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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 comers 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

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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

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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.

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"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.

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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