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THE CONCERTO OF DELIVERANCE 2 page

 

It was not a sound that stopped her, it was only a movement of his eyebrows, the brief, swift movement of a check mark. Then they saw him smile; the nature of the smile was the most terrifying of answers.

 



"So that's what you're afraid of," he said slowly.

 



"You can't quit!" his mother screamed in blind panic. "You can't quit now! You could have, last year, but not now! Not today! You can't turn deserter, because now they take it out on your family! They'll leave us penniless, they'll seize everything, they'll leave us to starve, they'll—"

 



"Keep still!" cried Lillian, more adept than the others at reading danger signs in Rearden's face.

 



His face held the remnant of a smile, and they knew that he was not seeing them any longer, but it was not in their power to know why his smile now seemed to hold pain and an almost wistful longing, or why he was looking across the room, at the niche of the farthest window.

 



He was seeing a finely sculptured face held composed under the lashing of his insults, he was hearing a voice that had said to him quietly, here, in this room: "It is against the sin of forgiveness that I wanted to warn you." You who had known it then, he thought . . . but he did not finish the sentence in his mind, he let it end in the bitter twist of his smile, because he knew what he had been about to think: You who had known it then—forgive me.

 



There it was—he thought, looking at his family—the nature of their pleas for mercy, the logic of those feelings they so righteously proclaimed as non-logical—there was the simple, brutal essence of all men who speak of being able to feel without thought and of placing mercy over justice.

 



They had known what to fear; they had grasped and named, before he had, the only way of deliverance left open to him; they had understood the hopelessness of his industrial position, the futility of his struggle, the impossible burdens descending to crush him; they had known that in reason, in justice, in self-preservation, his only course was to drop it all and run—yet they wanted to hold him, to keep him in the sacrificial furnace, to make him let them devour the last of him in the name of mercy, forgiveness and brother-cannibal love.

 



"If you still want me to explain it, Mother," he said very quietly, "if you're still hoping that I won't be cruel enough to name what you're pretending not to know, then here's what's wrong with your idea of forgiveness: You regret that you've hurt me and, as your atonement for it, you ask that I offer myself to total immolation."

 



"Logic!" she screamed. "There you go again with your damn logic!

 



It's pity that we need, pity, not logic!"

 



He rose to his feet.

 



"Wait! Don't go! Henry, don't abandon us! Don't sentence us to perish! Whatever we are, we're human! We want to live!"

 



"Why, no—" he started in quiet astonishment and ended in quiet horror, as the thought struck him fully, "I don't think you do. If you did, you would have known how to value me."

 



As if in silent proof and answer, Philip's face went slowly into an expression intended as a smile of amusement, yet holding nothing but fear and malice. "You won't be able to quit and run away," said Philip. "You can't run away without money."

 



It seemed to strike its goal; Rearden stopped short, then chuckled, "Thanks, Philip," he said.

 



"Uh?" Philip gave a nervous jerk of bewilderment.

 



"So that's the purpose of the attachment order. That's what your friends are afraid of. I knew they were getting set to spring something on me today. I didn't know that the attachment was their idea of cutting off escape." He turned incredulously to look at his mother. "And that's why you had to see me today, before the conference in New York."

 



"Mother didn't know it!" cried Philip, then caught himself and cried louder, "I don't know what you're talking about! I haven't said anything! I haven't said it!" His fear now seemed to have some much less mystic and much more practical quality.

 



"Don't worry, you poor little louse, I won't tell them that you've told me anything. And if you were trying—"

 



He did not finish; he looked at the three faces before him, and a sudden smile ended his sentence, a smile of weariness, of pity, of incredulous revulsion. He was seeing the final contradiction, the grotesque absurdity at the end of the irrationalists' game: the men in Washington had hoped to hold him by prompting these three to try for the role of hostages.

 



"You think you're so good, don't you?" It was a sudden cry and it came from Lillian; she had leaped to her feet to bar his exit; her face was distorted, as he had seen it once before, on that morning when she had learned the name of his mistress. "You're so good! You're so proud of yourself! Well, I have something to tell you!"

 



She looked as if she had not believed until this moment that her game was lost. The sight of her face struck him like a last shred completing a circuit, and in sudden clarity he knew what her game had been and why she had married him.

 



If to choose a person as the constant center of one's concern, as the focus of one's view of life, was to love—he thought—then it was true that she loved him; but if, to him, love was a celebration of one's self and of existence—then, to the self-haters and life-haters, the pursuit of destruction was the only form and equivalent of love. It was for the best of his virtues that Lillian had chosen him, for his strength, his confidence, his pride—she had chosen him as one chooses an object of love, as the symbol of man's living power, but the destruction of that power had been her goal.

