Atlas Shrugged (101 page)

“Hi, Slug,” he said softly.

She answered, groping for some great distance that had once been hers, “Hi, Frisco.”

“Have they finally murdered John Galt?”

She struggled to place the moment into some orderly sequence of time. The question belonged to the present, but the solemn face came from those days on the hill by the Hudson when he would have understood all that the question meant to her.

“How did you know that they’d do it tonight?” she asked.

“It’s been obvious for months that that would be the next step at their next meeting.”

“Why did you come here?”

“To see how you’d take it.”

“Want to laugh about it?”

“No, Dagny, I don’t want to laugh about it.”

She saw no hint of amusement in his face; she answered trustingly, “I don’t know how I’m taking it.”

“I do.”

“I was expecting it, I knew they’d have to do it, so now it’s only a matter of getting through”—
tonight
, she wanted to say, but said—“all the work and details.”

He took her arm. “Let’s go some place where we can have a drink together.”

“Francisco, why don’t you laugh at me? You’ve always laughed about that Line.”

“I will—tomorrow, when I see you going on with all the work and details. Not tonight.”

“Why not?”

“Come on. You’re in no condition to talk about it.”

“I—” She wanted to protest, but said, “No, I guess I’m not.”

He led her out to the street, and she found herself walking silently in time with the steady rhythm of his steps, the grasp of his fingers on her arm unstressed and firm. He signaled a passing taxicab and held the door open for her. She obeyed him without questions; she felt relief, like a swimmer who stops struggling. The spectacle of a man acting with assurance, was a life belt thrown to her at a moment when she had forgotten the hope of its existence. The relief was not in the surrender of responsibility, but in the sight of a man able to assume it.

“Dagny,” he said, looking at the city as it moved past their taxi window, “think of the first man who thought of making a steel girder. He knew what he saw, what he thought and what he wanted. He did not say, ‘It seems to me,’ and he did not take orders from those who say, ‘In my opinion.’ ”

She chuckled, wondering at his accuracy: he had guessed the nature of the sickening sense that held her, the sense of a swamp which she had to escape.

“Look around you,” he said. “A city is the frozen shape of human courage—the courage of those men who thought for the first time of every bolt, rivet and power generator that went to make it. The courage to say, not ‘It seems to me,’ but
.‘It is’
—and to stake one’s life on one’s judgment. You’re not alone. Those men exist. They have always existed. There was a time when human beings crouched in caves, at the mercy of any pestilence and any storm. Could men such as those on your Board of Directors have brought them out of the cave and up to this?” He pointed at the city.

“God, no!”

“Then
there’s
your proof that another kind of men do exist.”

“Yes,” she said avidly. “Yes.”

“Think of them and forget your Board of Directors.”

“Francisco, where are they now—the other kind of men?”

“Now they’re not wanted.”

“I want them. Oh God, how I want them!”

“When you do, you’ll find them.”

He did not question her about the John Galt Line and she did not speak of it, until they sat at a table in a dimly lighted booth and she saw the stem of a glass between her fingers. She had barely noticed how they had come here. It was a quiet, costly place that looked like a secret retreat; she saw a small, lustrous table under her hand, the leather of a circular seat behind her shoulders, and a niche of dark blue mirror that cut them off from the sight of whatever enjoyment or pain others had come here to hide. Francisco was leaning against the table, watching her, and she felt as if she were leaning against the steady attentiveness of his eyes.

They did not speak of the Line, but she said suddenly, looking down at the liquid in her glass:

“I’m thinking of the night when Nat Taggart was told that he had to abandon the bridge he was building. The bridge across the Mississippi. He had been desperately short of money—because people were afraid of the bridge, they called it an impractical venture. That morning, he was told that the river steamboat concerns had filed suit against him, demanding that his bridge be destroyed as a threat to the public welfare. There were three spans of the bridge built, advancing across the river. That same day, a local mob attacked the structure and set fire to the wooden scaffolding. His workers deserted him, some because they were scared, some because they were bribed by the steamboat people, and most of them because he had had no money to pay them for weeks. Throughout that day, he kept receiving word that men who had subscribed to buy the stock of the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad were cancelling their subscriptions, one after another. Toward evening, a committee, representing two banks that were his last hope of support, came to see him. It was right there, on the construction site by the river, in the old railway coach where he lived, with the door open to the view of the blackened ruin, with the wooden remnants still smoking over the twisted steel. He had negotiated a loan from those banks, but the contract had not been signed. The committee told him that he would have to give up his bridge, because he was certain to lose the suit, and the bridge would be ordered torn down by the time he completed it. If he was willing to give it up, they said, and to ferry his passengers across the river on barges, as other railroads were doing, the contract would stand and he would get the money to continue his line west on the other shore; if not, then the loan was off. What was his answer?—they asked. He did not say a word, he picked up the contract, tore it across, handed it to them and walked out. He walked to the bridge, along the spans, down to the last girder. He knelt, he picked up the tools his men had left and he started to clear the charred wreckage away from the steel structure. His chief engineer saw him there, axe in hand, alone over the wide river, with the sun setting behind him in that west where his line was to go. He worked there all night. By morning, he had thought out a plan of what he would do to find the right men, the men of independent judgment—to find them, to convince them, to raise the money, to continue the bridge.”

She spoke in a low, flat voice, looking down at the spot of light that shimmered in the liquid as her fingers turned the stem of her glass once in a while. She showed no emotion, but her voice had the intense monotone of a prayer:

“Francisco ... if he could live through that night, what right have I to complain? What does it matter, how I feel just now? He built that bridge. I have to hold it for him. I can’t let it go the way of the bridge of the Atlantic Southern. I feel almost as if he’d know it, if I let that happen, he’d know it that night when he was alone over the river ... no, that’s nonsense, but here’s what I feel: any man who knows what Nat Taggart felt that night, any man living now and capable of knowing it—it’s him that I would betray if I let it happen ... and I can’t.”

