Atlas Shrugged [362]
He saw a switchman going by and he asked, pointing, "Who is that?"
"Dagny Taggart," said the man, walking on.
Rearden felt as if the words struck him inside his throat. He felt the start of a current that cut his breath for a moment, then went slowly down his body, carrying in its wake a sense of weight, a drained heaviness that left him no capacity but one. He was aware-with an abnormal clarity-of the place, the woman's name, and everything it implied, but all of it had receded into some outer ring and had become a pressure that left him alone in the center, as the ring's meaning and essence-and his only reality was the desire to have this woman, now, here, on top of the flatcar in the open sun-to have her before a word was spoken between them, as the first act of their meeting, because it would say everything and because they had earned it long ago.
She turned her head. In the slow curve of the movement, her eyes came to his and stopped. He felt certain that she saw the nature of his glance, that she was held by it, yet did not name it to herself.
Her eyes moved on and he saw her speak to some man who stood beside the flatcar, taking notes.
Two things struck him together: his return to his normal reality, and the shattering impact of guilt. He felt a moment's approach to that which no man may feel fully and survive: a sense of self-hatred-the more terrible because some part of him refused to accept it and made him feel guiltier. It was not a progression of words, but the instantaneous verdict of an emotion, a verdict that told him: This, then, was his nature, this was his depravity-that the shameful desire he had never been able to conquer, came to him in response to the only sight of beauty he had found, that it came with a violence he had not known to be possible, and that the only freedom now left to him was to hide it and to despise himself, but never to be rid of it so long as he and this woman were alive.
He did not know how long he stood there or what devastation that span of time left within him. All that he could preserve was the will to decide that she must never know it.
He waited until she had descended to the ground and the man with the notes had departed; then he approached her and said coldly: "Miss Taggart? I am Henry Rearden."
"Oh!" It was just a small break, then he heard the quietly natural "How do you do, Mr. Rearden."
He knew, not admitting it to himself, that the break came from some faint equivalent of his own feeling: she was glad that a face she had liked belonged to a man she could admire. When he proceeded to speak to her about business, his manner was more harshly abrupt than it had ever been with any of his masculine customers.
Now, looking from the memory of the girl on the flatcar to the Gift Certificate lying on his desk, he felt as if the two met in a single shock, fusing all the days and doubts he had lived between them, and, by the glare of the explosion, in a moment's vision of a final sum, he saw the answer to all his questions.
He thought: Guilty?-guiltier than I had known, far guiltier than I had thought, that day-guilty of the evil of damning as guilt that which was my best. I damned the fact that my mind and body were a unit, and that my body responded to the values of my mind. I damned the fact that joy is the core of existence, the motive power of every living being, that it is the need of one's body as it is the goal of one's spirit, that my body was not a weight of inanimate muscles, but an instrument able to give me an experience of superlative joy to unite my flesh and my spirit. That capacity, which I damned as shameful, had left me indifferent to sluts, but gave me my one desire in answer to a woman's greatness. That desire, which I damned as obscene, did not come from the sight of her body, but from the knowledge that the lovely form I saw, did express the spirit I was seeing-
it was not her body that I wanted, but her person-it was not the girl in gray