—if she loves me, why doesn’t the damn coward say so and let us both face it in the open? He heard another, louder voice, saying evenly: Don’t switch the blame to her, that’s the oldest trick of all cowards—you’re guilty—no matter what she does, it’s nothing compared to your guilt—she’s right—it makes you sick, doesn’t it, to know it’s she who’s right?—let it make you sick, you damn adulterer—it’s she who’s right!
“What would make you happy, Lillian?” he asked. His voice was toneless.
She smiled, leaning back in her chair, relaxing; she had been watching his face intently.
“Oh, dear!” she said, as in bored amusement. “That’s the shyster question. The loophole. The escape clause.”
She got up, letting her arms fall with a shrug, stretching her body in a limp, graceful gesture of helplessness.
“What would make me happy, Henry? That is what you ought to tell me. That is what you should have discovered for me. I don’t know. You were to create it and offer it to me. That was your trust, your obligation, your responsibility. But you won’t be the first man to default on that promise. It’s the easiest of all debts to repudiate. Oh, you’d never welsh on a payment for a load of iron ore delivered to you. Only on a life.”
She was moving casually across the room, the green-yellow folds of her skirt coiling in long waves about her, “I know that claims of this kind are impractical,” she said. “I have no mortgage on you, no collateral, no guns, no chains. I have no hold on you at all, Henry—nothing but your honor.”
He stood looking at her as if it took all of his effort to keep his eyes directed at her face, to keep seeing her, to endure the sight. “What do you want?” he asked.
“Darling, there are so many things you could guess by yourself, if you really wished to know what I want. For instance, if you have been avoiding me so blatantly for months, wouldn’t I want to know the reason?”
“I have been very busy.”
She shrugged. “A wife expects to be the first concern of her husband’s existence. I didn’t know that when you swore to forsake all others, it didn’t include blast furnaces.”
She came closer and, with an amused smile that seemed to mock them both, she slipped her arms around him.
It was the swift, instinctive, ferocious gesture of a young bridegroom at the unrequested contact of a whore—the gesture with which he tore her arms off his body and threw her aside.
He stood, paralyzed, shocked by the brutality of his own reaction.
She was staring at him, her face naked in bewilderment, with no mystery, no pretense or protection; whatever calculations she had made, this was a thing she had not expected.
“I’m sorry, Lillian . . .” he said, his voice low, a voice of sincerity and of suffering.
She did not answer.
“I’m sorry . . . It’s just that I’m very tired,” he added, his voice lifeless; he was broken by the triple lie, one part of which was a disloyalty he could not bear to face; it was not the disloyalty to Lillian.
She gave a brief chuckle. “Well, if that’s the effect your work has on you, I may come to approve of it. Do forgive me, I was merely trying to do my duty. I thought that you were a sensualist who’d never rise above the instincts of an animal in the gutter. I’m not one of those bitches who belong in it.” She was snapping the words dryly, absently, without thinking. Her mind was on a question mark, racing over every possible answer.
It was her last sentence that made him face her suddenly, face her simply, directly, not as one on the defensive any longer. “Lillian, what purpose do you live for?” he asked.
“What a crude question! No enlightened person would ever ask it.”
“Well, what is it that enlightened people do with their lives?”
“Perhaps they do not attempt to do anything. That is their enlightenment.”
“What do they do with their time?”
“They certainly don’t spend it on manufacturing plumbing pipes.”
“Tell me, why do you keep making those cracks? I know that you feel contempt for the plumbing pipes. You’ve made that clear long ago.
Your contempt means nothing to me. Why keep repeating it?”
He wondered why this hit her; he did not know in what manner, but he knew that it did. He wondered why he felt with absolute certainty that that had been the right thing to say.
She asked, her voice dry, “What’s the purpose of the sudden questionnaire?”
He answered simply, “I’d like to know whether there’s anything that you really want. If there is, I’d like to give it to you, if I can.”
“You’d like to buy it? That’s all you know—paying for things. You get off easily, don’t you? No, it’s not as simple as that. What I want is non-material.”
“What is it?”
“You.”
“How do you mean that, Lillian? You don’t mean it in the gutter sense.”
“No, not in the gutter sense.”
“How, then?”
She was at the door, she turned, she raised her head to look at him and smiled coldly.
“You wouldn’t understand it,” she said and walked out.
The torture remaining to him was the knowledge that she would never want to leave him and he would never have the right to leave—the thought that he owed her at least the feeble recognition of sympathy, of respect for a feeling he could neither understand nor return—the knowledge that he could summon nothing for her, except contempt, a strange, total, unreasoning contempt, impervious to pity, to reproach, to his own pleas for justice—and, hardest to bear, the proud revulsion against his own verdict, against his demand that he consider himself lower than this woman he despised.
Then it did not matter to him any longer, it all receded into some outer distance, leaving only the thought that he was willing to bear anything—leaving him in a state which was both tension and peace—because he lay in bed, his face pressed to the pillow, thinking of Dagny, of her slender, sensitive body stretched beside him, trembling under the touch of his fingers. He wished she were back in New York. If she were, he would have gone there, now, at once, in the middle of the night.
Eugene Lawson sat at his desk as if it were the control panel of a bomber plane commanding a continent below. But he forgot it, at times, and slouched down, his muscles going slack inside his suit, as if he were pouting at the world. His mouth was the one part of him which he could not pull tight at any time; it was uncomfortably prominent in his lean face, attracting the eyes of any listener: when he spoke, the movement ran through his lower lip, twisting its moist flesh into extraneous contortions of its own.
“I am not ashamed of it,” said Eugene Lawson. “Miss Taggart, I want you to know that I am not ashamed of my past career as president of the Community National Bank of Madison.”
“I haven’t made any reference to shame,” said Dagny coldly.
“No moral guilt can be attached to me, inasmuch as I lost everything I possessed in the crash of that bank. It seems to me that I would have the right to feel proud of such a sacrifice.”
“I merely wanted to ask you some questions about the Twentieth Century Motor Company which—”
“I shall be glad to answer any questions. I have nothing to hide. My conscience is clear. If you thought that the subject was embarrassing to me, you were mistaken.’1
“I wanted to inquire about the men who owned the factory at the time when you made a loan to—”
“They were perfectly good men. They were a perfectly sound risk—though, of course, I am speaking in human terms, not in the terms of cold cash, which you are accustomed to expect from bankers. I granted them the loan for the purchase of that factory, because they needed the money. If people needed money, that was enough for me. Need was my standard, Miss Taggart. Need, not greed. My father and grandfather built up the Community National Bank just to amass a fortune for themselves. I placed their fortune in the service of a higher ideal. I did not sit on piles of money and demand collateral from poor people who needed loans. The heart was my collateral. Of course, I do not expect anyone in this materialistic country to understand me. The rewards I got were not of a kind that people of your class, Miss Taggart, would appreciate. The people who used to sit in front of my desk at the bank, did not sit as you do, Miss Taggart. They were humble, uncertain, worn with care, afraid to speak. My rewards were the tears of gratitude in their eyes, the trembling voices, the blessings, the woman who kissed my hand when I granted her a loan she had begged for in vain everywhere else.”