by Ayn Rand
"Do you mind if we don't discuss it?"
She made a tightening, sidewise movement with her lips, the equivalent of a shrug, and walked into the bedroom.
He stood at the window, looking down at the streaming roofs of automobiles, letting his eyes rest on something while his faculty of sight was disconnected. His mind was still focused on the crowd in the ballroom downstairs and on two figures in that crowd. But as his living room remained on the edge of his vision, so the sense of some action he had to perform remained on the edge of his consciousness. He grasped it for a moment--it was the fact that he had to remove his evening clothes--but farther beyond the edge there was the feeling of reluctance to undress in the presence of a strange woman in his bedroom, and he forgot it again in the next moment.
Lillian came out, as trimly groomed as she had arrived, the beige traveling suit outlining her figure with efficient tightness, the hat tilted over half a head of hair set in waves. She carried her suitcase, swinging it a little, as if in demonstration of her ability to carry it.
He reached over mechanically and took the suitcase out of her hand.
"What are you doing?" she asked.
"I'm going to take you to the station."
"Like this? You haven't changed your clothes."
"It doesn't matter."
"You don't have to escort me. I'm quite able to find my own way. If you have business appointments tomorrow, you'd better go to bed."
He did not answer, but walked to the door, held it open for her and followed her to the elevator.
They remained silent when they rode in a taxicab to the station. At such moments as he remembered her presence, he noticed that she sat efficiently straight, almost flaunting the perfection of her poise; she seemed alertly awake and contented, as if she were starting out on a purposeful journey of early morning.
The cab stopped at the entrance to the Taggart Terminal. The bright lights flooding the great glass doorway transformed the lateness of the hour into a sense of active, timeless security. Lillian jumped lightly out of the cab, saying, "No, no, you don't have to get out, drive on back. Will you be home for dinner tomorrow--or next month?"
"I'll telephone you," he said.
She waved her gloved hand at him and disappeared into the lights of the entrance. As the cab started forward, he gave the driver the address of Dagny's apartment.
The apartment was dark when he entered, but the door to her bedroom was half-open and he heard her voice saying, "Hello, Hank."
He walked in, asking, "Were you asleep?"
"No."
He switched on the light. She lay in bed, her head propped by the pillow, her hair falling smoothly to her shoulders, as if she had not moved for a long time; but her face was untroubled. She looked like a schoolgirl, with the tailored collar of a pale blue nightgown lying severely high at the base of her throat; the nightgown's front was a deliberate contrast to the severity, a spread of pale blue embroidery that looked luxuriously adult and feminine.
He sat down on the edge of the bed--and she smiled, noticing that the stern formality of his full dress clothes made his action so simply, naturally intimate. He smiled in answer. He had come, prepared to reject the forgiveness she had granted him at the party, as one rejects a favor from too generous an adversary. Instead, he reached out suddenly and moved his hand over her forehead, down the line of her hair, in a gesture of protective tenderness, in the sudden feeling of how delicately childlike she was, this adversary who had borne the constant challenge of his strength, but who should have had his protection.
"You're carrying so much," he said, "and it's I who make it harder for you . . ."
"No, Hank, you don't and you know it."
"I know that you have the strength not to let it hurt you, but it's a strength I have no right to call upon. Yet I do, and I have no solution, no atonement to offer. I can only admit that I know it and that there's no way I can ask you to forgive me."
"There's nothing to forgive."
"I had no right to bring her into your presence."
"It did not hurt me. Only . . ."
"Yes?"
".... only seeing the way you suffered . . . was hard to see."
"I don't think that suffering makes up for anything, but whatever I felt, I didn't suffer enough. If there's one thing I loathe, it's to speak of my own suffering--that should be no one's concern but mine. But if you want to know, since you know it already--yes, it was hell for me. And I wish it were worse. At least, I'm not letting myself get away with it."
