Atlas Shrugged [54]
She looked at him in the exact moment when he turned to look at her. They stood very close to each other. She saw, in his eyes, that he felt as she did. If joy is the aim and the core of existence, she thought, and if that which has the power to give one joy is always guarded as one's deepest secret, then they had seen each other naked in that moment.
He made a step back and said in a strange tone of dispassionate wonder, "We're a couple of blackguards, aren't we?"
"Why?"
"We haven't any spiritual goals or qualities. All we're after is material things. That's all we care for,"
She looked at him, unable to understand. But he was looking past her, straight ahead, at the crane in the distance. She wished he had not said it. The accusation did not trouble her, she never thought of herself in such terms and she was completely incapable of experiencing a feeling of fundamental guilt. But she felt a vague apprehension which she could not define, the suggestion that there was something of grave consequence in whatever had made him say it, something dangerous to him. He had not said it casually. But there had been no feeling in his voice, neither plea nor shame. He had said it indifferently, as a statement of fact.
Then, as she watched him, the apprehension vanished. He was looking at his mills beyond the window; there was no guilt in his face, no doubt, nothing but the calm of an inviolate self-confidence.
"Dagny" he said, "whatever we are, it's we who move the world and it's we who'll pull it through."
CHAPTER V: THE CLIMAX OF THE D'ANCONIAS
The newspaper was the first thing she noticed. It was clutched tightly in Eddie's hand, as he entered her office. She glanced up at his face: it was tense and bewildered.
"Dagny, are you very busy?"
"Why?"
"I know that you don't like to talk about him. But there's something here I think you ought to see."
She extended her hand silently for the newspaper.
The story on the front page announced that upon taking over the San Sebastian Mines, the government of the People's State of Mexico had discovered that they were worthless-blatantly, totally, hopelessly worthless. There was nothing to justify the five years of work and the millions spent; nothing but empty excavations, laboriously cut. The few traces of copper were not worth the effort of extracting them. No great deposits of metal existed or could be expected to exist there, and there were no indications that could have permitted anyone to be deluded. The government of the People's State of Mexico was holding emergency sessions about their discovery, in an uproar of indignation; they felt that they had been cheated.
Watching her, Eddie knew that Dagny sat looking at the newspaper long after she had finished reading. He knew that he had been right to feel a hint of fear, even though he could not tell what frightened him about that story.
He waited. She raised her head. She did not look at him. Her eyes were fixed, intent in concentration, as if trying to discern something at a great distance.
He said, his voice low, "Francisco is not a fool. Whatever else he may be, no matter what depravity he's sunk to-and I've given up trying to figure out why-he is not a fool. He couldn't have made a mistake of this kind. It is not possible. I don't understand it."
"I'm beginning to."
She sat up, jolted upright by a sudden movement that ran through her body like a shudder. She said: "Phone him at the Wayne-Falkland and tell the bastard that I want to see him."
"Dagny," he said sadly, reproachfully, "it's Frisco d'Anconia."
"It was."
She walked through the early twilight of the city streets to the Wayne-Falkland Hotel. "He says, any time you wish," Eddie had told her. The first lights appeared in a few windows high under the clouds.
The skyscrapers looked like abandoned lighthouses sending feeble, dying signals out into an empty sea where no ships moved any longer.
A few snowflakes came down, past the dark windows of empty stores, to melt in the mud