by Ayn Rand
“Where’s Miss Winford?” cried Laury.
Pug-Nose looked with hazy eyes at the group of men in his doorway, and the gleaming brass buttons were the first thing he understood.
“So yuh squealed, yuh goddamn louse, yuh did?” he yelled, jumping at Laury, but the two policemen seized him, one by each arm, and handcuffed his big, hairy fists.
“Where’s the girl?” asked Inspector Rafferty in a threatening voice.
“The girl? The girl, she’s gone, damn her, she escaped from me!”
“How could she escape?”
“How could she? Oh boy! The only thing I wonder ’bout is how that boob managed to keep her fer three days!” And he shook his fist at Laury.
“What do you mean?” cried Mr. Scraggs.
“Haw-haw! So yuh don’t know, do yuh? Damned Dan—there he is, in his own person! Shake hands an’ make yerself acquainted!” And he bellowed his ferocious laugh into Laury’s face.
“The man’s insane!” Mr. Scraggs exclaimed.
“Who’s insane, yuh old fool? Sure, I stole the girl, but I stole her from him! He’s the one that pulled the whole thing! Yuh thought maybe I wouldn’t squeal on yuh, yuh dirty double-crosser?”
Five pairs of bulging eyes turned to Laury. He looked at them, cold, silent, immobile. He did not want to deny it; he knew that his guilt could be proved too easily.
“Why . . . Laury! . . . Why . . .” choked Mr. Scraggs.
Silently, Laury stretched his hand out to Inspector Rafferty for the handcuffs.
“My stars in heaven!” was all Mr. Scraggs could utter.
“Hot diggity dog!” added Vic Perkins. . . .
Laury was silent in the car all the way down to the jail, and the five men did not dare to look at him. Pug-Nose snored by his side.
The big door of the damp, gray jail building opened like a gaping mouth, eager to swallow Laury, and the heavy iron gratings clicked like hungry teeth. Inspector Rafferty had to kick the jailer on the back to get him out of the trance he had fallen into, on learning who his new prisoner was and why.
When the rusty grate of his cell closed after him, Laury turned suddenly and handed a piece of paper to the jailer with a few words written in the form of a headline. The words were:RENEGADE IN OUR MIDST:
OUR OWN REPORTER—
ATROCIOUS KIDNAPPER!
“Give that to Mr. Scraggs,” said Laury sadly. “That, too, will make good copy!”
“I suppose,” said Inspector Rafferty, entering his office with Mr. Scraggs, Vic Perkins, and the two policemen, “I suppose Miss Winford is safe at home by this time. I shall inquire.”
He called up the Winford residence and asked if Miss Winford had returned home.
“No! Oh, my God, no!” answered Mrs. Winford’s hysterical voice.
The five men looked at each other, dumbfounded.
“Well, I’ll be damned!” cried Inspector Rafferty, falling into a chair. “What a case! What’s happened now?”
Laury’s apartment being the only place they could think of searching, all five of them rushed back to the car and hurried there at full speed. They were not only anxious by this time, they were panic-stricken.
When they entered Laury’s apartment, Jinx herself met them. She had one of Laury’s shirts draped gracefully instead of an apron, with the two sleeves tied around her waist, and she was in the kitchen, cooking dinner.
“To what do I owe the honor of this visit?” she asked with the charming smile of a gracious hostess.
“Miss . . . Miss Winford!” gulped Inspector Rafferty. He was the only one that had retained the use of his voice.
Jinx stood facing them, perfectly poised, smiling, unperturbed, a slight interrogative frown raising her eyebrows, as though waiting politely for an explanation.
“I . . . I’m glad to see you safe, Miss Winford,” muttered Inspector Rafferty, not at all sure whether he quite understood just what the situation was. “I’m glad we managed to rescue you at last!”
“Oh, you did?”
“Yes, Miss Winford! You have nothing to fear from him any more!”
“Fear from whom?”
“The young man that kidnapped you, Laurence McGee!”
“Laurence McGee?” Jinx shouted. “Laurence McGee?”
And such a thunder of laughter exploded like a bomb with splinters ringing all over the room, that Inspector Rafferty and his companions started, terrified.
