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THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE 6 page

 

"That's why nobody can deal with you or talk to you—because you're inhuman,"

 

"I have just learned that for the last three months, you have not been shipping your ore by the lake boats, you have been shipping it by rail.

 

Why?"

 

"Well, after all, I have a right to run my business as I see fit."

 

"Why are you willing to pay the extra cost?"

 

"What do you care? I'm not charging it to you."

 

"What will you do when you find that you can't afford the rail rates and that you have destroyed the lake shipping?"

 

"I am sure you wouldn't understand any consideration other than dollars and cents, but some people do consider their social and patriotic responsibilities."

 

"What responsibilities?"

 

"Well, I think that a railroad like Taggart Transcontinental is essential to the national welfare and it is one's public duty to support Jim's Minnesota branch line, which is running at a deficit."

 

Rearden leaned forward across the desk; he was beginning to see the links of a sequence he had never understood. "To whom did you ship your ore last month?" he asked evenly.

 

"Well, after all, that is my private business which—"

 

"To Orren Boyle, wasn't it?"

 

"You can't expect people to sacrifice the entire steel industry of the nation to your selfish interests and—"

 

"Get out of here," said Rearden. He said it calmly. The sequence was clear to him now.

 

"Don't misunderstand me, I didn't mean—"

 

"Get out."

 

Larkin got out.

 

Then there followed the days and nights of searching a continent by phone, by wire, by plane—of looking at abandoned mines and at mines ready to be abandoned—of tense, rushed conferences held at tables hi the unlighted corners of disreputable restaurants. Looking across the table, Rearden had to decide how much he could risk to invest upon the sole evidence of a man's face, manner and tone of voice, hating the state of having to hope for honesty as for a favor, but risking it, pouring money into unknown hands in exchange for unsupported promises, into unsigned, unrecorded loans to dummy owners of failing mines—money handed and taken furtively, as an exchange between criminals, in anonymous cash; money poured into unenforceable contracts—both parties knowing that in case of fraud, the defrauded was to be punished, not the defrauder—but poured that a stream of ore might continue flowing into furnaces, that the furnaces might continue to pour a stream of white metal.

 

"Mr. Rearden," asked the purchasing manager of his mills, "if you keep that up, where will be your profit?"

 

"We'll make it up on tonnage," said Rearden wearily. "We have an unlimited market for Rearden Metal."

 

The purchasing manager was an elderly man with graying hair, a lean, dry face, and a heart which, people said, was given exclusively to the task of squeezing every last ounce of value out of a penny. He stood in front of Rearden's desk, saying nothing else, merely looking straight at Rearden, his cold eyes narrowed and grim. It was a look of the most profound sympathy that Rearden had ever seen.



 

There's no other course open, thought Rearden, as he had thought through days and nights. He knew no weapons but to pay for what he wanted, to give value for value, to ask nothing of nature without trading his effort in return, to ask nothing of men without trading the product of his effort. What were the weapons, he thought, if values were not a weapon any longer?

 

"An unlimited market, Mr. Rearden?" the purchasing manager asked dryly.

 

Rearden glanced up at him. "I guess I'm not smart enough to make the sort of deals needed nowadays," he said, in answer to the unspoken thoughts that hung across his desk.

 

The purchasing manager shook his head. "No, Mr. Rearden, it's one or the other. The same kind of brain can't do both. Either you're good at running the mills or you're good at running to Washington."

 

"Maybe I ought to learn their method."

 

"You couldn't learn it and it wouldn't do you any good. You wouldn't win in any of those deals. Don't you understand? You're the one who's got something to be looted."

 

When he was left alone, Rearden felt a jolt of blinding anger, as it had come to him before, painful, single and sudden like an electric shock—the anger bursting out of the knowledge that one cannot deal with pure evil, with the naked, full-conscious evil that neither has nor seeks justification. But when he felt the wish to fight and kill in the rightful cause of self-defense—he saw the fat, grinning face of Mayor Bascom and heard the drawling voice saying, ". . . you and the charming lady who is not your wife."

 

Then no rightful cause was left, and the pain of anger was turning into the shameful pain of submission. He had no right to condemn anyone—he thought—to denounce anything, to fight and die joyously, claiming the sanction of virtue. The broken promises, the unconfessed desires, the betrayal, the deceit, the lies, the fraud—he was guilty of them all. What form of corruption could he scorn? Degrees do not matter, he thought; one does not bargain about inches of evil.

