THE EXPLOITERS AND THE EXPLOITED 5 page

. . . To bring you down to things you can't conceive—and to know that it's I who have done it. To reduce you to a body, to teach you an animal's pleasure, to see you need it, to see you asking me for it, to see your wonderful spirit dependent upon the obscenity of your need. To watch you as you are, as you face the world with your clean, proud strength—then to see you, in my bed, submitting to any infamous whim I may devise, to any act which I'll perform for the sole purpose of watching your dishonor and to which you'll submit for the sake of an unspeakable sensation . . . I want you—and may I be damned for it! . . .

She was reading the papers, leaning back in the darkness—he saw the reflection of the fire touching her hair, moving to her shoulder, down her arm, to the naked skin of her wrist.

. . . Do you know what I'm thinking now, in this moment? . . .

Your gray suit and your open collar . . . you look so young, so austere, so sure of yourself . . . What would you be like if I knocked your head back, if I threw you down in that formal suit of yours, if I raised your skirt—

She glanced up at him. He looked down at the papers on his desk.

In a moment, he said, "The actual cost of the bridge is less than our original estimate. You will note that the strength of the bridge allows for the eventual addition of a second track, which, I think, that section of the country will justify in a very few years. If you spread the cost over a period of—"

He spoke, and she looked at his face in the lamplight, against the black emptiness of the office. The lamp was outside her field of vision, and she felt as if it were his face that illuminated the papers on the desk. His face, she thought, and the cold, radiant clarity of his voice, of his mind, of Ms drive to a single purpose. The face was like his words—as if the line of a single theme ran from the steady glance of the eyes, through the gaunt muscles of the cheeks, to the faintly scornful, downward curve of the mouth—the line of a ruthless asceticism.

The day began with the news of a disaster: a freight train of the Atlantic Southern had crashed head-on into a passenger train, in New Mexico, on a sharp curve in the mountains, scattering freight cars all over the slopes. The cars carried five thousand tons of copper, bound from a mine in Arizona to the Rearden mills, Rearden telephoned the general manager of the Atlantic Southern, but the answer he received was: "Oh God, Mr. Rearden, how can we tell? How can anybody tell how long it will take to clear that wreck?

One of the worst we've ever had . . . I don't know, Mr. Rearden.

There are no other lines anywhere in that section. The track is torn for twelve hundred feet. There's been a rockslide. Our wrecking train can't get through. I don't know how we'll ever get those freight cars back on rails, or when. Can't expect it sooner than two weeks . . .

Three days? Impossible, Mr. Rearden! . . . But we can't help it!

. . . But surely you can tell your customers that it's an act of God!

What if you do hold them up? Nobody can blame you in a case of this kind!"

In the next two hours, with the assistance of his secretary, two young engineers from his shipping department, a road map, and the long-distance telephone, Rearden arranged for a fleet of trucks to proceed to the scene of the wreck, and for a chain of hopper cars to meet them at the nearest station of the Atlantic Southern. The hopper cars had been borrowed from Taggart Transcontinental. The trucks had been recruited from all over New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado. Rearden's engineers had hunted by telephone for private truck owners and had offered payments that cut all arguments short.

It was the third of three shipments of copper that Rearden. had expected; two orders had not been delivered: one company had gone out of business, the other was still pleading delays that it could not help.

He had attended to the matter without breaking his chain of appointments, without raising his voice, without sign of strain, uncertainty or apprehension; he had acted with the swift precision of a military commander under sudden fire—and Gwen Ives, his secretary, had acted as his calmest lieutenant. She was a girl in her late twenties, whose quietly harmonious, impenetrable face had a quality matching the best designed office equipment; she was one of his most ruthlessly competent employees; her manner of performing her duties suggested the kind of rational cleanliness that would consider any element of emotion, while at work, as an unpardonable immorality.

When the emergency was over, her sole comment was, "Mr. Rearden, I think we should ask all our suppliers to ship via Taggart Transcontinental." "I'm thinking that, too," he answered; then added, "Wire Fleming in Colorado. Tell him I'm taking an option on that copper mine property."

He was back at his desk, speaking to his superintendent on one phone and to his purchasing manager on another, checking every date and ton of ore on hand—he could not leave to chance or to another person the possibility of a single hour's delay in the flow of a furnace: it was the last of the rail for the John Galt Line that was being poured—when the buzzer rang and Miss Ives' voice announced that his mother was outside, demanding to see him.

He had asked his family never to come to the mills without appointment. He had been glad that they hated the place and seldom appeared in his office. What he now felt was a violent impulse to order his mother off the premises. Instead, with a greater effort than the problem of the train wreck had required of him, he said quietly, "All right. Ask her to come in."