He said it sternly, without emotion, as an impersonal verdict upon himself. She smiled, in amused sadness, she took his hand and pressed it to her lips, and shook her head in rejection of the verdict, holding her face hidden against his hand.
"What do you mean?" he asked softly.
"Nothing ..." Then she raised her head and said firmly, "Hank, I knew you were married. I knew what I was doing. I chose to do it. There's nothing that you owe me, no duty that you have to consider."
He shook his head slowly, in protest.
"Hank, I want nothing from you except what you wish to give me. Do you remember that you called me a trader once? I want you to come to me seeking nothing but your own enjoyment. So long as you wish to remain married, whatever your reason, I have no right to resent it. My way of trading is to know that the joy you give me is paid for by the joy you get from me--not by your suffering or mine. I don't accept sacrifices and I don't make them. If you asked me for more than you meant to me, I would refuse. If you asked me to give up the railroad, I'd leave you. If ever the pleasure of one has to be bought by the pain of the other, there better be no trade at all. A trade by which one gains and the other loses is a fraud. You don't do it in business, Hank. Don't do it in your own life."
Like a dim sound track under her words, he was hearing the words said to him by Lillian; he was seeing the distance between the two, the difference in what they sought from him and from life.
"Dagny, what do you think of my marriage?"
"I have no right to think of it."
"You must have wondered about it."
"I did . . . before I came to Ellis Wyatt's house. Not since."
"You've never asked me a question about it."
"And won't."
He was silent for a moment, then said, looking straight at her, underscoring his first rejection of the privacy she had always granted him, "There's one thing I want you to know: I have not touched her since . . . Ellis Wyatt's house."
"I'm glad."
"Did you think I could?"
"I've never permitted myself to wonder about that."
"Dagny, do you mean that if I had, you . . . you'd accept that, too?"
"Yes."
"You wouldn't hate it?"
"I'd hate it more than I can tell you. But if that were your choice, I would accept it. I want you, Hank."
He took her hand and raised it to his lips, she felt the moment's struggle in his body, in the sudden movement with which he came down, half-collapsing, and let his mouth cling to her shoulder. Then he pulled her forward, he pulled the length of her body in the pale blue nightgown to lie stretched across his knees, he held it with an unsmiling violence, as if in hatred for her words and as if they were the words he had most wanted to hear.
He bent his face down to hers and she heard the question that had come again and again in the nights of the year behind them, always torn out of him involuntarily, always as a sudden break that betrayed his constant, secret torture: "Who was your first man?"
She strained back, trying to draw away from him, but he held her. "No, Hank," she said, her face hard.
The brief, taut movement of his lips was a smile. "I know that you won't answer it, but I won't stop asking--because that is what I'll never accept."
"Ask yourself why you won't accept it."
He answered, his hand moving slowly from her breasts to her knees, as if stressing his ownership and hating it, "Because . . . the things
you've permitted me to do ... I didn't think you could, not ever, not even for me ... but to find that you did, and more: that you had permitted another man, had wanted him to, had--"
"Do you understand what you're saying? That you've never accepted my wanting you, either--you've never accepted that I should want you, just as I should have wanted him, once."
He said, his voice low, "That's true."
She tore herself away from him with a brusque, twisting movement, she stood up, but she stood looking down at him with a faint smile, and she said softly, "Do you know your only real guilt? With the greatest capacity for it, you've never learned to enjoy yourself. You've always rejected your own pleasure too easily. You've been willing to bear too much."
"He said that, too."
"Who?"
"Francisco d.'Anconia."
He wondered why he had the impression that the name shocked her and that she answered an instant too late, "He said that to you?"
"We were talking about quite a different subject."
In a moment, she said calmly, "I saw you talking to him. Which one of you was insulting the other, this time?"
"We weren't. Dagny, what do you think of him?"
"I think that he's done it intentionally--that smash-up we're in for, .tomorrow."
"I know he has. Still, what do you think of him as a person?"
"I don't know. I ought to think that he's the most depraved person I've ever met."
