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place others described as his place, to accept ineptitude as his master--and to

wait. No one had ever heard him speak of what he felt. He felt many emotions

toward his fellow men, but respect was not one of them.

He worked as bootblack on a ferryboat. He was shoved and ordered around by every

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bloated horse trader, by every drunken deck hand aboard. If he spoke, he heard

some thick voice answering: "You don’t run things around here." But he liked

this job. When he had no customers, he stood at the rail and looked at

Manhattan. He looked at the yellow boards of new houses, at the vacant lots, at

the cranes and derricks, at the few towers rising in the distance. He thought of

what should be built and what should be destroyed, of the space, the promise and

what could be made of it. A hoarse shout--"Hey, boy!"--interrupted him. He went

back to his bench and bent obediently over some muddy shoe. The customer saw

only a small head of light brown hair and two thin, capable hands.

On foggy evenings, under a gas lantern on a street corner, nobody noticed the

slender figure leaning against a lamppost, the aristocrat of the Middle Ages,

the timeless patrician whose every instinct cried that he should command, whose

swift brain told him why he had the right to do so, the feudal baron created to

rule--but born to sweep floors and take orders.

He had taught himself to read and write at the age of five, by asking questions.

He read everything he found. He could not tolerate the inexplicable. He had to

understand anything known to anyone. The emblem of his childhood--the

coat-of-arms he devised for himself in place of the one lost for him centuries

ago--was the question mark. No one ever needed to explain anything to him twice.

He learned his first mathematics from the engineers laying sewer pipes. He

learned geography from the sailors on the waterfront. He learned civics from the

politicians at a local club that was a gangsters’ hangout. He had never gone to

church or to school. He was twelve when he walked into a church. He listened to

a sermon on patience and humility. He never came back. He was thirteen when he

decided to see what education was like and enrolled at a public school. His

father said nothing about this decision, as he said nothing whenever Gail came

home battered after a gang fight.

During his first week at school the teacher called on Gail Wynand constantly--it

was sheer pleasure to her, because he always knew the answers. When he trusted

his superiors and their purpose, he obeyed like a Spartan, imposing on himself

the kind of discipline he demanded of his own subjects in the gang. But the

force of his will was wasted: within a week he saw that he needed no effort to

be first in the class. After a month the teacher stopped noticing his presence;

it seemed pointless, he always knew his lesson and she had to concentrate on the

slower, duller children. He sat, unflinching, through hours that dragged like

chains, while the teacher repeated and chewed and rechewed, sweating to force

some spark of intellect from vacant eyes and mumbling voices. At the end of two

months, reviewing the rudiments of history which she had tried to pound into her

class, the teacher asked: "And how many original states were there in the

Union?" No hands were raised. Then Gail Wynand’s arm went up. The teacher nodded

to him. He rose. "Why," he asked, "should I swill everything down ten times? I

know all that."

"You are not the only one in the class," said the teacher. He uttered an

expression that struck her white and made her blush fifteen minutes later, when

she grasped it fully. He walked to the door. On the threshold he turned to add:

"Oh yes. There were thirteen original states." That was the last of his formal

education. There were people in Hell’s Kitchen who never ventured beyond its

boundaries, and others who seldom stepped out of the tenement in which they were

born. But Gail Wynand often went for a walk through the best streets of the

city. He felt no bitterness against the world of wealth, no envy and no fear. He

was simply curious and he felt at home on Fifth Avenue, just as anywhere else.

He walked past the stately mansions, his hands in his pockets, his toes sticking

out of flat-soled shoes. People glared at him, but it had no effect. He passed

by and left behind him the feeling that he belonged on this street and they

didn’t. He wanted nothing, for the time being, except to understand.

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He wanted to know what made these people different from those in his

neighborhood. It was not the clothes, the carriages or the banks that caught his

notice; it was the books. People in his neighborhood had clothes, horse wagons

and money; degrees were inessential; but they did not read books. He decided to

learn what was read by the people on Fifth Avenue. One day, he saw a lady

waiting in a carriage at the curb; he knew she was a lady--his judgment on such

matters was more acute than the discrimination of the Social Register; she was

reading a book. He leaped to the steps of the carriage, snatched the book and

ran away. It would have taken swifter, slimmer men than the cops to catch him.

It was a volume of Herbert Spencer. He went through a quiet agony trying to read

it to the end. He read it to the end. He understood one quarter of what he had

read. But this started him on a process which he pursued with a systematic,

fist-clenched determination. Without advice, assistance or plan, he began

reading an incongruous assortment of books; he would find some passage which he

could not understand in one book, and he would get another on that subject. He

branched out erratically in all directions; he read volumes of specialized

erudition first, and high-school primers afterward. There was no order in his

reading; but there was order in what remained of it in his mind.

He discovered the reading room of the Public Library and he went there for a

while--to study the layout. Then, one day, at various times, a succession of

young boys, painfully combed and unconvincingly washed, came to visit the

reading room. They were thin when they came, but not when they left. That

evening Gail Wynand had a small library of his own in the corner of his

basement. His gang had executed his orders without protest. It was a scandalous

assignment; no self-respecting gang had ever looted anything as pointless as

books. But Stretch Wynand had given the orders--and one did not argue with

Stretch Wynand. He was fifteen when he was found, one morning, in the gutter, a

mass of bleeding pulp, both legs broken, beaten by some drunken longshoreman. He

was unconscious when found. But he had been conscious that night, after the

beating. He had been left alone in a dark alley. He had seen a light around the

corner. Nobody knew how he could have managed to drag himself around that

corner; but he had; they saw the long smear of blood on the pavement afterward.

