Home Random Page


CATEGORIES:

BiologyChemistryConstructionCultureEcologyEconomyElectronicsFinanceGeographyHistoryInformaticsLawMathematicsMechanicsMedicineOtherPedagogyPhilosophyPhysicsPolicyPsychologySociologySportTourism






THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE 2 page

 

Nobody ever invents anything."

 

She said, puzzled, "But the iron ore and all those other things were there all the time. Why didn't anybody else make that Metal, but Mr.

 

Rearden did?"

 

"He didn't do it for any noble purpose, he did it just for his own profit, he's never done anything for any other reason."

 

"What's wrong with that, Mr. Taggart?" Then she laughed softly, as if at the sudden solution of a riddle. "That's nonsense, Mr. Taggart. You don't mean it. You know that Mr. Rearden has earned all his profits, and so have you. You're saying those things just to be modest, when everybody knows what a great job you people have done—you and Mr. Rearden and your sister, who must be such a wonderful person!"

 

"Yeah? That's what you think. She's a hard, insensitive woman who spends her life building tracks and bridges, not for any great ideal, but only because that's what she enjoys doing. If she enjoys it, what is there to admire about her doing it? I'm not so sure it was great—building that Line for all those prosperous industrialists in Colorado, when there are so many poor people in blighted areas who need transportation."

 

"But, Mr. Taggart, it was you who fought to build that Line."

 

"Yes, because it was my duty—to the company and the stockholders and our employees. But don't expect me to enjoy it. I'm not so sure it was great—inventing this complex new Metal, when so many nations are in need of plain iron—why, do you know that the People's State of China hasn't even got enough nails to put wooden roofs over people's heads?"

 

"But . . . but I don't see that that's your fault."

 

"Somebody should attend to it. Somebody with the vision to see beyond his own pocketbook. No sensitive person these days—when there's so much suffering around us—would devote ten years of his life to splashing about with a lot of trick metals. You think it's great? Well, it's not any kind of superior ability, but just a hide that you couldn't pierce if you poured a ton of his own steel over his head! There are many people of much greater ability in the world, but you don't read about them in the headlines and you don't run to gape at them at grade crossings—because they can't invent non-collapsible bridges at a time when the suffering of mankind weighs on their spirit!"

 

She was looking at him silently, respectfully, her joyous eagerness toned down, her eyes subdued. He felt better.

 

He picked up his drink, took a gulp, and chuckled abruptly at a sudden recollection.

 

"It was funny, though," he said, his tone easier, livelier, the tone of a confidence to a pal. "You should have seen Orren Boyle yesterday, when the first flash came through on the radio from Wyatt Junction! He turned green—but I mean, green, the color of a fish that's been lying around too long! Do you know what he did last night, by way of taking the bad news? Hired himself a suite at the Valhalla Hotel—and you know what that is—and the last I heard, he was still there today, drinking himself under the table and the beds, with a few choice friends of his and half the female population of upper Amsterdam Avenue!"



 

"Who is Mr. Boyle?" she asked, stupefied.

 

"Oh, a fat slob that's inclined to overreach himself. A smart guy who gets too smart at times. You should have seen his face yesterday! I got a kick out of that. That—and Dr. Floyd Ferris. That smoothy didn't like it a bit, oh not a bit!—the elegant Dr. Ferris of the State Science Institute, the servant of the people, with the patent-leather vocabulary—but he carried it off pretty well, I must say, only you could see him squirming in every paragraph—I mean, that interview he gave out this morning, where he said, 'The country gave Rearden that Metal, now we expect him to give the country something in return.' That was pretty nifty, considering who's been riding on the gravy train and . . . well, considering. That was better than Bertram Scudder—Mr. Scudder couldn't think of anything but 'No comment,' when his fellow gentlemen of the press asked him to voice his sentiments. 'No comment'—from Bertram Scudder who's never been known to shut his trap from the day he was born, about anything you ask him or don't ask, Abyssinian poetry or the state of the ladies' rest rooms in the textile industry! And Dr. Pritchett, the old fool, is going around saying that he knows for certain that Rearden didn't invent that Metal—because he was told, by an unnamed reliable source, that Rearden stole the formula from a penniless inventor whom he murdered!"

