Atlas Shrugged [712]
She saw the laughter in his eyes, she felt the touch of his mouth again and again, she was sagging in his arms, she was breathing in gasps, as if she had not breathed for five flights of stairs, her face was pressed to the angle between his neck and shoulder, to hold him, to hold him with her arms, her hands and the skin of her cheek.
"John . . . you're alive . . ." was all she could say.
He nodded, as if he knew what the words were intended to explain.
Then he picked up her hat that had fallen to the floor, he took off her coat and put it aside, he looked at her slender, trembling figure, a sparkle of approval in his eyes, his hand moving over the tight, high collared, dark blue sweater that gave to her body the fragility of a schoolgirl and the tension of a fighter.
"The next time I see you," he said, "wear a white one. It will look wonderful, too,"
She realized that she was dressed as she never appeared in public.
as she had been dressed at home through the sleepless hours of that night. She laughed, rediscovering the ability to laugh: she had expected his first words to be anything but that.
"If there is a next time," he added calmly.
"What . . . do you mean?"
He went to the door and locked it. "Sit down," he said.
She remained standing, but she took the time to glance at the room she had not noticed: a long, bare garret with a bed in one corner and a gas stove in another, a few pieces of wooden furniture, naked boards stressing the length of the floor, a single lamp burning on a desk, a closed door in the shadows beyond the lamp's circle-and New York City beyond an enormous window, the spread of angular structures and scattered lights, and the shaft of the Taggart Building far in the distance.
"Now listen carefully," he said. "We have about half an hour, I think. I know why you came here. I told you that it would be hard to stand and that you would be likely to break. Don't regret it. You see?-I can't regret it, either. But now, we have to know how to act, from here on. In about half an hour, the looters' agents, who followed you, will be here to arrest me."
"Oh no!" she gasped.
"Dagny, whoever among them had any remnant of human perceptiveness would know that you're not one of them, that you're their last link to me, and would not let you out of his sight-or the sight of his spies."
"I wasn't followed! I watched, I-"
"You wouldn't know how to notice it. Sneaking is one art they're expert at. Whoever followed you is reporting to his bosses right now.
Your presence in this district, at this hour, my name on the board downstairs, the fact that I work for your railroad-it's enough even for them to connect,"
"Then let's get out of here!"
He shook his head. "They've surrounded the block by now. Your follower would have every policeman in the district at his immediate call. Now I want you to know what you'll have to do when they come here. Dagny, you have only one chance to save me. If you did not quite understand what I said on the radio about the man in the middle, you'll understand it now. There is no middle for you to take. And you cannot take my side, not so long as we're in their hands. Now you must take their side."
"What?"
"You must take their side, as fully, consistently and loudly as your capacity for deception will permit. You must act as one of them. You must act as my worst enemy. If you do, I'll have a chance to come out of it alive. They need me too much, they'll go to any extreme before they bring themselves to kill me. Whatever they extort from people, they can extort it only through their victims' values - and they have no value of mine to hold over my head, nothing to threaten me with. But if they get the slightest suspicion of what we are to each other, they will have you on a torture rack - I mean, physical torture - before my eyes, in less than a week. I am not going to wait for that. At the first mention of a threat to you, I will kill myself and stop them right there."
He said it without emphasis, in the same impersonal