by Ayn Rand
She fought it. She recovered. Years helped her to reach the day when she could face her memories indifferently, then the day when she felt no necessity to face them. It was finished and of no concern to her any longer.
There had been no other men in her life. She did not know whether this had made her unhappy. She had had no time to know. She found the clean, brilliant sense of life as she wanted it--in her work. Once, Francisco had given her the same sense, a feeling that belonged with her work and in her world. The men she had met since were like the men she met at her first ball.
She had won the battle against her memories. But one form of torture remained, untouched by the years, the torture of the word "why?"
Whatever the tragedy he met, why had Francisco taken the ugliest way of escape, as ignoble as the way of some cheap alcoholic? The boy she had known could not have become a useless coward. An incomparable mind could not turn its ingenuity to the invention of melting ballrooms. Yet he had and did, and there was no explanation to make it conceivable and to let her forget him in peace. She could not doubt the fact of what he had been; she could not doubt the fact of what he had become; yet one made the other impossible. At times, she almost doubted her own rationality or the existence of any rationality anywhere; but this was a doubt which she did not permit to anyone. Yet there was no explanation, no reason, no clue to any conceivable reason -and in all the days of ten years she had found no hint of an answer.
No, she thought--as she walked through the gray twilight, past the windows of abandoned shops, to the Wayne-Falkland Hotel--no, there could be no answer. She would not seek it. It did not matter now.
The remnant of violence, the emotion rising as a thin trembling within her, was not for the man she was going to see; it was a cry of protest against a sacrilege--against the destruction of what had been greatness.
In a break between buildings, she saw the towers of the Wayne-Falkland. She felt a slight jolt, in her lungs and legs, that stopped her for an instant. Then she walked on evenly.
By the time she walked through the marble lobby, to the elevator, then down the wide, velvet-carpeted, soundless corridors of the Wayne-Falkland, she felt nothing but a cold anger that grew colder with every step.
She was certain of the anger when she knocked at his door. She heard his voice, answering, "Come in." She jerked the door open and entered.
Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastian d'Anconia sat on the floor, playing marbles.
Nobody ever wondered whether Francisco d'Anconia was good-looking or not; it seemed irrelevant; when he entered a room, it was impossible to look at anyone else. His tall, slender figure had an air of distinction, too authentic to be modern, and he moved as if he had a cape floating behind him in the wind. People explained him by saying that he had the vitality of a healthy animal, but they knew dimly that that was not correct. He had the vitality of a healthy human being, a thing so rare that no one could identify it. He had the power of certainty.
Nobody described his appearance as Latin, yet the word applied to him, not in its present, but in its original sense, not pertaining to Spain, but to ancient Rome. His body seemed designed as an exercise in consistency of style, a style made of gauntness, of tight flesh, long legs and swift movements. His features had the fine precision of sculpture. His hair was black and straight, swept back. The suntan of his skin intensified the startling color of his eyes: they were a pure, clear blue. His face was open, its rapid changes of expression reflecting whatever he felt, as if he had nothing to hide. The blue eyes were still and changeless, never giving a hint of what he thought.
He sat on the floor of his drawing room, dressed in sleeping pajamas of thin black silk. The marbles spread on the carpet around him were made of the semi-precious stones of his native country: carnelian and rock crystal. He did not rise when Dagny entered. He sat looking up at her, and a crystal marble fell like a teardrop out of his hand. He smiled, the unchanged, insolent, brilliant smile of his childhood.
"Hi, Slug!"
She heard herself answering, irresistibly, helplessly, happily:
"Hi, Frisco!"
She was looking at his face; it was the face she had known. It bore no mark of the kind of life he had led, nor of what she had seen on their last night together. There was no sign of tragedy, no bitterness, no tension--only the radiant mockery, matured and stressed, the look of dangerously unpredictable amusement, and the great, guiltless serenity of spirit. But this, she thought, was impossible; this was more shocking than all the rest.
His eyes were studying her: the battered coat thrown open, half-slipping off her shoulders, and the slender body in a gray suit that looked like an office uniform.
"If you came here dressed like this in order not to let me notice how lovely you are," he said, "you miscalculated. You're lovely. I wish I could tell you what a relief it is to see a face that's intelligent though a woman's. But you don't want to hear it. That's not what you came here for."
The words were improper in so many ways, yet were said so lightly that they brought her back to reality, to anger and to the purpose of her visit. She remained standing, looking down at him, her face blank, refusing him any recognition of the personal, even of its power to offend her. She said, "I came here to ask you a question."
"Go ahead."
"When you told those reporters that you came to New York to witness the farce, which farce did you mean?"
He laughed aloud, like a man who seldom finds a chance to enjoy the unexpected.
"That's what I like about you, Dagny. There are seven million people in the city of New York, at present. Out of seven million people, you are the only one to whom it could have occurred that I wasn't talking about the Vail divorce scandal."
"What were you talking about?"
"What alternative occurred to you?"
"The San Sebastian disaster."
"That's much more amusing than the Vail divorce scandal, isn't it?"
