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.