Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [560]
“Yes!” Her voice was half-gasp, half-scream, as under a physical blow, with shock as her only awareness. “Hank!—how did you know .it?”
He smiled and pointed at the radio. “My darling, you used nothing buf the past tense.”
“Oh ... !” Her voice was now half-gasp, half-moan, and she closed her eyes.
“You never pronounced the one word you would have rightfully thrown at them, were it otherwise. You said, ‘I wanted him,’ not, ‘I love him.’ You told me on the phone today that you could have returned sooner. No other reason would have made you leave me as you did. Only that one reason was valid and right.”
She was leaning back a little, as if fighting for balance to stand, yet she was looking straight at him, with a smile that did not part her lips, but softened her eyes to a glance of admiration and her mouth to a shape of pain.
“It’s true. I’ve met the man I love and will always love, I’ve seen him, I’ve spoken to him—but he’s a man whom I can’t have, whom I may never have and, perhaps, may never see again.”
“I think I’ve always known that you would find him. I knew what you felt for me, I knew how much it was, but I knew that I was not your final choice. What you’ll give him is not taken away from me, it’s what I’ve never had. I can’t rebel against it. What I’ve had means too much to me—and that I’ve had it, can never be changed.”
“Do you want me to say it, Hank? Will you understand it, if I say that I’ll always love you?”
“I think I’ve understood it before you did.”
“I’ve always seen you as you are now. That greatness of yours which you are just beginning to allow yourself to know—I’ve always known it and I’ve watched your struggle to discover it. Don’t speak of atonement, you have not hurt me, your mistakes came from your magnificent integrity under the torture of an impossible code—and your fight against it did not bring me suffering, it brought me the feeling I’ve found too seldom: admiration. If you will accept it, it will always be yours. What you meant to me can never be changed. But the man I met—he is the love I had wanted to reach long before I knew that he existed, and I think he will remain beyond my reach, but that I love him will be enough to keep me living.”
He took her hand and pressed it to his lips. “Then you know what I feel,” he said, “and why I am still happy.”
Looking up at his face, she realized that for the first time he was what she had always thought him intended to be: a man with an immense capacity for the enjoyment of existence. The taut look of endurance, of fiercely unadmitted pain, was gone; now, in the midst of the wreckage and of his hardest hour, his face had the serenity of pure strength; it had the look she had seen in the faces of the men in the valley.
“Hank,” she whispered, “I don’t think I can explain it, but I feel that I have committed no treason, either to you or to him.”
“You haven’t.”
Her eyes seemed abnormally alive in a face drained of color, as if her consciousness remained untouched in a body broken by exhaustion. He made her sit down and slipped his arm along the back of the couch, not touching her, yet holding her in a protective embrace.
“Now tell me,” he asked, “where were you?”
“I can’t tell you that. I’ve given my word never to reveal anything about it. I can say only that it’s a place I found by accident, when I crashed, and I left it blindfolded—and I wouldn’t be able to find it again.”
“Couldn’t you trace your way back to it?”
“I won’t try.”
“And the man?”
“I won’t look for him.”
“He remained there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why did you