 

He did not know—as he sat slumped at his desk, thinking of the honesty he could claim no longer, of the sense of justice he had lost—that it was his rigid honesty and ruthless sense of justice that were now knocking his only weapon out of his hands. He would fight the looters, but the wrath and fire were gone. He would fight, but only as one guilty wretch against the others. He did not pronounce the words, but the pain was their equivalent, the ugly pain saying: Who am I to cast the first stone?

 

He let his body fall across the desk. . . . Dagny, he thought, Dagny, if this is the price I have to pay, I'll pay it. . . . He was still the trader who knew no code except that of full payment for his desires.

 

It was late when he came home and hurried soundlessly up the stairs to his bedroom. He hated himself for being reduced to sneaking, but he had done it on most of his evenings for months. The sight of his family had become unbearable to him; he could not tell why. Don't hate them for your own guilt, he had told himself, but knew dimly that this was not the root of his hatred.

 

He closed the door of his bedroom like a fugitive winning a moment's reprieve. He moved cautiously, undressing for bed: he wanted no sound to betray his presence to his family, he wanted no contact with them, not even in their own minds.

 

He had put on his pajamas and stopped to light a cigarette, when the door of his bedroom opened. The only person who could properly enter his room without knocking had never volunteered to enter it, so he stared blankly for a moment before he was able to believe that it was Lillian who came in.

 

She wore an Empire garment of pale chartreuse, its pleated skirt streaming gracefully from its high waistline; one could not tell at first glance whether it was an evening gown or a negligee; it was a negligee.

 

She paused in the doorway, the lines of her body flowing into an attractive silhouette against the light.

 

"I know I shouldn't introduce myself to a stranger," she said softly, "but I'll have to: my name is Mrs. Rearden." He could not tell whether it was sarcasm or a plea.

 

She entered and threw the door closed with a casual, imperious gesture, the gesture of an owner.

 

"What is it, Lillian?" he asked quietly.

 

"My dear, you mustn't confess so much so bluntly"—she moved in a leisurely manner across the room, past his bed, and sat down in an armchair—"and so unflatteringly. It's an admission that I need to show special cause for taking your time. Should I make an appointment through your secretary?"

 

He stood in the middle of the room, holding the cigarette at his lips, looking at her. volunteering no answer.

 

She laughed. "My reason is so unusual that I know it will never occur to you: loneliness, darling. Do you mind throwing a few crumbs of your expensive attention to a beggar? Do you mind if I stay here without any formal reason at all?"

 

"No," he said quietly, "not if you wish to."

 

"I have nothing weighty to discuss—no million-dollar orders, no transcontinental deals, no rails, no bridges. Not even the political situation. I just want to chatter like a woman about perfectly unimportant things."

 

"Go ahead."

 

"Henry, there's no better way to stop me, is there?" She had an air of helpless, appealing sincerity. "What can I say after that? Suppose I wanted to tell you about the new novel which Balph Eubank is writing—he is dedicating it to me—would that interest you?"

 

"If it's the truth that you want—not in the least."

 

She laughed. "And if it's not the truth that I want?"

 

"Then I wouldn't know what to say," he answered—and felt a rush of blood to his brain, tight as a slap, realizing suddenly the double infamy of a lie uttered in protestation of honesty; he had said it sincerely, but it implied a boast to which he had no right any longer. "Why would you want it, if it's not the truth?" he asked. "What for?"

 

"Now you see, that's the cruelty of conscientious people. You wouldn't understand it—would you?—if I answered that real devotion consists of being willing to lie, cheat and fake in order to make another person happy—to create for him the reality he wants, if he doesn't like the one that exists."

 

"No," he said slowly, "I wouldn't understand it."

 

"It's really very simple. If you tell a beautiful woman that she is beautiful, what have you given her? It's no more than a fact and it has cost you nothing. But if you tell an ugly woman that she is beautiful, you offer her the great homage of corrupting the concept of beauty. To love a woman for her virtues is meaningless. She's earned it, it's a payment, not a gift. But to love her for her vices is a real gift, unearned and undeserved. To love her for her vices is to defile all virtue for her sake—and that is a real tribute of love, because you sacrifice your conscience, your reason, your integrity and your invaluable self-esteem.”

 

He looked at her blankly. It sounded like some sort of monstrous corruption that precluded the possibility of wondering whether anyone could mean it; he wondered only what was the point of uttering it.