 



He saw them as they had been at their first meeting: he, the man of violent energy and passionate ambition, the man of achievement, lighted by the flame of his success and flung into the midst of those pretentious ashes who called themselves an intellectual elite, the burned out remnants of undigested culture, feeding on the afterglow of the minds of others, offering their denial of the mind as their only claim to distinction, and a craving to control the world as their only lust—she, the woman hanger-on of that elite, wearing their shopworn sneer as her answer to the universe, holding impotence as superiority and emptiness as virtue—he, unaware of their hatred, innocently scornful of their posturing fraud—she, seeing him as the danger to their world, as a threat, as a challenge, as a reproach.

 



The lust that drives others to enslave an empire, had become, in her limits, a passion for power over him. She had set out to break him, as if, unable to equal his value, she could surpass it by destroying it, as if the measure of his greatness would thus become the measure of hers, as if—he thought with a shudder—as if the vandal who smashed a statue were greater than the artist who had made it, as if the murderer who killed a child were greater than the mother who had given it birth.

 



He remembered her hammering derision of his work, his mills, his Metal, his success, he remembered her desire to see him drunk, just once, her attempts to push him into infidelity, her pleasure at the thought that he had fallen to the level of some sordid romance, her terror on discovering that that romance had been an attainment, not a degradation. Her line of attack, which he had found so baffling, had been constant and clear—it was his self-esteem she had sought to destroy, knowing that a man who surrenders his value is at the mercy of anyone's will; it was his moral purity she had struggled to breach, it was his confident rectitude she had wanted to shatter by means of the poison of guilt—as if, were he to collapse, his depravity would give her a right to hers.

 



For the same purpose and motive, for the same satisfaction, as others weave complex systems of philosophy to destroy generations, of establish dictatorships to destroy a country, so she, possessing no weapons except femininity, had made it her goal to destroy one man.

 



Yours was the code of life—he remembered the voice of his lost young teacher—what, then, is theirs?

 



"I have something to tell you!" cried Lillian, with the sound of that impotent rage which wishes that words were brass knuckles. "You're so proud of yourself, aren't you? You're so proud of your name!

 



Rearden Steel, Rearden Metal, Rearden Wife! That's what I was, wasn't I? Mrs. Rearden! Mrs. Henry Rearden!" The sounds she was making were now a string of cackling gasps, an unrecognizable corruption of laughter. "Well, I think you'd like to know that your wife's been laid by another man! I've been unfaithful to you, do you hear me? I've been unfaithful, not with some great, noble lover, but with the scummiest louse, with Jim Taggart! Three months ago! Before your divorce!

 



While I was your wife! While I was still your wife!"

 



He stood listening like a scientist studying a subject of no personal relevance whatever. There, he thought, was the final abortion of the creed of collective interdependence, the creed of non-identity, nonproperty, non-fact: the belief that the moral stature of one is at the mercy of the action of another.

 



"I've been unfaithful to you! Don't you hear me, you stainless Puritan? I've slept with Jim Taggart, you incorruptible hero! Don't you hear me? . . . Don't you hear me? . . . Don't you . . . ?"

 



He was looking at her as he would have looked if a strange woman had approached him on the street with a personal confession—a look like the equivalent of the words: Why tell it to me?

 



Her voice trailed off. He had not known what the destruction of a person would be like; but he knew that he was seeing the destruction of Lillian. He saw it in the collapse of her face, in the sudden slackening of features, as if there were nothing to hold them together, in the eyes, blind, yet staring, staring inward, filled with that terror which no outer threat can equal. It was not the look of a person losing her mind, but the look of a mind seeing total defeat and, in the same instant, seeing, her own nature for the first time—the look of a person seeing that after years of preaching non-existence, she had achieved it.

 



He turned to go. His mother stopped him at the door, seizing his arm. With a look of stubborn bewilderment, with the last of her effort at self-deceit, she moaned in a voice of tearfully petulant reproach, "Are you really incapable of forgiveness?"

 



"No, Mother," he answered, "I'm not. I would have forgiven the past—if, today, you had urged me to quit and disappear."

 



There was a cold wind outside, tightening his overcoat about him like an embrace, there was the great, fresh sweep of country stretching at the foot of the hill, and the clear, receding sky of twilight. Like two sunsets ending the day, the red glow of the sun was a straight, still band in the west, and the breathing red band in the east was the glow of his mills.

