for the pause of an instant, then extended one to Dagny, the other to Galt.
“Take it,” he said. “You’ve earned it—and it wasn’t chance.”
Galt took the goblet from his hand, but it was as if the acceptance was done by their eyes as they looked at each other.
“I would have given anything to let it be otherwise,” said Galt, “except that which is beyond giving.”
She held her goblet, she looked at Francisco and she let him see her eyes glance at Galt. “Yes,” she said in the tone of an answer, “But I have not earned it—and what you’ve paid, I’m paying it now, and I don’t know whether I’ll ever earn enough to hold clear title, but if hell is the price—and the measure—then let me be the greediest of the three of us.”
As they drank, as she stood, her eyes closed, feeling the liquid motion of the wine inside her throat, she knew that for all three of them this was the most tortured—and the most exultant—moment they had ever reached.
She did not speak to Galt, as they walked down the last stretch of the trail to his house. She did not turn her head to him, feeling that even a glance would be too dangerous. She felt, in their silence, both the calm of a total understanding and the tension of the knowledge that they were not to name the things they understood.
But she faced him, when they were in his living room, with full confidence and as if in sudden certainty of a right—the certainty that she would not break and that it was now safe to speak. She said evenly, neither as plea nor as triumph, merely as the statement of a fact, “You are going back to the outer world because I will be there.”
“Yes.”
“I do not want you to go.”
“You have no choice about it.”
“You are going for my sake.”
“No, for mine.”
“Will you allow me to see you there?”
“No.”
“I am not to see you?”
“No.”
“I am not to know where you are or what you do?”
“You’re not.”
“Will you be watching me, as you did before?”
“More so.”
“Is your purpose to protect me?”
“No.”
“What is it, then?”
“To be there on the day when you decide to join us.”
She looked at him attentively, permitting herself no other reaction, but as if groping for an answer to the first point she had not fully understood.
“All the rest of us will be gone,” he explained. “It will become too dangerous to remain. I will remain as your last key, before the door of this valley closes altogether.”
“Oh!” She choked it off before it became a moan. Then, regaining the manner of impersonal detachment, she asked, “Suppose I were to tell you that my decision is final and that I am never to join you?”
“It would be a lie.”
“Suppose I were now to decide that I wish to make it final and to stand by it, no matter what the future?”
“No matter what future evidence you observe and what convictions you form?”
“Yes.”
“That would be worse than a lie.”
“You are certain that I have made the wrong decision?”
“I am.”
“Do you believe that one must be responsible for one’s own errors?”
“I do.”
“Then why aren’t you letting me bear the consequences of mine?”
“I am and you will.”
“If I find, when it is too late, that I want to return to this valley—why should you have to bear the risk of keeping that door open to me?”
“I don’t have to. I wouldn’t do it if I had no selfish end to gain.”
“What selfish end?”
“I want you here.”
She closed her eyes and inclined her head in open admission of defeat—defeat in the argument and in her attempt to face calmly the full meaning of that which she was leaving.
Then she raised her head and, as if she had absorbed his kind of frankness, she looked at him, hiding neither her suffering nor her longing nor her calm, knowing that all three were in her glance.
His face was as it had been in the sunlight of the moment when she had seen it for the first time: a face of merciless serenity and unflinching perceptiveness, without pain or fear or guilt. She thought that were it possible for her to stand looking at him, at the straight lines of his eyebrows over the dark green eyes, at the curve of the shadow underscoring the shape of his mouth, at the poured-metal planes of his skin in the open collar of his shirt and the casually immovable posture of his legs—she would wish to spend the rest of her life on this spot and in this manner. And in the next instant she knew that if her wish were granted, the contemplation would lose all meaning, because she would have betrayed all the things that gave it value.
Then, not as memory, but as an experience of the present, she felt herself reliving the moment when she had stood at the window of her room in New York, looking at a fogbound city, at the unattainable shape of Atlantis sinking out of reach—and she knew that she was now seeing the answer to that moment. She felt, not the words she had then addressed to the city, but that untranslated sensation from which the words had come: You, whom I have always loved and never found, you whom I expected to see at the end of the rails beyond the horizon—
Aloud, she said, “I want you to know this. I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle”—you whose presence I had always felt in the streets of the city, the wordless voice within her was saying, and whose world I had wanted to build—“Now I know that I was fighting for this valley”—it is my love for you that had kept me moving—“It was this valley that I saw as possible and would exchange for nothing less and would not give up to a mindless evil”—my love and my hope to reach you and my wish to be worthy of you on the day when I would stand before you face to face—“I am going back to fight for this valley—to release it from its underground, to regain for it its full and rightful realm, to let the earth belong to you in fact, as it does in spirit—and to meet you again on the day when I’m able to deliver to you the whole of the world—or, if I fail, to remain in exile from this valley to the end of my life”—but what is left of my life will still be yours, and I will go on in your name, even though it is a name I’m never to pronounce, I will go on serving you, even though I’m never to win, I will go on, to be worthy of you on the day when I would have met you, even though I won’t—“I will fight for it, even if I have to fight against you, even if you damn me as a traitor... even if I am never to see you again.”
He had stood without moving, he had listened with no change in his face, only his eyes had looked at her as if he were hearing every word, even the words she had not pronounced. He answered, with the same look, as if the look were holding some circuit not yet to be broken, his voice catching some tone of hers, as if in signal of the same code, a voice with no sign of emotion except in the spacing of the words: “If you fail, as men have failed in their quest for a vision that should have been possible, yet has remained forever beyond their reach—if, like them, you come to think that one’s highest values are not to be attained and one’s greatest vision is not to be made real— don’t damn this earth, as they did, don’t damn existence. You have seen the Atlantis they were seeking, it is here, it exists—but one must enter it naked and alone, with no rags from the falsehoods of centuries, with the purest clarity of mind—not an innocent heart, but that which is much rarer: an intransigent mind—as one’s only possession and key. You will not enter it until you learn that you do not need to convince or to conquer the world. When you learn it, you will see that through all the years of your struggle, nothing had barred you from Atlantis and there were no
