Atlas Shrugged (123 page)

“Is that true?”

“How do I know? How can anybody know? But by the time they untangle it and decide whatever it is they please to decide—our track will be built.”

“I see.”

“I’ll go over the lists and give you the names of our local men to put in charge—if they’re still there. By the time tonight’s Comet reaches Kirby, Nebraska, the track will be ready. It will add about thirty-six hours to the transcontinental schedule—but there will be a transcontinental schedule. Then have them get for me out of the files the old maps of our road as it was before Nat Taggart’s grandson built the tunnel.”

“The ... what?” He did not raise his voice, but the catch of his breath was the break of emotion he had wanted to avoid.

Her face did not change, but a faint note in her voice acknowledged him, a note of gentleness, not reproof: “The old maps of the days before the tunnel. We’re going back, Eddie. Let’s hope we can. No, we won’t rebuild the tunnel. There’s no way to do it now. But the old grade that crossed the Rockies is still there. It can be reclaimed. Only it will be hard to get the rail for it and the men to do it. Particularly the men.”

He knew, as he had known from the first, that she had seen his tears and that she had not walked past in indifference, even though her clear, toneless voice and unmoving face gave him no sign of feeling. There was some quality in her manner, which he sensed but could not translate. Yet the feeling it gave him, translated, was as if she were saying to him: I know, I understand, I would feel compassion and gratitude, if we were alive and free to feel, but we’re not, are we, Eddie?—we’re on a dead planet, like the moon, where we must move, but dare not stop for a breath of feeling or we’ll discover that there is no air to breathe.

“We have today and tomorrow to get things started,” she said. “I’ll leave for Colorado tomorrow night.”

“If you want to fly, I’ll have to rent a plane for you somewhere. Yours is still in the shops, they can’t get the parts for it.”

“No, I’ll go by rail. I have to see the line. I’ll take tomorrow’s Comet.”

It was two hours later, in a brief pause between long-distance phone calls, that she asked him suddenly the first question which did not pertain to the railroad: “What have they done to Hank Rearden?”

Eddie caught himself in the small evasion of looking away, forced his glance back to meet hers, and answered, “He gave in. He signed their Gift Certificate, at the last moment.”

“Oh.” The sound conveyed no shock or censure, it was merely a vocal punctuation mark, denoting the acceptance of a fact. “Have you heard from Quentin Daniels?”

“No.”

“He sent no letter or message for me?”

“No.”

He guessed the thing she feared and it reminded him of a matter he had not reported. “Dagny, there’s another problem that’s been growing all over the system since you left. Since May first. It’s the frozen trains.”

“The what?”

“We’ve had trains abandoned on the line, on some passing track, in the middle of nowhere, usually at night—with the entire crew gone. They just leave the train and vanish. There’s never any warning given or any special reason, it’s more like an epidemic, it hits the men suddenly and they go. It’s been happening on other railroads, too. Nobody can explain it. But I think that everybody understands. It’s the directive that’s doing it. It’s our men’s form of protest. They try to go on and then they suddenly reach a moment when they can’t take it any longer. What can we do about it?” He shrugged. “Oh well, who is John Galt?”

She nodded thoughtfully; she did not look astonished.

The telephone rang and the voice of her secretary said, “Mr. Wesley Mouch calling from Washington, Miss Taggart.”

Her lips stiffened a little, as at the unexpected touch of an insect. “It must be for my brother,” she said.

“No, Miss Taggart. For you.”

“All right. Put him on.”

“Miss Taggart,” said the voice of Wesley Mouch in the tone of a cocktail-party host, “I was so glad to hear you’ve regained your health that I wanted to welcome you back in person. I know that your health required a long rest and I appreciate the patriotism that made you cut your leave of absence short in this terrible emergency. I wanted to assure you that you can count on our co-operation in any step you now find it necessary to take. Our fullest co-operation, assistance and support. If there are any ... special exceptions you might require, please feel certain that they can be granted.”

