Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [315]
“But telling them that you have no right to your wealth, while they have—is what’s going to restrain them?”
“Well, I don’t know ...”
“I don’t like the things you said at your trial,” said another man. “In my opinion, I don’t agree with you at all. Personally, I’m proud to believe that I am working for the public good, not just for my own profit. I like to think that I have some goal higher than just earning my three meals a day and my Hammond limousine.”
“And I don’t like that idea about no directives and no controls,” said another. “I grant you they’re running hog-wild and overdoing it. But—no controls at all? I don’t go along with that. I think some controls are necessary. The ones which are for the public good.”
“I am sorry, gentlemen,” said Rearden, “that I will be obliged to save your goddamn necks along with mine.”
A group of businessmen headed by Mr. Mowen did not issue any statements about the trial. But a week later they announced, with an inordinate amount of publicity, that they were endowing the construction of a playground for the children of the unemployed.
Bertram Scudder did not mention the trial in his column. But ten days later, he wrote, among items of miscellaneous gossip: “Some idea of the public value of Mr. Hank Rearden may be gathered from the fact that of all social groups, he seems to be most unpopular with his own fellow businessmen. His old-fashioned brand of ruthlessness seems to be too much even for those predatory barons of profit.”
On an evening in December—when the street beyond his window was like a congested throat coughing with the horns of pre-Christmas tramc—Rearden sat in his room at the Wayne-Falkland Hotel, fighting an enemy more dangerous than weariness or fear: revulsion against the thought of having to deal with human beings.
He sat, unwilling to venture into the streets of the city, unwilling to move, as if he were chained to his chair and to this room. He had tried for hours to ignore an emotion that felt like the pull of homesickness : his awareness that the only man whom he longed to see, was here, in this hotel, just a few floors above him.
He had caught himself, in the past few weeks, wasting time in the lobby whenever he entered the hotel or left it, loitering unnecessarily at the mail counter or the newsstand, watching the hurried currents of people, hoping to see Francisco d.‘Anconia among them. He had caught himself eating solitary dinners in the restaurant of the Wayne-Falkland, with his eyes on the curtains of the entrance doorway. Now he caught himself sitting in his room, thinking that the distance was only a few floors.
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, absent-minded 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