Atlas Shrugged (165 page)

When she raised her head, he was smiling down at her.

“Hank ...” she whispered guiltily, in desperate astonishment at her own break.

“Quiet, darling.”

She let her face drop back on his knees; she lay still, fighting for rest, fighting against the pressure of a wordless thought: he had been able to bear and to accept her broadcast only as a confession of her love; it made the truth she now had to tell him more inhuman a blow than anyone had the right to deliver. She felt terror at the thought that she would not have the strength to do it, and terror at the thought that she would.

When she looked up at him again, he ran his hand over her forehead, brushing the hair off her face.

“It’s over, darling,” he said. “The worst of it is over, for both of us.”

“No, Hank, it isn’t.”

He smiled.

He drew her to sit beside him, with her head on his shoulder. “Don’t say anything now,” he said. “You know that we both understand all that has to be said, and we’ll speak of it, but not until it has ceased to hurt you quite so much.”

His hand moved down the line of her sleeve, down a fold of her skirt, with so light a pressure that it seemed as if the hand did not feel the body inside the clothes, as if he were regaining possession, not of her body, but only of its vision.

“You’ve taken too much,” he said. “So have I. Let them batter us. There’s no reason why we should add to it. No matter what we have to face, there can be no suffering between the two of us. No added pain. Let that come from their world. It won’t come from us. Don’t be afraid. We won’t hurt each other. Not now.”

She raised her head, shaking it with a bitter smile—there was a desperate violence in her movement, but the smile was a sign of recovery: of the determination to face the despair.

“Hank, the kind of hell I let you go through in the last month—” Her voice was trembling.

“It’s nothing, compared to the kind of hell I let you go through in the last hour.” His voice was steady.

She got up, to pace the room, to prove her strength—her steps like words telling him that she was not to be spared any longer. When she stopped and turned to face him, he rose, as if he understood her motive.

“I know that I’ve made it worse for you,” she said, pointing at the radio.

He shook his head. “No.”

“Hank, there’s something I have to tell you.”

“So have I. Will you let me speak first? You see, it’s something I should have said to you long ago. Will you let me speak and not answer me until I finish?”

She nodded.

He took a moment to look at her as she stood before him, as if to hold the full sight of her figure, of this moment and of everything that had led them to it.

“I love you, Dagny,” he said quietly, with the simplicity of an unclouded, yet unsmiling happiness.

She was about to speak, but knew that she couldn.‘t, even if he had permitted it, she caught her unuttered words, the movement of her lips was her only answer, then she inclined her head in acceptance.

“I love you. As the same value, as the same expression, with the same pride and the same meaning as I love my work, my mills, my Metal, my hours at a desk, at a furnace, in a laboratory, in an ore mine, as I love my ability to work, as I love the act of sight and knowledge, as I love the action of my mind when it solves a chemical equation or grasps a sunrise, as I love the things I’ve made and the things I’ve felt, as
my
product, as
my
choice, as a shape of
my
world, as my best mirror, as the wife I’ve never had, as that which makes all the rest of it possible: as my power to live.”

She did not drop her face, but kept it level and open, to hear and accept, as he wanted her to and as he deserved.

“I loved you from the first day I saw you, on a flatcar on a siding of Milford Station. I loved you when we rode in the cab of the first engine on the John Galt Line. I loved you on the gallery of Ellis Wyatt’s house. I loved you on that next morning. You knew it. But it’s I who must say it to you, as I’m saying it now—if I am to redeem all those days and to let them be fully what they were for both of us. I loved you. You knew it. I didn’t. And because I didn.‘t, I had to learn it when I sat at my desk and looked at the Gift Certificate for Rearden .Metal.”

She closed her eyes. But there was no suffering in his face, nothing but the immense and quiet happiness of clarity.