She let him speak, even though he had made several small pauses inviting an answer. When his pause became long enough, she said, “I would be much obliged if you would let me speak to Mr. Weatherby.”

“Why, of course, Miss Taggart, any time you wish ... why ... that is ... do you mean,
now?”

“Yes. Right now.”

He understood. But he said, “Yes, Miss Taggart.”

When Mr. Weatherby’s voice came on the wire, it sounded cautious: “Yes, Miss Taggart? Of what service can I be to you?”

“You can tell your boss that if he doesn’t want me to quit again, as he knows I did, he is never to call me or speak to me. Anything your gang has to tell me, let them send
you
to tell it. I’ll speak to you, but not to him. You may tell him that my reason is what he did to Hank Rearden when he was on Rearden’s payroll. If everybody else has forgotten it, I haven’t.”

“It is my duty to assist the nation’s railroads at any time, Miss Taggart.” Mr. Weatherby sounded as if he were trying to avoid the commitment of having heard what he had heard; but a sudden note of interest crept into his voice as he asked slowly, thoughtfully, with guarded shrewdness, “Am I to understand, Miss Taggart, that it is your wish to deal exclusively with
me
in all official matters? May I take this as your policy?”

She gave a brief, harsh chuckle. “Go ahead,” she said. “You may list me as your exclusive property, use me as a special item of pull, and trade me all over Washington. But I don’t know what good that will do you, because I’m not going to play the game, I’m not going to trade favors, I’m simply going to start breaking your laws right now—and you can arrest me when you feel that you can afford to.”

“I believe that you have an old-fashioned idea about law, Miss Taggart. Why speak of rigid, unbreakable laws? Our modern laws are elastic and open to interpretation according to ... circumstances.”

“Then start being elastic right now, because I’m not and neither are railroad catastrophes.”

She hung up, and said to Eddie, in the tone of an estimate passed on physical objects, “They’ll leave us alone for a while.”

She did not seem to notice the changes in her office: the absence of Nat Taggart’s portrait, the new glass coffee table where Mr. Locey had spread, for the benefit of visitors, a display of the loudest humanitarian magazines with titles of articles headlined on their covers.

She heard—with the attentive look of a machine equipped to record, not to react—Eddie’s account of what one month had done to the railroad. She heard his report on what he guessed about the causes of the catastrophe. She faced, with the same look of detachment, a succession of men who went in and out of her office with overhurried steps and hands fumbling in superfluous gestures. He thought that she had become impervious to anything. But suddenly—while pacing the office, dictating to him a list of track-laying materials and where to obtain them illegally—she stopped and looked down at the magazines on the coffee table. Their headlines said: “The New Social Conscience,” “Our Duty to the Underprivileged,” “Need versus Greed.” With a single movement of her arm, the abrupt, explosive movement of sheer physical brutality, such as he had never seen from her before, she swept the magazines off the table and went on, her voice reciting a list of figures without a break, as if there were no connection between her mind and the violence of her body.

Late in the afternoon, finding a moment alone in her office, she telephoned Hank Rearden.

She gave her name to his secretary—and she heard, in the way he said it, the haste with which he had seized the receiver: “Dagny?”

“Hello, Hank. I’m back.”

“Where?”

“In my office.”

She heard the things he did not say, in the moment’s silence on the wire, then he said, “I suppose I’d better start bribing people at once to get the ore to start pouring rail for you.”

“Yes. As much of it as you can. It doesn’t have to be Rearden Metal. It can be—” The break in her voice was almost too brief to notice, but what it held was the thought: Rearden Metal rail for going back to the time before heavy steel?—perhaps back to the time of wooden rails with strips of iron? “It can be steel, any weight, anything you can give me.”

“All right. Dagny, do you know that I’ve surrendered Rearden Metal to them? I’ve signed the Gift Certificate.”

“Yes, I know.”

“I’ve given in.”

