Atlas Shrugged (31 page)

She did not know that his eyes were following her, as she walked away from him.

She moved slowly through the room, looking at no one. She noticed a small group huddled by the unlighted fireplace. The room was not cold, but they sat as if they drew comfort from the thought of a non-existent fire.

“I do not know why, but I am growing to be afraid of the dark. No, not now, only when I am alone. What frightens me is night. Night as such.”

The speaker was an elderly spinster with an air of breeding and hopelessness. The three women and two men of the group were well dressed, the skin of their faces was smoothly well tended, but they had a manner of anxious caution that kept their voices one tone lower than normal and blurred the differences of their ages, giving them all the same gray look of being spent. It was the look one saw in groups of respectable people everywhere. Dagny stopped and listened.

“But, my dear,” one of them asked, “why should it frighten you?”

“I don’t know,” said the spinster. “I am not afraid of prowlers or robberies or anything of the sort. But I stay awake all night. I fall asleep only when I see the sky turning pale. It is very odd. Every evening, when it grows dark, I get the feeling that this time it is final, that daylight will not return.”

“My cousin who lives on the coast of Maine wrote me the same thing,” said one of the women.

“Last night,” said the spinster, “I stayed awake because of the shooting. There were guns going off all night, way out at sea. There were no flashes. There was nothing. Just those detonations, at long intervals, somewhere in the fog over the Atlantic.”

“I read something about it in the paper this morning. Coast Guard target practice.”

“Why, no,” the spinster said indifferently. “Everybody down on the shore knows what it was. It was Ragnar Danneskjöld. It was the Coast Guard trying to catch him.”

“Ragnar Danneskjöld in Delaware Bay?” a woman gasped.

“Oh, yes. They say it is not the first time.”

“Did they catch him?”

“No.”

“Nobody can catch him,” said one of the men.

“The People’s State of Norway has offered a million-dollar reward for his head.”

“That’s an awful lot of money to pay for a pirate’s head.”

“But how are we going to have any order or security or planning in the world, with a pirate running loose all over the seven seas?”

“Do you know what it was that he seized last night?” said the spinster. “The big ship with the relief supplies we were sending to the People’s State of France.”

“How does he dispose of the goods he seizes?”

“Ah, that—nobody knows.”

“I met a sailor once, from a ship he’d attacked, who’d seen him in person. He said that Ragnar Danneskjöld has the purest gold hair and the most frightening face on earth, a face with no sign of any feeling. If there ever was a man born without a heart, he’s it—the sailor said.”

“A nephew of mine saw Ragnar Danneskjöld’s ship one night, off the coast of Scotland. He wrote me that he couldn’t believe his eyes. It was a better ship than any in the navy of the People’s State of England.”

“They say he hides in one of those Norwegian fjords where neither God nor man will ever find him. That’s where the Vikings used to hide in the Middle Ages.”

“There’s a reward on his head offered by the People’s State of Portugal, too. And by the People’s State of Turkey.”

“They say it’s a national scandal in Norway. He comes from one of their best families. The family lost its money generations ago, but the name is of the noblest. The ruins of their castle are still in existence. His father is a bishop. His father has disowned him and excommunicated him. But it had no effect.”

“Did you know that Ragnar Danneskjöld went to school in this country? Sure. The Patrick Henry University.”

“Not really?”

“Oh yes. You can look it up.”

“What bothers me is ... You know, I don’t like it. I don’t like it that he’s now appearing right here, in our own waters. I thought things like that could happen only in the wastelands. Only in Europe. But a big-scale outlaw of that kind operating in Delaware in our day and age!”

“He’s been seen off Nantucket, too. And at Bar Harbor. The newspapers have been asked not to write about it.”

“Why?”

“They don’t want people to know that the navy can’t cope with him.”

“I don’t like it. It feels funny. It’s like something out of the Dark Ages.”

Dagny glanced up. She saw Francisco d‘Anconia standing a few steps away. He was looking at her with a kind of stressed curiosity; his eyes were mocking.

“It’s a strange world we’re living in,” said the spinster, her voice low.

