THE SANCTION OF THE VICTIM 6 page

She spoke in a low, flat voice, looking down at the spot of light that shimmered in the liquid as her fingers turned the stem of her glass once in a while. She showed no emotion, but her voice had the intense monotone of a prayer: "Francisco . . . if he could live through that night, what right have I to complain? What does it matter, how I feel just now? He built that bridge, I have to hold it for him. I can't let it go the way of the bridge of the Atlantic Southern. I feel almost as if he'd know it, if I let that happen, he'd know it that night when he was alone over the river . . . no, that's nonsense, but here's what I feel: any man who knows what Nat Taggart felt that night, any man living now and capable of knowing it—it's him that I would betray if I let it happen . . . and I can't."

"Dagny, if Nat Taggart were living now, what would he do?"

She answered involuntarily, with a swift, bitter chuckle, "He wouldn't last a minute!"—then corrected herself: "No, he would. He would find a way to fight them."

"How?"

"I don't know."

She noticed some tense, cautious quality in the attentive way he watched her as he leaned forward and asked, "Dagny, the men of your Board of Directors are no match for Nat Taggart, are they? There's no form of contest in which they could beat him, there's nothing he'd have to fear from them, there's no mind, no will, no power in the bunch of them to equal one-thousandth of his."

"No, of course not."

"Then why is it that throughout men's history the Nat Taggarts, who make the world, have always won—and always lost it to the men of the Board?"

"I . . . don't know."

"How could men who're afraid to hold an unqualified opinion about the weather, fight Nat Taggart? How could they seize his achievement, if he chose to defend it? Dagny, he fought with every weapon he possessed, except the most important one. They could not have won, if we —he and the rest of us—had not given the world away to them."

"Yes, You gave it away to them. Ellis Wyatt did. Ken Danagger did, I won't."

He smiled. "Who built the John Galt Line for them?"

He saw only the faintest contraction of her mouth, but he knew that the question was like a blow across an open wound. Yet she answered quietly, "I did."

"For this kind of end?"

"For the men who did not hold out, would not fight and gave up."

"Don't you see that no other end was possible?"

"No."

"How much injustice are you willing to take?"

"As much as I'm able to fight."

"What will you do now? Tomorrow?"

She said calmly, looking straight at him with the faintly proud look of stressing her calm, "Start to tear it up."

"What?"

"The John Galt Line. Start to tear it up as good as with my own hands—with my own mind, by my own instructions. Get it ready to be closed, then tear it up and use its pieces to reinforce the transcontinental track. There's a lot of work to do. It will keep me busy." The calm cracked a little, in the faintest change of her voice: "You know, I'm looking forward to it. I'm glad that I'll have to do it myself.

That's why Nat Taggart worked all that night—just to keep going. It's not so bad as long as there's something one can do. And I'll know, at least, that I'm saving the main line."

"Dagny," he asked very quietly—and she wondered what made her feel that he looked as if his personal fate hung on her answer, "what if it were the main line that you had to dismember?"

She answered irresistibly, "Then I'd let the last engine run over me!"—but added, "No. That's just self-pity. I wouldn't."

He said gently, "I know you wouldn't. But you'd wish you could."

"Yes."

He smiled, not looking at her; it was a mocking smile, but it was a smile of pain and the mockery was directed at himself. She wondered what made her certain of it; but she knew his face so well that she would always know what he felt, even though she could not guess his reasons any longer. She knew his face as well, she thought, as she knew every line of his body, as she could still see it, as she was suddenly aware of it under his clothes, a few feet away, in the crowding intimacy of the booth. He turned to look at her and some sudden change in his eyes made her certain that he knew what she was thinking. He looked away and picked up his glass.

"Well—" he said, "to Nat Taggart."

"And to Sebastian d'Anconia?" she asked—then regretted it, because it had sounded like mockery, which she had not intended.

But she saw a look of odd, bright clarity in his eyes and he answered firmly, with the faintly proud smile of stressing his firmness, "Yes—and to Sebastian d'Anconia,"

Her hand trembled a little and she spilled a few drops on the square of paper lace that lay on the dark, shining plastic of the table. She watched him empty his glass in a single gesture; the brusque, brief movement of his hand made it look like the gesture of some solemn pledge.

She thought suddenly that this was the first time in twelve years that he had come to her of his own choice.

He had acted as if he were confidently in control, as if his confidence were a transfusion to let her recapture hers, he had given her no time to wonder that they should be here together. Now she felt, unaccountably, that the reins he had held were gone. It was only the silence of a few blank moments and the motionless outline of his forehead, cheekbone and mouth, as he sat with his face turned away from her—but she felt as if it were he who was now struggling for something he had to recapture.

