The Early Ayn Rand Page 8

  Somebody had said that Laury’s gray eyes looked like a deep cloudy sky behind which one could feel the sun coming out. But there was no trace of sun in his eyes when they stared straight at City Editor Jonathan Scraggs, and if there was anything coming behind their dark gray it looked more like a thunderstorm, and a serious one.

  “Mr. Scraggs,” he said slowly, ominously, “things are going to happen!”

  “Amen!” answered Mr. Scraggs, and turning comfortably in his chair lit a cigar, then dropped his head on his breast and closed his eyes to enjoy the peace of the Dicksville afternoon, with the hot summer air breathing in through the open windows that needed a washing.

  Laury took his coat from an old rack in a corner and looked fiercely at the room; no one had paid any attention to the conversation. The city room was hot and stuffy, and smelled of print, dust, and chewing gum. One walked as though in a forest on a thick carpet of fallen leaves cracking under the feet—a carpet of old, yellow newspapers, cigarette wrappers, bills, ads, everything that has ever been made out of paper. The walls were an art museum of calendars, drawings, cartoons, comic strips, pasted on the bare bricks and alternated by philosophical inscriptions such as “Easy on the corkscrew!” and “Vic Perkins is a big bum!” The dusty bottle of spring water on a shaking stand was hopelessly and significantly empty; water, after all, was not the only drink that had been used in the room.

  The energetic activity of Dicksville’s leading paper made Laury grind his teeth. The chief copy man was very busy making a sailboat out of a paper drinking cup. The sports editor was carefully drawing a pair of French-heeled legs on the dust of a file bureau. Two reporters were playing an exciting game of rummy; and a third was thoroughly cleaning his fingernails with a pen and trying to catch a fly that kept annoying him. The copy boy was sound asleep on a pile of paper, his back turned disdainfully on the room, his face red like his hair and his hair red like a carrot, his decided snores shaking the mountain of future newspapers under him.

  However, at one of the central desks, under an imposing sign of: “Don’t park here. Busy” Vic Perkins, the Dawn’s star reporter, was profoundly absorbed in some serious work. Vic Perkins had a long, thin face and a little black mustache under his nose that looked like he needed a handkerchief, more than like anything else. He always wore his hat on the back of his head and never condescended to use a toothbrush. He was chewing zealously the end of a pencil and looking up at a green-shaded lamp, in deep meditation.

  “Any news?” asked Laury, approaching him.

  “There’s always news for the man who’s smart enough to write ’em!” replied Vic Perkins in a tone of disdainful superiority.

  Laury glanced at the story he was writing. It was a gripping account of Dicksville’s latest sensational crime—$550 cash and a silver pepper shaker stolen by Pug-Nose Thomson, the town’s desperate outlaw.

  Laury swung on his heels and walked out of the building, slamming the door ferociously, hoping one of the dusty glass panes would bust for a change; but it didn’t.

  Laury had graduated from college with a B.A. degree, high honors, and the football championship, this spring. He had accepted the first opportunity to work on a newspaper, to start on the road of his buoyant ambition. He came to the Dicksville Dawn with an overflowing energy, a wild enthusiasm, an irresistible smile, and no experience whatsoever. And he was disappointed.

  He had expected a glorious career full of action, danger, and thrills, the career of a glamorous being whose every word on the printed pages sends thousands of hearts beating fast, like a sonorous trumpet that rings through the country thrilling and terrifying men. And now he had found himself hustling after news that wouldn’t disturb a mosquito. . . .

  Laury walked fast, his hands in his pockets, a lock of unruly hair falling down to mix with his long, long eyelashes. The sky was blue, blue like a color postcard. An odor of frying grease floated from the open door of Ye Buttercup Tea Room. In a music shop a hoarse radio was singing “My Blue Heaven.” Clampitt’s Grocery Market was having a big event—a canned-goods sale.

  Oh, if only something would happen here! Laury’s heart throbbed. But what could happen—here?

  A drowsy newsboy was muttering: “Dicksville Dawn poiper,” as though he were selling sleeping tablets. Laury threw a quick glance at the front page, passing by. The headline announced the birth of the town Mayor’s fifth child; there was a prominent news item about the Spinsters’ Club annual convention; and an editorial by Victor Z. Perkins on the importance of animal pets.

  Were these, then, the scorching, flamboyant headlines, roaring into people’s eyes, that he had dreamed about? Oh, if only somebody would do something! Somebody, anybody. . . . It seemed hopeless in Dicksville. And yet . . . was it so hopeless? Wasn’t it possible to . . . ?

  Laury quickened his steps and clenched his fists in his pockets. His eyes narrowed and glistened. His heart beat faster. For City Editor Jonathan Scraggs’ opinion to the contrary notwithstanding, Laury McGee had an idea.

  It would be dangerous, he knew. He had had that idea for a long time. It would be a mad chance to take, a frightful risk. And yet . . . and yet . . .

  “Sap!!”

  He felt a strong knock across his body and when he turned his head all he could see was a slim, swift, sparkling sports car, like a thrown torpedo, speeding away, and a wild mass of brown hair flying above it like a flag.

