“But . . . but nothing is, any more. Jim and his friends—they’re not. I don’t know what I’m looking at, when I’m among them, I don’t know what I’m hearing when they speak . . . it’s not real, any of it, it’s some ghastly sort of act that they’re all going through . . . and I don’t know what they’re after. . . . Dagny! We’ve always been told that human beings have such a great power of knowledge, so much greater than animals, but I—I feel blinder than any animal right now, blinder and more helpless. An animal knows who are its friends and who are its enemies, and when to defend itself. It doesn’t expect a friend to step on it or to cut its throat. It doesn’t expect to be told that love is blind, that plunder is achievement, that gangsters are statesmen and that it’s great to break the spine of Hank Rearden!—oh God, what am I saying?”
“I know what you’re saying.”
“I mean, how am I to deal with people? I mean, if nothing held firm for the length of one hour—we couldn’t go on, could we? Well, I know that things are solid—but people? Dagny! They’re nothing and anything, they’re not beings, they’re only switches, just constant switches without any shape. But I have to live among them. How am I to do it?”
“Cherryl, what you’ve been struggling with is the greatest problem in history, the one that has caused ail of human suffering. You’ve understood much more than most people, who suffer and die, never knowing what killed them. I’ll help you to understand. It’s a big subject and a hard battle—but first, above all, don’t be afraid.”
The look on Cherryl’s face was an odd, wistful longing, as if, seeing Dagny from a great distance, she were straining and failing to come closer, “I wish I could wish to fight,” she said softly, “but I don’t. I don’t even want to win any longer. There’s one change that I don’t seem to have the strength to make. You see, I had never expected anything like my marriage to Jim, Then when it happened, I thought that life was much more wonderful than I had expected. And now to get used to the idea that life and people are much more horrible than anything I had imagined and that my marriage was not a glorious miracle, but some unspeakable kind of evil which I’m still afraid to learn fully—that is what I can’t force myself to take. I can’t get past it.” She glanced up suddenly. “Dagny, how did you do it? How did you manage to remain unmangled?”
“By holding to just one rule.”
“Which?”
“To place nothing—nothing—above the verdict of my own mind.”
“You’ve taken some terrible beatings . . . maybe worse than I did . . . worse than any of us. . . . What held you through it?”
“The knowledge that my life is the highest of values, too high to give up without a fight.”
She saw a look of astonishment, of incredulous recognition on Cherryl’s face, as if the girl were struggling to recapture some sensation across a span of years. “Dagny”—her voice was a whisper—”that’s . . . that’s what I felt when I was a child . . . that’s what I seem to remember most about myself . . . that kind of feeling . . . and I never lost it, it’s there, it’s always been there, but as I grew up, I thought it was something that I must hide. . . . I never had any name for it, but just now, when you said it, it struck me that that’s what it was. . . . Dagny, to feel that way about your own life—is that good?”
“Cherryl, listen to me carefully: that feeling—with everything which it requires and implies—is the highest, noblest and only good on earth.”
“The reason I ask is because I . . . I wouldn’t have dared to think that. Somehow, people always made me feel as if they thought it was a sin . . . as if that were the thing in me which they resented and . . . and wanted to destroy.”
“It’s true. Some people do want to destroy it. And when you learn to understand their motive, you’ll know the darkest, ugliest and only evil in the world, but you’ll be safely out of its reach.”
Cherryl’s smile was like a feeble flicker struggling to retain its hold upon a few drops of fuel, to catch them, to flare up. “It’s the first time in months,” she whispered, “that I’ve felt as if . . . as if there’s still a chance.” She saw Dagny’s eyes watching her with attentive concern, and she added, “I’ll be all right . . . Let me get used to it—to you, to all the things you said. I think I’ll come to believe it . . . to believe that it’s real . . . and that Jim doesn’t matter.” She rose to her feet, as if trying to retain the moment of assurance.
Prompted by a sudden, causeless certainty, Dagny said sharply, “Cherryl, I don’t want you to go home tonight.”
“Oh no! I’m all right. I’m not afraid, that way. Not of going home.”
“Didn’t something happen there tonight?”
“No . . . not really . . . nothing worse than usual. It was just that I began to see things a little more clearly, that was all . . . I’m all right. I have to think, think harder than I ever did before . . . and then I’ll decide what I must do. May I—” She hesitated.
“Yes?’1
“May I come back to talk to you again?”
“Of course.”
“Thank you, I . . . I’m very grateful to you.”
“Will you promise me that you’ll come back?”
“I promise.”
Dagny saw her walking off down the hall toward the elevator, saw the slump of her shoulders, then the effort that lifted them, saw the slender figure that seemed to sway then marshal all of its strength to remain erect. She looked like a plant with a broken stem, still held together by a single fiber, struggling to heal the breach, which one more gust of wind would finish.
Through the open door of his study, James Taggart had seen Cherryl cross the anteroom and walk out of the apartment. He had slammed his door and slumped down on the davenport, with patches of spilled champagne still soaking the cloth of his trousers, as if his own discomfort were a revenge upon his wife and upon a universe that would not provide him with the celebration he had wanted.
After a while, he leaped to his feet, tore off his coat and threw it across the room. He reached for a cigarette, but snapped it in half and flung it at a painting over the fireplace.
He noticed a vase of Venetian glass—a museum piece, centuries old, with an intricate system of blue and gold arteries twisting through its transparent body. He seized it and flung it at the wall; it burst into a rain of glass as thin as a shattered light bulb.
He had bought that vase for the satisfaction of thinking of all the connoisseurs who could not afford it. Now he experienced the satisfaction of a revenge upon the centuries which had prized it—and the satisfaction of thinking that there were millions of desperate families, any one of whom could have lived for a year on the price of that vase.
He kicked off his shoes, and fell back on the davenport, letting his stocking feet dangle in mid-air.
The sound of the doorbell startled him: it seemed to match his mood.
It was the kind of brusque, demanding, impatient snap of sound he would have produced if he were now jabbing his finger at someone’s doorbell.
He listened to the butler’s steps, promising himself the pleasure of refusing admittance to whoever was seeking it. In a moment, he heard the knock at his door and the butler entered to announce, “Mrs.
Rearden to see you, sir.”
“What? . . . Oh . . . Well! Have her come in!”
He swung his feet down to the floor, but made no other concession, and waited with half a smile of alerted curiosity, choosing not to rise until a moment after Lillian had entered the room.
She wore a wine-colored dinner gown, an imitation of an Empire traveling suit, with a miniature double-breasted jacket gripping her high waistline over the long sweep of the skirt, and a small hat clinging to one ear, with a feather sweeping down to curl under her chin. She entered with a brusque, unrhythmical motion, the train of her dress and the feather of her hat swirling, then flapping against her legs and throat, like pennants signaling nervousness.