She wondered what had been his purpose tonight—and noticed that he had, perhaps, accomplished it: he had carried her over the worst moment, he had given her an invaluable defense against despair—the knowledge that a living intelligence had heard her and understood. But why had he wanted to do it? Why had he cared about her hour of despair—after the years of agony he had given her? Why had it mattered to him how she would take the death of the John Galt Line? She noticed that this was the question she had not asked him in the lobby of the Taggart Building.

This was the bond between them, she thought: that she would never be astonished if he came when she needed him most, and that he would always know when to come. This was the danger: that she would trust him even while knowing that it could be nothing but some new kind of trap, even while remembering that he would always betray those who trusted him.

He sat, leaning forward with his arms crossed on the table, looking straight ahead. He said suddenly, not turning to her: "1 am thinking of the fifteen years that Sebastian d'Anconia had to wait for the woman he loved. He did not know whether he would ever find her again, whether she would survive . . . whether she would wait for him. But he knew that she could not live through his battle and that he could not call her to him until it was won. So he waited, holding his love in the place of the hope which he had no right to hold.

But when he carried her across the threshold of his house, as the first Senora d'Anconia of a new world, he knew that the battle was won, that they were free, that nothing threatened her and nothing would ever hurt her again."

In the days of their passionate happiness, he had never given her a hint that he would come to think of her as Senora d'Anconia. For one moment, she wondered whether she had known what she had meant to him. But the moment ended in an invisible shudder: she would not believe that the past twelve years could allow the things she was hearing to be possible. This was the new trap, she thought.

"Francisco," she asked, her voice hard, "what have you done to Hank Rearden?"

He looked startled that she should think of that name at that moment "Why?" he asked.

"He told me once that you were the only man he'd ever liked. But last time I saw him, he said that he would kill you on sight."

"He did not tell you why?"

"No."

“He told you nothing about it?"

"No." She saw him smiling strangely, a smile of sadness, gratitude and longing. "I warned him that you would hurt him—when he told me that you were the only man he liked."

His words came like a sudden explosion: "He was the only man—with one exception—to whom I could have given my life!"

"Who is the exception?"

"The man to whom I have."

"What do you mean?"

He shook his head, as if he had said more than he intended, and did not answer.

"What did you do to Rearden?"

"I'll tell you some time. Not now."

"Is that what you always do to those who . . . mean a great deal to you?"

He looked at her with a smile that had the luminous sincerity of innocence and pain. "You know," he said gently, "I could say that that is what they always do to me." He added, "But I won't. The actions—and the knowledge—were mine."

He stood up. "Shall we go? I'll take you home."

She rose and he held her coat for her; it was a wide, loose garment, and his hands guided it to enfold her body. She felt his arm remain about her shoulders a moment longer than he intended her to notice.

She glanced back at him. But he was standing oddly still, staring intently down at the table. In rising, they had brushed aside the mats of paper lace and she saw an inscription cut into the plastic of the table top. Attempts had been made to erase it, but the inscription remained, as the graven voice of some unknown drunk's despair: "Who is John Galt?"

With a brusque movement of anger, she flicked the mat back to cover the words. He chuckled.

"I can answer it," he said. "I can tell you who is John Galt."

"Really? Everybody seems to know him, but they never tell the same story twice."

"They're all true, though—all the stories you've heard about him."

"Well, what's yours? Who is he?"

"John Galt is Prometheus who changed his mind. After centuries of being torn by vultures in payment for having brought to men the fire of the gods, he broke his chains and he withdrew his fire—until the day when men withdraw their vultures."

The band of crossties swept in wide curves around granite corners, clinging to the mountainsides of Colorado. Dagny walked down the ties, keeping her hands in her coat pockets, and her eyes on the meaningless distance ahead; only the familiar movement of straining her steps to the spacing of the ties gave her the physical sense of an action pertaining to a railroad.

A gray cotton, which was neither quite fog nor clouds, hung in sloppy wads between sky and mountains, making the sky look like an old mattress spilling its stuffing down the sides of the peaks. A crusted snow covered the ground, belonging neither to winter nor to spring. A net of moisture hung in the air, and she felt an icy pin-prick on her face once in a while, which was neither a raindrop nor a snowflake.

The weather seemed afraid to take a stand and clung noncommittally to some sort of road's middle; Board of Directors' weather, she thought.

The light seemed drained and she could not tell whether this was the afternoon or the evening of March 31. But she was very certain that it was March 31; that was a certainty not to be escaped.

