Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [299]
Rearden asked, in the tone of the most eloquent salute he could offer, “Where did you learn to work like that?”
Francisco shrugged. “I was brought up around smelters of every kind,” he answered indifferently.
Rearden could not decipher the expression of his face: it was only a look of peculiar stillness, as if his eyes were fixed on some secret vision of his own that drew his mouth into a line of desolate, bitter, hurting self-mockery.
They did not speak until they were back in the office.
“You know,” said Rearden, “everything you said here was true. But that was only part of the story. The other part is what we’ve done tonight. Don’t you see? We’re able to act. They’re not. So it’s we who’ll win in the long run, no matter what they do to us.”
Francisco did not answer.
“Listen,” said Rearden, “I know what’s been the trouble with you. You’ve never cared to do a real day’s work in your life. I thought you were conceited enough, but I see that you have no idea of what you’ve got in you. Forget that fortune of yours for a while and come to work for me. I’ll start you as furnace foreman any time. You don’t know what it will do for you. In a few years, you’ll be ready to appreciate and to run d.‘Anconia Copper.”
He expected a burst of laughter and he was prepared to argue; instead, he saw Francisco shaking his head slowly, as if he could not trust his voice, as if he feared that were he to speak, he would accept. In a moment, he said, “Mr. Rearden ... I think I would give the rest of my life for one year as your furnace foreman. But I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Don’t ask me. It’s ... a personal matter.”
The vision of Francisco in Rearden’s mind, which he had resented and found irresistibly attractive, had been the figure of a man radiantly incapable of suffering. What he saw now in Francisco’s eyes was the look of a quiet, tightly controlled, patiently borne torture.
Francisco reached silently for his overcoat.
“You’re not leaving, are you?” asked Rearden.
“Yes.”
“Aren’t you going to finish what you had to tell me?”
“Not tonight.”
“You wanted me to answer a question. What was it?”
Francisco shook his head.
“You started asking me how can I ... How can I—what?”
Francisco’s smile was like a moan of pain, the only moan he would permit himself. “I won’t ask it, Mr. Rearden. I know it.”
CHAPTER IV
THE SANCTION OF THE VICTIM
The roast turkey had cost $30. The champagne had cost $25. The lace tablecloth, a cobweb of grapes and vine leaves iridescent in the candlelight, had cost $2,000. The dinner service, with an artist’s design burned in blue and gold into a translucent white china, had cost $2,500. The silverware, which bore the initials LR in Empire wreaths of laurels, had cost $3,000. But it was held to be unspiritual to think of money and of what that money represented.
A peasant’s wooden shoe, gilded, stood in the center of the table, filled with marigolds, grapes and carrots. The candles were stuck into pumpkins that were cut as open-mouthed faces drooling raisins, nuts and candy upon the tablecloth.
It was Thanksgiving dinner, and the three who faced Rearden about the table were his wife, his mother and his brother.
“This is the night to thank the Lord for our blessings,” said Rearden’s mother. “God has been kind to us. There are people all over the country who haven’t got any food in the house tonight, and some that haven’t even got a house, and more of them going jobless every day. Gives me the creeps to look around in the city. Why, only last week, who do you suppose I ran into but Lucie Judson—Henry, do you remember Lucie Judson? Used to live next door to us, up in Minnesota, when you were ten-twelve years old. Had a boy about your age. I lost track of Lucie when they moved to New York, must have been all of twenty years ago. Well, it gave me the creeps to see what she’s come to—just a toothless old hag, wrapped in a man’s overcoat, panhandling on a street corner. And I thought: That could’ve been me, but for the grace of God.”
“Well, if thanks are in order,” said Lillian gaily, “I think