Atlas Shrugged (169 page)

“What plan?”

“I can’t tell you. It’s secret. Top secret. You have no idea how many people would like to know it. There’s no industrialist who wouldn’t give a dozen of his best furnaces for just one hint of warning, which he’s not going to get! Like Hank Rearden, for instance, whom you admire so much.” He chuckled, looking off into the future.

“Jim,” she asked, the sound of fear in her voice telling him what the sound of his chuckle had been like, “why do you hate Hank Rearden?”

“I don’t hate him!” He whirled to her, and his face, incredibly, looked anxious, almost frightened. “I never said I hated him. Don’t worry, he’ll approve of the plan. Everybody will. It’s for everybody’s good.” He sounded as if he were pleading. She felt the dizzying certainty that he was lying, yet that the plea was sincere—as if he had a desperate need to reassure her, but not about the things he said.

She forced herself to smile. “Yes, Jim, of course,” she answered, wondering what instinct in what impossible kind of chaos had made her say it as if it were her part to reassure him.

The look she saw on his face was almost a smile and almost of gratitude. “I had to tell you about it tonight. I had to tell you. I wanted you to know what tremendous issues I deal with. You always talk about my work, but you don’t understand it at all, it’s so much wider than you imagine. You think that running a railroad is a matter of track-laying and fancy metals and getting trains there on time. But it’s not. Any underling can do that. The real heart of a railroad is in Washington. My job is politics. Politics. Decisions made on a national scale, affecting everything, controlling everybody. A few words on paper, a directive—changing the life of every person in every nook, cranny and penthouse of this country!”

“Yes, Jim,” she said, wishing to believe that he was, perhaps, a man of stature in the mysterious realm of Washington.

“You’ll see,” he said, pacing the room. “You think they’re powerful -those giants of industry who’re so clever with motors and furnaces? They’ll be stopped! They’ll be stripped! They’ll be brought down! They’ll be—” He noticed the way she was staring at him. “It’s not for ourselves,” he snapped hastily, “it’s for the people. That’s the difference between business and politics—we have no selfish ends in view, no private motives, we’re not after profit, we don’t spend our lives scrambling for money, we don’t have to! That’s why we’re slandered and misunderstood by all the greedy profit-chasers who can’t conceive of a spiritual motive or a moral ideal or ... We couldn’t help it!” he cried suddenly, whirling to her. “We had to have that plan! With everything falling to pieces and stopping, something had to be done! We had to stop them from stopping! We couldn’t help it!”

His eyes were desperate; she did not know whether he was boasting or begging for forgiveness; she did not know whether this was triumph or terror. “Jim, don’t you feel well? Maybe you’ve worked too hard and you’re worn out and—”

“I’ve never felt better in my life!” he snapped, resuming his pacing. “You bet I’ve worked hard. My work is bigger than any job you can hope to imagine. It’s above anything that grubbing mechanics, like Rearden and my sister, are doing. Whatever they do, I can undo it. Let them build a track—I can come and break it, just like that!” He snapped his fingers. “Just like breaking a spine!”

“You want to break spines?” she whispered, trembling.

“I haven’t said that!” he screamed. “What’s the matter with you? I haven’t said it!”

“I’m sorry, Jim!” she gasped, shocked by her own words and by the terror in his eyes. “It’s just that I don’t understand, but . . . but I know I shouldn’t bother you with questions when you’re so tired”—she was struggling desperately to convince herself—“when you have so many things on your mind . . . such . . . such great things . . . things I can’t even begin to think of ...”

His shoulders sagged, relaxing. He approached her and dropped wearily down on his knees, slipping his arms around her. “You poor little fool,” he said affectionately.

She held onto him, moved by something that felt like tenderness and almost like pity. But he raised his head to glance up at her face, and it seemed to her that the look she saw in his eyes was part-gratification, part-contempt-almost as if, by some unknown kind of sanction, she had absolved him and damned herself.

