THE TOP AND THE BOTTOM 6 page

The Rio Norte Line, when rebuilt, would redeem the rest. As she looked at the sheets of figures announcing losses and more losses, she did not think of the long, senseless agony of the Mexican venture. She thought of a telephone call. "Hank, can you save us? Can you give us rail on the shortest notice and the longest credit possible?" A quiet, steady voice had answered, "Sure."

The thought was a point of support. She leaned over the sheets of paper on her desk, finding it suddenly easier to concentrate. There was one thing, at least, that could be counted upon not to crumble when needed.

James Taggart crossed the anteroom of Dagny's office, still holding the kind of confidence he had felt among his companions at the barroom half an hour ago. When he opened her door, the confidence vanished. He crossed the room to her desk like a child being dragged to punishment, storing the resentment for all his future years.

He saw a head bent over sheets of paper, the light of the desk lamp glistening on strands of disheveled hair, a white shirt clinging to her shoulders, its loose folds suggesting the thinness of her body.

"What is it, Jim?"

"What are you trying to pull on the San Sebastian Line?"

She raised her head. "Pull? Why?"

"What sort of schedule are we running down there and what kind of trains?"

She laughed; the sound was gay and a little weary. "You really ought to read the reports sent to the president's office, Jim, once in a while."

"What do you mean?"

"We've been running that schedule and those trains on the San Sebastian for the last three months."

"One passenger train a day?"

"—in the morning. And one freight train every other night."

"Good God! On an important branch like that?"

"The important branch can't pay even for those two trams."

"But the Mexican people expect real service from us!"

"I'm sure they do."

"They need trains!"

"For what?"

"For . . . To help them develop local industries. How do you expect them to develop if we don't give them transportation?"

"I don't expect them to develop,"

"That's just your personal opinion. I don't see what right you had to take it upon yourself to cut our schedules. Why, the copper traffic alone will pay for everything."

"When?"

He looked at her; his face assumed the satisfaction of a person about to utter something that has the power to hurt. "You don't doubt the success of those copper mines, do you?—when it's Francisco d'Anconia who's running them?" He stressed the name, watching her.

She said, "He may be your friend, but—"

"My friend? I thought he was yours."

She said steadily, "Not for the last ten years."

"That's too bad, isn't it? Still, he's one of the smartest operators on earth. He's never failed in a venture—I mean, a business venture—and he's sunk millions of his own money into those mines, so we can rely on his judgment."

"When will you realize that Francisco d'Anconia has turned into a worthless bum?"

He chuckled. "I always thought that that's what he was—as far as his personal character is concerned. But you didn't share my opinion. Yours was opposite. Oh my, how opposite! Surely you remember our quarrels on the subject? Shall I quote some of the things you said about him? I can only surmise as to some of the things you did."

"Do you wish to discuss Francisco d'Anconia? Is that what you came here for?"

His face showed the anger of failure—because hers showed nothing.

"You know damn well what I came here for!" he snapped. "I've heard some incredible things about our trains in Mexico."

"What things?"

"What sort of rolling stock are you using down there?"

"The worst I could find."

"You admit that?"

"I've stated it on paper in the reports I sent you."

"Is it true that you're using wood-burning locomotives?"

"Eddie found them for me in somebody's abandoned roundhouse down in Louisiana. He couldn't even learn the name of the railroad."

"And that's what you're running as Taggart trains?"

"Yes."

"What in hell's the big idea? What's going on? I want to know what's going on!"

She spoke evenly, looking straight at him. "If you want to know, I have left nothing but junk on the San Sebastian Line, and as little of that as possible. I have moved everything that could be moved—switch engines, shop tools, even typewriters and mirrors—out of Mexico."

"Why in blazes?"

"So that the looters won't have too much to loot when they nationalize the line."

He leaped to his feet. "You won't get away with that! This is one time you won't get away with it! To have the nerve to pull such a low, unspeakable . . . just because of some vicious rumors, when we have a contract for two hundred years and . . ."