 

He was chuckling happily. She was listening as to a lecture on higher mathematics, grasping nothing, not even the style of the language, a style which made the mystery greater, because she was certain that it did not mean—coming from him—what it would have meant anywhere else.

 

He refilled his glass and drained it, but his gaiety vanished abruptly.

 

He slumped into an armchair, facing her, looking up at her from under his bald forehead, his eyes blurred.

 

"She's coming back tomorrow," he said, with a sound like a chuckle devoid of amusement.

 

"Who?"

 

"My sister. My dear sister. Oh, she'll think she's great, won't she?"

 

"You dislike your sister, Mr. Taggart?" He made the same sound; its meaning was so eloquent that she needed no other answer. "Why?" she asked.

 

"Because she thinks she's so good. What right has she to think it?

 

What right has anybody to think he's good? Nobody's any good."

 

"You don't mean it, Mr. Taggart."

 

"I mean, we're only human beings—and what's a human being? A weak, ugly, sinful creature, born that way, rotten in his bones—so humility is the one virtue he ought to practice. He ought to spend his life on his knees, begging to be forgiven for his dirty existence. When a man thinks he's good—that's when he's rotten. Pride is the worst of all sins, no matter what he's done."

 

"But if a man knows that what he's done is good?"

 

"Then he ought to apologize for it."

 

"To whom?"

 

"To those who haven't done it."

 

"I . . . I don't understand."

 

"Of course you don't. It takes years and years of study in the higher reaches of the intellect. Have you ever heard of The Metaphysical Contradictions of the Universe, by Dr. Simon Pritchett?" She shook her head, frightened. "How do you know what's good, anyway? Who knows what's good? Who can ever know? There are no absolutes—as Dr.

 

Pritchett has proved irrefutably. Nothing is absolute. Everything is a matter of opinion. How do you know that that bridge hasn't collapsed?

 

You only think it hasn't. How do you know that there's any bridge at all?

 

You think that a system of philosophy—such as Dr. Pritchett's—is just something academic, remote, impractical? But it isn't. Oh, boy, how it isn't!"

 

"But, Mr. Taggart, the Line you built—"

 

"Oh, what's that Line, anyway? It's only a material achievement, is that of any importance? Is there any greatness in anything material?

 

Only a low animal can gape at that bridge—when there are so many higher things in life. But do the higher things ever get recognition? Oh no! Look at people. All that hue and cry and front pages about some trick arrangement of some scraps of matter. Do they care about any nobler issue? Do they ever give front pages to a phenomenon of the spirit? Do they notice or appreciate a person of finer sensibility? And you wonder whether it's true that a great man is doomed to unhappiness in this depraved world!" He leaned forward, staring at her intently. "I'll tell you . . . I'll tell you something . . . unhappiness is the hallmark of virtue. If a man is unhappy, really, truly unhappy, it means that he is a superior sort of person."

 

He saw the puzzled, anxious look of her face. "But, Mr. Taggart, you got everything you wanted. Now you have the best railroad in the country, the newspapers call you the greatest business executive of the age, they say the stock of your company made a fortune for you overnight, you got everything you could ask for—aren't you glad of it?"

 

In the brief space of his answer, she felt frightened, sensing a sudden fear within him. He answered, "No."

 

She didn't know why her voice dropped to a whisper. "You'd rather the bridge had collapsed?"

 

"I haven't said that!" he snapped sharply. Then he shrugged and waved his hand in a gesture of contempt. "You don't understand."

 

"I'm sorry . . . Oh, I know that I have such an awful lot to learn!"

 

"I am talking about a hunger for something much beyond that bridge.

 

A hunger that nothing material will ever satisfy."

