by Ayn Rand
She walked past a movie theater. Its lights wiped out half a block, leaving only a huge photograph and some letters suspended in blazing mid-air. The photograph was of a smiling young woman; looking at her face, one felt the weariness of having seen it for years, even while seeing it for the first time. The letters said: "... in a momentous drama giving the answer to the great problem: Should a woman tell?"
She walked past the door of a night club. A couple came staggering out to a taxicab. The girl had blurred eyes, a perspiring face, an ermine cape and a beautiful evening gown that had slipped off one shoulder like a slovenly housewife's bathrobe, revealing too much of her breast, not in a manner of daring, but in the manner of a drudge's indifference. Her escort steered her, gripping her naked arm; his face did not have the expression of a man anticipating a romantic adventure, but the sly look of a boy out to write obscenities on fences.
What had she hoped to find?--she thought, walking on. These were the things men lived by, the forms of their spirit, of their culture, of their enjoyment. She had seen nothing else anywhere, not for many years.
At the corner of the street where she lived, she bought a newspaper and went home.
Her apartment was two rooms on the top floor of a skyscraper. The sheets of glass in the corner window of her living room made it look like the prow of a ship in motion, and the lights of the city were like phosphorescent sparks on the black waves of steel and stone. When she turned on a lamp, long triangles of shadow cut the bare walls, in a geometrical pattern of light rays broken by a few angular pieces of furniture.
She stood in the middle of the room, alone between sky and city. There was only one thing that could give her the feeling she wanted to experience tonight; it was the only form of enjoyment she had found. She turned to a phonograph and put on a record of the music of Richard Halley.
It was his Fourth Concerto, the last work he had written. The crash of its opening chords swept the sights of the streets away from her mind. The Concerto was a great cry of rebellion. It was a "No" flung at some vast process of torture, a denial of suffering, a denial that held the agony of the struggle to break free. The sounds were like a voice saying: There is no necessity for pain--why, then, is the worst pain reserved for those who will not accept its necessity?--we who hold the love and the secret of joy, to what punishment have we been sentenced for it, and by whom? ... The sounds of torture became defiance, the statement of agony became a hymn to a distant vision for whose sake anything was worth enduring, even this. It was the song of rebellion--and of a desperate quest.
She sat still, her eyes closed, listening.
No one knew what had happened to Richard Halley, or why. The story of his life had been like a summary written to damn greatness by showing the price one pays for it. It had been a procession of years spent in garrets and basements, years that had taken the gray tinge of the walls imprisoning a man whose music overflowed with violent color. It had been the gray of a struggle against long flights of unlighted tenement stairs, against frozen plumbing, against the price of a sandwich in an ill-smelling delicatessen store, against the faces of men who listened to music, their eyes empty. It had been a struggle without the relief of violence, without the recognition of finding a conscious enemy, with only a deaf wall to batter, a wall of the most effective soundproofing: indifference, that swallowed blows, chords and screams--a battle of silence, for a man who could give to sounds a greater eloquence than they had ever carried--the silence of obscurity, of loneliness, of the nights when some rare orchestra played one of his works and he looked at the darkness, knowing that his soul went in trembling, widening circles from a radio tower through the air of the city, but there were no receivers tuned to hear it.
"The music of Richard Halley has a quality of the heroic. Our age has outgrown that stuff," said one critic. "The music of Richard Halley is out of key with our times. It has a tone of ecstasy. Who cares for ecstasy nowadays?" said another.
His life had been a summary of the lives of all the men whose reward is a monument in a public park a hundred years after the time when a reward can matter--except that Richard Halley did not die soon enough. He lived to see the night which, by the accepted laws of history, he was not supposed to see. He was forty-three years old and it was the opening night of Phaethon, an opera he had written at the age of twenty-four. He had changed the ancient Greek myth to his own purpose and meaning: Phaethon, the young son of Helios, who stole his father's chariot and, in ambitious audacity, attempted to drive the sun across the sky, did not perish, as he perished in the myth; in Halley's opera, Phaethon succeeded. The opera had been performed then, nineteen years ago, and had closed after one performance, to the sound of booing and catcalls. That night, Richard Halley had walked the streets of the city till dawn, trying to find an answer to a question, which he did not find.
