Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [590]
These were not words in her mind, these were the words which would have named, had she had the power to find them, what she knew only as a sudden fury that made her beat her fists in futile horror against the iron post of the traffic light beside her, against the hollow tube where the hoarse, rusty chuckle of a relentless mechanism went grating on and on.
She could not smash it with her fists, she could not batter one by one all the posts of the street stretching off beyond eyesight—as she could not smash that creed from the souls of the men she would encounter, one by one. She could not deal with people any longer, she could not take the paths they took—but what could she say to them, she who had no words to name the thing she knew and no voice that people would hear? What could she tell them? How could she reach them all? Where were the men who could have spoken?
These were not words in her mind, these were only the blows of her fists against metal—then she saw herself suddenly, battering her knuckles to blood against an immovable post, and the sight made her shudder—and she stumbled away. She went on, seeing nothing around her, feeling trapped in a maze with no exit.
No exit—her shreds of awareness were saying, beating it into the pavements in the sound of her steps—no exit ... no refuge ... no signals ... no way to tell destruction from safety, or enemy from friend.... Like that dog she had heard about, she thought ... somebody’s dog in somebody’s laboratory ... the dog who got his signals switched on him, and saw no way to tell satisfaction from torture, saw food changed to beatings and beatings to food, saw his eyes and ears deceiving him and his judgment futile and his consciousness impotent in a shifting, swimming, shapeless world—and gave up, refusing to eat at that price or to live in a world of that kind.... No!—was the only conscious word in her brain—no!—no!—no!—not your way, not your world—even if this “no” is all that’s to be left of mine!
It was in the darkest hour of the night, in an alley among wharfs and warehouses that the social worker saw her. The social worker was a woman whose gray face and gray coat blended with the walls of the district. She saw a young girl wearing a suit too smart and expensive for the neighborhood, with no hat, no purse, with a broken heel, disheveled hair and a bruise at the corner of her mouth, a girl staggering blindly, not knowing sidewalks from pavements. The street was only a narrow crack between the sheer, blank walls of storage structures, but a ray of light fell through a fog dank with the odor of rotting water; a stone parapet ended the street on the edge of a vast black hole merging river and sky.
The social worker approached her and asked severely, “Are you in trouble?”—and saw one wary eye, the other hidden by a lock of hair, and the face of a wild creature who has forgotten the sound of human voices, but listens as to a distant echo, with suspicion, yet almost with hope.
The social worker seized her arm. “It’s a disgrace to come to such a state ... if you society girls had something to do besides indulging your desires and chasing pleasures, you wouldn’t be wandering, drunk as a tramp, at this hour of the night ... if you stopped living for your own enjoyment, stopped thinking of yourself and found some higher—”
Then the girl screamed—and the scream went beating against the blank walls of the street as in a chamber of torture, an animal scream of