"Gail?" asked Scarret. "Gail, what do you say?"
There was no answer.
"God damn it, Wynand, it's now or never! This can't go on!"
"Make up your mind or get out!"
"I'll buy you out!" shrieked Layton. "Want to sell? Want to sell and get the hell out of it?"
"For God's sake, Wynand, don't be a fool!"
"Gail, it's the Banner ..." whispered Scarret. "It's our Banner...."
"We'll stand by you, Gail, we'll all chip in, we'll pull the old paper back on its feet, we'll do as you say, you'll be the boss--but for God's sake, act like a boss now!"
"Quiet, gentlemen, quiet! Wynand, this is final: we switch policy on Cortlandt, we take Harding, Allen and Falk back, and we save the wreck. Yes or no?"
There was no answer.
"Wynand, you know it's that--or you have to close the Banner. You can't keep this up, even if you bought us all out. Give in or close the Banner. You had better give in."
Wynand heard that. He had heard it through all the speeches. He had heard it for days before the meeting. He knew it better than any man present. Close the Banner.
He saw a single picture: the new masthead rising over the door of the Gazette.
"You had better give in."
He made a step back. It was not a wall behind him. It was only the side of his chair.
He thought of the moment in his bedroom when he had almost pulled a trigger. He knew he was pulling it now.
"All right," he said.
It's only a bottle cap, thought Wynand looking down at a speck of glitter under his feet; a bottle cap ground into the pavement. The pavements of New York are full of things like that--bottle caps, safety pins, campaign buttons, sink chains; sometimes--lost jewels; it's all alike now, flattened, ground in; it makes the pavements sparkle at night. The fertilizer of a city. Someone drank the bottle empty and threw the cap away. How many cars have passed over it? Could one retrieve it now? Could one kneel and dig with bare hands and tear it out again? I had no right to hope for escape. I had no right to kneel and seek redemption. Millions of years ago, when the earth was being born, there were living things like me: flies caught in resin that became amber, animals caught in ooze that became rock. I am a man of the twentieth century and I became a bit of tin in the pavements, for the trucks of New York to roll over.
He walked slowly, the collar of his topcoat raised. The street stretched before him, empty, and the buildings ahead were like the backs of books lining a shelf, assembled without order, of all sizes. The corners he passed led to black channels; street lamps gave the city a protective cover, but it cracked in spots. He turned a corner when he saw a slant of light ahead; it was a goal for three or four blocks.
The light came from the window of a pawnshop. The shop was closed, but a glaring bulb hung there to discourage looters who might be reduced to this. He stopped and looked at it. He thought, the most indecent sight on earth, a pawnshop window. The things which had been sacred to men, and the things which had been precious, surrendered to the sight of all, to the pawing and the bargaining, trash to the indifferent eyes of strangers, the equality of a junk heap, typewriters and violins--the tools of dreams, old photographs and wedding rings--the tags of love, together with soiled trousers, coffee pots, ash trays, pornographic plaster figures; the refuse of despair, pledged, not sold, not cut off in clean finality, but hocked to a stillborn hope, never to be redeemed. "Hello, Gail Wynand," he said to the things in the window, and walked on.
He felt an iron grate under his feet and an odor struck him in the face, an odor of dust, sweat and dirty clothing, worse than the smell of stockyards, because it had a homey, normal quality, like decomposition made routine. The grating of a subway. He thought, this is the residue of many people put together, of human bodies pressed into a mass, with no space to move, with no air to breathe. This is the sum, even though down there, among the packed flesh, one can find the smell of starched white dresses, of clean hair, of healthy young skin. Such is the nature of sums and of quests for the lowest common denominator. What, then, is the residue of many human minds put together, unaired, unspaced, undifferentiated? The Banner, he thought, and walked on.
My city, he thought, the city I loved, the city I thought I ruled.
He had walked out of the board meeting, he had said: "Take over, Alvah, until I come back." He had not stopped to see Manning drunk with exhaustion at the city desk, nor the people in the city room, still functioning, waiting, knowing what was being decided in the board room; nor Dominique. Scarret would tell them. He had walked out of the building and gone to his penthouse and sat alone in the bedroom without windows. Nobody had come to disturb him.