“Oh . . . oh, how adorable!” Jinx laughed, understanding the real meaning and reason of the whole case.
“You are glad that we arrested him, is that it?” asked Inspector Rafferty timidly, very much surprised.
“Arrested? Him? Oh, my God! . . . Inspector, you must release him immediately!”
Vic Perkins, who had been taking notes, dropped his pad and pencil.
“It’s all a big misunderstanding, Inspector!” Jinx said quickly, still anxious, but regaining her calm.
“A misunderstanding, Miss Winford?”
“You see, I’ve never been kidnapped,” she explained, so sweetly, so sincerely that it would have been hard to doubt the straight look of her bold, mocking eyes. “I feel that you ought to know the truth, and I must confess everything. Mr. McGee did not kidnap me. We have known each other for a long time, and we were in love, and we eloped to get married; because, you see, my parents would have objected to it. So we made it look like a kidnapping to throw them off the track. It was all my idea!”
The five faces before her were frozen with the queerest expressions she had ever seen.
“Of course, I escaped from that broken-nosed bum, who tried to butt in, and then I came right back here. So there wasn’t any particular need to rescue me.”
“I . . . I don’t . . . I’ve never in my life . . . I . . .” Inspector Rafferty felt that his power of speech had been knocked out together with the rest of his reasoning abilities.
“Oh, dear Inspector!” Jinx gave him her sweetest smile and her most innocent look. “Surely you won’t break my heart and be too severe with my poor fiance?”
“Of . . . of course . . . I see that it . . . it changes the situation,” stuttered Inspector Rafferty.
“Where is he now?”
“In jail, Miss Win—”
“In jail? How dare you! Come, at once, set him free!”
And she rushed out, flying like a bullet down the stairs, the five men hardly able to follow her.
She jumped at the wheel of the police car, pushing the chauffeur aside.
“Never mind, I’m a better driver than any of you!” she cried in reply to Inspector Rafferty’s protest. “Jump in! Hurry!”
And the big car tore forward like a rocket, with a deafening whistle of the siren, in the hands of the little blue driver with wild, flying hair. . . .
“Don’t try to write it, Vic, old boy!” Mr. Scraggs cried, striving to be heard above the roar of the speeding machine. “No words will ever cover that story!”
Jinx had to wait in the jail reception room, while Inspector Rafferty and the jailer went to bring Laury.
They found him lying on his cot, his face in his hands. But he jumped up when they entered the cell and faced them calmly, the brave gray eyes steady and unfaltering.
“I must apologize, Mr. McGee,” said Inspector Rafferty, “though, of course, you shouldn’t have kept silent. But I’m glad to say that you are free to go now.”
“I’m . . . free?”
“Yes, we know the whole truth. Miss Winford confessed everything.”
“She did?”
Laury was stupefied, but he had learned by this time that it was better not to protest against anything Jinx said.
He walked to the reception room. Jinx rushed to him, threw her arms around his neck, and kissed him, before the eyes of all the witnesses.
“Oh, Laury darling, I’m so sorry you had to suffer like that for me!” she cried.
“It was very noble of you to keep silent, but, really, you should have told t
hem the truth,” she went on, as though without noticing the amazed look in his eyes. “I told them everything, how we eloped to get married and how I made up the kidnapping story to deceive my parents. You can tell them it’s true now, darling!”
“Oh! Yes! . . . Yes, it’s true!” confirmed Laury enthusiastically, for he would not have denied it, even if he could.
“Oh, Laury!” cried Mr. Scraggs with admiration. “And to think that he works on our paper!”
“The headlines, Mr. Scraggs,” said Jinx to the Editor, “the headlines will be: ‘Society Beauty Elopes with Our Own Reporter!’ ”
“Don’t thank me, you helpless, unimaginative sap of a criminal!” Jinx whispered to Laury, squeezing his hand, as they walked down the steps and his arm encircled her in the darkness of the narrow jail stair way. “So you wanted to give them sensational news, didn’t you? Now think of the sensation my news is going to give them!”
