Atlas Shrugged [169]
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 great 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.
"They kept asking you questions, too, didn't they?" He spoke intently, leaning forward.