Atlas Shrugged [423]
It was the laundered collar and this gesture for the last of his possessions-the gesture of a sense of property-that made her feel an emotion like a sudden, burning twist within her. "Wait," she said.
The two men turned to her.
"Let him be my guest," she said to the conductor, and held her door open for the tramp, ordering, "Come in."
The tramp followed her, obeying as blankly as he had been about to obey the conductor.
He stood in the middle of her car, holding his bundle, looking around him with the same observant, unreacting glance.
"Sit down," she said.
He obeyed-and looked at her, as if waiting for further orders.
There was a kind of dignity in his manner, the honesty of the open admission that he had no claim to make, no plea to offer, no questions to ask, that he now had to accept whatever was done to him and was ready to accept it.
He seemed to be in his early fifties; the structure of his bones and the looseness of his suit suggested that he had once been muscular.
The lifeless indifference of his eyes did not fully hide that they had been intelligent; the wrinkles cutting his face with the record of some incredible bitterness, had not fully erased the fact that the face had once possessed the kindliness peculiar to honesty.
"When did you eat last?" she asked.
"Yesterday," he said, and added, "I think."
She rang for the porter and ordered dinner for two, to be brought to her car from the diner.
The tramp had watched her silently, but when the porter departed, he offered the only payment it was in his power to offer: "I don't want to get you in trouble, ma'am," he said.
She smiled. "What trouble?"
"You're traveling with one of those railroad tycoons, aren't you?"
"No, alone."
"Then you're the wife of one of them?"
"No."
"Oh." She saw his effort at a look of something like respect, as if to make up for having forced an improper confession, and she laughed.
"No, not that, either. I guess I'm one of the tycoons myself. My name is Dagny Taggart and I work for this railroad."
"Oh . . . I think I've heard of you, ma'am-in the old days." It was hard to tell what "the old days" meant to him, whether it was a month or a year or whatever period of time had passed since he had given up. He was looking at her with a sort of interest in the past tense, as if he were thinking that there had been a time when he would have considered her a personage worth seeing. "You were the lady who ran a railroad," he said.
"Yes," she said. "I was."
He showed no sign of astonishment at the fact that she had chosen to help him. He looked as if so much brutality had confronted him that he had given up the attempt to understand, to trust or to expect anything.
"When did you get aboard the train?" she asked.
"Back at the division point, ma'am. Your door wasn't locked." He added, "I figured maybe nobody would notice me till morning on account of it being a private car."
"Where are you going?"
"I don't know." Then, almost as if he sensed that this could sound too much like an appeal for pity, he added, "I guess I just wanted to keep moving till I saw some place that looked like there might be a chance to find work there." This was his attempt to assume the responsibility of a purpose, rather than to throw the burden of his aimlessness upon her mercy-an attempt of the same order as his shirt collar.
"What kind of work are you looking for?"
"People don't look for kinds of work any more, ma'am," he answered impassively. "They just look for work."
"What sort of place did you hope to find?"
"Oh . . . well . . . where there's factories, I guess."
"Aren't you going in the wrong direction for that? The factories are in the East."
"No." He said it with the firmness of knowledge. "There are too many people in the East.