He had crawled, able to move nothing but his arms. He had knocked against the

bottom of a door. It was a saloon, still open. The saloonkeeper came out. It was

the only time in his life that Gail Wynand asked for help. The saloonkeeper

looked at him with a flat, heavy glance, a glance that showed full consciousness

of agony, of injustice--and a stolid, bovine indifference. The saloonkeeper went

inside and slammed the door. He had no desire to get mixed up with gang fights.

Years later, Gail Wynand, publisher of the New York Banner, still knew the names

of the longshoreman and the saloonkeeper, and where to find them. He never did

anything to the longshoreman. But he caused the saloonkeeper’s business to be

ruined, his home and savings to be lost, and drove the man to suicide.

Gail Wynand was sixteen when his father died. He was alone, jobless at the

moment, with sixty-five cents in his pocket, an unpaid rent bill and a chaotic

erudition. He decided that the time had come to decide what he would make of his

life. He went, that night, to the roof of his tenement and looked at the lights

of the city, the city where he did not run things. He let his eyes move slowly

from the windows of the sagging hovels around him to the windows of the mansions

in the distance. There were only lighted squares hanging in space, but he could

tell from them the quality of the structures to which they belonged; the lights

around him looked muddy, discouraged; those in the distance were clean and

tight. He asked himself a single question: what was there that entered all those

houses, the dim and the brilliant alike, what reached into every room, into

every person? They all had bread. Could one rule men through the bread they

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bought? They had shoes, they had coffee, they had...The course of his life was

set.

Next morning, he walked into the office of the editor of the Gazette, a

fourth-rate newspaper in a rundown building, and asked for a job in the city

room. The editor looked at his clothes and inquired, "Can you spell cat?"

"Can you spell anthropomorphology?" asked Wynand. "We have no jobs here," said

the editor. "I’ll hang around," said Wynand. "Use me when you want to. You don’t

have to pay me. You’ll put me on salary when you’ll feel you’d better."

He remained in the building, sitting on the stairs outside the city room. He sat

there every day for a week. No one paid any attention to him. At night he slept

in doorways. When most of his money was gone, he stole food, from counters or

from garbage pails, before returning to his post on the stairs.

One day a reporter felt sorry for him and, walking down the stairs, threw a

nickel into Wynand’s lap, saying: "Go buy yourself a bowl of stew, kid." Wynand

had a dime left in his pocket. He took the dime and threw it at the reporter,

saying: "Go buy yourself a screw." The man swore and went on down. The nickel

and the dime remained lying on the steps. Wynand would not touch them. The story

was repeated in the city room. A pimply-faced clerk shrugged and took the two

coins.

At the end of the week, in a rush hour, a man from the city room called Wynand

to run an errand. Other small chores followed. He obeyed with military

precision. In ten days he was on salary. In six months he was a reporter. In two

years he was an associate editor.

Gail Wynand was twenty when he fell in love. He had known everything there was

to know about sex since the age of thirteen. He had had many girls. He never

spoke of love, created no romantic illusion and treated the whole matter as a

simple animal transaction; but at this he was an expert--and women could tell

it, just by looking at him. The girl with whom he fell in love had an exquisite

beauty, a beauty to be worshipped, not desired. She was fragile and silent. Her

face told of the lovely mysteries within her, left unexpressed.

She became Gail Wynand’s mistress. He allowed himself the weakness of being

happy. He would have married her at once, had she mentioned it. But they said

little to each other. He felt that everything was understood between them.

One evening he spoke. Sitting at her feet, his face raised to her, he allowed

his soul to be heard. "My darling, anything you wish, anything I am, anything I

can ever be...That’s what I want to offer you--not the things I’ll get for you,

but the thing in me that will make me able to get them. That thing--a man can’t

renounce it--but I want to renounce it--so that it will be yours--so that it

will be in your service--only for you." The girl smiled and asked: "Do you think

I’m prettier than Maggy Kelly?"

He got up. He said nothing and walked out of the house. He never saw that girl

again. Gail Wynand, who prided himself on never needing a lesson twice, did not

fall in love again in the years that followed.

He was twenty-one when his career on the Gazette was threatened, for the first

and only time. Politics and corruption had never disturbed him; he knew all

about it; his gang had been paid to help stage beatings at the polls on election

days. But when Pat Mulligan, police captain of his precinct, was framed, Wynand

could not take it; because Pat Mulligan was the only honest man he had ever met

in his life.

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The Gazette was controlled by the powers that had framed Mulligan. Wynand said

nothing. He merely put in order in his mind such items of information he

possessed as would blow the Gazette into hell. His job would be blown with it,

but that did not matter. His decision contradicted every rule he had laid down

for his career. But he did not think. It was one of the rare explosions that hit

him at times, throwing him beyond caution, making of him a creature possessed by

the single impulse to have his way, because the rightness of his way was so

blindingly total. But he knew that the destruction of the Gazette would be only

a first step. It was not enough to save Mulligan.

For three years Wynand had kept one small clipping, an editorial on corruption,

by the famous editor of a great newspaper. He had kept it, because it was the

most beautiful tribute to integrity he had ever read. He took that clipping and

went to see the great editor. He would tell him about Mulligan and together they

would beat the machine.

He walked far across town, to the building of the famous paper. He had to walk.

It helped to control the fury within him. He was admitted into the office of the

editor--he had a way of getting admitted into places against all rules. He saw a

fat man at a desk, with thin slits of eyes set close together. He did not

introduce himself, but laid the clipping down on the desk and asked: "Do you

remember this?" The editor glanced at the clipping, then at Wynand. It was a

glance Wynand had seen before: in the eyes of the saloonkeeper who had slammed

the door. "How do you expect me to remember every piece of swill I write?" asked

the editor.

After a moment, Wynand said: "Thanks." It was the only time in his life that he