Atlas Shrugged [501]
"When did you see me?"
"Two years later."
"How?"
"By chance. It was late at night . . . on a passenger platform of the Taggart Terminal." She knew that this was a form of surrender, he did not want to say it, yet he had to speak, she heard both the muted intensity and the pull of resistance in his voice-he had to speak, because he had to give himself and her this one form of contact. "You wore an evening gown. You had a cape half-slipping off your body-I saw, at first, only your bare shoulders, your back and your profile-it looked for a moment as if the cape would slip further and you would stand there naked. Then I saw that you wore a long gown, the color of ice, like the tunic of a Grecian goddess, but had the short hair and the imperious profile of an American woman. You looked preposterously out of place on a railroad platform-and it was not on a railroad platform that I was seeing you, I was seeing a setting that had never haunted me before-but then, suddenly, I knew that you did belong among the rails, the soot and the girders, that that was the proper setting for a flowing gown and naked shoulders and a face as alive as yours-a railroad platform, not a curtained apartment-you looked like a symbol of luxury and you belonged in the place that was its source-you seemed to bring wealth, grace, extravagance and the enjoyment of life back to their rightful owners, to the men who created railroads and factories-you had a look of energy and of its reward, together, a look of competence and luxury combined-and I was the first man who had ever stated in what manner these two were inseparable-and I thought that if our age gave form to its proper gods and erected a statue to the meaning of an American railroad, yours would be that statue. . . . Then I saw what you were doing-and I knew who you were. You were giving orders to three Terminal officials, I could not hear your words, but your voice sounded swift, clear-cut and confident. I knew that you were Dagny Taggart. I came closer, close enough to hear two sentences. 'Who said so?' asked one of the men. 'I did,' you answered. That was all I heard. That was enough."
"And then?"
He raised his eyes slowly to hold hers across the room, and the submerged intensity that pulled his voice down, blurring its tone to softness, gave it a sound of self-mockery that was desperate and almost gentle: "Then I knew that abandoning my motor was not the hardest price I would have to pay for this strike."
She wondered which anonymous shadow-among the passengers who had hurried past her, as insubstantial as the steam of the engines and as ignored-which shadow and face had been his; she wondered how close she had come to him for the length of that unknown moment. "Oh, why didn't you speak to me, then or later?"
"Do you happen to remember what you were doing in the Terminal that night?"
"I remember vaguely a night when they called me from some party I was attending. My father was out of town and the new Terminal manager had made some sort of error that tied up all traffic in the tunnels. The old manager had quit unexpectedly the week before,"
"It was I who made him quit."
"I see . . ."
Her voice trailed off, as if abandoning sound, as her eyelids dropped, abandoning sight. If he had not withstood it then-she thought-if he had come to claim her, then or later, what( sort of tragedy would they have had to reach? . . . She remembered what she had felt when she had cried that she would shoot the destroyer on sight. . . .
I would have-the thought was not in words, she knew it only as a trembling pressure in her stomach-I would have shot him, afterward, if I discovered his role . . . and I would have had to discover it . . .
and yet-she shuddered, because she knew she still wished he had come to her, because the thought not to be admitted into her mind.
but flowing as a dark warmth through her body, was: I would have shot him, but not before-
She raised her eyelids-and she knew that that thought was as naked to him in her eyes, as it was to her in his. She saw his veiled glance and