Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [411]
She let him speak, even though he had made several small pauses inviting an answer. When his pause became long enough, she said, “I would be much obliged if you would let me speak to Mr. Weatherby.”
“Why, of course, Miss Taggart, any time you wish ... why ... that is ... do you mean, now?”
“Yes. Right now.”
He understood. But he said, “Yes, Miss Taggart.”
When Mr. Weatherby’s voice came on the wire, it sounded cautious: “Yes, Miss Taggart? Of what service can I be to you?”
“You can tell your boss that if he doesn’t want me to quit again, as he knows I did, he is never to call me or speak to me. Anything your gang has to tell me, let them send you to tell it. I’ll speak to you, but not to him. You may tell him that my reason is what he did to Hank Rearden when he was on Rearden’s payroll. If everybody else has forgotten it, I haven’t.”
“It is my duty to assist the nation’s railroads at any time, Miss Taggart.” Mr. Weatherby sounded as if he were trying to avoid the commitment of having heard what he had heard; but a sudden note of interest crept into his voice as he asked slowly, thoughtfully, with guarded shrewdness, “Am I to understand, Miss Taggart, that it is your wish to deal exclusively with me in all official matters? May I take this as your policy?”
She gave a brief, harsh chuckle. “Go ahead,” she said. “You may list me as your exclusive property, use me as a special item of pull, and trade me all over Washington. But I don’t know what good that will do you, because I’m not going to play the game, I’m not going to trade favors, I’m simply going to start breaking your laws right now—and you can arrest me when you feel that you can afford to.”
“I believe that you have an old-fashioned idea about law, Miss Taggart. Why speak of rigid, unbreakable laws? Our modern laws are elastic and open to interpretation according to ... circumstances.”
“Then start being elastic right now, because I’m not and neither are railroad catastrophes.”
She hung up, and said to Eddie, in the tone of an estimate passed on physical objects, “They’ll leave us alone for a while.”
She did not seem to notice the changes in her office: the absence of Nat Taggart’s portrait, the new glass coffee table where Mr. Locey had spread, for the benefit of visitors, a display of the loudest humanitarian magazines with titles of articles headlined on their covers.
She heard—with the attentive look of a machine equipped to record, not to react—Eddie’s account of what one month had done to the railroad. She heard his report on what he guessed about the causes of the catastrophe. She faced, with the same look of detachment, a succession of men who went in and out of her office with overhurried steps and hands fumbling in superfluous gestures. He thought that she had become impervious to anything. But suddenly—while pacing the office, dictating to him a list of track-laying materials and where to obtain them illegally—she stopped and looked down at the magazines on the coffee table. Their headlines said: “The New Social Conscience,” “Our Duty to the Underprivileged,” “Need versus Greed.” With a single movement of her arm, the abrupt, explosive movement of sheer physical brutality, such as he had never seen from her before, she swept the magazines off the table and went on, her voice reciting a list of figures without a break, as if there were no connection between her mind and the violence of her body.
Late in the afternoon, finding a moment alone in her office, she telephoned Hank Rearden.
She gave her name to his secretary—and she heard, in the way he said it, the haste with which he had seized the receiver: “Dagny?”
“Hello, Hank. I’m back.”
“Where?”
“In my office.”
She heard the things he did not say, in the moment’s silence on the wire, then he said, “I suppose I’d better start bribing people at once to get the ore to start pouring rail for