"Jim," she said slowly, "there's not a car, engine or ton of coal that we can spare anywhere on the system."

"I won't permit it, I absolutely won't permit such an outrageous policy toward a friendly people who need our help. Material greed isn't everything. After all, there are non-material considerations, even though you wouldn't understand them!"

She pulled a pad forward and picked up a pencil. "All right, Jim.

How many trains do you wish me to run on the San Sebastian Line?"

"Huh?"

"Which runs do you wish me to cut and on which of our lines—in order to get the Diesels and the steel coaches?"

"I don't want you to cut any runs!"

"Then where do I get the equipment for Mexico?"

"That's for you to figure out. It's your job."

"I am not able to do it. You will have to decide."

"That's your usual rotten trick—switching the responsibility to me!"

"I'm waiting for orders, Jim."

"I'm not going to let you trap me like that!"

She dropped the pencil. "Then the San Sebastian schedule will remain as it is."

"Just wait till the Board meeting next month. I'll demand a decision, Once and for all, on how far the Operating Department is to be permitted to exceed its authority. You're going to have to answer for this."

"Ill answer for it."

She was back at her work before the door had closed on James Taggart.

When she finished, pushed the papers aside and glanced up, the sky was black beyond the window, and the city had become a glowing spread of lighted glass without masonry. She rose reluctantly. She resented the small defeat of being tired, but she knew that she was, tonight.

The outer office was dark and empty; her staff had gone. Only Eddie Willers was still there, at his desk in his glass-partitioned enclosure that looked like a cube of light in a comer of the large room. She waved to him on her way out.

She did not take the elevator to the lobby of the building, but to the concourse of the Taggart Terminal. She liked to walk through it on her way home.

She had always felt that the concourse looked like a temple. Glancing up at the distant ceiling, she saw dim vaults supported by giant granite columns, and the tops of vast windows glazed by darkness. The vaulting held the solemn peace of a cathedral, spread in protection high above the rushing activity of men.

Dominating the concourse, but ignored by the travelers as a habitual sight, stood a statue of Nathaniel Taggart, the founder of the railroad.

Dagny was the only one who remained aware of it and had never been able to take it for granted. To look at that statue whenever she crossed the concourse, was the only form of prayer she knew.

Nathaniel Taggart had been a penniless adventurer who had come from somewhere in New England and built a railroad across a continent, in the days of the first steel rails. His railroad still stood; his battle to build it had dissolved into a legend, because people preferred not to Understand it or to believe it possible.

He was a man who had never accepted the creed that others had the right to stop him. He set his goal and moved toward it, his way as straight as one of his rails. He never sought any loans, bonds, subsidies, land grants or legislative favors from the government. He obtained money from the men who owned it, going from door to door—from the mahogany doors of bankers to the clapboard doors of lonely farmhouses. He never talked about the public good. He merely told people that they would make big profits on his railroad, he told them why he expected the profits and he gave his reasons. He had good reasons.

Through all the generations that followed, Taggart Transcontinental was one of the few railroads that never went bankrupt and the only one whose controlling stock remained in the hands of the founder's descendants.

In his lifetime, the name "Nat Taggart" was not famous, but notorious; it was repeated, not in homage, but in resentful curiosity; and if anyone admired him, it was as one admires a successful bandit. Yet no penny of his wealth had been obtained by force or fraud; he was guilty of nothing, except that he earned his own fortune and never forgot that it was his.

Many stories were whispered about him. It was said that in the wilderness of the Middle West, he murdered a state legislator who attempted to revoke a charter granted to him, to revoke it when his rail was laid halfway across the state; some legislators had planned to make a fortune on Taggart stock—by selling it short. Nat Taggart was indicted for the murder, but the charge could never be proved. He had no trouble with legislators from then on.