On the night when the opera was presented again, nineteen years later, the last sounds of the music crashed into the sounds of the greatest ovation the opera house had ever heard. The ancient walls could not contain it, the sounds of cheering burst through to the lobbies, to the stairs, to the streets, to the boy who had walked those streets nineteen years ago.
Dagny was in the audience on the night of the ovation. She was one of the few who had known the music of Richard Halley much earlier; but she had never seen him. She saw him being pushed out on the stage, saw him facing the enormous spread of waving arms and cheering heads. He stood without moving, a tall, emaciated man with graying hair. He did not bow, did not smile; he just stood there, looking at the crowd. His face had the quiet, earnest look of a man staring at a question.
"The music of Richard Halley," wrote a critic next morning, "belongs to mankind. It is the product and the expression of the greatness of the people." "There is an inspiring lesson," said a minister, "in the life of Richard Halley. He has had a terrible struggle, but what does that matter? It is proper, it is noble that he should have endured suffering, injustice, abuse at the hands of his brothers--in order to enrich their lives and teach them to appreciate the beauty of great music."
On the day after the opening, Richard Halley retired.
He gave no explanation. He merely told his publishers that his career was over. He sold them the rights to his works for a modest sum, even though he knew that his royalties would now bring him a fortune. He went away, leaving no address. It was eight years ago; no one had seen him since.
Dagny listened to the Fourth Concerto, her head thrown back, her eyes closed. She lay half-stretched across the corner of a couch, her body relaxed and still; but tension stressed the shape of her mouth on her motionless face, a sensual shape drawn in lines of longing.
After a while, she opened her eyes. She noticed the newspaper she had thrown down on the couch. She reached for it absently, to turn the vapid headlines out of sight. The paper fell open. She saw the photograph of a face she knew, and the heading of a story. She slammed the pages shut and flung them aside.
It was the face of Francisco d'Anconia. The heading said that he had arrived in New York. What of it?--she thought. She would not have to see him. She had not seen him for years.
She sat looking down at the newspaper on the floor. Don't read it, she thought; don't look at it. But the face, she thought, had not changed. How could a face remain the same when everything else was gone? She wished they had not caught a picture of him when he smiled. That kind of smile did not belong in the pages of a newspaper. It was the smile of a man who is able to see, to know and to create the glory of existence. It was the mocking, challenging smile of a brilliant intelligence. Don't read it, she thought; not now--not to that music--oh, not to that music!
She reached for the paper and opened it.
The story said that Senor Francisco d'Anconia had granted an interview to the press in his suite at the Wayne-Falkland Hotel. He said that he had come to New York for two important reasons: a hat-check girl at the Cub Club, and the liverwurst at Moe's Delicatessen on Third Avenue. He had n
othing to say about the coming divorce trial of Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert Vail. Mrs. Vail, a lady of noble breeding and unusual loveliness, had taken a shot at her distinguished young husband, some months ago, publicly declaring that she wished to get rid of him for the sake of her lover, Francisco d'Anconia. She had given to the press a detailed account of her secret romance, including a description of the night of last New Year's Eve which she had spent at d'Anconia's villa in the Andes. Her husband had survived the shot and had sued for divorce. She had countered with a suit for half of her husband's millions, and with a recital of his private life which, she said, made hers look innocent. All of that had been splashed over the newspapers for weeks. But Senor d'Anconia had nothing to say about it, when the reporters questioned him. Would he deny Mrs. Vail's story, they asked. "I never deny anything," he answered. The reporters had been astonished by his sudden arrival in town; they had thought that he would not wish to be there just when the worst of the scandal was about to explode on the front pages. But they had been wrong. Francisco d'Anconia added one more comment to the reasons for his arrival. "I wanted to witness the farce," he said.
