Atlas Shrugged

by Ayn Rand

  "How can"--she tried to stop, but the words burst involuntarily, in helplessly indignant protest, whether against him, fate or the outer world, she could not tell--"how can she live through eleven months of thinking that you, at any moment, might be ... ?" She did not finish.

  He was smiling, but she saw the enormous solemnity of that which he and his wife had needed to earn their right to this kind of smile. "She can live through it, Miss Taggart, because we do not hold the belief that this earth is a realm of misery where man is doomed to destruction. We do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and we do not live in chronic dread of disaster. We do not expect disaster until we have specific reason to expect it--and when we encounter it, we are free to fight it. It is not happiness, but suffering that we consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that we regard as the abnormal exception in human life."

  Galt accompanied him to the door, then came back, sat down at the table and in a leisurely manner reached for another cup of coffee.

  She shot to her feet, as if flung by a jet of pressure breaking a safety valve. "Do you think that I'll ever accept his money?"

  He waited until the curving streak of coffee had filled his cup, then glanced up at her and answered, "Yes, I think so."

  "Well, 1 won.'t! I won't let him risk his life for it!"

  "You have no choice about that."

  "I have the choice never to claim it!"

  "Yes, you have."

  "Then it will lie in that bank till doomsday!"

  "No, it won't. If you don't claim it, some part of it--a very small part--will be turned over to me in your name."

  "In my name? Why?"

  "To pay for your room and board."

  She stared at him, her look of anger switching to bewilderment, then dropped slowly back on her chair.

  He smiled. "How long did you think you were going to stay here, Miss Taggart?" He saw her startled look of helplessness. "You haven't thought of it? I have. You're going to stay here for a month. For the one month of our vacation, like the rest of us. I am not asking for your consent--you did not ask for ours when you came here. You broke our rules, so you'll have to take the consequences. Nobody leaves the valley during this month. I could let you go, of course, but I won't. There's no rule demanding that I hold you, but by forcing your way here, you've given me the right to any choice I make--and I'm going to hold you simply because I want you here. If, at the end of a month, you decide that you wish to go back, you will be free to do so. Not until then."

  She sat straight, the planes of her face relaxed, the shape of her mouth softened by the faint, purposeful suggestion of a smile; it was the dangerous smile of an adversary, but her eyes were coldly brilliant and veiled at once, like the eyes of an adversary who fully intends to fight, but hopes to lose.

  "Very well," she said.

  "I shall charge you for your room and board--it is against our rules to provide the unearned sustenance of another human being. Some of us have wives and children, but there is a mutual trade involved in that, and a mutual payment"--he glanced at her--"of a kind I am not entitled to collect. So I shall charge you fifty cents a day and you will pay me when you accept the account that lies in your name at the Mulligan Bank. If you don't accept the account, Mulligan will charge your debt against it and he will give me the money when I ask for it."

  "I shall comply with your terms," she answered; her voice had the shrewd, confident, deliberating slowness of a trader. "But I shall not permit the use of that money for my debts."

  "How else do you propose to comply?"

  "I propose to earn my room and board."

  "By what means?"

  "By working."

  "In what capacity?"

  "In the capacity of your cook and housemaid."

  For the first time, she saw him take the shock of the unexpected, in a manner and with a violence she had not foreseen. It was only an explosion of laughter on his part--but he laughed as if he were hit beyond his defenses, much beyond the immediate meaning of her words; she felt that she had struck his past, tearing loose some memory and meaning of his own which she could not know. He laughed as if he were seeing some distant image, as if he were laughing in its face, as if this were his victory--and hers.

  "If you will hire me," she said, her face severely polite, her tone harshly clear, impersonal and businesslike, "I shall cook your meals, clean your house, do your laundry and perform such other duties as are required of a servant--in exchange for my room, board and such money as I will need for some items of clothing. I may be slightly handicapped by my injuries for the next few days, but that will not last and I will be able to do the job fully."

  "Is that what you want to do?" he asked.

  "That is what I want to do--" she answered, and stopped before she uttered the rest of the answer in her mind: more than anything else in the world.

  He was still smiling, it was a smile of amusement, but it was as if amusement could be transmuted into some shining glory. "All right, Miss Taggart," he said, "I'll hire you."

  She inclined her head in a dryly formal acknowledgment. "Thank you."

  "I will pay you ten dollars a month, in addition to your room and board."

  "Very well."

  "I shall be the first man in this valley to hire a servant." He got up, reached into his pocket and threw a five-dollar gold piece down on the table. "As advance on your wages," he said.

  She was startled to discover, as her hand reached for the gold piece, that she felt the eager, desperate, tremulous hope of a young girl on her first job: the hope that she would be able to deserve it.

