Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [316]
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 his own pront—and to say it proudly—he would have saved the world.”
“I haven’t given up the world as lost.”
“It isn’t. It never can be. But oh God!—what he would have spared us!”
“Well, I guess we have to fight, no matter what era we’re caught in.”
“Yes ... You know, Mr. Rearden, I would suggest that you get a transcript of your trial and read what you said. Then see whether you are practicing it fully and consistently—or not.”
“You mean that I’m not?”
“See for yourself.”
“I know that you had a great deal to tell me, when we were interrupted, that night at the mills. Why don’t you finish what you had to say?”
“No. It’s too soon.”
Francisco acted as if there were nothing unusual about this visit, as if he took it as a matter of natural course—as he had always acted in Rearden’s presence. But Rearden noted that he was not so calm as he wished to appear; he was pacing the room, in a manner that seemed a release for an emotion he did not want to confess; he had forgotten the lamp and it still stood on the floor as the room’s sole illumination.
“You’ve been taking an awful beating in the way of discoveries, haven’t you?” said Francisco. “How did you like the behavior of your fellow businessmen?”
“I suppose it was to be expected.”
His voice tense with the anger of compassion, Francisco said, “It’s been twelve years and yet I’m still unable to see it indifferently!” The sentence sounded involuntary, as if, trying to suppress the sound of emotion, he had uttered suppressed words.
“Twelve years—since what?” asked Rearden.
There was an instant’s pause, but Francisco answered calmly, “Since I understood what those men were doing.” He added, “I know what you’re going through right now ... and what’s still ahead.”
“Thanks,