 



The feel of the steering wheel under his hands and of the smooth highway streaming past, as he sped to New York, had an oddly bracing quality. It was a sense of extreme precision and of relaxation, together, a sense of action without strain, which seemed inexplicably youthful—until he realized that this was the way he had acted and had expected always to act, in his youth—and what he now felt was like the simple, astonished question: Why should one ever have to act in any other manner?

 



It seemed to him that the skyline of New York, when it rose before him, had a strangely luminous clarity, though its shapes were veiled by distance, a clarity that did not seem to rest in the object, but felt as if the illumination came from him. He looked at the great city, with no tie to any view or usage others had made of it, it was not a city of gangsters or panhandlers or derelicts or whores, it was the greatest industrial achievement in the history of man, its only meaning was that which it meant to him, there was a personal quality in his sight of it, a quality of possessiveness and of unhesitant perception, as if he were seeing it for the first time—or the last.

 



He paused in the silent corridor of the Wayne-Falkland, at the door of the suite he was to enter; it took him a long moment's effort to lift his hand and knock; it was the suite that had belonged to Francisco d'Anconia.

 



There were coils of cigarette smoke weaving through the air of the drawing room, among the velvet drapes and bare, polished tables.

 



With its costly furniture and the absence of all personal belongings, the room had that air of dreary luxury which pertains to transient occupancy, as dismal as the air of a flophouse. Five figures rose in. the fog at his entrance: Wesley Mouch, Eugene Lawson, James Taggart, Dr. Floyd Ferris and a slim, slouching man who looked like a rat-faced tennis player and was introduced to him as Tinky Holloway.

 



"All right," said Rearden, cutting off the greetings, the smiles, the offers of drinks and the comments on the national emergency, "what did you want?"

 



"We're here as your friends, Mr. Rearden," said Tinky Holloway, "purely as your friends, for an informal conversation with a view to closer mutual teamwork."

 



"We're anxious to avail ourselves of your outstanding ability," said Lawson, "and your expert advice on the country's industrial problems."

 



"It's men like you that we need in Washington," said Dr. Ferris.

 



"There's no reason why you should have remained an outsider for so long, when your voice is needed at the top level of national leadership.”

 



The sickening thing about it, thought Rearden, was that the speeches were only half-lies; the other half, in their tone of hysterical urgency, was the unstated wish to have it somehow be true. "What did you want?" he asked.

 



"Why . . . to listen to you, Mr. Rearden," said Wesley Mouch, the jerk of his features imitating a frightened smile; the smile was faked, the fear was real. "We . . . we want the benefit of your opinion on the nation's industrial crisis."

 



"I have nothing to say."

 



"But, Mr. Rearden," said Dr. Ferris, "all we want is a chance to co-operate with you."

 



"I've told you once, publicly, that I don't co-operate at the point of a gun."

 



"Can't we bury the hatchet at a time like this?" said Lawson beseechingly.

 



"The gun? Go ahead."

 



"Uh?"

 



"It's you who're holding it. Bury it, if you think you can."

 



"That . . . that was just a figure of speech," Lawson explained, blinking, "I was speaking metaphorically."

 



>78

 



"I wasn't."

 



"Can't we all stand together for the sake of the country in this hour of emergency?" said Dr. Ferris. "Can't we disregard our differences of opinion? We're willing to meet you halfway. If there's any aspect of our policy which you oppose, just tell us and we'll issue a directive to—"

 



"Cut it, boys. I didn't come here to help you pretend that I'm not in the position I'm in and that any halfway is possible between us.

 



Now come to the point. You've prepared some new gimmick to spring on the steel industry. What is it?"

 



"As a matter of fact," said Mouch, "we do have a vital question to discuss in regard to the steel industry, but . . . but your language, Mr. Rearden!"

 



"We don't want to spring anything on you," said Holloway. "We asked you here to discuss it with you."

 



"I came here to take orders. Give them."

 



"But, Mr. Rearden, we don't want to look at it that way. We don't want to give you orders. We want your voluntary consent."

 



Rearden smiled. "I know it."

 



"You do?" Holloway started eagerly, but something about Rearden's smile made him slide into uncertainty. "Well, then—"

 



"And you, brother," said Rearden, "know that that is the flaw in your game, the fatal flaw that will blast it sky-high. Now do you tell me what clout on my head you're working so hard not to let me notice—or do I go home?"

 



"Oh no, Mr. Rearden!" cried Lawson, with a sudden dart of his eyes to his wrist watch. "You can't go now!—That is, I mean, you wouldn't want to go without hearing what we have to say."

