by Ayn Rand
"What's the matter, Miss Taggart?"
It was the soft voice of the tower director, who stood by her side, with some sort of paper in his hand--and she thought it was strange to emerge from a span of unconsciousness which had been the span of the sharpest awareness she had ever experienced, only she did not know how long it had lasted or where she was or why. She had been aware of Galt's face, she had been seeing, in the shape of his mouth, in the planes of his cheeks, the crackup of that implacable serenity which had always been his, but he still retained it in his look of acknowledging the breach, of admitting that this moment was too much even for him.
She knew that she went on speaking, because those around her looked as if they were listening, though she could not hear a sound, she went on speaking as if carrying out a hypnotic order given to herself some endless time ago, knowing only that the completion of that order was a form of defiance against him, neither knowing nor hearing her own words.
She felt as if she were standing in a radiant silence where sight was her only capacity and his face was its only object, and the sight of his face was like a speech in the form of a pressure at the base of her .throat. It seemed so natural that he should be here, it seemed so un endurably simple--she felt as if the shock were not his presence, but the presence of others on the tracks of her railroad, where he belonged and they did not. She was seeing those moments aboard a train when, at its plunge into the tunnels, she had felt a sudden, solemn tension, as if this place were showing her in naked simplicity the essence of her railroad and of her life, the union of consciousness and matter, the frozen form of a mind's ingenuity giving physical existence to its purpose; she had felt a sense of sudden hope, as if this place held the meaning of all of her values, and a sense of secret excitement, as if a nameless promise were awaiting her under the ground--it was right that she should now meet him here, he had been the meaning and the promise--she was not seeing his clothing any longer, nor to what level her railroad had reduced him--she was seeing only the vanishing torture of the months when he had been outside her reach--she was seeing in his face the confession of what those months had cost him -the only speech she heard was as if she were saying to him: This is the reward for all my days--and as if he were answering: For all of mine.
She knew that she had finished speaking to the strangers when she saw that the tower director had stepped forward and was saying something to them, glancing at a list in his hand. Then, drawn by a sense of irresistible certainty, she found herself descending the stairs, slipping away from the crowd, not toward the platforms and the exit, but into the darkness of the abandoned tunnels. You will follow me, she thought -and felt as if the thought were not in words, but in the tension of her muscles, the tension of her will to accomplish a thing she knew to be outside her power, yet she knew with certainty that it would be accomplished and by her wish ... no, she thought, not by her wish, but by its total rightness. You will follow me--it was neither plea nor prayer nor demand, but the quiet statement of a fact, it contained the whole of her power of knowledge and the whole of the knowledge she had earned through the years. You will follow me, if we are what we are, you and I, if we live, if the world exists, if you know the meaning of this moment and can't let it slip by, as others let it slip, into the senselessness of the unwilled and unreached. You will follow me--she felt an exultant assurance, which was neither hope nor faith, but an act of worship for the logic of existence.
She was hurrying down the remnants of abandoned rails, down the long, dark corridors twisting through granite. She lost the sound of the director's voice behind her. Then she felt the beat of her arteries and heard, in answering rhythm, the beat of the city above her head, but she felt as if she heard the motion of her blood as a sound filling the silence, and the motion of the city as the beat inside her body--and, far behind her, she heard the sound of steps. She did not glance back. She went faster.
She went past the locked iron door where the remnant of his motor was still hidden, she did not stop, but a faint shudder was her answer to the sudden glimpse of the unity and logic in the events of the last two years. A string of blue lights went on into the darkness, over patches of glistening granite, over broken sandbags spilling drifts on the rails, over rusty piles of scrap metal. When she heard the steps coming closer, she stopped and turned to look back.
She saw a sweep of blue light flash briefly on the shining strands of Galt's hair, she caught the pale outline of his face and the dark hollows of his eyes. The face disappeared, but the sound of his steps served as the link to the next blue light that swept across the line of his eyes, the eyes that remained held level, directed ahead--and she felt certain that she had stayed in his sight from the moment he had seen her at the tower.
