Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
he valley."
She was looking down and did not notice the sudden, eager shot of his glance to her face or the sound of caution in his voice: "I know it, but it's such a difficult job that the mine's output won't justify it at present."
"Nonsense! It's much simpler than it looks. There's a pass to the east where there's an easier grade and softer stone, I watched it on the way up, it wouldn't take so many curves, three miles of rail or less would do it."
She was pointing east, she did not notice the intensity with which the two men were watching her face.
"Just a narrow-gauge track is all you'll need . . . like the first railroads ... that's where the first railroads started--at mines, only they were coal mines.... Look, do you see that ridge? There's plenty of clearance for a three-foot gauge, you wouldn't need to do any blasting or widening. Do you see where there's a slow rise for a stretch of almost half a mile? That would be no worse than a four per cent grade, any engine could manage it." She was speaking with a swift, bright certainty, conscious of nothing but the joy of performing her natural function in her natural world where nothing could take precedence over the act of offering a solution to a problem. "The road will pay for itself within three years. I think, at a rough glance, that the costliest part of the job will be a couple of steel trestles--and there's one spot where I might have to blast a tunnel, but it's only for a hundred feet or less. I'll need a steel trestle to throw the track across that gorge and bring it here, but it's not as hard as it looks--let me show you, have you got a piece of paper?"
She did not notice with what speed Galt produced a notebook and a pencil and thrust them into her hands--she seized them, as if she expected them to be there, as if she were giving orders on a construction site where details of this kind were not to delay her.
"Let me give you a rough idea of what I mean. If we drive diagonal piles into the rock"--she was sketching rapidly--"the actual steel span would be only six hundred feet long--it would cut off this last half-mile of your corkscrew turns--I could have the rail laid in three months and--"
She stopped. When she looked up at their faces, the fire had gone out of hers. She crumpled her sketch and flung it aside into the red dust of the gravel. "Oh, what for?" she cried, the despair breaking out for the first time. "To build three miles of railroad and abandon a transcontinental system!"
The two men were looking at her, she saw no reproach in their faces, only a look of understanding which was almost compassion.
"I'm sorry," she said quietly, dropping her eyes.
"If you change your mind," said Francisco, "I'll hire you on the spot--or Midas will give you a loan in five minutes to finance that railroad, if you want to own it yourself."
She shook her head. "I can't ..." she whispered, "not yet ..."
She raised her eyes, knowing that they knew the nature of her despair and that it was useless to hide her struggle. "I've tried it once," she said. "I've tried to give it up ... I know what it will mean ... I'll think of it with every crosstie I'll see laid here, with every spike driven ... I'll think of that other tunnel and ... and of Nat Taggart's bridge.... Oh, if only I didn't have to hear about it! If only I could stay here and never know what they're doing to the railroad, and never learn when it goes!"
"You'll have to hear about it," said Galt; it was that ruthless tone, peculiarly his, which sounded implacable by being simple, devoid of any emotional value, save the quality of respect for facts. "You'll hear the whole course of the last agony of Taggart Transcontinental. You'll hear about every wreck. You'll hear about every discontinued train. You'll hear about every abandoned line. You'll hear about the collapse of the Taggart Bridge. Nobody stays in this valley except by a full, conscious choice based on a full, conscious knowledge of every fact involved in his decision. Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever."
She looked at him, her head lifted, knowing what chance he was rejecting. She thought that no man of the outer world would have said this to her at this moment--she thought of the world's code that worshipped white lies as an act of mercy--she felt a stab of revulsion against that code, suddenly seeing its full ugliness for the first time-she felt an enormous pride for the tight, clean face of the man before her--he saw the shape of her mouth drawn firm in self-control, yet softened by some tremulous emotion, while she answered quietly, "Thank you. You're right."
"You don't have to answer me now," he said. "You'll tell me when you've decided. There's still a week left."
"Yes," she said calmly, "just one more week."
He turned, picked up her crumpled sketch, folded it neatly and slipped it into his pocket.
"Dagny," said Francisco, "when you weigh your decision, consider the first time you quit, if you wish, but consider everything about it. In this valley, you won't have to torture yourself by shingling roofs and building paths that lead nowhere."
"Tell me," she asked suddenly, "how did you find out where I was, that time?"
He smiled. "It was John who told me. The destroyer, remember? You wondered why the destroyer had not sent anyone after you. But he had. It was he who sent me there."
