The Fountainhead (73 page)

It was the lack of shock, when he thought he would kill himself, that convinced him he should. The thought seemed so simple, like an argument not worth contesting. Like a bromide.

Now he stood at the glass wall, stopped by that very simplicity. One could make a bromide of one’s life, he thought; but not of one’s death.

He walked to the bed and sat down, the gun hanging in his hand. A man about to die, he thought, is supposed to see his whole life in a last flash. I see nothing. But I could make myself see it. I could go over it again, by force. Let me find in it either the will to live on or the reason to end it now.

 

Gail Wynand, aged twelve, stood in the darkness under a broken piece of wall on the shore of the Hudson, one arm swung back, the fist closed, ready to strike, waiting.

The stones under his feet rose to the remnant of a corner; one side of it hid him from the street; there was nothing behind the other side but a sheer drop to the river. An unlighted, unpaved stretch of waterfront lay before him, sagging structures and empty spaces of sky, warehouses, a crooked cornice hanging somewhere over a window with a malignant light.

In a moment he would have to fight—and he knew it would be for his life. He stood still. His closed fist, held down and back, seemed to clutch invisible wires that stretched to every key spot of his lanky, fleshless body, under the ragged pants and shirt, to the long, swollen tendon of his bare arm, to the taut cords of his neck. The wires seemed to quiver; the body was motionless. He was like a new sort of lethal instrument; if a finger were to touch any part of him, it would release the trigger.

He knew that the leader of the boys’ gang was looking for him and that the leader would not come alone. Two of the boys he expected fought with knives; one had a killing to his credit. He waited for them, his own pockets empty. He was the youngest member of the gang and the last to join. The leader had said that he needed a lesson.

It had started over the looting of the barges on the river, which the gang was planning. The leader had decided that the job would be done at night. The gang had agreed; all but Gail Wynand. Gail Wynand had explained, in a slow, contemptuous voice, that the Little Plug-Uglies, farther down the river, had tried the same stunt last week and had left six members in the hands of the cops, plus two in the cemetery; the job had to be done at daybreak, when no one would expect it. The gang hooted him. It made no difference. Gail Wynand was not good at taking orders. He recognized nothing but the accuracy of his own judgment. So the leader wished to settle the issue once and for all.

The three boys walked so softly that the people behind the thin walls they passed could not hear their steps. Gail Wynand heard them a block away. He did not move in his corner; only his wrist stiffened a little.

When the moment was right, he leaped. He leaped straight into space, without thought of landing, as if a catapult had sent him on a flight of miles. His chest struck the head of one enemy, his stomach another, his feet smashed into the chest of the third. The four of them went down. When the three lifted their faces, Gail Wynand was unrecognizable; they saw a whirl suspended in the air above them, and something darted at them out of the whirl with a scalding touch.

He had nothing but his two fists; they had five fists and a knife on their side; it did not seem to count. They heard their blows landing with a thud as on hard rubber; they felt the break in the thrust of their knife, which told that it had been stopped and had cut its way out. But the thing they were fighting was invulnerable. He had no time to feel; he was too fast; pain could not catch up with him; he seemed to leave it hanging in the air over the spot where it had hit him and where he was no longer in the next second.

He seemed to have a motor between his shoulder blades to propel his arms in two circles; only the circles were visible; the arms had vanished like the spokes of a speeding wheel. The circle landed each time, and stopped whatever it had landed upon, without a break in its spin. One boy saw his knife disappear in Wynand’s shoulder; he saw the jerk of the shoulder that sent the knife slicing down through Wynand’s side and flung it out at the belt. It was the last thing the boy saw. Something happened to his chin and he did not feel it when the back of his head struck against a pile of old bricks.

For a long time the two others fought the centrifuge that was now spattering red drops against the walls around them. But it was no use. They were not fighting a man. They were fighting a bodiless human will.

When they gave up, groaning among the bricks, Gail Wynand said in a normal voice: “We’ll pull it off at daybreak,” and walked away. From that moment on, he was the leader of the gang.

The looting of the barges was done at daybreak, two days later, and came off with brilliant success.

Gail Wynand lived with his father in the basement of an old house in the heart of Hell’s Kitchen. His father was a longshoreman, a tall, silent, illiterate man who had never gone to school. His own father and his grandfather were of the same kind, and they knew of nothing but poverty in their family. But somewhere far back in the line there had been a root of aristocracy, the glory of some noble ancestor and then some tragedy, long since forgotten, that had brought the descendants to the gutter. Something about all the Wynands—in tenement, saloon and jail —did not fit their surroundings. Gail’s father was known on the waterfront as the Duke.

Gail’s mother had died of consumption when he was two years old. He was an only son. He knew vaguely that there had been some great drama in his father’s marriage; he had seen a picture of his mother; she did not look and she was not dressed like the women of their neighborhood; she was very beautiful. All life had gone out of his father when she died. He loved Gail; but it was the kind of devotion that did not require two sentences a week.

Gail did not look like his mother or father. He was a throwback to something no one could quite figure out; the distance had to be reckoned, not in generations, but in centuries. He was always too tall for his age, and too thin. The boys called him Stretch Wynand. Nobody knew what he used for muscles; they knew only that he used it.

He had worked at one job after another since early childhood. For a long while he sold newspapers on street corners. One day he walked up to the press-room boss and stated that they should start a new service—delivering the paper to the reader’s door in the morning; he explained how and why it would boost circulation. “Yeah?” said the boss. “I know it will work,” said Wynand. “Well, you don’t run things around here,” said the boss. “You’re a fool,” said Wynand. He lost the job.

He worked in a grocery store. He ran errands, he swept the soggy wooden floor, he sorted out barrels of rotting vegetables, he helped to wait on customers, patiently weighing a pound of flour or filling a pitcher with milk from a huge can. It was like using a steamroller to press handkerchiefs. But he set his teeth and stuck to it. One day, he explained to the grocer what a good idea it would be to put milk up in bottles, like whisky. “You shut your trap and go wait on Mrs. Sullivan there,” said the grocer, “don’t you tell me nothing I don’t know about my business. You don’t run things around here.” He waited on Mrs. Sullivan and said nothing.

He worked in a poolroom. He cleaned spittoons and washed up after drunks. He heard and saw things that gave him immunity from astonishment for the rest of his life. He made his greatest effort and learned to keep silent, to keep the 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 bootlack on a ferryboat. He was shoved and ordered around by every 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’ hang-out. 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.

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 unconsious 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 comer; 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.