Dagny let the paper slip to the floor. She sat, bent over, her head on her arms. She did not move, but the strands of hair, hanging down to her knees, trembled in sudden jolts once in a while.
The great chords of Halley's music went on, filling the room, piercing the glass of the windows, streaming out over the city. She was hearing the music. It was her quest, her cry.
James Taggart glanced about the living room of his apartment, wondering what time it was; he did not feel like moving to find his watch. He sat in an armchair, dressed in wrinkled pajamas, barefooted; it was too much trouble to look for his slippers. The light of the gray sky in the windows hurt his eyes, still sticky with sleep. He felt, inside his skull, the nasty heaviness which is about to become a headache. He wondered angrily why he had stumbled out into the living room. Oh yes, he remembered, to look for the time.
He slumped sidewise over the arm of the chair and caught sight of a clock on a distant building: it was twenty minutes past noon.
Through the open door of the bedroom, he heard Betty Pope washing her teeth in the bathroom beyond. Her girdle lay on the floor, by the side of a chair with the rest of her clothes; the girdle was a faded pink, with broken strands of rubber.
"Hurry up, will you?" he called irritably. "I've got to dress."
She did not answer. She had left the door of the bathroom open; he could hear the sound of gargling.
Why do I do those things?--he thought, remembering last night. But it was too much trouble to look for an answer.
Betty Pope came into the living room, dragging the folds of a satin negligee harlequin-checkered in orange and purple. She looked awful in a negligee, thought Taggart; she was ever so much better in a riding habit, in the photographs on the society pages of the newspapers. She was a lanky girl, all bones and loose joints that did not move smoothly. She had a homely face, a bad complexion and a look of impertinent condescension derived from the fact that she belonged to one of the very best families.
"Aw, hell!" she said at nothing in particular, stretching herself to limber up. "Jim, where are your nail clippers? I've got to trim my toe-nails."
"I don't know. I have a headache. Do it at home."
"You look unappetizing in the morning," she said indifferently. "You look like a snail."
"Why don't you shut up?"
She wandered aimlessly about the room. "I don't want to go home," she said with no particular feeling. "I hate morning. Here's another day and nothing to do. I've got a tea session on for this afternoon, at Liz Blane's. Oh well, it might be fun, because Liz is a bitch." She picked up a glass and swallowed the stale remnant of a drink. "Why don't you have them repair your air-conditioner? This place smells."
"Are you through in the bathroom?" he asked. "I have to dress. I have an important engagement today."
"Go right in. I don't mind. I'll share the bathroom with you. I hate to be rushed."
While he shaved, he saw her dressing in front of the open bathroom door. She took a long time twisting herself into her girdle, hooking garters to her stockings, pulling on an ungainly, expensive tweed suit. The harlequin negligee, picked from an advertisement in the smartest fashion magazine, was like a uniform which she knew to be expected on certain occasions, which she had worn dutifully for a specified purpose and then discarded.
The nature of their relationship had the same quality. There was no passion in it, no desire, no actual pleasure, not even a sense of shame. To them, the act of sex was neither joy nor sin. It meant nothing. They had heard that men and women were supposed to sleep together, so they did.
"Jim, why don't you take me to the Armenian restaurant tonight?" she asked. "I love shish-kebab."
"I can't," he answered angrily through the soap lather on his face. "I've got a busy day ahead."
"Why don't you cancel it?"
"What?"
"Whatever it is."
"It is very important, my dear. It is a meeting of our Board of Directors."
"Oh, don't be stuffy about your damn railroad. It's boring. I hate businessmen. They're dull."
He did not answer.
She glanced at him slyly, and her voice acquired a livelier note when she drawled, "Jock Benson said that you have a soft snap on that railroad anyway, because it's your sister who runs the whole works."