 

"What, Mr. Taggart? What is it you want?"

 

"Oh, there you go! The moment you ask, 'What is it?' you're back in the crude, material world where everything's got to be tagged and measured. I'm speaking of things that can't be named in materialistic words . . . the higher realms of the spirit, which man can never reach. . . .

 

What's any human achievement, anyway? The earth is only an atom whirling in the universe—of what importance is that bridge to the solar system?"

 

A sudden, happy look of understanding cleared her eyes. "It's great of you, Mr. Taggart, to think that your own achievement isn't good enough for you. I guess no matter how far you've gone, you want to go still farther. You're ambitious. That's what I admire most: ambition. I mean, doing things, not stopping and giving up, but doing. I understand, Mr. Taggart . . . even if I don't understand all the big thoughts."

 

"You'll learn."

 

"Oh, I'll work very hard to learn!"

 

Her glance of admiration had not changed. He walked across the room, moving in that glance as in a gentle spotlight. He went to refill his glass. A mirror hung in the niche behind the portable bar. He caught a glimpse of his own figure: the tall body distorted by a sloppy, sagging posture, as if in deliberate negation of human grace, the thinning hair, the soft, sullen mouth. It struck him suddenly that she did not see him at all: what she saw was the heroic figure of a builder, with proudly straight shoulders and wind-blown hair. He chuckled aloud, feeling that this was a good joke on her, feeling dimly a satisfaction that resembled a sense of victory: the superiority of having put something over on her.

 

Sipping his drink, he glanced at the door of his bedroom and thought of the usual ending for an adventure of this kind. He thought that it would be easy: the girl was too awed to resist. He saw the reddish-bronze sparkle of her hair—as she sat, head bent, under a light—and a wedge of smooth, glowing skin on her shoulder. He looked away. Why bother?

 

—he thought.

 

The hint of desire that he felt, was no more than a sense of physical discomfort. The sharpest impulse in his mind, nagging him to action, was not the thought of the girl, but of all the men who would not pass up an opportunity of this kind. He admitted to himself that she was a much better person than Betty Pope, perhaps the best person ever offered to him. The admission left him indifferent. He felt no more than he had felt for Betty Pope. He felt nothing. The prospect of experiencing pleasure was not worth the effort; he had no desire to experience pleasure.

 

"It's getting late," he said. "Where do you live? Let me give you another drink and then I'll take you home."

 

When he said good-bye to her at the door of a miserable rooming house in a slum neighborhood, she hesitated, fighting not to ask a question which she desperately wished to ask him, "Will I . . . " she began, and stopped.

 

"What?"

 

"No, nothing, nothing!"

 

He knew that the question was: "Will I see you again?" It gave him pleasure not to answer, even though he knew that she would.

 

She glanced up at him once more, as if it were perhaps for the last time, then said earnestly, her voice low, "Mr. Taggart, I'm very grateful to you, because you . . . I mean, any other man would have tried to . . . I mean, that's all he'd want, but you're so much better than that, oh, so much better!"

 

He leaned closer to her with a faint, interested smile. "Would you have?" he asked.

 

She drew back from him, in sudden terror at her own words. "Oh, I didn't mean it that way!" she gasped. "Oh God, I wasn't hinting or . . . or . . ." She blushed furiously, whirled around and ran, vanishing up the long, steep stairs of the rooming house.

 

He stood on the sidewalk, feeling an odd, heavy, foggy sense of satisfaction: feeling as if he had committed an act of virtue—and as if he had taken his revenge upon every person who had stood cheering along the three-hundred-mile track of the John Galt Line.

 

When their train reached Philadelphia, Rearden left her without a word, as if the nights of their return journey deserved no acknowledgment in the daylight reality of crowded station platforms and moving engines, the reality he respected. She went on to New York, alone. But late that evening, the doorbell of her apartment rang and Dagny knew that she had expected it.