“. ‘We are those who do not disconnect the values of their minds from the actions of their bodies.’ You said it in your broadcast tonight. But you knew it, then, on that morning in Ellis Wyatt’s house. You knew that all those insults I was throwing at you were the fullest confession of love a man could make. You knew that the physical desire I was damning as our mutual shame, is neither physical nor an expression of one’s body, but the expression of one’s mind’s deepest values, whether one has the courage to know it or not. That was why you laughed at me as you did, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“You said, ‘I do not want your mind, your will, your being or your soul—so long as it’s to me that you will come for that lowest one of your desires.’ You knew, when you said it, that it was my mind, my will, my being and my soul that I was giving you by means of that desire. And I want to say it now, to let that morning mean what it meant: my mind, my will, my being and my soul, Dagny—yours, for as long as I shall live.”

He was looking straight at her and she saw a brief sparkle in his eyes, which was not a smile, but almost as if he had heard the cry she had not uttered.

“Let me finish, dearest. I want you to know how fully I know what I am saying. I, who thought that I was fighting them, I had accepted the worst of our enemies’ creed—and
that
is what I’ve paid for ever since, as I am paying now and as I must. I had accepted the one tenet by which they destroy a man before he’s started, the killer-tenet: the breach between his mind and body. I had accepted it, like most of their victims, not knowing it, not knowing even that the issue existed. I rebelled against their creed of human impotence and I took pride in my ability to think, to act, to work for the satisfaction of my desires. But I did not know that this was virtue, I never identified it as a moral value, as the highest of moral values, to be defended above one’s life, because it’s that which makes life possible. And I accepted punishment for it, punishment for virtue at the hands of an arrogant evil, made arrogant solely by my ignorance and my submission.

“I accepted their insults, their frauds, their extortions. I thought I could afford to ignore them—all those impotent mystics who prattle about their souls and are unable to build a roof over their heads. I thought that the world was mine, and that those jabbering incompetents were no threat to my strength. I could not understand why I kept losing every battle. I did not know that the force unleashed against me was my own. While I was busy conquering matter, I had surrendered to them the realm of the mind, of thought, of principle, of law, of values, of morality. I had accepted, unwittingly and by default, the tenet that ideas were of no consequence to one’s existence, to one’s work, to reality, to this earth—as if ideas were not the province of reason, but of that mystic faith which I despised. This was all they wanted me to concede. It was enough. I had surrendered that which all of their claptrap is designed to subvert and to destroy: man’s reason. No, they were not able to deal with matter, to produce abundance, to control this earth. They did not have to. They controlled
me.

“I, who knew that wealth is only a means to an end, created the means and let them prescribe my ends. I, who took pride in my ability to achieve the satisfaction of my desires, let them prescribe the code of values by which I judged my desires. I, who shaped matter to serve my purpose, was left with a pile of steel and gold, but with my every purpose defeated, my every desire betrayed, my every attempt at happiness frustrated.

“I had cut myself in two, as the mystics preached, and I ran my business by one code of rules, but my own life by another. I rebelled against the looters’ attempt to set the price and value of my steel—but I let them set the moral values of my life. I rebelled against demands for an unearned wealth—but I thought it was my duty to grant an unearned love to a wife I despised, an unearned respect to a mother who hated me, an unearned support to a brother who plotted for my destruction. I rebelled against undeserved financial injury—but I accepted a life of undeserved pain. I rebelled against the doctrine that my productive ability was guilt—but I accepted, as guilt, my capacity for happiness. I rebelled against the creed that virtue is some disembodied unknowable of the spirit—but I damned you, you, my dearest one, for the desire of your body and mine. But if the body is evil, then so are those who provide the means of its survival, so is material wealth and those who produce it—and if moral values are set in contradiction to our physical existence, then it’s right that rewards should be unearned, that virtue should consist of the undone, that there should be no tie between achievement and profit, that the inferior animals who’re able to produce should serve those superior beings whose superiority in spirit consists of incompetence in the flesh.