  "Yes, sir," she said, her eyes lowered.

  Owen Kellogg arrived on the afternoon of her third day in the valley.

  She did not know which shocked him most: the sight of her standing on the edge of the airfield as he descended from the plane--the sight of her clothes: her delicate, transparent blouse, tailored by the most expensive shop in New York, and the wide, cotton-print skirt she had bought in the valley for sixty cents--her cane, her bandages or the basket of groceries on her arm.

  He descended among a group of men, he saw her, he stopped, then ran to her as if flung forward by some emotion so strong that, whatever its nature, it looked like terror.

  "Miss Taggart . . ." he whispered--and said nothing else, while she laughed, trying to explain how she had come to beat him to his destination.

  He listened, as if it were irrelevant, and then he uttered the thing from which he had to recover, "But we thought you were dead."

  "Who thought it?"

  "All of us ... I mean, everybody in the outside world."

  Then she suddenly stopped smiling, while his voice began to recapture his story and his first sound of joy.

  "Miss Taggart, don't you remember? You told me to phone Winston, Colorado, and to tell them that you'd be there by noon of the next day. That was to be the day before yesterday, May thirty-first. But you did not reach Winston--and by late afternoon, the news was on all the radios that you were lost in a plane crash somewhere in the Rocky Mountains."

  She nodded slowly, grasping the events she had not thought of considering.

  "I heard it aboard the Comet," he said. "At a small station in the middle of New Mexico. The conductor held us there for an hour, while I helped him to check the story on long-distance phones. He was hit by the news just as I was. They all were--the train crew, the station agent, the switchmen. They huddled around me while I called the city rooms of newspapers in Denver and New York. We didn't learn much. Only that you had left the Afton airfield just before dawn on May thirty-first, that you seemed to be following some stranger's plane, that the attendant had seen you go off southeast--and that nobody had seen you since . . . And that searching parties were combing the Rockies for the wreckage of your plane."

  She asked involuntarily, "Did the Comet reach San Francisco?"

  "I don't know. She was crawling north through Arizona, when I gave up. There were too many
delays, too many things going wrong, and a total confusion of orders. I got off and spent the night hitchhiking my way to Colorado, bumming rides on trucks, on buggies, on horse carts, to get there on time--to get to our meeting place, I mean, where we gather for Midas' ferry plane to pick us up and bring us here."

  She started walking slowly up the path toward the car she had left in front of Hammond's Grocery Market. Kellogg followed, and when he spoke again, his voice dropped a little, slowing down with their steps, as if there were something they both wished to delay.

  "I got a job for Jeff Allen," he said; his voice had the peculiarly solemn tone proper for saying: I have carried out your last will. "Your agent at Laurel grabbed him and put him to work the moment we got there. The agent needed every able-bodied--no, able-minded--man he could find."

  They had reached the car, but she did not get in.

  "Miss Taggart, you weren't hurt badly, were you? Did you say you crashed, but it wasn't serious?"

  "No, not serious at all. I'll be able to get along without Mr. Mulligan's car by tomorrow--and in a day or two I won't need this thing, either." She swung her cane and tossed it contemptuously into the car. They stood in silence; she was waiting.

  "The last long-distance call I made from that station in New Mexico," he said slowly, "was to Pennsylvania. I spoke to Hank Rearden. I told him everything I knew. He listened, and then there was a pause, and then he said, 'Thank you for calling me.' " Kellogg's eyes were lowered; he added, "I never want to hear that kind of pause again as long as I live."

  He raised his eyes to hers; there was no reproach in his glance, only the knowledge of that which he had not suspected when he heard her request, but had guessed since.

  "Thank you," she said, and threw the door of the car open. "Can I give you a lift? I have to get back and get dinner ready before my employer comes home."

  It was in the first moment of returning to Galt's house, of standing alone in the silent, sun-filled room, that she faced the full meaning of what she felt. She looked at the window, at the mountains barring the sky in the east. She thought of Hank Rearden as he sat at his desk, now, two thousand miles away, his face tightened into a retaining wall against agony, as it had been tightened under all the blows of all his years--and she felt a desperate wish to fight his battle, to fight for him, for his past, for that tension of his face and the courage that fed it-as she wanted to fight for the Comet that crawled by a last effort across a desert on a crumbling track. She shuddered, closing her eyes, feeling as if she were guilty of double treason, feeling as if she were suspended in space between this valley and the rest of the earth, with no right to either.

  The feeling vanished when she sat facing Galt across the dinner table. He was watching her, openly and with an untroubled look, as if her presence were normal--and as if the sight of her were all he wished to allow into his consciousness.

