The pale person called Monte disappeared and John returned to the table. Rags was startled to find that a tremendous change had come over him. He lurched into his chair like a drunken man.

  “John! What’s the matter?”

  Instead of answering he reached for the champagne bottle, but his fingers were trembling so that the splattered wine made a wet yellow ring around his glass.

  “Are you sick?”

  “Rags,” he said unsteadily, “I’m all through.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m all through, I tell you.” He managed a sickly smile. “There’s been a warrant out for me for over an hour.”

  “What have you done?” she demanded in a frightened voice. “What’s the warrant for?”

  The lights went out for the next number and he collapsed suddenly over the table.

  “What is it?” she insisted, with rising apprehension. She leaned forward—his answer was barely audible.

  “Murder?” She could feel her body grow cold as ice.

  He nodded. She took hold of both arms and tried to shake him upright, as one shakes a coat into place. His eyes were rolling in his head.

  “Is it true? Have they got proof?”

  Again he nodded drunkenly.

  “Then you’ve got to get out of the country now! Do you understand, John? You’ve got to get out now, before they come looking for you here!”

  He loosed a wild glance of terror toward the entrance.

  “Oh, God!” cried Rags, “why don’t you do something?” Her eyes strayed here and there in desperation, became suddenly fixed. She drew in her breath sharply, hesitated and then whispered fiercely into his ear.

  “If I arrange it, will you go to Canada tonight?”

  “How?”

  “I’ll arrange it—if you’ll pull yourself together a little. This is Rags talking to you, don’t you understand, John? I want you to sit here and not move until I come back!”

  A minute later she had crossed the room under cover of the darkness.

  “Baron Marchbanks,” she whispered softly, standing just behind his chair.

  He motioned her to sit down.

  “Have you room in your car for two more passengers tonight?”

  One of the aides turned around abruptly.

  “His lordship’s car is full,” he said shortly.

  “It’s terribly urgent.” Her voice was trembling.

  “Well,” said the prince hesitantly, “I don’t know.”

  Lord Charles Este looked at the prince and shook his head.

  “I don’t think it’s advisable. This is a ticklish business anyhow with contrary orders from home. You know we agreed there’d be no complications.”

  The prince frowned.

  “This isn’t a complication,” he objected.

  Este turned frankly to Rags.

  “Why is it urgent?”

  Rags hesitated.

  “Why”—she flushed suddenly—“it’s a runaway marriage.”

  The prince laughed.

  “Good!” he exclaimed. “That settles it. Este is just being official. Bring him over right away. We’re leaving shortly, what?”

  Este looked at his watch.

  “Right now!”

  Rags rushed away. She wanted to move the whole party from the roof while the lights were still down.

  “Hurry!” she cried in John’s ear. “We’re going over the border—with the Prince of Wales. You’ll be safe by morning.”

  He looked up at her with dazed eyes. She hurriedly paid the check, and seizing his arm piloted him as inconspicuously as possible to the other table, where she introduced him with a word. The prince acknowledged his presence by shaking hands—the aides nodded, only faintly concealing their displeasure.

  “We’d better start,” said Este, looking impatiently at his watch.

  They were on their feet when suddenly an exclamation broke from all of them—two policemen and a redhaired man in plain clothes had come in at the main door.

  “Out we go,” breathed Este, impelling the party toward the side entrance. “There’s going to be some kind of riot here.” He swore—two more bluecoats barred the exit there. They paused uncertainly. The plain-clothes man was beginning a careful inspection of the people at the tables.

  Este looked sharply at Rags and then at John, who shrank back behind the palms.

  “Is that one of your revenue fellas out there?” demanded Este.

  “No,” whispered Rags. “There’s going to be trouble. Can’t we get out this entrance?”

  The prince with rising impatience sat down again in his chair.

  “Let me know when you chaps are ready to go.” He smiled at Rags. “Now just suppose we all get in trouble just for that jolly face of yours.”

  Then suddenly the lights went up. The plain-clothes man whirled around quickly and sprang to the middle of the cabaret floor.

  “Nobody try to leave this room!” he shouted. “Sit down, that party behind the palms! Is John M. Chestnut in this room?”

  Rags gave a short involuntary cry.

  “Here!” cried the detective to the policeman behind him. “Take a look at that funny bunch over there. Hands up, you men!”

  “My God!” whispered Este, “we’ve got to get out of here!” He turned to the prince. “This won’t do, Ted. You can’t be seen here. I’ll stall them off while you get down to the car.”

  He took a step toward the side entrance.

  “Hands up, there!” shouted the plain-clothes man. “And when I say hands up I mean it! Which one of you’s Chestnut?”

  “You’re mad!” cried Este. “We’re British subjects. We’re not involved in this affair in any way!”

