Atlas Shrugged (50 page)

She was leaning against his shoulder, feeling unsteady on the motionless ground, with his arm about her, she was laughing, she was listening to the things he said, she was answering, “But didn’t you know we would?”

In a moment, she saw the faces around them. They were the bondholders of the John Galt Line, the men who were Nielsen Motors, Hammond Cars, Stockton Foundry and all the others. She shook their hands, and there were no speeches; she stood against Ellis Wyatt, sagging a little, brushing her hair away from her eyes, leaving smudges of soot on her forehead. She shook the hands of the men of the train’s crew, without words, with the seal of the grins on their faces. There were flash bulbs exploding around them, and men waving to them from the riggings of the oil wells on the slopes of the mountains. Above her head, above the heads of the crowd, the letters TT on a silver shield were hit by the last ray of a sinking sun.

Ellis Wyatt had taken charge. He was leading her somewhere, the sweep of his arm cutting a path for them through the crowd, when one of the men with the cameras broke through to her side. “Miss Taggart,” he called, “will you give us a message for the public?” Ellis Wyatt pointed at the long string of freight cars. “She has.”

Then she was sitting in the back seat of an open car, driving up the curves of a mountain road. The man beside her was Rearden, the driver was Ellis Wyatt.

They stopped at a house that stood on the edge of a cliff, with no other habitation anywhere in sight, with the whole of the oil fields spread on the slopes below.

“Why, of course you’re staying at my house overnight, both of you,” said Ellis Wyatt, as they went in. “Where did you expect to stay?”

She laughed. “I don’t know. I hadn’t thought of it at all.”

“The nearest town is an hour’s drive away. That’s where your crew has gone: your boys at the division point are giving a party in their honor. So is the whole town. But I told Ted Nielsen and the others that we’d have no banquets for you and no oratory. Unless you’d like it?”

“God, no!” she said. “Thanks, Ellis.”

It was dark when they sat at the dinner table in a room that had large windows and a few pieces of costly furniture. The dinner was served by a silent figure in a white jacket, the only other inhabitant of the house, an elderly Indian with a stony face and a courteous manner. A few points of fire were scattered through the room, running over and out beyond the windows: the candles on the table, the lights on the derricks, and the stars.

“Do you think that you have your hands full now?” Ellis Wyatt was saying. “Just give me a year and I’ll give you something to keep you busy. Two tank trains a day, Dagny? It’s going to be four or six or as many as you wish me to fill.” His hand swept over the lights on the mountains. “This? It’s nothing, compared to what I’ve got coming.” He pointed west. “The Buena Esperanza Pass. Five miles from here. Everybody’s wondering what I’m doing with it. Oil shale. How many years ago was it that they gave up trying to get oil from shale, because it was too expensive? Well, wait till you see the process I’ve developed. It will be the cheapest oil ever to splash in their faces, and an unlimited supply of it, an untapped supply that will make the biggest oil pool look like a mud puddle. Did I order a pipe line? Hank, you and I will have to build pipe lines in all directions to ... Oh, I beg your pardon. I don’t believe I introduced myself when I spoke to you at the station. I haven’t even told you my name.”

Rearden grinned. “I’ve guessed it by now.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t like to be careless, but I was too excited.”

“What were you excited about?” asked Dagny, her eyes narrowed in mockery.

Wyatt held her glance for a moment; his answer had a tone of solemn intensity strangely conveyed by a smiling voice. “About the most beautiful slap in the face I ever got and deserved.”

“Do you mean, for our first meeting?”

“I mean, for our first meeting.”

“Don’t. You were right.”

“I was. About everything but you. Dagny, to find an exception after years of ... Oh, to hell with them! Do you want me to turn on the radio and hear what they’re saying about the two of you tonight?”

“No.”

“Good. I don’t want to hear them. Let them swallow their own speeches. They’re all climbing on the band wagon now.
We’re
the band.” He glanced at Rearden. “What are you smiling at?”

“I’ve always been curious to see what you’re like.”