 

He said nothing when he entered, he looked at her, making his silent presence more intimate a greeting than words. There was the faint suggestion of a contemptuous smile in his face, at once admitting and mocking his knowledge of her hours of impatience and his own. He stood in the middle of her living room, looking slowly around him; this was her apartment, the one place in the city that had been the focus of two years of his torment, as the place he could not think about and did, the place he could not enter—and was now entering with the casual, unannounced right of an owner. He sat down in an armchair, stretching his legs forward—and she stood before him, almost as if she needed his permission to sit down and it gave her pleasure to wait.

 

"Shall I tell you that you did a magnificent job, building that Line?" he asked. She glanced at him in astonishment; he had never paid her open compliments of that kind; the admiration in his voice was genuine, but the hint of mockery remained in his face, and she felt as if he were speaking to some purpose which she could not guess. "I've spent all day answering questions about you-—and about the Line, the Metal and the future. That, and counting the orders for the Metal.

 

They're coming in at the rate of thousands of tons an hour. When was it, nine months ago?—I couldn't get a single answer anywhere. Today, I had to cut off my phone, not to listen to all the people who wanted to speak to me personally about their urgent need of Rearden Metal.

 

What did you do today?"

 

"I don't know. Tried to listen to Eddie's reports—tried to get away from people—tried to find the rolling stock to put more trains on the John Galt Line, because the schedule I'd planned won't be enough for the business that's piled up in just three days."

 

"A great many people wanted to see you today, didn't they?"

 

"Why. yes."

 

"They'd have given anything just for a word with you, wouldn't they?"

 

"I . . . I suppose so."

 

"The reporters kept asking me what you were like. A young boy from a local sheet kept saying that you were a great woman. He said he'd be afraid to speak to you, if he ever had the chance. He's right. That future that they're all talking and trembling about—it will be as you made it, because you had the courage none of them could conceive of.

 

All the roads to wealth that they're scrambling for now, it's your strength that broke them open. The strength to stand against everyone.

 

The strength to recognize no will but your own."

 

She caught the sinking gasp of her breath: she knew his purpose. She stood straight, her arms at her sides, her face austere, as if in unflinching endurance; she stood under the praise as under a lashing of insults.

 

"They kept asking you questions, too, didn't they?" He spoke intently, leaning forward. "And they looked at you with admiration.

 

They looked, as if you stood on a mountain peak and they could only take their hats off to you across the great distance. Didn't they?"

 

"Yes," she whispered.

 

"They looked as if they knew that one may not approach you or speak in your presence or touch a fold of your dress. They knew it and it's true. They looked at you with respect, didn't they? They looked up to you?"

 

He seized her arm, threw her down on her knees, twisting her body against his legs, and bent down to kiss her mouth. She laughed soundlessly, her laughter mocking, but her eyes half-closed, veiled with pleasure.

 

Hours later, when they lay in bed together, his hand moving over her body, he asked suddenly, throwing her back against the curve of his arm, bending over her—and she knew, by the intensity of his face, by the sound of a gasp somewhere in the quality of his voice, even though his voice was low and steady, that the question broke out of him as if it were worn by the hours of torture he had spent with it: "Who were the other men that had you?"

 

He looked at her as if the question were a sight visualized in every detail, a sight he loathed, but would not abandon; she heard the contempt in his voice, the hatred, the suffering—and an odd eagerness that did not pertain to torture; he had asked the question, holding her body tight against him.

 

She answered evenly, but he saw a dangerous flicker in her eyes, as of a warning that she understood him too well. "There was only one other, Hank."

 

"When?"

 

"When I was seventeen.'1

 

"Did it last?"

 

"For some years."

 

"Who was he?"

 

She drew back, lying against his arm; he leaned closer, his face taut; she held his eyes. "I won't answer you.”

 

"Did you love him?"

 

"I won't answer."

 

"Did you like sleeping with him?"

 

"Yes!"

 

The laughter in her eyes made it sound like a slap across his face, the laughter of her knowledge that this was the answer he dreaded and wanted.

