Atlas Shrugged – Day 007 – pp. 64-73
And Chapter IV — The Immovable Movers
Dagny returns from a trip to United Locomotive Works in Jersey. She had gone to see the president about why they were unable to deliver the locomotives Taggart had ordered.
As is seemingly the norm, the president is bathing himself in self-absolution.
Upon returning she finds Eddie who tells her that McNamara (the contractor who was to finish the Rio Norte line) has quit. Retired. Quit. Left the business. Walked out on a fortune worth of pending contracts.
Looks like time for a little conflict build-up.
While Eddie sums up the blindness of the class…
“I wouldn’t be frightened if I could understand it . . . . But a thing that can’t have any possible reason. . . ” (It seems larger set of wheels are in motion and no one can see the bigger picture.)
As she walks home, she sees reminders all around her of the state of the country… A speaker blaring inharmonious music… A best seller in the window of a book store with the tag line “The novel of our century. The penetrating study of a businessman’s greed. A fearless revelation of man’s depravity.” … The movie theater playing a film tagged “…in a momentous drama, giving the answer to the great problem: should a woman tell.”
“What had she hoped to find,” she thought…
She arrives back at her apartment. The one place “that could give her the feeling she wanted to experience tonight.”
She puts Richard Halley’s 4th concerto on the phonograph.
About the only thing I can gather from her love for Halley’s music is that it was brilliant, triumphant and heroic. Kind of like her character. And she takes solace in it.
Ah! We get some back story on Richard Halley. Some 20 years prior, he had written an opera, Phaeton – based on the story in Greek mythology of the son who wanted to fly and flew too close to the sun. In Halley’s version, however, the overachieving boy succeeded!
Opera closed after the first night
Twenty years later it reopened to resounding cheers. Dagny was at the performance. Halley came out on stage, acknowledged the crowd, and retired the next day never to compose again.
Tossing a newspaper aside, she sees a picture. Ah Ha again! Francisco d’Anconia is in town at the Wayne-Falkland Hotel giving an interview to reporters.
“He said that he had come to New York for two important reasons” a hat-check girl at the Cub Club and the liverwurst at Moe’s Delicatessen on third Avenue. He had nothing to say about the pending divorce trial of Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert Vail.”
Apparently rumors linked the two romantically. The Cad!
The reporters assumed he wouldn’t care to be in town during the divorce proceedings.
His reply. “I wanted to witness the farce.” (Sounds subtly ominous.)
Cut to Jim Taggart the next morning. Slumped in a chair, with Betty Pope — apparently some bimbo he’s banging, dressing in the bathroom.
“The nature of their relationship had the same quality. There was no passion in it. no desire, no actual pleasure, not even a sense of shame. To them, the ace of sex was neither joy nor sin It meant nothing. They had heard that men and women were supposed to sleep together, so they did.”
Seems like Jim has his priorities backward. Or his sex life is representative of his business philosophy. Empty and for the behest of society at large.
But it’s the big board meeting today. Where he plans to expose — Dagny’s irresponsibility — overreaching re the San Sebastian line. As he ponders getting his sis back under his thumb a bit, the phone rings…
Don’t is always?
It was a long distance call from Mexico. (go figure.)
“I couldn’t help it Jim! . . . We had no warning. I swear to God, nobody suspected, nobody saw it coming. I’ve done my best, you can’t blame me. Jim, it was a bolt our of the blue! The decree came out this morning, just five minutes ago. they sprang it on us like that, without any notice! The government of the People’s State of Mexico has nationalize the San Sebastian Mines and the San Sebastian railroad.”
Nope, never saw that coming.
Cut to the board meeting where Jim is taking credit for all Dagny’s maneuvering. He put the crappy engines there, he cut the runs to once a day. Of course it’s hard for a board to damn an exec when the guilt is so evenly spread around.
So what’s left to do?
Ah yes, look to someone else for answers. Francisco D. He’s losing $15 mil in the deal on the mines. He’s got to have a plan that’ll pull all their asses out of the fire.
Taggart calls to his secretary to see if she’s set up the meeting he’s requested with d’Anconia. Nope. Well get the meeting. She called. And? He declined…
“Senor d’Anconia said that you bore him, Mr. Taggart.”
Ouch… Francicso 1 Taggart -3
and a section break…