When he left the penthouse, it was safe to go out: it was dark. He passed a newsstand and saw late editions of the afternoon papers announcing the settlement of the Wynand strike. The Union had accepted Scarret's compromise. He knew that Scarret would take care of all the rest. Scarret would replate the front page of tomorrow's Banner. Scarret would write the editorial that would appear on the front page. He thought, the presses are rolling right now. Tomorrow morning's Banner will be out on the streets in an hour.
He walked at random. He owned nothing, but he was owned by any part of the city. It was right that the city should now direct his way and that he should be moved by the pull of chance corners. Here I am, my masters, I am coming to salute you and acknowledge, wherever you want me, I shall go as I'm told. I'm the man who wanted power.
That woman sitting on the stoop of an old brownstone house, her fat white knees spread apart--the man pushing the white brocade of his stomach out of a cab in front of a great hotel--the little man sipping root beer at a drugstore counter--the woman leaning over a stained mattress on the sill of a tenement window--the taxi driver parked on a corner--the lady with orchids, drunk at the table of a sidewalk cafe--the toothless woman selling chewing gum--the man in shirt sleeves, leaning against the door of a poolroom--they are my masters. My owners, my rulers without a face.
Stand here, he thought, and count the lighted windows of a city. You cannot do it. But behind each yellow rectangle that climbs, one over another, to the sky--under each bulb--down to there, see that spark over the river which is not a star?--there are people whom you will never see and who are your masters. At the supper tables, in the drawing rooms, in their beds and in their cellars, in their studies and in their bathrooms. Speeding in the subways under your feet. Crawling up in elevators through vertical cracks around you. Jolting past you in every bus. Your masters, Gail Wynand. There is a net--longer than the cables that coil through the walls of this city, larger than the mesh of pipes that carry water, gas and refuse--there is another hidden net around you; it is strapped to you, and the wires lead to every hand in the city. They jerked the wires and you moved. You were a ruler of men. You held a leash. A leash is only a rope with a noose at both ends.
My masters, the anonymous, the unselected. They gave me a penthouse, an office, a yacht. To them, to any one of them who wished, for the sum of three cents, I sold Howard Roark.
He walked past an open marble court, a cave cut deep into a building, filled with light, spurting the sudden cold of air-conditioning. It was a movie theater and the marquee had letters made of rainbows: Romeo and Juliet. A placard stood by the glass column of the box office: "Bill Shakespeare's immortal classic! But there's nothing highbrow about it! Just a simple human love story. A boy from the Bronx meets a girl from Brooklyn. Just like the folks next door. Just like you and me."
He walked past the door of a saloon. There was a smell of stale beer. A woman sat slumped, breasts flattened against the table top. A juke box played Wagner's "Song to the Evening Star," adapted, in swing time.
He saw the trees of Central Park. He walked, his eyes lowered. He was passing by the Aquitania Hotel.
He came to a corner. He had escaped other corners like it, but this one caught him. It was a dim corner, a slice of sidewalk trapped between the wall of a closed
garage and the pillars of an elevated station. He saw the rear end of a truck disappearing down the street. He had not seen the name on it, but he knew what truck it was. A newsstand crouched under the iron stairs of the elevated. He moved his eyes slowly. The fresh pile was there, spread out for him. Tomorrow's Banner.
He did not come closer. He stood, waiting. He thought, I still have a few minutes in which not to know.
He saw faceless people stopping at the stand, one after another. They came for different papers, but they bought the Banner also, when they noticed its front page. He stood pressed to the wall, waiting. He thought, it is right that I should be the last to learn what I have said.
Then he could delay no longer: no customers came, the stand stood deserted, papers spread in the yellow light of a bulb, waiting for him. He could see no vendor in the black hovel beyond the bulb. The street was empty. A long corridor filled by the skeleton of the elevated. Stone paving, blotched walls, the interlacing of iron pillars. There were lighted windows, but they looked as if no people moved inside the walls. A train thundered over his head, a long roll of clangor that went shuddering down the pillars into the earth. It looked like an aggregation of metal rushing without human driver through the night.
