“Word of honor . . .” gasped the man.
“What you’d better do is run to your stockbroker and sell as fast as you can—because things haven’t been going too well for d’Anconia Copper, I’m trying to raise some money, but if I don’t succeed, you’ll be lucky if you’ll have ten cents on your dollar tomorrow morning—oh my! I forgot that you can’t reach your stockbroker before tomorrow morning—well, it’s too bad, but—”
The man was running across the room, pushing people out of his way, like a torpedo shot into the crowd.
“Watch,” said Francisco austerely, turning to Rearden.
The man was lost in the crowd, they could not see him, they could not tell to whom he was selling his secret or whether he had enough of his cunning left to make it a trade with those who held favors—but they saw the wake of his passage spreading through the room, the sudden cuts splitting the crowd, like the first few cracks, then like the accelerating branching that runs through a wall about to crumble, the streaks of emptiness slashed, not by a human touch, but by the impersonal breath of terror.
There were the voices abruptly choked off, the pools of silence, then sounds of a different nature; the rising, hysterical inflections of uselessly repeated questions, the unnatural whispers, a woman’s scream, the few spaced, forced giggles of those still trying to pretend that nothing was happening.
There were spots of immobility in the motion of the crowd, like spreading blotches of paralysis; there was a sudden stillness, as if a motor had been cut off; then came the frantic, jerking, purposeless, rudderless movement of objects bumping down a hill by the blind mercy of gravitation and of every rock they hit on the way. People were running out, running to telephones, running to one another, clutching or pushing the bodies around them at random. These men, the most powerful men in the country, those who held, unanswerable to any power, the power over every man’s food and every man’s enjoyment of his span of years on earth—these men had become a pile of rubble, clattering in the wind of panic, the rubble left of a structure when its key pillar has been cut.
James Taggart, his face indecent in its exposure of emotions which centuries had taught men to keep hidden, rushed up to Francisco and screamed, “Is it true?”
“Why, James,” said Francisco, smiling, “what’s the matter? Why do you seem to be upset? Money is the root of all evil—so I just got tired of being evil.”
Taggart ran toward the main exit, yelling something to Orren Boyle on the way. Boyle nodded and kept on nodding, with the eagerness and humility of an inefficient servant, then darted of in another direction. Cherryl, her wedding veil coiling like a crystal cloud upon the air, as she ran after him, caught Taggart at the door. “Jim, what’s the matter?” He pushed her aside and she fell against the stomach of Paul Larkin, as Taggart rushed out.
Three persons stood immovably still, like three pillars spaced through the room, the lines of their sight cutting across the spread of the wreckage: Dagny, looking at Francisco—Francisco and Rearden, looking at each other.
CHAPTER III
WHITE BLACKMAIL
“What time is it?”
It’s running out, thought Rearden—but he answered, “I don’t know, Not yet midnight,” and remembering his wrist watch, added, “Twenty of.”
“I’m going to take a train home,” said Lillian.
He heard the sentence, but it had to wait its turn to enter the crowded passages to his consciousness. He stood looking absently at the living room of his suite, a few minutes’ elevator ride away from the party. In a moment, he answered automatically, “At this hour?”
“It’s still early. There are plenty of trains running.”
“You’re welcome to stay here, of course.”
“No, I think I prefer to go home.” He did not argue. “What about you, Henry? Do you intend going home tonight?”
“No.” He added, “I have business appointments here tomorrow.”
“As you wish.”
She shrugged her evening wrap off her shoulders, caught it on her arm and started toward the door of his bedroom, but stopped.
“I hate Francisco d’Anconia,” she said tensely. “Why did he have to come to that party? And didn’t he know enough to keep his mouth shut, at least till tomorrow morning?” He did not answer. “It’s monstrous—what he’s allowed to happen to his company. Of course, he’s nothing but a rotten playboy—still, a fortune of that size is a responsibility, there’s a limit to the negligence a man can permit himself!” He glanced at her face: it was oddly tense, the features sharpened, making her look older. “He owed a certain duty to his stockholders, didn’t he?
. . . Didn’t he, Henry?”
“Do you mind if we don’t discuss it?”
She made a tightening, sidewise movement with her lips, the equivalent of a shrug, and walked into the bedroom.
He stood at the window, looking down at the streaming roofs of automobiles, letting his eyes rest on something while his faculty of sight was disconnected. His mind was still focused on the crowd in the ballroom downstairs and on two figures in that crowd. But as his living room remained on the edge of his vision, so the sense of some action he had to perform remained on the edge of his consciousness. He grasped it for a moment—it was the fact that he had to remove his evening clothes—but farther beyond the edge there was the feeling of reluctance to undress in the presence of a strange woman in his bedroom, and he forgot it again in the next moment.
Lillian came out, as trimly groomed as she had arrived, the beige traveling suit outlining her figure with efficient tightness, the hat tilted over half a head of hair set in waves. She carried her suitcase, swinging it a little, as if in demonstration of her ability to carry it.
He reached over mechanically and took the suitcase out of her hand.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m going to take you to the station.”
“Like this? You haven’t changed your clothes.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“You don’t have to escort me. I’m quite able to find my own way. If you have business appointments tomorrow, you’d better go to bed.”
He did not answer, but walked to the door, held it open for her and followed her to the elevator.
They remained silent when they rode in a taxicab to the station. At such moments as he remembered her presence, he noticed that she sat efficiently straight, almost flaunting the perfection of her poise; she seemed alertly awake and contented, as if she were starting out on a purposeful journey of early morning.
The cab stopped at the entrance to the Taggart Terminal. The bright lights flooding the great glass doorway transformed the lateness of the hour into a sense of active, timeless security. Lillian jumped lightly out of the cab, saying, “No, no, you don’t have to get out, drive on back.
Will you be home for dinner tomorrow—or next month?”
“I’ll telephone you,” he said.
She waved her gloved hand at him and disappeared into the lights of the entrance. As the cab started forward, he gave the driver the address of Dagny’s apartment.
The apartment was dark when he entered, but the door to her bedroom was half-open and he heard her voice saying, “Hello, Hank.”
He walked in, asking, “Were you asleep?”
“No.”
He switched on the light. She lay in bed, her head propped by the pillow, her hair falling smoothly to her shoulders, as if she had not moved for a long time; but her face was untroubled. She looked like a schoolgirl, with the tailored collar of a pale blue nightgown lying severely high at the base of her throat; the nightgown’s front was a deliberate contrast to the severity, a spread of pale blue embroidery that looked luxuriously adult and feminine.
He sat down on the edge of the bed—and she smiled, noticing that the stern formality of his full dress clothes made his action so simply, naturally intimate. He smiled in answer. He had come, prepared to reject the forgiveness she had granted him at the party, as one rejects a favor from too generous an adversary. Instead, he reached out suddenly and moved his hand over her forehead, down the line of her hair, in a gesture of protective tenderness, in the sudden feeling of how delicately childlike she was, this adversary who had borne the constant challenge of his strength, but who should have had his protection.
“You’re carrying BO much,” he said, “and it’s I who make it harder for you . . .”
“No, Hank, you don’t and you know it.”
“I know that you have the strength not to let it hurt you, but it’s a strength I have no right to call upon. Yet I do, and I have no solution, no atonement to offer. I can only admit that I know it and that there’s no way I can ask you to forgive me.”