Atlas Shrugged [584]
She fell against the side of an armchair, her head striking the floor, but she raised her head in a moment and looked up at him blankly, without astonishment, as if physical reality were merely taking the form she had expected. A single pear-shaped drop of blood went slithering slowly from the corner of her mouth.
He stood motionless-and for a moment they looked at each other, as if neither dared to move.
She moved first. She sprang to her feet-and ran. She ran out of the room, out of the apartment-he heard her running down the hall, tearing open the iron door of the emergency stairway, not waiting to ring for the elevator.
She ran down the stairs, opening doors on random landings, running through the twisting hallways of the building, then down the stairs again, until she found herself in the lobby and ran to the street.
After a while, she saw that she was walking down a littered sidewalk in a dark neighborhood, with an electric bulb glaring in the cave of a subway entrance and a lighted billboard advertising soda crackers on the black roof of a laundry. She did not remember how she had come here. Her mind seemed to work in broken spurts, without connections.
She knew only that she had to escape and that escape was impossible.
She had to escape from Jim, she thought. Where?-she asked, looking around her with a glance like a cry of prayer. She would have seized upon a job in a five-and-ten, or in that laundry, or in any of the dismal shops she passed. But she would work, she thought, and the harder she worked, the more malevolence she would draw from the people around her, and she would not know when truth would be expected of her and when a lie, but the stricter her honesty, the greater the fraud she would be asked to suffer at their hands. She had seen it before and had borne it, in the home of her family, in the shops of the slums, but she had thought that these were vicious exceptions, chance evils, to escape and forget. Now she knew that they were not exceptions, that theirs was the code accepted by the world, that it was a creed of living, known by all, but kept unnamed, leering at her from people's eyes in that sly, guilty look she had never been able to understand-and at the root of the creed, hidden by silence, lying in wait for her in the cellars of the city and in the cellars of their souls, there was a thing with which one could not live.
Why are you doing it to me?-she cried soundlessly to the darkness around her. Because you're good-some enormous laughter seemed to be answering from the roof tops and from the sewers. Then I won't want to be good any longer-But you will-I don't have to-You will-
I can't bear it-You will.
She shuddered and walked faster-but ahead of her, in the foggy distance, she saw the calendar above the roofs of the city-it was long past midnight and the calendar said: August 6, but it seemed to her suddenly that she saw September 2 written above the city in letters of blood-and she thought: If she worked, if she struggled, if she rose., she would take a harder beating with each step of her climb, until, at the end, whatever she reached, be it a copper company or an unmortgaged cottage, she would see it seized by Jim on some September 2
and she would see it vanish to pay for the parties where Jim made his deals with his friends.
Then I won't!-she screamed and whirled around and went running back along the street-but it seemed to her that in the black sky.
grinning at her from the steam of the laundry, there weaved an enormous figure that would hold no shape, but its grin remained the same on its changing faces, and its face was Jim's and her childhood preacher's and the woman social worker's from the personnel department of the five-and-ten-and the grin seemed to say to her: People like you will always stay honest, people like you will always struggle to rise, people like you will always work, so we're safe and you have no choice.
She ran. When she looked around her once more, she was walking down a quiet street, past the glass doorways