Atlas Shrugged

by Ayn Rand

  She raised her eyelids--and she knew that that thought was as naked to him in her eyes, as it was to her in his. She saw his veiled glance and the tautness of his mouth, she saw him reduced to agony, she felt herself drowned by the exultant wish to cause him pain, to see it, to watch it, to watch it beyond her own endurance and his, then to reduce him to the helplessness of pleasure.

  He got up, he looked away, and she could not tell whether it was the slight lift of his head or the tension of his features that made his face look oddly calm and clear, as if it were stripped of emotion down to the naked purity of its structure.

  "Every man that your railroad needed and lost in the past ten years," he said, "it was I who made you lose him." His voice had the single-toned flatness and the luminous simplicity of an accountant who reminds a reckless purchaser that cost is an absolute which cannot be escaped. "I have pulled every girder from under Taggart Transcontinental and, if you choose to go back, I will see it collapse upon your head."

  He turned to leave the room. She stopped him. It was her voice, more than her words, that made him stop: her voice was low, it had no quality of emotion, only of a sinking weight, and its sole color was some dragging undertone, like an inner echo, resembling a threat; it was the voice of the plea of a person who still retains a concept of honor, but is long past caring for it:

  "You want to hold me here, don't you?"

  "More than anything else in the world."

  "You could hold me."

  "I know it."

  His voice had said it with the same sound as hers. He waited, to regain his breath. When he spoke, his voice was low and clear, with some stressed quality of awareness, which was almost the quality of a smile of understanding:

  "It's your acceptance of this place that I want. What good would it do me, to have your physical presence without any meaning? That's the kind of faked reality by which most people cheat themselves of their lives. I'm not capable of it." He turned to go. "And neither are you. Good night, Miss Taggart."

  He walked out, into his bedroom, closing the door.

  She was past the realm of thought--as she lay in bed in the darkness of her room, unable to think or to sleep--and the moaning violence that filled her mind seemed only a sensation of her muscles, but its tone and its twisting shades were like a pleading cry, which she knew, not as words, but as pain: Let him come here, let him break -let it be damned, all of it, my railroad and his strike and everything we've lived by!--let it be damned, everything we've been and are!-- he would, if tomorrow I were to die--then let me die, but tomorrow -let him come here, be it any price he names, I have nothing left that's not for sale to him any longer--is this what it means to be an animal?--it does and I am.... She lay on her back, her palms pressed to the sheet at her sides, to stop herself from rising and walking into his room, knowing that she was capable even of that.... It's not I, it's a body I can neither endure nor control.... But somewhere within her, not as words, but as a radiant point of stillness, there was the presence of the judge who seemed to observe her, not in stem condemnation any longer, but in approval and amusement, as if saying: Your body?--if he were not what you know him to be, would your body bring you to this?--why is it his body that you want, and no other?--do you think that you are damning them, the things you both have lived by?--are you damning that which you are honoring in this very moment, by your very desire? ... She did not have to hear the words, she knew them, she had always known them. ... After a while, she lost the glow of that knowledge, and there was nothing left but pain and the palms that were pressed to the sheet--and the almost indifferent wonder whether he, too, was awake and fighting the same torture.

  She heard no sound in the house and saw no light from his window on the tree trunks outside. After a long while she heard, from the darkness of his room, two sounds that gave her a full answer; she knew that he was awake and that he would not come; it was the sound of a step and the click of a cigarette lighter.

  Richard Halley stopped playing, turned away from the piano and glanced at Dagny. He saw her drop her face with the involuntary movement of hiding too strong an emotion, he rose, smiled and said softly, "Thank you."

  "Oh no ..." she whispered, knowing that the gratitude was hers and that it was futile to express it. She was thinking of the years when the works he had just played for her were being written, here, in his small cottage on a ledge of the valley, when all this prodigal magnificence of sound was being shaped by him as a flowing monument to a concept which equates the sense of life with the sense of beauty--while she had walked through the streets of New York in a hopeless quest for some form of enjoyment, with the screeches of a modem symphony running after her, as if spit by the infected throat of a loud-speaker coughing its malicious hatred of existence.

  "But I mean it," said Richard Halley, smiling. "I'm a businessman and I never do anything without payment. You've paid me. Do you see why I wanted to play for you tonight?"

