Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [308]
She had listened without moving. At his last sentence, he saw a faint contraction of her cheeks and lips; it was not quite a smile, but it gave him her whole answer: pain, admiration, understanding.
Then he saw her eyes becoming softer, more painfully, dangerously alive—he took her wrist, as if the tight grasp of his fingers and the severity of his glance were to give her the support she needed—and he said sternly, “Don’t thank me—this is not a favor—I am doing it in order to be able to bear my work, or else I’ll break like Ken Danagger.”
She whispered, “All right, Hank, I won’t thank you,” the tone of her voice and the look of her eyes making it a lie by the time it was uttered.
He smiled. “Give me the word I asked.”
She inclined her head. “I give you my word.” He released her wrist. She added, not raising her head, “The only thing I’ll say is that if they sentence you to jail tomorrow, I’ll quit—without waiting for any destroyer to prompt me.”
“You won’t. And I don’t think they’ll sentence me to jail. I think they’ll let me off very lightly. I have a hypothesis about it—I’ll explain it to you afterwards, when I’ve put it to the test.”
“What hypothesis?”
“Who is John Galt?” He smiled, and stood up. “That’s all. We won’t talk any further about my trial, tonight. You don’t happen to have anything to drink in your office, have you?”
“No. But I think my traffic manager has some sort of a bar on one shelf of his filing closet.”
“Do you think you could steal a drink for me, if he doesn’t have it locked?”
“I’ll try.”
He stood looking at the portrait of Nat Taggart on the wall of her office—the portrait of a young man with a lifted head—until she returned, bringing a bottle of brandy and two glasses. He filled the glasses in silence.
“You know, Dagny, Thanksgiving was a holiday established by productive people to celebrate the success of their work.”
The movement of his arm, as he raised his glass, went from the portrait—to her—to himself—to the buildings of the city beyond the window.
For a month in advance, the people who filled the courtroom had been told by the press that they would see the man who was a greedy enemy of society; but they had come to see the man who had invented Rearden Metal.
He stood up, when the judges called upon him to do so. He wore a gray suit, he had pale blue eyes and blond hair; it was not the colors that made his figure seem icily implacable, it was the fact that the suit had an expensive simplicity seldom flaunted these days, that it belonged in the sternly luxurious office of a rich corporation, that his bearing came from a civilized era and clashed with the place around .him.
The crowd knew from the newspapers that he represented the evil of ruthless wealth; and—as they praised the virtue of chastity, then ran to see any movie that displayed a half-naked female on its posters—so they came to see him; evil, at least, did not have the stale hopelessness of a bromide which none believed and none dared to challenge. They looked at him without admiration—admiration was a feeling they had lost the capacity to experience, long ago; they looked with curiosity and with a dim sense of defiance against those who had told them that it was their duty to hate him.
A few years ago, they would have jeered at his air of self-confident wealth. But today, there was a slate-gray sky in the windows of the courtroom, which promised the first snowstorm of a long, hard winter; the last of the country’s oil was vanishing, and the coal mines were not able to keep up with the hysterical scramble for winter supplies. The crowd in the courtroom remembered that this was the case which had cost them the services of Ken Danagger. There were rumors that the output of the Danagger Coal Company