Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [469]
“Hello, Miss Taggart. I told you we’d soon meet again.”
Her head dropped, as if in assent and in greeting, but her hand bore down heavily upon her cane, for a moment, while she stood reliving their last encounter: the tortured hour of waiting, then the gently distant face at the desk and the tinkling of a glass-paneled door closing upon a stranger.
It was so brief a moment that two of the men before her could take it only as a greeting—but it was at Gait that she looked when she raised her head, and she saw him looking at her as if he knew what she felt—she saw him seeing in her face the realization that it was he who had walked out of Danagger’s office, that day. His face gave her nothing in answer: it had that look of respectful severity with which a man stands before the fact that the truth is the truth.
“I didn’t expect it,” she said softly, to Danagger. “I never expected to see you again.”
Danagger was watching her as if she were a promising child he had once discovered and was now affectionately amused to watch. “I know,” he said. “But why are you so shocked?”
“I ... oh, it’s just that it’s preposterous!” She pointed at his clothes.
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Is this, then, the end of your road?”
“Hell, no! The beginning.”
“What are you aiming at?”
“Mining. Not coal, though. Iron.”
“Where?”
He pointed toward the mountains. “Right here. Did you ever know Midas Mulligan to make a bad investment? You’d be surprised what one can find in that stretch of rock, if one knows how to look. That’s what I’ve been doing—looking.”
“And if you don’t find any iron ore?”
He shrugged. “There’s other things to do. I’ve always been short on time in my life, never on what to use it for.”
She glanced at Stockton with curiosity. “Aren’t you training a man who could become your most dangerous competitor?”
“That’s the only sort of men I like to hire. Dagny, have you lived too long among the looters? Have you come to think that one man’s ability is a threat to another?”
“Oh no! But I thought I was almost the only one left who didn’t think that.”
“Any man who’s afraid of hiring the best ability he can find, is a cheat who’s in a business where he doesn’t belong. To me—the foulest man on earth, more contemptible than a criminal, is the employer who rejects men for being too good. That’s what I’ve always thought and—say, what are you laughing at?”
She was listening to him with an eager, incredulous smile. “It’s so startling to hear,” she said, “because it’s so right!”
“What else can one think?”
She chuckled softly. “You know, when I was a child, I expected every businessman to think it.”
“And since then?”
“Since then, I’ve learned not to expect it.”
“But it’s right, isn’t it?”
“I’ve learned not to expect the right.”
“But it stands to reason, doesn’t it?”
“I’ve given up expecting reason.”
“That’s what one must never give up,” said Ken Danagger.
They had returned to the car and had started down the last, descending curves of the road, when she glanced at Galt and he turned to her at once, as if he had expected it.
“It was you in Danagger’s office that day, wasn’t it?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Did you know, then, that I was waiting outside?”
“Yes.”
“Did you know what it was like, to wait behind that closed door?”
She could not name the nature of the glance with which he looked at her. It was not pity, because she did not seem to be its object; it was the kind of glance with which one looks at suffering, but it was not her suffering that he seemed to be seeing.
“Oh yes,” he answered quietly, almost lightly.
The first shop to rise by the side of the valley’s single street was like the sudden sight of an open theater: a frame box without front wall, its stage set in the bright colors of a musical comedy—with red cubes, green circles, gold triangles, which were bins of tomatoes, barrels of lettuce, pyramids of oranges, and a spangled backdrop where the sun hit shelves of metal containers. The name on the marquee said: Hammond Grocery Market. A distinguished man in shirt sleeves, with a stern profile