She had come to Colorado with Hank Rearden, to buy whatever machinery could still be found in the closed factories. It had been like a hurried search through the sinking hulk of a great ship before it was to vanish out of reach. They could have given the task to employees, but they had come, both prompted by the same unconfessed motive: they could not resist the desire to attend the run of the last train, as one cannot resist the desire to give a last salute by attending a funeral, even while knowing that it is only an act of self-torture.

They had been buying machinery from doubtful owners in sales of dubious legality, since nobody could tell who had the right to dispose of the great, dead properties, and nobody would come to challenge the transactions. They had bought everything that could be moved from the gutted plant of Nielsen Motors. Ted Nielsen had quit and vanished, a week after the announcement that the Line was to be closed.

She had felt like a scavenger, but the activity of the hunt had made her able to bear these past few days. When she had found that three empty hours remained before the departure of the last train, she had gone to walk through the countryside, to escape the stillness of the town. She had walked at random through twisting mountain trails, alone among rocks and snow, trying to substitute motion for thought, knowing that she had to get through this day without thinking of the summer when she had ridden the engine of the first train.

But she found herself walking back along the roadbed of the John Galt Line—and she knew that she had intended it, that she had gone out for that purpose.

It was a spur track which had already been dismembered. There were no signal lights, no switches, no telephone wires, nothing but a long band of wooden strips left on the ground—a chain of ties without rail, like the remnant of a spine—and, as its lonely guardian, at an abandoned grade crossing, a pole with slanted arms saying: "Stop.

Look. Listen."

An early darkness mixed with fog was slipping down to fill the valleys, when she came upon the factory. There was an inscription high on the lustrous tile of its front wall: "Roger Marsh. Electrical Appliances." The man who had wanted to chain himself to his desk in order not to leave this, she thought. The building stood intact, like a corpse in that instant when its eyes have just closed and one still waits to see them open again. She felt that the lights would flare up at any moment behind the great sheets of windows, under the long, flat roofs. Then she saw one broken pane, pierced by a stone for some young moron's enjoyment—and she saw the tall, dry stem of a single weed rising from the steps of the main entrance. Hit by a sudden, blinding hatred, in rebellion against the weed's impertinence, knowing of what enemy this was the scout, she ran forward, she fell on her knees and jerked the weed up by its roots. Then, kneeling on the steps of a closed factory, looking at the vast silence of mountains, brush and dusk, she thought: What do you think you're doing?

It was almost dark when she reached the end of the ties that led her back to the town of Marshville. Marshville had been the end of the Line for months past; service to Wyatt Junction had been discontinued long ago; Dr. Ferris' Reclamation Project had been abandoned this winter.

The street lights were on, and they hung in mid-air at the intersections, in a long, diminishing line of yellow globes over the empty streets of Marshville. All the better homes were closed—the neat, sturdy houses of modest cost, well built and well kept; there were faded "For Sale" signs on their lawns. But she saw lights in the windows of the cheap, garish structures that had acquired, within a few years, the slovenly dilapidation of slum hovels; the homes of people who had not moved, the people who never looked beyond the span of one week. She saw a large new television set in the lighted room of a house with a sagging roof and cracking walls. She wondered how long they expected the electric power companies of Colorado to remain in existence. Then she shook her head: those people had never known that power companies existed.

The main street of Marshville was lined by the black windows of shops out of business. All the luxury stores are gone—she thought, looking at their signs; and then she shuddered, realizing what things she now called luxury, realizing to what extent and in what manner those things, once available to the poorest, had been luxuries: Dry Cleaning—Electrical Appliances—Gas Station—Drug Store—Five and Ten. The only ones left open were grocery stores and saloons.

The platform of the railroad station was crowded. The glaring arc lights seemed to pick it out of the mountains, to isolate and focus it, like a small stage on which every movement was naked to the sight of the unseen tiers rising in the vast, encircling night. People were carting luggage, bundling their children, haggling at ticket windows, the stifled panic of their manner suggesting that what they really wanted to do was to fall down on the ground and scream with terror. Their terror had the evasive quality of guilt: it was not the fear that comes from understanding, but from the refusal to understand.

The last train stood at the platform, its windows a long, lone streak of light. The steam of the locomotive, gasping tensely through the wheels, did not have its usual joyous sound of energy released for a sprint; it had the sound of a panting breath that one dreads to hear and dreads more to stop hearing. Far at the end of the lighted windows, she saw the small red dot of a lantern attached to her private car. Beyond the lantern, there was nothing but a black void.

