Home Random Page


CATEGORIES:

BiologyChemistryConstructionCultureEcologyEconomyElectronicsFinanceGeographyHistoryInformaticsLawMathematicsMechanicsMedicineOtherPedagogyPhilosophyPhysicsPolicyPsychologySociologySportTourism






THE CONCERTO OF DELIVERANCE 4 page

 

Then, as if by some dim recoil against self-pity, he added, reciting a memorized lesson, his voice a desperate attempt at his old, cynical, intellectual tone, "What does it matter, Mr. Rearden? . . . Man is only a collection of . . . conditioned chemicals . . . and a man's dying doesn't make . . . any more difference than an animal's."

 

"You know better than that."

 

"Yes," he whispered. "Yes, I guess I do."

 

His eyes wandered over the vast darkness, then rose to Rearden's face; the eyes were helpless, longing, childishly bewildered. "I know . . . it's crap, all those things they taught us . . . all of it, everything they said . . . about living or . . . or dying . . . Dying . . . it wouldn't make any difference to chemicals, but—" he stopped, and all of his desperate protest was only in the intensity of his voice dropping lower to say, "—but it does, to me . . . And . . . and, I guess, it makes a difference to an animal, too . . . But they said there are no values . . . only social customs . . . No values!" His hand clutched blindly at the hole in his chest, as if trying to hold that which he was losing. "No . . . values . . .”

 

Then his eyes opened wider, with the sudden calm of full frankness.

 

"I'd like to live, Mr. Rearden. God, how I'd like to!" His voice was passionately quiet. "Not because I'm dying . . . but because I've just discovered it tonight, what it means, really to be alive . . . And . . . it's funny . . . do you know when [ discovered it? . . . In the office . . . when I stuck my neck out . . . when I told the bastards to go to hell . . . There's . . . there's so many things I wish I'd known sooner . . . But . . . well, it's no use crying over spilled milk." He saw Rearden's involuntary glance at the flattened trail below and added, "Over spilled anything, Mr. Rearden."

 

"Listen, kid," said Rearden sternly, "I want you to do me a favor."

 

"Now, Mr. Rearden?"

 

"Yes. Now."

 

"Why, of course, Mr. Rearden . . . if I can."

 

"You've done me a big favor tonight, but I want you to do a still bigger one. You've done a great job, climbing out of that slag heap.

 

Now will you try for something still harder? You were willing to die to save my mills. Will you try to live for me?"

 

"For you, Mr. Rearden?"

 

"For me. Because I'm asking you to. Because I want you to. Because we still have a great distance to climb together, you and I."

 

"Does it . . . does it make a difference to you, Mr. Rearden?"

 

"It does. Will you make up your mind that you want to live—just as you did down there on the slag heap? That you want to last and live? Will you fight for it? You wanted to fight my battle. Will you fight this one with me, as our first?"



 

He felt the clutching of the boy's hand; it conveyed the violent eagerness of the answer; the voice was only a whisper: "I'll try, Mr.

 

Rearden."

 

"Now help me to get you to a doctor. Just relax, take it easy and let me lift you."

 

"Yes, Mr. Rearden." With the jerk of a sudden effort, the boy pulled himself up to lean on an elbow.

 

"Take it easy, Tony."

 

He saw a sudden flicker in the boy's face, an attempt at his old, bright, impudent grin. "Not 'Non-Absolute' any more?"

 

"No, not any more. You're a full absolute now, and you know it."

 

"Yes. I know several of them, now. There's one"—he pointed at the wound in his chest—"that's an absolute, isn't it? And"—he went on speaking while Rearden was lifting him from the ground by imperceptible seconds and inches, speaking as if the trembling intensity of his words were serving as an anesthetic against the pain—"and men can't live . . . if rotten bastards . . . like the ones in Washington . . . get away with things like . . . like the one they're doing tonight . . . if everything becomes a stinking fake . . . and nothing is real . . . and nobody is anybody . . . men can't live that way . . . that's an absolute, isn't it?"