She said in the solemn, merciless tone of a prosecutor, "You did it consciously, cold-bloodedly and with full intention."
"Don't you think it would be better if you took your coat off and sat down?"
She knew she had made a mistake by betraying too much intensity. She turned coldly, removed her coat and threw it aside. He did not rise to help her. She sat down in an armchair. He remained on the floor, at some distance, but it seemed as if he were sitting at her feet.
"What was it I did with full intention?" he asked.
"The entire San Sebastian swindle."
"What was my full intention?"
"That is what I want to know."
He chuckled, as if she had asked him to explain in conversation a complex science requiring a lifetime of study.
"You knew that the San Sebastian mines were worthless," she said. "You knew it before you began the whole wretched business."
"Then why did I begin it?"
"Don't start telling me that you gained nothing. I know it. I know you lost fifteen million dollars of your own money. Yet it was done on purpose."
"Can you think of a motive that would prompt me to do it?"
"No. It's inconceivable."
"Is it? You assume that I have a great mind, a great knowledge and a great productive ability, so that anything I undertake must necessarily be successful. And then you claim that I had no desire to put out my best effort for the People's State of Mexico. Inconceivable, isn't it?"
"You knew, before you bought that property, that Mexico was in the hands of a looters' government. You didn't have to start a mining project for them."
"No, I didn't have to."
"You didn't give a damn about that Mexican government, one way or another, because--"
"You're wrong about that."
"--because you knew they'd seize those mines sooner or later. What you were after is your American stockholders."
"That's true." He was looking straight at her, he was not smiling, his face was earnest. He added, "That's part of the tr
uth."
"What's the rest?"
"It was not all I was after."
"What else?"
"That's for you to figure out."
"I came here because I wanted you to know that I am beginning to understand your purpose."
He smiled. "If you did, you wouldn't have come here."
"That's true. I don't understand and probably never shall. I am merely beginning to see part of it."
"Which part?"
"You had exhausted every other form of depravity and sought a new thrill by swindling people like Jim and his friends, in order to watch them squirm. I don't know what sort of corruption could make anyone enjoy that, but that's what you came to New York to see, at the right time."
"They certainly provided a spectacle of squirming on the grand scale. Your brother James in particular."
"They're rotten fools, but in this case their only crime was that they trusted you. They trusted your name and your honor."
Again, she saw the look of earnestness and again knew with certainty that it was genuine, when he said, "Yes. They did. I know it."
"And do you find it amusing?"
"No. I don't find it amusing at all."
He had continued playing with his marbles, absently, indifferently, taking a shot once in a while. She noticed suddenly the faultless accuracy of his aim, the skill of his hands. He merely flicked his wrist and sent a drop of stone shooting across the carpet to click sharply against another drop. She thought of his childhood and of the predictions that anything he did would be done superlatively.
"No," he said, "I don't find it amusing. Your brother James and his friends knew nothing about the copper-mining industry. They knew nothing about making money. They did not think it necessary to learn. They considered knowledge superfluous and judgment inessential. They observed that there I was in the world and that I made it my honor to know. They thought they could trust my honor. One does not betray a trust of this kind, does one?"
"Then you did betray it intentionally?"
"That's for you to decide. It was you who spoke about their trust and my honor. I don't think in such terms any longer...." He shrugged, adding, "I don't give a damn about your brother James and his friends. Their theory was not new, it has worked for centuries. But it wasn't foolproof. There is just one point that they overlooked. They thought it was safe to ride on my brain, because they assumed that the goal of my journey was wealth. All their calculations rested on the premise that I wanted to make money. What if I didn't?"
"If you didn't, what did you want?"
"They never asked me that. Not to inquire about my aims, motives or desires is an essential part of their theory."
"If you didn't want to make money, what possible motive could you have had?"
"Any number of them. For instance, to spend it."
"To spend money on a certain, total failure?"
"How was I to know that those mines were a certain, total failure?"
"How could you help knowing it?"
"Quite simply. By giving it no thought."
"You started that project without giving it any thought?"
"No, not exactly. But suppose I slipped up? I'm only human. I made a mistake. I failed. I made a bad job of it." He flicked his wrist; a crystal marble shot, sparkling, across the floor and cracked violently against a brown one at the other end of the room.
"I don't believe it," she said.
"No? But haven't I the right to be what is now accepted as human? Should I pay for everybody's mistakes and never be permitted one of my own?"
"That's not like you."
"No?" He stretched himself full-length on the carpet, lazily, relaxing. "Did you intend me to notice that if you think I did it on purpose, then you still give me credit for having a purpose? You're still unable to accept me as a bum?"
She closed her eyes. She heard him laughing; it was the gayest sound in the world. She opened her eyes hastily; but there was no hint of cruelty in his face, only pure laughter.
"My motive, Dagny? You don't think that it's the simplest one of all--the spur of the moment?"
No, she thought, no, that's not true; not if he laughed like that, not if he looked as he did. The capacity for unclouded enjoyment, she thought, does not belong to irresponsible fools; an inviolate peace of spirit is not the achievement of a drifter; to be able to laugh like that is the end result of the most profound, most solemn thinking.
