Holding the newspaper in her hand, she walked out of her office and on toward the hall. She knew, crossing the anteroom, that the faces of her staff were turned to her, but they seemed to be many years away.
She walked down the hall, moving swiftly but without effort, with the same sensation of knowing that her feet were probably touching the ground but that she did not feel it. She did not know how many rooms she crossed to reach Jim’s office, or whether there had been any people in her way, she knew the direction to take and the door to pull open to enter unannounced and walk toward his desk.
The newspaper was twisted into a roll by the time she stood before him. She threw it at his face, it struck his cheek and fell down to the carpet.
“There’s my resignation, Jim,” she said. “I won’t work as a slave or as a slave-driver.”
She did not hear the sound of his gasp; it came with the sound of the door closing after her.
She went back to her office and, crossing the anteroom, signaled Eddie to follow her inside.
She said, her voice calm and clear, “I have resigned.”
He nodded silently.
“I don’t know as yet what I’ll do in the future. I’m going away, to think it over and to decide. If you want to follow me, I’ll be at the lodge in Woodstock.” It was an old hunting cabin in a forest of the Berkshire Mountains, which she had inherited from her father and had not visited for years.
“I want to follow,” he whispered, “I want to quit, and . . . and I can’t. I can’t make myself do it.”
“Then will you do me a favor?”
“Of course.”
“Don’t communicate with me about the railroad. I don’t want to hear it. Don’t tell anyone where I am, except Hank Rearden. If he asks, tell him about the cabin and how to get there. But no one else. I don’t want to see anybody.”
“AU right.”
“Promise?”
“Of course.”
“When I decide what’s to become of me, I’ll let you know.”
“Ill wait.”
“That’s all, Eddie.”
He knew that every word was measured and that nothing else could be said between them at this moment. He inclined his head, letting it say the rest, then walked out of the office.
She saw the chief engineer’s report still lying open on her desk, and thought that she had to order him at once to resume the work on the Winston section, then remembered that it was not her problem any longer. She felt no pain. She knew that the pain would come later and that it would be a tearing agony of pain, and that the numbness of this moment was a rest granted to her, not after, but before, to make her ready to bear it. But it did not matter. If that is required of me, then I’ll bear it—she thought.
She sat down at her desk and telephoned Rearden at his mills in Pennsylvania.
“Hello, dearest,” he said. He said it simply and clearly, as if he wanted to say it because it was real and right, and he needed to hold on to the concepts of reality and Tightness.
“Hank, I’ve quit.”
“I see.” He sounded as if he had expected it.
“Nobody came to get me, no destroyer, perhaps there never was any destroyer, after all. I don’t know what I’ll do next, but I have to get away, so that I won’t have to see any of them for a while. Then I’ll decide. I know that you can’t go with me right now.”
“No. I have two weeks in which they expect me to sign their Gift Certificate. I want to be right here when the two weeks expire.”
“Do you need me—for the two weeks?”
“No. It’s worse for you than for me. You have no way to fight them. I have. I think I’m glad they did it. It’s clear and final. Don’t worry about me. Rest. Rest from all of it, first.”
“Yes.”
“Where are you going?”
“To the country. To a cabin I own in the Berkshires. If you want to see me, Eddie Willers will tell you the way to get there. I’ll be back in two weeks.”
“Will you do me a favor?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t come back until I come for you.”
“But I want to be here, when it happens.”
“Leave that up to me.”
“Whatever they do to you, I want it done to me also.”
“Leave it up to me. Dearest, don’t you understand? I think that what I want most right now is what you want: not to see any of them. But I have to stay here for a while. So it will help me if I know that you, at least, are out of their reach. I want to keep one clean point in my mind, to lean against. It will be only a short while—and then I’ll come for you. Do you understand?”
“Yes, my darling. So long.”
It was weightlessly easy to walk out of her office and down the stretching halls of Taggart Transcontinental. She walked, looking ahead, her steps advancing with the unbroken, unhurried rhythm of finality.
Her face was held level and it had a look of astonishment, of acceptance, of repose.
She walked across the concourse of the Terminal. She saw the statue of Nathaniel Taggart. But she felt no pain from it and no reproach, only the rising fullness of her love, only the feeling that she was going to join him, not in death, but in that which had been his life.
The first man to quit at Rearden Steel was Tom Colby, rolling mill foreman, head of the Rearden Steel Workers Union. For ten years, he had heard himself denounced throughout the country, because his was a “company union” and because he had never engaged in a violent conflict with the management. This was true: no conflict had ever been necessary; Rearden paid a higher wage scale than any union scale in the country, for which he demanded—and got—the best labor force to be found anywhere.
When Tom Colby told him that he was quitting, Rearden nodded, without comment or questions.
“I won’t work under these conditions, myself,” Colby added quietly, “and I won’t help, to keep the men working. They trust me. I won’t be the Judas goat leading them to the stockyards.”
“What are you going to do for a living?” asked Rearden.
“I’ve saved enough to last me for about a year.”
“And after that?”
Colby shrugged.
Rearden thought of the boy with the angry eyes, who mined coal at night as a criminal. He thought of all the dark roads, the alleys, the back yards of the country, where the best of the country’s men would now exchange their services in jungle barter, in chance jobs, in unrecorded transactions. He thought of the end of that road.
Tom Colby seemed to know what he was thinking. “You’re on your way to end up right alongside of me, Mr. Rearden,” he said. “Are you going to sign your brains over to them?”
“No.”
“And after that?”
Rearden shrugged.
Colby’s eyes watched him for a moment, pale, shrewd eyes in a furnace-tanned face with soot-engraved wrinkles. “They’ve been telling us for years that it’s you against me, Mr. Rearden. But it isn’t. It’s Orren Boyle and Fred Kinnan against you and me.”
“I know it.”
The Wet Nurse had never entered Rearden’s office, as if sensing that that was a place he had no right to enter. He always waited to catch a glimpse of Rearden outside. The directive had attached him to his job, as the mills’ official watchdog of over-or-under-production. He stopped Rearden, a few days later, in an alley between the rows of open-hearth furnaces. There was an odd look of fierceness on the boy’s face.
“Mr. Rearden,” he said, “I wanted to tell you that if you want to pour ten times the quota of Rearden Metal or steel or pig iron or anything, and bootleg it all over the place to anybody at any price—I wanted to tell you to go ahead. Ill fix it up. I’ll juggle the books, I’ll fake the reports, I’ll get phony witnesses, I’ll forge affidavits, I’ll commit perjury—so you don’t have to worry, there won’t be any trouble!”
“Now why do you want to do that?” asked Rearden, smiling, but his smile vanished when he heard the boy answer earnestly: “Because I want, for once, to do something moral.”
“That’s not the way to be moral—” Rearden started, and stopped abruptly, realizing that- it was the way, the only way left, realizing through how many twists of intellectual corruption upon corruption this boy had to struggle toward his momentous discovery.
“I guess that’s not the word,” the boy said sheepishly. “I know it’s a stuffy, old-fashioned word. That’s not what I meant. I meant—” It was a sudden, desperate cry of incredulous anger: “Mr. Rearden, they have no right to do it!”