Atlas Shrugged (20 page)

After a while, Mrs. Taggart began to worry and decided to investigate. She never learned how he had managed to by-pass all the child-labor laws, but she found Francisco working—by an unofficial deal with the dispatcher—as a call boy for Taggart Transcontinental, at a division point ten miles away. The dispatcher was stupefied by her personal visit; he had no idea that his call boy was a house guest of the Taggarts. The boy was known to the local railroad crews as Frankie, and Mrs. Taggart preferred not to enlighten them about his full name. She merely explained that he was working without his parents’ permission and had to quit at once. The dispatcher was sorry to lose him; Frankie, he said, was the best call boy they had ever had. “I’d sure like to keep him on. Maybe we could make a deal with his parents?” he suggested. “I’m afraid not,” said Mrs. Taggart faintly.

“Francisco,” she asked, when she brought him home, “what would your father say about this, if he knew?”

“My father would ask whether I was good at the job or not. That’s all he’d want to know.”

“Come now, I’m serious.”

Francisco was looking at her politely, his courteous manner suggesting centuries of breeding and drawing rooms; but something in his eyes made her feel uncertain about the politeness. “Last winter,” he answered, “I shipped out as cabin boy on a cargo steamer that carried d‘Anconia copper. My father looked for me for three months, but that’s all he asked me when I came back.”

“So that’s how you spend your winters?” said Jim Taggart. Jim’s smile had a touch of triumph, the triumph of finding cause to feel contempt.

“That was last winter,” Francisco answered pleasantly, with no change in the innocent, casual tone of his voice. “The winter before last I spent in Madrid, at the home of the Duke of Alba.”

“Why did you want to work on a railroad?” asked Dagny.

They stood looking at each other: hers was a glance of admiration, his of mockery; but it was not the mockery of malice—it was the laughter of a salute.

“To learn what it’s like, Slug,” he answered, “and to tell you that I’ve had a job with Taggart Transcontinental before you did.”

Dagny and Eddie spent their winters trying to master some new skill, in order to astonish Francisco and beat him, for once. They never succeeded. When they showed him how to hit a ball with a bat, a game he had never played before, he watched them for a few minutes, then said, “I think I get the idea. Let me try.” He took the bat and sent the ball flying over a line of oak trees far at the end of the field.

When Jim was given a motorboat for his birthday, they all stood on the river landing, watching the lesson, while an instructor showed Jim how to run it. None of them had ever driven a motorboat before. The sparkling white craft, shaped like a bullet, kept staggering clumsily across the water, its wake a long record of shivering, its motor choking with hiccoughs, while the instructor, seated beside him, kept seizing the wheel out of Jim’s hands. For no apparent reason, Jim raised his head suddenly and yelled at Francisco, “Do you think you can do it any better?” “I can do it.” “Try it!”

When the boat came back and its two occupants stepped out, Francisco slipped behind the wheel. “Wait a moment,” he said to the instructor, who remained on the landing. “Let me take a look at this.” Then, before the instructor had time to move, the boat shot out to the middle of the river, as if fired from a gun. It was streaking away before they grasped what they were seeing. As it went shrinking into the distance and sunlight, Dagny’s picture of it was three straight lines: its wake, the long shriek of its motor, and the aim of the driver at its wheel.

She noticed the strange expression of her father’s face as he looked at the vanishing speedboat. He said nothing; he just stood looking. She remembered that she had seen him look that way once before. It was when he inspected a complex system of pulleys which Francisco, aged twelve, had erected to make an elevator to the top of a rock; he was teaching Dagny and Eddie to dive from the rock into the Hudson. Francisco’s notes of calculation were still scattered about on the ground; her father picked them up, looked at them, then asked, “Francisco, how many years of algebra have you had?” “Two years.” “Who taught you to do this?” “Oh, that’s just something I figured out.” She did not know that what her father held on the crumpled sheets of paper was the crude version of a differential equation.

The heirs of Sebastián d‘Anconia had been an unbroken line of first sons, who knew how to bear his name. It was a tradition of the family that the man to disgrace them would be the heir who died, leaving the d’Anconia fortune no greater than he had received it. Throughout the generations, that disgrace had not come. An Argentinian legend said that the hand of a d‘Anconia had the miraculous power of the saints—only it was not the power to heal, but the power to produce.

The d‘Anconia heirs had been men of unusual ability, but none of them could match what Francisco d’Anconia promised to become. It was as if the centuries had sifted the family’s qualities through a fine mesh, had discarded the irrelevant, the inconsequential, the weak, and had let nothing through except pure talent; as if chance, for once, had achieved an entity devoid of the accidental.

Francisco could do anything he undertook, he could do it better than anyone else, and he did it without effort. There was no boasting in his manner and consciousness, no thought of comparison. His attitude was not: “I can do it better than you,” but simply: “I can do it.” What he meant by doing was doing superlatively.

No matter what discipline was required of him by his father’s exacting plan for his education, no matter what subject he was ordered to study, Francisco mastered it with effortless amusement. His father adored him, but concealed it carefully, as he concealed the pride of knowing that he was bringing up the most brilliant phenomenon of a brilliant family line. Francisco, it was said, was to be the climax of the d‘Anconias.

“I don’t know what sort of motto the d‘Anconias have on their family crest,” Mrs. Taggart said once, “but I’m sure that Francisco will change it to ’What for?‘ ” It was the first question he asked about any activity proposed to him—and nothing would make him act, if he found no valid answer. He flew through the days of his summer month like a rocket, but if one stopped him in mid-flight, he could always name the purpose of his every random moment. Two things were impossible to him: to stand still or to move aimlessly.

“Let’s find out” was the motive he gave to Dagny and Eddie for anything he undertook, or “Let’s make it.” These were his only forms of enjoyment.

“I can do it,” he said, when he was building his elevator, clinging to the side of a cliff, driving metal wedges into rock, his arms moving with an expert’s rhythm, drops of blood slipping, unnoticed, from under a bandage on his wrist. “No, we can’t take turns, Eddie, you’re not big enough yet to handle a hammer. Just cart the weeds off and keep the way clear for me, I’ll do the rest.... What blood? Oh, that’s nothing, just a cut I got yesterday. Dagny, run to the house and bring me a clean bandage.”

Jim watched them. They left him alone, but they often saw him standing in the distance, watching Francisco with a peculiar kind of intensity.

He seldom spoke in Francisco’s presence. But he would corner Dagny and he would smile derisively, saying, “All those airs you put on, pretending that you’re an iron woman with a mind of her own! You’re a spineless dishrag, that’s all you are. It’s disgusting, the way you let that conceited punk order you about. He can twist you around his little finger. You haven’t any pride at all. The way you run when he whistles and wait on him! Why don’t you shine his shoes?” “Because he hasn’t told me to,” she answered.

Francisco could win any game in any local contest. He never entered contests. He could have ruled the junior country club. He never came within sight of their clubhouse, ignoring their eager attempts to enroll the most famous heir in the world. Dagny and Eddie were his only friends. They could not tell whether they owned him or were owned by him completely; it made no difference: either concept made them happy.

The three of them set out every morning on adventures of their own kind. Once, an elderly professor of literature, Mrs. Taggart’s friend, saw them on top of a pile in a junk yard, dismantling the carcass of an automobile. He stopped, shook his head and said to Francisco, “A young man of your position ought to spend his time in libraries, absorbing the culture of the world.” “What do you think I’m doing?” asked Francisco.

There were no factories in the neighborhood, but Francisco taught Dagny and Eddie to steal rides on Taggart trains to distant towns, where they climbed fences into mill yards or hung on window sills, watching machinery as other children watched movies. “When I run Taggart Transcontinental ...” Dagny would say at times. “When I run d‘Anconia Copper ...” said Francisco. They never had to explain the rest to each other; they knew each other’s goal and motive.

Railroad conductors caught them, once in a while. Then a stationmaster a hundred miles away would telephone Mrs. Taggart: “We’ve got three young tramps here who say that they are—” “Yes,” Mrs. Taggart would sigh, “they are. Please send them back.”

