Atlas Shrugged [398]
"Harder," she whispered. "I'm not sure T can take it, even now.
Neither your kind of renunciation nor my own . . . But, Francisco"-
she threw her head back suddenly to look up at him-"if this was your secret, then of all the hell you had to take, I was-"
"Oh yes, my darling, yes, you were the worst of it!" It was a desperate cry, its sound of laughter and of release confessing all the agony he wanted to sweep away. He seized her hand, he pressed his mouth to it, then his face, not to let her see the reflection of what his years had been like. "If it's any kind of atonement, which it isn't . . .
whatever I made you suffer, that's how I paid for it . . . by knowing what I was doing to you and having to do it . . . and waiting, waiting to . . . But it's over."
He raised his head, smiling, he looked down at her and she saw a look of protective tenderness come into his face, which told her of the despair he saw in hers.
"Dagny, don't think of that. I won't claim any suffering of mine as my excuse. Whatever my reason, I knew what I was doing and I've hurt you terribly. I'll need years to make up for it. Forget what"-she knew that he meant: what his embrace had confessed-"what I haven't said. Of all the things I have to tell you, that is the one I'll say last." But his eyes, his smile, the grasp of his fingers on her wrist were saying it against his will. "You've borne too much, and there's a great deal that you have to learn to understand in order to lose every scar of the torture you never should have had to bear. All that matters now is that you're free to recover. We're free, both of us, we're free of the looters, we're out of their reach."
She said, her voice quietly desolate, "That's what I came here for-
to try to understand. But I can't. It seems monstrously wrong to surrender the world to the looters, and monstrously wrong to live under their rule. I can neither give up nor go back. I can neither exist without work nor work as a serf. I had always thought that any sort of battle was proper, anything, except renunciation. I'm not sure we're right to quit, you and f, when we should have fought them. But there is no way to fight. It's surrender, if we leave-and surrender, if we remain. I don't know what is right any longer."
"Check your premises, Dagny. Contradictions don't exist."
"But I can't find any answer. I can't condemn you for what you're doing, yet it's horror that I feel-admiration and horror, at the same time. You, the heir of the d'Anconias, who could have surpassed all his ancestors of the miraculous hand that produced, you're turning your matchless ability to the job of destruction. And I-I'm playing with cobblestones and shingling a roof, while a transcontinental railroad system is collapsing in the hands of congenital ward heelers. Yet you and I were the kind who determine the fate of the world. If this is what we let it come to, then it must have been our own guilt. But I can't see the nature of our error."
"Yes, Dagny, it was our own guilt."
"Because we didn't work hard enough?"
"Because we worked too hard-and charged too little."
"What do you mean?"
"We never demanded the one payment that the world owed us-and we let our best reward go to the worst of men. The error was made centuries ago, it was made by Sebastian d'Anconia, by Nat Taggart, by every man who fed the world and received no thanks in return.
You don't know what is right any longer? Dagny, this is not a battle over material goods. It's a moral crisis, the greatest the world has ever faced and the last. Our age is the climax of centuries of evil. We must put an end to it, once and for all, or perish-we, the men of the mind. It was our own guilt. We produced the wealth of the world-
but we let our enemies write its moral code."
"But we never accepted their code. We lived by our own standards."
"Yes-and paid ransoms for it! Ransoms in matter and in spirit-in money, which our enemies received, but did not deserve, and in honor, which we deserved, but did not receive. That was our guilt-
that