"He sent you?"
"Yes."
"What did he say to you?"
"Nothing much. Why?"
"What did he say? Do you remember the exact words?"
"Yes, I do remember. He said, 'If you want your chance, take it. You've earned it.' I remember, because--" He turned to Galt with the untroubled frown of a slight, casual puzzle. "John, I never quite understood why you said it. Why that? Why--my chance?"
"Do you mind if I don't answer you now?"
"No, but--"
Someone hailed him from the ledges of the mine, and he went off swiftly, as if the subject required no further attention.
She was conscious of the long span of moments she took while turning her head to Galt. She knew that she would find him looking at her. She could read nothing in his eyes, except a hint of derision, as if he knew what answer she was seeking and that she would not find it in his face.
"You gave him a chance that you wanted?"
"I could have no chance till he'd had every chance possible to him."
"How did you know what he had earned?"
"I had been questioning him about you for ten years, every time I could, in every way, from every angle. No, he did not tell me--it was the way he spoke of you that did. He didn't want to speak, but he spoke too eagerly, eagerly and reluctantly together--and then I knew that it had not been just a childhood friendship. I knew how much he had given up for the strike and how desperately he hadn't given it up forever. I? I was merely questioning him about one of our most important future strikers--as I questioned him about many others."
The hint of derision remained in his eyes; he knew that she had wanted to hear this, but that this was not the answer to the one question she feared.
She looked from his face to Francisco's approaching figure, not hiding from herself any longer that her sudden, heavy, desolate anxiety was the fear that Galt might throw the three of them into the hopeless waste of self-sacrifice.
Francisco approached, looking at her thoughtfully, as if weighing some question of his own, but some question that gave a sparkle of reckless gaiety to his eyes.
"Dagny, there's only one week left," he said. "If you decide to go back, it will be the last, for a long time." There was no reproach and no sadness in his voice, only some softened quality as sole evidence of emotion. "If you leave now--oh yes, you'll still come back -but it won't be soon. And I--in a few months, I'll come to live here permanently, so if you go, I won't see you again, perhaps for years. I'd like you to spend this last week with me. I'd like you to move to my house. As my guest, nothing else, for no reason, except that I'd like you to."
He said it simply, as if nothing were or could be hidden among the three of them. She saw no sign of astonishment in Galt's face. She felt some swift tightening in her chest, something hard, reckless and almost vicious that had the quality of a dark excitement driving her blindly into action.
"But I'm an employee," she said, with an odd smile, looking at Galt, "I have a job to finish."
"I won't hold you to it," said Galt, and she felt anger at the tone of his voice, a tone that granted her no hidden significance and answered nothing but the literal meaning of her words. "You can quit the job any time you wish. It's up to you."
"No, it isn't. I'm a prisoner here. Don't you remember? I'm to take orders. I have no preferences to follow, no wishes to express, no decisions to make. I want the decision to be yours."
"You want it to be mine?"
"Yes!"
"You've expressed a wish."
The mockery of his voice was in its seriousness--and she threw at him defiantly, not smiling, as if daring him to continue pretending that he did not understand: "All right. That's what I wish!"
He smiled, as at a child's complex scheming which he had long since seen through. "Very well." But he did not smile, as he said, turning to Francisco, "Then--no."
The defiance toward an adversary who was the sternest of teachers, was all that Francisco had read in her face. He shrugged, regretfully, but gaily. "You're probably right. If you can't prevent her from going back--nobody can."
She was not hearing Francisco's words. She was stunned by the magnitude of the relief that hit her at the sound of Galt's answer, a relief that told her the magnitude of the fear it swept away. She knew, only after it was over, what had hung for her on his decision; she knew that had his answer been different, it would have destroyed the valley in her eyes.
She wanted to laugh, she wanted to embrace them both and laugh with them in celebration, it did not seem to matter whether she would stay here or return to the world, a week was like an endless span of time, either course seemed flooded by an unchanging sunlight--and no struggle was hard, she thought, if this was the nature of existence. The relief did not come from the knowledge that he would not renounce her, nor from any assurance that she would win--the relief came from the certainty that he would always remain what he was.
"I don't know whether I'll go back to the world or not," she said soberly, but her voice was trembling with a subdued violence, which was pure gaiety. "I'm sorry that I'm still unable to make a decision. I'm certain of only one thing: that I won't be afraid to decide."