  She raised her head. He stood in the middle of his living room, they were alone, with the window open to the summer night, to the dark trees on a long sweep of ledges descending toward the glitter of the valley's distant lights.

  "Miss Taggart, how many people are there to whom my work means as much as it does to you?"

  "Not many," she answered simply, neither as boast nor flattery, but as an impersonal tribute to the exacting values involved.

  "That is the payment I demand. Not many can afford it. I don't mean your enjoyment, I don't mean your emotion--emotions be damned!--I mean your understanding and the fact that your enjoyment was of the same nature as mine, that it came from the same source: from your intelligence, from the conscious judgment of a mind able to judge my work by the standard of the same values that went to write it--I mean, not the fact that you felt, but that you felt what I wished you to feel, not the fact that you admire my work, but that you admire it for the things I wished to be admired." He chuckled. "There's only one passion in most artists more violent than their desire for admiration: their fear of identifying the nature of such admiration as they do receive. But it's a fear I've never shared. I do not fool myself about my work or the response I seek--I value both too highly. I do not care to be admired causelessly, emotionally, intuitively, instinctively--or blindly. I do not care for blindness in any form, I have too much to show--or for deafness, I have too much to say. I do not care to be admired by anyone's heart--only by someone's head. And when I find a customer with that invaluable capacity, then my performance is a mutual trade to mutual profit. An artist is a trader, Miss Taggart, the hardest and most exacting of all traders. Now do you understand me?"

  "Yes," she said incredulously, "I do," incredulously because she was hearing her own symbol of moral pride, chosen by a man she had least expected to choose it.

  "If you do, why did you look quite so tragic just a moment ago? What is it that you regret?"

  "The years when your work has remained unheard."

  "But it hasn't. I've given two or three concerts every year. Here, in Galt's Gulch. I am giving one next week. I hope you'll come. The price of admission is twenty-five cents."

  She could not help laughing. He smiled, then his face slipped slowly into earnestness, as under the tide of some unspoken contemplation of his own. He looked at the darkness beyond the window, at a spot where, in a clearing of the branches, with the moonlight draining its color, leaving only its metallic luster, the sign of the dollar hung like a curve of shining steel engraved on the sky.

  "Miss Taggart, do you see why I'd give three dozen modern artists for one real businessman? Why I have much more in common with Ellis Wyatt or Ken Danagger--who happens to be tone deaf--than with men like Mort Liddy and Balph Eubank? Whether it's a symphony or a coal mine, all work is an act of creating and comes from the same source: from an inviolate capacity to see through one's own eyes--which means: the capacity to perform a rational identification -which means: the capacity to see, to connect and to make what had not been seen, connected a
nd made before. That shining vision which they talk about as belonging to the authors of symphonies and novels--what do they think is the driving faculty of men who discover how to use oil, how to run a mine, how to build an electric motor? That sacred fire which is said to burn within musicians and poets--what do they suppose moves an industrialist to defy the whole world for the sake of his new metal, as the inventors of the airplane, the builders of the railroads, the discoverers of new germs or new continents have done through all the ages? ... An intransigent devotion to the pursuit of truth, Miss Taggart? Have you heard the moralists and the art lovers of the centuries talk about the artist's intransigent devotion to the pursuit of truth? Name me a greater example of such devotion than the act of a man who says that the earth does turn, or the act of a man who says that an alloy of steel and copper has certain properties which enable it to do certain things, that it is and does--and let the world rack him or ruin him, he will not bear false witness to the evidence of his mind! This, Miss Taggart, this sort of spirit, courage and love for truth--as against a sloppy bum who goes around proudly assuring you that he has almost reached the perfection of a lunatic, because he's an artist who hasn't the faintest idea what his art work is or means, he's not restrained by such crude concepts as 'being' or '.meaning,.'. he's the vehicle of higher mysteries, he doesn't know how he created his work or why, it just came out of him spontaneously, like vomit out of a drunkard, he did not think, he wouldn't stoop to thinking, he just felt it, all he has to do is fee!--he feels, the flabby, loose-mouthed, shifty-eyed, drooling, shivering, uncongealed bastard! I, who know what discipline, what effort, what tension of mind, what unrelenting strain upon one's power of clarity are needed to produce a work of art--I, who know that it requires a labor which makes a chain gang look like rest and a severity no army-drilling sadist could impose--I'll take the operator of a coal mine over any walking vehicle of higher mysteries. The operator knows that it's not his feelings that keep the coal carts moving under the earth--and he knows what does keep them moving. Feelings? Oh yes, we do feel, he, you and I--we are, in fact, the only people capable of feeling-and we know where our feelings come from. But what we did not know and have delayed learning for too long is the nature of those who claim that they cannot account for their feelings. We did not know what it is that they feel. We are learning it now. It was a costly error. And those most guilty of it, will pay the hardest price--as, in justice, they must. Those most guilty of it were the real artists, who will now see that they are first to be exterminated and that they had prepared the triumph of their own exterminators by helping to destroy their only protectors. For if there is more tragic a fool than the businessman who doesn't know that he's an exponent of man's highest creative spirit--it's the artist who thinks that the businessman is his enemy."

