Atlas Shrugged [359]
"I know it," said Rearden; his voice conveyed no reaction. The trip to Florida was not inexplicable to him any longer.
"There is nothing in this blackjack of mine that can harm you personally," said Dr. Ferris, "We knew that no form of personal injury would ever make you give in. Therefore, I am telling you frankly that this will not hurt you at all. It will only hurt Miss Taggart"
Rearden was looking straight at him now, but Dr. Ferris wondered why it seemed to him that the calm, closed face was moving away into a greater and greater distance.
"If this affair of yours is spread from one end of the country to the other," said Dr, Ferris, "by such experts in the art of smearing as Bertram Scudder, it will do no actual damage to your reputation.
Beyond a few glances of curiosity and a few raised eyebrows in a few of the stuffier drawing rooms, you will get off quite easily. Affairs of this sort are expected of a man. In fact, it will enhance your reputation.
It will give you an aura of romantic glamour among the women and, among the men, it will give you a certain kind of prestige, in the nature of envy for an unusual conquest. But what it will do to Miss Taggart-with her spotless name, her reputation for being above scandal, her peculiar position of a woman in a strictly masculine business-
what it will do to her, what she will see in the eyes of everyone she meets, what she will hear from every man she deals with-I will leave that up to your own mind to imagine. And to consider."
Rearden felt nothing but a great stillness and a great clarity. It was as if some voice were telling him sternly: This is the time-the scene is lighted-now look. And standing naked in the great light, he was looking quietly, solemnly, stripped of fear, of pain, of hope, with nothing left to him but the desire to know.
Dr. Ferris was astonished to hear him say slowly, in the dispassionate tone of an abstract statement that did not seem to be addressed to his listener, "But all your calculations rest on the fact that Miss Taggart is a virtuous woman, not the slut you're going to call her."
"Yes, of course," said Dr. Ferris.
"And that this means much more to me than a casual affair."
"Of course."
"If she and I were the kind of scum you're going to make us appear, your blackjack wouldn't work."
"No, it wouldn't."
"If our relationship were the depravity you're going to proclaim it to be, you'd have no way to harm us."
"No."
"We'd be outside your power."
"Actually-yes."
It was not to Dr. Ferris that Rearden was speaking. He was seeing a long line of men stretched through the centuries from Plato onward, whose heir and final product was an incompetent little professor with the appearance of a gigolo and the soul of a thug.
"I offered you, once, a chance to join us," said Dr. Ferris. "You refused. Now you can see the consequences. How a man of your intelligence thought that he could win by playing it straight, I can't imagine."
"But if I had joined you," said Rearden with the same detachment, as if he were not speaking about himself, "what would I have found worth looting from Orren Boyle?"
"Oh hell, there's always enough suckers to expropriate in the world!"
"Such as Miss Taggart? As Ken Danagger? As Ellis Wyatt? As I?"
"Such as any man who wants to be impractical."
"You mean that it is not practical to live on earth, is it?"
He did not know whether Dr. Ferris answered him. He was not listening any longer. He was seeing the pendulous face of Orren Boyle with the small slits of pig's eyes, the doughy face of Mr. Mowen with the eyes that scurried away from any speaker and any fact-he was seeing them go through the jerky motions of an ape performing a routine it had learned to copy by muscular habit, performing it in order to manufacture Rearden Metal, with no knowledge and no capacity to know what had taken place in the experimental laboratory of Rearden Steel through ten years