The train was loaded to capacity, and the shrill notes of hysteria in the confusion of voices were the pleas for space in vestibules and aisles. Some people were not leaving, but stood in vapid curiosity, watching the show; they had come, as if knowing that this was the last event they would ever witness in their community and, perhaps, in their lives.

She walked hastily through the crowd, trying not to look at anyone.

Some knew who she was, most of them did not. She saw an old woman with a ragged shawl on her shoulders and the graph of a lifetime's struggle on the cracked skin of her face; the woman's glance was a hopeless appeal for help. An unshaved young man with gold-rimmed glasses stood on a crate under an arc light, yelling to the faces shifting past him, "What do they mean, no business! Look at that train! It's full of passengers! There's plenty of business! It's just that there's no profits for them—that's why they're letting you perish, those greedy parasites!" A disheveled woman rushed up to Dagny, waving two tickets and screaming something about the wrong date. Dagny found herself pushing people out of the way, fighting to reach the end of the train—but an emaciated man, with the staring eyes of years of malicious futility, rushed at her, shouting, "It's all right for you, you've got a good overcoat and a private car, but you won't give us any trains, you and all the selfish—"

He stopped abruptly, looking at someone behind her. She felt a hand grasping her elbow: it was Hank Rearden. He held her arm and led her toward her car; seeing the look on his face, she understood why people got out of their way. At the end of the platform, a pallid, plumpish man stood saying to a crying woman, "That's how it's always been in this world. There will be no chance for the poor, until the rich are destroyed." High above the town, hanging in black space like an uncooled planet, the flame of Wyatt's Torch was twisting in the wind.

Rearden went inside her car, but she remained on the steps of the vestibule, delaying the finality of turning away. She heard the "All aboard!" She looked at the people who remained on the platform as one looks at those who watch the departure of the last lifeboat.

The conductor stood below, at the foot of the steps, with his lantern in one hand and his watch in the other. He glanced at the watch, then glanced up at her face. She answered by the silent affirmation of closing her eyes and inclining her head. She saw his lantern circling through the air, as she turned away—and the first jolt of the wheels, on the rails of Rearden Metal, was made easier for her by the sight of Rearden, as she pulled the door open and went into her car.

When James Taggart telephoned Lillian Rearden from New York and said, "Why, no—no special reason, just wondered how you were and whether you ever came to the city—haven't seen you for ages and just thought we might have lunch together next time you're in New York"—she knew that he had some very special reason in mind.

When she answered lazily, "Oh, let me see—what day is this? April second?—let me look at my calendar—why, it just so happens that I have some shopping to do in New York tomorrow, so I'll be delighted to let you save me my lunch money"—he knew that she had no shopping to do and that the luncheon would be the only purpose of her trip to the city.

They met in a distinguished, high-priced restaurant, much too distinguished and high-priced ever to be mentioned in the gossip columns; not the kind of place which James Taggart, always eager for personal publicity, was in the habit of patronizing; he did not want them to be seen together, she concluded.

The half-hint of half-secret amusement remained on her face while she listened to him talking about their friends, the theater and the weather, carefully building for himself the protection of the unimportant. She sat gracefully not quite straight, as if she were leaning back, enjoying the futility of his performance and the fact that he had to stage it for her benefit. She waited with patient curiosity to discover his purpose.

"I do think that you deserve a pat on the back or a medal or something, Jim," she said, "for being remarkably cheerful in spite of all the messy trouble you're having. Didn't you just close the best branch of your railroad?"

"Oh, it's only a slight financial setback, nothing more. One has to expect retrenchments at a time like this. Considering the general state of the country, we're doing quite well. Better than the rest of them." He added, shrugging, "Besides, it's a matter of opinion whether the Rio Norte Line was our best branch. It is only my sister who thought so.

It was her pet project."

She caught the tone of pleasure blurring the drawl of his syllables.

She smiled and said, "I see."

Looking up at her from under his lowered forehead, as if stressing that he expected her to understand, Taggart asked, "How is he taking it?"

"Who?" She understood quite well.

"Your husband.”

"Taking what?"

"The closing of that Line."

She smiled gaily. "Your guess is as good as mine, Jim—and mine is very good indeed,"

"What do you mean?"

"You know how he would take it—just as you know how your sister is taking it. So your cloud has a double silver lining, hasn't it?"

"What has he been saying in the last few days?"