Francisco took the sudden brightness of her face as proof that the incident had been of no significance. But Galt understood; he glanced at her and the glance was part amusement, part contemptuous reproach.
He said nothing, until they were alone, walking down the trail to the valley. Then he glanced at her again, the amusement sharper in his eyes, and said, "You had to put me to a test in order to learn whether I'd fall to the lowest possible stage of altruism?"
She did not answer, but looked at him in open, undefensive admission.
He chuckled and looked away, and a few steps later said slowly, in the tone of a quotation, "Nobody stays here by faking reality in any . manner whatever."
Part of the intensity of her relief--she thought, as she walked silently by his side--was the shock of a contrast: she had seen, with the sudden, immediate vividness of sensory perception, an exact picture of what the code of self-sacrifice would have meant, if enacted by the three of them. Galt, giving up the woman he wanted, for the sake of his friend, faking his greatest feeling out of existence and himself out of her life, no matter what the cost to him and to her, then dragging the rest of his years through the waste of the unreached and unfulfilled -she, turning for consolation to a second choice, faking a love she did not feel, being willing to fake, since her will to self-deceit was the essential required for Galt's self-sacrifice, then living out her years in hopeless longing, accepting, as relief for an unhealing wound, some moments of weary affection, plus the tenet that love is futile and happiness is not to be found on earth--Francisco, struggling in the elusive fog of a counterfeit reality, his life a fraud staged by the two who were dearest to him and most trusted, struggling to grasp what was missing from his happiness, struggling down the brittle scaffold of a lie over the abyss of the discovery that he was not the man she loved, but only a resented substitute, half-charity-patient, half-crutch, his perceptiveness becoming his danger and only his surrender to lethargic stupidity protecting the shoddy structure of his joy, struggling and giving up and settling into the dreary routine of the conviction that fulfillment is impossible to man--the three of them, who had had all the gifts of existence spread out before them, ending up as embittered hulks, who cry in despair that life is frustration--the frustration of not being able to make unreality real.
But this--she thought--was men's moral code in the outer world, a code that told them to act on the premise of one another's weakness, deceit and stupidity, and this was the pattern of their lives, this struggle through a fog of the pretended and unacknowledged, this belief that facts are not solid or final, this state where, denying any form to reality, men stumble through life, unreal and unformed, and die having never been born. Here--she thought, looking down through green branches at the glittering roofs of the valley--one dealt with men as clear and firm as sun and rocks, and the immense light-heartedness of her relief came from the knowledge that no battle was hard, no decision was dangerous where there was no soggy uncertainty, no shapeless evasion to encounter.
"Did it ever occur to you, Miss Taggart," said Galt, in the casual tone of an abstract discussion, but as if he had known her thoughts, "that there is no conflict of interests among men, neither in business nor in trade nor in their most personal desires--if they omit the irrational from their view of the possible and destruction from their view of the practical? There is no conflict, and no call for sacrifice, and no man is a threat to the aims of another--if men understand that reality is an absolute not to be faked, that lies do not work, that the unearned cannot be had, that the undeserved cannot be given, that the destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn't. The businessman who wishes to gain a market by throttling a superior competitor, the worker who wants a share of his employer's wealth, the artist who envies a rival's higher talent--they're all wishing facts out of existence, and destruction is the only means of their wish. If they pursue it, they will not achieve a market, a fortune or an immortal fame--they will merely destroy production, employment and art. A wish for the irrational is not to be achieved, whether the sacrificial victims are willing or not. But men will not cease to desire the impossible and will not lose their longing to destroy--so long as self-destruction and self-sacrifice are preached to them as the practical means of achieving the happiness of the recipients."
He glanced at her and added slowly, a slight emphasis as sole change in the impersonal tone of his voice, "No one's happiness but my own is in my power to achieve or to destroy. You should have had more respect for him and for me than to fear what you had feared."
She did not answer, she felt as if a word would overfill the fullness of this moment, she merely turned to him with a look of acquiescence that was disarmed, childishly humble and would have been an apology but for its shining joy.
He smiled--in amusement, in understanding, almost in comradeship of the things they shared and in sanction of the things she felt.
They went on in silence, and it seemed to her that this was a summer day out of a carefree youth she had never lived, it was just a walk through the country by two people who were free for the pleasure of motion and sunlight, with no unsolved burdens left to carry. Her sense of lightness blended with the weightless sense of walking downhill, as if she needed no effort to walk, only to restrain herself from flying, and she walked, fighting the speed of the downward pull, her body leaning back, the wind blowing her skirt like a sail to brake her motion.
