He told her the story of the John Galt Line. She listened, and what she felt was not shock, but worse: the lack of shock, as if she had always known it. “Thank you, Mr. Willers,” was all that she said when he finished.
She waited for Jim to come home, that evening, and the thing that eroded any pain or indignation, was a feeling of her own detachment, as if it did not matter to her any longer, as if some action were required of her, but it made no difference what the action would be or the consequences.
It was not anger that she felt when she saw Jim enter the room, but a murky astonishment, almost as if she wondered who he was and why it should now be necessary to speak to him. She told him what she knew, briefly, in a tired, extinguished voice. It seemed to her that he understood it from her first few sentences, as if he had expected this to come sooner or later.
“Why didn’t you tell me the truth?” she asked.
“So that’s your idea of gratitude?” he screamed. “So that’s how you feel after everything I’ve done for you? Everybody told me that crudeness and selfishness was all I could expect for lifting a cheap little alley cat by the scruff of her neck!”
She looked at him as if he were making inarticulate sounds that connected to nothing inside her mind. “Why didn’t you tell me the truth?”
“Is that all the love you felt for me, you sneaky little hypocrite? Is that all I get in return for my faith in you?”
“Why did you lie? Why did you let me think what I thought?”
“You should be ashamed of yourself, you should be ashamed to face me or speak to me!”
“I?” The inarticulate sounds had connected, but she could not believe the sum they made. “What are you trying to do, Jim?” she asked, her voice incredulous and distant.
“Have you thought of my feelings? Have you thought of what this would do to my feelings? You should have considered my feelings first!
That’s the first obligation of any wife—and of a woman in your position in particular! There’s nothing lower and uglier than ingratitude!”
For the flash of one instant, she grasped the unthinkable fact of a man who was guilty and knew it and was trying to escape by inducing an emotion of guilt in his victim. But she could not hold the fact inside her brain. She felt a stab of horror, the convulsion of a mind rejecting a sight that would destroy it—a stab like a swift recoil from the edge of insanity. By the time she dropped her head, closing her eyes, she knew only that she felt disgust, a sickening disgust for a nameless reason.
When she raised her head, it seemed to her that she caught a glimpse of him watching her with the uncertain, retreating, calculating look of a man whose trick has not worked. But before she had time to believe it, his face was hidden again under an expression of injury and anger.
She said, as if she were naming her thoughts for the benefit of the rational being who was not present, but whose presence she had to assume, since no other could be addressed, “That night... those headlines... that glory... it was not you at all... it was Dagny.”
“Shut up, you rotten little bitch!”
She looked at him blankly, without reaction. She looked as if nothing could reach her, because her dying words had been uttered.
He made the sound of a sob. “Cherryl, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it, I take it back, I didn’t mean it...”
She remained standing, leaning against the wall, as she had stood from the first.
He dropped down on the edge of a couch, in a posture of helpless dejection. “How could I have explained it to you?” he said in the tone of abandoning hope. “It’s all so big and so complex. How could I have told you anything about a transcontinental railroad, unless you knew all the details and ramifications? How could I have explained to you my years of work, my... Oh, what’s the use? I’ve always been misunderstood and I should have been accustomed to it by now, only I thought that you were different and that I had a chance.”
“Jim, why did you marry me?”
He chuckled sadly. “That’s what everybody kept asking me. I didn’t think you’d ever ask it. Why? Because I love you.”
She wondered at how strange it was that this word—which was supposed to be the simplest in the human language, the word understood by all, the universal bond among men—conveyed to her no meaning whatever. She did not know what it was that it named in his mind.
“Nobody’s ever loved me,” he said. “There isn’t any love in the world. People don’t feel. I feel things. Who cares about that? All they care for is time schedules and freight loads and money. I can’t live among those people. I’m very lonely. I’ve always longed to find understanding. Maybe I’m just a hopeless idealist, looking for the impossible.
Nobody will ever understand me.”
“Jim,” she said, with an odd little note of severity in her voice, “what I’ve struggled for all this time is to understand you.”
He dropped his hand in a motion of brushing her words aside, not offensively, but sadly. “I thought you could. You’re all I have. But maybe understanding is just not possible between human beings.”
“Why should it be impossible? Why don’t you tell me what it is that you want? Why don’t you help me to understand you?”
He sighed. “That’s it. That’s the trouble—your asking all those why’s. Your constant asking of a why for everything. What I’m talking about can’t be put into words. It can’t be named. It has to be felt.
Either you feel it or you don’t. It’s not a thing of the mind, but of the heart. Don’t you ever feel? Just feel, without asking all those questions? Can’t you understand me as a human being, not as if I were a scientific object in a laboratory? The great understanding that transcends our shabby words and helpless minds... No, I guess I shouldn’t look for it. But I’ll always seek and hope. You’re my last hope. You’re all I have.”
She stood at the wall, without moving.
“I need you,” he wailed softly. “I’m all alone. You’re not like the others. I believe in you. I trust you. What has all that money and fame and business and struggle given me? You’re all I have... ”
She stood without moving and the direction of her glance, lowered to look down at him, was the only form of recognition she gave him.
The things he said about his suffering were lies, she thought; but the suffering was real; he was a man torn by some continual anguish, which he seemed unable to tell her, but which, perhaps, she could learn to understand. She still owed him this much—she thought, with the grayness of a sense of duty—in payment for the position he had given her, which, perhaps, was all he had to give, she owed him an effort to understand him.
It was strange to feel, in the days that followed, that she had become a stranger to herself, a stranger who had nothing to want or to seek. In place of a love made by the brilliant fire of hero worship, she was left with the gnawing drabness of pity. In place of the men she had struggled to find, men who fought for their goals and refused to suffer—she was left with a man whose suffering was his only claim to value and his only offer in exchange for her life. But it made no difference to her any longer. The one who was she, had looked with eagerness at the turn of every corner ahead; the passive stranger who had taken her place, was like all the over groomed people around her, the people who said that they were adult because they did not try to think or to desire.
But the stranger was still haunted by a ghost who was herself, and the ghost had a mission to accomplish. She had to learn to understand the things that had destroyed her. She had to know, and she lived with a sense of ceaseless waiting. She had to know, even though she felt that the headlight was closer and in the moment of knowledge she would be struck by the wheels.
What do you want of me?—was the question that kept beating in her mind as a clue. What do you want of me?—she kept crying soundlessly, at dinner tables, in drawing rooms, on sleepless nights— crying it to Jim and those who seemed to share his secret, to Balph Eubank, to Dr. Simon Pritchett—what do you want of me? She did not ask it aloud; she knew that they would not answer. What do you want of me?—she asked, feeling as if she were running, but no way were open to escape. What do you want of me?—she asked, looking at the whole long torture of her marriage that had not lasted the full span of one year.
“What do you want of me?” she asked aloud—and saw that she was sitting at the table in her dining room, looking at Jim, at his feverish face, and at a drying stain of water on the table.
She did not know how long a span of silence had stretched between them, she was startled by her own voice and by the--question she had not intended to utter. She did not expect him to understand it, he had never
