Atlas Shrugged (174 page)

“No. I wouldn’t have.”

“Why did you marry me?”

He felt himself drawn as by a whirlpool, part in relief that the moment of danger was past, part in irresistible defiance of the same danger. “Because you were a cheap, helpless, preposterous little gutter-snipe, who’d never have a chance at anything to equal me! Because I thought you’d love me! I thought you’d know that you had to love .me!”

“As you are?”

“Without daring to ask what I am! Without reasons! Without putting me on the spot always to live up to reason after reason after reason, like being on some goddamn dress parade to the end of my days!”

“You loved me ... because I was worthless?”

“Well, what did you think you were?”

“You loved me for being rotten?”

“What else did you have to offer? But you didn’t have the humility to appreciate it. I wanted to be generous, I wanted to give you security—what security is there in being loved for one’s virtues? The competition’s wide open, like a jungle market place, a better person will always come along to beat you! But I—I was willing to love you for your flaws, for your faults and weaknesses, for your ignorance, your crudeness, your vulgarity—and that’s safe, you’d have nothing to fear, nothing to hide, you could be yourself, your real, stinking, sinful, ugly self—everybody’s self is a gutter—but you could hold my love, with nothing demanded of you!”

“You wanted me to ... accept your love ... as alms’ ”

“Did you imagine that you could earn it? Did you imagine that you could deserve to marry me, you poor little tramp? I used to buy the likes of you for the price of a meal! I wanted you to know, with every step you took, with every mouthful of caviar you swallowed, that you owed it all to
me,
that you had nothing and were nothing and could never hope to equal, deserve or repay!”

“I ... tried ... to deserve it.”

“Of what use would you be to me, if you had?”

“You didn’t want me to?”

“Oh, you goddamn fool!”

“You didn’t want me to improve? You didn’t want me to rise? You thought me rotten and you wanted me to stay rotten?”

“Of what use would you be to me, if you earned it all, and I had to work to hold you, and you could trade elsewhere if you chose?”

“You wanted it to be alms ... for both of us and from both? You wanted us to be two beggars chained to each other?”

“Yes, you goddamn evangelist! Yes, you goddamn hero worshipper! Yes!”

“You chose me because I was worthless?”

“Yes!”

“You’re lying, Jim.”

His answer was only a startled glance of astonishment.

“Those girls that you used to buy for the price of a meal, they would have been glad to let their real selves become a gutter, they would have taken your alms and never tried to rise, but you would not marry one of them. You married me, because you knew that I did not accept the gutter, inside or out, that I was struggling to rise and would go on struggling—didn’t you?”

“Yes!” he cried.

Then the headlight she had felt rushing upon her, hit its goal—and she screamed in the bright explosion of
the
impact—she screamed in physical terror, backing away from him.

“What’s the matter with you?” he cried, shaking, not daring to see in her eyes the thing she had seen.

She moved her hands in groping gestures, half-waving it away, half-trying to grasp it; when she answered, her words did not quite name it, but they were the only words she could find: “You ... you’re a killer ... for the sake of killing ...”

It was too close to the unnamed; shaking with terror, he swung out blindly and struck her in the face.

She fell against the side of an armchair, her head striking the floor, but she raised her head in a moment and looked up at him blankly, without astonishment, as if physical reality were merely taking the form she had expected. A single pear-shaped drop of blood went slithering slowly from the corner of her mouth.

He stood motionless—and for a moment they looked at each other, as if neither dared to move.

She moved first. She sprang to her feet—and ran. She ran out of the room, out of the apartment—he heard her running down the hall, tearing open the iron door of the emergency stairway, not waiting to ring for the elevator.

She ran down the stairs, opening doors on random landings, running through the twisting hallways of the building, then down the stairs again, until she found herself in the lobby and ran to the street.

