Atlas Shrugged [397]
"Then you know what they felt, all the men who quit, and what it was that they loved when they gave up."
"Francisco," she asked, not looking at him, her head bent, "why did you ask me whether I could have given it up twelve years ago?"
"Don't you know what night I am thinking of, just as you are?"
"Yes . . ." she whispered.
"That was the night I gave up d'Anconia Copper."
Slowly, with a long effort, she moved her head to glance up at him.
His face had the expression she had seen then, on that next morning, twelve years ago: the look of a smile, though he was not smiling, the quiet look of victory over pain, the look of a man's pride in the price he paid and in that which made it worth paying.
"But you didn't give it up," she said. "You didn't quit. You're still the President of d'Anconia Copper, only it means nothing to you now."
"It means as much to me now as it did that night."
"Then how can you let it go to pieces?"
"Dagny, you're more fortunate than I. Taggart Transcontinental is a delicate piece of precision machinery. It will not last long without you. It cannot be run by slave labor. They will mercifully destroy it for you and you won't have to see it serving the looters. But copper mining is a simpler job. D'Anconia Copper could have lasted for generations of looters and slaves. Crudely, miserably, ineptly-but it could have lasted and helped them to last. I had to destroy it myself."
-You-what?"
"I am destroying d'Anconia Copper, consciously, deliberately, by plan and by my own hand. I have to plan it as carefully and work as hard as if I were producing a fortune-in order not to let them notice it and stop me, in order not to let them seize the mines until it is too late. AH the effort and energy I had hoped to spend on d'Anconia Copper, I'm spending them, only . . . only it's not to make it grow. I shall destroy every last bit of it and every last penny of my fortune and every ounce of copper that could feed the looters. I shall not leave it as I found it-I shall leave it as Sebastian d'Anconia found it-then let them try to exist without him or me!"
"Francisco!" she screamed. "How could you make yourself do it?"
"By the grace of the same love as yours," he answered quietly, "my love for d'Anconia Copper, for the spirit of which it was the shape.
Was-and, some day, will be again."
She sat still, trying to grasp all the implications of what she now grasped only as the numbness of shock. In the silence, the music of the radio symphony went on, and the rhythm of the chords reached her like the slow, solemn pounding of steps, while she struggled to see at once the whole progression of twelve years: the tortured boy who called for help on her breasts-the man who sat on the floor of a drawing room, playing marbles and laughing at the destruction of great industries-the man who cried, "My love, I can't!" while refusing to help her-the man who drank a toast, in the dim booth of a barroom, to the years which Sebastian d'Anconia had had to wait. . . .
"Francisco . . . of all the guesses I tried to make about you . . . I never thought of it . . . I never thought that you were one of those men who had quit . . ."
"I was one of the first of them."
"I thought that they always vanished . . ."
"Well, hadn't I? Wasn't it the worst of what I did to you-that I left you looking at a cheap playboy who was not the Francisco d'Anconia you had known?"
"Yes . . ." she whispered, "only the worst was that I couldn't believe it . . . I never did . . . It was Francisco d'Anconia that I kept seeing every time I saw you. . . ."
"I know. And I know what it did to you. I tried to help you understand, but it was too soon to tell you. Dagny, if I had told you-
that night or the day when you came to damn me for the San Sebastian Mines-that I was not an aimless loafer, that I was out to speed up the destruction of everything we had held sacred together, the destruction of d'Anconia Copper, of Taggart Transcontinental, of Wyatt Oil, of Rearden Steel-would