Atlas Shrugged [490]
"I got a job for Jeff Alien," 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,