“Here I am,” said Dolly faintly.
He turned around and came toward her slowly.
“I knew it was you,” he said. “I can’t escape you anywhere.”
They walked into each other’s arms and she turned up her face, but this time instead of kissing her he held her rigidly and looked at her in the moonlight.
“What was the matter?” he said almost harshly. “Why did they send you to prison?”
“For a crime,” she answered.
As he looked at her he was unable to believe it possible, if he hadn’t seen her in a prison cell.
Meanwhile Mimi has come up the stairs in search of Ben and encountered the professor. She is skeptical of his story that Dolly is up on top meditating all alone, and communicates her suspicion to him.
Incredulously the professor accompanies her to the top and stands with her for a moment, silently watching. They see Ben and Dolly come toward each other again, as if drawn by an irresistible force, hesitate, and then, with Ben’s face only an inch away from hers, break apart, without speaking, the professor draws Mimi down the stairs. He is distraught and wild.
“I knew it,” he says miserably. “That’s what comes of trusting a girl with a prison past. I found out in the nick of time.”
“A prison past?” repeats Mimi, her eyes narrowing. “A prison past?”
Innocently he repeats the whole story to Mimi, without seeing that he is putting a dangerous weapon into her hands.
As they descend the steps they encounter Joe Jakes coming up— he has been turning the couples out of the tower upon orders from the Dean who has decided that necking parties have gone far enough.
“Anyone else up there?” he demands of the professor.
The professor is too distraught to reply, even to hear, but Mimi answers for him. She shakes her head implying no, well aware that Ben and Dolly are on the tower.
When everyone is out Joe Jakes closes the door to the wedding stair and hangs a sign on it.
Any undergraduate found in this tower will be indefinitely suspended.
By Order of the Dean.
Mimi, when no one is looking, turns the key in the lock, effectually preventing Ben and Dolly from coming out.
At the moment Ben and Dolly are too wrapped up in themselves to care what is happening below. She knows the struggle that is going on in Ben, knows that he cares for her, yet she cannot make him kiss her when he holds her in his arms. She takes out the lipstick, brings it near her lips—then shakes her head. No—better give up and let it and tonight with all pleasant things than know that she had made him declare himself by a trick.
“Oh, Ben—” she cried aloud, “Ben—”
He stood with his back to her, silent and motionless. Once more she raised the lipstick, hesitated, then she dashed it to the stone floor of the tower and blind with tears turned away toward the stair.
But now there was a strong arm about her, a face near to her and a voice she knew whispering what she had not hoped to hear.
“I love you. I love you.”
With a long sigh of happiness she melted into his dinner coat.
Downstairs other forces are in motion—a clucking of hens in one box with Mimi in the center feeding them the poison grain. She tells the story the professor has told her, keeping back only the identity of the girl. Disgraceful. A blackbird among all those swallows. The clucks soar to a crescendo—it is a case for the Dean.
And Mimi has another string to her bow—Ben and Dolly are in the forbidden tower. Once the agitation against Dolly’s presence is under way she seeks Joe Jakes outside the door.
“Please,” she asks innocently. “Can’t anyone go in the tower?”
“I’m sorry, Miss, nobody.”
“But,” she protests, “I saw a couple go up there not ten minutes ago.
Upon the tower the night is soft as a benediction. With Dolly in the circle of his arms, Ben is reading a paper she has taken from her bosom and handed to him. But almost before he has comprehended what it means to them, to their love, a bell sounds the strokes of midnight from another tower.
Twelve o’clock. The grand march which he, as chairman of the committee, must lead!
He seizes her hand and pulls her down the steps three at a time. To his astonishment the door is locked. He considers—he knows there has been some talk of closing the tower and concludes that this is the result.
Somewhat worried they climb once more to the top of the tower and hand in hand survey the prospects of escape. Downstairs, though they are unaware of it, Joe Jakes, breathing fire, is already at the stair door.
Forty feet below the tower is the pebble covered roof of the adjoining Gothic building, and by great luck a vine pruner’s ladder is resting against the ivied tower wall. Down they go to the roof— pick out a lighted window in the next quadrangle and silhouetted clearly against the moon, scurry toward it along the battlement. One can go a good three miles over the medieval chain of masonry that winds in and out over the campus, forming in turn halls, towers, and quadrangles, without once descending to earth, but this is not their object. They know now that there a determined figure is scrambling along behind them in full pursuit. With the aid of a slide down a slanting slate roof, they reach a window. It is the work of but a moment, to break a pane, step inside, toss fifty cents on the table to pay for damages and dash downstairs.
Back at the prom the scandal had just reached the Dean’s ears. The little committee of chaperones, buzzing with restrained indignation, “really thought that this was too much.” Not only should the girl be ejected but the man responsible for bringing her should be severely disciplined. The Dean agreed that he would take action. They had only to supply the name of the girl.
The box where this sub rosa dispute took place was the center of attention as rumor began to drift about. Purity demanded a sacrifice—someone was going to be decorated with the scarlet letter and publicly thrown out of the prom. Only Dolly and Ben who had just drifted breathlessly in and drifted out upon the floor were awareof what hung over Dolly’s head. They and Professor Swope who had discovered the allurements of Grace Jones and was quickly forgetting his sorrows of an hour before.
Mimi waited triumphant. In a minute it would be time—when the proctor brought them down from the tower she would say the word, and Ben would see the lady of his fancy disgraced before his eyes.
Someone else was watching too—one of the men who figures in this story, with in his coat pocket which he fingered with a twitchy hand.
By the time Ben and Dolly realize that something is up and join the fringe of the little group, the Dean is growing impatient.
“All right, Miss Haughton,” he says impatiently. “Let me have the name of this unfortunate young lady. We don’t want a public scene.”
Ben and Dolly hear and pause. Her face turns white; Ben’s arm tightens on her.
“I’m behind you whatever happens,” he says. “Remember that and keep your head.”
For another moment Mimi hesitates triumphantly—hesitates just a fraction too long, for she hears a familiar and insinuating voice low in her ear.
“Mimi, you’d better not say a word.”
She turns. It is Cupid. His hand slides a little from his pocket and she sees what he has in his hand.
“It’s better to have a jail term over, Mimi, than to have one staring you in the face.”
“Why —what do you mean?” she gasps.
“I mean that we saw you take this bag and we saw you throw it away. There happens to be a law against larceny in this state, and if you say one word about Miss Dolly Carrol, just as sure as you’re alive you’ll go to jail.”
His stout face is very grim and determined now—Dolly retreats a little bit before him. The Dean’s voice breaks in on them again.
“I’ll have to ask you to tell me the girl’s name.”
Mimi looks about, hate and rage in her eyes. Then she meets Cupid’s glance and her expression changes to one of fear.
“I’m—I’m sorry,” she falters, “I don’t know the name. I was mistaken. I must have been wrong.”
A minute later the group dissolved in laughter and contempt and not long after Mimi and her mother might have been seen making their way hurriedly toward the door. It was time for the grand march and as Ben had no partner now what more natural than that he should ask Dolly, or that the professor should be more content with Grace, or that Cupid should be happiest with nobody at all.
There they go!
I must add that the lipstick was found by a little colored girl delivering laundry, who in consequence grew up and had a perfectly enormous family.
Ben and Dolly were never known to care.
Notes
In December 1926 the Fitzgeralds returned to America after two-and-a-half years in France. While visiting Montgomery Fitzgerald accepted an offer from John W. Considine, Jr. of United Artists to write a flapper movie in Hollywood for Constance Talmadge.