  A woman screamed somewhere and there was a general movement toward the elevator, a movement which stopped short before the muzzles of two automatic pistols. A girl next to Rags collapsed in a dead faint to the floor, and at the same moment the music on the other roof began to play.

  “Stop that music!” bellowed the plain-clothes man. “And get some earrings on that whole bunch—quick!”

  Two policemen advanced toward the party, and simultaneously Este and the other aides drew their revolvers, and, shielding the prince as they best could, began to edge toward the side. A shot rang out and then another, followed by a crash of silver and china as half a dozen diners overturned their tables and dropped quickly behind.

  The panic became general. There were three shots in quick succession and then a fusillade. Rags saw Este firing coolly at the eight amber lights above, and a thick fume of grey smoke began to fill the air. As a strange undertone to the shouting and screaming came the incessant clamor of the distant jazz band.

  Then in a moment it was all over. A shrill whistle rang out over the roof, and through the smoke Rags saw John Chestnut advancing toward the plain-clothes man, his hands held out in a gesture of surrender. There was a last nervous cry, a chill clatter as someone inadvertently stepped into a pile of dishes, and then a heavy silence fell on the roof—even the band seemed to have died away.

  “It’s all over!” John Chestnut’s voice rang out wildly on the night air. “The party’s over. Everybody who wants to can go home!”

  Still there was silence—Rags knew it was the silence of awe—the strain of guilt had driven John Chestnut insane.

  “It was a great performance,” he was shouting. “I want to thank you one and all. If you can find any tables still standing, champagne will be served as long as you care to stay.”

  It seemed to Rags that the roof and the high stars suddenly began to swim round and round. She saw John take the detective’s hand and shake it heartily, and she watched the detective grin and pocket his gun. The music had recommenced, and the girl who had fainted was suddenly dancing with Lord Charles Este in the corner. John was running here and there patting people on the back, and laughing and shaking hands. Then he was coming toward her, fresh and innocent as a child.

  “Wasn’t it wonderful?” he cried.

  Rags felt a faintness stealing over her. She groped backward with her hand toward a chair.

  “What was it?” she cried dazedly. “Am I dreaming?”

  “Of course not! You’re wide awake. I made it up, Rags, don’t you see? I made up the whole thing for you. I had it invented! The only thing real about it was my name!”

  She collapsed suddenly against his coat, clung to his lapels and would have wilted to the floor if he had not caught her quickly in his arms.

  “Some champagne—quick!” he called, and then he shouted at the Prince of Wales, who stood nearby. “Order my car quick, you! Miss Martin-Jones has fainted from excitement.”

  V

  The skyscraper rose bulkily through thirty tiers of windows before it attenuated itself to a graceful sugar-loaf of shining white. Then it darted up again another hundred feet, thinned to a mere oblong tower in its last fragile aspiration toward the sky. At the highest of its high windows Rags Martin-Jones stood full in the stiff breeze, gazing down at the city.

  “Mr. Chestnut wants to know if you’ll come right in to his private office.”

  Obediently her slim feet moved along the carpet into a high cool chamber overlooking the harbor and the wide sea.

  John Chestnut sat at his desk, waiting, and Rags walked to him and put her arms around his shoulder.

  “Are you sure you’re real?” she asked anxiously. “Are you absolutely sure?”

  “You only wrote me a week before you came,” he protested modestly, “or I could have arranged a revolution.”

  “Was the whole thing just mine?” she demanded. “Was it a perfectly useless, gorgeous thing, just for me?”

  “Useless?” He considered. “Well, it started out to be. At the last minute I invited a big restaurant man to be there, and while you were at the other table I sold him the whole idea of the night-club.”

  He looked at his watch.

  “I’ve got one more thing to do—and then we’ve got just time to be married before lunch.” He picked up his telephone. “Jackson? . . . Send a triplicated cable to Paris, Berlin and Budapest and have those two bogus dukes who tossed up for Schwartzberg-Rhineminster chased over the Polish border. If the Duchy won’t act, lower the rate of exchange to point triple zero naught two. Also, that idiot Blutchdak is in the Balkans again, trying to start a new war. Put him on the first boat for New York or else throw him in a Greek jail.”

  He rang off, turned to the startled cosmopolite with a laugh.

  “The next stop is the City Hall. Then if you like we’ll run over to Paris.”

  “John,” she asked him intently, “who was the Prince of Wales?”

  He waited till they were in the elevator, dropping twenty floors at a swoop. Then he leaned forward and tapped the lift boy on the shoulder.

  “Not so fast, Cedric. This lady isn’t used to falls from high places.”

  The elevator boy turned around, smiled. His face was pale, oval, framed in yellow hair. Rags blushed like fire.

  “Cedric’s from Wessex,” explained John. “The resemblance is, to say the least, amazing. Princes are not particularly discreet, and I suspect Cedric of being a Guelph in some left-handed way.”