They parted at the bottom of the trail; he went to keep an appointment with Midas Mulligan, while she went to Hammond's Market with a list of items for the evening's dinner as the sole concern of her world.
His wife--she thought, letting herself hear consciously the word Dr. Akston had not pronounced, the word she had long since felt, but never named--for three weeks she had been his wife in every sense but one, and that final one was still to be earned, but this much was real and today she could permit herself to know it, to feel it, to live with that one thought for this one day.
The groceries, which Lawrence Hammond was lining up at her order on the polished counter of his store, had never appeared to her as such shining objects--and, intent upon them, she was only half-conscious of some disturbing element, of something that was wrong but that her mind was too full to notice. She noticed it only when she saw Hammond pause, frown and stare upward, at the sky beyond his open store front.
In time with his words: "I think somebody's trying to repeat your stunt, Miss Taggart," she realized that it was the sound of an airplane overhead and that it had been there for some time, a sound which was not to be heard in the valley after the first of this month.
They rushed out to the street. The small silver cross of a plane was circling above the ring of mountains, like a sparkling dragonfly about to brush the peaks with its wings.
"What does he think he's doing?" said Lawrence Hammond.
There were people at the doors of the shops and standing still all down the street, looking up.
"Is ... is anyone expected?" she asked and was astonished by the anxiety of her own voice.
"No," said Hammond. "Everyone who's got any business here is here." He did not sound disturbed, but grimly curious.
The plane was now a small dash, like a silver cigarette, streaking against the flanks of the mountains: it had dropped lower.
"Looks like a private monoplane," said Hammond, squinting against the sun. "Not an army model."
"Will the ray screen hold out?" she asked tensely, in a tone of defensive resentment against the approach of an enemy.
He chuckled. "Hold out?"
"Will he see us?"
"That screen is safer than an underground vault, Miss Taggart. As you ought to know."
The plane rose, and for a moment it was only a bright speck, like a bit of paper blown by the wind--it hovered uncertainly, then dropped down again into another cir
She was looking down and did not notice the sudden, eager shot of his glance to her face or the sound of caution in his voice: "I know it, but it's such a difficult job that the mine's output won't justify it at present."
"Nonsense! It's much simpler than it looks. There's a pass to the east where there's an easier grade and softer stone, I watched it on the way up, it wouldn't take so many curves, three miles of rail or less would do it."
She was pointing east, she did not notice the intensity with which the two men were watching her face.
"Just a narrow-gauge track is all you'll need . . . like the first railroads ... that's where the first railroads started--at mines, only they were coal mines.... Look, do you see that ridge? There's plenty of clearance for a three-foot gauge, you wouldn't need to do any blasting or widening. Do you see where there's a slow rise for a stretch of almost half a mile? That would be no worse than a four per cent grade, any engine could manage it." She was speaking with a swift, bright certainty, conscious of nothing but the joy of performing her natural function in her natural world where nothing could take precedence over the act of offering a solution to a problem. "The road will pay for itself within three years. I think, at a rough glance, that the costliest part of the job will be a couple of steel trestles--and there's one spot where I might have to blast a tunnel, but it's only for a hundred feet or less. I'll need a steel trestle to throw the track across that gorge and bring it here, but it's not as hard as it looks--let me show you, have you got a piece of paper?"
She did not notice with what speed Galt produced a notebook and a pencil and thrust them into her hands--she seized them, as if she expected them to be there, as if she were giving orders on a construction site where details of this kind were not to delay her.
"Let me give you a rough idea of what I mean. If we drive diagonal piles into the rock"--she was sketching rapidly--"the actual steel span would be only six hundred feet long--it would cut off this last half-mile of your corkscrew turns--I could have the rail laid in three months and--"
She stopped. When she looked up at their faces, the fire had gone out of hers. She crumpled her sketch and flung it aside into the red dust of the gravel. "Oh, what for?" she cried, the despair breaking out for the first time. "To build three miles of railroad and abandon a transcontinental system!"
The two men were looking at her, she saw no reproach in their faces, only a look of understanding which was almost compassion.
"I'm sorry," she said quietly, dropping her eyes.
