Atlas Shrugged [37]
The statue was of a young man with a tall, gaunt body and an angular face. He held his head as if he faced a challenge and found joy in his capacity to meet it. All that Dagny wanted of life was contained in the desire to hold her head as he did.
Tonight, she looked at the statue when she walked across the concourse. It was a moment's rest; it was as if a burden she could not name were lightened and as if a faint current of air were touching her forehead.
In a corner of the concourse, by the main entrance, there was a small newsstand. The owner, a quiet, courteous old man with an air of breeding, had stood behind his counter for twenty years. He had owned a cigarette factory once, but it had gone bankrupt, and he had resigned himself to the lonely obscurity of his little stand in the midst of an eternal whirlpool of strangers. He had no family or friends left alive.
He had a hobby which was his only pleasure: he gathered cigarettes from all over the world for his private collection; he knew every brand made or that had ever been made.
Dagny liked to stop at his newsstand on her way out. He seemed to be part of the Taggart Terminal, like an old watchdog too feeble to protect it, but reassuring by the loyalty of his presence. He liked to see her coming, because it amused him to think that he alone knew the importance of the young woman in a sports coat and a slanting hat, who came hurrying anonymously through the crowd.
She stopped tonight, as usual, to buy a package of cigarettes. "How is the collection?" she asked him. "Any new specimens?"
He smiled sadly, shaking his head. "No, Miss Taggart. There aren't any new brands made anywhere in the world. Even the old ones are going, one after another. There's only five or six kinds left selling now.
There used to be dozens. People aren't making anything new any more."
"They will. That's only temporary."
He glanced at her and did not answer. Then he said, "I like cigarettes, Miss Taggart. I like to think of fire held in a man's hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come from such hours. When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind-and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression."
"Do they ever think?" she asked involuntarily, and stopped; the question was her one personal torture and she did not want to discuss it.
The old man looked as if he had noticed the sudden stop and understood it; but he did not start discussing it; he said, instead, "I don't like the thing that's happening to people, Miss Taggart."
"What?"
"I don't know. But I've watched them here for twenty years and I've seen the change. They used to rush through here, and it was wonderful to watch, it was the hurry of men who knew where they were going and were eager to get there. Now they're hurrying because they are afraid.
It's not a purpose that drives them, it's fear. They're not going anywhere, they're escaping. And I don't think they know what it is that they want to escape. They don't look at one another. They jerk when brushed against. They smile too much, but it's an ugly kind of smiling: it's not joy, it's pleading. I don't know what it is that's happening to the world." He shrugged. "Oh well, who is John Galt?"
"He's just a meaningless phrase!"
She was startled by the sharpness of her own voice, and she added in apology, "I don't like that empty piece of slang. What does it mean?
Where did it come from?"
"Nobody knows," he answered slowly.
"Why do people keep saying it? Nobody seems able to explain just what it stands for, yet they all use it as if they knew the meaning."
"Why does it disturb you?" he asked.
"I don't like what they seem to mean when they say it."
"I don't, either, Miss Taggart."
Eddie Willers ate his dinners in the employees'