“Mr. Danagger will be free in a moment, Miss Taggart. He has a visitor in his office. Will you excuse it, please?” said the secretary.
Through the two hours of her flight to Pittsburgh, Dagny had been tensely unable to justify her anxiety or to dismiss it; there was no reason to count minutes, yet she had felt a blind desire to hurry. The anxiety vanished when she entered the anteroom of Ken Danagger’s office: she had reached him, nothing had happened to prevent it, she felt safety, confidence and an enormous sense of relief.
The words of the secretary demolished it. You’re becoming a coward—thought Dagny., feeling a causeless jolt of dread at the words, out of all proportion to their meaning.
“I am so sorry, Miss Taggart.” She heard the secretary’s respectful, solicitous voice and realized that she had stood there without answering. “Mr. Danagger will be with you in just a moment. Won’t you sit down?” The voice conveyed an anxious concern over the impropriety of keeping her waiting.
Dagny smiled. “Oh, that’s quite all right.”
She sat down in a wooden armchair, facing the secretary’s railing.
She reached for a cigarette and stopped, wondering whether she would have time to finish it, hoping that she would not, then lighted it brusquely.
It was an old-fashioned frame building, this headquarters of the great Danagger Coal Company. Somewhere in the hills beyond the window were the pits where Ken Danagger had once worked as a miner. He had never moved his office away from the coal fields.
She could see the mine entrances cut into the hillsides, small frames of metal girders, that led to an immense underground kingdom. They seemed precariously modest, lost in the violent orange and red of the hills. . . . Under a harsh blue sky, in the sunlight of late October, the sea of leaves looked like a sea of fire . . . like waves rolling to swallow the fragile posts of the mine doorways. She shuddered and looked away: she thought of the flaming leaves spread over the hills of Wisconsin, on the road to Starnesville.
She noticed that there was only a stub left of the cigarette between her fingers. She lighted another.
When she glanced at the clock on the wall of the anteroom, she caught the secretary glancing at it at the same time. Her appointment was for three o’clock; the white dial said: 3:12.
“Please forgive it, Miss Taggart,” said the secretary, “Mr. Danagger will be through, any moment now, Mr. Danagger is extremely punctual about Ms appointments. Please believe me that this is unprecedented.”
“I know it.” She knew that Ken Danagger was as rigidly exact about his schedule as a railroad timetable and that he had been known to cancel an interview if a caller permitted himself to arrive five minutes late.
The secretary was an elderly spinster with a forbidding manner: a manner of even-toned courtesy impervious to any shock, just as her spotless white blouse was impervious to an atmosphere filled with coal dust. Dagny thought it strange that a hardened, well-trained woman of this type should appear to be nervous: she volunteered no conversation, she sat still, bent over some pages of paper on her desk. Half of Dagny’s cigarette had gone in smoke, while the woman still sat looking at the same page.
When she raised her head to glance at the clock, the 4ial said: 3:30.
“I know that this is inexcusable, Miss Taggart.” The note of apprehension was obvious in her voice now. “I am unable to understand it.”
“Would you mind telling Mr. Danagger that I’m here?”
“I can’t!” It was almost a cry; she saw Dagny’s astonished glance and felt obliged to explain: “Mr. Danagger called me, on the interoffice communicator, and told me that he was not to be interrupted under any circumstances or for any reason whatever.”
“When did he do that?”
The moment’s pause was like a small air cushion for the answer: “Two hours ago.”
Dagny looked at the closed door of Danagger’s office. She could hear the sound of a voice beyond the door, but so faintly that she could not tell whether it was the voice of one man or the conversation of two; she could not distinguish the words or the emotional quality of the tone: it was only a low, even progression of sounds that seemed normal and did not convey the pitch of raised voices.
“How long has Mr. Danagger been in conference?” she asked.
“Since one o’clock,” said the secretary grimly, then added in apology, “It was an unscheduled caller, or Mr. Danagger would never have permitted this to happen.”
The door was not locked, thought Dagny; she felt an unreasoning desire to tear it open and walk in—it was only a few wooden boards with a brass knob, it would require only a small muscular contraction of her arm—but she looked away, knowing that the power of a civilized order and of Ken Danagger’s right was more impregnable a barrier than any lock.
She found herself staring at the stubs of her cigarettes in the ashtray stand beside her, and wondered why it gave her a sharper feeling of apprehension. Then she realized that she was thinking of Hugh Akston: she had written to him, at his diner in Wyoming, asking him to tell her where he had obtained the cigarette with the dollar sign; her letter had come back, with a postal inscription to inform her that he had moved away, leaving no forwarding address.
She told herself angrily that this had no connection with the present moment and that she had to control her nerves. But her hand jerked to press the button of the ashtray and make the cigarette stubs vanish inside the stand.
As she looked up, her eyes met the glance of the secretary watching her. “I am sorry, Miss Taggart. I don’t know what to do about it.”
It was an openly desperate plea. “I don’t dare interrupt.”
Dagny asked slowly, as a demand, in defiance of office etiquette, “Who is with Mr. Danagger?”
“I don’t know, Miss Taggart. I have never seen the gentleman before.” She noticed the sudden, fixed stillness of Dagny’s eyes and added, “I think it’s a childhood friend of Mr. Danagger.”
“Oh!” said Dagny, relieved.
“He came in unannounced and asked to see Mr. Danagger and said that this was an appointment which Mr. Danagger had made with him forty years ago,”
“How old is Mr. Danagger?”
“Fifty-two,” said the secretary. She added reflectively, in the tone of a casual remark, “Mr. Danagger started working at the age of twelve.”
After another silence, she added, “The strange thing is that the visitor does not look as if he’s even forty years old. He seems to be a man in his thirties.”
“Did he give his name?”
“No.”
“What does he look like?”
The secretary smiled with sudden animation, as if she were about to utter an enthusiastic compliment, but the smile vanished abruptly.
“I don’t know,” she answered uneasily. “He’s hard to describe. He has a strange face.”
They had been silent for a long time, and the hands of the dial were approaching 3:50 when the buzzer rang on the secretary’s desk—the bell from Danagger’s office, the signal of permission to enter.
They both leaped to their feet, and the secretary rushed forward, smiling with relief, hastening to open the door.
As she entered Danagger’s office, Dagny saw the private exit door closing after the caller who had preceded her. She heard the knock of the door against the jamb and the faint tinkle of the glass panel.
She saw the man who had left, by his reflection on Ken Danagger’s face. It was not the face she had seen in the courtroom, it was not the face she had known for years as a countenance of unchanging, unfeeling rigidity—it was a face which a young man of twenty should hope for, but could not achieve, a face from which every sign of strain had been wiped out, so that the lined cheeks, the creased forehead, the graying hair—like elements rearranged by a new theme—were made to form a composition of hope, eagerness and guiltless serenity: the theme was deliverance.
He did not rise when she entered—he looked as if he had not quite returned to the reality of the moment and had forgotten the proper routine—but he smiled at her with such simple benevolence that she found herself smiling in answer. She caught herself thinking that this was the way every human being should greet another—and she lost her anxiety, feeling suddenly certain that all was well and that nothing to be feared could exist.
“How do you do, Miss Taggart,” he said. “Forgive me, I think that I have kept you waiting. Please sit down.” He pointed to the chair in front of his desk.
“I didn’t mind waiting,” she said. “I’m grateful that you gave me this appointment. I was extremely anxious to speak to you on a matter of urgent importance.”