"If you change your mind," said Francisco, "I'll hire you on the spot--or Midas will give you a loan in five minutes to finance that railroad, if you want to own it yourself."
She shook her head. "I can't ..." she whispered, "not yet ..."
She raised her eyes, knowing that they knew the nature of her despair and that it was useless to hide her struggle. "I've tried it once," she said. "I've tried to give it up ... I know what it will mean ... I'll think of it with every crosstie I'll see laid here, with every spike driven ... I'll think of that other tunnel and ... and of Nat Taggart's bridge.... Oh, if only I didn't have to hear about it! If only I could stay here and never know what they're doing to the railroad, and never learn when it goes!"
"You'll have to hear about it," said Galt; it was that ruthless tone, peculiarly his, which sounded implacable by being simple, devoid of any emotional value, save the quality of respect for facts. "You'll hear the whole course of the last agony of Taggart Transcontinental. You'll hear about every wreck. You'll hear about every discontinued train. You'll hear about every abandoned line. You'll hear about the collapse of the Taggart Bridge. Nobody stays in this valley except by a full, conscious choice based on a full, conscious knowledge of every fact involved in his decision. Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever."
She looked at him, her head lifted, knowing what chance he was rejecting. She thought that no man of the outer world would have said this to her at this moment--she thought of the world's code that worshipped white lies as an act of mercy--she felt a stab of revulsion against that code, suddenly seeing its full ugliness for the first time-she felt an enormous pride for the tight, clean face of the man before her--he saw the shape of her mouth drawn firm in self-control, yet softened by some tremulous emotion, while she answered quietly, "Thank you. You're right."
"You don't have to answer me now," he said. "You'll tell me when you've decided. There's still a week left."
"Yes," she said calmly, "just one more week."
He turned, picked up her crumpled sketch, folded it neatly and slipped it into his pocket.
"Dagny," said Francisco, "when you weigh your decision, consider the first time you quit, if you wish, but consider everything about it. In this valley, you won't have to torture yourself by shingling roofs and building paths that lead nowhere."
"Tell me," she asked suddenly, "how did you find out where I was, that time?"
He smiled. "It was John who told me. The destroyer, remember? You wondered why the destroyer had not sent anyone after you. But he had. It was he who sent me there."
"He sent you?"
"Yes."
"What did he say to you?"
"Nothing much. Why?"
"What did he say? Do you remember the exact words?"
"Yes, I do remember. He said, 'If you want your chance, take it. You've earned it.' I remember, because--" He turned to Galt with the untroubled frown of a slight, casual puzzle. "John, I never quite understood why you said it. Why that? Why--my chance?"
"Do you mind if I don't answer you now?"
"No, but--"
Someone hailed him from the ledges of the mine, and he went off swiftly, as if the subject required no further attention.
She was conscious of the long span of moments she took while turning her head to Galt. She knew that she would find him looking at her. She could read nothing in his eyes, except a hint of derision, as if he knew what answer she was seeking and that she would not find it in his face.
"You gave him a chance that you wanted?"
"I could have no chance till he'd had every chance possible to him."
"How did you know what he had earned?"
"I had been questioning him about you for ten years, every time I could, in every way, from every angle. No, he did not tell me--it was the way he spoke of you that did. He didn't want to speak, but he spoke too eagerly, eagerly and reluctantly together--and then I knew that it had not been just a childhood friendship. I knew how much he had given up for the strike and how desperately he hadn't given it up forever. I? I was merely questioning him about one of our most important future strikers--as I questioned him about many others."
The hint of derision remained in his eyes; he knew that she had wanted to hear this, but that this was not the answer to the one question she feared.
She looked from his face to Francisco's approaching figure, not hiding from herself any longer that her sudden, heavy, desolate anxiety was the fear that Galt might throw the three of them into the hopeless waste of self-sacrifice.
Francisco approached, looking at her thoughtfully, as if weighing some question of his own, but some question that gave a sparkle of reckless gaiety to his eyes.
"Dagny, there's only one week left," he said. "If you decide to go back, it will be the last, for a long time." There was no reproach and no sadness in his voice, only some softened quality as sole evidence of emotion. "If you leave now--oh yes, you'll still come back -but it won't be soon. And I--in a few months, I'll come to live here permanently, so if you go, I won't see you again, perhaps for years. I'd like you to spend this last week with me. I'd like you to move to my house. As my guest, nothing else, for no reason, except that I'd like you to."
