Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [427]
There was no astonishment in the tramp’s face, no protest, no anger, no hope; he looked as if he had long since abandoned any judgment of any human action. He moved obediently to rise, his hand groping upward along the rivets of the car’s wall. She saw him glance at her and glance away, as if she were merely another inanimate fixture of the train. He did not seem to be aware of her person, any more than of his own, he was indifferently ready to comply with an order which, in his condition, meant certain death.
She glanced at the conductor. She saw nothing in his face except the blind malevolence of pain, of some long-repressed anger that broke out upon the first object available, almost without consciousness of the object’s identity. The two men were not human beings to each other any longer.
The tramp’s suit was a mass of careful patches on a cloth so stiff and shiny with wear that one expected it to crack like glass if bent; but she noticed the collar of his shirt: it was bone-white from repeated laundering and it still preserved a semblance of shape. He had pulled himself up to his feet, he was looking indifferently at the black hole open upon miles of uninhabited wilderness where no one would see the body or hear the voice of a mangled man, but the only gesture of concern he made was to tighten his grip on a small, dirty bundle, as if to make sure he would not lose it in leaping off the train.
It was the laundered collar and this gesture for the last of his possessions—the gesture of a sense of property—that made her feel an emotion like a sudden, burning twist within her. “Wait,” she said.
The two men turned to her.
“Let him be my guest,” she said to the conductor, and held her door open for the tramp, ordering, “Come in.”
The tramp followed her, obeying as blankly as he had been about to obey the conductor.
He stood in the middle of her car, holding his bundle, looking around him with the same observant, unreacting glance.
“Sit down,” she said.
He obeyed—and looked at her, as if waiting for further orders. There was a kind of dignity in his manner, the honesty of the open admission that he had no claim to make, no plea to offer, no questions to ask, that he now had to accept whatever was done to him and was ready to accept it.
He seemed to be in his early fifties; the structure of his bones and the looseness of his suit suggested that he had once been muscular. The lifeless indifference of his eyes did not fully hide that they had been intelligent; the wrinkles cutting his face with the record of some incredible bitterness, had not fully erased the fact that the face had once possessed the kindliness peculiar to honesty.
“When did you eat last?” she asked.
“Yesterday,” he said, and added, “I think.”
She rang for the porter and ordered dinner for two, to be brought to her car from the diner.
The tramp had watched her silently, but when the porter departed, he offered the only payment it was in his power to offer: “I don’t want to get you in trouble, ma.‘am,” he said.
She smiled. “What trouble?”
“You’re traveling with one of those railroad tycoons, aren’t you?”
“No, alone.”
“Then you’re the wife of one of them?”
.“No.”
“Oh.” She saw his effort at a look of something like respect, as if to make up for having forced an improper confession, and she laughed.
“No, not that, either. I guess I’m one of the tycoons myself. My name is Dagny Taggart and I work for this railroad.”
“Oh ... I think I’ve heard of you, ma.‘am—in the old days.” It was hard to tell what “the old days” meant to him, whether it was a month