“Francisco,” Eddie asked him once, as they stood by the tracks of the Taggart station, “you’ve been just about everywhere in the world. What’s the most important thing on earth?” “This,” answered Francisco, pointing to the emblem TT on the front of an engine. He added, “I wish I could have met Nat Taggart.”

He noticed Dagny’s glance at him. He said nothing else. But minutes later, when they went on through the woods, down a narrow path of damp earth, ferns and sunlight, he said, “Dagny, I’ll always bow to a coat-of-arms. I’ll always worship the symbols of nobility. Am I not supposed to be an aristocrat? Only I don’t give a damn for moth-eaten turrets and tenth-hand unicorns. The coats-of-arms of our day are to be found on billboards and in the ads of popular magazines.” “What do you mean?” asked Eddie. “Industrial trademarks, Eddie,” he answered. Francisco was fifteen years old, that summer.

“When I run d‘Anconia Copper ...” “I’m studying mining and mineralogy, because I must be ready for the time when I run d’Anconia Copper....” “I’m studying electrical engineering, because power companies are the best customers of d‘Anconia Copper....” “I’m going to study philosophy, because I’ll need it to protect d’Anconia Copper....”

“Don’t you ever think of anything but d‘Anconia Copper?” Jim asked him once.

“No.”

“It seems to me that there are other things in the world.”

“Let others think about them.”

“Isn’t that a very selfish attitude?”

“It is.”

“What are you after?”

“Money.”

“Don’t you have enough?”

“In his lifetime, every one of my ancestors raised the production of d‘Anconia Copper by about ten per cent. I intend to raise it by one hundred.”

“What for?”
Jim asked, in sarcastic imitation of Francisco’s voice.

“When I die, I hope to go to heaven—whatever the hell that is-and I want to be able to afford the price of admission.”

“Virtue is the price of admission,” Jim said haughtily.

“That’s what I mean, James. So I want to be prepared to claim the greatest virtue of all—that I was a man who made money.”

“Any grafter can make money.”

“James, you ought to discover some day that words have an exact meaning.”

Francisco smiled; it was a smile of radiant mockery. Watching them, Dagny thought suddenly of the difference between Francisco and her brother Jim. Both of them smiled derisively. But Francisco seemed to laugh at things because he saw something much greater. Jim laughed as if he wanted to let nothing remain great.

She noticed the particular quality of Francisco’s smile again, one night, when she sat with him and Eddie at a bonfire they had built in the woods. The glow of the fire enclosed them within a fence of broken, moving strips that held pieces of tree trunks, branches and distant stars. She felt as if there were nothing beyond that fence, nothing but black emptiness, with the hint of some breath-stopping, frightening promise ... like the future. But the future, she thought, would be like Francisco’s smile,
there
was the key to it, the advance warning of its nature -in his face in the firelight under the pine branches—and suddenly she felt an unbearable happiness, unbearable because it was too full and she had no way to express it. She glanced at Eddie. He was looking at Francisco. In some quiet way of his own, Eddie felt as she did.

“Why do you like Francisco?” she asked him weeks later, when Francisco was gone.

Eddie looked astonished; it had never occurred to him that the feeling could be questioned. He said, “He makes me feel safe.”

She said, “He makes me expect excitement and danger.”

Francisco was sixteen, next summer, the day when she stood alone with him on the summit of a cliff by the river, their shorts and shirts torn in their climb to the top. They stood looking down the Hudson; they had heard that on clear days one could see New York in the distance. But they saw only a haze made of three different kinds of light merging together: the river, the sky and the sun.

She knelt on a rock, leaning forward, trying to catch some hint of the city, the wind blowing her hair across her eyes. She glanced back over her shoulder—and saw that Francisco was not looking at the distance: he stood looking at her. It was an odd glance, intent and unsmiling. She remained still for a moment, her hands spread flat on the rock, her arms tensed to support the weight of her body; inexplicably, his glance made her aware of her pose, of her shoulder showing through the torn shirt, of her long, scratched, sunburned legs slanting from the rock to the ground. She stood up angrily and backed away from him. And while throwing her head up, resentment in her eyes to meet the sternness in his, while feeling certain that his was a glance of condemnation and hostility, she heard herself asking him, a tone of smiling defiance in her voice: