"This place, for no particular reason, is called the Hole in the Sky."
Rags looked around her. They were on a roof-garden wide open to the
April night. Overhead the true stars winked cold, and there was a lunar
sliver of ice in the dark west. But where they stood it was warm as
June, and the couples dining or dancing on the opaque glass floor were
unconcerned with the forbidding sky.
"What makes it so warm?" she whispered as they moved toward a table.
"It's some new invention that keeps the warm air from rising. I don't
know the principle of the thing, but I know that they can keep it open
like this even in the middle of winter--"
"Where's the Prince of Wales?" she demanded tensely.
John looked around.
"He hasn't arrived yet. He won't be here for about half an hour."
She sighed profoundly.
"It's the first time I've been excited in four years."
Four years--one year less than he had loved her. He wondered if when she
was sixteen, a wild lovely child, sitting up all night in restaurants
with officers who were to leave for Brest next day, losing the glamour
of life too soon in the old, sad, poignant days of the war, she had ever
been so lovely as under these amber lights and this dark sky. From her
excited eyes to her tiny slipper heels, which were striped with layers
of real silver and gold, she was like one of those amazing ships that
are carved complete in a bottle. She was finished with that delicacy,
with that care; as though the long lifetime of some worker in fragility
had been used to make her so. John Chestnut wanted to take her up in his
hands, turn her this way and that, examine the tip of a slipper or the
tip of an ear or squint closely at the fairy stuff from which her lashes
were made.
"Who's that?" She pointed suddenly to a handsome Latin at a table over
the way.
"That's Roderigo Minerlino, the movie and face-cream star. Perhaps he'll
dance after a while."
Rags became suddenly aware of the sound of violins and drums, but the
music seemed to come from far away, seemed to float over the crisp night
and on to the floor with the added remoteness of a dream.
"The orchestra's on another roof," explained John. "It's a new idea--
Look, the entertainment's beginning."
A negro girl, thin as a reed, emerged suddenly from a masked entrance
into a circle of harsh barbaric light, startled the music to a wild
minor, and commenced to sing a rhythmic, tragic song. The pipe of her
body broke abruptly and she began a slow incessant step, without
progress and without hope, like the failure of a savage insufficient
dream. She had lost Papa Jack, she cried over and over with a hysterical
monotony at once despairing and unreconciled. One by one the loud horns
tried to force her from the steady beat of madness but she listened only
to the mutter of the drums which were isolating her in some lost place
in time, among many thousand forgotten years. After the failure of the
piccolo, she made herself again into a thin brown line, wailed once with
sharp and terrible intensity, then vanished into sudden darkness.
"If you lived in New York you wouldn't need to be told who she is," said
John when the amber light flashed on. "The next fella is Sheik B. Smith,
a comedian of the fatuous, garrulous sort----"
He broke off. Just as the lights went down for the second number Rags
had given a long sigh, and leaned forward tensely in her chair. Her eyes
were rigid like the eyes of a pointer dog, and John saw that they were
fixed on a party that had come through a side entrance, and were
arranging themselves around a table in the half-darkness.
The table was shielded with palms, and Rags at first made out only three
dim forms. Then she distinguished a fourth who seemed to be placed well
behind the other three--a pale oval of a face topped with a glimmer of
dark-yellow hair.
"Hello!" ejaculated John. "There's his majesty now."
Her breath seemed to die murmurously in her throat. She was dimly aware
that the comedian was now standing in a glow of white light on the
dancing floor, that he had been talking for some moments, and that there
was a constant ripple of laughter in the air. But her eyes remained
motionless, enchanted. She saw one of the party bend and whisper to
another, and after the low glitter of a match the bright button of a
cigarette end gleamed in the background. How long it was before she
moved she did not know. Then something seemed to happen to her eyes,
something white, something terribly urgent, and she wrenched about
sharply to find herself full in the centre of a baby spot-light from
above. She became aware that words were being said to her from
somewhere, and that a quick trail of laughter was circling the roof, but
the light blinded her, and instinctively she made a half-movement from
her chair.
"Sit still!" John was whispering across the table. "He picks somebody
out for this every night."
Then she realized--it was the comedian, Sheik B. Smith. He was talking
to her, arguing with her--about something that seemed incredibly funny
to every one else, but came to her ears only as a blur of muddled sound.
Instinctively she had composed her face at the first shock of the light
and now she smiled. It was a gesture of rare self-possession. Into this
smile she insinuated a vast impersonality, as if she were unconscious of
the light, unconscious of his attempt to play upon her loveliness--but
amused at an infinitely removed _him_, whose darts might have been thrown
just as successfully at the moon. She was no longer a "lady"--a lady
would have been harsh or pitiful or absurd; Rags stripped her attitude
to a sheer consciousness of her own impervious beauty, sat there
glittering until the comedian began to feel alone as he had never felt
alone before. At a signal from him the spot-light was switched suddenly
out. The moment was over.
The moment was over, the comedian left the floor, and the far-away music
began. John leaned toward her.
"I'm sorry. There really wasn't anything to do. You were wonderful."
She dismissed the incident with a casual laugh--then she started, there
were now only two men sitting at the table across the floor.
"He's gone!" she exclaimed in quick distress.
"Don't worry--he'll be back. He's got to be awfully careful, you see, so
he's probably waiting outside with one of his aides until it gets dark
again."
"Why has he got to be careful?"
"Because he's not supposed to be in New York. He's even under one of his
second-string names."
The lights dimmed again, and almost immediately a tall man appeared out
of the darkness and approached their table.
"May I introduce myself?" he said rapidly to John in a supercilious
British voice. "Lord Charles Este, of Baron Marchbanks' party." He
glanced at John closely as if to be sure that he appreciated the
significance of the name.
John nodded.
"That is between ourselves, you understand."
"Of course."
Rags groped on the table for her untouched champagne, and tipped the
glassful down her throat.
"Baron Marchbanks requests that your companion will join his party
during this number."
Both men looked at Rags. There was a moment's pause.
"Very well," she said, and glanced back again interrogatively at John.
Again he nodded. She rose and with her heart beating wildly threaded the
tables, making the half-circuit of the room; then melted, a slim figure
in shimmering gold, into the table set in half-darkness.