His mother came in with an air of belligerent defensiveness. She looked at his office as if she knew what it meant to him and as if she were declaring her resentment against anything being of greater importance to him than her own person. She took a long time settling down in an armchair, arranging and rearranging her bag, her gloves, the folds of her dress, while droning, "It's a fine thing when a mother has to wait in an anteroom and ask permission of a stenographer before she's allowed to see her own son who—"

"Mother, is it anything important? I am very rushed today."

"You're not the only one who's got problems. Of course, it's important. Do you think I'd go to the trouble of driving way out here, if it wasn't important?"

"What is it?"

"It's about Philip."

"Yes?"

"Philip is unhappy."

"Well?"

"He feels it's not right that he should have to depend on your charity and live on handouts and never be able to count on a single dollar of his own."

"Well!" he said with a startled smile. "I've been waiting for him to realize that."

"It isn't right for a sensitive man to be in such a position."

"It certainly isn't."

"I'm glad you agree with me. So what you have to do is give him a job."

"A . . . what?"

"You must give him a job, here, at the mills—but a nice, clean job, of course, with a desk and an office and a decent salary, where he wouldn't have to be among your day laborers and your smelly furnaces."

He knew that he was hearing it; he could not make himself believe it. "Mother, you're not serious."

"I certainly am. I happen to know that that's what he wants, only 's too proud to ask you for it But if you offer it to him and make it look like it's you who're asking him a favor—why, I know he'd be happy to take it. That's why I had to come here to talk to you—so he wouldn't guess that I put you up to it."

It was not in the nature of his consciousness to understand the nature of the things he was hearing. A single thought cut through his mind like a spotlight, making him unable to conceive how any eyes could miss it. The thought broke out of him as a cry of bewilderment: "But he knows nothing about the steel business!"

"What has that got to do with it? He needs a job."

"But he couldn't do the work."

"He needs to gain self-confidence and to feel important."

"But he wouldn't be any good whatever."

"He needs to feel that he's wanted."

"Here? What could I want him for?"

"You hire plenty of strangers.”

"I hire men who produce. What has he got to offer?"

"He's your brother, isn't he?"

"What has that got to do with it?"

She stared incredulously, in turn, silenced by shock. For a moment, they sat looking at each other, as if across an interplanetary distance.

"He's your brother," she said, her voice like a phonograph record repeating a magic formula she could not permit herself to doubt. "He needs a position in the world. He needs a salary, so that he'd feel that he's got money coming to him as his due, not as alms."

"As his due? But he wouldn't be worth a nickel to me."

"Is that what you think of first? Your profit? I'm asking you to help your brother, and you're figuring how to make a nickel on him, and you won't help him unless there's money in it for you—is that it?"

She saw the expression of his eyes, and she looked away, but spoke hastily, her voice rising. "Yes, sure, you're helping him—like you'd help any stray beggar. Material help—that's all you know or understand. Have you thought about his spiritual needs and what his position is doing to his self-respect? He doesn't want to live like a beggar. He wants to be independent of you."

"By means of getting from me a salary he can't earn for work he can't do?"

"You'd never miss it. You've got enough people here who're making money for you."

"Are you asking me to help him stage a fraud of that kind?"

"You don't have to put it that way."

"Is it a fraud—or isn't it?"

"That's why I can't talk to you—because you're not human. You have no pity, no feeling for your brother, no compassion for his feelings."

"Is it a fraud or not?"

"You have no mercy for anybody."

"Do you think that a fraud of this kind would be just?"

"You're the most immoral man living—you think of nothing but justice! You don't feel any love at all!"

He got up, his movement abrupt and stressed, the movement of ending an interview and ordering a visitor out of his office. "Mother, I'm running a steel plant—not a whorehouse."

"Henry!" The gasp of indignation was at his choice of language, nothing more.

"Don't ever speak to me again about a job for Philip. I would not give him the job of a cinder sweeper. I would not allow him inside my mills. I want you to understand that, once and for all. You may try to help him in any way you wish, but don't ever let me see you thinking of my mills as a means to that end."

The wrinkles of her soft chin trickled into a shape resembling a sneer. "What are they, your mills—a holy temple of some kind?"

"Why . . . yes," he said softly, astonished at the thought.

"Don't you ever think of people and of your moral duties?"

"I don't know what it is that you choose to call morality. No, I don't think of people—except that if I gave a job to Philip, I wouldn't be able to face any competent man who needed work and deserved it."

