seemed to understand much simpler queries—and she shook her head, struggling to recapture the reality of the present.
She was startled to see him looking at her with a touch of derision, as if he were mocking her estimate of his understanding.
“Love,” he answered.
She felt herself sagging with hopelessness, in the face of that answer which was at once so simple and so meaningless.
“You don’t love me,” he said accusingly. She did not answer. “You don’t love me or you wouldn’t ask such a question.”
“I did love you once,” she said dully, “but it wasn’t what you wanted. I loved you for your courage, your ambition, your ability. But it wasn’t real, any of it.”
His lower lip swelled a little in a faint, contemptuous thrust. “What a shabby idea of love!” he said.
“Jim, what is it that you want to be loved for?”
“What a cheap shopkeeper’s attitude!”
She did not speak; she looked at him, her eyes stretched by a silent question.
“To be loved
“But then... what is yourself?”
“If you loved me, you wouldn’t ask it.” His voice had a shrill note of nervousness, as if he were swaying dangerously between caution and some blindly heedless impulse. “You wouldn’t ask. You’d know. You’d feel it. Why do you always try to tag and label everything? Can’t you rise above those petty materialistic definitions? Don’t you ever feel—just feel?”
“Yes. Jim, I do,” she said, her voice low. “But I am trying not to, because... because what I feel is fear.”
“Of me?” he asked hopefully.
“No, not exactly. Not fear of what you can do to me, but of what you are.”
He dropped his eyelids with the swiftness of slamming a door—but she caught a flash of his eyes and the flash, incredibly, was terror.
“You’re not capable of love, you cheap little gold-digger!” he cried suddenly, in a tone stripped of all color but the desire to hurt. “Yes, I said gold-digger. There are many forms of it, other than greed for money, other and worse. You’re a gold-digger of the spirit. You didn’t marry me for my cash—but you married me for my ability or courage or whatever value it was that you set as the price of your love!”
“Do you want... love... to be... causeless?”
“Love is its own cause! Love is above causes and reasons. Love is blind. But you wouldn’t be capable of it. You have the mean, scheming, calculating little soul of a shopkeeper who trades, but never gives!
Love is a gift—a great, free, unconditional gift that transcends and forgives everything. What’s the generosity of loving a man for his virtues?
What do you give him? Nothing. It’s no more than cold justice. No more than he’s earned.”
Her eyes were dark with the dangerous intensity of glimpsing her goal. “You want it to be unearned,” she said, not in the tone of a question, but of a verdict.
“Oh, you don’t understand!”
“Yes, Jim, I do. That’s what you want—that’s what all of you really want—not money, not material benefits, not economic security, not any of the handouts you keep demanding.” She spoke in a flat monotone, as if reciting her thoughts to herself, intent upon giving the solid identity of words to the torturous shreds of chaos twisting in her mind.
“All of you welfare preachers—it’s not unearned money that you’re after. You want handouts, but of a different kind. I’m a gold-digger of the spirit, you said, because I look for value. Then you, the welfare preachers... it’s the spirit that you want to loot. I never thought and nobody ever told us how it could be thought of and what it would mean—the unearned in spirit. But that is what you want. You want unearned love. You want unearned admiration. You want unearned greatness. You want to be a man like Hank Rearden without the necessity of being what he is. Without the necessity of being anything.
Without... the necessity... of being.”
“Shut up!” he screamed.
They looked at each other, both in terror, both feeling as if they were swaying on an edge which she could not and he would not name, both knowing that one more step would be fatal.
“What do you think you’re saying?” he asked in a tone of petty anger, which sounded almost benevolent by bringing them back into the realm of the normal, into the near-wholesomeness of nothing worse than a family quarrel. “What sort of metaphysical subject are you trying to deal with?”
“I don’t know...” she said wearily, dropping her head, as if some shape she had tried to capture had slipped once more out of her grasp. “I don’t know... It doesn’t seem possible...”
“You’d better not try to wade in way over your head or—” But he had to stop, because the butler entered, bringing the glittering ice bucket with the champagne ordered for celebration.
They remained silent, letting the room be filled by the sounds which centuries of men and of struggle had established as the symbol of joyous attainment: the blast of the cork, the laughing tinkle of a pale gold liquid running into two broad cups filled with the weaving reflections of candles, the whisper of bubbles rising through two crystal stems, almost demanding that everything in sight rise, too, in the same aspiration.
They remained silent, till the butler had gone. Taggart sat looking down at the bubbles, holding the stem of his glass between two limply casual fingers. Then his hand closed suddenly about the stem into an awkwardly convulsed fist and he raised it, not as one lifts a glass of champagne, but as one would lift a butcher knife.
“To Francisco d’Anconia!” he said.
She put her glass down. “No,” she answered.
“Drink it!” he screamed.
“No,” she answered, her voice like a drop of lead.
They held each other’s glances for a moment, the light playing on the golden liquid, not reaching their faces or eyes.
“Oh, go to hell!” he cried, leaping to his feet, flinging his glass to smash on the floor and rushing out of the room.
She sat at the table, not moving, for a long time, then rose slowly and pressed the bell.
She walked to her room, her steps unnaturally even, she opened the door of a closet, she reached for a suit and a pair of shoes, she took off the housecoat, moving with cautious precision, as if her life depended on not jarring anything about or within her. She held onto a single thought: that she had to get out of this house—just get out of it for a while, if only for the next hour—and then, later, she would be able to face all that had to be faced.
The lines were blurring on the paper before her and, raising her head, Dagny realized that it had long since grown dark.
She pushed the papers aside, unwilling to turn on the lamp, permitting herself the luxury of idleness and darkness. It cut her off from the city beyond the windows of her living room. The calendar in the distance said: August 5.
The month behind her had gone, leaving nothing but the blank of dead time. It had gone into the planless, thankless work of racing from emergency to emergency, of delaying the collapse of a railroad—a month like a waste pile of disconnected days, each given to averting the disaster of the moment. It had not been a sum of achievements brought into existence, but only a sum of zeros, of that which had not happened, a sum of prevented catastrophes—not a task in the service of life, but only a race against death.
There had been times when an unsummoned vision—a sight of the valley—had seemed to rise before her, not as a sudden appearance, but as a constant, hidden presence that suddenly chose to assume an insistent reality. She had faced it, through moments of blinded stillness, in a contest between an unmoving decision and an unyielding pain, a pain to be fought by acknowledgment, by saying: All right, even this.
