Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [380]
He had pressed the starter and the motor was churning the air with bright cracks of sound, when the second policeman leaned forward. He had been looking at the blond hair under Danneskjöld’s cap.
“Who is that, Mr. Rearden?” he asked.
“My new bodyguard,” said Rearden.
“Oh . . . ! A sensible precaution, Mr. Rearden, in times like these. Good night, sir.”
The motor jerked forward. The red taillights of the car went shrinking down the road. Danneskjöld watched it go, then glanced pointedly at Rearden’s right hand. Rearden realized that he had stood facing the policemen with his hand clutching the gun in his pocket and that he had been prepared to use it.
He opened his fingers and drew his hand out hastily. Danneskjöld smiled. It was a smile of radiant amusement, the silent laughter of a clear, young spirit greeting a moment it was glad to have lived. And although the two did not resemble each other, the smile made Rearden think of Francisco d.‘Anconia.
“You haven’t told a lie,” said Ragnar Danneskjöld. “Your bodyguard—that’s what I am and what I’ll deserve to be, in many more ways than you can know at present. Thanks, Mr. Rearden, and so long—we’ll meet again much sooner than I had hoped.”
He was gone before Rearden could answer. He vanished beyond the stone fence, as abruptly and soundlessly as he had come. When Rearden turned to look through the farm field, there was no trace of him and no sign of movement anywhere in the darkness.
Rearden stood on the edge of an empty road in a spread of loneliness vaster than it had seemed before. Then he saw, lying at his feet, an object wrapped in burlap, with one corner exposed and glistening in the moonlight, the color of the pirate’s hair. He bent, picked it up and walked on.
Kip Chalmers swore as the train lurched and spilled his cocktail over the table top. He slumped forward, his elbow in the puddle, and said:
“God damn these railroads! What’s the matter with their track? You’d think with all the money they’ve got they’d disgorge a little, so we wouldn’t have to bump like farmers on a hay cart!”
His three companions did not take the trouble to answer. It was late, and they remained in the lounge merely because an effort was needed to retire to their compartments. The lights of the lounge looked like feeble portholes in a fog of cigarette smoke dank with the odor of alcohol. It was a private car, which Chalmers had demanded and obtained for his journey; it was attached to the end of the Comet and it swung like the tail of a nervous animal as the Comet coiled through the curves of the mountains.
“I’m going to campaign for the nationalization of the railroads,” said Kip Chalmers, glaring defiantly at a small, gray man who looked at him without interest. “That’s going to be my platform plank. I’ve got to have a platform plank. I don’t like Jim Taggart. He looks like a soft-boiled clam. To hell with the railroads! It’s time we took them .over.”
“Go to bed,” said the man, “if you expect to look like anything human at the big rally tomorrow.”
“Do you think we’ll make it?”
“You’ve got to make it.”
“I know I’ve got to. But I don’t think we’ll get there on time. This goddamn snail of a super-special is hours late.”
“You’ve got to get there, Kip,” said the man ominously, in that stubborn monotone of the unthinking which asserts an end without concern for the means.
“God damn you, don’t you suppose I know it?”
Kip Chalmers had curly blond hair and a shapeless mouth. He came from a semi-wealthy, semi-distinguished family, but he sneered at wealth and distinction in a manner which implied that only a top-rank aristocrat could permit himself such a degree of cynical indifference. He had graduated from a college which specialized in breeding that kind of aristocracy. The college had taught him that the purpose of ideas is to fool those who are stupid enough to think. He had made his way in Washington with the grace of a cat-burglar, climbing from bureau to bureau as from ledge to ledge of a crumbling structure.