"You ought to? But you don't?"
"No. I can't quite make myself feel certain of it."
He smiled. "That's what's strange about him. I know that he's a liar, a loafer, a cheap playboy, the most viciously irresponsible waste of a human being I ever imagined possible. Yet, when I look at him, I feel that if ever there was a man to whom I would entrust my life, he's the .one."
She gasped. "Hank, are you saying that you like him?"
"I'm saying that I didn't know what it meant, to like a man, I didn't know how much I missed it--until I met him."
"Good God, Hank, you've fallen for him!"
"Yes--I think I have." He smiled. "Why does it frighten you?"
"Because . . . because I think he's going to hurt you in some terrible way . . . and the more you see in him, the harder it will be to bear . . . and it will take you a long time to get over it, if ever.... I feel that I ought to warn you against him, but I can.'t--because I'm certain of nothing about him, not even whether he's the greatest or the lowest man on earth."
"I'm certain of nothing about him--except that I like him."
"But think of what he's done. It's not Jim and Boyle that he's hurt, it's you and me and Ken Danagger and the rest of us, because Jim's gang will merely take it out on us--and it's going to be another disaster, like the Wyatt fire."
"Yes . . . yes, like the Wyatt fire. But, you know, I don't think I care too much about that. What's one more disaster? Everything's going anyway, it's only a question of a little faster or a little slower, all that's left for us ahead is to keep the ship afloat as long as we can and then go down with it."
"Is that his excuse for himself? Is that what he's made you feel?"
"No. Oh no! That's the feeling I lose when I speak to him. The strange thing is what he does make me feel."
"What?"
"Hope."
She nodded, in helpless wonder, knowing that she had felt it, too.
"I don't know why," he said. "But I look at people and they seem to be made of nothing but pain. He's not. You're not. That terrible hopelessness that's all around us, I lose it only in his presence. And here. Nowhere else."
She came back to him and slipped down to sit at his feet, pressing her face to his knees. "Hank, we still have so much ahead of us ... and so much right now. . . ."
He looked at the shape of pale blue silk huddled against the black of his clothes--he bent down to her--he said, his voice low, "Dagny ... the things I said to you that morning in Ellis Wyatt's house . . . I think I was lying to myself."
"I know it."
Through a gray drizzle of rain, the calendar above the roofs said: September 3, and a clock on another tower said: 10:40, as Rearden rode back to the Wayne-Falkland Hotel. The cab's radio was spitting out shrilly the sounds of a panic-tinged voice announcing the crash of d.'Anconia Copper.
Rearden leaned wearily against the seat: the disaster seemed to be no more than a stale news story read long ago. He felt nothing, except an uncomfortable sense of impropriety at finding himself out in the morning streets, dressed in evening clothes. He felt no desire to return from the world he had left to the world he saw drizzling past the windows of the taxi.
He turned the key in the door of his hotel suite, hoping to get back to a desk as fast as possible and have to see nothing around him.
They hit his consciousness together: the breakfast table--the door to his bedroom, open upon the sight of a bed that had been slept in--and Lillian's voice saying, "Good morning, Henry."
She sat in an armchair, wearing the suit she had worn yesterday, without the jacket or hat; her white blouse looked smugly crisp. There were remnants of a breakfast on the table. She was smoking a cigarette, with the air and pose of a long, patient vigil.
As he stood still, she took the time to cross her legs and settle down more comfortably, then asked, "Aren't you going to say anything, Henry?"
He stood like a man in military uniform at some official proceedings where emotions could not be permitted to exist. "It is for you to speak."
"Aren't you going to try to justify yourself?"
"No."
"Aren't you going to start begging my forgiveness?"
"There is no reason why you should forgive me. There is nothing for me to add. You know the truth. Now it is up to you."