 

"Yes, Tony, that's an absolute."

 

Rearden rose to his feet by a long, cautious effort; he saw the tortured spasm of the boy's features, as he settled him slowly against his chest, like a baby held tight in his arms—but the spasm twisted into another echo of the impudent grin, and the boy asked, "Who's the Wet Nurse now?"

 

"I guess I am."

 

He took the first steps up the slant of crumbling soil, his body tensed to the task of shock absorber for his fragile burden, to the task of maintaining a steady progression where there was no foothold to find.

 

The boy's head dropped on Rearden's shoulder, hesitantly, almost as if this were a presumption. Rearden bent down and pressed his lips to the dust-streaked forehead.

 

The boy jerked back, raising his head with a shock of incredulous, indignant astonishment. "Do you know what you did?" he whispered, as if unable to believe that it was meant for him.

 

"Put your head down," said Rearden, "and I'll do it again."

 

The boy's head dropped and Rearden kissed his forehead; it was like a father's recognition granted to a son's battle.

 

The boy lay still, his face hidden, his hands clutching Rearden's shoulders. Then, with no hint of sound, with only the sudden beat of faint, spaced, rhythmic shudders to show it, Rearden knew that the boy was crying—crying in surrender, in admission of all the things which he could not put into the words he had never found.

 

Rearden went on moving slowly upward, step by groping step, fighting for firmness of motion against the weeds, the drifts of dust, the chunks of scrap metal, the refuse of a distant age. He went on, toward the line where the red glow of his mills marked the edge of the pit above him, his movement a fierce struggle that had to take the form of a gentle, unhurried flow.

 

He heard no sobs, but he felt the rhythmic shudders, and, through the cloth of his shirt, in place of tears, he felt the small, warm, liquid spurts flung from the wound by the shudders. He knew that the tight pressure of his arms was the only answer which the boy was now able to hear and understand—and he held the trembling body as if the strength of his arms could transfuse some part of his living power into the arteries beating ever fainter against him.

 

Then the sobbing stopped and the boy raised his head. His face seemed thinner and paler, but the eyes were lustrous, and he looked up at Rearden, straining for the strength to speak.

 

"Mr. Rearden . . . I . . . I liked you very much."

 

"I know it."

 

The boy's features had no power to form a smile, but it was a smile that spoke in his glance, as he looked at Rearden's face—as he looked at that which he had not known he had been seeking through the brief span of his life, seeking as the image of that which he had not known to be his values.

 

Then his head fell back, and there was no convulsion in his face, only his mouth relaxing to a shape of serenity—but there was a brief stab of convulsion in his body, like a last cry of protest—and Rearden went on slowly, not altering his pace, even though he knew that no caution was necessary any longer because what he was carrying in his arms was now that which had been the boy's teachers' idea of man—a collection of chemicals.

 

He walked, as if this were his form of last tribute and funeral procession for the young life that had ended in his arms. He felt an anger too intense to identify except as a pressure within him: it was a desire to kill.

 

The desire was not directed at the unknown thug who had sent a bullet through the boy's body, or at the looting bureaucrats who had hired the thug to do it, but at the boy's teachers who had delivered him, disarmed, to the thug's gun—at the soft, safe assassins of college classrooms who, incompetent to answer the queries of a quest for reason, took pleasure in crippling the young minds entrusted to their care.

 

Somewhere, he thought, there was this boy's mother, who had trembled with protective concern over his groping steps, while teaching him to walk, who had measured his baby formulas with a jeweler's caution, who had obeyed with a zealot's fervor the latest words of science on his diet and hygiene, protecting his unhardened body from germs—then had sent him to be turned into a tortured neurotic by the men who taught him that he had no mind and must never attempt to think. Had she fed him tainted refuse, he thought, had she mixed poison into his food, it would have been more kind and less fatal.