She got up. Her head was drawn into her shoulders, and the righteous bitterness of her voice seemed to push the words upward at his tall, straight figure: "That's your cruelty, that's what's mean and selfish about you. If you loved your brother, you'd give him a job he didn't deserve, precisely because he didn't deserve it—that would be true love and kindness and brotherhood. Else what's love for? If a man deserves a job, there's no virtue in giving it to him. Virtue is the giving of the undeserved."

He was looking at her like a child at an unfamiliar nightmare, incredulity preventing it from becoming horror. "Mother," he said slowly, "you don't know what you're saying. I'm not able ever to despise you enough to believe that you mean it"

The look on her face astonished him more than all the rest: it was a look of defeat and yet of an odd, sly, cynical cunning, as if, for a moment, she held some worldly wisdom that mocked his innocence.

The memory of that look remained in his mind, like a warning signal telling him that he had glimpsed an issue which he had to understand.

But he could not grapple with it, he could not force his mind to accept it as worthy of thought, he could find no clue except his dim uneasiness and his revulsion—and he had no time to give it, he could not think of it now, he was facing his next caller seated in front of his desk—he was listening to a man who pleaded for his life.

The man did not state it in such terms, but Rearden knew that that was the essence of the case. What the man put into words was only a a for five hundred tons of steel.

He was Mr. Ward, of the Ward Harvester Company of Minnesota.

It was an unpretentious company with an unblemished reputation, the kind of business concern that seldom grows large, but never fails. Mr.

Ward represented the fourth generation of a family that had owned the plant and had given it the conscientious best of such ability as they possessed.

He was a man in his fifties, with a square, stolid face. Looking at him, one knew that he would consider it as indecent to let his face show suffering as to remove his clothes in public. He spoke in a dry, businesslike manner. He explained that he had always dealt, as his father had, with one of the small steel companies now taken over by Orren Boyle's Associated Steel. He had waited for his last order of steel for a year. He had spent the last month struggling to obtain a personal interview with Rearden.

"I know that your mills are running at capacity, Mr. Rearden," he said, "and I know that you are not in a position to take care of new orders, what with your biggest, oldest customers having to wait their turn, you being the only decent—I mean, reliable—steel manufacturer left in the country. I don't know what reason to offer you as to why you should want to make an exception in my case. But there was nothing else for me to do, except close the doors of my plant for good, and I"—there was a slight break in his voice—"I can't quite see my way to closing the doors . . . as yet . . . so I thought I'd speak to you, even if I didn't have much chance . . . still, I had to try everything possible."

This was language that Rearden could understand, "I wish I could help you out," he said, "but this is the worst possible time for me, because of a very large, very special order that has to take precedence over everything."

"I know. But would you just give me a hearing, Mr. Rearden?"

"Sure."

"If it's a question of money, I'll pay anything you ask. If I could make it worth your while that way, why, charge me any extra you please, charge me double the regular price, only let me have the steel.

I wouldn't care if I had to sell the harvester at a loss this year, just so I could keep the doors open. I've got enough, personally, to run at a loss for a couple of years, if necessary, just to hold out—because, I figure, things can't go on this way much longer, conditions are bound to improve, they've got to or else we'll—" He did not finish. He said firmly, "They've got to."

"They will," said Rearden.

The thought of the John Galt Line ran through his mind like a harmony under the confident sound of his words. The John Galt Line was moving forward. The attacks on his Metal had ceased. He felt as if, miles apart across the country, he and Dagny Taggart now stood in empty space, their way cleared, free to finish the job. They'll leave us alone to do it, he thought. The words were like a battle hymn in his mind: They'll leave us alone.

"Our plant capacity is one thousand harvesters per year," said Mr.

Ward. "Last year, we put out three hundred. I scraped the steel together from bankruptcy sales, and begging a few tons here and there from big companies, and just going around like a scavenger to all sorts of unlikely places—well, I won't bore you with that, only I never thought I'd live to see the time when I'd have to do business that way.

And all the while Mr. Orren Boyle was swearing to me that he was going to deliver the steel next week. But whatever he managed to pour, it went to new customers of his, for some reason nobody would mention, only I heard it whispered that they were men with some sort of political pull. And now I can't even get to Mr. Boyle at all.

He's in Washington, been there for over a month. And all his office tells me is just that they can't help it, because they can't get the ore."

"Don't waste your time on them," said Rearden. "You'll never get anything from that outfit."

"You know, Mr. Rearden," he said in the tone of a discovery which he could not quite bring himself to believe, "I think there's something phony about the way Mr. Boyle runs his business. I can't understand what he's after. They've got half their furnaces idle, but last month there were all those big stories about Associated Steel in all the newspapers. About their output? Why, no—about the wonderful housing project that Mr. Boyle's just built for his workers. Last week, it was colored movies that Mr. Boyle sent to all the high schools, showing how steel is made and what great service it performs for everybody.