 

"What's love, darling, if it's not self-sacrifice?" she went on lightly, in the tone of a drawing-room discussion. "What's self-sacrifice, unless one sacrifices that which is one's most precious and most important? But I don't expect you to understand it. Not a stainless-steel Puritan like you.

 

That's the immense selfishness of the Puritan. You'd let the whole world perish rather than soil that immaculate self of yours with a single spot of which you'd have to be ashamed."

 

He said slowly, his voice oddly strained and solemn, "I have never claimed to be immaculate."

 

She laughed. "And what is it you're being right now? You're giving me an honest answer, aren't you?" She shrugged her naked shoulders.

 

"Oh, darling, don't take me seriously! I'm just talking."

 

He ground his cigarette into an ashtray; he did not answer.

 

"Darling," she said, "I actually came here only because I kept thinking that I had a husband and I wanted to find out what he looked like."

 

She studied him as he stood across the room, the tall, straight, taut lines of his body emphasized by the single color of the dark blue pajamas.

 

"You're very attractive," she said. "You look so much better—these last few months. Younger. Should I say happier? You look less tense.

 

Oh, I know you're rushed more than ever and you act like a commander in an air raid, but that's only the surface. You're less tense—inside."

 

He looked at her, astonished. It was true; he had not known it, had not admitted it to himself. He wondered at her power of observation.

 

She had seen little of him in these last few months. He had not entered her bedroom since his return from Colorado. He had thought that she would welcome their isolation from each other. Now he wondered what motive could have made her so sensitive to a change in him—unless it was a feeling much greater than he had ever suspected her of experiencing.

 

"I was not aware of it,” he said.

 

"It's quite becoming, dear—and astonishing, since you've been having such a terribly difficult time."

 

He wondered whether this was intended as a question. She paused, as if waiting for an answer, but she did not press it and went on gaily: "I know you're having all sorts of trouble at the mills—and then the political situation is getting to be ominous, isn't it? If they pass those laws they're talking about, it will hit you pretty hard, won't it?"

 

"Yes. It will. But that is a subject which is of no interest to you, Lillian, is it?"

 

"Oh, but it is!" She raised her head and looked straight at him; her eyes had the blank, veiled look he had seen before, a look of deliberate mystery and of confidence in his inability to solve it. "It is of great interest to me . . . though not because of any possible financial losses,” she added softly.

 

He wondered, for the first time, whether her spite, her sarcasm, the cowardly manner of delivering insults under the protection of a smile, were not the opposite of what he had always taken them to be—not a method of torture, but a twisted form of despair, not a desire to make him suffer, but a confession of her own pain, a defense for the pride of an unloved wife, a secret plea—so that the subtle, the hinted, the evasive in her manner, the thing begging to be understood, was not the open malice, but the hidden love. He thought of it, aghast. It made his guilt greater than he had ever contemplated.

 

"If we're talking politics, Henry, I had an amusing thought. The side you represent—what is that slogan you all use so much, the motto you're supposed to stand for? 'The sanctity of contract'—is that it?"

 

She saw his swift glance, the intentness of his eyes, the first response of something she had struck, and she laughed aloud.

 

"Go on," he said; his voice was low; it had the sound of a threat.

 

"Darling, what for?—since you understood me quite well."

 

"What was it you intended to say?" His voice was harshly precise and without any color of feeling.

 

"Do you really wish to bring me to the humiliation of complaining?

 

It's so trite and such a common complaint—although I did think I had a husband who prides himself on being different from lesser men. Do you want me to remind you that you once swore to make my happiness the aim of your life? And that you can't really say in all honesty whether I'm happy or unhappy, because you haven't even inquired whether I exist?"

 

He felt them as a physical pain—all the things that came tearing at him impossibly together. Her words were a plea, he thought—and he felt the dark, hot flow of guilt. He felt pity—the cold ugliness of pity without affection. He felt a dim anger, like a voice he tried to choke, a voice crying in revulsion: Why should I deal with her rotten, twisted lying?—why should I accept torture for the sake of pity?—why is it I who should have to take the hopeless burden of trying to spare a feeling she won't admit, a feeling I can't know or understand or try to guess?

 

—if she loves me, why doesn't the damn coward say so and let us both face it in the open? He heard another, louder voice, saying evenly: Don't switch the blame to her, that's the oldest trick of all cowards—you're guilty—no matter what she does, it's nothing compared to your guilt—she's right—it makes you sick, doesn't it, to know it's she who's right?—let it make you sick, you damn adulterer—it's she who's right!