"Oh, he did, did he?"
"I think that your sister is awful. I think it's disgusting--a woman acting like a grease-monkey and posing around like a big executive. It's so unfeminine. Who does she think she is, anyway?"
Taggart stepped out to the threshold. He leaned against the doorjamb, studying Betty Pope. There was a faint smile on his face, sarcastic and confident. They had, he thought, a bond in common.
"It might interest you to know, my dear," he said, "that I'm putting the skids under my sister this afternoon."
"No?" she said, interested. "Really?"
"And that is why this Board meeting is so important."
"Are you really going to kick her out?"
"No. That's not necessary or advisable. I shall merely put her in her place. It's the chance I've been waiting for."
"You got something on her? Some scandal?"
"No, no. You wouldn't understand. It's merely that she's gone too far, for once, and she's going to get slapped down. She's pulled an inexcusable sort of stunt, without consulting anybody. It's a serious offense against our Mexican neighbors. When the Board hears about it, they'll pass a couple of new rulings on the Operating Department, which will make my sister a little easier to manage."
"You're smart, Jim," she said.
"I'd better get dressed." He sounded pleased. He turned back to the washbowl, adding cheerfully, "Maybe I will take you out tonight and buy you some shish-kebab."
The telephone rang.
He lifted the receiver. The operator announced a long-distance call from Mexico City.
The hysterical voice that came on the wire was that of his political man in Mexico.
"I couldn't help it, Jim!" it gulped. "I couldn't help it! ... We had no warning, I swear to God, nobody suspected, nobody saw it coming, I've done my best, you can't blame me, Jim, it was a bolt out of the blue! The decree came out this morning, just five minutes ago, they sprang it on us like that, without any notice! The government of the People's State of Mexico has nationalized the San Sebastian Mines and the San Sebastian Railroad."
"... and, therefore, I can assure the gentlemen of the Board that there is no occasion for panic. The event of this morning is a regrettable development, but I have full confidence--based on my knowledge of the inner processes shaping our foreign policy in Washington--that our government will negotiate an equitable settlement with the government of the People's State of Mexico, and that we will receive full and just compensation for our property."
James Taggart stood at the long table, addressing the Board of Dire
ctors. His voice was precise and monotonous; it connoted safety.
"I am glad to report, however, that I foresaw the possibility of such a turn of events and took every precaution to protect the interests of Taggart Transcontinental. Some months ago, I instructed our Operating Department to cut the schedule on the San Sebastian Line down to a single train a day, and to remove from it our best motive power and rolling stock, as well as every piece of equipment that could be moved. The Mexican government was able to seize nothing but a few wooden cars and one superannuated locomotive. My decision has saved the company many millions of dollars--I shall have the exact figures computed and submit them to you. I do feel, however, that our stockholders will be justified in expecting that those who bore the major responsibility for this venture should now bear the consequences of their negligence. I would suggest, therefore, that we request the resignation of Mr. Clarence Eddington, our economic consultant, who recommended the construction of the San Sebastian Line, and of Mr. Jules Mott, our representative in Mexico City."
The men sat around the long table, listening. They did not think of what they would have to do, but of what they would have to say to the men they represented. Taggart's speech gave them what they needed.
Orren Boyle was waiting for him, when Taggart returned to his office. Once they were alone, Taggart's manner changed. He leaned against the desk, sagging, his face loose and white.
"Well?" he asked.
Boyle spread his hands out helplessly. "I've checked, Jim," he said. "It's straight all right: d'Anconia's lost fifteen million dollars of his own money in those mines. No, there wasn't anything phony about that, he didn't pull any sort of trick, he put up his own cash and now he's lost it."
"Well, what's he going to do about it?"
"That--I don't know. Nobody does."
"He's not going to let himself be robbed, is he? He's too smart for that. He must have something up his sleeve."