“Who am I to blame you? Haven’t I?” He did not answer, and she said, “Hank, I don’t think they care whether there’s a train or a blast furnace left on earth. We do. They’re holding us by our love of it, and we’ll go on paying so long as there’s still one chance left to keep one single wheel alive and moving in token of human intelligence. We’ll go on holding it afloat, like our drowning child, and when the flood swallows it, we’ll go down with the last wheel and the last syllogism. I know what we’re paying, but—price is no object any longer.”

“I know.”

“Don’t be afraid for me, Hank. I’ll be all right by tomorrow morning.”

“I’ll never be afraid for you, darling. I’ll see you tonight.”

CHAPTER IX

THE FACE WITHOUT PAIN OR FEAR OR GUILT

The silence of her apartment and the motionless perfection of objects that had remained just as she had left them a month before, struck her with a sense of relief and desolation together, when she entered her living room. The silence gave her an illusion of privacy and ownership; the sight of the objects reminded her that they were preserving a moment she could not recapture, as she could not undo the events that had happened since.

There was still a remnant of daylight beyond the windows. She had left the office earlier than she intended, unable to summon the effort for any task that could be postponed till morning. This was new to her -and it was new that she should now feel more at home in her apartment than in her office.

She took a shower, and stood for long, blank minutes, letting the water run over her body, but stepped out hastily when she realized that what she wanted to wash off was not the dust of the drive from the country, but the feel of the office.

She dressed, lighted a cigarette and walked into the living room, to stand at the window, looking at the city, as she had stood looking at the countryside at the start of this day.

She had said she would give her life for one more year on the railroad. She was back; but this was not the joy of working; it was only the clear, cold peace of a decision reached—and the stillness of unadmitted pain.

Clouds had wrapped the sky and had descended as fog to wrap the streets below, as if the sky were engulfing the city. She could see the whole of Manhattan Island, a long, triangular shape cutting into an invisible ocean. It looked like the prow of a sinking ship; a few tall buildings still rose above it, like funnels, but the rest was disappearing under gray-blue coils, going down slowly into vapor and space. This was how they had gone—she thought—Atlantis, the city that sank into the ocean, and all the other kingdoms that vanished, leaving the same legend in all the languages of men, and the same longing.

She felt—as she had felt it one spring night, slumped across her desk in the crumbling office of the John Galt Line, by a window facing a dark alley—the sense and vision of her own world, which she would never reach.... You—she thought—whoever you are, whom I have always loved and never found, you whom I expected to see at the end of the rails beyond the horizon, you whose presence I had always felt in the streets of the city and whose world I had wanted to build, it is my love for you that had kept me moving, my love and my hope to reach you and my wish to be worthy of you on the day when I would stand before you face to face. Now I know that I shall never find you-that it is not to be reached or lived—but what is left of my life is still yours, and I will go on in your name, even though it is a name I’ll never learn, I will go on serving you, even though I’m never to win, I will go on, to be worthy of you on the day when I would have met you, even though I won’t.... She had never accepted hopelessness, but she stood at the window and, addressed to the shape of a fogbound city, it was her self-dedication to unrequited love.

The doorbell rang.

She turned with indifferent astonishment to open the door—but she knew that she should have expected him, when she saw that it was Francisco d.‘Anconia. She felt no shock and no rebellion, only the cheerless serenity of her assurance—and she raised her head to face him, with a slow, deliberate movement, as if telling him that she had chosen her stand and that she stood in the open.

His face was grave and calm; the look of happiness was gone, but the amusement of the playboy had not returned. He looked as if all masks were down, he looked direct, tightly disciplined, intent upon a purpose, he looked like a man able to know the earnestness of action, as she had once expected him to look—he had never seemed so attractive as he did in this moment—and she noted, in astonishment, her sudden feeling that he was not a man who had deserted her, but a man whom she had deserted.

“Dagny, are you able to talk about it now?”

“Yes—if you wish. Come in.”

He glanced briefly at her living room, her home which he had never entered, then his eyes came back to her. He was watching her attentively. He seemed to know that the quiet simplicity of her manner was the worst of all signs for his purpose, that it was like a spread of ashes where no flicker of pain could be revived, that even pain would have been a form of fire.