After a while, she saw that she was walking down a littered sidewalk in a dark neighborhood, with an electric bulb glaring in the cave of a subway entrance and a lighted billboard advertising soda crackers on the black roof of a laundry. She did not remember how she had come here. Her mind seemed to work in broken spurts, without connections. She knew only that she had to escape and that escape was impossible.

She had to escape from Jim, she thought. Where?—she asked, looking around her with a glance like a cry of prayer. She would have seized upon a job in a five-and-ten, or in that laundry, or in any of the dismal shops she passed. But she would work, she thought, and the harder she worked, the more malevolence she would draw from the people around her, and she would not know when truth would be expected of her and when a lie, but the stricter her honesty, the greater the fraud she would be asked to suffer at their hands. She had seen it before and had borne it, in the home of her family, in the shops of the slums, but she had thought that these were vicious exceptions, chance evils, to escape and forget. Now she knew that they were not exceptions, that theirs was the code accepted by the world, that it was a creed of living, known by all, but kept unnamed, leering at her from people’s eyes in that sly, guilty look she had never been able to understand—and at the root of the creed, hidden by silence, lying in wait for her in the cellars of the city and in the cellars of their souls, there was a thing with which one could not live.

Why are you doing it to me?—she cried soundlessly to the darkness around her. Because you’re good—some enormous laughter seemed to be answering from the roof tops and from the sewers. Then I won’t want to be good any longer—But you will—I don’t have to—You will—I can’t bear it—You will.

She shuddered and walked faster—but ahead of her, in the foggy distance, she saw the calendar above the roofs of the city—it was long past midnight and the calendar said: August 6, but it seemed to her suddenly that she saw September 2 written above the city in letters of Mood—and she thought: If she worked, if she struggled, if she rose, she would take a harder beating with each step of her climb, until, at the end, whatever she reached, be it a copper company or an unmortgaged cottage, she would see it seized by Jim on some September 2 and she would see it vanish to pay for the parties where Jim made his deals with his friends.

Then I won.‘t!—she screamed and whirled around and went running back along the street—but it seemed to her that in the black sky, grinning at her from the steam of the laundry, there weaved an enormous figure that would hold no shape, but its grin remained the same on its changing faces, and its face was Jim’s and her childhood preacher’s and the woman social worker’s from the personnel department of the five-and-ten-and the grin seemed to say to her: People like you will always stay honest, people like you will always struggle to rise, people like you will always work, so we’re safe and you have no choice.

She ran. When she looked around her once more, she was walking down a quiet street, past the glass doorways where lights were burning in the carpeted lobbies of luxurious buildings. She noticed that she was limping, and saw that the heel of her pump was loose; she had broken it somewhere in her blank span of running.

From the sudden space of a broad intersection, she looked at the great skyscrapers in the distance. They were vanishing quietly into a veil of fog, with the faint breath of a glow behind them, with a few lights like a smile of farewell. Once, they had been a promise, and from the midst of the stagnant sloth around her she had looked to them for proof that another kind of men existed. Now she knew that they were tombstones, slender obelisks soaring in memory of the men who had been destroyed for having created them, they were the frozen shape of the silent cry that the reward of achievement was martyrdom.

Somewhere in one of those vanishing towers, she thought, there was Dagny—but Dagny was a lonely victim, fighting a losing battle, to be destroyed and to sink into fog like the others.

There is no place to go, she thought and stumbled on—I can’t stand still, nor move much longer—I can neither work nor rest—I can neither surrender nor fight—but this...
this
is what they want of me, this is where they want me—neither living nor dead, neither thinking nor insane, but just a chunk of pulp that screams with fear, to be shaped by them as they please, they who have no shape of their own.

She plunged into the darkness behind a corner, shrinking in dread from any human figure. No, she thought, they’re not evil, not all people ... they’re only their own first victims, but they all believe in Jim’s creed, and I can’t deal with them, once I know it ... and if I spoke to them, they would try to grant me their good will, but I’d know what it is that they hold as the good and I would see death staring out of their eyes.

