Atlas Shrugged – Day 084 – pp. 902-911
The world, as represented by ole Jimmy Taggart, is rapidly spiraling down into a moral abyss. He’s just hit it with Lillian Rearden. More or less taking advantage of a woman down on her most-undeserved luck to satisfy not a sexual but a power lust.
Yeah, he’s a sick POS. (And I’m getting the sense he’s going off the deep end.)
Anyway, back to the ever-increasing drama…
“Cherryl unlocked the door and slipped in quietly…”
Oh boy. Either Jim’s a master love-maker or she wasn’t gone that long.
On the way in, she sees Jim’s study door ajar. Sees two glasses and a woman’s hat on the floor.
“She stood, in unreacting stupor, until she heard the muffled drawl of two voices behind the door of Jim’s bedroom.”
OH! OH! NO!! Confrontation? Is Cherryl up for something like that?
She sneaks to her room, locks the door and sags to the ground. She sat there until she heard the front door close. Then she went out and confronted Jim.
“Jim, I know.”
“What do you know?”
“You were there . . . with a woman.”
These are the parts where Rand gets good with the Jim character
“An unadmitted rage was boiling in his mind, struggling between escape and explosion, and it blew up into the sensation that this negligible little wife of his was depriving him of his triumph, that he would not surrender to his new enjoyment.”
He fires back.
“Sure! So what? What are you going to do about it?”
He blasts away in a rage at her. Flouting his superiority. Belittling her.
He tells her it was Lillian. And goes on telling her what a naive fool she is. This is the way the world works. He tells her to go be a cheap slut and have her own affairs – he doesn’t care. Just keep her mouth shut.
“Jim, if I were that kind who did or would, you wouldn’t have married me.”
“No, I wouldn’t have.”
“Why did you marry me?”
And now just a little too much honesty.
“Because you were a cheap, helpless, preposterous little guttersnipe, who’d never have a chance at anything to equal me! Because I thought you’d love me!. . . Without daring to ask what I am! Without reasons! Without putting me on the spot always to live up to reason after reason after reason . . “
Someone who would love him and not question him.
“You loved me . . . because I was worthless?”
“What else did you have to offer? But you didn’t have the humility to appreciate it. I wanted to be generous, I wanted to give you security. . .”
“You wanted me to . . . accept your love . . . as alms?”
“Did you imagine you could earn it? Did you imagine that you could deserve to marry me, you poor little tramp? I used to buy the likes of you for the price of a meal.”
Ugly, ugly, ugly…
“Of what use would you be to me, if you earned it all, and I had to work to hold you, and you could trade elsewhere if you chose?”
Then Cherryl sees him fully for what he is.
“You . . . you’re a killer . . .for the sake of killing . . .”
She springs to her feet and runs out the back. Down the emergency stairway. And out into the night.
Rand now goes through four pages describing Cherryl’s confusion and suffering. (Why she doesn’t go back to Dagny’s I don’t know.)
“Somewhere in one of those vanishing towers she thought,there was Dagny — but Dagny was a lonely victim, fighting a losing battle, to be destroyed and to sink into fog like the others.”
Oh.
So she runs then walks the streets.
“There is no place to go, she thought and stumbled on — I can’t stand still, nor move much longer — I can neither work nor rest — I can neither surrender nor fight — but this . . . this is what they want of me, this is where they want me — neither living nor dead, neither thinking nor insane, but just a chunk of pulp that screams with fear, to be shaped by them as they please, they who have no shape of their own.”
‘Bout sums it up.
She carries on and on. Until she finds herself sitting in an alley by the wharfs and warehouses.
She’s spotted by a social worker who comes over to help. The social worker sees she’s a woman of some means.
“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. . .”
Cherryl jumped up screaming…
“…she ran straight down the street that ended at the river — and in a single streak of speed, with no break, no moment of doubt, with full consciousness of acting in self-preservation, she kept running till the parapet barred her way and, not stopping, went over into space.”