It was useless—she found in the days that followed—to tell herself that these things were beyond her understanding, that it was her duty to believe in him, that love was faith. Her doubt kept growing—doubt of his incomprehensible work and of his relation to the railroad. She wondered why it kept growing in direct proportion to her self-admonitions that faith was the duty she owed him. Then, one sleepless night, she realized that her effort to fulfill that duty consisted of turning away whenever people discussed his job, of refusing to look at newspaper mentions of Taggart Transcontinental, of slamming her mind shut against any evidence and every contradiction. She stopped, aghast, struck by the question: What is it, then-faith versus truth? And realizing that part of her zeal to believe was her fear to know, she set out to learn the truth, with a cleaner, calmer sense of rightness than the effort at dutiful self-fraud had ever given her.

It did not take her long to learn. The evasiveness of the Taggart executives, when she asked a few casual questions, the stale generalities of their answers, the strain of their manner at the mention of their boss, and their obvious reluctance to discuss him—told her nothing concrete, but gave her a feeling equivalent to knowing the worst. The railroad workers were more specific—the switchmen, the gatemen, the ticket sellers whom she drew into chance conversations in the Taggart Terminal and who did not know her. “Jim Taggart? That whining, sniveling, speech-making deadhead!” “Jimmy the President? Well, I’ll tell you: he’s the hobo on the gravy train.” “The boss? Mr. Taggart? You mean Miss Taggart, don’t you?”

It was Eddie Willers who told her the whole truth. She heard that he had known Jim since childhood, and she asked him to lunch with her. When she faced him at the table, when she saw the earnest, questioning directness of his eyes and the severely literal simplicity of his words, she dropped all attempts at casual prodding, she told him what she wanted to know and why, briefly, impersonally, not appealing for help or for pity, only for truth. He answered her in the same manner. He told her the whole story, quietly, impersonally, pronouncing no verdict, expressing no opinion, never encroaching on her emotions by any sign of concern for them, speaking with the shining austerity and the awesome power of facts. He told her who ran Taggart Transcontinental. He told her the story of the John Galt Line. She listened, and what she felt was not shock, but worse: the lack of shock, as if she had always known it. “Thank you, Mr. Willers,” was all that she said when he finished.

She waited for Jim to come home, that evening, and the thing that eroded any pain or indignation, was a feeling of her own detachment, as if it did not matter to her any longer, as if some action were required of her, but it made no difference what the action would be or the consequences.

It was not anger that she felt when she saw Jim enter the room, but a murky astonishment, almost as if she wondered who he was and why it should now be necessary to speak to him. She told him what she knew, briefly, in a tired, extinguished voice. It seemed to her that he understood it from her first few sentences, as if he had expected this to come sooner or later.

“Why didn’t you tell me the truth?” she asked.

“So that’s your idea of gratitude?” he screamed. “So that’s how you feel after everything I’ve done for you? Everybody told me that crudeness and selfishness was all I could expect for lifting a cheap little alley cat by the scruff of her neck!”

She looked at him as if he were making inarticulate sounds that connected to nothing inside her mind. “Why didn’t you tell me the truth?”

“Is that all the love you felt for me, you sneaky little hypocrite? Is that all I get in return for my faith in you?”

“Why did you lie? Why did you let me think what I thought?”

“You should be ashamed of yourself, you should be ashamed to face me or speak to me!”

“I?” The inarticulate sounds had connected, but she could not believe the sum they made. “What are you trying to do, Jim?” she asked, her voice incredulous and distant.

“Have you thought of my feelings? Have you thought of what this would do to my feelings? You should have considered my feelings first! That’s the first obligation of any wife—and of a woman in your position in particular! There’s nothing lower and uglier than ingratitude!”

For the flash of one instant, she grasped the unthinkable fact of a man who was guilty and knew it and was trying to escape by inducing an emotion of guilt in his victim. But she could not hold the fact inside her brain. She felt a stab of horror, the convulsion of a mind rejecting a sight that would destroy it—a stab like a swift recoil from the edge of insanity. By the time she dropped her head, closing her eyes, she knew only that she felt disgust, a sickening disgust for a nameless reason.