She chuckled, stretching, rubbing her shoulder blades against the chair's back. "Didn't you expect to be caught, sooner or later?" she asked. "If a man like you stays pure as a monk for over a year, didn't you think that I might begin to suspect the reason? It's funny, though, that that famous brain of yours didn't prevent you from getting caught as simply as this." She waved at the room, at the breakfast table. "I felt certain that you weren't going to return here, last night. And it wasn't difficult or expensive at all to find out from a hotel employee, this morning, that you haven't spent a night in these rooms in the past year."
He said nothing.
"The man of stainless steel!" She laughed. "The man of achievement and honor who's so much better than the rest of us! Does she dance in the chorus or is she a manicurist in an exclusive barber shop patronized by millionaires?"
He remained silent.
"Who is she, Henry?"
"I won't answer that."
"I want to know."
"You're not going to."
"Don't you think it's ridiculous, your playing the part of a gentleman who's protecting the lady's name--or of any sort of gentleman, from now on? Who is she?"
"I said I won't answer."
She shrugged. "I suppose it makes no difference. There's only one standard type for the one standard purpose. I've always known that under that ascetic look of yours you were a plain, crude sensualist who sought nothing from a woman except an animal satisfaction which I pride myself on not having given you. I knew that your vaunted sense of honor would collapse some day and you would be drawn to the lowest, cheapest type of female, just like any other cheating husband." She chuckled. "That great admirer of yours, Miss Dagny Taggart, was furious at me for the mere hint of a suggestion that her hero wasn't as pure as his stainless, non-corrosive rail. And she was naive enough to imagine that I could suspect her of being the type men find attractive for a relationship in which what they seek is most notoriously not brains. I knew your real nature and inclinations. Didn't I?" He said nothing. "Do you know what I think of you now?"
"You have the right to condemn me in any way you wish."
She laughed. "The great man who was so contemptuous--in business--of weaklings who trimmed comers or fell
by the wayside, because they couldn't match his strength of character and steadfastness of purpose! How do you feel about it now?"
"My feelings need not concern you. You have the right to decide what you wish me to do. I will agree to any demand you make, except one: don't ask me to give it up."
"Oh, I wouldn't ask you to give it up! I wouldn't expect you to change your nature. This is your true level--under all that self-made grandeur of a knight of industry who rose by sheer genius from the ore mine gutters to finger bowls and white tie! It fits you well, that white tie, to come home in at eleven o.'clock in the morning! You never rose out of the ore mines, that's where you belong--all of you self-made princes of the cash register--in the corner saloon on Saturday night, with the traveling salesmen and the dance-hall girls!"
"Do you wish to divorce me?"
"Oh, wouldn't you like that! Wouldn't that be a smart trade to pull! Don't you suppose I know that you've wanted to divorce me since the first month of our marriage?"
"If that is what you thought, why did you stay with me?"
She answered severely, "It's a question you have lost the right to ask."
"That's true," he said, thinking that only one conceivable reason, her love for him, could justify her answer.
"No, I'm not going to divorce you. Do you suppose that I will allow your romance with a floozie to deprive me of my home, my name, my social position? I shall preserve such pieces of my life as I can, whatever does not rest on so shoddy a foundation as your fidelity. Make no mistake about it: I shall never give you a divorce. Whether you like it or not, you're married and you'll stay married."
"I will, if that is what you wish."
"And furthermore, I will not consider--incidentally, why don't you sit down?"
He remained standing. "Please say what you have to say."
"I will not consider any unofficial divorce, such as a separation. You may continue your love idyll in the subways and basements where it belongs, but in the eyes of the world I will expect you to remember that I am Mrs. Henry Rearden. You have always proclaimed such an exaggerated devotion to honesty--now let me see you be condemned to the life of the hypocrite that you really are. I will expect you to maintain your residence at the home which is officially yours, but will now be mine."
"If you wish."
She leaned back loosely, in a manner of untidy relaxation, her legs spread apart, her arms resting in two strict parallels on the arms of the chair--like a judge who could permit himself to be sloppy.