“Are you saying,” he asked slowly, “that I rose in your estimation when you found that I wanted you?”
“Of course.”
“That’s not the reaction of most people to being wanted.”
“It isn’t.”
“Most people feel that they rise in their own eyes, if others want them.”.
“I feel that others live up to me, if they want me. And that is the way you feel, too, Hank, about yourself—whether you admit it or not,”
That’s not what I said to you then, on that first morning—he thought, looking down at her. She lay stretched out lazily, her face blank, but her eyes bright with amusement. He knew that she was thinking of it and that she knew he was. He smiled, but said nothing else.
As he sat half-stretched on the couch, watching her across the room, he felt at peace—as if some temporary wall had risen between him and the things he had felt on his way here. He told her about his encounter with the man from the State Science Institute, because, even though he knew that the event held danger, an odd, glowing sense of satisfaction still remained from it in his mind.
He chuckled at her look of indignation. “Don’t bother being angry at them,” he said. “It’s no worse than all the rest of what they’re doing every day.”
“Hank, do you want me to speak to Dr. Stadler about it?”
“Certainly not!”
“He ought to stop it. He could at least do that much.”
“I’d rather go to jail. Dr. Stadler? You’re not having anything to do with him, are you?”
“1 saw him a few days ago.”
“Why?”
“In regard to the motor.”
“The motor . . . ?” He said it slowly, in a strange way, as if the thought of the motor had suddenly brought back to him a realm he had forgotten. “Dagny . . . the man who invented that motor . . . he did exist, didn’t he?”
“Why . . . of course. What do you mean?”
“I mean only that . . . that it’s a pleasant thought, isn’t it? Even if he’s dead now, he was alive once . . . so alive that he designed that motor. . . .”
“What’s the matter, Hank?”
“Nothing. Tell me about the motor.”
She told him about her meeting with Dr. Stadler. She got up and paced the room, while speaking; she could not lie still, she always felt a surge of hope and of eagerness for action when she dealt with the subject of the motor.
The first thing he noticed were the lights of the city beyond the window: he felt as if they were being turned on, one by one, forming the great skyline he loved; he felt it, even though he knew that the lights had been there all the time. Then he understood that the thing which was returning was within him: the shape coming back drop by drop was his love for the city. Then he knew that it had come back because he was looking at the city past the taut, slender figure of a woman whose head was lifted eagerly as at a sight of distance, whose steps were a restless substitute for flight. He was looking at her as at a stranger, he was barely aware that she was a woman, but the sight was flowing into a feeling the words for which were: This is the world and the core of it, this is what made the city—they go together, the angular shapes of the buildings and the angular lines of a face stripped of everything but purpose—the rising steps of steel and the steps of a being intent upon his goal—this is what they had been, all the men who had lived to invent the lights, the steel, the furnaces, the motors—they were the world, they, not the men who crouched in dark corners, half-begging, half-threatening, boastfully displaying their open sores as their only claim on life and virtue—so long as he knew that there existed one man with the bright courage of a new thought, could he give up the world to those others?—so long as he could find a single sight to give him a life-restoring shot of admiration, could he believe that the world belonged to the sores, the moans and the guns?—the men who invented motors did exist, he would never doubt their reality, it was his vision of them that had made the contrast-unbearable, so that even the loathing was the tribute of his loyalty to them and to that world which was theirs and his.
“Darling . . .” he said, “darling . . .” like a man awakening suddenly, when he noticed that she had stopped speaking.
“What’s the matter, Hank?” she asked softly.
“Nothing . . . Except that you shouldn’t have called Stadler.” His face was bright with confidence, his voice sounded amused, protective and gentle; she could discover nothing else, he looked as he had always looked, it was only the note of gentleness that seemed strange and new.
“I kept feeling that I shouldn’t have,” she said, “but I didn’t know why.”
“I’ll tell you why.” He leaned forward. “What he wanted from you was a recognition that he was still the Dr, Robert Stadler he should have been, but wasn’t and knew he wasn’t. He wanted you to grant him your respect, in spite of and in contradiction to his actions. He wanted you to juggle reality for him, so that his greatness would remain, but the State Science Institute would be wiped out, as if it had never existed—and you’re the only one who could do it for him.”
“Why I?”
“Because you’re the victim.”
She looked at him, startled. He spoke intently; he felt a sudden, violent clarity of perception, as if a surge of energy were rushing into the activity of sight, fusing the half-seen and haft-grasped into a single shape and direction.
“Dagny, they’re doing something that we’ve never understood. They know something which we don’t, but should discover. I can’t see it fully yet, but I’m beginning to see parts of it. That looter from the State Science Institute was scared when I refused to help him pretend that he was just an honest buyer of my Metal. He was scared way deep. Of what? I don’t know—public opinion was just his name for it, but it’s not the full name. Why should he have been scared? He has the guns, the jails, the laws—he could have seized the whole of my mills, if he wished, and nobody would have risen to defend me, and he knew it—so why should he have cared what I thought? But he did.
It was I who had to tell him that he wasn’t a looter, but my customer and friend. That’s what he needed from me. And that’s what Dr. Stadler needed from you—it was you who had to act as if he were a great man who had never tried to destroy your rail and my Metal. I don’t know what it is that they think they accomplish—but they want us to pretend that we sec the world as they pretend they see it. They need some sort of sanction from us. I don’t know the nature of that sanction—but. Dagny, I know that if we value our lives, we must not give it to them. If they put you on a torture rack, don’t give it to them. Let them destroy your railroad and my mills, but don’t give it to them. Because I know this much: I know that that’s our only chance.”
She had remained standing still before him, looking attentively at the faint outline of some shape she, too, had tried to grasp.
“Yes . . .” she said, “yes, I know what you’ve seen in them. . . .
I’ve felt it, too—but it’s only like something brushing past that’s gone before I know I’ve seen it, like a touch of cold air, and what’s left is always the feeling that I should have stopped it. . . . I know that you’re right. I can’t understand their game, but this much is right: We must not see the world as they want us to see it. It’s some sort of fraud, very ancient and very vast—and the key to break it is: to check every premise they teach us, to question every precept, to—”
She whirled to him at a sudden thought, but she cut the motion and the words in the same instant: the next words- would have been the ones she did not want to say to him. She stood looking at him with a slow, bright smile of curiosity.
Somewhere within him, he knew the thought she would not name, but he knew it only in that prenatal shape which has to find its words in the future. He did not pause to grasp it now—because in the flooding brightness of what he felt, another thought, which was its predecessor, had become clear to him and had been holding him for many minutes past. He rose, approached her and took her in his arms.