 

He twisted her arms behind her, holding her helpless, her breasts pressed against him; she felt the pain ripping through her shoulders, she heard the anger in his words and the huskiness of pleasure in his voice: "Who was he?"

 

She did not answer, she looked at him, her eyes dark and oddly brilliant, and he saw that the shape of her mouth, distorted by pain, was the shape of a mocking smile.

 

He felt it change to a shape of surrender, under the touch of his lips.

 

He held her body as if the violence and the despair of the way he took her could wipe his unknown rival out of existence, out of her past, and more: as if it could transform any part of her, even the rival, into an instrument of his pleasure. He knew, by the eagerness of her movement as her arms seized him, that this was the way she wanted to be taken.

 

 

 

The silhouette of a conveyor belt moved against the strips of fire in the sky, raising coal to the top of a distant tower, as if an inexhaustible number of small black buckets rode out of the earth in a diagonal line across the sunset. The harsh, distant clatter kept going through the rattle of the chains which a young man in blue overalls was fastening over the machinery, securing it to the flatcars lined on the siding of the Quinn Ball Bearing Company of Connecticut.

 

Mr. Mowen, of the Amalgamated Switch and Signal Company across the street, stood by, watching. He had stopped to watch, on his way home from his own plant. He wore a light overcoat stretched over his short, paunchy figure, and a derby hat over his graying, blondish head.

 

There was a first touch of September chill in the air. All the gates of the Quinn plant buildings stood wide open, while men and cranes moved the machinery out; like taking the vital organs and leaving a carcass, thought Mr. Mowen.

 

"Another one?" asked Mr. Mowen, jerking his thumb at the plant, even though he knew the answer.

 

"Huh?" asked the young man, who had not noticed him standing there.

 

"Another company moving to Colorado?"

 

"Uh-huh."

 

"It's the third one from Connecticut in the last two weeks," said Mr.

 

Mowen. "And when you look at what's happening in New Jersey, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and all along the Atlantic coast . . ."

 

The young man was not looking and did not seem to listen. "It's like a leaking faucet," said Mr. Mowen, "and all the water's running out to Colorado. All the money." The young man flung the chain across and followed it deftly, climbing over the big shape covered with canvas.

 

"You'd think people would have some feeling for their native state, some loyalty . . . But they're running away. I don't know what's happening to people."

 

"It's the Bill," said the young man.

 

"What Bill?"

 

"The Equalization of Opportunity Bill."

 

"How do you mean?"

 

"I hear Mr. Quinn was making plans a year ago to open a branch in Colorado. The Bill knocked that out cold. So now he's made up his mind to move there, lock, stock and barrel."

 

"I don't see where that makes it right. The Bill was necessary. It's a rotten shame—old firms that have been here for generations . . .

 

There ought to be a law . . ."

 

The young man worked swiftly, competently, as if he enjoyed it. Behind him. the conveyor belt kept rising and clattering against the sky.

 

Four distant smokestacks stood like flagpoles, with coils of smoke weaving slowly about them, like long banners at half-mast in the reddish glow of the evening.

 

Mr. Mowen had lived with every smokestack of that skyline since the days of his father and grandfather. He had seen the conveyor belt from his office window for thirty years. That the Quinn Ball Bearing Company should vanish from across the street had seemed inconceivable; he had known about Quinn's decision and had not believed it; or rather, he had believed it as he believed any words he heard or spoke: as sounds that bore no fixed relation to physical reality. Now he knew that it was real. He stood by the flatcars on the siding as if he still had a chance to stop them.

 

"It isn't right," he said; he was speaking to the skyline at large, but the young man above was the only part of it that could hear him.

 

"That's not the way it was in my father's time. I'm not a big shot. I don't want to fight anybody. What's the matter with the world?" There was no answer, "Now you, for instance—are they taking you along to Colorado?"

 

"Me? No. I don't work here. I'm just transient labor. Just picked up this job helping to lug the stuff out."