“I read an article,” said one of the women tonelessly. “It said that times of trouble are good for us. It is good that people are growing poorer. To accept privations is a moral virtue.”

“I suppose so,” said another, without conviction.

“We must not worry. I heard a speech that said it is useless to worry or to blame anyone. Nobody can help what he does, that is the way things made him. There is nothing we can do about anything. We must learn to bear it.”

“What’s the use anyway? What is man’s fate? Hasn’t it always been to hope, but never to achieve? The wise man is the one who does not attempt to hope.”

“That is the right attitude to take.”

“I don’t know . . . I don’t know what is right any more . . . How can we ever know?”

“Oh well, who is John Galt?”

Dagny turned brusquely and started away from them. One of the women followed her.

“But I do know it,” said the woman, in the soft, mysterious tone of sharing a secret.

“You know what?”

“I know who is John Galt.”

“Who?” Dagny asked tensely, stopping.

“I know a man who knew John Galt in person. This man is an old friend of a great-aunt of mine. He was there and he saw it happen. Do you know the legend of Atlantis, Miss Taggart?”

“What?”

“Atlantis.”

“Why . . . vaguely.”

“The Isles of the Blessed. That is what the Greeks called it, thousands of years ago. They said Atlantis was a place where hero-spirits lived in a happiness unknown to the rest of the earth. A place which only the spirits of heroes could enter, and they reached it without dying, because they carried the secret of life within them. Atlantis was lost to mankind, even then. But the Greeks knew that it had existed. They tried to find it. Some of them said it was underground, hidden in the heart of the earth. But most of them said it was an island. A radiant island in the Western Ocean. Perhaps what they were thinking of was America. They never found it. For centuries afterward, men said it was only a legend. They did not believe it, but they never stopped looking for it, because they knew that that was what they had to find.”

“Well, what about John Galt?”

“He found it.”

Dagny’s interest was gone. “Who was he?”

“John Galt was a millionaire, a man of inestimable wealth. He was sailing his yacht one night, in mid-Atlantic, fighting the worst storm ever wreaked upon the world, when he found it. He saw it in the depth, where it had sunk to escape the reach of men. He saw the towers of Atlantis shining on the bottom of the ocean. It was a sight of such kind that when one had seen it, one could no longer wish to look at the rest of the earth. John Galt sank his ship and went down with his entire crew. They all chose to do it. My friend was the only one who survived.”

“How interesting.”

“My friend saw it with his own eyes,” said the woman, offended. “It happened many years ago. But John Galt’s family hushed up the story.”

“And what happened to his fortune? I don’t recall ever hearing of a Galt fortune.”

“It went down with him.” She added belligerently, “You don’t have to believe it.”

“Miss Taggart doesn‘t,” said Francisco d’Anconia. “I do.”

They turned. He had followed them and he stood looking at them with the insolence of exaggerated earnestness.

“Have you ever had faith in anything, Senor d‘Anconia?” the woman asked angrily.

“No, madame.”

He chuckled at her brusque departure. Dagny asked coldly, “What’s the joke?”

“The joke’s on that fool woman. She doesn’t know that she was telling you the truth.”

“Do you expect me to believe that?”

“No.”

“Then what do you find so amusing?”

“Oh, a great many things here. Don’t you?”

“No.”

“Well,
that’s
one of the things I find amusing.”

“Francisco, will you leave me alone?”

“But I have. Didn’t you notice that you were first to speak to me tonight?”

“Why do you keep watching me?”

“Curiosity.”

“About what?”

“Your reaction to the things which you don’t find amusing.”

“Why should you care about my reaction to anything?”

“That is my own way of having a good time, which, incidentally, you are not having, are you, Dagny? Besides, you’re the only woman worth watching here.”

She stood defiantly still, because the way he looked at her demanded an angry escape. She stood as she always did, straight and taut, her head lifted impatiently. It was the unfeminine pose of an executive. But her naked shoulder betrayed the fragility of the body under the black dress, and the pose made her most truly a woman. The proud strength became a challenge to someone’s superior strength, and the fragility a reminder that the challenge could be broken. She was not conscious of it. She had met no one able to see it.

