Atlas Shrugged [311]
He rose to his feet, with a chuckle of amused indignation; he was acting, he thought, like a woman who waits for a telephone call and fights against the temptation to end the torture by making the first move. There was no reason, he thought, why he could not go to Francisco d'Anconia, if that was what he wanted. Yet when he told himself that he would, he felt some dangerous element of surrender in the intensity of his own relief.
He made a step toward the phone, to call Francisco's suite, but stopped. It was not what he wanted; what he wanted was simply to walk in, unannounced, as Francisco had walked into his office; it was this that seemed to state some unstated right between them.
On his way to the elevator, he thought: He won't be in or, if he is, you'll probably find him entertaining some floozie, which will serve you right. But the thought seemed unreal, he could not make it apply to the man he had seen at the mouth of the furnace-he stood confidently in the elevator, looking up-he walked confidently down the hall, feeling his bitterness relax into gaiety-he knocked at the door.
Francisco's voice snapped, "Come in!" It had a brusque, absentminded sound.
Rearden opened the door and stopped on the threshold. One of the hotel's costliest satin-shaded lamps stood in the middle of the floor, throwing a circle of light on wide sheets of drafting paper. Francisco d'Anconia, in shirt sleeves, a strand of hair hanging down over his face, lay stretched on the floor, on his stomach, propped up by his elbows, biting the end of a pencil in concentration upon some point of the intricate tracing before him. He did not look up, he seemed to have forgotten the knock. Rearden tried to distinguish the drawing: it looked like the section of a smelter. He stood watching in startled wonder; had he had the power to bring into reality his own image of Francisco d'Anconia, this was the picture he would have seen: the figure of a purposeful young worker intent upon a difficult task, In a moment, Francisco raised his head. In the next instant, he flung his body upward to a kneeling posture, looking at Rearden with a smile of incredulous pleasure. In the next, he seized the drawings and threw them aside too hastily, face down.
"What did I interrupt?" asked Rearden.
"Nothing much. Come in." He was grinning happily. Rearden felt suddenly certain that Francisco had waited, too, had waited for this as for a victory which he had not quite hoped to achieve.
"What were you doing?" asked Rearden.
"Just amusing myself."
"Let me see it."
"No." He rose and kicked the drawings aside.
Rearden noted that if he had resented as impertinence Francisco's manner of proprietorship in his office, he himself was now guilty of the same attitude-because he offered no explanation for his visit, but crossed the room and sat down in an armchair, casually, as if he were at home.
"Why didn't you come to continue what you had started?" he asked.
"You have been continuing it brilliantly without my help."
"Do you mean, my trial?"
"I mean, your trial."
"How do you know? You weren't there."
Francisco smiled, because the tone of the voice confessed an added sentence: I was looking for you. "Don't you suppose I heard every word of it on the radio?"
"You did? Well, how did you like hearing your own lines come over the air, with me as your stooge?"
"You weren't, Mr. Rearden. They weren't my lines. Weren't they the things you had always lived by?"
"Yes."
"I only helped you to see that you should have been proud to live by them."
"I am glad you heard it"
"It was great, Mr. Rearden-and about three generations too late."
"What do you mean?"
"If one single businessman had had the courage, then, to say that he worked for nothing but