“What is the plan?”
“You realize, of course, the insurmountable difficulties of any sort of construction job during this period of emergency. It is—temporarily—impossible to lay new track. Therefore, the country’s top problem is to preserve the transportation industry as a whole, to preserve its existing plant and all of its existing facilities. The national survival requires—”
“What is the plan?”
“As a policy of national survival, the railroads of the country have been unified into a single team, pooling their resources. All of their gross revenue is turned over to the Railroad Pool Board in Washington, which acts as trustee for the industry as a whole, and divides the total income among the various railroads, according to a . . . a more modern principle of distribution.”
“What principle?”
“Now don’t worry, property rights have been fully preserved and protected, they’ve merely been given a new form. Every railroad retains independent responsibility for its own operations, its train schedules and the maintenance of its track and equipment. As its contribution to the national pool, every railroad permits any other, when conditions so require, to use its track and facilities without charge. At the end of the year, the Pool Board distributes the total gross income, and every individual railroad is paid, not on the haphazard, old-fashioned basis of the number of trains run or the tonnage of freight carried, but on the basis of its need—that is, the preservation of its track being its main need, every individual railroad is paid according to the mileage of the track which it owns and maintains.”
She heard the words; she understood the meaning; she was unable to make it real—to grant the respect of anger, concern, opposition to a nightmare piece of insanity that rested on nothing but people’s willingness to pretend to believe that it was sane. She felt a numbed emptiness —and the sense of being thrown far below the realm where moral indignation is pertinent.
“Whose track are we using for our transcontinental traffic?” she asked, her voice flat and dry.
“Why, our own, of course,” said Taggart hastily, “that is, from New York to Bedford, Illinois. We run our trains out of Bedford on the track of the Atlantic Southern.”
“To San Francisco?”
“Well, it’s much faster than that long detour you tried to establish.”
“We run our trains without charge for the use of the track?”
“Besides, your detour couldn’t have lasted, the Kansas Western rail was shot, and besides—”
“Without charge for the use of the Atlantic Southern track?”
“Well, we’re not charging them for the use of our Mississippi bridge, either.”
After a moment, she asked, “Have you looked at a map?”
“Sure,” said Meigs unexpectedly. “You own the largest track mileage of any railroad in the country. So you’ve got nothing to worry about.”
Eddie Willers burst out laughing.
Meigs glanced at him blankly, “What’s the matter with you?” he asked.
“Nothing,” said Eddie wearily, “nothing.”
“Mr. Meigs,” she said, “if you look at a map, you will see that two thirds of the cost of maintaining a track for our transcontinental traffic is given to us free and is paid by our competitor.”
“Why, sure,” he said, but his eyes narrowed, watching her suspiciously, as if he were wondering what motive prompted her to so explicit a statement.
“While we’re paid for owning miles of useless track which carries no traffic,” she said.
Meigs understood—and leaned back as if he had lost all further interest in the discussion.
“That’s not true!” snapped Taggart. “We’re running a great number of local trains to serve the region of our former transcontinental line—through Iowa, Nebraska and Colorado—and, on the other side of the tunnel, through California, Nevada and Utah.”
“We’re running two locals a day,” said Eddie Willers, in the dry, blankly innocent tone of a business report. “Fewer, some places.”
“What determines the number of trains which any given railroad is obligated to run?” she asked.
“The public welfare,” said Taggart “The Pool Board,” said Eddie.
“How many trains have been discontinued in the country in the past three weeks?”
“As a matter of fact,” said Taggart eagerly, “the plan has helped to harmonize the industry and to eliminate cutthroat competition.”
“It has eliminated thirty per cent of the trains run in-the country,” said Eddie. “The only competition left is in the applications to the Board for permission to cancel trains. The railroad to survive will be the one that manages to run no trains at all.”
“Has anybody calculated how long the Atlantic Southern is expected to be able to remain in business?”
“That’s no skin off your—” started Meigs.
“Please, Cuffy!” cried Taggart.
“The president of the Atlantic Southern,” said Eddie impassively, “has committed suicide.”
“That had nothing to do with this!” yelled Taggart. “It was over a personal matter!”
She remained silent. She sat, looking at their faces. There was still an element of wonder in the numbed indifference of her mind: Jim had always managed to switch the weight of his failures upon the strongest plants around him and to survive by destroying them to pay for his errors, as he had done with Dan Conway, as he had done with the industries of Colorado; but this did not have even the rationality of a looter—this pouncing upon the drained carcass of a weaker, a half bankrupt competitor for a moment’s delay, with nothing but a cracking bone between the pouncer and the abyss.
The impulse of the habit of reason almost pushed her to speak, to argue, to demonstrate the self-evident—but she looked at their faces and she saw that they knew it. In some terms different from hers, in some inconceivable manner of consciousness, they knew all that she could tell them, it was useless to prove to them the irrational horror of their course and of its consequences, both Meigs and Taggart knew it—and the secret of their consciousness was the means by which they escaped the finality of their knowledge, “I see,” she said quietly.
“Well, what would you rather have had me do?” screamed Taggart.
“Give up our transcontinental traffic? Go bankrupt? Turn the railroad into a miserable East Coast local?” Her two words seemed to have hit him worse than any indignant objection; he seemed to be shaking with terror at that which the quiet “I see” had acknowledged seeing. “I couldn’t help it! We had to have a transcontinental track! There was no way to get around the tunnel! We had no money to pay for any extra costs! Something had to be done! We had to have a track!”
Meigs was looking at him with a glance of part-astonishment, part disgust, “I am not arguing, Jim,” she said dryly.
“We couldn’t permit a railroad like Taggart Transcontinental to crash! It would have been a national catastrophe! We had to think of all the cities and industries and shippers and passengers and employees and stockholders whose lives depend on us! It wasn’t just for ourselves, it was for the public welfare! Everybody agrees that the Railroad Unification Plan is practical! The best-informed—”
“Jim,” she said, “if you have any further business to discuss with me —discuss it.”
“You’ve never considered the social angle of anything,” he said, in a sullen, retreating voice.
She noticed that this form of pretense was as unreal to Mr. Meigs as it was to her, though for an antipodal reason. He was looking at Jim with bored contempt. Jim appeared to her suddenly as a man who had tried to find a middle course between two poles—Meigs and herself —and who was now seeing that his course was narrowing and that he was to be ground between two straight walls.
“Mr. Meigs,” she asked, prompted by a touch of bitterly amused curiosity, “what is your economic plan for day after tomorrow?”
She saw his bleary brown eyes focus upon her without expression.
“You’re impractical,” he said.
“It’s perfectly useless to theorize about the future,” snapped Taggart, “when we have to take care of the emergency of the moment. In the long run—”
“In the long run, we’ll all be dead,” said Meigs.
Then, abruptly, he shot to his feet. “I’ll run along, Jim,” he said. “I’ve got no time to waste on conversations.” He added, “You talk to her about that matter of doing something to stop all those train wrecks—if she’s the little girl who’s such a wizard at railroading.” It was said inoffensively; he was a man who would not know when he was giving offense or taking it.
“I’ll see you later, Cuffy,” said Taggart, as Meigs walked out with no parting glance at any of them.
Taggart looked at her, expectantly and fearfully, as if dreading her comment, yet desperately hoping to hear some word, any word.
“Well?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Have you anything else to discuss?”
“Well, I . . . ” He sounded disappointed. “Yes!” he cried, in the tone of a desperate plunge. “I have another matter to discuss, the most important one of all, the—”