  It was true--she thought, when she walked through the streets of the valley, looking with a child's excitement at the shop windows sparkling in the sun--that the businesses here had the purposeful selectiveness of art--and that the art--she thought, when she sat in the darkness of a clapboard concert hall, listening to the controlled violence and the mathematical precision of Halley's music--had the stern discipline of business.

  Both had the radiance of engineering--she thought, when she sat among rows of benches under the open sky, watching Kay Ludlow on the stage. It was an experience she had not known since childhood -the experience of being held for three hours by a play that told a story she had not seen before, in lines she had not heard, uttering a theme that had not been picked from the hand-me-downs of the centuries. It was the forgotten delight of being held in rapt attention by the reins of the ingenious, the unexpected, the logical, the purposeful, the new--and of seeing it embodied in a performance of superlative artistry by a woman playing a character whose beauty of spirit matched her own physical perfection.

  "That's why I'm here, Miss Taggart," said Kay Ludlow, smiling in answer to her comment, after the performance. "Whatever quality of human greatness I have the talent to portray--that was the quality the outer world sought to degrade. They let me play nothing but symbols of depravity, nothing but harlots, dissipation-chasers and home-wreckers, always to be beaten at the end by the little girl next door, personifying the virtue of mediocrity. They used my talent--for the defamation of itself. That was why I quit."

  Not since childhood, thought Dagny, had she felt that sense of exhilaration after witnessing the performance of a play--the sense that life held things worth reaching, not the sense of having studied some aspect of a sewer there had been no reason to see. As the audience filed away into the darkness from the lighted rows of benches, she noticed Ellis Wyatt, Judge Narragansett, Ken Danagger, men who had once been said to despise all forms of art.

  The last image she caught, that evening, was the sight of two tall, straight, slender figures walking away together down a trail among the rocks, with the beam of a spotlight flashing once on the gold of their hair. They were Kay Ludlow and Ragnar Danneskjold--and she wondered whether she could bear to return to a world where these were the two doomed to destruction.

  The recaptured sense of her own childhood kept coming back to her whenever she met the two sons of the young woman who owned the bakery shop. She often saw them wandering down the trails of the valley--two fearless beings, aged seven and four. They seemed to face life as she had faced it. They did not have the look she had seen in the children of the outer world--a look of fear, half-secretive, half-sneering, the look of a child's defense against an adult, the look of a being in the process of discovering that he is hearing lies and of learning to feel hatred. The two boys had the open, joyous, friendly confidence of kittens who do not expect to get hurt, they had an innocently natural, non-boastful sense of their own value and as innocent a trust in any stranger's ability to recognize it, they had the eager curiosity that would venture anywhere with the certainty that life held nothing unworthy of or closed to discovery, and they looked as if, should they encounter malevolence, they would reject it contemptuously, not as dangerous, but as stupid, they would not accept it in bruised resignation as the law of existence.

  "They represent my particular career, Miss Taggart," said the young mother in answer to her comment, wrapping a loaf of fresh bread and smiling at her across the counter. "They're the profession I've chosen to practice, which, in spite of all the guff about motherhood, one can't practice successfully in the outer world. I believe you've met my husband, he's the teacher of economics who works as linesman for Dick McNamara. You know, of course, that there can be no collective commitments in this valley and that families or relatives are not allowed to come here, unless each person takes the striker's oath by his own independent conviction. I came here, not merely for the sake of my husband's profession, but for the sake of my own. I came here in order to bring up my sons as human beings. I would not surrender them to the educational systems devised to stunt a child's brain, to convince him that reason is impotent, that existence is an irrational chaos with which he's unable to deal, and thus reduce him to a state of chronic terror. You marvel at the difference between my children and those outside, Miss Taggart? Yet the cause is so simple. The cause is that here, in Galt's Gulch, there's no person who would not consider it monstrous ever to confront a child with the slightest suggestion of the irrational."

