Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [401]
“Do you really think that?” he asked.
She whispered, “No ...”
“Dagny, we can never lose the things we live for. We may have to change their form at times, if we’ve made an error, but the purpose remains the same and the forms are ours to make.”
“That is what I’ve been telling myself for a month. But there’s no way left open toward any purpose whatever.”
He did not answer. He sat down on a boulder by the door of the cabin, watching her as if he did not want to miss a single shadow of reaction on her face. “What do you think now of the men who quit and vanished?” he asked.
She shrugged, with a faint smile of helpless sadness, and sat down on the ground beside him. “You know,” she said, “I used to think that there was some destroyer who came after them and made them quit. But I guess there wasn’t. There have been times, this past month, when I’ve almost wished he would come for me, too. But nobody came.”
“No?”
“No. I used to think that he gave them some inconceivable reason to make them betray everything they loved. But that wasn’t necessary. I know how they felt. I can’t blame them any longer. What I don’t know is how they learned to exist afterward—if any of them still exist.”
“Do you feel that you’ve betrayed Taggart Transcontinental?”
“No. I ... I feel that I would have betrayed it by remaining at work.”
“You would have.”
“If I had agreed to serve the looters, it’s ... it’s Nat Taggart that I would have delivered to them. I couldn’t. I couldn’t let his achievement, and mine, end up with the looters as our final goal.”
“No, you couldn’t. Do you call this indifference? Do you think that you love the railroad less than you did a month ago?”
“I think that I would give my life for just one more year on the railroad ... But I can’t go back to it.”
“Then you know what they felt, all the men who quit, and what it was that they loved when they gave up.”
“Francisco,” she asked, not looking at him, her head bent, “why did you ask me whether I could have given it up twelve years ago?”
“Don’t you know what night I am thinking of, just as you are?”
“Yes ...” she whispered.
“That was the night I gave up d.‘Anconia Copper.”
Slowly, with a long effort, she moved her head to glance up at him. His face had the expression she had seen then, on that next morning, twelve years ago: the look of a smile, though he was not smiling, the quiet look of victory over pain, the look of a man’s pride in the price he paid and in that which made it worth paying.
“But you didn’t give it up,” she said. “You didn’t quit. You’re still the President of d.‘Anconia Copper, only it means nothing to you now.”
“It means as much to me now as it did that night.”
“Then how can you let it go to pieces?”
“Dagny, you’re more fortunate than I. Taggart Transcontinental is a delicate piece of precision machinery. It will not last long without you. It cannot be run by slave labor. They will mercifully destroy it for you and you won’t have to see it serving the looters. But copper-mining is a simpler job. D.‘Anconia Copper could have lasted for generations of looters and slaves. Crudely, miserably, ineptly—but it could have lasted and helped them to last. I had to destroy it myself.”
“You—what?”
“I am destroying d‘Anconia Copper, consciously, deliberately, by plan and by my own hand. I have to plan it as carefully and work as hard as if I were producing a fortune—in order not to let them notice it and stop me, in order not to let them seize the mines until it is too late. All the effort and energy I had hoped to spend on d’.Anconia Copper, I’m spending them, only ... only it’s not to make it grow. I shall destroy every last bit of it and every last penny of my fortune and every ounce of copper that could feed the looters. I shall not leave it as I found it—I shall leave it as Sebastián d.‘Anconia found it—then let them try to exist without him or