Almost dispassionately, looking at his figure stretched on the carpet at her feet, she observed what memory it brought back to her: the black pajamas stressed the long lines of his body, the open collar showed a smooth, young, sunburned skin--and she thought of the figure in black slacks and shirt stretched beside her on the grass at sunrise. She had felt pride then, the pride of knowing that she owned his body; she still felt it. She remembered suddenly, specifically, the excessive acts of their intimacy; the memory should have been offensive to her now, but wasn't. It was still pride, without regret or hope, an emotion that had no power to reach her and that she had no power to destroy.
Unaccountably, by an association of feeling that astonished her, she remembered what had conveyed to her recently the same sense of consummate joy as his.
"Francisco," she heard herself saying softly, "we both loved the music of Richard Halley...."
"I still love it."
"Have you ever met him?"
"Yes. Why?"
"Do you happen to know whether he has written a Fifth Concerto?"
He remained perfectly still. She had thought him impervious to shock; he wasn't. But she could not attempt to guess why of all the things she had said, this should be the first to reach him. It was only an instant; then he asked evenly, "What makes you think he has?"
"Well, has he?"
"You know that there are only four Halley Concertos."
"Yes. But I wondered whether he had written another one."
"He has stopped writing."
"I know."
"Then what made you ask that?"
"Just an idle thought. What is he doing now? Where is he?"
"I don't know. I haven't seen him for a long time. What made you think that there was a Fifth Concerto?"
"I didn't say there was. I merely wondered about it."
"Why did you think of Richard Halley just now?"
"Because"--she felt her control cracking a little--"because my mind can't make the leap from Richard Halley's music to ... to Mrs. Gilbert Vail."
He laughed, relieved. "Oh, that? ... Incidentally, if you've been following my publicity, have you noticed a funny little discrepancy in the story of Mrs. Gilbert Vail?"
"I don't read the stuff."
"You should. She gave such a beautiful description of last New Year's Eve, which we spent together in my villa in the Andes. The moonlight on the mountain peaks, and the blood-red flowers hanging on vines in the open windows. See anything wrong in the picture?"
She said quietly, "It's I who should ask you that, and I'm not going to."
"Oh, I see nothing wrong--except that last New Year's Eve I was in El Paso, Texas, presiding at the opening of the San Sebastian Line of Taggart Transcontinental, as you should remember, even if you didn't choose to be present on the occasion. I had my picture taken with my arms around your brother James and the Senor Orren Boyle."
She gasped, remembering that this was true, remembering also that she had seen Mrs. Vail's story in the newspapers.
"Francisco, what ... what does that mean?"
He chuckled. "Draw your own conclusions.... Dagny"--his face was serious--"why did you think of Halley writing a Fifth Concerto? Why not a new symphony or opera? Why specifically a concerto?"
"Why does that disturb you?"
"It doesn't." He added softly, "I still love his music, Dagny." Then he spoke lightly again. "But it belonged to another age. Our age provides a different kind of entertainment."
He rolled over on his back and lay with his hands crossed under his head, looki
ng up as if he were watching the scenes of a movie farce unrolling on the ceiling.
"Dagny, didn't you enjoy the spectacle of the behavior of the People's State of Mexico in regard to the San Sebastian Mines? Did you read their government's speeches and the editorials in their newspapers? They're saying that I am an unscrupulous cheat who has defrauded them. They expected to have a successful mining concern to seize. I had no right to disappoint them like that. Did you read about the scabby little bureaucrat who wanted them to sue me?"
He laughed, lying flat on his back; his arms were thrown wide on the carpet, forming a cross with his body; he seemed disarmed, relaxed and young.
"It was worth whatever it's cost me. I could afford the price of that show. If I had staged it intentionally, I would have beaten the record of the Emperor Nero. What's burning a city--compared to tearing the lid off hell and letting men see it?"
He raised himself, picked up a few marbles and sat shaking them absently in his hand; they clicked with the soft, clear sound of good stone. She realized suddenly that playing with those marbles was not a deliberate affectation on his part; it was restlessness; he could not remain inactive for long.
"The government of the People's State of Mexico has issued a proclamation," he said, "asking the people to be patient and put up with hardships just a little longer. It seems that the copper fortune of the San Sebastian Mines was part of the plans of the central planning council. It was to raise everybody's standard of living and provide a roast of pork every Sunday for every man, woman, child and abortion in the People's State of Mexico. Now the planners are asking their people not to blame the government, but to blame the depravity of the rich, because I turned out to be an irresponsible playboy, instead of the greedy capitalist I was expected to be. How were they to know, they're asking, that I would let them down? Well, true enough. How were they to know it?"
She noticed the way he fingered the marbles in his hand. He was not conscious of it, he was looking off into some grim distance, but she felt certain that the action was a relief to him, perhaps as a contrast. His fingers were moving slowly, feeling the texture of the stones with sensual enjoyment. Instead of finding it crude, she found it strangely attractive--as if, she thought suddenly, as if sensuality were not physical at all, but came from a fine discrimination of the spirit.