She heard the beat of the city above them--these tunnels, she had once thought, were the roots of the city and of all the motion reaching to the sky--but they, she thought, John Galt and she, were the living power within these roots, they were the start and aim and meaning--he, too, she thought, heard the beat of the city as the beat of his body.
She threw her cape back, she stood defiantly straight, as he had seen her stand on the steps of the tower--as he had seen her for the first time, ten years ago, here, under the ground--she was hearing the words of his confession, not as words, but by means of that beating which made it so difficult to breathe: You looked like a symbol of luxury and you belonged in the place that was its source ... you seemed to bring the enjoyment of life back to its rightful owners ... you had a look of energy and of its reward, together ... and I was the first man who had ever stated in what manner these two were inseparable....
The next span of moments was like flashes of light in stretches of blinded unconsciousness--the moment when she saw his face, as he stopped beside her, when she saw the unastonished calm, the leashed intensity, the laughter of understanding in the dark green eyes--the moment when she knew what he saw in her face, by the tight, drawn harshness of his lips--the moment when she felt his mouth on hers, when she felt the shape of his mouth both as an absolute shape and as a liquid filling her body--then the motion of his lips down the line of her throat, a drinking motion that left a trail of bruises--then the sparkle of her diamond clip against the trembling copper of his hair.
Then she was conscious of nothing but the sensations of her body, because her body acquired the sudden power to let her know her most complex values by direct perception. Just as her eyes had the power to translate wave lengths of energy into sight, just as her ears had the power to translate vibrations into sound, so her body now had the power to translate the energy that had moved all the choices of her life, into immediate sensory perception. It was not the pressure of a hand that made her tremble, but the instantaneous sum of its meaning, the knowledge that it was his hand, that it moved as if her flesh were his possession, that its movement was his signature of acceptance under the whole of that achievement which was herself--it was only a sensation of physical pleasure, but it contained her worship of him, of everything that was his person and his life--from the night of the mass meeting in a factory in Wisconsin, to the Atlantis of a valley hidden in the Rocky Mountains, to the triumphant mockery of the green eyes of the superlative intelligence above a worker's figure at the foot of the tower--it contained her pride in herself and that it should be she whom he had chosen as his mirror, that it should be her body which was now giving him the sum of his existence, as his body was giving her the sum of hers. These were the things it contained--but what she knew was only the sensation of the movement of his hand on her breasts.
He tore off her cape and she felt the slenderness of her own body by means of the circle of his arms, as if his person were only a tool for her triumphant awareness of herself, but that self were only a tool for her awareness of him. It was as if she were reaching the limit of her capacity to feel, yet what she felt was like a cry of impatient demand, which she was now incapable of naming, except that it had the same quality of ambition as the course o
f her life, the same inexhaustible quality of radiant greed.
He pulled her head back for a moment, to look straight into her eyes, to let her see his, to let her know the full meaning of their actions, as if throwing the spotlight of consciousness upon them for the meeting of their eyes in a moment of intimacy greater than the one to come.
Then she felt the mesh of burlap striking the skin of her shoulders, she found herself lying on the broken sandbags, she saw the long, tight gleam of her stockings, she felt his mouth pressed to her ankle, then rising in a tortured motion up the line of her leg, as if he wished to own its shape by means of his lips, then she felt her teeth sinking into the flesh of his arm, she felt the sweep of his elbow knocking her head aside and his mouth seizing her lips with a pressure more viciously painful than hers--then she felt, when it hit her throat, that which she knew only as an upward streak of motion that released and united her body into a single shock of pleasure--then she knew nothing but the motion of his body and the driving greed that went reaching on and on, as if she were not a person any longer, only a sensation of endless reaching for the impossible--then she knew that it was possible, and she gasped and lay still, knowing that nothing more could be desired, ever.
