The Early Ayn Rand

"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 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.

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.