When she raised her head, it seemed to her that she caught a glimpse of him watching her with the uncertain, retreating, calculating look of a man whose trick has not worked. But before she had time to believe it, his face was hidden again under an expression of injury and anger.

She said, as if she were naming her thoughts for the benefit of the rational being who was not present, but whose presence she had to assume, since no other could be addressed, “That night . . . those headlines . . . that glory . . . it was not you at all ... it was Dagny.”

“Shut up, you rotten little bitch!”

She looked at him blankly, without reaction. She looked as if nothing could reach her, because her dying words had been uttered.

He made the sound of a sob. “Cherryl, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it, I take it back, I didn’t mean it ...”

She remained standing, leaning against the wall, as she had stood from the first.

He dropped down on the edge of a couch, in a posture of helpless dejection. “How could I have explained it to you?” he said in the tone of abandoning hope. “It’s all so big and so complex. How could I have told you anything about a transcontinental railroad, unless you knew all the details and ramifications? How could I have explained to you my years of work, my ... Oh, what’s the use? I’ve always been misunderstood and I should have been accustomed to it by now, only I thought that you were different and that I had a chance.”

“Jim, why did you marry me?”

He chuckled sadly. “That’s what everybody kept asking me. I didn’t think
you’d
ever ask it. Why? Because I love you.”

She wondered at how strange it was that this word—which was supposed to be the simplest in the human language, the word understood by all, the universal bond among men—conveyed to her no meaning whatever. She did not know what it was that it named in his mind.

“Nobody’s ever loved me,” he said. “There isn’t any love in the world. People don’t feel. I feel things. Who cares about that? All they care for is time schedules and freight loads and money. I can’t live among those people. I’m very lonely. I’ve always longed to find understanding. Maybe I’m just a hopeless idealist, looking for the impossible. Nobody will ever understand me.”

“Jim,” she said, with an odd little note of severity in her voice, “what I’ve struggled for all this time is to understand you.”

He dropped his hand in a motion of brushing her words aside, not offensively, but sadly. “I thought you could. You’re all I have. But maybe understanding is just not possible between human beings.”

“Why should it be impossible? Why don’t you tell me what it is that you want? Why don’t you help me to understand you?”

He sighed. “That’s it. That’s the trouble—your asking all those why’s. Your constant asking of a why for everything. What I’m talking about can’t be put into words. It can’t be named. It has to be felt. Either you feel it or you don’t. It’s not a thing of the mind, but of the heart. Don’t you ever feel? Just feel, without asking all those questions? Can’t you understand me as a human being, not as if I were a scientific object in a laboratory? The great understanding that transcends our shabby words and helpless minds . . . No, I guess I shouldn’t look for it. But I’ll always seek and hope. You’re my last hope. You’re all I have.”

She stood at the wall, without moving.

“I need you,” he wailed softly. “I’m all alone. You’re not like the others. I believe in you. I trust you. What has all that money and fame and business and struggle given me? You’re all I have . . .”

She stood without moving and the direction of her glance, lowered to look down at him, was the only form of recognition she gave him. The things he said about his suffering were lies, she thought; but the suffering was real; he was a man torn by some continual anguish, which he seemed unable to tell her, but which, perhaps, she could learn to understand. She still owed him this much—she thought, with the grayness of a sense of duty—in payment for the position he had given her, which, perhaps, was all he had to give, she owed him an effort to understand him.

It was strange to feel, in the days that followed, that she had become a stranger to herself, a stranger who had nothing to want or to seek. In place of a love made by the brilliant fire of hero worship, she was left with the gnawing drabness of pity. In place of the men she had struggled to find, men who fought for their goals and refused to suffer—she was left with a man whose suffering was his only claim to value and his only offer in exchange for her life. But it made no difference to her any longer. The one who was she, had looked with eagerness at the turn of every corner ahead; the passive stranger who had taken her place, was like all the overgroomed people around her, the people who said that they were adult because they did not try to think or to desire.