  Rags took the monocle from around her neck and threw the ribbon over Cedric’s head.

  “Thank you,” she said simply, “for the second greatest thrill of my life.”

  John Chestnut began rubbing his hands together in a commercial gesture.

  “Patronize this place, lady,” he besought her. “Best bazaar in the city!”

  “What have you got for sale?”

  “Well, M’selle, today we have some perfectly bee-oo-tiful love.”

  “Wrap it up, Mr. Merchant,” cried Rags Martin-Jones. “It looks like a bargain to me.”

  TO: Maxwell Perkins

  c. April 10, 1924

  Long Island, New York

  Great Neck.

  Dear Max:

  A few words more relative to our conversation this afternoon. While I have every hope + plan of finishing my novel in June you know how those things often come out. And even it takes me 10 times that long I cannot let it go out unless it has the very best I’m capable of in it or even as I feel sometimes, something better than I’m capable of. Much of what I wrote last summer was good but it was so interrupted that it was ragged + in approaching it from a new angle I’ve had to discard a lot of it—in one case 18,000 words (part of which will appear in the Mercury as a short story). It is only in the last four months that I’ve realized how much I’ve—well, almost deteriorated in the three years since I finished the Beautiful and Damned. The last four months of course I’ve worked but in the two years—over two years—before that, I produced exactly one play, half a dozen short stories and three or four articles—an average of about one hundred words a day. If I’d spent this time reading or travelling or doing anything—even staying healthy—it’d be different but I spent it uselessly, niether in study nor in contemplation but only in drinking and raising hell generally. If I’d written the B. & D. at the rate of 100 words a day it would have taken me 4 years so you can imagine the moral effect the whole chasm had on me.

  What I’m trying to say is just that I’ll have to ask you to have patience about the book and trust me that at last, or at least for the 1st time in years, I’m doing the best I can. I’ve gotten in dozens of bad habits that I’m trying to get rid of

  Laziness

  Referring everything to Zelda—a terrible habit, nothing ought to be referred to anybody until its finished

  Word consciousness—self doubt

  ect. ect. ect. ect.

  I feel I have an enormous power in me now, more than I’ve ever had in a way but it works so fitfully and with so many bogeys because I’ve talked so much and not lived enough within myself to delelop the nessessary self reliance. Also I don’t know anyone who has used up so [torn]sonel experience as I have at 27. Copperfield + Pendennis were written at past forty while This Side of Paradise was three books + the B. + D. was two. So in my new novel I’m thrown directly on purely creative work—not trashy imaginings as in my stories but the sustained imagination of a sincere and yet radiant world. So I tread slowly and carefully + at times in considerable distress. This book will be a consciously artistic achievment + must depend on that as the 1st books did not.

  If I ever win the right to any liesure again I will assuredly not waste it as I wasted this past time. Please believe me when I say that now I’m doing the best I can.

  Yours Ever

  Scott F———

  TO: Maxwell Perkins

  c. August 27, 1924

  Villa Marie, Valescure

  St Raphael, France

  Dear Max:

  The novel will be done next week. That doesn’t mean however that it’ll reach America before October 1st. as Zelda + I are contemplating a careful revision after a weeks complete rest.

  The clippings have never arrived.

  Seldes has been with me and he thinks “For the Grimalkins” is a wonderful title for Rings book. Also I’ve got great ideas about “My Life and Loves” which I’ll tell Ring when comes over in September.

  How many copies has his short stories sold?

  Your bookkeeper never did send me my royalty report for Aug 1st.

  For Christs sake don’t give anyone that jacket you’re saving for me. I’ve written it into the book.

  I think my novel is about the best American novel ever written. It is rough stuff in places, runs only to about 50,000 words, and I hope you won’t shy at it

  Its been a fair summer. I’ve been unhappy but my work hasn’t suffered from it. I am grown at last.

  What books are being talked about? I don’t mean best sellers. Hergeshiemers novel in the Post seems vile to me.

  I hope you’re reading Gertrude Stiens novel in The Transatlantic Review.

  Raymond Radiguets last book (he is the young man who wrote “Le deable au Corps” at sixteen [untranslatable]) is a great hit here. He wrote it at 18. Its called “Le Bal de Compte Orgel” + though I’m only half through it I’d get an opinion on it if I were you. Its cosmopolitan rather than French and my instinct tells me that in a good translation it might make an enormous hit in America where everyone is yearning for Paris. Do look it up + get at least one opinion of it. The preface is by the da-dist Jean Cocteau but the book is not da-da at all.

  Did you get hold of Rings other books?

  We’re liable to leave here by Oct 1st so after the 15th of Sept I wish you’d send everything care of Guarantee Trust Co. Paris

  Please ask the bookstore, if you have time, to send me Havelock Ellis “Dance of Life” + charge to my account

  I asked Struthers Burt to dinner but his baby was sick.