Atlas Shrugged (76 page)

She stood still for a moment. “I’m afraid that’s a long, complicated story,” she answered.

“Have you any way of getting in touch with the person who gave it to you?”

“I suppose so—though I’m not too sure. Why?”

“Would he tell you where he got it?”

“I don’t know. What makes you suspect that he wouldn’t?”

He hesitated, then asked, “Miss Taggart, what do you do when you have to tell someone something which you know to be impossible?”

She chuckled. “The man who gave me the cigarette said that in such a case one must check one’s premises.”

“He did? About the cigarette?”

“Well, no, not exactly. But why? What is it you have to tell me?”

“Miss Taggart, I have inquired all over the world. I have checked every source of information in and about the tobacco industry. I have had that cigarette stub put through a chemical analysis. There is no plant that manufactures that kind of paper. The flavoring elements in that tobacco have never been used in any smoking mixture I could find. That cigarette was machine-made, but it was not made in any factory I know—and I know them all. Miss Taggart, to the best of my knowledge, that cigarette was not made anywhere on earth.”

Rearden stood by, watching absently, while the waiter wheeled the dinner table out of his hotel room. Ken Danagger had left. The room was half-dark; by an unspoken agreement, they had kept the lights low during their dinner, so that Danagger’s face would not be noticed and, perhaps, recognized by the waiters.

They had had to meet furtively, like criminals who could not be seen together. They could not meet in their offices or in their homes, only in the crowded anonymity of a city, in his suite at the Wayne-Falkland Hotel. There could be a fine of $10,000 and ten years of imprisonment for each of them, if it became known that he had agreed to deliver to Danagger four thousand tons of structural shapes of Rearden Metal.

They had not discussed that law, at their dinner together, or their motives or the risk they were taking. They had merely talked business. Speaking clearly and dryly, as he always spoke at any conference, Danagger had explained that half of his original order would be sufficient to brace such tunnels as would cave in, if he delayed the bracing much longer, and to recondition the mines of the Confederated Coal Company, gone bankrupt, which he had purchased three weeks ago—“It’s an excellent property, but in rotten condition; they had a nasty accident there last month, cave-in and gas explosion, forty men killed.” He had added, in the monotone of reciting some impersonal, statistical report, “The newspapers are yelling that coal is now the most crucial commodity in the country. They are also yelling that the coal operators are profiteering on the oil shortage. One gang in Washington is yelling that I am expanding too much and something should be done to stop me, because I am becoming a monopoly. Another gang in Washington is yelling that I am not expanding enough and something should be done to let the government seize my mines, because I am greedy for profits and unwilling to satisfy the public’s need of fuel. At my present rate of profit, this Confederated Coal property will bring back the money I spent on it—in forty-seven years. I have no children. I bought it, because there’s one customer I don’t dare leave without coal -and that’s Taggart Transcontinental. I keep thinking of what would happen if the railroads collapsed.” He had stopped, then added, “I don’t know why I still care about that, but I do. Those people in Washington don’t seem to have a clear picture of what that would be like. I have.” Rearden had said, “I’ll deliver the Metal. When you need the other half of your order, let me know. I’ll deliver that, too.”

At the end of the dinner, Danagger had said in the same precise, impassive tone, the tone of a man who knows the exact meaning of his words, “If any employee of yours or mine discovers this and attempts private blackmail, I will pay it, within reason. But I will not pay, if he has friends in Washington. If any of those come around, then I go to jail.” “Then we go together,” Rearden had said.

Standing alone in his half-darkened room, Rearden noted that the prospect of going to jail left him blankly indifferent. He remembered the time when, aged fourteen, faint with hunger, he would not steal fruit from a sidewalk stand. Now, the possibility of being sent to jail—if this dinner was a felony—meant no more to him than the possibility of being run over by a truck: an ugly physical accident without any moral significance.

He thought that he had been made to hide, as a guilty secret, the only business transaction he had enjoyed in a year’s work—and that he was hiding, as a guilty secret, his nights with Dagny, the only hours that kept him alive. He felt that there was some connection between the two secrets, some essential connection which he had to discover. He could not grasp it, he could not find the words to name it, but he felt that the day when he would find them, he would answer every question of his life.

He stood against the wall, his head thrown back, his eyes closed, and thought of Dagny, and then he felt that no questions could matter to him any longer. He thought that he would see her tonight, almost hating it, because tomorrow morning seemed so close and then he would have to leave her—he wondered whether he could remain in town tomorrow, or whether he should leave now, without seeing her, so that he could wait, so that he could always have it ahead of him: the moment of closing his hands over her shoulders and looking down at her face. You’re going insane, he thought—but he knew that if she were beside him through every hour of his days, it would still be the same, he would never have enough of it, he would have to invent some senseless form of torture for himself in order to bear it—he knew he would see her tonight, and the thought of leaving without it made the pleasure greater, a moment’s torture to underscore his certainty of the hours ahead. He would leave the light on in her living room, he thought, and hold her across the bed, and see nothing but the curve of the strip of light running from her waist to her ankle, a single line drawing the whole shape of her long, slim body in the darkness, then he would pull her head into the light, to see her face, to see it falling back, unresisting, her hair over his arm, her eyes closed, the face drawn as in a look of pain, her mouth open to him.