Escort
c. 1929
Editor’s Preface
This brief story seems to have been written in 1929, the year Ayn Rand married Frank O’Connor. One of his earliest gifts to her was a pair of small, stuffed lion cubs, christened Oscar and Oswald, who soon became to the young couple a private symbol of the “benevolent universe.” Every Christmas the cubs were brought out, dressed in colorful hats, to preside over the gaiety of the season.
I mention this because “Escort,” in manuscript, is signed by one “O. O. Lyons.” This means, I take it, that the story is intended as humor, the kind of fine, twinkling humor that Ayn Rand associated with her husband, and with Oscar and Oswald.
Ayn Rand by this time had read a great deal of O. Henry. She admired his cheerful lightheartedness and virtuoso plot ingenuity. “Escort” (and “The Night King”) may be read as her own private salute to O. Henry, her own attempt at his kind of twist ending.
—L. P.
Escort
Before he left the house, Sue asked:
“You won’t be back until morning, dear?”
He nodded dejectedly, for he had heard the question often and he wished his wife would not ask it. She never complained, and her blue eyes looked at him quietly and patiently, but he always felt a sadness in her voice, and a reproach. Yet tonight, the question and the voice seemed different somehow. Sue did not seem to mind. She even repeated:
“You won’t be back until the small hours?”
“God knows, darling,” he protested. “I don’t like it any better than you do. But a job’s a job.”
He had explained it so many times so very carefully: shipping clerks in warehouses could not choose their hours; and since he could not choose jobs, he had to work nights, even though he knew how wistfully she looked at the women whose husbands came home each evening, after the day’s work, to a bright dinner table under a bright lamp. And Sue had done such a grand job of their little house with less than nothing to go on. He had not noticed how the dreary shack they had rented had turned into a bright, warm little miracle, with rows of red-and-white-checkered dishes gleaming in the kitchen, and Sue among them in a wide, starched dress of red and white checks, slim and blond and gay as a child among toys. It was the third year of their marriage, and such a far cry from the first, when he had come, fresh from college, to these same rooms, then full of dust and cracked paint and desolation, when he had brought his young bride here, with nothing to offer her save the menacing monster of rent to be paid, which stared at them each month and which they could not pay. When he thought of those days, his lips tightened grimly and he said:
“I’ve got to hang on to this job, sweetheart, much as you hate it. I hate it too, but I won’t let you go through what we’ve been through ever again.”
“Yes,” said Sue, “of course.” But she seemed to be looking past him, without hearing his voice.
He kissed her and hurried to the door, but Sue stopped him.
“Larry,” she reminded him sweetly, “it’s Saturday.”
So it was. He had forgotten. He groped for his billfold and slipped her weekly allowance into her hand. Her hand seemed much too eager as it closed over the bills.
Then she smiled at him, her gay, impish smile, her eyes sparkling and open and innocent. And he left.
He raised the collar of his neat, modest gray overcoat against the thin drizzle of the street. He looked back once, with regret, at the light over their door, over the number 745, his number, his home, 745 Grant Street. Then he hurried to the subway.
When he alighted upon the milling platforms of Grand Central, Larry Dean did not walk to an exit. He hurried to a locker room instead, opened a locker, took from it a neat suitcase, and then walked to the men’s room. Fifteen minutes later, he emerged from it, and the fat black attendant looked with respectful admiration at his tall, slender figure in full dress clothes, trim and resplendent from the tips of his shining pumps to his shining top hat set at the right careless angle of a dazzling man of the world bent upon a gay evening. He put the suitcase with his modest working clothes back in the locker, snapped his fingers lightly, and walked to an exit, carelessly, without hurry.
The gold-braided doorman at a magnificent entrance on Park Avenue greeted Larry with a respectful bow denoting a long acquaintance. Larry entered the elevator with just the right touch of nonchalant swagger. But he stopped and his gay smile vanished before an imposing door marked: CLAIRE VAN NUYS ESCORT BUREAU.
Larry hated the place and he hated his job. Each evening, night after night, he had to accompany fat dowagers, rich spinsters, and foolish, giggling out-of-town matrons on an endless round of dinners, suppers, dances, nightclubs. He had to bow gracefully, and smile enchantingly, and laugh, and dance, and throw tips to waiters as if he were a millionaire. He had to keep going an endless stream of charming, entertaining drivel, and listen to more drivel in answer, and try to know what he was talking about, while his thoughts ran miserably miles away, to a quiet little room and Sue’s lonely shadow under the lamp.