  He realized that he had been crossing a street, too absorbed in his serious thoughts to notice anything, automobiles included. The result of which was a considerable pain and a greasy line on his tan trousers where the sports car’s fender had struck him.

  He looked again at the disappearing car and started as though hit by a sudden inspiration. He had recognized the driver. It was Miss Winford, the “dime-a-hair girl”; called so for being the sole heiress to her father’s fortune, that could number a dime for each hair on her head; which may not seem much, but try to figure it out!

  Christopher A. Winford was a big steel magnate from Pittsburgh who had the bad taste to spend his summers in Dicksville. He owned half the town and the white residence on a hill overlooking it, a royal building whose glass-and-marble turrets looked like glistening fountains thrown to the blue sky from a sea of green foliage.

  Miss Winford was eighteen and the absolute leader of Dicksville’s younger set, of her parents, and of her sports car. Laury had never met her, but he had seen her often in town. She looked like an antelope and acted like a mustang. She had big, slightly slanting, ominously glistening eyes that made people feel a little nervous wondering just what was going on behind their suspicious calm; she had thin, dancing eyebrows and a determined mouth. Her brown hair was thrown behind her ears in a long, disheveled cut. From the tips of her little feet to that stormy tangle of hair she was slim, straight, strong like a steel spring.

  Her ambitious mother had christened her Juliana Xenia. But her friends of the younger set, to the horror of said mother, called her simply Jinx.

  Laury stood staring at her car long after it had disappeared. He had a strange, fixed, enraptured expression on his face, the expression of a man who has just been struck by an idea for the invention of an interplanetary communication. That girl . . . was it a coincidence? His idea—this was just what he needed for his idea. He had the aim—here was the means. . . .

  He walked home without noticing the streets around him, the sky above or the pavement under his feet. . . .

  That night, in his apartment, Laury McGee sat on the desk, his feet on a chair, his elbows on his knees, his chin on his fists, his eyes unblinking—and thought. The result of these thoughts was the lively happenings which occurred in Dicksville in the days that followed.

  ——II——

  Jinx Winford was speeding home at fifty miles an hour, as usual; and at midnight, as usual, too. She had been visiting a girl friend out of town and now was on her way back, not in the slightest measure disturbed by the fact that her little gray sports ca
r was the only sign of life on the dark, deserted road. Under a heavy black sky the endless plain stretched like a frozen sea with immobile waves of hills. Far ahead, a pale glow rose to the sky like a faint luminous fog, and the lights of Dicksville twinkled mysteriously, in straight lines bordering streets and in lonely, disorderly sparks, as though a tangle of golden beads had been thrown into the dark plain and some strings had broken in the fall.

  The gray sports car was flying down the road like a swift, humming bug with two long, shuddering feelers of light sweeping the ground and tiny wings beating in the wind—the silk scarf on Jinx’s shoulders. Her two firm hands on the wheel, Jinx was whistling a song. And she remained perfectly calm when, turning a sharp curve, she saw an automobile standing straight across the road, barring the way. It was an old sports car with no one at the wheel. But its lights were turned on, two glaring white spots that made the darkness beyond it seem empty and impenetrable, like a bottomless black hole.

  She stepped on the brakes just in time to make her car stop with a jerk and a sharp, alarmed creaking a few inches from the strange sports car.

  “Hey, what’s the idea?” she threw into the darkness where it seemed she could distinguish the shadow of a man.

  In the darkness, behind the old sports car, Laury McGee was ready. He had been waiting there for two hours. He had a black mask and a revolver. The lips under the mask were grim and determined; the fingers clutching the revolver trembled. Laury McGee was not hunting for news any more—he was making it.

  The time had come. He looked, catching his breath, at the girl in the gray sports car, who sat clutching the wheel and peering into the darkness interrogatively, with raised eyebrows.

  “How will she take it?” he shuddered. “I hope she doesn’t scream too loud! Oh, I hope she doesn’t faint!”

  Then, resolutely, with broad steps, he walked towards her and stopped in full light, his threatening eyes behind the mask and the muzzle of his revolver looking straight at her. He waited silently for the effect that his appearance would produce. But there was no particular effect. Jinx raised one eyebrow higher and looked at him with decided curiosity, waiting.

  “Don’t scream for help!” he ordered in his most lugubrious voice. “No man can save you!”

  “I haven’t screamed yet,” she observed. “Why suggest it?”

  “Not a sound from you nor a movement! And step out of that car!”

  “Well, I can’t do that, you know,” she answered sweetly.

  Laury bit his lips. “I mean, get out of your car at once! Men like me are used to having their slightest order obeyed immediately!”

  “Well, I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting any men like you before, I’m sorry to say. As it happens, I’m not well acquainted with the profession.”

  “Then you better remember that my name is whispered with terror from coast to coast!”

  “What’s your name? Mine’s Jinx Winford.”

  “You’ll be sorry to learn my name! Everybody will tell you that my hand is of steel; that my heart is of granite; that I pass in the night like a death-bearing lightning, leaving terror and desolation behind!”

  “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’?”