He said, looking down at her body, “Dagny, what a magnificent waste!”

She had to turn and escape. She felt herself blushing, for the first time in years: blushing because she knew suddenly that the sentence named what she had felt all evening.

She ran, trying not to think. The music stopped her. It was a sudden blast from the radio. She noticed Mort Liddy, who had turned it on, waving his arms to a group of friends, yelling, “That’s it! That’s it! I want you to hear it!”

The great burst of sound was the opening chords of Halley’s Fourth Concerto. It rose in tortured triumph, speaking its denial of pain, its hymn to a distant vision. Then the notes broke. It was as if a handful of mud and pebbles had been flung at the music, and what followed was the sound of the rolling and the dripping. It was Halley’s Concerto swung into a popular tune. It was Halley’s melody torn apart, its holes stuffed with hiccoughs. The great statement of joy had become the giggling of a barroom. Yet it was still the remnant of Halley’s melody that gave it form; it was the melody that supported it like a spinal cord.

“Pretty good?” Mort Liddy was smiling at his friends, boastfully and nervously. “Pretty good, eh? Best movie score of the year. Got me a prize. Got me a long-term contract. Yeah, this was my score for
Heaven’s in Your Backyard.”

Dagny stood, staring at the room, as if one sense could replace another, as if sight could wipe out sound. She moved her head in a slow circle, trying to find an anchor somewhere. She saw Francisco leaning against a column, his arms crossed; he was looking straight at her; he was laughing.

Don’t shake like this, she thought. Get out of here. This was the approach of an anger she could not control. She thought: Say nothing. Walk steadily. Get out.

She had started walking, cautiously, very slowly. She heard Lillian’s words and stopped. Lillian had said it many times this evening, in answer to the same question, but it was the first time that Dagny heard it.

“This?” Lillian was saying, extending her arm with the metal bracelet for the inspection of two smartly groomed women. “Why, no, it’s not from a hardware store, it’s a very special gift from my husband. Oh, yes, of course it’s hideous. But don’t you see? It’s supposed to be priceless. Of course, I’d exchange it for a common diamond bracelet any time, but somehow nobody will offer me one for it, even though it is so very, very valuable. Why? My dear, it’s the first thing ever made of Rearden Metal.”

Dagny did not see the room. She did not hear the music. She felt the pressure of dead stillness against her eardrums. She did not know the moment that preceded, or the moments that were to follow. She did not know those involved, neither herself, nor Lillian, nor Rearden, nor the meaning of her own action. It was a single instant, blasted out of context. She had heard. She was looking at the bracelet of green-blue metal.

She felt the movement of something being torn off her wrist, and she heard her own voice saying in the great stillness, very calmly, a voice cold as a skeleton, naked of emotion, “If you are not the coward that I think you are, you will exchange it.”

On the palm of her hand, she was extending her diamond bracelet to Lillian.

“You’re not serious, Miss Taggart?” said a woman’s voice.

It was not Lillian’s voice. Lillian’s eyes were looking straight at her. She saw them. Lillian knew that she was serious.

“Give me that bracelet,” said Dagny, lifting her palm higher, the diamond band glittering across it.

“This is horrible!” cried some woman. It was strange that the cry stood out so sharply. Then Dagny realized that there were people standing around them and that they all stood in silence. She was hearing sounds now, even the music; it was Halley’s mangled Concerto, somewhere far away.

She saw Rearden’s face. It looked as if something within him were mangled, like the music; she did not know by what. He was watching them.

Lillian’s mouth moved into an upturned crescent. It resembled a smile. She snapped the metal bracelet open, dropped it on Dagny’s palm and took the diamond band.

“Thank you, Miss Taggart,” she said.

Dagny’s fingers closed about the metal. She felt that; she felt nothing else.

Lillian turned, because Rearden had approached her. He took the diamond bracelet from her hand. He clasped it on her wrist, raised her hand to his lips and kissed it.