Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [360]
“All right.”
“Promise?”
“Of course.”
“When I decide what’s to become of me, I’ll let you know.”
“I’ll wait.”
“That’s all, Eddie.”
He knew that every word was measured and that nothing else could be said between them at this moment. He inclined his head, letting it say the rest, then walked out of the office.
She saw the chief engineer’s report still lying open on her desk, and thought that she had to order him at once to resume the work on the Winston section, then remembered that it was not her problem any longer. She felt no pain. She knew that the pain would come later and that it would be a tearing agony of pain, and that the numbness of this moment was a rest granted to her, not after, but before, to make her ready to bear it. But it did not matter. If that is required of me, then I’ll bear it—she thought.
She sat down at her desk and telephoned Rearden at his mills in Pennsylvania.
“Hello, dearest,” he said. He said it simply and clearly, as if he wanted to say it because it was real and right, and he needed to hold on to the concepts of reality and rightness.
“Hank, I’ve quit.”
“I see.” He sounded as if he had expected it.
“Nobody came to get me, no destroyer, perhaps there never was any destroyer, after all. I don’t know what I’ll do next, but I have to get away, so that I won’t have to see any of them for a while. Then I’ll decide. I know that you can’t go with me right now.”
“No. I have two weeks in which they expect me to sign their Gift Certificate. I want to be right here when the two weeks expire.”
“Do you need me—for the two weeks?”
“No. It’s worse for you than for me. You have no way to fight them. I have. I think I’m glad they did it. It’s clear and final. Don’t worry about me. Rest. Rest from all of it, first.”
“Yes.”
“Where are you going?”
“To the country. To a cabin I own in the Berkshires. If you want to see me, Eddie Willers will tell you the way to get there. I’ll be back in two weeks.”
“Will you do me a favor?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t come back until I come for you.”
“But I want to be here, when it happens.”
“Leave that up to me.”
.“Whatever they do to you, I want it done to me also.”
“Leave it up to me. Dearest, don’t you understand? I think that what I want most right now is what you want: not to see any of them. But I have to stay here for a while. So it will help me if I know that you, at least, are out of their reach. I want to keep one clean point in my mind, to lean against. It will be only a short while—and then I’ll come for you. Do you understand?”
“Yes, my darling. So long.”
It was weightlessly easy to walk out of her office and down the stretching halls of Taggart Transcontinental. She walked, looking ahead, her steps advancing with the unbroken, unhurried rhythm of finality. Her face was held level and it had a look of astonishment, of acceptance, of repose.
She walked across the concourse of the Terminal. She saw the statue of Nathaniel Taggart. But she felt no pain from it and no reproach, only the rising fullness of her love, only the feeling that she was going to join him, not in death, but in that which had been his life.
The first man to quit at Rearden Steel was Tom Colby, rolling mill foreman, head of the Rearden Steel Workers Union. For ten years, he had heard himself denounced throughout the country, because his was a “company union” and because he had never engaged in a violent conflict with the management. This was true: no conflict had ever been necessary; Rearden paid a higher wage scale than any union scale in the country, for which he demanded—and got—the best labor force to be found anywhere.
When Tom Colby told him that he was quitting, Rearden nodded, without comment or questions.
“I won’t work under these conditions, myself,” Colby added quietly, “and I won’t help. to keep the men working. They trust me. I won’t be the Judas goat leading them to the stockyards.”
“What are you going to do for a living?” asked Rearden.
“I’ve saved enough