Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [476]
“We never make assertions, Miss Taggart,” said Hugh Akston. “That is the moral crime peculiar to our enemies. We do not tell—we show. We do not claim—we prove. It is not your obedience that we seek to win, but your rational conviction. You have seen all the elements of our secret. The conclusion is now yours to draw—we can help you to name it, but not to accept it—the sight, the knowledge and the acceptance must be yours.”
“I feel as if I know it,” she answered simply, “and more: I feel as if I’ve always known it, but never found it, and now I’m afraid, not afraid to hear it, just afraid that it’s coming so close.”
Akston smiled. “What does this look like to you, Miss Taggart?” He pointed around the room.
“This?” She laughed suddenly, looking at the faces of the men against the golden sunburst of rays filling the great windows. “This looks like... You know, I never hoped to see any of you again, I wondered at times how much I’d give for just one more glimpse or one more word—and now—now this is like that dream you imagine in childhood, when you think that some day, in heaven, you will see those great departed whom you had not seen on earth, and you choose, from all the past centuries, the great men you would like to meet.”
“Well, that’s one clue to the nature of our secret,” said Akston. “Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be left waiting for us in our graves—or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.”
“I know,” she whispered.
“And if you met those great men in heaven,” asked Ken Danagger, “what would you want to say to them?”
“Just . . . just ‘hello,’ I guess.”
“That’s not all,” said Danagger. “There’s something you’d want to hear from them. I didn’t know it, either, until I saw him for the first time”—he pointed to Galt—“and he said it to me, and then I knew what it was that I had missed all my life. Miss Taggart, you’d want them to look at you and to say, ‘Well done.’ ”She dropped her head and nodded silently, head down, not to let him see the sudden spurt of tears to her eyes. “All right, then: Well done, Dagny!—well done—too well—and now it’s time for you to rest from that burden which none of us should ever have had to carry.”
“Shut up,” said Midas Mulligan, looking at her bowed head with anxious concern.
But she raised her head, smiling. “Thank you,” she said to Danagger.
“If you talk about resting, then let her rest,” said Mulligan. “She’s had too much for one day.”
“No.” She smiled. “Go ahead, say it—whatever it is.”
“Later,” said Mulligan.
It was Mulligan and Akston who served dinner, with Quentin Daniels to help them. They served it on small silver trays, to be placed on the arms of the chairs—and they all sat about the room, with the fire of the sky fading in the windows and sparks of electric light glittering in the wine glasses. There was an air of luxury about the room, but it was the luxury of expert simplicity; she noted the costly furniture, carefully chosen for comfort, bought somewhere at a time when luxury had still been an art. There were no superfluous objects, but she noticed a small canvas by a great master of the Renaissance, worth a fortune, she noticed an Oriental rug of a texture and color that belonged under glass in a museum. This was Mulligan’s concept of wealth, she thought—the wealth of selection, not of accumulation.
Quentin Daniels sat on the floor, with his tray on his lap; he seemed completely at home, and he glanced up at her once in a while, grinning like an impudent kid brother who had beaten her to a secret she had not discovered. He had preceded her into the valley by some ten minutes, she thought, but he was one of them, while she was still a stranger.
Galt sat aside, beyond the circle of lamplight, on the arm of Dr. Akston’s chair. He had not said a word, he had stepped back and turned her over to the others, and he sat watching it as a spectacle in which he had no further part to play. But her eyes kept coming