He waited for the sound to die, then he walked to the stand. "The Banner," he said. He did not see who sold him the paper, whether it was a man or a woman. He saw only a gnarled brown hand pushing the copy forward.
He started walking away, but stopped while crossing the street. There was a picture of Roark on the front page. It was a good picture. The calm face, the sharp cheekbones, the implacable mouth. He read the editorial, leaning against a pillar of the elevated.
"We have always endeavored to give our readers the truth without fear or prejudice ...
"... charitable consideration and the benefit of the doubt even to a man charged with an outrageous crime ...
"... but after conscientious investigation and in the light of new evidence placed before us, we find ourselves obliged honestly to admit that we might have been too lenient ...
"... A society awakened to a new sense of responsibility toward the underprivileged ...
"... We join the voice of public opinion ... "... The past, the career, the personality of Howard Roark seem to support the widespread impression that he is a reprehensible character, a dangerous, unprincipled, antisocial type of man ...
"... If found guilty, as seems inevitable, Howard Roark must be made to bear the fullest penalty the law can impose on him."
It was signed "Gail Wynand."
When he looked up, he was in a brightly lighted street, on a trim sidewalk, looking at a wax figure exquisitely contorted on a satin chaise longue in a shop window; the figure wore a salmon-colored negligee, lucite sandals and a string of pearls suspended from one raised finger.
He did not know when he had dropped the paper. It was not in his hands any longer. He glanced back. It would be impossible to find a discarded paper lying on some street he did not know he had passed. He thought, what for? There are other papers like it. The city is full of them.
"You have been the one encounter in my life that can never be repeated ..."
Howard, I wrote that editorial forty years ago. I wrote it one night when I was sixteen and stood on the roof of a tenement.
He walked on. Another street lay before him, a sudden cut of long emptiness and a chain of green traffic lights strung out to the horizon. Like a rosary without end. He thought, now walk from green bead to green bead. He thought, these are not the words; but the words kept ringing with his steps: Mea culpa--mea culpa--mea maxima culpa.
He went past a window of old shoes corroded by wear--past the door of a mission with a cross above it--past the peeling poster of a political candidate who ran two years ago--past a grocery store with barrels of rotting greens on the sidewalk. The streets were contracting, walls drawing closer together. He could smell the odor of the river, and there were wads of fog over the rare lights.
He was in Hell's Kitchen.
The facades of the buildings around him were like the walls of secret backyards suddenly exposed; decay without reticence, past the need of privacy or shame. He heard shrieks coming from a saloon on a corner; he could not tell whether it was joy or brawling.
He stood in the middle of a street. He looked slowly down the mouth of every dark crevice, up the streaked walls, to the windows, to the roofs.
I never got out of here.
I never got out. I surrendered to the grocery man--to the deck hands on the ferryboat--to the owner of the poolroom. You don't run things around here. You don't run things around here. You've never run things anywhere, Gail Wynand. You've only added yourself to the things they ran.
Then he looked up, across the city, to the shapes of the great skyscrapers. He saw a string of lights rising unsupported in black space, a glowing pinnacle anchored to nothing, a small, brilliant square hanging detached in the sky. He knew the famous buildings to which these belonged, he could reconstruct their forms in space. He thought, you're my judges and witnesses. You rise, unhindered, above the sagging roofs. You shoot your gracious tension to the stars, out of the slack, the tired, the accidental. The eyes one mile out on the ocean will see none of this and none of this will matter, but you will be the presence and the city. As down the centuries, a few men stand in lonely rectitude that we may look and say, there is a human race behind us. One can't escape from you; the streets change, but one looks up and there you stand, unchanged. You have seen me walking through the streets tonight. You have seen all my steps and all my years. It's you that I've betrayed. For I was born to be one of you.