He said it simply, as if nothing were or could be hidden among the three of them. She saw no sign of astonishment in Galt's face. She felt some swift tightening in her chest, something hard, reckless and almost vicious that had the quality of a dark excitement driving her blindly into action.
"But I'm an employee," she said, with an odd smile, looking at Galt, "I have a job to finish."
"I won't hold you to it," said Galt, and she felt anger at the tone of his voice, a tone that granted her no hidden significance and answered nothing but the literal meaning of her words. "You can quit the job any time you wish. It's up to you."
"No, it isn't. I'm a prisoner here. Don't you remember? I'm to take orders. I have no preferences to follow, no wishes to express, no decisions to make. I want the decision to be yours."
"You want it to be mine?"
"Yes!"
"You've expressed a wish."
The mockery of his voice was in its seriousness--and she threw at him defiantly, not smiling, as if daring him to continue pretending that he did not understand: "All right. That's what I wish!"
He smiled, as at a child's complex scheming which he had long since seen through. "Very well." But he did not smile, as he said, turning to Francisco, "Then--no."
The defiance toward an adversary who was the sternest of teachers, was all that Francisco had read in her face. He shrugged, regretfully, but gaily. "You're probably right. If you can't prevent her from going back--nobody can."
She was not hearing Francisco's words. She was stunned by the magnitude of the relief that hit her at the sound of Galt's answer, a relief that told her the magnitude of the fear it swept away. She knew, only after it was over, what had hung for her on his decision; she knew that had his answer been different, it would have destroyed the valley in her eyes.
She wanted to laugh, she wanted to embrace them both and laugh with them in celebration, it did not seem to matter whether she would stay here or return to the world, a week was like an endless span of time, either course seemed flooded by an unchanging sunlight--and no struggle was hard, she thought, if this was the nature of existence. The relief did not come from the knowledge that he would not renounce her, nor from any assurance that she would win--the relief came from the certainty that he would always remain what he was.
"I don't know whether I'll go back to the world or not," she said soberly, but her voice was trembling with a subdued violence, which was pure gaiety. "I'm sorry that I'm still unable to make a decision. I'm certain of only one thing: that I won't be afraid to decide."
Francisco took the sudden brightness of her face as proof that the incident had been of no significance. But Galt understood; he glanced at her and the glance was part amusement, part contemptuous reproach.
He said nothing, until they were alone, walking down the trail to the valley. Then he glanced at her again, the amusement sharper in his eyes, and said, "You had to put me to a test in order to learn whether I'd fall to the lowest possible stage of altruism?"
She did not answer, but looked at him in open, undefensive admission.
He chuckled and looked away, and a few steps later said slowly, in the tone of a quotation, "Nobody stays here by faking reality in any . manner whatever."
Part of the intensity of her relief--she thought, as she walked silently by his side--was the shock of a contrast: she had seen, with the sudden, immediate vividness of sensory perception, an exact picture of what the code of self-sacrifice would have meant, if enacted by the three of them. Galt, giving up the woman he wanted, for the sake of his friend, faking his greatest feeling out of existence and himself out of her life, no matter what the cost to him and to her, then dragging the rest of his years through the waste of the unreached and unfulfilled -she, turning for consolation to a second choice, faking a love she did not feel, being willing to fake, since her will to self-deceit was the essential required for Galt's self-sacrifice, then living out her years in hopeless longing, accepting, as relief for an unhealing wound, some moments of weary affection, plus the tenet that love is futile and happiness is not to be found on earth--Francisco, struggling in the elusive fog of a counterfeit reality, his life a fraud staged by the two who were dearest to him and most trusted, struggling to grasp what was missing from his happiness, struggling down the brittle scaffold of a lie over the abyss of the discovery that he was not the man she loved, but only a resented substitute, half-charity-patient, half-crutch, his perceptiveness becoming his danger and only his surrender to lethargic stupidity protecting the shoddy structure of his joy, struggling and giving up and settling into the dreary routine of the conviction that fulfillment is impossible to man--the three of them, who had had all the gifts of existence spread out before them, ending up as embittered hulks, who cry in despair that life is frustration--the frustration of not being able to make unreality real.