  She thought of the teachers whom the schools of the world had lost -when she looked at the three pupils of Dr. Akston, on the evening of their yearly reunion.

  The only other guest he had invited was Kay Ludlow. The six of them sat in the back yard of his house, with the light of the sunset on their faces, and the floor of the valley condensing into a soft blue vapor far below.

  She looked at his pupils, at the three pliant, agile figures half-stretched on canvas chairs in poses of relaxed contentment, dressed in slacks, windbreakers and open-collared shirts: John Galt, Francisco d.'Anconia, Ragnar Danneskjold.

  "Don't be astonished, Miss Taggart," said Dr. Akston, smiling, "and don't make the mista
ke of thinking that these three pupils of mine are some sort of superhuman creatures. They're something much greater and more astounding than that: they're normal men--a thing the world has never seen--and their feat is that they managed to survive as such. It does take an exceptional mind and a still more exceptional integrity to remain untouched by the brain-destroying influences of the world's doctrines, the accumulated evil of centuries--to remain human, since the human is the rational."

  She felt some new quality in Dr. Akston's attitude, some change in the sternness of his usual reserve; he seemed to include her in their circle, as if she were more than a guest. Francisco acted as if her presence at their reunion were natural and to be taken gaily for granted. Galt's face gave no hint of any reaction; his manner was that of a courteous escort who had brought her here at Dr. Akston's request.

  She noticed that Dr. Akston's eyes kept coming back to her, as if with the quiet pride of displaying his students to an appreciative observer. His conversation kept returning to a single theme, in the manner of a father who has found a listener interested in his most cherished subject:

  "You should have seen them, when they were in college, Miss Taggart. You couldn't have found three boys .'conditioned' to such different backgrounds, but--conditioners be damned!--they must have picked one another at first sight, among the thousands on that campus. Francisco, the richest heir in the world--Ragnar, the European aristocrat--and John, the self-made man, self-made in every sense, out of nowhere, penniless, parentless, tie-less. Actually, he was the son of a gas-station mechanic at some forsaken crossroads in Ohio, and he had left home at the age of twelve to make his own way--but I've always thought of him as if he had come into the world like Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, who sprang forth from Jupiter's head, fully grown and fully armed.... I remember the day when I saw the three of them for the first time. They were sitting at the back of the classroom--I was giving a special course for postgraduate students, so difficult a course that few outsiders ever ventured to attend these particular lectures. Those three looked too young even for freshmen--they were sixteen at the time, as I learned later. At the end of that lecture, John got up to ask me a question. It was a question which, as a teacher, I would have been proud to hear from a student who'd taken six years of philosophy. It was a question pertaining to Plato's metaphysics, which Plato hadn't had the sense to ask of himself. I answered--and I asked John to come to my office after the lecture. He came--all three of them came--I saw the two others in my anteroom and let them in. I talked to them for an hour--then I cancelled all my appointments and talked to them for the rest of the day. After which, I arranged to let them take that course and receive their credits for it. They took the course. They got the highest grades in the class. ... They were majoring in two subjects: physics and philosophy. Their choice amazed everybody but me: modern thinkers considered it unnecessary to perceive reality, and modern physicists considered it unnecessary to think. I knew better; what amazed me was that these children knew it, too.... Robert Stadler was head of the Department of Physics, as I was head of the Department of Philosophy. He and I suspended all rules and restrictions for these three students, we spared them all the routine, unessential courses, we loaded them with nothing but the hardest tasks, and we cleared their way to major in our two subjects within their four years. They worked for it. And, during those four years, they worked for their living, besides. Francisco and Ragnar were receiving allowances from their parents, John had nothing, but all three of them held part-time jobs to earn their own experience and money. Francisco worked in a copper foundry, John worked in a railroad roundhouse, and Ragnar--no, Miss Taggart, Ragnar was not the least, but the most studiously sedate of the three--he worked as clerk in the university library. They had time for everything they wanted, but no time for people or for any communal campus activities. They ... Ragnar!" he interrupted himself suddenly, sharply. "Don't sit on the ground!"