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 pressroom 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 bootblack 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' 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.
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.