But this--she thought--was men's moral code in the outer world, a code that told them to act on the premise of one another's weakness, deceit and stupidity, and this was the pattern of their lives, this struggle through a fog of the pretended and unacknowledged, this belief that facts are not solid or final, this state where, denying any form to reality, men stumble through life, unreal and unformed, and die having never been born. Here--she thought, looking down through green branches at the glittering roofs of the valley--one dealt with men as clear and firm as sun and rocks, and the immense light-heartedness of her relief came from the knowledge that no battle was hard, no decision was dangerous where there was no soggy uncertainty, no shapeless evasion to encounter.
"Did it ever occur to you, Miss Taggart," said Galt, in the casual tone of an abstract discussion, but as if he had known her thoughts, "that there is no conflict of interests among men, neither in business nor in trade nor in their most personal desires--if they omit the irrational from their view of the possible and destruction from their view of the practical? There is no conflict, and no call for sacrifice, and no man is a threat to the aims of another--if men understand that reality is an absolute not to be faked, that lies do not work, that the unearned cannot be had, that the undeserved cannot be given, that the destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn't. The businessman who wishes to gain a market by throttling a superior competitor, the worker who wants a share of his employer's wealth, the artist who envies a rival's higher talent--they're all wishing facts out of existence, and destruction is the only means of their wish. If they pursue it, they will not achieve a market, a fortune or an immortal fame--they will merely destroy production, employment and art. A wish for the irrational is not to be achieved, whether the sacrificial victims are willing or not. But men will not cease to desire the impossible and will not lose their longing to destroy--so long as self-destruction and self-sacrifice are preached to them as the practical means of achieving the happiness of the recipients."
He glanced at her and added slowly, a slight emphasis as sole change in the impersonal tone of his voice, "No one's happiness but my own is in my power to achieve or to destroy. You should have had more respect for him and for me than to fear what you had feared."
She did not answer, she felt as if a word would overfill the fullness of this moment, she merely turned to him with a look of acquiescence that was disarmed, childishly humble and would have been an apology but for its shining joy.
He smiled--in amusement, in understanding, almost in comradeship of the things they shared and in sanction of the things she felt.
They went on in silence, and it seemed to her that this was a summer day out of a carefree youth she had never lived, it was just a walk through the country by two people who were free for the pleasure of motion and sunlight, with no unsolved burdens left to carry. Her sense of lightness blended with the weightless sense of walking downhill, as if she needed no effort to walk, only to restrain herself from flying, and she walked, fighting the speed of the downward pull, her body leaning back, the wind blowing her skirt like a sail to brake her motion.
They parted at the bottom of the trail; he went to keep an appointment with Midas Mulligan, while she went to Hammond's Market with a list of items for the evening's dinner as the sole concern of her world.
His wife--she thought, letting herself hear consciously the word Dr. Akston had not pronounced, the word she had long since felt, but never named--for three weeks she had been his wife in every sense but one, and that final one was still to be earned, but this much was real and today she could permit herself to know it, to feel it, to live with that one thought for this one day.
The groceries, which Lawrence Hammond was lining up at her order on the polished counter of his store, had never appeared to her as such shining objects--and, intent upon them, she was only half-conscious of some disturbing element, of something that was wrong but that her mind was too full to notice. She noticed it only when she saw Hammond pause, frown and stare upward, at the sky beyond his open store front.
In time with his words: "I think somebody's trying to repeat your stunt, Miss Taggart," she realized that it was the sound of an airplane overhead and that it had been there for some time, a sound which was not to be heard in the valley after the first of this month.
They rushed out to the street. The small silver cross of a plane was circling above the ring of mountains, like a sparkling dragonfly about to brush the peaks with its wings.
"What does he think he's doing?" said Lawrence Hammond.
There were people at the doors of the shops and standing still all down the street, looking up.
"Is ... is anyone expected?" she asked and was astonished by the anxiety of her own voice.
"No," said Hammond. "Everyone who's got any business here is here." He did not sound disturbed, but grimly curious.
The plane was now a small dash, like a silver cigarette, streaking against the flanks of the mountains: it had dropped lower.
"Looks like a private monoplane," said Hammond, squinting against the sun. "Not an army model."
"Will the ray screen hold out?" she asked tensely, in a tone of defensive resentment against the approach of an enemy.
He chuckled. "Hold out?"
"Will he see us?"
"That screen is safer than an underground vault, Miss Taggart. As you ought to know."
The plane rose, and for a moment it was only a bright speck, like a bit of paper blown by the wind--it hovered uncertainly, then dropped down again into another cir