Atlas Shrugged

Then she felt the mesh of burlap striking the skin of her shoulders, she found herself lying on the broken sandbags, she saw the long, tight gleam of her stockings, she felt his mouth pressed to her ankle, then rising in a tortured motion up the line of her leg, as if he wished to own its shape by means of his lips, then she felt her teeth sinking into the flesh of his arm, she felt the sweep of his elbow knocking her head aside and his mouth seizing her lips with a pressure more viciously painful than hers—then she felt, when it hit her throat, that which she knew only as an upward streak of motion that released and united her body into a single shock of pleasure—then she knew nothing but the motion of his body and the driving greed that went reaching on and on, as if she were not a person any longer, only a sensation of endless reaching for the impossible—then she knew that it was possible, and she gasped and lay still, knowing that nothing more could be desired, ever.

He lay beside her, on his back, looking up at the darkness of the granite vault above them, she saw him stretched on the jagged slant of sandbags as if his body were fluid in relaxation, she saw the black wedge of her cape flung across the rails at their feet, there were beads of moisture twinkling on the vault, shifting slowly, running into invisible cracks, like the lights of a distant traffic. When he spoke, his voice sounded as if he were quietly continuing a sentence in answer to the questions in her mind, as if he had nothing to hide from her any longer and what he owed her now was only the act of undressing his soul, as simply as he would have undressed his body: ". . . this is how I've watched you for ten years . . . from here, from under the ground under your feet . . . knowing every move you made in your office at the top of the building, but never seeing you, never enough . . . ten years of nights, spent waiting to catch a glimpse of you, here, on the platforms, when you boarded a train. . . .

Whenever the order came down to couple your car, I'd know of it and wait and see you come down the ramp, and wish you didn't walk so fast . . . it was so much like you, that walk, I'd know it anywhere . . . your walk and those legs of yours . . . it was always your legs that I'd see first, hurrying down the ramp, going past me as I looked up at you from a dark side track below. . . . I think I could have molded a sculpture of your legs, I knew them, not with my eyes, but with the palms of my hands when I watched you go by . . . when I turned back to my work . . . when I went home just before sunrise for the three hours of sleep which I didn't get . . ."

"I love you," she said, her voice quiet and almost toneless except for a fragile sound of youth.

He closed his eyes, as if letting the sound travel through the years behind them. "Ten years, Dagny . . ., except that once there were a few weeks when I had you before me, in plain sight, within reach, not hurrying away, but held still, as on a lighted stage, a private stage for me to watch . . . and I watched you for hours through many evenings . . . in the lighted window of an office that was called the John Galt Line. . . . And one night—"

Her breath was a faint gasp. "Was it you, that night?"

"Did you see me?"

"I saw your shadow . . . on the pavement . . . pacing back and forth . . . it looked like a struggle . . . it looked like—" She stopped; she did not want to say "torture."

"It was," he said quietly. "That night, I wanted to walk in, to face you, to speak, to . . . That was the night I came closest to breaking my oath, when I saw you slumped across your desk, when I saw you broken by the burden you were carrying—"

"John, that night, it was you that I was thinking of . . . only I didn't know it . . ."

"But, you see, 7 knew it,"

". . . it was you, all my life, through everything I did and everything I wanted . . . "

"I know it."

"John, the hardest was not when I left you in the valley . . . it was—"

"Your radio speech, the day you returned?"

"Yes! Were you listening?"

"Of course. I'm glad you did it. It was a magnificent thing to do. And I—I knew it, anyway."

"You knew . . . about Hank Rearden?"

"Before I saw you in the valley."

"Was it . . . when you learned about him, had you expected it?"

"No."

"Was it . . . ?" she stopped.

"Hard? Yes. But only for the first few days. That next night . . . Do you want me to tell you what I did the night after I learned it?"

"Yes."

"I had never seen Hank Rearden, only pictures of him in the newspapers.