 



"Then let me hear it."

 



He saw them glancing at one another. Wesley Mouch seemed afraid to address him; Mouch's face assumed an expression of petulant stubbornness, like a signal of command pushing the others forward; whatever their qualifications to dispose of the fate of the steel industry, they had been brought here to act as Mouch's conversational bodyguards.

 



Rearden wondered about the reason for the presence of James Taggart; Taggart sat in gloomy silence, sullenly sipping a drink, never glancing in his direction.

 



"We have worked out a plan," said Dr. Ferris too cheerfully, "which will solve the problems of the steel industry and which will meet with your full approval, as a measure providing for the general welfare, while protecting your interests and insuring your safety in a—"

 



"Don't try to tell me what I'm going to think. Give me the facts."

 



"It is a plan which is fair, sound, equitable and—"

 



"Don't tell me your evaluation. Give me the facts."

 



"It is a plan which—" Dr. Ferris stopped; he had lost the habit of naming facts.

 



"Under this plan," said Wesley Mouch, "we will grant the industry a five per cent increase in the price of steel." He paused triumphantly.

 



Rearden said nothing.

 



"Of course, some minor adjustments will be necessary," said Holloway airily, leaping into the silence as onto a vacant tennis court. "A certain increase in prices will have to be granted to the producers of iron ore—oh, three per cent at most—in view of the added hardships which some of them, Mr. Larkin of Minnesota, for instance, will now encounter, inasmuch as they'll have to ship their ore by the costly means of trucks, since Mr. James Taggart has had to sacrifice his Minnesota branch line to the public welfare. And, of course, an increase in freight rates will have to be granted to the country's railroads—let's say, seven per cent, roughly speaking—in view of the absolutely essential need for—"

 



Holloway stopped, like a player emerging from a whirlwind activity to notice suddenly that no opponent was answering his shots.

 



"But there will be no increase in wages," said Dr. Ferris hastily. "An essential point of the plan is that we will grant no increase in wages to the steel workers, in spite of their insistent demands. We do wish to be fair to you, Mr. Rearden, and to protect your interests—even at the risk of popular resentment and indignation."

 



"Of course, if we expect labor to make a sacrifice," said Lawson, "we must show them that management, too, is making certain sacrifices for the sake of the country. The mood of labor in the steel industry is extremely tense at present, Mr. Rearden, it is dangerously explosive and . . . and in order to protect you from . . . from . . . " He stopped.

 



"Yes?" said Rearden. "From?"

 



"From possible . . . violence, certain measures are necessary, which . . . Look, Jim"—he turned suddenly to James Taggart—"why don't you explain it to Mr. Rearden, as a fellow industrialist?"

 



"Well, somebody's got to support the railroads," said Taggart sullenly, not looking at him. "The country needs railroads and somebody's got to help us carry the load, and if we don't get an increase in freight rates—"

 



"No, no, no!" snapped Wesley Mouch. "Tell Mr. Rearden about the working of the Railroad Unification Plan."

 



"Well, the Plan is a full success," said Taggart lethargically, "except for the not fully controllable element of time. It is only a question of time before our unified teamwork puts every railroad in the country back on its feet. The Plan, I'm in a position to assure you, would work as successfully for any other industry."

 



"No doubt about that," said Rearden, and turned to Mouch. "Why do you ask the stooge to waste my time? What has the Railroad Unification Plan to do with me?"

 



"But, Mr. Rearden," cried Mouch with desperate cheerfulness, "that's the pattern we're to follow! That's what we called you here to discuss!"

 



"What?"

 



"The Steel Unification Plan!"

 



There was an instant of silence, as of breaths drawn after a plunge.

 



Rearden sat looking at them with a glance that seemed to be a glance of interest.

 



"In view of the critical plight of the steel industry," said Mouch with a sudden rush, as if not to give himself time to know what made him uneasy about the nature of Rearden's glance, "and since steel is the most vitally, crucially basic commodity, the foundation of our entire industrial structure, drastic measures must be taken to preserve the country's steel-making facilities, equipment and plant." The tone and impetus of public speaking carried him that far and no farther. "With this objective in view, our Plan is . . . our Plan is . . ."