He lay beside her, on his back, looking up at the darkness of the granite vault above them, she saw him stretched on the jagged slant of sandbags as if his body were fluid in relaxation, she saw the black wedge of her cape flung across the rails at their feet, there were beads of moisture twinkling on the vault, shifting slowly, running into invisible cracks, like the lights of a distant traffic. When he spoke, his voice sounded as if he were quietly continuing a sentence in answer to the questions in her mind, as if he had nothing to hide from her any longer and what he owed her now was only the act of undressing his soul, as simply as he would have undressed his body:
".... this is how I've watched you for ten years ... from here, from under the ground under your feet ... knowing every move you made in your office at the top of the building, but never seeing you, never enough ... ten years of nights, spent waiting to catch a glimpse of you, here, on the platforms, when you boarded a train.... Whenever the order came down to couple your car, I'd know of it and wait and see you come down the ramp, and wish you didn't walk so fast ... it was so much like you, that walk, I'd know it anywhere ... your walk and those legs of yours ... it was always your legs that I'd see first, hurrying down the ramp, going past me as I looked up at you from a dark side track below.... I think I could have molded a sculpture of your legs, I knew them, not with my eyes, but with the palms of my hands when I watched you go by ... when I turned back to my work ... when I went home just before sunrise for the three hours of sleep which I didn't get ..."
"I love you," she said, her voice quiet and almost toneless except for a fragile sound of youth.
He closed his eyes, as if letting the sound travel through the years behind them. "Ten years, Dagny ... except that once there were a few weeks when I had you before me, in plain sight, within reach, not hurrying away, but held still, as on a lighted stage, a private stage for me to watch ... and I watched you for hours through many evenings ... in the lighted window of an office that was called the John Galt Line.... And one night--"
Her breath was a faint gasp. "Was it you, that night?"
"Did you see me?"
"I saw your shadow ... on the pavement ... pacing back and forth ... it looked like a struggle ... it looked like--" She stopped; she did not want to say "torture."
"It was," he said quietly. "That night, I wanted to walk in, to face you, to speak, to ... That was the night I came closest to breaking my oath, when I saw you slumped across your desk, when I saw you broken by the burden you were carrying--"
"John, that night, it was you that I was thinking of ... only I didn't know it ..."
"But, you see, I knew it."
".... it was you, all my life, through everything I did and everything I wanted ..."
"I know it."
"John, the hardest was not when I left you in the valley ... it was--"
"Your radio speech, the day you returned?"
"Yes! Were you listening?"
"Of course. I'm glad you did it. It was a magnificent thing to do. And I--I knew it, anyway."
"You knew ... about Hank Rearden?"
"Before I saw you in the valley."
"Was it ... when you learned about him, had you expected it?"
."No."
"Was it ... ?" she stopped.
"Hard? Yes. But only for the first few days. That next night ... Do you want me to tell you what I did the night after I learned it?"
"Yes."
