Atlas Shrugged [539]
"Will you still be in New York tonight?"
"Why, yes. I'm . . . I'm back for good."
"Are you?"
"Why do you ask that?"
"I don't know. I guess I'm too used to what it's like when . . . when I can't find you."
"I'm back."
"Yes. I'll see you in a few hours." His voice broke off, as if the sentence were too enormous to believe. "In a few hours," he repeated firmly.
"I'll be here."
"Dagny-"
"Yes?"
He chuckled softly. "No, nothing. Just wanted to hear your voice awhile longer. Forgive me. I mean, not now. I mean, I don't want to say anything now."
"Hank, I-"
"When I see you, my darling. So long."
She stood looking at the silent receiver. For the first time since her return, she felt pain, a violent pain, but it made her alive, because it was worth feeling.
She telephoned her secretary at Taggart Transcontinental, to say briefly that she would be in the office in half an hour.
The statue of Nathaniel Taggart was real-when she stood facing it in the concourse of the Terminal. It seemed to her that they were alone in a vast, echoing temple, with fog coils of formless ghosts weaving and vanishing around them. She stood still, looking up at the statue, as for a brief moment of dedication. I'm back-were the only words she had to offer.
"Dagny Taggart" was still the inscription on the frosted glass panel of the door to her office. The look on the faces of her staff, as she entered the anteroom, was the look of drowning persons at the sight of a lifeline. She saw Eddie Willers standing at his desk in his glass enclosure, with some man before him. Eddie made a move in her direction, but stopped; he looked imprisoned. She let her glance greet every face in turn, smiling at them gently as at doomed children, then walked toward Eddie's desk.
Eddie was watching her approach as if he were seeing nothing else in the world, but his rigid posture seemed designed to pretend that he was listening to the man before him.
"Motive power?" the man was saying in a voice that had a brusque, staccato snap and a slurred, nasal drawl, together. "There's no problem about motive power. You just take-"
"Hello," said Eddie softly, with a muted smile, as to a distant vision.
The man turned to glance at her. He had a yellow complexion, curly hair, a hard face made of soft muscles, and the revolting handsomeness belonging to the esthetic standards of barroom corners; his blurred brown eyes had the empty flatness of glass.
"Miss Taggart," said Eddie, in a resonant tone of severity, the tone of slapping the man into the manners of a drawing room he had never entered, "may I present Mr. Meigs?"
"How d' do," said the man without interest, then turned to Eddie and proceeded, as if she were not present: "You just take the Comet off the schedule for tomorrow and Tuesday, and shoot the engines to Arizona for the grapefruit special, with the rolling stock from the Scranton coal run I mentioned. Send the orders out at once."
"You'll do nothing of the kind!" she gasped, too incredulous to be angry.
Eddie did not answer.
Meigs glanced at her with what would have been astonishment if his eyes were capable of registering a reaction. "Send the orders," he said to Eddie, with no emphasis, and walked out.
Eddie was jotting notations on a piece of paper.
"Are you crazy?" she asked.
He raised his eyes to her, as though exhausted by hours of beating.
"We'll have to, Dagny" he said, his voice dead.
"What is that?" she asked, pointing at the outer door that had closed on Mr. Meigs.
"The Director of Unification."
"What?"
"The Washington representative, in charge of the Railroad Unification Plan."
"What's that?"
"It's . . . Oh, wait, Dagny, are you all right? Were you hurt? Was it a plane crash?"
She had never imagined what the face of Eddie Willers would look like in the process of aging, but she was seeing it now-aging at thirty-five and within the span of one month. It was not a matter of texture or wrinkles, it was the same face with the same muscles, but saturated by the withering look of resignation to a pain accepted as hopeless.