Atlas Shrugged (53 page)

She was looking at him silently, respectfully, her joyous eagerness toned down, her eyes subdued. He felt better.

He picked up his drink, took a gulp, and chuckled abruptly at a sudden recollection.

“It was funny, though,” he said, his tone easier, livelier, the tone of a confidence to a pal. “You should have seen Orren Boyle yesterday, when the first flash came through on the radio from Wyatt Junction! He turned green—but I mean,
green,
the color of a fish that’s been lying around too long! Do you know what he did last night, by way of taking the bad news? Hired himself a suite at the Valhalla Hotel—and you know what
that
is—and the last I heard, he was still there today, drinking himself under the table and the beds, with a few choice friends of his and half the female population of upper Amsterdam Avenue!”

“Who is Mr. Boyle?” she asked, stupefied.

“Oh, a fat slob that’s inclined to overreach himself. A smart guy who gets too smart at times. You should have seen his face yesterday! I got a kick out of that. That—and Dr. Floyd Ferris. That smoothy didn’t like it a bit, oh not a bit!—the elegant Dr. Ferris of the State Science Institute, the servant of the people, with the patent-leather vocabulary—but he carried it off pretty well, I must say, only you could see him squirming in every paragraph—I mean, that interview he gave out this morning, where he said, ‘The country gave Rearden that Metal, now we expect him to give the country something in return.’ That was pretty nifty, considering who’s been riding on the gravy train and ... well, considering. That was better than Bertram Scudder—Mr. Scudder couldn’t think of anything but ‘No comment,’ when his fellow gentlemen of the press asked him to voice his sentiments. ‘No comment’—from Bertram Scudder who’s never been known to shut his trap from the day he was born, about anything you ask him or don’t ask, Abyssinian poetry or the state of the ladies’ rest rooms in the textile industry! And Dr. Pritchett, the old fool, is going around saying that he knows for certain that Rearden didn’t invent that Metal—because he was told, by an unnamed reliable source, that Rearden stole the formula from a penniless inventor whom he murdered!”

He was chuckling happily. She was listening as to a lecture on higher mathematics, grasping nothing, not even the style of the language, a style which made the mystery greater, because she was certain that it did not mean—coming from him—what it would have meant anywhere else.

He refilled his glass and drained it, but his gaiety vanished abruptly. He slumped into an armchair, facing her, looking up at her from under his bald forehead, his eyes blurred.

“She’s coming back tomorrow,” he said, with a sound like a chuckle devoid of amusement.

“Who?”

“My sister. My dear sister. Oh, she’ll think she’s great, won’t she?”

“You dislike your sister, Mr. Taggart?” He made the same sound; its meaning was so eloquent that she needed no other answer. “Why?” she asked.

“Because she thinks she’s so good. What right has she to think it? What right has anybody to think he’s good? Nobody’s any good.”

“You don’t mean it, Mr. Taggart.”

“I mean, we’re only human beings—and what’s a human being? A weak, ugly, sinful creature, born that way, rotten in his bones—so humility is the one virtue he ought to practice. He ought to spend his life on his knees, begging to be forgiven for his dirty existence. When a man thinks he’s
good-that’s
when he’s rotten. Pride is the worst of all sins, no matter what he’s done.”

“But if a man knows that what he’s done is good?”

“Then he ought to apologize for it.”

“To whom?”

“To those who haven’t done it.”

“I ... I don’t understand.”

“Of course you don’t. It takes years and years of study in the higher reaches of the intellect. Have you ever heard of
The Metaphysical Contradictions of the Universe,
by Dr. Simon Pritchett?” She shook her head, frightened. “How do you know what’s good, anyway? Who knows what’s good? Who can ever know? There are no absolutes—as Dr. Pritchett has proved irrefutably. Nothing is absolute. Everything is a matter of opinion. How do you know that that bridge hasn’t collapsed? You only
think
it hasn’t. How do you know that there’s any bridge at all? You think that a system of philosophy—such as Dr. Pritchett‘s—is just something academic, remote, impractical? But it isn’t. Oh, boy, how it isn’t!”

“But, Mr. Taggart, the Line you built—”

“Oh, what’s that Line, anyway? It’s only a material achievement. Is that of any importance? Is there any greatness in anything material? Only a low animal can gape at that bridge—when there are so many higher things in life. But do the higher things ever get recognition? Oh no! Look at people. All that hue and cry and front pages about some trick arrangement of some scraps of matter. Do they care about any nobler issue? Do they ever give front pages to a phenomenon of the spirit? Do they notice or appreciate a person of finer sensibility? And you wonder whether it’s true that a great man is doomed to unhappiness in this depraved world!” He leaned forward, staring at her intently. “I’ll tell you ... I’ll tell you something ... unhappiness is the hallmark of virtue. If a man is unhappy, really, truly unhappy, it means that he is a superior sort of person.”

He saw the puzzled, anxious look of her face. “But, Mr. Taggart, you got everything you wanted. Now you have the best railroad in the country, the newspapers call you the greatest business executive of the age, they say the stock of your company made a fortune for you overnight, you got everything you could ask for—aren’t you glad of it?”

In the brief space of his answer, she felt frightened, sensing a sudden fear within him. He answered, “No.”

She didn’t know why her voice dropped to a whisper. “You’d rather the bridge had collapsed?”

“I haven’t said that!” he snapped sharply. Then he shrugged and waved his hand in a gesture of contempt. “You don’t understand.”

“I’m sorry ... Oh, I know that I have such an awful lot to learn!”

“I am talking about a hunger for something much beyond that bridge. A hunger that nothing material will ever satisfy.”

“What, Mr. Taggart? What is it you want?”

