Atlas Shrugged [309]
The judges retired to consider their verdict. They did not stay out long. They returned to an ominously silent courtroom-and announced that a fine of $5,000 was imposed on Henry Rearden, but that the sentence was suspended.
Streaks of jeering laughter ran through the applause that swept the courtroom. The applause was aimed at Rearden, the laughter-at the judges.
Rearden stood motionless, not turning to the crowd, barely hearing the applause. He stood looking at the judges. There was no triumph in his face, no elation, only the still intensity of contemplating a vision with a bitter wonder that was almost fear. He was seeing the enormity of the smallness of the enemy who was destroying the world. He felt as if, after a journey of years through a landscape of devastation, past the ruins of great factories, the wrecks of powerful engines, the bodies of invincible men, he had come upon the despoiler, expecting to find a giant-and had found a rat eager to scurry for cover at the first sound of a human step. If this is what has beaten us, he thought, the guilt is ours.
He was jolted back into the courtroom by the people pressing to surround him. He smiled in answer to their smiles, to the frantic, tragic eagerness of their faces; there was a touch of sadness in his smile.
"God bless you, Mr. Rearden!" said an old woman with a ragged shawl over her head. "Can't you save us, Mr. Rearden? They're eating us alive, and it's no use fooling anybody about how it's the rich that they're after-do you know what's happening to us?"
"Listen, Mr. Rearden," said a man who looked like a factory worker, "it's the rich who're selling us down the river. Tell those wealthy bastards, who're so anxious to give everything away, that when they give away their palaces, they're giving away the skin off our backs."
"I know it," said Rearden.
The guilt is ours, he thought. If we who were the movers, the providers, the benefactors of mankind, were willing to let the brand of evil be stamped upon us and silently to bear punishment for our virtues-what sort of "good" did we expect to triumph in the world?
He looked at the people around him. They had cheered him today; they had cheered him by the side of the track of the John Galt Line.
But tomorrow they would clamor for a new directive from Wesley Mouch and a free housing project from Orren Boyle, while Boyle's girders collapsed upon their heads. They would do it, because they would be told to forget, as a sin, that which had made them cheer Hank Rearden.
Why were they ready to renounce their highest moments as a sin?
Why were they willing to betray the best within them? What made them believe that this earth was a realm of evil where despair was their natural fate? He could not name the reason, but he knew that it had to be named. He felt it as a huge question mark within the courtroom, which it was now his duty to answer.
This was the real sentence imposed upon him, he thought-to discover what idea, what simple idea available to the simplest man, had made mankind accept the doctrines that led it to self-destruction.
"Hank, I'll never think that it's hopeless, not ever again," said Dagny that evening, after the trial. "I'll never be tempted to quit. You've proved that the right always works and always wins-" She stopped, then added, "-provided one knows what is the right."
Lillian said to him at dinner next day, "So you've won, have you?"
Her voice was noncommittal; she said nothing else; she was watching him, as If studying a riddle.
The Wet Nurse asked him at the mills, "Mr. Rearden, what's a moral premise?" "What you're going to have a lot of trouble with."
The boy frowned, then shrugged and said, laughing, "God, that was a wonderful show! What a beating you gave them, Mr. Rearden! I sat by the radio and howled." "How do you know it was a beating?" "Well, it was, wasn't it?" "Are you sure of it?" "Sure I'm sure." "The thing that makes you