 

He thought of all the living species that train their young in the art of survival, the cats who teach their kittens to hunt, the birds who spend such strident effort on teaching their fledglings to fly—yet man, whose tool of survival is the mind, does not merely fail to teach <a child to think, but devotes the child's education to the purpose of destroying his brain, of convincing him that thought is futile and evil, before he has started to think.

 

From the first catch-phrases flung at a child to the last, it is like a series of shocks to freeze his motor, to undercut the power of his consciousness. "Don't ask so many questions, children should be seen and not heard!"—"Who are you to think? It's so, because I say so!"—"Don't argue, obey!"—"Don't try to understand, believe!"-—"Don't rebel, adjust!"—"Don't stand out, belong!"—"Don't struggle, compromise!"—"Your heart is more important than your mind!"—"Who are you to know? Your parents know best!"—"Who are you to know? Society knows best!"—"Who are you to know? The bureaucrats know best!"—"Who are you to object? All values are relative!"—"Who are you to want to escape a thug's bullet? That's only a personal prejudice!"

 

Men would shudder, he thought, if they saw a mother bird plucking the feathers from the wings of her young, then pushing him out of the nest to struggle for survival—yet that was what they did to their children.

 

Armed with nothing but meaningless phrases, this boy had been thrown to fight for existence, he had hobbled and groped through a brief, doomed effort, he had screamed his indignant, bewildered protest —and had perished in his first attempt to soar on his mangled wings.

 

But a different breed of teachers had once existed, he thought, and had reared the men who created this country; he thought that mothers should set out on their knees to look for men like Hugh Akston, to find them and beg them to return.

 

He went through the gate of the mills, barely noticing the guards who let him enter, who stared at his face and his burden; he did not pause to listen to their words, as they pointed to the fighting in the distance; he went on walking slowly toward the wedge of light which was the open door of the hospital building.

 

He stepped into a lighted room full of men, bloody bandages and the odor of antiseptics; he deposited his burden on a bench, with no word of explanation to anyone, and walked out, not glancing behind him.

 

He walked in the direction of the front gate, toward the glare of fire and the bursts of guns. He saw, once in a while, a few figures running through the cracks between structures or darting behind black corners, pursued by groups of guards and workers; he was astonished to notice that his workers were well armed. They seemed to have subdued the hoodlums inside the mills, and only the siege at the front gate remained to be beaten. He saw a lout scurrying across a patch of lamplight, swinging a length of pipe at a wall of glass panes, battering them down with an animal relish, dancing like a gorilla to the sound of crashing glass, until three husky human figures descended upon him, carrying him writhing to the ground.

 

The siege of the gate appeared to be ebbing, as if the spine of the mob had been broken. He heard the distant screeches of their cries—but the shots from the road were growing rarer, the fire set to the gatekeeper's office was put out, there were armed men on the ledges and at windows, posted in well-planned defense.

 

On the roof of a structure above the gate, he saw, as he came closer, the slim silhouette of a man who held a gun in each hand and, from behind the protection of a chimney, kept firing at intervals down into the mob, firing swiftly and, it seemed, in two directions at once, like a sentinel protecting the approaches to the gate. The confident skill of his movements, his manner of firing, with no time wasted to take aim, but with the kind of casual abruptness that never misses a target, made him look like a hero of Western legend—and Rearden watched him with detached, impersonal pleasure, as if the battle of the mills were not his any longer, but he could still enjoy the sight of the competence and certainty with which men of that distant age had once combatted evil.

 

The beam of a roving searchlight struck Rearden's face, and when the light swept past he saw the man on the roof leaning down, as if peering in his direction. The man waved to someone to replace him, then vanished abruptly from his post.

 

Rearden hurried on through the short stretch of darkness ahead —but then, from the side, from the crack of an alley, he heard a drunken voice yell, "There he is!" and whirled to see two beefy figures advancing upon him. He saw a leering, mindless face with a mouth hung loose in a joyless chuckle, and a club in a rising fist—he heard the sound of running steps approaching from another direction, he attempted to turn his head, then the club crashed down on his skull from behind—and in the moment of splitting darkness, when he wavered, refusing to believe it, then felt himself going down, he felt a strong, protective arm seizing him and breaking his fall, he heard a gun exploding an inch above his ear, then another explosion from the same gun in the same second, but it seemed faint and distant, as if he had fallen down a shaft.