“I’ve never had a chance to be what I’m like—except tonight.”

“Do you live here alone, like this, miles away from everything?”

Wyatt pointed at the window. “I’m a couple of steps away from—everything.”

“What about people?”

“I have guest rooms for the kind of people who come to see me on business. I want as many miles as possible between myself and all the other kinds.” He leaned forward to refill their wine glasses. “Hank, why don’t you move to Colorado? To hell with New York and the Eastern Seaboard! This is the capital of the Renaissance. The Second Renaissance—not of oil paintings and cathedrals—but of oil derricks, power plants, and motors made of Rearden Metal. They had the Stone Age and the Iron Age and now they’re going to call it the Rearden Metal Age—because there’s no limit to what your Metal has made possible.”

“I’m going to buy a few square miles of Pennsylvania,” said Rearden. “The ones around my mills. It would have been cheaper to build a branch here, as I wanted, but you know why I can‘t, and to hell with them! I’ll beat them anyway. I’m going to expand the mills—and if she can give me three-day freight service to Colorado, I’ll give you a race for who’s going to be the capital of the Renaissance!”

“Give me a year,” said Dagny, “of running trains on the John Galt Line, give me time to pull the Taggart system together—and I’ll give you three-day freight service across the continent, on a Rearden Metal track from ocean to ocean!”

“Who was it that said he needed a fulcrum?” said Ellis Wyatt. “Give me an unobstructed right-of-way and I’ll show them how to move the earth!”

She wondered what it was that she liked about the sound of Wyatt’s laughter. Their voices, even her own, had a tone she had never heard before. When they rose from the table, she was astonished to notice that the candles were the only illumination of the room: she had felt as if she were sitting in a violent light.

Ellis Wyatt picked up his glass, looked at their faces and said, “To the world as it seems to be right now!”

He emptied the glass with a single movement.

She heard the crash of the glass against the wall in the same instant that she saw a circling current—from the curve of his body to the sweep of his arm to the terrible violence of his hand that flung the glass across the room. It was not the conventional gesture meant as celebration, it was the gesture of a rebellious anger, the vicious gesture which is movement substituted for a scream of pain.

“Ellis,” she whispered, “what’s the matter?”

He turned to look at her. With the same violent suddenness, his eyes were clear, his face was calm; what frightened her was seeing him smile gently. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Never mind. We’ll try to think that it will last.”

The earth below was streaked with moonlight, when Wyatt led them up an outside stairway to the second floor of the house, to the open gallery at the doors of the guest rooms. He wished them good night and they heard his steps descending the stairs. The moonlight seemed to drain sound as it drained color. The steps rolled into a distant past, and when they died, the silence had the quality of a solitude that had lasted for a long time, as if no person were left anywhere in reach.

She did not turn to the door of her room. He did not move. At the level of their feet, there was nothing but a thin railing and a spread of space. Angular tiers descended below, with shadows repeating the steel tracery of derricks, criss-crossing sharp, black lines on patches of glowing rock. A few lights, white and red, trembled in the clear air, like drops of rain caught on the edges of steel girders. Far in the distance, three small drops were green, strung in a line along the Taggart track. Beyond them, at the end of space, at the foot of a white curve, hung a webbed rectangle which was the bridge.

She felt a rhythm without sound or movement, a sense of beating tension, as if the wheels of the John Galt Line were still speeding on. Slowly, in answer and in resistance to an unspoken summons, she turned and looked at him.

The look she saw on his face made her know for the first time that she had known this would be the end of the journey. That look was not as men are taught to represent it, it was not a matter of loose muscles, hanging lips and mindless hunger. The lines of his face were pulled tight, giving it a peculiar purity, a sharp precision of form, making it clean and young. His mouth was taut, the lips faintly drawn inward, stressing the outline of its shape. Only his eyes were blurred, their lower lids swollen and raised, their glance intent with that which resembled hatred and pain.

