“Do you?”
“No.”
“Well... well, I guess the blame is ours. That’s what I wanted to tell you—that we know we’re to blame. We haven’t treated you right, all these years. We’ve been unfair to you, we’ve made you suffer, we’ve used you and given you no thanks in return. We’re guilty, Henry, we’ve sinned against you, and we confess it. What more can we say to you now? Will you find it in your heart to forgive us?”
“What is it you want me to do?” he asked, in the clear, flat tone of a business conference.
“I don’t know! Who am I to know? But that’s not what I’m talking of right now. Not of doing, only of feeling. It’s your feeling that I’m begging you for, Henry—just your feeling—even if we don’t deserve it. You’re generous and strong. Will you cancel the past, Henry? Will you forgive us?”
The look of terror in her eyes was real. A year ago, he would have told himself that this was her way of making amends; he would have choked his revulsion against her words, words which conveyed nothing to him but the fog of the meaningless; he would have violated his mind to give them meaning, even if he did not understand; he would have ascribed to her the virtue of sincerity in her own terms, even if they were not his. But he was through with granting respect to any terms other than his own.
“Will you forgive us?”
“Mother, it would be best not to speak of that. Don’t press me to tell you why. I think you know it as well as I do. If there’s anything you want done, tell me what it is. There’s nothing else to discuss.
“But I don’t understand you! I don’t! That’s what I called you here for—to ask your forgiveness! Are you going to refuse to answer me?”
“Very well. What would it mean, my forgiveness?”
“Uh?”
“I said, what would it mean?”
. She spread her hands out in an astonished gesture to indicate the self-evident. “Why, it... it would make us feel better.”
“Will it change the past?”
“It would make us feel better to know that you’ve forgiven it.”
“Do you wish me to pretend that the past has not existed?”
“Oh God, Henry, can’t you see? All we want is only to know that you... that you feel some concern for us.”
“I don’t feel it. Do you wish me to fake it?”
“But that’s what I’m begging you for—to feel it!”
“On what ground?”
“Ground?”
“In exchange for what?”
“Henry, Henry, it’s not business we’re talking about, not steel tonnages and bank balances, it’s feelings—and you talk like a trader!”
“I am one.”
What he saw in her eyes was terror—not the helpless terror of struggling and failing to understand, but the terror of being pushed toward the edge where to avoid understanding would no longer be possible.
“Look, Henry,” said Philip hastily, “Mother can’t understand those things. We don’t know how to approach you. We can’t speak your language.”
“I don’t speak yours.”
“What she’s trying to say is that we’re sorry. We’re terribly sorry that we’ve hurt you. You think we’re not paying for it, but we are.
We’re suffering remorse.”
The pain in Philip’s face was real. A year ago, Rearden would have felt pity. Now, he knew that they had held him through nothing but his reluctance to hurt them, his fear of their pain. He was not afraid of it any longer, “We’re sorry, Henry. We know we’ve harmed you. We wish we could atone for it. But what can we do? The past is past. We can’t undo it.”
“Neither can I.”
“You can accept our repentance,” said Lillian, in a voice glassy with caution. “I have nothing to gain from you now. I only want you to know that whatever I’ve done, I’ve done it because I loved you.”
He turned away, without answering.
“Henry!” cried his mother. “What’s happened to you? What’s changed you like that? You don’t seem to be human any more! You keep pressing us for answers, when we haven’t any answers to give. You keep beating us with logic—what’s logic at a time like this?—what’s logic when people are suffering?”
“We can’t help it!” cried Philip.
“We’re at your mercy,” said Lillian.
They were throwing their pleas at a face that could not be reached.
They did not know—and their panic was the last of their struggle to escape the knowledge—that his merciless sense of justice, which had been their only hold on him, which had made him take any punishment and give them the benefit of every doubt, was now turned against them—that the same force that had made him tolerant, was now the force that made him ruthless—that the justice which would forgive miles of innocent errors of knowledge, would not forgive a single step taken in conscious evil.
“Henry, don’t you understand us?” his mother was pleading.
“I do,” he said quietly.
She looked away, avoiding the clarity of his eyes. “Don’t you care what becomes of us?”
“I don’t.”
“Aren’t you human?” Her voice grew shrill with anger. “Aren’t you capable of any love at all? It’s your heart I’m trying to reach, not your mind! Love is not something to argue and reason and bargain about!
It’s something to give! To feel! Oh God, Henry, can’t you feel without thinking?”
“I never have.”
In a moment, her voice came back, low and droning: “We’re not as smart as you are, not as strong. If we’ve sinned and blundered, it’s because we’re helpless. We need you, you’re all we’ve got—and we’re losing you—and we’re afraid. These are terrible times, and getting worse, people are scared to death, scared and blind and not knowing what to do. How are we to cope with it, if you leave us? We’re small and weak and we’ll be swept like driftwood in that terror that’s running loose in the world. Maybe we had our share of guilt for it, maybe we helped to bring it about, not knowing any better, but what’s done is done—and we can’t stop it now. If you abandon us, we’re lost. If you give up and vanish, like all those men who—”
It was not a sound that stopped her, it was only a movement of his eyebrows, the brief, swift movement of a check mark. Then they saw him smile; the nature of the smile was the most terrifying of answers.
“So that’s what you’re afraid of,” he said slowly.
“You can’t quit!” his mother screamed in blind panic. “You can’t quit now! You could have, last year, but not now! Not today! You can’t turn deserter, because now they take it out on your family! They’ll leave us penniless, they’ll seize everything, they’ll leave us to starve, they’ll—”
“Keep still!” cried Lillian, more adept than the others at reading danger signs in Rearden’s face.
His face held the remnant of a smile, and they knew that he was not seeing them any longer, but it was not in their power to know why his smile now seemed to hold pain and an almost wistful longing, or why he was looking across the room, at the niche of the farthest window.
He was seeing a finely sculptured face held composed under the lashing of his insults, he was hearing a voice that had said to him quietly, here, in this room: “It is against the sin of forgiveness that I wanted to warn you.” You who had known it then, he thought... but he did not finish the sentence in his mind, he let it end in the bitter twist of his smile, because he knew what he had been about to think: You who had known it then—forgive me.
There it was—he thought, looking at his family—the nature of their pleas for mercy, the logic of those feelings they so righteously proclaimed as non-logical—there was the simple, brutal essence of all men who speak of being able to feel without thought and of placing mercy over justice.
They had known what to fear; they had grasped and named, before he had, the only way of deliverance left