He stood at the wall, waiting, to let all the events of the day drop away from him, to feel free, to know that the next span of time was his.

When the door of his room flew open without warning, he did not quite hear or believe it, at first. He saw the silhouette of a woman, then of a bellboy who put down a suitcase and vanished. The voice he heard was Lillian’s: “Why, Henry! All alone and in the dark?”

She pressed a light switch by the door. She stood there, fastidiously groomed, wearing a pale beige traveling suit that looked as if she had traveled under glass; she was smiling and pulling her gloves off with the air of having reached home.

“Are you in for the evening, dear?” she asked. “Or were you going out?”

He did not know how long a time passed before he answered, “What are you doing here?”

“Why, don’t you remember that Jim Taggart invited us to his wedding? It’s tonight.”

“I didn’t intend to go to his wedding.”

“Oh, but I did!”

“Why didn’t you tell me this morning, before I left?”

“To surprise you, darling.” She laughed gaily. “It’s practically impossible to drag you to any social function, but I thought you might do it like this, on the spur of the moment, just to go out and have a good time, as married couples are supposed to. I thought you wouldn’t mind it—you’ve been staying overnight in New York so often!”

He saw the casual glance thrown at him from under the brim of her fashionably tilted hat. He said nothing.

“Of course, I was running a risk,” she said. “You might have been taking somebody out to dinner.” He said nothing. “Or were you, perhaps, intending to return home tonight?”

“No.”

“Did you have an engagement for this evening?”

“No.”

“Fine.” She pointed at her suitcase. “I brought my evening clothes. Will you bet me a corsage of orchids that I can get dressed faster than you can?”

He thought that Dagny would be at her brother’s wedding tonight; the evening did not matter to him any longer. “I’ll take you out, if you wish,” he said, “but not to that wedding.”

“Oh, but that’s where I want to go! It’s the most preposterous event of the season, and everybody’s been looking forward to it for weeks, all my friends. I wouldn’t miss it for the world. There isn’t any better show in town—nor better publicized. It’s a perfectly ridiculous marriage, but just about what you’d expect from Jim Taggart.”

She was moving casually through the room, glancing around, as if getting acquainted with an unfamiliar place. “I haven’t been in New York for years,” she said. “Not with you, that is. Not on any formal occasion.”

He noticed the pause in the aimless wandering of her eyes, a glance that stopped briefly on a filled ashtray and moved on. He felt a stab of revulsion.

She saw it in his face and laughed gaily. “Oh but, darling, I’m not relieved! I’m disappointed. I did hope I’d find a few cigarette butts smeared with lipstick.”

He gave her credit for the admission of the spying, even if under cover of a joke. But something in the stressed frankness of her manner made him wonder whether she was joking; for the flash of an instant, he felt that she had told him the truth. He dismissed the impression, because he could not conceive of it as possible.

“I’m afraid that you’ll never be human,” she said. “So I’m sure that I have no rival. And if I have—which I doubt, darling—I don’t think I’ll worry about it, because if it’s a person who’s always available on call, without appointment—well, everybody knows what sort of a person that is.”

He thought that he would have to be careful; he had been about to slap her face. “Lillian, I think you know,” he said, “that humor of this kind is more than I can stand.”

“Oh, you’re so serious!” she laughed. “I keep forgetting it. You’re so serious about everything—particularly yourself.”

Then she whirled to him suddenly, her smile gone. She had the strange, pleading look which he had seen in her face at times, a look that seemed made of sincerity and courage:

“You prefer to be serious, Henry? All right. How long do you wish me to exist somewhere in the basement of your life? How lonely do you want me to become? I’ve asked nothing of you. I’ve let you live your life as you pleased. Can’t you give me one evening? Oh, I know you hate parties and you’ll be bored. But it means a great deal to me. Call it empty, social vanity—I want to appear, for once, with my husband. I suppose you never think of it in such terms, but you’re an important man, you’re envied, hated, respected and feared, you’re a man whom any woman would be proud to show off as her husband. You may say it’s a low form of feminine ostentation, but that’s the form of any woman’s happiness. You don’t live by such standards, but I do. Can’t you give me this much, at the price of a few hours of boredom? Can’t you be strong enough to fulfill your obligation and to perform a husband’s duty? Can’t you go there, not for your own sake, but mine, not because you want to go, but only because
I
want it?”

Dagny—he thought desperately—Dagny, who had never said a word about his life at home, who had never made a claim, uttered a reproach or asked a question—he could not appear before her with his wife, he could not let her see him as the husband being proudly shown off—he wished he could die now, in this moment, before he committed this action—because he knew that he would commit it.

Because he had accepted his secret as guilt and promised himself to take its consequences—because he had granted that the right was with Lillian, and he was able to bear any form of damnation, but not able to deny the right when it was claimed of him—because he knew that the reason for his refusal to go, was the reason that gave him no right to refuse—because he heard the pleading cry in his mind: “Oh God, Lillian, anything but that party!” and he did not allow himself to beg for mercy-

-he said evenly, his voice lifeless and firm:

“All right, Lillian. I’ll go.”