"I had never seen Hank Rearden, only pictures of him in the newspapers. I knew that he was in New York, that night, at some conference of big industrialists. I wanted to have just one look at him. I went to wait at the entrance of the hotel where that conference was held. There were bright lights under the marquee of the entrance, but it was dark beyond, on the pavement, so I could see without being seen, there were a few loafers and vagrants hanging around, there was a drizzle of rain and we clung to the walls of the building. One could tell the members of the conference when they began filing out, by their clothes and their manner--ostentatiously prosperous clothes and a manner of overbearing timidity, as if they were guiltily trying to pretend that they were what they appeared to be for that moment. There were chauffeurs driving up their cars, there were a few reporters delaying them for questions and hangers-on trying to catch a word from them. They were worn men, those industrialists, aging, flabby, frantic with the effort to disguise uncertainty. And then I saw him. He wore an expensive trenchcoat and a hat slanting across his eyes. He walked swiftly, with the kind of assurance that has to be earned, as he'd earned it. Some of his fellow industrialists pounced on him with questions, and those tycoons were acting like hangers-on around him. I caught a glimpse of him as he stood with his hand on the door of his car, his head lifted, I saw the brief flare of a smile under the slanting brim, a confident smile, impatient and a little amused. And then, for one instant, I did what I had never done before, what most men wreck their lives on doing--I saw that moment out of context, I saw the world as he made it look, as if it matched him, as if he were its symbol--I saw a world of achievement, of unenslaved energy, of unobstructed drive through purposeful years to the enjoyment of one's reward--I saw, as I stood in the rain in a crowd of vagrants, what my years would have brought me, if that world had existed, and I felt a desperate longing--he was the image of everything I should have been ... and he had everything that should have been mine.... But it was only a moment. Then I saw the scene in full context again and in all of its actual meaning--I saw what price he was paying for his brilliant ability, what torture he was enduring in silent bewilderment, struggling to understand what I had understood--I saw that the world he suggested, did not exist and was yet to be made, I saw him again for what he was, the symbol of my battle, the unrewarded hero whom I was to avenge and to release--and then ... then I accepted what I had learned about you and him. I saw that it changed nothing, that I should have expected it--that it was right."
He heard the faint sound of her moan and he chuckled softly.
"Dagny, it's not that I don't suffer, it's that I know the unimportance of suffering, I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one's soul and as a permanent scar across one's view of existence. Don't feel sorry for me. It was gone right then."
She turned her head to look at him in silence, and he smiled, lifting himself on an elbow to look down at her face as she lay helplessly still. She whispered, "You've been a track laborer, here--here!--for twelve years ..."
"Yes."
"Ever since--"
"Ever since I quit the Twentieth Century."
"The night when you saw me for the first time ... you were working here, then?"
"Yes. And the morning when you offered to work for me as my cook, I was only your track laborer on le
ave of absence. Do you see why I laughed as I did?"
She was looking up at his face; hers was a smile of pain, his--of pure gaiety. "John ..."
"Say it. But say it all."
"You were here ... all those years ..."
"Yes."
".... all those years ... while the railroad was perishing ... while I was searching for men of intelligence ... while I was struggling to hold onto any scrap of it I could find ..."
".... while you were combing the country for the inventor of my motor, while you were feeding James Taggart and Wesley Mouch, while you were naming your best achievement after the enemy whom you wanted to destroy."
She closed her eyes.
"I was here all those years," he said, "within your reach, inside your own realm, watching your struggle, your loneliness, your longing, watching you in a battle you thought you were fighting for me, a battle in which you were supporting my enemies and taking an endless defeat -I was here, hidden by nothing but an error of your sight, as Atlantis is hidden from men by nothing but an optical illusion--I was here, waiting for the day when you would see, when you would know that by the code of the world you were supporting, it's to the darkest bottom of the underground that all the things you valued would have to be consigned and that it's there that you would have to look. I was here. I was waiting for you. I love you, Dagny. I love you more than my life, I who have taught men how life is to be loved. I've taught them also never to expect the unpaid for-and what I did tonight, I did it with full knowledge that I would pay for it and that my life might have to be the price."
."No!"
He smiled, nodding. "Oh yes. You know that you've broken me for once, that I broke the decision I had set for myself--but I did it consciously, knowing what it meant, I did it, not in blind surrender to the moment, but with full sight of the consequences and full willingness to bear them. I could not let this kind of moment pass us by, it was ours, my love, we had earned it. But you're not ready to quit and join me--you don't have to tell me, I know--and since I chose to take what I wanted before it was fully mine, I'll have to pay for it, I have no way of knowing how or when, I know only that if I give in to an enemy, I'll take the consequences." He smiled in answer to the look on her face. "No, Dagny, you're not my enemy in mind--and that is what brought me to this--but you are in fact, in the course you're pursuing, though you don't see it yet, but I do. My actual enemies are of no danger to me. You are. You're the only one who can lead them to find me. They would never have the capacity to know what I am, but with your help -they will."