• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 5018 0

light still burning on her desk. She’d been there all night. I just stood and looked at her. I wouldn’t have awakened her if the whole goddamn railroad collapsed.... When she was asleep? Why, she looked like a young girl. She looked as if she felt certain that she would awaken in a world where no one would harm her, as if she had nothing to hide or to fear. That’s what was terrible—that guiltless purity of her face, with her body twisted by exhaustion, still lying there as she had collapsed. She looked—say, why should you ask me what she looks like when she’s asleep? ... Yes, you’re right, why do I talk about it? I shouldn’t. I don’t know what made me think of it.... Don’t pay any attention to me. I’ll be all right tomorrow. I guess it’s just that I’m sort of shell-shocked by that courtroom. I keep thinking: if men like Rearden and Danagger are to be sent to jail, then what kind of world are we working in and what for? Isn’t there any justice left on earth? I was foolish enough to say that to a reporter when we were leaving the courtroom—and he just laughed and said, ‘Who is John Galt?’ ... Tell me, what’s happening to us? Isn’t there a single man of justice left? Isn’t there anyone to defend them? Oh, do you hear me? Isn’t there anyone to defend them?”

“Mr. Danagger will be free in a moment, Miss Taggart. He has a visitor in his office. Will you excuse it, please?” said the secretary.

Through the two hours of her flight to Pittsburgh, Dagny had been tensely unable to justify her anxiety or to dismiss it; there was no reason to count minutes, yet she had felt a blind desire to hurry. The anxiety vanished when she entered the anteroom of Ken Danagger’s office: she had reached him, nothing had happened to prevent it, she felt safety, confidence and an enormous sense of relief.

The words of the secretary demolished it. You’re becoming a coward—thought Dagny, feeling a causeless jolt of dread at the words, out of all proportion to their meaning.

“I am so sorry, Miss Taggart.” She heard the secretary’s respectful, solicitous voice and realized that she had stood there without answering. “Mr. Danagger will be with you in just a moment. Won’t you sit down?” The voice conveyed an anxious concern over the impropriety of keeping her waiting.

Dagny smiled. “Oh, that’s quite all right.”

She sat down in a wooden armchair, facing the secretary’s railing. She reached for a cigarette and stopped, wondering whether she would have time to finish it, hoping that she would not, then lighted it brusquely.

It was an old-fashioned frame building, this headquarters of the great Danagger Coal Company. Somewhere in the hills beyond the window were the pits where Ken Danagger had once worked as a miner. He had never moved his office away from the coal fields.

She could see the mine entrances cut into the hillsides, small frames of metal girders, that led to an immense underground kingdom. They seemed precariously modest, lost in the violent orange and red of the hills.... Under a harsh blue sky, in the sunlight of late October, the sea of leaves looked like a sea of fire . . . like waves rolling to swallow the fragile posts of the mine doorways. She shuddered and looked away: she thought of the flaming leaves spread over the hills of Wisconsin, on the road to Starnesville.

She noticed that there was only a stub left of the cigarette between her fingers. She lighted another.

When she glanced at the clock on the wall of the anteroom, she caught the secretary glancing at it at the same time. Her appointment was for three o.‘clock; the white dial said: 3:12.

“Please forgive it, Miss Taggart,” said the secretary. “Mr. Danagger will be through, any moment now. Mr. Danagger is extremely punctual about his appointments. Please believe me that this is unprecedented.”

“I know it.” She knew that Ken Danagger was as rigidly exact about his schedule as a railroad timetable and that he had been known to cancel an interview if a caller permitted himself to arrive five minutes late.

The secretary was an elderly spinster with a forbidding manner: