Ayn Rand - The Early Ayn Rand

"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 fiancé?"

"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 them 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!"

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 lightheadedness 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.

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: