Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [339]
The half-hint of half-secret amusement remained on her face while she listened to him talking about their friends, the theater and the weather, carefully building for himself the protection of the unimportant. She sat gracefully not quite straight, as if she were leaning back, enjoying the futility of his performance and the fact that he had to stage it for her benefit. She waited with patient curiosity to discover his purpose.
“I do think that you deserve a pat on the back or a medal or something, Jim,” she said, “for being remarkably cheerful in spite of all the messy trouble you’re having. Didn’t you just close the best branch of your railroad?”
“Oh, it’s only a slight financial setback, nothing more. One has to expect retrenchments at a time like this. Considering the general state of the country, we’re doing quite well. Better than the rest of them.” He added, shrugging, “Besides, it’s a matter of opinion whether the Rio Norte Line was our best branch. It is only my sister who thought so. It was her pet project.”
She caught the tone of pleasure blurring the drawl of his syllables. She smiled and said, “I see.”
Looking up at her from under his lowered forehead, as if stressing that he expected her to understand, Taggart asked, “How is he taking it?”
“Who?” She understood quite well.
“Your husband.”
“Taking what?”
“The closing of that Line.”
She smiled gaily. “Your guess is as good as mine, Jim—and mine is very good indeed.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know how he would take it—just as you know how your sister is taking it. So your cloud has a double silver lining, hasn’t it?”
“What has he been saying in the last few days?”
“He’s been away in Colorado for over a week, so I—” She stopped; she had started answering lightly, but she noticed that Taggart’s question had been too specific while his tone had been too casual, and she realized that he had struck the first note leading toward the purpose of the luncheon; she paused for the briefest instant, then finished, still more lightly, “so I wouldn’t know. But he’s coming back any day .now.”
“Would you say that his attitude is still what one might call recalcitrant?”
“Why, Jim, that would be an understatement!”
“It was to be hoped that events had, perhaps, taught him the wisdom of a mellower approach.”
It amused her to keep him in doubt about her understanding. “Oh yes,” she said innocently, “it would be wonderful if anything could ever make him change.”
“He is making things exceedingly hard for himself.”
“He always has.”
“But events have a way of beating us all into a more ... pliable frame of mind, sooner or later.”
“I’ve heard many characteristics ascribed to him, but .‘pliable’ has never been one of them.”
“Well, things change and people change with them. After all, it is a law of nature that animals must adapt themselves to their background. And I might add that adaptability is the one characteristic most stringently required at present by laws other than those of nature. We’re in for a very difficult time, and I would hate to see you suffer the consequences of his intransigent attitude. I would hate—as your friend—to see you in the kind of danger he’s headed for, unless he learns to co-operate.”
“How sweet of you, Jim,” she said sweetly.
He was doling his sentences out with cautious slowness, balancing himself between word and intonation to hit the right degree of semi-clarity. He wanted her to understand, but he did not want her to understand fully, explicitly, down to the root—since the essence of that modern language, which he had learned to speak expertly, was never to let oneself or others understand anything down to the root.
He had not needed many words to understand Mr. Weatherby. On his last trip to Washington, he had pleaded with Mr. Weatherby that a cut in the rates of the railroads would be a deathblow; the