“Dagny, if Nat Taggart were living now, what would he do?”

She answered involuntarily, with a swift, bitter chuckle, “He wouldn’t last a minute!”—then corrected herself: “No, he would. He would find a way to fight them.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

She noticed some tense, cautious quality in the attentive way he watched her as he leaned forward and asked, “Dagny, the men of your Board of Directors are no match for Nat Taggart, are they? There’s no form of contest in which they could beat him, there’s nothing he’d have to fear from them, there’s no mind, no will, no power in the bunch of them to equal one-thousandth of his.”

“No, of course not.”

“Then why is it that throughout men’s history the Nat Taggarts, who make the world, have always won—and always lost it to the men of the Board?”

“I ... don’t know.”

“How could men who’re afraid to hold an unqualified opinion about the weather, fight Nat Taggart? How could they seize his achievement, if he chose to defend it? Dagny, he fought with every weapon he possessed, except the most important one. They could not have won, if we -he and the rest of us—had not given the world away to them.”

“Yes. You gave it away to them. Ellis Wyatt did. Ken Danagger did. I won’t.”

He smiled. “Who built the John Galt Line for them?”

He saw only the faintest contraction of her mouth, but he knew that the question was like a blow across an open wound. Yet she answered quietly, “I did.”

“For this kind of end?”

“For the men who did not hold out, would not fight and gave up.”

“Don’t you see that no other end was possible?”

“No.”

“How much injustice are you willing to take?”

“As much as I’m able to fight.”

“What will you do now? Tomorrow?”

She said calmly, looking straight at him with the faintly proud look of stressing her calm, “Start to tear it up.”

“What?”

“The John Gait Line. Start to tear it up as good as with my own hands—with my own mind, by my own instructions. Get it ready to be closed, then tear it up and use its pieces to reinforce the transcontinental track. There’s a lot of work to do. It will keep me busy.” The calm cracked a little, in the faintest change of her voice: “You know, I’m looking forward to it. I’m glad that I’ll have to do it myself. That’s why Nat Taggart worked all that night—just to keep going. It’s not so bad as long as there’s something one can do. And I’ll know, at least, that I’m saving the main line.”

“Dagny,” he asked very quietly—and she wondered what made her feel that he looked as if his personal fate hung on her answer, “what if it were the main line that you had to dismember?”

She answered irresistibly, “Then I’d let the last engine run over me!” -but added, “No. That’s just self-pity. I wouldn’t.”

He said gently, “I know you wouldn’t. But you’d wish you could.”

“Yes.”

He smiled, not looking at her; it was a mocking smile, but it was a smile of pain and the mockery was directed at himself. She wondered what made her certain of it; but she knew his face so well that she would always know what he felt, even though she could not guess his reasons any longer. She knew his face as well, she thought, as she knew every line of his body, as she could still see it, as she was suddenly aware of it under his clothes, a few feet away, in the crowding intimacy of the booth. He turned to look at her and some sudden change in his eyes made her certain that he knew what she was thinking. He looked away and picked up his glass.

“Well—” he said, “to Nat Taggart.”

“And to Sebastián d.‘Anconia?” she asked—then regretted it, because it had sounded like mockery, which she had not intended.

But she saw a look of odd, bright clarity in his eyes and he answered firmly, with the faintly proud smile of stressing his firmness, “Yes—and to Sebastián d.‘Anconia.”

Her hand trembled a little and she spilled a few drops on the square of paper lace that lay on the dark, shining plastic of the table. She watched him empty his glass in a single gesture; the brusque, brief movement of his hand made it look like the gesture of some solemn pledge.

She thought suddenly that this was the first time in twelve years that he had come to her of his own choice.

He had acted as if he were confidently in control, as if his confidence were a transfusion to let her recapture hers, he had given her no time to wonder that they should be here together. Now she felt, unaccountably, that the reins he had held were gone. It was only the silence of a few blank moments and the motionless outline of his forehead, cheekbone and mouth, as he sat with his face turned away from her—but she felt as if it were he who was now struggling for something he had to recapture.

She wondered what had been his purpose tonight—and noticed that he had, perhaps, accomplished it: he had carried her over the worst moment, he had given her an invaluable defense against despair—the knowledge that a living intelligence had heard her and understood. But why had he wanted to do it? Why had he cared about her hour of despair—after the years of agony he had given her? Why had it mattered to him how she would take the death of the John Galt Line? She noticed that this was the question she had not asked him in the lobby of the Taggart Building.

This was the bond between them, she thought: that she would never be astonished if he came when she needed him most, and that he would always know when to come. This was the danger: that she would trust him, even while knowing that it could be nothing but some new kind of trap, even while remembering that he would always betray those who trusted him.

He sat, leaning forward with his arms crossed on the table, looking straight ahead. He said suddenly, not turning to her:

“I am thinking of the fifteen years that Sebastián d‘Anconia had to wait for the woman he loved. He did not know whether he would ever find her again, whether she would survive ... whether she would wait for him. But he knew that she could not live through his battle and that he could not call her to him until it was won. So he waited, holding his love in the place of the hope which he had no right to hold. But when he carried her across the threshold of his house, as the first Señora d’.Anconia of a new world, he knew that the battle was won, that they were free, that nothing threatened her and nothing would ever hurt her again.”

In the days of their passionate happiness, he had never given her a hint that he would come to think of her as Senora d.‘Anconia. For one moment, she wondered whether she had known what she had meant to him. But the moment ended in an invisible shudder: she would not believe that the past twelve years could allow the things she was hearing to be possible. This was the new trap, she thought.