 



"Our Plan Is really very simple," said Tinky Holloway, striving to prove it by the gaily bouncing simplicity of his voice. "We'll lift all restrictions from the production of steel and every company will produce all it can, according to its ability. But to avoid the waste and danger of dog-eat-dog competition, all the companies will deposit their gross earnings into a common pool, to be known as the Steel Unification Pool, in charge of a special Board. At the end of the year, the Board will distribute these earnings by totaling the nation's steel output and dividing it by the number of open-hearth furnaces in existence, thus arriving at an average which will be fair to all—and every company will be paid according to its need. The preservation of its furnaces being its basic need, every company will be paid according to the number of furnaces it owns."

 



He stopped, waited, then added, "That's it, Mr. Rearden," and getting no answer, said, "Oh, there's a lot of wrinkles to be ironed out, but . . . but that's it."

 



Whatever reaction they had expected, it was not the one they saw.

 



Rearden leaned back in his chair, his eyes attentive, but fixed on space, as if looking at a not too distant distance, then he asked, with an odd note of quietly impersonal amusement, "Will you tell me just one thing, boys: what is it you're counting on?"

 



He knew that they understood. He saw, on their faces, that stubbornly evasive look which he had once thought to be the look of a liar cheating a victim, but which he now knew to be worse: the look of a man cheating himself of his own consciousness. They did not answer. They remained silent, as if struggling, not to make him forget his question, but to make themselves forget that they had heard it.

 



"It's a sound, practical Plan!" snapped James Taggart unexpectedly, with an angry edge of sudden animation in his voice. "It will work!

 



It has to work! We want it to work!"

 



No one answered him.

 



"Mr. Rearden . . . ?" said Holloway timidly.

 



"Well, let me see," said Rearden. "Orren Boyle's Associated Steel owns 60 open-hearth furnaces, one-third of them standing idle and the rest producing an average of 300 tons of steel per furnace per day.

 



I own 20 open-hearth furnaces, working at capacity, producing tons of Rearden Metal per furnace per day. So we own SO 'pooled' furnaces with a 'pooled' output of 27,000 tons, which makes an average of 337.5 tons per furnace. Each day of the year, I, producing 15,000 tons, will be paid for 6,750 tons. Boyle, producing 12,000 tons, will be paid for 20,250 tons. Never mind the other members of the pool, they won't change the scale, except to bring the average still lower, most of them doing worse than Boyle, none of them producing as much as I. Now how long do you expect me to last under your Plan?"

 



There was no answer, then Lawson cried suddenly, blindly, righteously, "In time of national peril, it is your duty to serve, suffer and work for the salvation of the country!"

 



"I don't see why pumping my earnings into Orren Boyle's pocket is going to save the country."

 



"You have to make certain sacrifices to the public welfare!"

 



"I don't see why Orren Boyle is more 'the public' than I am."

 



"Oh, it's not a question of Mr. Boyle at all! It's much wider than any one person. It's a matter of preserving the country's natural resources—such as factories—and saving the whole of the nation's industrial plant. We cannot permit the ruin of an establishment as vast as Mr. Boyle's. The country needs it."

 



"I think," said Rearden slowly, "that the country needs me much more than it needs Orren Boyle."

 



"But of course!" cried Lawson with startled enthusiasm. "The country needs you, Mr. Rearden! You do realize that, don't you?"

 



But Lawson's avid pleasure at the familiar formula of self-immolation, vanished abruptly at the sound of Rearden's voice, a cold, trader's voice answering: "I do."

 



"It's not Boyle alone who's involved," said Holloway pleadingly.

 



"The country's economy would not be able to stand a major dislocation at the present moment. There are thousands of Boyle's workers, suppliers and customers. What would happen to them if Associated Steel went bankrupt?"

 



"What will happen to the thousands of my workers, suppliers and customers when I go bankrupt?"

 



"You, Mr. Rearden?" said Holloway incredulously. "But you're the richest, safest and strongest industrialist in the country at this moment!"

 



"What about the moment after next?"

 



"Uh?"

 



"How long do you expect me to be able to produce at a loss?"

 



"Oh, Mr. Rearden, I have complete faith in you!"

 



"To hell with your faith! How do you expect me to do it?"

 



"You'll manage!"

 



"How?"

 



There was no answer.

 



"We can't theorize about the future," cried Wesley Mouch, "when here's an immediate national collapse to avoid! We've got to save the country's economy! We've got to do something!" Rearden's imperturbible glance of curiosity drove him to heedlessness. "If you don't like it, do you have a better solution to offer?"

 



"Sure," said Rearden easily. "If it's production that you want, then get out of the way, junk all of your damn regulations, let Orren Boyle go broke, let me buy the plant of Associated Steel—and it will be pouring a thousand tons a day from every one of its sixty furnaces."


Date: 2015-12-17; view: 485


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