The shock became numbness spreading through her body—she felt a tight pressure in her throat and her stomach—she was conscious of nothing but a silent convulsion that made her unable to breathe. But what she felt, without words for it, was: Yes, Hank, yes—now—because it is part of the same battle, in some way that I can’t name ... because it is our being, against theirs ... our great capacity, for which they torture us, the capacity of happiness ... Now, like this, without words or questions ... because we want it....

It was like an act of hatred, like the cutting blow of a lash encircling her body: she felt his arms around her, she felt her legs pulled forward against him and her chest bent back under the pressure of his, his mouth on hers.

Her hand moved from his shoulders to his waist to his legs, releasing the unconfessed desire of her every meeting with him. When she tore her mouth away from him, she was laughing soundlessly, in triumph, as if saying: Hank Rearden—the austere, unapproachable Hank Rearden of the monklike office, the business conferences, the harsh bargains—do you remember them now?—I’m thinking of it, for the pleasure of knowing that I’ve brought you to this. He was not smiling, his face was tight, it was the face of an enemy, he jerked her head and caught her mouth again, as if he were inflicting a wound.

She felt him trembling and she thought that this was the kind of cry she had wanted to tear from him—this surrender through the shreds of his tortured resistance. Yet she knew, at the same time, that the triumph was his, that her laughter was her tribute to him, that her defiance was submission, that the purpose of all of her violent strength was only to make his victory the greater—he was holding her body against his, as if stressing his wish to let her know that she was now only a tool for the satisfaction of his desire—and his victory, she knew, was her wish to let him reduce her to that. Whatever I am, she thought, whatever pride of person I may hold, the pride of my courage, of my work, of my mind and my freedom—
that
is what I offer you for the pleasure of your body,
that
is what I want you to use in your service—and that you want it to serve you is the greatest reward I can have.

There were lights burning in the two rooms behind them. He took her wrist and threw her inside his room, making the gesture tell her that he needed no sign of consent or resistance. He locked the door, watching her face. Standing straight, holding his glance, she extended her arm to the lamp on the table and turned out the light. He approached. He turned the light on again, with a single, contemptuous jerk of his wrist. She saw him smile for the first time, a slow, mocking, sensual smile that stressed the purpose of his action.

He was holding her half-stretched across the bed, he was tearing her clothes off, while her face was pressed against him, her mouth moving down the line of his neck, down his shoulder. She knew that every gesture of her desire for him struck him like a blow, that there was some shudder of incredulous anger within him—yet that no gesture would satisfy his greed for every evidence of her desire.

He stood looking down at her naked body, he leaned over, she heard his voice—it was more a statement of contemptuous triumph than a question: “You want it?” Her answer was more a gasp than a word, her eyes closed, her mouth open: “Yes.”

She knew that what she felt with the skin of her arms was the cloth of his shirt, she knew that the lips she felt on her mouth were his, but in the rest of her there was no distinction between his being and her own, as there was no division between body and spirit. Through all the steps of the years behind them, the steps down a course chosen in the courage of a single loyalty: their love of existence—chosen in the knowledge that nothing will be given, that one must make one’s own desire and every shape of its fulfilment—through the steps of shaping metal, rails and motors—they had moved by the power of the thought that one remakes the earth for one’s enjoyment, that man’s spirit gives meaning to insentient matter by molding it to serve one’s chosen goal. The course led them to the moment when, in answer to the highest of one’s values, in an admiration not to be expressed by any other form of tribute, one’s spirit makes one’s body become the tribute, recasting it—as proof, as sanction, as reward—into a single sensation of such intensity of joy that no other sanction of one’s existence is necessary. He heard the moan of her breath, she felt the shudder of his body, in the same instant.

CHAPTER IX

THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE

She looked at the glowing bands on the skin of her arm, spaced like bracelets from her wrist to her shoulder. They were strips of sunlight from the Venetian blinds on the window of an unfamiliar room. She saw a bruise above her elbow, with dark beads that had been blood. Her arm lay on the blanket that covered her body. She was aware of her legs and hips, but the rest of her body was only a sense of lightness, as if it were stretched restfully across the air in a place that looked like a cage made of sunrays.