Ayn Rand - The Early Ayn Rand

"Oh, really? I am sorry and you have all my sympathy: it must be awfully hard to live up to such a reputation!"

Laury looked at her strangely. Then he remembered that great bandits are always courteous to women. So he spoke gallantly:

"However, you have nothing to fear: I crush all men, but I spare women!"

"That's nothing to be proud of: women are the bunk and you ought to know it!"

"I'm profoundly sorry that I have to do this," he continued, "but you'll be treated with the greatest respect and courtesy, so you don't have to be afraid."

"Afraid? What of?"

"Say, will you please step out of your car and get into mine?"

"Is that absolutely necessary?"

"Yes!"

"Will you please kindly tell me what the hell this is all about?" she asked very suavely.

"You are being kidnapped," he explained politely.

"Oh!"

He didn't like that "Oh!" — it was not what he had expected at all. There was no terror or indignation in it; it sounded rather simple, matter-of-fact, as a person would say: "Oh, I see!"

She jumped lightly to the ground, her short skirt whirling high above graceful legs in tight, glistening stockings. The wind blew her clothes tight around her body and for a moment she looked like a slim little dancer in a wet, clinging dress, on an immense black stage, torn out of the darkness by the bright circle of the car's spotlight. And behind her, as a background — a gray, sandy piece of hill with bushes of dry, thorny weeds sticking out like deer horns.

"Will you please kindly wait while I lock my car?" she asked. "I don't mind being kidnapped, but I don't want some other gentleman to get the notion of kidnapping my car."

Calmly, she turned off the headlights, locked the car, and slipped the key into her pocketbook. She approached his old sports car and looked it over critically.

"Your business doesn't pay, does it?" she asked. "That buggy of yours doesn't look as though you get three meals a day."

"Will you please step in!" he almost shouted, exasperated. "We have no time to waste!"

She stepped in and snuggled comfortably on the seat, stretching her pretty legs far out on the slanting floorboard, her pleated skirt hardly covering the knees. He jumped to the wheel beside her.

"Do you expect a lot of money out of this?" she asked.

He did not answer.

"Are you desperately in love with me, then?"

"I should say not!" he snapped.

With a sharp, hoarse growl and a convulsive jerk from top to tire, the sports car tore forward, snorted, shuddered and rolled, wavering, into the darkness, towards the lights of Dicksville.

The wind and the dark hills rushed to meet them and rolled past. They were both silent. She studied him furtively from the corner of her eye. All she could see was a black mask between a gray cap and gracefully curved lips. He did not look at her once. All he knew of her presence was a faint, expensive perfume and tangled locks of soft hair that the wind blew into his face occasionally.

The first houses of Dicksville rose by the side of the road. Laury drove into town cautiously, choosing the darkest, emptiest streets. There were few streetlamps and no passersby. He stepped on the gas involuntarily, when passing through the white squares of light streaming from lonely corner drugstores.

Laury lived in an old apartment house in a narrow little street winding up a hill, in a new, half-built neighborhood. The house had two floors, big windows, and little balconies with no doors to them. There was an empty, unfinished bungalow next to it and a vacant lot across the street. Only two apartments on the first floor were occupied. Laury was the sole tenant on the second floor.

As the car swung around the corner into his street, Laury turned off the headlights and drove up to the house as noiselessly as he could. He looked carefully around before stopping. There was no one in sight. The little street was as dark and empty as an abandoned stage setting.

"Now, not a sound! Don't make any noise!" he whispered, clutching the girl's arm and dashing with her to the front door.

"Sure, I won't," she answered. "I know how you feel!"

They tiptoed noiselessly up the carpeted steps to Laury's door. The first thing that met Jinx's eyes, as Laury politely let her enter first, was one of his dirty shirts in the middle of the little hall, that had rolled out of an open clothes closet. Laury blushed under his mask and kicked it back into the closet, slamming its door angrily.

The living room had two windows and a soft blue carpet. A desk stood between the windows, a tempestuous ocean of papers with a typewriter as an island in it. The blue davenport had a few cushions on it, also a newspaper, a safety razor, and one shoe. The only big, low armchair was occupied by a pile of victrola records with an alarm clock on top of them; and a portable victrola stood next to it on a soap box covered with an old striped sweater. A big box marked "Puffed Wheat Cereal" served as a bookcase. A graceful glass bowl on a tall stand, intended for goldfish, contained no water, but cigarette ashes and a telephone, instead. The rest of the room was occupied by old newspapers, magazines without covers, covers without magazines, a tennis racket, a bath towel, a bunch of dry, shriveled flowers, a big dictionary, and a ukulele.

Jinx looked the room over slowly, carefully. Laury threw his coat and cap on a chair, took off the mask, wiped his forehead with a sigh of relief, and ran his fingers through his hair. Jinx looked at him, looked again, then took out her compact, powdered her face quickly, and passed the lipstick over her lips with unusual care.

"What's your name?" she asked in a somewhat changed voice.

"It doesn't matter, for the present," he answered.

She settled herself comfortably on the edge of his desk. He looked at her now, in the light. She had a lovely figure, as her tight silk sweater showed in detail, he thought. She had inscrutable eyes, and he could not decide whether their glance, fixed on him, was openly mocking or sweetly innocent.

"Well, you showed good judgment in choosing me for kidnapping," she said. "I don't know who else would be as good a bet. If you had less discrimination you might have chosen Louise Chatterton, perhaps, but, you know, her old man is so tight he never gets off a trolley before the end of the line, to get all his money's worth!"

She glanced over the room.

"You're a beginner, aren't you?" she asked. "Your place doesn't look like the lair of a very sinister criminal."

He looked at the room and blushed. "I'm sorry the room looks like this," he muttered. "I'll straighten it out. I'll do my best to make you comfortable. I hope your stay here will be as pleasant as possible."

"There's no doubt about that, I'm beginning to think. But then, where's your sweetheart's picture? Haven't you got a 'moll'?"

"Are you hungry?" Laury asked briskly. "If you want something to eat, I can..."

"No, I do not. Have you got a gang? Or are you a lonely mastermind?"

"If there's anything you want..."

"No, thanks. Have you ever been in jail yet? And how does it feel?"

"It's getting late," Laury said abruptly. "Do you want to sleep?"

"Well, you don't expect me to stay up all night, do you?"

Laury arranged the davenport for her. For himself he had fixed something like a bed out of a few chairs and an old mattress, in the kitchen.

"Tomorrow," he said before leaving her, "I'll have to go out for a while. You'll find food in the icebox. Don't make any attempts to run away. Don't make any noise — no one will hear you. You will save yourself a lot of trouble if you will promise me not to try to escape."

"I promise," she said, and added with a strange look straight into his sunny gray eyes: "In fact, I'll do my best not to escape!"...