At least, Sue did not know of this and she would never know. He would rather die than let her guess the kind of job he really had. It was respectable enough, oh yes, most respectable! Miss Van Nuys saw to that. But it was no job for a man, Larry felt. Still, he had to be grateful, for it was a job and it kept the little house at 745 Grant Street going.
Sue must never know of his sacrifice, the shy, quiet Sue who would be horrified at the thought of a nightclub and who had never seen one. At first, she had asked him timidly to take her out some night, but his anger had made her drop the subject, and she never asked it again. He could not let her enter one of those vile, noisy places where he was so well known, and his job as well. Besides, he was sick of the glitter, of the jazz, of the waiters.
He sighed, squared his shoulders for the night’s ordeal, and walked into Miss Van Nuys’ office. . . .
When Larry had left his house, Sue stood for a long time looking at the closed door, the money clutched in her hand. Then she took out the little tin box hidden deep in a kitchen drawer, and added the last dollar to her secret fund. It was a hundred dollars now, an even hundred, and this was the night she had been waiting for.
She had saved the money out of the household allowance, so carefully, with such painstaking little economies, for such a long time. Now she was ready. She went to a closet and took out her evening gown, her lovely blue, shimmering evening gown, which she had had no chance to wear for two years. She laid it out cautiously on the bed, and stood looking at it happily. For one night, for just one night, she would wear it, and dance, and laugh, and see one of those brilliant nightclubs she had heard so much about ever since she came to New York. She was deceiving Larry, she thought, but it was such a harmless deception! Just a few hours of dancing and some innocent fun, which Larry would not understand, the earnest, hardworking Larry who never thought of such things. She loved him so much, she was so happy in their little home, but the lonely evenings were so long, and she was still young, and she looked so pretty in her blue evening gown
. Just one night . . . there was no harm in that, and Larry need never know.
It would be different if she allowed some man to take her out. But she wasn’t going to. She was going to pay for it herself, and do it right, one hundred dollars for one grand, reckless smash. She had heard how it could be arranged safely and respectably. Her heart beating, she went to the phone.
In the office on Park Avenue, a trimly permanented, efficient secretary looked up at Larry Dean standing before her desk.
“Your assignment for tonight, Mr. Dean,” she said, “will be dinner, dancing, best place in town, full dress clothes. You are to call in an hour for Mrs. Dean—no relation, I presume?—at 745 Grant Street.”
Her Second Career
c. 1929
Editor’s Preface
“Her Second Career” seems to date from 1929. It was probably written soon after Ayn Rand had begun working in the office of the RKO wardrobe department (a job she hated, but had to hold for three years, until she began to earn money by writing).
The subject matter of “Her Second Career” remains, in a broad sense, that of the early stories: the importance of values in human life. But here the focus is on the negative, on those who do not live life but merely posture at it, those who do something other than pursue values.
By 1929, Ayn Rand had a fund of observations on this subject: she had been working in and around Hollywood for three years. She respected the potential of the film medium, and she loved certain movies (her favorites were the great German Romantic silent films, with stars such as Conrad Veidt and Hans Albers, and directors such as Ernst Lubitsch and Fritz Lang). But she rejected out of hand the syrupy, platitudinous stories enshrining mediocrity, offering odes to “the boy next door” or “the sweet maiden next door.” She despised what she saw as Hollywood’s trite values, its undiscriminating taste, its “incommunicable vulgarity of spirit,” as she put it in The Romantic Manifesto.
Unlike most critics, however, Ayn Rand did not ascribe the movies’ low estate to “commercialism” or “box-office chasing.” She singled out as the basic cause an inner mental practice or default, described by the hero in this story as follows:There’s no one in this business with an honest idea of what’s good and what’s bad. And there’s no one who’s not scared green of having such an idea for himself. They’re all sitting around waiting for someone to tell them. Begging someone to tell them. Anyone, just so they won’t have to take the awful responsibility of judging and valuing on their own. So merit doesn’t exist here.