It was said that Nat Taggart had staked his life on his railroad many times; but once, he staked more than his life. Desperate for funds, with the construction of his line suspended, he threw down three flights of stairs a distinguished gentleman who offered him a loan from the government. Then he pledged his wife as security for a loan from a millionaire who hated him and admired her beauty. He repaid the loan on time and did not have to surrender his pledge. The deal had been made with his wife's consent. She was a great beauty from the noblest family of a southern state, and she had been disinherited by her family because she eloped with Nat Taggart when he was only a ragged young adventurer.

Dagny regretted at times that Nat Taggart was her ancestor. What she felt for him did not belong in the category of unchosen family affections. She did not want her feeling to be the thing one was supposed to owe an uncle or a grandfather. She was incapable of love for any object not of her own choice and she resented anyone's demand for it. But had it been possible to choose an ancestor, she would have chosen Nat Taggart, in voluntary homage and with all of her gratitude.

Nat Taggart's statue was copied from an artist's sketch of him, the only record ever made of his appearance. He had lived far into old age, but one could never think of him except as he was on that sketch —as a young man. In her childhood, his statue had been Dagny's first concept of the exalted. When she was sent to church or to school, and heard people using that word, she thought that she knew what they meant: she thought of the statue.

The statue was of a young man with a tall, gaunt body and an angular face. He held his head as if he faced a challenge and found joy in his capacity to meet it. All that Dagny wanted of life was contained in the desire to hold her head as he did.

Tonight, she looked at the statue when she walked across the concourse. It was a moment's rest; it was as if a burden she could not name were lightened and as if a faint current of air were touching her forehead.

In a corner of the concourse, by the main entrance, there was a small newsstand. The owner, a quiet, courteous old man with an air of breeding, had stood behind his counter for twenty years. He had owned a cigarette factory once, but it had gone bankrupt, and he had resigned himself to the lonely obscurity of his little stand in the midst of an eternal whirlpool of strangers. He had no family or friends left alive.

He had a hobby which was his only pleasure: he gathered cigarettes from all over the world for his private collection; he knew every brand made or that had ever been made.

Dagny liked to stop at his newsstand on her way out. He seemed to be part of the Taggart Terminal, like an old watchdog too feeble to protect it, but reassuring by the loyalty of his presence. He liked to see her coming, because it amused him to think that he alone knew the importance of the young woman in a sports coat and a slanting hat, who came hurrying anonymously through the crowd.

She stopped tonight, as usual, to buy a package of cigarettes. "How is the collection?" she asked him. "Any new specimens?"

He smiled sadly, shaking his head. "No, Miss Taggart. There aren't any new brands made anywhere in the world. Even the old ones are going, one after another. There's only five or six kinds left selling now.

There used to be dozens. People aren't making anything new any more."

"They will. That's only temporary."

He glanced at her and did not answer. Then he said, "I like cigarettes, Miss Taggart. I like to think of fire held in a man's hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come from such hours. When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind—and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression."

"Do they ever think?" she asked involuntarily, and stopped; the question was her one personal torture and she did not want to discuss it.

The old man looked as if he had noticed the sudden stop and understood it; but he did not start discussing it; he said, instead, "I don't like the thing that's happening to people, Miss Taggart."

"What?"

"I don't know. But I've watched them here for twenty years and I've seen the change. They used to rush through here, and it was wonderful to watch, it was the hurry of men who knew where they were going and were eager to get there. Now they're hurrying because they are afraid.

It's not a purpose that drives them, it's fear. They're not going anywhere, they're escaping. And I don't think they know what it is that they want to escape. They don't look at one another. They jerk when brushed against. They smile too much, but it's an ugly kind of smiling: it's not joy, it's pleading. I don't know what it is that's happening to the world." He shrugged. "Oh well, who is John Galt?"

"He's just a meaningless phrase!"

She was startled by the sharpness of her own voice, and she added in apology, "I don't like that empty piece of slang. What does it mean?

