization of the purpose struck him like a sudden blow, he stopped.

“You don’t care for anything but business.” He had heard it all his life, pronounced as a verdict of damnation. He had always known that business was regarded as some sort of secret, shameful cult, which one did not impose on innocent laymen, that people thought of it as of an ugly necessity, to be performed but never mentioned, that to talk shop was an offense against higher sensibilities, that just as one washed machine grease off one’s hands before coming home, so one was supposed to wash the stain of business off one’s mind before entering a drawing room. He had never held that creed, but he had accepted it as natural that his family should hold it. He took it for granted—wordlessly, in the manner of a feeling absorbed in childhood, left unquestioned and unnamed—that he had dedicated himself, like the martyr of some dark religion, to the service of a faith which was his passionate love, but which made him an outcast among men, whose sympathy he was not to expect.

He had accepted the tenet that it was his duty to give his wife some form of existence unrelated to business. But he had never found the capacity to do it or even to experience a sense of guilt. He could neither force himself to change nor blame her if she chose to condemn him.

He had given Lillian none of his time for months—no, he thought, for years; for the eight years of their marriage. He had no interest to spare for her interests, not even enough to learn just what they were. She had a large circle of friends, and he had heard it said that their names represented the heart of the country’s culture, but he had never had time to meet them or even to acknowledge their fame by knowing what achievements had earned it. He knew only that he often saw their names on the magazine covers on newsstands. If Lillian resented his attitude, he thought, she was right. If her manner toward him was objectionable, he deserved it. If his family called him heartless, it was true.

He had never spared himself in any issue. When a problem came up at the mills, his first concern was to discover what error he had made; he did not search for anyone’s fault but his own; it was of himself that he demanded perfection. He would grant himself no mercy now; he took the blame. But at the mills, it prompted him to action in an immediate impulse to correct the error; now, it had no effect.... Just a few more minutes, he thought, standing against the mirror, his eyes closed.

He could not stop the thing in his mind that went on throwing words at him; it was like trying to plug a broken hydrant with his bare hands. Stinging jets, part words, part pictures, kept shooting at his brain.... Hours of it, he thought, hours to spend watching the eyes of the guests getting heavy with boredom if they were sober or glazing into an imbecile stare if they weren‘t, and pretend that he noticed neither, and strain to think of something to say to them, when he had nothing to say -while he needed hours of inquiry to find a successor for the superintendent of his rolling mills who had resigned suddenly, without explanation—he had to do it at once—men of that sort were so hard to find—and if anything happened to break the flow of the rolling mills—it was the Taggart rail that was being rolled.... He remembered the silent reproach, the look of accusation, long-bearing patience and scorn, which he always saw in the eyes of his family when they caught some evidence of his passion for his business—and the futility of his silence, of his hope that they would not think Rearden Steel meant as much to him as it did—like a drunkard pretending indifference to liquor, among people who watch him with the scornful amusement of their full knowledge of his shameful weakness.... “I heard you last night coming home at two in the morning, where were you?” his mother saying to him at the dinner table, and Lillian answering, “Why, at the mills, of course,” as another wife would say, “At the corner saloon.” ... Or Lillian asking him, the hint of a wise half-smile on her face, “What were you doing in New York yesterday?” “It was a banquet with the boys.” “Business?” “Yes.” “Of
course”
—and Lillian turning away, nothing more, except the shameful realization that he had almost hoped she would think he had attended some sort of obscene stag party.... An ore carrier had gone down in a storm on Lake Michigan, with thousands of tons of Rearden ore—those boats were falling apart—if he didn’t take it upon himself to help them obtain the replacements they needed, the owners of the line would go bankrupt, and there was no other line left in operation on Lake Michigan.... “That nook?” said Lillian, pointing to an arrangement of settees and coffee tables in their drawing room. “Why, no, Henry, it’s not new, but I suppose I should feel flattered that three weeks is all it took you to notice it. It’s my own adaptation of the morning room of a famous French palace -but things like that can’t possibly interest you, darling, there’s no stock market quotation on them, none whatever.” ... The order for copper, which he had placed six months ago, had not been delivered, the promised date had been postponed three times—“We can’t help it, Mr. Rearden”—he had to find another company to deal with, the supply of copper was becoming increasingly uncertain.... Philip did not smile, when he looked up in the midst of a speech he was making to some friend of their mother’s, about some organization he had joined, but there was something that suggested a smile of superiority in the loose muscles of his face when he said, “No, you wouldn’t care for this, it’s not business, Henry, not business at all, it’s a strictly non-commercial endeavor.” ... That contractor in Detroit, with the job of rebuilding a large factory, was considering structural shapes of Rearden Metal -he should fly to Detroit and speak to him in person—he should have done it a week ago—he could have done it tonight.... “You’re not listening,” said his mother at the breakfast table, when his mind wandered to the current coal price index, while she was telling him about the dream she’d had last night. “You’ve never listened to a living soul. You’re not interested in anything but yourself. You don’t give a damn about people, not about a single human creature on God’s earth.” ... The typed pages lying on the desk in his office were a report on the tests of an airplane motor made of Rearden Metal—perhaps of all things on earth, the one he wanted most at this moment was to read it—it had lain on his desk, untouched, for three days, he had had no time for it—why didn’t he do it now and—