He walked on. It was late. Circles of light lay undisturbed on the empty sidewalks under the lampposts. The horns of taxis shrieked once in a while like doorbells ringing through the corridors of a vacant interior. He saw discarded newspapers, as he passed: on the pavements, on park benches, in the wire trash-baskets on corners. Many of them were the Banner. Many copies of the Banner had been read in the city tonight. He thought, we're building circulation, Alvah.
He stopped. He saw a paper spread out in the gutter before him, front page up. It was the Banner. He saw Roark's picture. He saw the gray print of a rubber heel across Roark's face.
He bent, his body folding itself down slowly, with both knees, both arms, and picked up the paper. He folded the front page and put it in his pocket. He walked on.
An unknown rubber heel, somewhere in the city, on an unknown foot that I released to march.
I released them all. I made every one of those who destroyed me. There is a beast on earth, dammed safely by its own impotence. I broke the dam. They would have remained helpless. They can produce nothing. I gave them the weapon. I gave them my strength, my energy, my living power. I created a great voice and let them dictate the words. The woman who threw the beet leaves in my face had a right to do it. I made it possible for her.
Anything may be betrayed, anyone may be forgiven. But not those who lack the courage of their own greatness. Alvah Scarret can be forgiven. He had nothing to betray. Mitchell Layton can be forgiven. But not I. I was not born to be a second-hander.
XVII
IT WAS A SUMMER DAY, CLOUDLESS AND COOL, AS IF THE SUN WERE screened by an invisible film of water, and the energy of heat had been transformed into a sharper clarity, an added brilliance of outline for the buildings of the city. In the streets, scattered like scraps of gray foam, there were a great many copies of the Banner. The city read, chuckling, the statement of Wynand's renunciation.
"That's that," said Gus Webb, chairman of the "We Don't Read Wynand" Committee. "It's slick," said Ike. "I'd like one peek, just one peek, at the great Mr. Gail Wynand's face today," said Sally Brent. "It's about time," said Homer Slottern. "Isn't it splendid? Wynand's surrendered," said a tight-lipped woman; she knew little about Wynand and nothing about the issue, but she liked to hear of people surrendering. In a kitchen, after dinner, a fat woman scraped the remnants off the
dishes onto a sheet of newspaper; she never read the front page, only the installments of a love serial in the second section; she wrapped onion peelings and lamb-chop bones in a copy of the Banner.
"It's stupendous," said Lancelot Clokey, "only I'm really sore at that Union, Ellsworth. How could they double-cross you like that?" "Don't be a sap, Lance," said Ellsworth Toohey. "What do you mean?" "I told them to accept the terms." "You did?" "Yep." "But Jesus! 'One Small Voice' ..." "You can wait for 'One Small Voice' another month or so, can't you? I've filed suit with the labor board today, to be reinstated in my job on the Banner. There are more ways than one to skin a cat, Lance. The skinning isn't important once you've broken its spine."
That evening Roark pressed the bell button at the door of Wynand's penthouse. The butler opened the door and said: "Mr. Wynand cannot see you, Mr. Roark." From the sidewalk across the street Roark looked up and saw a square of light high over the roofs, in the window of Wynand's study.
In the morning Roark came to Wynand's office in the Banner Building. Wynand's secretary told him: "Mr. Wynand cannot see you, Mr. Roark." She added, her voice polite, disciplined: "Mr. Wynand has asked me to tell you that he does not wish ever to see you again."
Roark wrote him a long letter: "... Gail, I know. I hoped you could escape it, but since it had to happen, start again from where you are. I know what you're doing to yourself. You're not doing it for my sake, it's not up to me, but if this will help you I want to say that I'm repeating, now, everything I've ever said to you. Nothing has changed for me. You're still what you were. I'm not saying that I forgive you, because there can be no such question between us. But if you can't forgive yourself, will you let me do it? Let me say that it doesn't matter, it's not the final verdict on you. Give me the right to let you forget it. Go on just on my faith until you've recovered. I know it's something no man can do for another, but if I am what I've been to you, you'll accept it. Call it a blood transfusion. You need it. Take it. It's harder than fighting that strike. Do it for my sake, if that will help you. But do it. Come back. There will be another chance. What you think you've lost can neither be lost nor found. Don't let it go."