“If some man like Hugh Akston had told me, when I started, that by accepting the mystics’ theory of sex I was accepting the looters’ theory of economics, I would have laughed in his face. I would not laugh at him now. Now I see Rearden Steel being ruled by human scum—I see the achievement of my life serving to enrich the worst of my enemies—and as to the only two persons I ever loved, I’ve brought a deadly insult to one and public disgrace to the other. I slapped the face of the man who was my friend, my defender, my teacher, the man who set me free by helping me to learn what I’ve learned. I loved him, Dagny, he was the brother, the son, the comrade I never had—but I knocked him out of my life, because he would not help me to produce for the looters. I’d give anything now to have him back, but I own nothing to offer in such repayment, and I’ll never see him again, because it’s I who’ll know that there is no way to deserve even the right to ask forgiveness.

“But what I’ve done to you, my dearest, is still worse. Your speech and that you had to make it—that’s what I’ve brought upon the only woman I loved, in payment for the only happiness I’ve known. Don’t tell me that it was your choice from the first and that you accepted all consequences, including tonight—it does not redeem the fact that it was I who had no better choice to offer you. And that the looters forced you to speak, that you spoke to avenge me and set me free—does not redeem the fact that it was I who made their tactics possible. It was not their own convictions of sin and dishonor that they could use to disgrace you—it was mine. They merely carried out the things I believed and said in Ellis Wyatt’s house. It was I who kept our love hidden as a guilty secret—they merely treated it for what it was by my own appraisal. It was I who was willing to counterfeit reality for the sake of appearance in their eyes—they merely cashed in on the right I had given them.

“People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked. And if one gains the immediate purpose of the lie—the price one pays is the destruction of that which the gain was intended to serve. The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on. When I chose to hide my love for you, to disavow it in public and live it as a lie, I made it public property—and the public has claimed it in a fitting sort of manner. I had no way to avert it and no power to save you. When I gave in to the looters, when I signed their Gift Certificate, to protect you—I was still faking reality, there was nothing else left open to me—and, Dagny, I’d rather have seen us both dead than permit them to do what they threatened. But there are no white lies, there is only the blackness of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all. I was still faking reality, and it had the inexorable result: instead of protection, it brought you a more terrible kind of ordeal, instead of saving your name, it forced you to offer yourself for a public stoning and to throw the stones by your own hand. I know that you were proud of the things you said, and I was proud to hear you—but that was the pride we should have claimed two years ago.

“No, you did not make it worse for me, you set me free, you saved us both, you redeemed our past. I can’t ask you to forgive me, we’re far beyond such terms—and the only atonement I can offer you is the fact that I am happy. That I am happy, my darling, not that I suffer. I am happy that I have seen the truth—even if my power of sight is all that’s left to me now. Were I to surrender to pain and give up in futile regret that my own error has wrecked my past—
that
would be the act of final treason, the ultimate failure toward that truth I regret having failed. But if my love of truth is left as my only possession, then the greater the loss behind me, the greater the pride I may take in the price I have paid for that love. Then the wreckage will not become a funereal mount above me, but will serve as a height I have climbed to attain a wider field of vision. My pride and my power of vision were all that I owned when I started—and whatever I achieved, was achieved by means of them. Both are greater now. Now I have the knowledge of the superlative value I had missed: of my right to be proud of my vision. The rest is mine to reach.

“And, Dagny, the one thing I wanted, as the first step of my future, was to say that I love you—as I’m saying it now. I love you, my dearest, with that blindest passion of my body which comes from the clearest perception of my mind—and my love for you is the only attainment of my past that will be left to me, unchanged, through all the years ahead. I wanted to say it to you while I still had the right to say it. And because I had not said it at our beginning, this is the way I have to say it—at the end. Now I’ll tell you what it was that you wanted to tell me—because, you see, I know it and I accept: somewhere within the past month, you have met the man you love, and if love means one’s final, irreplaceable choice, then he is the only man you’ve ever loved.”