“Did you take over the Starnes research laboratory?”
“Yes, yes, it was there. Everything was there.”
“His staff, too?”
“Oh, some of them. A lot of them had gone while the factory was closed.”
“His research staff?”
“They were gone.”
“Did you hire any research men of your own?”
“Yes, yes, some—but let me tell you, I didn’t have much money to spend on such things as laboratories, when I never had enough funds to give me a breathing spell. I couldn’t even pay the bills I owed for the absolutely essential modernizing and redecorating which I’d had to do —that factory was disgracefully old-fashioned from the standpoint of human efficiency. The executive offices had bare plaster walls and a dinky little washroom. Any modern psychologist will tell you that nobody could do his best in such depressing surroundings. I had to have a brighter color scheme in my office, and a decent modern bathroom with a stall shower. Furthermore, I spent a lot of money on a new cafeteria and a playroom and rest room for the workers. We had to have morale, didn’t we? Any enlightened person knows that man is made by the material factors of his background, and that a man’s mind is shaped by his tools of production. But people wouldn’t wait for the laws of economic determinism to operate upon us. We never had a motor factory before. We had to let the tools condition our minds, didn’t we? But nobody gave us time.”
“Can you tell me about the work of your research staff?”
“Oh, I had a group of very promising young men, all of them guaranteed by diplomas from the best universities. But it didn’t do me any good. I don’t know what they were doing. I think they were just sitting around, eating up their salaries.”
“Who was in charge of your laboratory?”
“Hell, how can I remember that now?”
“Do you remember any of the names of your research staff?”
“Do you think I had time to meet every hireling in person?”
“Did any of them ever mention to you any experiments with a . . . with an entirely new kind of motor?”
“What motor? Let me tell you that an executive of my position does not hang around laboratories. I spent most of my time in New York and Chicago, trying to raise money to keep us going.”
“Who was the general manager of tie factory?”
“A very able fellow by the name of Roy Cunningham. He died last year in an auto accident. Drunk driving, they said.”
“Can you give me the names and addresses of any of your associates? Anyone you remember?”
“I don’t know what’s become of them. I wasn’t in a mood to keep track of that.”
“Have you preserved any of the factory records?”
“I certainly have.”
She sat up eagerly. “Would you let me see them?”
“You bet!”
He seemed eager to comply; he rose at once and hurried out of the room. What he put down before her, when he returned, was a thick album of clippings: it contained his newspaper interviews and his press agent’s releases.
“I was one of the big industrialists, too,” he said proudly. “I was a national figure, as you can see. My life will make a book of deep, human significance. I’d have written it long ago, if I had the proper tools of production.” He banged angrily upon his typewriter. “I can’t work on this damn thing. It skips spaces. How can I get any inspiration and write a best seller with a typewriter that skips spaces?”
“Thank you, Mr. Hunsacker,” she said. “I believe this is all you can tell me.” She rose. “You don’t happen to know what became of the Starnes heirs?”
“Oh, they ran for cover after they’d wrecked the factory. There were three of them, two sons and a daughter. Last I heard, they were hiding their faces out in Durance, Louisiana.”
The last sight she caught of Lee Hunsacker, as she turned to go, was his sudden leap to the stove; he seized the lid off the pot and dropped it to the floor, scorching his fingers and cursing: the stew was burned.
Little was left of the Starnes fortune and less of the Starnes heirs.
“You won’t like having to see them, Miss Taggart,” said the chief of police of Durance, Louisiana; he was an elderly man with a slow, firm manner and a look of bitterness acquired not in blind resentment., but in fidelity to clear-cut standards. “There’s all sorts of human beings to see in the world, there’s murderers and criminal maniacs—but, somehow, I think these Starnes persons are what decent people shouldn’t have to see. They’re a bad sort, Miss Taggart. Clammy and bad . . .
Yes, they’re still here in town—two of them, that is. The third one is: dead. Suicide. That was four years ago. It’s an ugly story. He was the youngest of the three, Eric Starnes. He was one of those chronic young men who go around whining about their sensitive feelings, when they’re well past forty. He needed love, was his line. He was being kept by older women, when he could find them. Then he started running after a girl of sixteen, a nice girl who wouldn’t have anything to do with him.
She married a boy she was engaged to. Eric Starnes got into their house on the wedding day, and when they came back from church after the ceremony, they found him in their bedroom, dead, messy dead, his wrists slashed. . . . Now I say there might be forgiveness for a man who kills himself quietly. Who can pass judgment on another man’s suffering and on the limit of what he can bear? But the man who kills himself, making a show of his death in order to hurt somebody, the man who gives his life for malice—there’s no forgiveness for him, no excuse, he’s rotten clear through, and what he deserves is that people spit at his memory, instead of feeling sorry for him and hurt, as he wanted them to be. . . . Well, that was Eric Starnes. I can tell you where to find the other two, if you wish.”
She found Gerald Starnes in the ward of a flophouse. He lay half twisted on a cot. His hair was still black, but the white stubble of his chin was like a mist of dead weeds over a vacant face. He was soggy drunk. A pointless chuckle kept breaking his voice when he spoke, the sound of a static, unfocused malevolence, “It went bust, the great factory. That’s what happened to it. Just went up and bust. Does that bother you, madam? The factory was rotten. Everybody is rotten. I’m supposed to beg somebody’s pardon, but I won’t. I don’t give a damn. People get fits trying to keep up the show, when it’s all rot, black rot, the automobiles, the buildings and the souls, and it doesn’t make any difference, one way or another. You should’ve seen the kind of literati who turned flip-flops when I whistled, when I had the dough. The professors, the poets, the intellectuals, the world-savers and the brother-lovers. Any way I whistled. I had lots of fun. I wanted to do good, but now I don’t. There isn’t any good. Not any goddamn good in the whole goddamn universe. I don’t propose to take a bath if I don’t feel like it, and that’s that. If you want to know anything about the factory, ask my sister. My sweet sister who had a trust fund they couldn’t touch, so she got out of it safe, even if she’s in the hamburger class now, not the filet mignon a la Sauce Bearnaise, but would she give a penny of it to her brother? The noble plan that busted was her idea as much as mine, but will she give me a penny?
Hah! Go take a look at the duchess, take a look. What do I care about the factory? It was just a pile of greasy machinery. I’ll sell you all my rights, claims and title to it—for a drink. I’m the last of the Starnes name. It used to be a great name—Starnes. I’ll sell it to you. You think I’m a stinking bum, but that goes for all the rest of them and for rich ladies like you, too. I wanted to do good for humanity. Hah! I wish they’d all boil in oil. Be lots of fun. I wish they’d choke. What does it matter? What does anything matter?”
On the next cot, a white-haired, shriveled little tramp turned in his sleep, moaning; a nickel clattered to the floor out of his rags. Gerald Starnes picked it up and slipped it into his own pocket. He glanced at Dagny. The creases of his face were a malignant smile.
“Want to wake him up and start trouble?” he asked. “If you do, I’ll say that you’re lying.”