 

His first awareness, when he opened his eyes, was a sense of profound serenity. Then he saw that he was lying on a couch in a modern, sternly gracious room—then, he realized that it was his office and that the two men standing beside him were the mills' doctor and the superintendent. He felt a distant pain in his head, which would have been violent had he cared to notice it, and he felt a strip of tape across his hair, on the side of his head. The sense of serenity was the knowledge that he was free.

 

The meaning of his bandage and the meaning of his office were not to be accepted or to exist, together—it was not a combination for men to live with—this was not his battle any longer, nor his job, nor his business.

 

"I think I'll be all right, Doctor," he said, raising his head.

 

"Yes, Mr. Rearden, fortunately." The doctor was looking at him as if still unable to believe that this had happened to Hank Rearden inside his own mills; the doctor's voice was tense with angry loyalty and indignation. "Nothing serious, just a scalp wound and a slight concussion.

 

But you must take it easy and allow yourself to rest."

 

"I will," said Rearden firmly.

 

"It's all over," said the superintendent, waving at the mills beyond the window. "We've got the bastards beaten and on the run. You don't have to worry, Mr. Rearden. It's all over."

 

"It is," said Rearden. "There must be a lot of work left for you to do, Doctor."

 

"Oh yes! I never thought I’d live to see the day when—"

 

"I know. Go ahead, take care of it. I'll be all right."

 

"Yes, Mr. Rearden."

 

"I'll take care of the place," said the superintendent, as the doctor hurried out. "Everything's under control, Mr. Rearden. But it was the dirtiest—"

 

"I know," said Rearden. "Who was it that saved my life? Somebody grabbed me as I fell, and fired at the thugs."

 

"Did he! Straight at their faces. Blew their heads off. That was that new furnace foreman of ours. Been here two months. Best man I've ever had. He's the one who got wise to what the gravy boys were planning and warned me, this afternoon. Told me to arm our men, as many as we could. We got no help from the police or the state troopers, they dodged all over the place with the fanciest delays and excuses I ever heard of, it was all fixed in advance, the goons weren't expecting any armed resistance. It was that furnace foreman—Frank Adams is his name—who organized our defense, ran the whole battle, and stood on a roof, picking off the scum that came too close to the gate. Boy, what a marksman! I shudder to think how many of our lives he saved tonight.

 

Those bastards were out for blood, Mr. Rearden."

 

"I'd like to see him."

 

"He's waiting somewhere outside. It's he who brought you here, and he asked permission to speak to you, when possible."

 

"Send him in. Then go back out there, take charge, finish the job."

 

"Is there anything else I can do for you, Mr. Rearden?"

 

"No, nothing else."

 

He lay still, alone in the silence of his office. He knew that the meaning of his mills had ceased to exist, and the fullness of the knowledge left no room for the pain of regretting an illusion. He had seen, in a final image, the soul and essence of his enemies: the mindless face of the thug with the club. It was not the face itself that made him draw back in horror, but the professors, the philosophers, the moralists, the mystics who had released that face upon the world.

 

He felt a peculiar cleanliness. It was made of pride and of love for this earth, this earth which was his, not theirs. It was the feeling which had moved him through his life, the feeling which some among men know in their youth, then betray, but which he had never betrayed and had carried within him as a battered, attacked, unidentified, but living motor—the feeling which he could now experience in its full, uncontested purity: the sense of his own superlative value and the superlative value of his life. It was the final certainty that his life was his, to be lived with no bondage to evil, and that that bondage had never been necessary. It was the radiant serenity of knowing that he was free of fear, of pain, of guilt.

 

If it's true, he thought, that there are avengers who are working for the deliverance of men like me, let them see me now, let them tell me their secret, let them claim me, let them—"Come in!" he said aloud, in answer to the knock on his door.

 

The door opened and he lay still. The man standing on the threshold, with disheveled hair, a soot-streaked face and furnace-smudged arms, dressed in scorched overalls and bloodstained shirt, standing as if he wore a cape waving behind him in the wind, was Francisco d'Anconia.

 

It seemed to Rearden that his consciousness shot forward ahead of his body, it was his body that refused to move, stunned by shock, while his mind was laughing, telling him that this was the most natural, the most-to-have-been-expected event in the world.

 

Francisco smiled, a smile of greeting to a childhood friend on a summer morning, as if nothing else had ever been possible between them—and Rearden found himself smiling in answer, some part of him feeling an incredulous wonder, yet knowing that it was irresistibly right.

 

"You've been torturing yourself for months," said Francisco, approaching him, "wondering what words you'd use to ask my forgiveness and whether you had the right to ask it, if you ever saw me again —but now you see that it isn't necessary, that there's nothing to ask or to forgive."

 

"Yes," said Rearden, the word coming as an astonished whisper, but by the time he finished his sentence he knew that this was the greatest tribute he could offer, "yes, I know it."

 

Francisco sat down on the couch beside him, and slowly moved his hand over Rearden's forehead. It was like a healing touch that closed the past.

 

"There's only one thing I want to tell you," said Rearden. "I want you to hear it from me: you kept your oath, you were my friend."

 

"I knew that you knew it. You knew it from the first. You knew it, no matter what you thought of my actions. You slapped me because you could not force yourself to doubt it."

 

"That . . ." whispered Rearden, staring at him, "that was the thing I had no right to tell you . . . no right to claim as my excuse . . ."

 

"Didn't you suppose I'd understand it?"

 

"I wanted to find you . . . I had no right to look for you . . . And all that time, you were—" He pointed at Francisco's clothes, then his hand dropped helplessly and he closed his eyes.

 

"I was your furnace foreman," said Francisco, grinning. "I didn't think you'd mind that. You offered me the job yourself."

 

"You've been here, as my bodyguard, for two months?"

 

"Yes."

 

"You've been here, ever since—" He stopped.

 

"That's right. On the morning of the day when you were reading my farewell message over the roofs of New York, I was reporting here for my first shift as your furnace foreman."

 

"Tell me," said Rearden slowly, "that night, at James Taggart's wedding, when you said that you were after your greatest conquest . . . you meant me, didn't you?"

 

"Of course."

 

Francisco drew himself up a little, as if for a solemn task, his face earnest, the smile remaining only in his eyes. "I have a great deal to tell you," he said, "But first, will you repeat a word you once offered me and I . . . I had to reject, because I knew that I was not free to accept it?"

 

Rearden smiled. "What word, Francisco?"

 

Francisco inclined his head in acceptance, and answered, "Thank you, Hank." Then he raised his head. "Now I'll tell you the things I had come to say, but did not finish, that night when I came here for the first time. I think you're ready to hear it,"

 

"I am."

 

The glare of steel being poured from a furnace shot to the sky beyond the window. A red glow went sweeping slowly over the walls of the office, over the empty desk, over Rearden's face, as if in salute and farewell.

 

CHAPTER VII

"THIS IS JOHN GALT SPEAKING"

 

The doorbell was ringing like an alarm, In a long, demanding scream, broken by the impatient stabs of someone's frantic finger.

 

Leaping out of bed, Dagny noticed the cold, pale sunlight of late morning and a clock on a distant spire marking the hour of ten. She had worked at the office till four A.M. and had left word not to expect her till noon.

 

The white face ungroomed by panic, that confronted her when she threw the door open, was James Taggart.

 

“He's gone!" he cried.

 

"Who?"

 

"Hank Rearden! He's gone, quit, vanished, disappeared!"

 

She stood still for a moment, holding the belt of the dressing gown she had been tying; then, as the full knowledge reached her, her hands jerked the belt tight—as if snapping her body in two at the waistline—while she burst out laughing. It was a sound of triumph.

 

He stared at her in bewilderment. "What's the matter with you?" he gasped. "Haven't you understood?"

 

"Come in, Jim," she said, turning contemptuously, walking into the living room. "Oh yes, I've understood."

 

"He's quit! Gone! Gone like all the others! Left his mills, his bank accounts, his property, everything! Just vanished! Took some clothing and whatever he had in the safe in his apartment—they found a safe left open in his bedroom, open and empty—that's all! No word, no note, no explanation! They called me from Washington, but it's all over town! The news, I mean, the story! They can't keep it quiet!

 

They've tried to, but . . . Nobody knows how it got out, but it went through the mills like one of those furnace break-outs, the word that he'd gone, and then . . . before anyone could stop it, a whole bunch of them vanished! The superintendent, the chief metallurgist, the chief engineer, Rearden's secretary, even the hospital doctor! And God knows how many others! Deserting, the bastards! Deserting us, in spite of all the penalties we've set up! He's quit and the rest are quitting and those mills are just left there, standing still! Do you understand what that means?"

 

"Do you?" she asked.

 

He had thrown his story at her, sentence by sentence, as if trying to knock the smile off her face, an odd, unmoving smile of bitterness and triumph; he had failed. "It's a national catastrophe! What's the matter with you? Don't you see that it's a fatal blow? It will break the last of the country's morale and economy! We can't let him vanish! You've got to bring him back!"

 

Her smile disappeared.

 

"You can!" he cried. "You're the only one who can! He's your lover, isn't he? . . . Oh, don't look like that! It's no time for squeamishness!

 

It's no time for anything except that we've got to have him! You must know where he is! You can find him! You must reach him and bring him back!"

 

The way she now looked at him was worse than her smile—she looked as if she were seeing him naked and would not endure the sight much longer. "I can't bring him back," she said, not raising her voice.

 

"And I wouldn't, if I could. Now get out of here."

 

"But the national catastrophe—"

 

"Get out."

 

She did not notice his exit. She stood alone in the middle of her living room, her head dropping, her shoulders sagging, while she was smiling, a smile of pain, of tenderness, of greeting to Hank Rearden. She wondered dimly why she should feel so glad that he had found liberation, so certain that he was right, and yet refuse herself the same deliverance. Two sentences were beating in her mind; one was the triumphant sweep of: He's free, he's out of their reach!—the other was like a prayer of dedication: There's still a chance to win, but let me be the only victim. . . .

 

It was strange—she thought, in the days that followed, looking at the men around her—that catastrophe had made them aware of Hank Rearden with an intensity that his achievements had not aroused, as if the paths of their consciousness were open to disaster, but not to value.

 

Some spoke of him in shrill curses—others whispered, with a look of guilt and terror, as if a nameless retribution were now to descend upon them—some tried, with hysterical evasiveness, to act as if nothing had happened.

 

The newspapers, like puppets on tangled strings, were shouting with the same belligerence and on the same dates: "It is social treason to ascribe too much importance to Hank Rearden's desertion and to undermine public morale by the old-fashioned belief that an individual can be of any significance to society." "It is social treason to spread rumors about the disappearance of Hank Rearden. Mr. Rearden has not disappeared, he is in his office, running his mills, as usual, and there has been no trouble at Rearden Steel, except a minor disturbance, a private scuffle among some workers." "It is social treason to cast an unpatriotic light upon the tragic loss of Hank Rearden. Mr. Rearden has not deserted, he was killed in an automobile accident on his way to work, and his grief-stricken family has insisted on a private funeral."


Date: 2015-12-17; view: 385


<== previous page | next page ==>
THE CONCERTO OF DELIVERANCE 3 page | THE CONCERTO OF DELIVERANCE 5 page
doclecture.net - lectures - 2014-2024 year. Copyright infringement or personal data (0.022 sec.)