“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.