Where did it come from?"

"Nobody knows," he answered slowly.

"Why do people keep saying it? Nobody seems able to explain just what it stands for, yet they all use it as if they knew the meaning."

"Why does it disturb you?" he asked.

"I don't like what they seem to mean when they say it."

"I don't, either, Miss Taggart."

Eddie Willers ate his dinners in the employees' cafeteria of the Taggart Terminal. There was a restaurant in the building, patronized by Taggart executives, but he did not like it. The cafeteria seemed part of the railroad, and he felt more at home.

The cafeteria lay underground. It was a large room with walls of white tile that glittered in the reflections of electric lights and looked like silver brocade. It had a high ceiling, sparkling counters of glass and chromium, a sense of space and light.

There was a railroad worker whom Eddie Willers met at times in the cafeteria. Eddie liked his face. They had been drawn into a chance conversation once, and then it became their habit to dine together whenever they happened to meet.

Eddie had forgotten whether he had ever asked the worker's name or the nature of his job; he supposed that the job wasn't much, because the man's clothes were rough and grease-stained. The man was not a person to him, but only a silent presence with an enormous intensity of interest in the one thing which was the meaning of his own life: in Taggart Transcontinental.

Tonight, coming down late, Eddie saw the worker at a table in a corner of the half-deserted room. Eddie smiled happily, waving to him, and carried his tray of food to the worker's table.

In the privacy of their corner, Eddie felt at ease, relaxing after the long strain of the day. He could talk as he did not talk anywhere else, admitting things he would not confess to anyone, thinking aloud, looking into the attentive eyes of the worker across the table.

"The Rio Norte Line is our last hope," said Eddie Willers. "But it will save us. We'll have at least one branch in good condition, where it's needed most, and that will help to save the rest. . . . It's funny—isn't it?—to speak about a last hope for Taggart Transcontinental. Do you take it seriously if somebody tells you that a meteor is going to destroy the earth? . . . I don't, either. . . . 'From Ocean to Ocean, forever'—that's what we heard all through our childhood, she and I.

No, they didn't say 'forever,' but that's what it meant. . . . You know, I'm not any kind of a great man. I couldn't have built that railroad. If it goes, I won't be able to bring it back. I'll have to go with it. . . .

Don't pay any attention to me. I don't know why I should want to say things like that. Guess I'm just a little tired tonight. . . . Yes, I worked late. She didn't ask me to stay, but there was a light under her door, long after all the others had gone . . . Yes, she's gone home now. . . .

Trouble? Oh, there's always trouble in the office. But she's not worried.

She knows she can pull us through. . . . Of course, it's bad. We're having many more accidents than you hear about. We lost two Diesels again, last week. One—just from old age, the other—in a head-on collision. . . . Yes, we have Diesels on order, at the United Locomotive Works, but we've waited for them for two years. I don't know whether we'll ever get them or not. . . . God, do we need them! Motive power —you can't imagine how important that is. That's the heart of everything. . . . What are you smiling at? . . . Well, as I was saying, it's bad. But at least the Rio Norte Line is set. The first shipment of rail will get to the site in a few weeks. In a year, we'll run the first train on the new track. Nothing's going to stop us, this time. . . . Sure, I know who's going to lay the rail. McNamara, of Cleveland. He's the contractor who finished the San Sebastian Line for us. There, at least, is one man who knows his job. So we're safe. We can count on him. There aren't many good contractors left. . . . We're rushed as hell, but I like it. I've been coming to the office an hour earlier than usual, but she beats me to it. She's always there first. . . . What? . . . I don't know what she does at night. Nothing much, I guess. . . . No, she never goes out with anyone. She sits at home, mostly, and listens to music. She plays records. . . . What do you care, which records? Richard Halley.

She loves the music of Richard Halley. Outside the railroad, that's the only thing she loves."

CHAPTER IV

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 740