"He's been away in Colorado for over a week, so I—" She stopped; she had started answering lightly, but she noticed that Taggart's question had been too specific while his tone had been too casual, and she realized that he had struck the first note leading toward the purpose of the luncheon; she paused for the briefest instant, then finished, still more lightly, "so I wouldn't know. But he's coming back any day now."

"Would you say that his attitude is still what one might call recalcitrant?"

"Why, Jim, that would be an understatement!"

"It was to be hoped that events had, perhaps, taught him the wisdom of a mellower approach."

It amused her to keep him in doubt about her understanding. "Oh yes," she said innocently, "it would be wonderful if anything could ever make him change."

"He is making things exceedingly hard for himself."

"He always has."

"But events have a way of beating us all into a more . . . pliable frame of mind, sooner or later."

"I've heard many characteristics ascribed to him, but 'pliable' has never been one of them."

"Well, things change and people change with them. After all, it is a law of nature that animals must adapt themselves to their background.

And I might add that adaptability is the one characteristic most stringently required at present by laws other than those of nature. We're in for a very difficult time, and I would hate to see you suffer the consequences of his intransigent attitude. I would hate—as your friend—to see you in the kind of danger he's headed for, unless he learns to cooperate."

"How sweet of you, Jim," she said sweetly.

He was doling his sentences out with cautious slowness, balancing himself between word and intonation to hit the right degree of semi clarity. He wanted her to understand, but he did not want her to understand fully, explicitly, down to the root—since the essence of that modern language, which he had learned to speak expertly, was never to let oneself or others understand anything down to the root.

He had not needed many words to understand Mr. Weatherby. On his last trip to Washington, he had pleaded with Mr. Weatherby that a cut in the rates of the railroads would be a deathblow; the wage raises had been granted, but the demands for the cut in rates were still heard in the press—and Taggart had known what it meant, if Mr. Mouch still permitted them to be heard; he had known that the knife was still poised at his throat. Mr. Weatherby had not answered his pleas, but had said, in a tone of idly irrelevant speculation, "Wesley has so many tough problems. If he is to give everybody a breathing spell, financially speaking, he's got to put into operation a certain emergency program of which you have some inkling. But you know what hell the unprogressive elements of the country would raise about it. A man like Rearden, for instance. We don't want any more stunts of the sort he's liable to pull. Wesley would give a lot for somebody who could keep Rearden in line. But I guess that's something nobody can deliver.

Though I may be wrong. You may know better, Jim, since Rearden is a sort of friend of yours, who comes to your parties and all that."

Looking at Lillian across the table, Taggart said, "Friendship, I find, is the most valuable thing in life—and I would be amiss if I didn't give you proof of mine."

"But I've never doubted it."

He lowered his voice to the tone of an ominous warning: "I think I should tell you, as a favor to a friend, although it's confidential, that your husband's attitude is being discussed in high places—very high places. I'm sure you know what I mean."

This was why he hated Lillian Rearden, thought Taggart: she knew the game, but she played it with unexpected variations of her own. It was against all rules to look at him suddenly, to laugh in his face, and —after all those remarks showing that she understood too little—to say bluntly, showing that she understood too much, "Why, darling, of course I know what you mean. You mean that the purpose of this very excellent luncheon was not a favor you wanted to do me, but a favor you wanted to get from me. You mean that it's you who are in danger and could use that favor to great advantage for a trade in high places.

And you mean that you are reminding me of my promise to deliver the goods."

"The sort of performance he put on at his trial was hardly what I'd call delivering the goods," he said angrily. "It wasn't what you had led me to expect."

"Oh my, no, it wasn't," she said placidly. "It certainly wasn't. But, darling, did you expect me not to know that after that performance of his he wouldn't be very popular in high places? Did you really think you had to tell me that as a confidential favor?"

"But it's true. I heard him discussed, so I thought I'd tell you."

"I'm sure it's true. I know that they would be discussing him. I know also that if there were anything they could do to him, they would have done it right after his trial. My, would they have been glad to do it! So I know that he's the only one among you who is in no danger whatever, at the moment. I know that it's they who are afraid of him. Do you see how well I understand what you mean, darling?"

"Well, if you think you do, I must say that for my part I don't understand you at all. I don't know what it is you're doing."

"Why, I'm just setting things straight—so that you'll know that I know how much you need me. And now that it's straight, I'll tell you the truth in my turn: I didn't double-cross you, I merely failed. His performance at the trial—I didn't expect it any more than you did.

Less. I had good reason not to expect it. But something went wrong.

I don't know what it was. I am trying to find out. When I do, I will keep my promise. Then you'll be free to take full credit for it and to tell your friends in high places that it's you who've disarmed him."

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 444