 

"What would make you happy, Lillian?" he asked. His voice was toneless.

 

She smiled, leaning back in her chair, relaxing; she had been watching his face intently.

 

"Oh, dear!" she said, as in bored amusement. "That's the shyster question. The loophole. The escape clause."

 

She got up, letting her arms fall with a shrug, stretching her body in a limp, graceful gesture of helplessness.

 

"What would make me happy, Henry? That is what you ought to tell me. That is what you should have discovered for me. I don't know. You were to create it and offer it to me. That was your trust, your obligation, your responsibility. But you won't be the first man to default on that promise. It's the easiest of all debts to repudiate. Oh, you'd never welsh on a payment for a load of iron ore delivered to you. Only on a life."

 

She was moving casually across the room, the green-yellow folds of her skirt coiling in long waves about her, "I know that claims of this kind are impractical," she said. "I have no mortgage on you, no collateral, no guns, no chains. I have no hold on you at all, Henry—nothing but your honor."

 

He stood looking at her as if it took all of his effort to keep his eyes directed at her face, to keep seeing her, to endure the sight. "What do you want?" he asked.

 

"Darling, there are so many things you could guess by yourself, if you really wished to know what I want. For instance, if you have been avoiding me so blatantly for months, wouldn't I want to know the reason?"

 

"I have been very busy."

 

She shrugged. "A wife expects to be the first concern of her husband's existence. I didn't know that when you swore to forsake all others, it didn't include blast furnaces."

 

She came closer and, with an amused smile that seemed to mock them both, she slipped her arms around him.

 

It was the swift, instinctive, ferocious gesture of a young bridegroom at the unrequested contact of a whore—the gesture with which he tore her arms off his body and threw her aside.

 

He stood, paralyzed, shocked by the brutality of his own reaction.

 

She was staring at him, her face naked in bewilderment, with no mystery, no pretense or protection; whatever calculations she had made, this was a thing she had not expected.

 

"I'm sorry, Lillian . . ." he said, his voice low, a voice of sincerity and of suffering.

 

She did not answer.

 

"I'm sorry . . . It's just that I'm very tired," he added, his voice lifeless; he was broken by the triple lie, one part of which was a disloyalty he could not bear to face; it was not the disloyalty to Lillian.

 

She gave a brief chuckle. "Well, if that's the effect your work has on you, I may come to approve of it. Do forgive me, I was merely trying to do my duty. I thought that you were a sensualist who'd never rise above the instincts of an animal in the gutter. I'm not one of those bitches who belong in it." She was snapping the words dryly, absently, without thinking. Her mind was on a question mark, racing over every possible answer.

 

It was her last sentence that made him face her suddenly, face her simply, directly, not as one on the defensive any longer. "Lillian, what purpose do you live for?" he asked.

 

"What a crude question! No enlightened person would ever ask it."

 

"Well, what is it that enlightened people do with their lives?"

 

"Perhaps they do not attempt to do anything. That is their enlightenment."

 

"What do they do with their time?"

 

"They certainly don't spend it on manufacturing plumbing pipes."

 

"Tell me, why do you keep making those cracks? I know that you feel contempt for the plumbing pipes. You've made that clear long ago.

 

Your contempt means nothing to me. Why keep repeating it?"

 

He wondered why this hit her; he did not know in what manner, but he knew that it did. He wondered why he felt with absolute certainty that that had been the right thing to say.

 

She asked, her voice dry, "What's the purpose of the sudden questionnaire?"

 

He answered simply, "I'd like to know whether there's anything that you really want. If there is, I'd like to give it to you, if I can."

 

"You'd like to buy it? That's all you know—paying for things. You get off easily, don't you? No, it's not as simple as that. What I want is non-material."

 

"What is it?"

 

"You."

 

"How do you mean that, Lillian? You don't mean it in the gutter sense."

 

"No, not in the gutter sense."

 

"How, then?"

 

She was at the door, she turned, she raised her head to look at him and smiled coldly.

 

"You wouldn't understand it," she said and walked out.

 

The torture remaining to him was the knowledge that she would never want to leave him and he would never have the right to leave—the thought that he owed her at least the feeble recognition of sympathy, of respect for a feeling he could neither understand nor return—the knowledge that he could summon nothing for her, except contempt, a strange, total, unreasoning contempt, impervious to pity, to reproach, to his own pleas for justice—and, hardest to bear, the proud revulsion against his own verdict, against his demand that he consider himself lower than this woman he despised.