  She leaned back a little, as if complying with the meaning of his glance, and said dryly, efficiently, in deliberate denial, "I have checked your shirts and found one with two buttons missing, and another with the left elbow worn through. Do you wish me to mend them?"

  "Why, yes--if you can do it."

  "I can do it."

  It did not seem to alter the nature of his glance; it merely seemed to stress its satisfaction, as if this were what he had wished her to say --except that she was not certain whether satisfaction was the name for the thing she saw in his eyes and fully certain that he had not wished her to say anything.

  Beyond the window, at the edge of the table, storm clouds had wiped out the last remnants of light in the eastern sky. She wondered why she felt a sudden reluctance to look out, why she felt as if she wanted to cling to the golden patches of light on the wood of the table, on the buttered crust of the rolls, on the copper coffee pot, on Galt's hair -to cling as to a small island on the edge of a void.

  Then she heard her own voice asking suddenly, involuntarily, and she knew that this was the treason she had wanted to escape, "Do you permit any communication with the outside world?"

  ". No."

  "Not any? Not even a note without return address?"

  "No."

  "Not even a message, if no secret of yours were given away?"

  "Not from here. Not during this month. Not to outsiders at any time."

  She noticed that she was avoiding his eyes, and she forced herself to lift her head and face him. His glance had changed; it was watchful, unmoving, implacably perceptive. He asked, looking at her as if he knew the reason of her query, "Do you wish to ask for a special exception?"

  "No," she answered, holding his glance.

  Next morning, after breakfast, when she sat in her room, carefully placing a patch on the sleeve of Galt's shirt, with her door closed, not to let him see her fumbling effort at an unfamiliar task, she heard the sound of a car stopping in front of the house.

  She heard Galt's steps hurrying across the living room, she heard him jerk the entrance door open and call out with the joyous anger of relief: "It's about time!"

  She rose to her feet, but stopped: she heard his voice, its tone abruptly changed and grave, as if in answer to the shock of some sight confronting him: "What's the matter?"

  "Hello, John," said a clear, quiet voice that sounded steady, but weighted with exhaustion.

  She sat down on her bed, feeling suddenly drained of strength: the voice was Francisco's.

  She heard Galt asking, his tone severe with concern, "What is it?"

  "I'll tell you afterwards."

  "Why are you so late?"

  "I have to leave again in an hour."

  "To leave?"

  "John, I just came to tell you that I won't be able to stay here this year."

  There was a pause, then Galt asked gravely, his voice low, "Is it as bad as that--whatever it is?"

  "Yes. I ... I might be back before the month is over. I don't know." He added, with the sound of a desperate effort, "I don't know whether to hope to be done with it quickly or ... or not."

  "Francisco, could you stand a shock right now?"

  "I? Nothing could shock me now."

  "There's a person, here, in my guest room, whom you have to see. It will be a shock to you, so I think I'd better warn you in advance that this person is still a scab."

  "What? A scab? In your house?"

  "Let me tell you how--"

  "That's something I want to see for myself!"

  She heard Francisco's contemptuous chuckle and the rush of his steps, she saw her door flung open, and she noticed dimly that it was Galt who closed it, leaving them alone.

  She did not know how long Francisco stood looking at her, because the first moment that she grasped fully was when she saw him on his knees, holding onto her, his face pressed to her legs, the moment when she felt as if the shudder that ran through his body and left him still, had run into hers and made her able to move.

  She saw, in astonishment, that her hand was moving gently over his hair, while she was thinking that she had no right to do it and feeling as if a current of serenity were flowing from her hand, enveloping them both, smoothing the past. He did not move, he made no sound, as if the act of holding her said everything he had to say.

  When he raised his head, he looked as she had felt when she had opened her eyes in the valley: he looked as if no pain had ever existed in the world. He was laughing.

  "Dagny, Dagny, Dagny"--his voice sounded, not as if a confession resisted for years were breaking out, but as if he were repeating the long since known, laughing at the pretense that it had ever been unsaid --"of course I love you. Were you afraid when he made me say it? I'll say it as often as you wish--I love you, darling, I love you, I always will--don't be afraid for me, I don't care if I'll never have you again, what does that matter?--you're alive and you're here and you know everything now. And it's so simple, isn't it? Do you see what it was and why I had to desert you?" His arm swept out to point at the valley. "There it is--it's your earth, your kingdom, y
our kind of world--Dagny, I've always loved you and that I deserted you, that was my love."

  He took her hands and pressed them to his lips and held them, not moving, not as a kiss, but as a long moment of rest--as if the effort of speech were a distraction from the fact of her presence, and as if he were torn by too many things to say, by the pressure of all the words stored in the silence of years.