Now Mr. Boyle's got a radio program, they give talks about the importance of the steel industry to the country and they keep saying that we must preserve the steel industry as a whole. I don't understand what he means by it as a whole."

"I do. Forget it. He won't get away with it."

"You know, Mr. Rearden, I don't like people who talk too much about how everything they do is just for the sake of others. It's not true, and I don't think it would be right if it ever were true. So I'll say that what I need the steel for is to save my own business. Because it's mine. Because if I had to close it . . . oh well, nobody understands that nowadays."

"I do."

"Yes . . . Yes, I think you would. . . . So, you see, that's my first concern. But still, there are my customers, too. They've dealt with me for years. They're counting on me. It's just about impossible to get any sort of machinery anywhere. Do you know what it's getting to be like, out in Minnesota, when the farmers can't get tools, when machine break down in the middle of the harvest season and there are no parts, no replacements . . . nothing but Mr. Orren Boyle's colored movies about . . . Oh well . . . And then there are my workers, too. Some of them have been with us since my father's time. They've got no other place to go. Not now."

It was impossible, thought Rearden, to squeeze more steel out of mills where every furnace, every hour and every ton were scheduled in advance for urgent orders, for the next six months. But . . . The John Galt Line, he thought. If he could do that, he could do anything.

- . . He felt as if he wished to undertake ten new problems at once.

He felt as if this were a world where nothing was impossible to him.

"Look," he said, reaching for the telephone, "let me check with my superintendent and see just what we're pouring in the next few weeks.

Maybe I'll find a way to borrow a few tons from some of the orders and—"

Mr. Ward looked quickly away from him, but Rearden had caught a glimpse of his face. It's so much for him, thought Rearden, and so little for me!

He lifted the telephone receiver, but he had to drop it, because the door of his office flew open and Gwen Ives rushed in.

It seemed impossible that Miss Ives should permit herself a breach of that kind, or that the calm of her face should look like an unnatural distortion, or that her eyes should seem blinded, or that her steps should sound a shred of discipline away from staggering. She said, "Excuse me for interrupting, Mr. Rearden," but he knew that she did not see the office, did not see Mr. Ward, saw nothing but him. "I thought I must tell you that the Legislature has just passed the Equalization of Opportunity Bill."

It was the stolid Mr. Ward who screamed, "Oh God, no! Oh, no!"—staring at Rearden.

Rearden had leaped to his feet. He stood unnaturally bent, one shoulder drooping forward. It was only an instant. Then he looked around him, as if regaining eyesight, said, "Excuse me," his glance including both Miss Ives and Mr. Ward, and sat down again.

"We were not informed that the Bill had been brought to the floor, were we?" he asked, his voice controlled and dry.

"No, Mr. Rearden. Apparently, it was a surprise move and it took them just forty-five minutes."

"Have you heard from Mouch?"

"No, Mr. Rearden." She stressed the no. "It was the office boy from the fifth floor who came running in to tell me that he'd just heard it on the radio. I called the newspapers to verify it. I tried to reach Mr.

Mouch in Washington. His office does not answer."

"When did we hear from him last?"

"Ten days ago, Mr. Rearden."

"All right. Thank you, Gwen. Keep trying to get his office."

"Yes, Mr. Rearden."

She walked out. Mr. Ward was on his feet, hat in hand. He muttered, "I guess I'd better—"

"Sit down!" Rearden snapped fiercely.

Mr. Ward obeyed, staring at him.

"We had business to transact, didn't we?" said Rearden. Mr. Ward could not define the emotion that contorted Rearden's mouth as he spoke. "Mr. Ward, what is it that the foulest bastards on earth denounce us for, among other things? Oh yes, for our motto of 'Business as usual.' Well—business as usual, Mr. Ward!"

He picked up the telephone receiver and asked for his superintendent. "Say, Pete . . . What? . . . Yes, I've heard. Can it. We'll talk about that later. What I want to know is, could you let me have five hundred tons of steel, extra, above schedule, in the next few weeks?

. . . Yes, I know . . . I know it's tough. . . . Give me the dates and the figures." He listened, rapidly jotting notes down on a sheet of paper. Then he said, "Right. Thank you," and hung up.

He studied the figures for a few moments, marking some brief calculations on the margin of the sheet. Then he raised his head.

"All right, Mr. Ward," he said. "You will have your steel in ten days."

When Mr. Ward had gone, Rearden came out into the anteroom.

He said to Miss Ives, his voice normal, "Wire Fleming in Colorado.