 

Then it did not matter to him any longer, it all receded into some outer distance, leaving only the thought that he was willing to bear anything—leaving him in a state which was both tension and peace—because he lay in bed, his face pressed to the pillow, thinking of Dagny, of her slender, sensitive body stretched beside him, trembling under the touch of his fingers. He wished she were back in New York. If she were, he would have gone there, now, at once, in the middle of the night.

 

Eugene Lawson sat at his desk as if it were the control panel of a bomber plane commanding a continent below. But he forgot it, at times, and slouched down, his muscles going slack inside his suit, as if he were pouting at the world. His mouth was the one part of him which he could not pull tight at any time; it was uncomfortably prominent in his lean face, attracting the eyes of any listener: when he spoke, the movement ran through his lower lip, twisting its moist flesh into extraneous contortions of its own.

 

"I am not ashamed of it," said Eugene Lawson. "Miss Taggart, I want you to know that I am not ashamed of my past career as president of the Community National Bank of Madison."

 

"I haven't made any reference to shame," said Dagny coldly.

 

"No moral guilt can be attached to me, inasmuch as I lost everything I possessed in the crash of that bank. It seems to me that I would have the right to feel proud of such a sacrifice."

 

"I merely wanted to ask you some questions about the Twentieth Century Motor Company which—"

 

"I shall be glad to answer any questions. I have nothing to hide. My conscience is clear. If you thought that the subject was embarrassing to me, you were mistaken.'1

 

"I wanted to inquire about the men who owned the factory at the time when you made a loan to—"

 

"They were perfectly good men. They were a perfectly sound risk—though, of course, I am speaking in human terms, not in the terms of cold cash, which you are accustomed to expect from bankers. I granted them the loan for the purchase of that factory, because they needed the money. If people needed money, that was enough for me. Need was my standard, Miss Taggart. Need, not greed. My father and grandfather built up the Community National Bank just to amass a fortune for themselves. I placed their fortune in the service of a higher ideal. I did not sit on piles of money and demand collateral from poor people who needed loans. The heart was my collateral. Of course, I do not expect anyone in this materialistic country to understand me. The rewards I got were not of a kind that people of your class, Miss Taggart, would appreciate. The people who used to sit in front of my desk at the bank, did not sit as you do, Miss Taggart. They were humble, uncertain, worn with care, afraid to speak. My rewards were the tears of gratitude in their eyes, the trembling voices, the blessings, the woman who kissed my hand when I granted her a loan she had begged for in vain everywhere else."

 

"Will you please tell me the names of the men who owned the motor factory?"

 

"That factory was essential to the region, absolutely essential. I was perfectly justified in granting that loan. It provided employment for thousands of workers who had no other means of livelihood."

 

"Did you know any of the people who worked in the factory?"

 

"Certainly. I knew them all. It was men that interested me, not machines. I was concerned with the human side of industry, not the cash register side."

 

She leaned eagerly across the desk. "Did you know any of the engineers who worked there?"

 

"The engineers? No, no. I was much more democratic than that. It's the real workers that interested me. The common men. They all knew me by sight. I used to come into the shops and they would wave and shout, 'Hello, Gene.' That's what they called me—Gene. But I'm sure this is of no interest to you. It's past history. Now if you really came to Washington in order to talk to me about your railroad"—he straightened up briskly, the bomber-plane pose returning—"I don't know whether I can promise you any special consideration, inasmuch as I must hold the national welfare above any private privileges or interests which—"

 

"1 didn't come to talk to you about my railroad," she said, looking at him in bewilderment. "I have no desire to talk to you about my railroad."

 

"No?" He sounded disappointed.

 

"No. I came for information about the motor factory. Could you possibly recall the names of any of the engineers who worked there?"

 

"I don't believe I ever inquired about their names. I wasn't concerned with the parasites of office and laboratory. I was concerned with the real workers—the men of calloused hands who keep a factory going. They were my friends."

 

"Can you give me a few of their names? Any names, of anyone who worked there?"

 

"My dear Miss Taggart, it was so long ago, there were thousands of them, how can I remember?"

 

"Can't you recall one, any one?”

 

"I certainly cannot. So many people have always filled my life that I can't be expected to recall individual drops in the ocean."

 

"Were you familiar with the production of that factory? With the kind of work they were doing—or planning?"


Date: 2015-12-17; view: 272


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