  "The women I chased--you didn't believe that, did you? I've never touched one of them--but I think you knew it, I think you've known it all along. The playboy--it was a part that I had to play in order not to let the looters suspect me while I was destroying d'Anconia Copper in plain sight of the whole world. That's the joker in their system, they're out to fight any man of honor and ambition, but let them see a worthless rotter and they think he's a friend, they think he's safe--safe!--that's their view of life, but are they learning!--are they learning whether evil is safe and incompetence practical! ... Dagny, it was the night when I knew, for the first time, that I loved you--it was then that I knew I had to go. It was when you entered my hotel room, that night, when I saw what you looked like, what you were, what you meant to me--and what awaited you in the future. Had you been less, you might have stopped me for a while. But it was you, you who were the final argument that made me leave you. I asked for your help, that night--against John Galt. But I knew that you were his best weapon against me, though neither you nor he could know it. You were everything that he was seeking, everything he told us to live for or die, if necessary.... I was ready for him, when he called me suddenly to come to New York, that spring. I had not heard from him for some time. He was fighting the same problem I was. He solved it. . . . Do you remember? It was the time when you did not hear from me for three years. Dagny, when I took over my father's business, when I began to deal with the whole industrial system of the world, it was then that I began to see the nature of the evil I had suspected, but thought too monstrous to believe. I saw the tax-collecting vermin that had grown for centuries like mildew on d'.Anconia Copper, draining us by no right that anyone could name--I saw the government regulations passed to cripple me, because I was successful, and to help my competitors, because they were loafing failures--I saw the labor unions who won every claim against me, by reason of my ability to make their livelihood possible--I saw that any man's desire for money he could not earn was regarded as a righteous wish, but if he earned it, it was damned as greed--I saw the politicians who winked at me, telling me not to worry, because I could just work a little harder and outsmart them all. I looked past the profits of the moment, and I saw that the harder I worked, the more I tightened the noose around my throat, I saw that my energy was being poured down a sewer, that the parasites who fed on me were being fed upon in their turn, that they were caught in their own trap--and that there was no reason for it, no answer known to anyone, that the sewer pipes of the world, draining its productive blood, led into some dank fog nobody had dared to pierce, while people merely shrugged and said that life on earth could be nothing but evil. And then I saw that the whole industrial establishment of the world, with all of its magnificent machinery, its thousand-ton furnaces, its transatlantic cables, its mahogany offices, its stock exchanges, its blazing electric signs, its power, its wealth--all of it was run, not by bankers and boards of directors, but by any unshaved humanitarian in any basement beer joint, by any face pudgy with malice, who preached that virtue must be penalized for being virtue, that the purpose of ability is to serve incompetence, that man has no right to exist except for the sake of others.... I knew it. I saw no way to fight it. John found the way. There were just the two of us with him, the night when we came to New York in answer to his call, Ragnar and I. He told us what we had to do and what sort of men we had to reach. He had quit the Twentieth Century. He was living in a garret in a slum neighborhood. He stepped to the window and pointed at the skyscrapers of the city. He said that we had to extinguish the lights of the world, and when we would see the lights of New York go out, we would know that our job was done. He did not ask us to join him at once. He told us to think it over and to weigh everything it would do to our lives. I gave him my answer on the morning of the second day, and Ragnar a few hours later, in the afternoon.... Dagny, that was the morning after our last night together. I had seen, in a manner of vision that I couldn't escape, what it was that I had to fight for. It was for the way you looked that night, for the way you talked about your railroad--for the way you had looked when we tried to see the skyline of New York from the top of a rock over the Hudson--I had to save you, to clear the way for you, to let you find your city--not to let you stumble the years of your life away, struggling on through a poisoned fog, with your eyes still held straight ahead, still looking as they had looked in the sunlight, struggling on to find, at the end of your road, not the towers of a city, but a fat, soggy, mindless cripple performing his enjoyment of life by means of swallowing the gin your life had gone to pay for! You--to know no joy in order that he may know it? You--to serve as fodder for the pleasure of others? You--as the means for the subhuman as the end? Dagny, that was what I saw and that was what I couldn't let them do to you! Not to you, not to any child who had your kind of look when *he faced the future, not to any man who had your spirit and was able to experience a moment of being proudly, guiltlessly, confidently, joyously alive. That was my love, that state of the human spirit, and I left you to fight for it, and I knew that if I were to lose you, it was still you that I would be winning with every year of the battle. But you see it now, don't you? You've seen this valley. It's the place we set out to reach when we were children, you and I. We've reached it. What else can I ask for now? Just to see you here--did John say you're still a scab?--oh well, it's only a matter of time, but you'll be one of us, because you've always been, if you don't see it fully, we'll wait, I don't care--so long as you're alive, so long as I don't have to go on flying over the Rockies, looking for the wreckage of your plane!"