Then this was the way they reached their first kiss—with tears running down her face, tears unshed at the party, tears of shock, of happiness, of thinking that this should be happiness, and of a low, desolate voice telling her that this was not the way she would have wanted it to happen.
She had not thought about the newspapers, until the day when Jim told her to come to his apartment and she found it crowded with people who had notebooks, cameras and flash bulbs. When she saw her picture in the papers for the first time—a picture of them together, Jim's arm around her—she giggled with delight and wondered proudly whether every person in the city had seen it. After a while, the delight vanished.
They kept photographing her at the dime-store counter, in the subway, on the stoop of the tenement house, in her miserable room. She would have taken money from Jim now and run to hide in some obscure hotel for the weeks of their engagement—but he did not offer it.
He seemed to want her to remain where she was. They printed pictures of Jim at his desk, in the concourse of the Taggart Terminal, by the steps of his private railway car, at a formal banquet in Washington.
The huge spreads of full newspaper pages, the articles in magazines, the radio voices, the newsreels, all were a single, long, sustained scream—about the "Cinderella Girl" and the "Democratic Businessman."
She told herself not to be suspicious, when she felt uneasy; she told herself not to be ungrateful, when she felt hurt. She felt it only in a few rare moments, when she awakened in the middle of the night and lay in the silence of her room, unable to sleep. She knew that it would take her years to recover, to believe, to understand. She was reeling through her days like a person with a sunstroke, seeing nothing but the figure of Jim Taggart as she had seen him first on the night of his great triumph.
"Listen, kid," the sob sister said to her, when she stood in her room for the last time, the lace of the wedding veil streaming like crystal foam from her hair to the blotched planks of the floor. "You think that if one gets hurt in life, it's through one's own sins—and that's true, in the long run. But there are people who'll try to hurt you through the good they see in you—knowing that it's the good, needing it and punishing you for it. Don't let it break you when you discover that."
"I don't think I'm afraid," she said, looking intently straight before her, the radiance of her smile melting the earnestness of her glance. "I have no right to be afraid of anything. I'm too happy. You sec, I always thought that there wasn't any sense in people saying that all you can do in life is suffer. I wasn't going to knuckle down to that and give up.
I thought that things could happen which were beautiful and very great.
I didn't expect it to happen to me—not so much and so soon. But I'll try to live up to it."
"Money is the root of all evil," said James Taggart. "Money can't buy happiness. Love will conquer any barrier and any social distance. That may be a bromide, boys, but that's how I feel."
He stood under the lights of the ballroom of the Wayne-Falkland Hotel, in a circle of reporters who had closed about him the moment the wedding ceremony ended. He heard the crowd of guests beating like a tide beyond the circle. Cherryl stood beside him, her white gloved hand on the black of his sleeve. She was still trying to hear the words of the ceremony, not quite believing that she had heard them.
"How do you feel, Mrs. Taggart?"
She heard the question from somewhere in the circle of reporters. It was like the jolt of returning to consciousness: two words suddenly made everything real to her. She smiled and whispered, choking, "I . . .
I'm very happy . . ."
At opposite ends of the ballroom, Orren Boyle, who seemed too stout for his full-dress clothes, and Bertram Scudder, who seemed too meager for his, surveyed the crowd of guests with the same thought, though neither of them admitted that he was thinking it. Orren Boyle half-told himself that he was looking for the faces of friends, and Bertram Scudder suggested to himself that he was gathering material for an article. But both, unknown to each other, were drawing a mental chart of the faces they saw, classifying them under two headings which, if named, would have read: "Favor" and "Fear." There were men whose presence signified a special protection extended to James Taggart, and men whose presence confessed a desire to avoid his hostility—those who represented a hand lowered to pull him up, and those who represented a back bent to let him climb. By the unwritten code of the day, nobody received or accepted an invitation from a man of public prominence except in token of one or the other of these motives.
Those in the first group were, for the most part, youthful; they had come from Washington. Those in the second group were older; they were businessmen.
Orren Boyle and Bertram Scudder were men who used words as a public instrument, to be avoided in the privacy of one's own mind.
Words were a commitment, carrying implications which they did not wish to face. They needed no words for their chart; the classification was done by physical means: a respectful movement of their eyebrows, equivalent to the emotion of the word "So!" for the first group—and a sarcastic movement of their lips, equivalent to the emotion of "Well, well!" for the second. One face blew up the smooth working of their calculating mechanisms for a moment: when they saw the cold blue eyes and blond hair of Hank Rearden, their muscles tore at the register of the second group in the equivalent of "Oh, boy!" The sum of the chart was an estimate of James Taggart's power. It added up to an impressive total.
They knew that James Taggart was fully aware of it, when they saw him moving among his guests. He walked briskly, in a Morse code pattern of short dashes and brief stops, with a manner of faint irritation, as if conscious of the number of people whom his displeasure might worry. The hint of a smile on his face had a flavor of gloating—as if he knew that the act of coming to honor him was an act that disgraced the men who had come; as if he knew and enjoyed it.
A tail of figures kept trailing and shifting behind him, as if their function were to give him the pleasure of ignoring them. Mr. Mowen flickered briefly among the tail, and Dr. Pritchett, and Balph Eubank.
The most persistent one was Paul Larkin. He kept describing circles around Taggart, as if trying to acquire a suntan by means of an occasional ray, his wistful smile pleading to be noticed.
Taggart's eyes swept over the crowd once in a while, swiftly and furtively, in the manner of a prowler's flashlight; this, in the muscular shorthand legible to Orren Boyle, meant that Taggart was looking for someone and did not want anyone to know it. The search ended when Eugene Lawson came to shake Taggart's hand and to say, his wet lower lip twisting like a cushion to soften the blow, "Mr. Mouch couldn't come, Jim, Mr. Mouch is so sorry, he had a special plane chartered, but at the last minute things came up, crucial national problems, you know." Taggart stood still, did not answer and frowned.
Orren Boyle burst out laughing. Taggart turned to him so sharply that the others melted away without waiting for a command to vanish.
"What do you think you're doing?" snapped Taggart.
"Having a good time, Jimmy, just having a good time," said Boyle. "Wesley is your boy, wasn't he?"
"I know somebody who's my boy and he'd better not forget it."
"Who? Larkin? Well, no, I don't think you're talking about Larkin.
And if it's not Larkin that you're talking about, why then I think you ought to be careful in your use of the possessive pronouns. I don't mind the age classification, I know I look young for my years, but I'm just allergic to pronouns."