“Oh, there you go! The moment you ask, ‘What is it?’ you’re back in the crude, material world where everything’s got to be tagged and measured. I’m speaking of things that can’t be named in materialistic words ... the higher realms of the spirit, which man can never reach.... What’s any human achievement, anyway? The earth is only an atom whirling in the universe—of what importance is that bridge to the solar system?”

A
sudden, happy look of understanding cleared her eyes. “It’s great of you, Mr. Taggart, to think that your own achievement isn’t good enough for you. I guess no matter how far you’ve gone, you want to go still farther. You’re ambitious. That’s what I admire most: ambition. I mean, doing things, not stopping and giving up, but doing. I understand, Mr. Taggart ... even if I don’t understand all the big thoughts.”

“You’ll learn.”

“Oh, I’ll work very hard to learn!”

Her glance of admiration had not changed. He walked across the room, moving in that glance as in a gentle spotlight. He went to refill his glass. A mirror hung in the niche behind the portable bar. He caught a glimpse of his own figure: the tall body distorted by a sloppy, sagging posture, as if in deliberate negation of human grace, the thinning hair, the soft, sullen mouth. It struck him suddenly that she did not see him at all: what she saw was the heroic figure of a builder, with proudly straight shoulders and wind-blown hair. He chuckled aloud, feeling that this was a good joke on her, feeling dimly a satisfaction that resembled a sense of victory: the superiority of having put something over on her.

Sipping his drink, he glanced at the door of his bedroom and thought of the usual ending for an adventure of this kind. He thought that it would be easy: the girl was too awed to resist. He saw the reddish-bronze sparkle of her hair—as she sat, head bent, under a light—and a wedge of smooth, glowing skin on her shoulder. He looked away. Why bother? -he thought.

The hint of desire that he felt, was no more than a sense of physical discomfort. The sharpest impulse in his mind, nagging him to action, was not the thought of the girl, but of all the men who would not pass up an opportunity of this kind. He admitted to himself that she was a much better person than Betty Pope, perhaps the best person ever offered to him. The admission left him indifferent. He felt no more than he had felt for Betty Pope. He felt nothing. The prospect of experiencing pleasure was not worth the effort; he had no desire to experience pleasure.

“It’s getting late,” he said. “Where do you live? Let me give you another drink and then I’ll take you home.”

When he said good-bye to her at the door of a miserable rooming house in a slum neighborhood, she hesitated, fighting not to ask a question which she desperately wished to ask him.

“Will I ...” she began, and stopped.

“What?”

“No, nothing, nothing!”

He knew that the question was: “Will I see you again?” It gave him pleasure not to answer, even though he knew that she would.

She glanced up at him once more, as if it were perhaps for the last time, then said earnestly, her voice low, “Mr. Taggart, I’m very grateful to you, because you ... I mean, any other man would have tried to ... I mean, that’s all he’d want, but you’re so much better than that, oh, so much better!”

He leaned closer to her with a faint, interested smile. “Would you have?” he asked.

She drew back from him, in sudden terror at her own words. “Oh, I didn’t mean it that way!” she gasped. “Oh God, I wasn’t hinting or ... or ...” She blushed furiously, whirled around and ran, vanishing up the long, steep stairs of the rooming house.

He stood on the sidewalk, feeling an odd, heavy, foggy sense of satisfaction : feeling as if he had committed an act of virtue—and as if he had taken his revenge upon every person who had stood cheering along the three-hundred-mile track of the John Galt Line.

When their train reached Philadelphia, Rearden left her without a word, as if the nights of their return journey deserved no acknowledgment in the daylight reality of crowded station platforms and moving engines, the reality he respected. She went on to New York, alone. But late that evening, the doorbell of her apartment rang and Dagny knew that she had expected it.

He said nothing when he entered, he looked at her, making his silent presence more intimate a greeting than words. There was the faint suggestion of a contemptuous smile in his face, at once admitting and mocking his knowledge of her hours of impatience and his own. He stood in the middle of her living room, looking slowly around him; this was her apartment, the one place in the city that had been the focus of two years of his torment, as the place he could not think about and did, the place he could not enter—and was now entering with the casual, unannounced right of an owner. He sat down in an armchair, stretching his legs forward—and she stood before him, almost as if she needed his permission to sit down and it gave her pleasure to wait.

“Shall I tell you that you did a magnificent job, building that Line?” he asked. She glanced at him in astonishment; he had never paid her open compliments of that kind; the admiration in his voice was genuine, but the hint of mockery remained in his face, and she felt as if he were speaking to some purpose which she could not guess. “I’ve spent all day answering questions about you—and about the Line, the Metal and the future. That, and counting the orders for the Metal. They’re coming in at the rate of thousands of tons an hour. When was it, nine months ago?—I couldn’t get a single answer anywhere. Today, I had to cut off my phone, not to listen to all the people who wanted to speak to me personally about their urgent need of Rearden Metal. What did you do today?”

“I don’t know. Tried to listen to Eddie’s reports—tried to get away from people—tried to find the rolling stock to put more trains on the John Galt Line, because the schedule I’d planned won’t be enough for the business that’s piled up in just three days.”

“A gieat many people wanted to see you today, didn’t they?”

“Why, yes.”

“They’d have given anything just for a word with you, wouldn’t they?”

“I ... I suppose so.”

“The reporters kept asking me what you were like. A young boy from a local sheet kept saying that you were a great woman. He said he’d be afraid to speak to you, if he ever had the chance. He’s right. That future that they’re all talking and trembling about—it will be as you made it, because you had the courage none of them could conceive of. All the roads to wealth that they’re scrambling for now, it’s your strength that broke them open. The strength to stand against everyone. The strength to recognize no will but your own.”

She caught the sinking gasp of her breath: she knew his purpose. She stood straight, her arms at her sides, her face austere, as if in unflinching endurance; she stood under the praise as under a lashing of insults.