“If that’s what you trunk he’s done, or if you think that he’s told me some inconceivable revelation, then I can see how bewildering it would appear to you. But that’s not what he’s done. He merely named what I had lived by, what every man lives by—at and to the extent of such time as he doesn’t spend destroying himself.”
She knew that questions were futile and that there was nothing she could say to him.
He looked at her bowed head and said gently, “You’re a brave person, Miss Taggart. I know what you’re doing right now and what it’s costing you. Don’t torture yourself. Let me go.”
She rose to her feet. She was about to speak—but suddenly he saw her stare down, leap forward and seize the ashtray that stood on the edge of the desk.
The ashtray contained a cigarette butt stamped with the sign of the dollar.
“What’s the matter, Miss Taggart?”
“Did he . . . did he smoke this?”
“Who?”
“Your caller—did he smoke this cigarette?”
“Why, I don’t know . . . I guess so . . . yes, I think I did see him smoking a cigarette once . . . let me see . . . no, that’s not my brand, so it must be his.”
“Were there any other visitors in this office today?”
“No. But why, Miss Taggart? What’s the matter?”
“May I take this?”
“What? The cigarette butt?” He stared at her in bewilderment.
“Yes.”
“Why, sure—but what for?”
She was looking down at the butt in the palm of her hand as if it were a jewel. “I don’t know . . . I don’t know what good it will do me, except that it’s a clue to”—she smiled bitterly—”to a secret of my own.”
She stood, reluctant to leave, looking at Ken Danagger in the manner of a last look at one departing for the realm of no return.
He guessed it, smiled and extended his hand. “I won’t say goodbye,” he said, “because I’ll see you again in the not too distant future.”
“Oh,” she said eagerly, holding his hand clasped across the desk, “are you going to return?”
“No. You’re going to join me.”
There was only a faint red breath above the structures in the darkness, as if the mills were asleep but alive, with the even breathing of the furnaces and the distant heartbeats of the conveyor belts to show it.
Rearden stood at the window of his office, his hand pressed to the pane; in the perspective of distance, his hand covered half a mile of structures, as if he were trying to hold them.
He was looking at a long wall of vertical strips, which was the battery of coke ovens. A narrow door slid open with a brief gasp of flame, and a sheet of red-glowing coke came sliding out smoothly, like a slice of bread from the side of a giant toaster. It held still for an instant, then an angular crack shot through the slice and it crumbled into a gondola waiting on the rails below.
Danagger coal, he thought. These were the only words in his mind.
The rest was a feeling of loneliness, so vast that even its own pain seemed swallowed in an enormous void.
Yesterday, Dagny had told him the story of her futile attempt and given him Danagger’s message. This morning, he had heard the news that Danagger had disappeared. Through his sleepless night, then through the taut concentration on the duties of the day, his answer to the message had kept beating in his mind, the answer he would never have a chance to utter.
“The only man I ever loved.” It came from Ken Danagger, who had never expressed anything more personal than “Look here, Rearden.”
He thought: Why had we let it go? Why had we both been condemned —in the hours away from our desks—to an exile among dreary strangers who had made us give up all desire for rest, for friendship, for the sound of human voices? Could I now reclaim a single hour spent listening to my brother Philip and give it to Ken Danagger? Who made it our duty to accept, as the only reward for our work, the gray torture of pretending love for those who roused us to nothing but contempt?
We who were able to melt rock and metal for our purpose, why had we never sought that which we wanted from men?
He tried to choke the words in his mind, knowing that it was useless to think of them now. But the words were there and they were like words addressed to the dead: No, I don’t damn you for leaving—if that is the question and the pain which you took away with you. Why didn’t you give me a chance to tell you . . . what? that I approve?
. . . no, but that I can neither blame you nor follow you.
Closing his eyes, he permitted himself to experience for a moment the immense relief he would feel if he, too, were to walk off, abandoning everything. Under the shock of his loss, he felt a thin thread of envy. Why didn’t they come for me, too, whoever they are, and give me that irresistible reason which would make me go? But in the next moment, his shudder of anger told him that he would murder the man who’d attempt to approach him, he would murder before he could hear the words of the secret that would take him away from his mills.
It was late, his staff had gone, but he dreaded the road to his house and the emptiness of the evening ahead. He felt as if the enemy who had wiped out Ken Danagger, were waiting for him in the darkness beyond the glow of the mills. He was not invulnerable any longer, but whatever it was, he thought, wherever it came from, he was safe from it here, as in a circle of fires drawn about him to ward off evil.
He looked at the glittering white splashes on the dark windows of a structure in the distance; they were like motionless ripples of sunlight on water. It was the reflection of the neon sign that burned on the roof of the building above his head, saying: Rearden Steel. He thought of the night when he had wished to light a sign above his past, saying: Rearden Life. Why had he wished it? For whose eyes to see?
He thought—in bitter astonishment and for the first time—that the joyous pride he had once felt, had come from his respect for men, for the value of their admiration and their judgment. He did not feel it any longer. There were no men, he thought, to whose sight he could wish to offer that sign.
He turned brusquely away from the window. He seized his overcoat with the harsh sweep of a gesture intended to jolt him back into the discipline of action. He slammed the two folds of the overcoat about his body, he jerked the belt tight, then hastened to turn off the lights with rapid snaps of his hand on his way out of the office.
He threw the door open—and stopped. A single lamp was burning in a corner of the dimmed anteroom. The man who sat on the edge of a desk, in a pose of casual, patient waiting, was Francisco d’Anconia.
Rearden stood still and caught a brief instant when Francisco, not moving, looked at him with the hint of an amused smile that was like a wink between conspirators at a secret they both understood, but would not acknowledge. It was only an instant, almost too brief to grasp, because it seemed to him that Francisco rose at once at his entrance, with a movement of courteous deference. The movement suggested a strict formality, the denial of any attempt at presumption—but it stressed the intimacy of the fact that he uttered no word of greeting or explanation.
Rearden asked, his voice hard, “What are you doing here?”
“I thought that you would want to see me tonight, Mr. Rearden.”
“Why?”
“For the same reason that has kept you so late in your office. You were not working.”
“How long have you been sitting here?”
“An hour or two.”
“Why didn’t you knock at my door?”
“Would you have allowed me to come in?”
“You’re late in asking that question,”
“Shall I leave, Mr. Rearden?”
Rearden pointed to the door of his office. “Come in.”
Turning the lights on in the office, moving with unhurried control, Rearden thought that he must not allow himself to feel anything, but felt the color of life returning to him in the tensely quiet eagerness of an emotion which he would not identify. What he told himself consciously was: Be careful.
He sat down on the edge of his desk, crossed his arms, looked at Francisco, who remained standing respectfully before him, and asked with the cold hint of a smile, “Why did you come here?”