The sidewalk had shrunk to a broken strip, and splashes of garbage ran over from the cans at the stoops of crumbling houses. Beyond the dusty glow of a saloon, she saw a lighted sign “Young Women’s Rest Club” above a locked door.

She knew the institutions of that kind and the women who ran them, the women who said that theirs was the job of helping sufferers. If she went in—she thought, stumbling past—if she faced them and begged them for help, “What is your guilt?” they would ask her. “Drink? Dope? Pregnancy? Shoplifting?” She would answer, “I have no guilt, I am innocent, but I.‘m—” “Sorry. We have no concern for the pain of the innocent.”

She ran. She stopped, regaining her eyesight, on the corner of a long, wide street. The buildings and pavements merged with the sky—and two lines of green lights hung in open space, going off into an endless distance, as if stretching into other towns and oceans and foreign lands, to encircle the earth. The green glow had a look of serenity, like an inviting, unlimited path open to confident travel. Then the lights switched to red, dropping heavily lower, turning from sharp circles into foggy smears, into a warning of unlimited danger. She stood and watched a giant truck go by, its enormous wheels crushing one more layer of shiny polish into the flattened cobbles of the street.

The lights went back to the green of safety—but she stood trembling, unable to move. That’s how it works for the travel of one’s body, she thought, but what have they done to the traffic of the soul? They have set the signals in reverse—and the road is safe when the lights are the red of evil—but when the lights are the green of virtue, promising that yours is the right-of-way, you venture forth and are ground by the wheels. All over the world, she thought—those inverted lights go reaching into every land, they go on, encircling the earth. And the earth is littered with mangled cripples, who don’t know what has hit them or why, who crawl as best they can on their crushed limbs through their lightless days, with no answer save that pain is the core of existence-and the traffic cops of morality chortle and tell them that man, by his nature, is unable to walk.

These were not words in her mind, these were the words which would have named, had she had the power to find them, what she knew only as a sudden fury that made her beat her fists in futile horror against the iron post of the traffic light beside her, against the hollow tube where the hoarse, rusty chuckle of a relentless mechanism went grating on and on.

She could not smash it with her fists, she could not batter one by one all the posts of the street stretching off beyond eyesight—as she could not smash that creed from the souls of the men she would encounter, one by one. She could not deal with people any longer, she could not take the paths they took—but what could she say to them, she who had no words to name the thing she knew and no voice that people would hear? What could she tell them? How could she reach them all? Where were the men who could have spoken?

These were not words in her mind, these were only the blows of her fists against metal—then she saw herself suddenly, battering her knuckles to blood against an immovable post, and the sight made her shudder—and she stumbled away. She went on, seeing nothing around her, feeling trapped in a maze with no exit.

No exit—her shreds of awareness were saying, beating it into the pavements in the sound of her steps—no exit ... no refuge ... no signals ... no way to tell destruction from safety, or enemy from friend.... Like that dog she had heard about, she thought ... somebody’s dog in somebody’s laboratory ... the dog who got his signals switched on him, and saw no way to tell satisfaction from torture, saw food changed to beatings and beatings to food, saw his eyes and ears deceiving him and his judgment futile and his consciousness impotent in a shifting, swimming, shapeless world—and gave up, refusing to eat at that price or to live in a world of that kind.... No!—was the only conscious word in her brain—no!—no!—no!—not your way, not your world—even if this “no” is all that’s to be left of mine!

It was in the darkest hour of the night, in an alley among wharfs and warehouses that the social worker saw her. The social worker was a woman whose gray face and gray coat blended with the walls of the district. She saw a young girl wearing a suit too smart and expensive for the neighborhood, with no hat, no purse, with a broken heel, disheveled hair and a bruise at the corner of her mouth, a girl staggering blindly, not knowing sidewalks from pavements. The street was only a narrow crack between the sheer, blank walls of storage structures, but a ray of light fell through a fog dank with the odor of rotting water; a stone parapet ended the street on the edge of a vast black hole merging river and sky.