He'll know why I have to cancel that option." She inclined her head, in the manner of a nod signifying obedience. She did not look at him.

He turned to his next caller and said, with a gesture of invitation toward his office, "How do you do. Come in."

He would think of it later, he thought; one moves step by step and one must keep moving. For the moment, with an unnatural clarity, with a brutal simplification that made it almost easy, his consciousness contained nothing but one thought: It must not stop me. The sentence hung alone, with no past and no future. He did not think of what it was that must not stop him, or why this sentence was such a crucial absolute. It held him and he obeyed. He went step by step. He completed his schedule of appointments, as scheduled.

It was late when his last caller departed and he came out of his office. The rest of his staff had gone home. Miss Ives sat alone at her desk in an empty room. She sat straight and stiff, her hands clasped tightly together in her lap. Her head was not lowered, but held rigidly level, and her face seemed frozen. Tears were running down her cheeks, with no sound, with no facial movement, against her resistance, beyond control.

She saw him and said dryly, guiltily, in apology, "I'm sorry, Mr.

Rearden," not attempting the futile pretense of hiding her face.

He approached her. "Thank you," he said gently.

She looked up at him, astonished.

He smiled. "But don't you think you're underestimating me, Gwen?

Isn't it too soon to cry over me?"

"I could have taken the rest of it," she whispered, "but they"—she pointed at the newspapers on her desk—"they're calling it a victory for anti-greed."

He laughed aloud. "I can see where such a distortion of the English language would make you furious," he said. "But what else?"

As she looked at him, her mouth relaxed a little. The victim whom she could not protect was her only point of reassurance in a world dissolving around her.

He moved his hand gently across her forehead; it was an unusual break of formality for him, and a silent acknowledgment of the things at which he had not laughed. "Go home, Gwen. I won't need you tonight. I'm going home myself in just a little while. No, I don't want you to wait."

It was past midnight, when, still sitting at his desk, bent over blueprints of the bridge for the John Galt Line, he stopped his work abruptly, because emotion reached him in a sudden stab, not to be escaped any longer, as if a curtain of anesthesia had broken, He slumped down, halfway, still holding onto some shred of resistance, and sat, his chest pressed to the edge of the desk to stop him, his head hanging down, as if the only achievement still possible to him was not to let his head drop down on the desk. He sat that way for a few moments, conscious of nothing but pain, a screaming pain without content or limit—he sat, not knowing whether it was in his mind or his body, reduced to the terrible ugliness of pain that stopped thought.

In a few moments, it was over. He raised his head and sat up straight, quietly, leaning back against his chair. Now he saw that in postponing this moment for hours, he had not been guilty of evasion: he had not thought of it, because there was nothing to think.

Thought—he told himself quietly—is a weapon one uses in order to act. No action was possible. Thought is the tool by which one makes a choice. No choice was left to him. Thought sets one's purpose and the way to reach it. In the matter of his life being torn piece by piece out of him, he was to have no voice, no purpose, no way, no defense.

He thought of this in astonishment. He saw for the first time that he had never known fear because, against any disaster, he had held the omnipotent cure of being able to act. No, he thought, not an assurance of victory—who can ever have that?—only the chance to act, which is all one needs. Now he was contemplating, impersonally and for the first time, the real heart of terror: being delivered to destruction with one's hands tied behind one's back.

Well, then, go on with your hands tied, he thought. Go on in chains.

Go on. It must not stop you. . . . But another voice was telling him things he did not want to hear, while he fought back, crying through and against it: There's no point in thinking of that . . . there's no use . . . what for? . . . leave it alone!

He could not choke it off. He sat still, over the drawings of the bridge for the John Galt Line, and heard the things released by a voice that was part-sound, part-sight: They decided it without him.

. . . They did not call for him, they did not ask, they did not let him speak. . . . They were not bound even by the duty to let him know—to let him know that they had slashed part of his life away and that he had to be ready to walk on as a cripple. . . . Of ah" those concerned, whoever they were, for whichever reason, for whatever need, he was the one they had not had to consider.

The sign at the end of a long road said: Rearden Ore. It hung over black tiers of metal . . . and over years and nights . . . over a clock ticking drops of his blood away . . . the blood he had given gladly, exultantly in payment for a distant day and a sign over a road . . paid for with his effort, his strength, his mind, his hope.

Destroyed at the whim of some men who sat and voted . . . Who knows by what minds? . . . Who knows whose will had placed them in power?—what motive moved them?—what was their knowledge?—which one of them, unaided, could bring a chunk of ore out of the earth? . . . Destroyed at the whim of men whom he had never seen and who had never seen those tiers of metal . . . Destroyed, because they so decided. By what right?

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 654