 

"Well, where are you going to go when they move away?"

 

"Haven't any idea."

 

"What are you going to do, if more of them move out?"

 

"Wait and see."

 

Mr. Mowen glanced up dubiously: he could not tell whether the answer was intended to apply to him or to the young man. But the young man's attention was fixed on his task; he was not looking down.

 

He moved on, to the shrouded shapes on the next flatcar, and Mr.

 

Mowen followed, looking up at him, pleading with something up in space: "I've got rights, haven't I? I was born here. I expected the old companies to be here when I grew up. I expected to run the plant like my father did. A man is part of his community, he's got a right to count on it, hasn't he? . . . Something ought to be done about it."

 

"About what?"

 

"Oh, I know, you think it's great, don't you?—that Taggart boom and Rearden Metal and the gold rush to Colorado and the drunken spree out there, with Wyatt and his bunch expanding their production like kettles boiling over! Everybody thinks it's great—that's all you hear anywhere you go—people are slap-happy, making plans like six-year olds on a vacation—you'd think it was a national honeymoon of some kind or a permanent Fourth of July!"

 

The young man said nothing.

 

"Well, I don't think so," said Mr. Mowen. He lowered his voice. 'The newspapers don't say so, either—mind you that—the newspapers aren't saying anything."

 

Mr. Mowen heard no answer, only the clanking of the chains.

 

"Why are they all running to Colorado?” he asked. "What have they got down there that we haven't got?"

 

The young man grinned. "Maybe it's something you've got that they haven't got."

 

"What?" The young man did not answer. "I don't see it. It's a backward, primitive, unenlightened place. They don't even have a modern government. It's the worst government in any state. The laziest. It does nothing—outside of keeping law courts and a police department.

 

It doesn't do anything for the people. It doesn't help anybody. I don't see why all our best companies want to run there."

 

The young man glanced down at him, but did not answer.

 

Mr. Mowen sighed. "Things aren't right," he said. "The Equalization of Opportunity Bill was a sound idea. There's got to be a chance for everybody. It's a rotten shame if people like Quinn take unfair advantage of it. Why didn't he let somebody else start manufacturing ball bearings in Colorado? . . . I wish the Colorado people would leave us alone. That Stockton Foundry out there had no right going into the switch and signal business. That's been my business for years, I have the right of seniority, it isn't fair, it's dog-eat-dog competition, newcomers shouldn't be allowed to muscle in. Where am I going to sell switches and signals? There were two big railroads out in Colorado.

 

Now the Phoenix-Durango's gone, so there's just Taggart Transcontinental left. It isn't fair—their forcing Dan Conway out. There's got to be room for competition. . . . And I've been waiting six months for an order of steel from Orren Boyle—and now he says he can't promise me anything, because Rearden Metal has shot his market to hell, there's a run on that Metal, Boyle has to retrench. It isn't fair—Rearden being allowed to ruin other people's markets that way. . . . And I want to get some Rearden Metal, too, I need it—but try and get it! He has a waiting line that would stretch across three states—nobody can get a scrap of it, except his old friends, people like Wyatt and Danagger and such. It isn't fair. It's discrimination. I'm just as good as the next fellow. I'm entitled to my share of that Metal."

 

The young man looked up. "I was in Pennsylvania last week," he said. "I saw the Rearden mills. There's a place that's busy! They're building four new open-hearth furnaces, and they've got six more coming. . . . New furnaces," he said, looking off to the south. "Nobody's built a new furnace on the Atlantic coast for the last five years. . . ." He stood against the sky, on the top of a shrouded motor, looking off at the dusk with a faint smile of eagerness and longing, as one looks at the distant vision of one's love. "They're busy. . . ." he said.


Date: 2015-12-17; view: 278


<== previous page | next page ==>
 | THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE 3 page
doclecture.net - lectures - 2014-2024 year. Copyright infringement or personal data (0.026 sec.)