Stacey and Mrs. Latimer were having tea together. But, since Stacey had ceased to visit the Latimer home, they were having it at the “Sign of the Purple Parrot.” This was a small but expensive tea-room recently opened on the fifth floor of a building close to the river front, and Stacey, as he entered it (for the first time), glanced swiftly about at its white walls, low white ceiling, small-paned windows with hangings of purple-figured cretonne, and at the purple wooden parrot on a tall standard in the centre of the room. A silver vase containing a single yellow rose decorated each of the ten or twelve little tables. Finally Stacey turned in mute amazement to his companion, since it was she who had suggested the place.
“They have very good tea,” she said, with an amused smile.
However, Miss Wilcox, proprietor of the tea-room, advanced toward them. “I’m so glad you’ve come early, before any one else, Mrs. Latimer,” she said, “because you can have one of the two tables out on the balcony. I’m sure you’d like that. They’re always the first to go.”
And accordingly they went outside and sat down in wicker chairs beneath a purple and white awning.
“Don’t you think it’s a nice idea,” asked Miss Wilcox, standing near them, “to try and use our river esthetically, Captain Carroll? It is Captain Carroll, isn’t it? I recognized you from your photograph. We’re honored to have you come. It seems such a shame to have this magnificent river and then use it solely for ugly business purposes. But that’s so often true in America, I think. Saint Louis is the same way. I should so like to have my modest little effort followed by others.”
Stacey said politely that he hoped it would be, and Miss Wilcox presently moved away.
“You mustn’t mind her, poor thing!” Mrs. Latimer observed kindly. “She’s devoted to her institution. It’s her child.”
“Preposterous virgin birth!” murmured Stacey, gazing down at the river.
It sweltered in the intense August sunlight. Barges and tugs moved up and down its sallow waters, and vast warehouses flanked it. Across on the further side was a train yard with multitudes of red freight cars, idle or with engines shunting them about. Trucks and drays rattled over the cobble stones of the streets leading down to the river (the strike having been settled some weeks since), and shouts rose and the odor of grease. And Stacey, turning away from it to order tea and scones from a capped and aproned maid who had come to his side, looked at her as though he did not believe in her.
“A movie world, Mrs. Latimer,” he remarked finally.
“Yes,” she said, “it is silly, isn’t it? This painted parrot, and the tea roses, and the tiny, fussy, white-and-purple room, trying to make itself noticed by that immense fierce reality out there! But it doesn’t do any harm, and I thought the incongruity of it might amuse you. Where has your sense of humor gone, Stacey? Once you would have laughed gaily at this.”
“Where does a china tea-cup go in an earthquake?” he responded absently, looking down again at the river, then back at the room. “No, of course there’s no harm in it,” he said, after a moment, “since it is so obviously absurd, but you might, I suppose, take it as a fantastic caricature of something—”
But Miss Wilcox was seating people at the other table of the balcony. “. . . so often true in America, I think,” she was saying. “I should like to have my modest little effort followed by others.”
Mrs. Latimer smiled, but Stacey did not. He waited impassively until Miss Wilcox had finished speaking and had walked away.
“Now in the movies,” he continued, “you are presented with standards of behavior—sweetness and light, purity unsoiled, virtue triumphant, best of all possible worlds—that have nothing to do with real life. Seems impossible that real men and women could have posed for the pictures. You’d think the contrast with the promiscuity of their actual California divorce-court lives would be too strong. Not a bit of it! Well, that’s all right—if people like that kind of thing. Personally, I think it’s sickening. No matter how abominable real life is, I’d a thousand times rather have to live in it than in a Pollyanna, Mary Pickford, glad-and-tender world! Faugh!”
“So should I,” said Mrs. Latimer. “But if weary people find release in such tawdry fairy-tales—”
“Sure! Let them! Nobody’s business! But there’s the trouble. The silly stuff isn’t just taken as release. It gets accepted as truth. I mean to say, the ideals and standards are taken as those of real people. How in heaven’s name they can be by any member of a movie audience who knows anything about himself, I swear I can’t imagine, but they are.”
“Ah, but that’s the point!” said Mrs. Latimer gently. “They don’t know themselves. Even you don’t know yourself, Stacey.”
“I know enough about myself to see that I’m not like that. And what results? That any glimpse of truth is condemned as rotten, abnormal, pathological. For the movies are only a glowing example of a spirit that corrupts everything. Why, if a novelist were to take any man alive—I don’t say me, but somebody better—Jimmy Prout, for instance—and tell the whole truth about him, the ghastly things he did and the ghastlier ones he wanted to do but didn’t dare, what a row there’d be! The reviewers would call the book abominable, the hero a hopeless rotter, though every one of them has done or wanted to do things just as bad. A movie world, Mrs. Latimer! No truth in it!”
“Yes,” she said, “no doubt. I’d like it different, honester. But what harm does the pretence do? It even sets a standard of a sort, doesn’t it?”
“What harm?” he cried. “Why, it makes people shocked at German atrocities, as though they were sins committed by some alien inhuman monsters. Down with Prussianism? As much as you like! I’m glad we beat the Germans. So far, so good. But how about the Prussianism in ourselves? A movie world! A smug, lying, movie world!”
“But there is kindliness in it, too,” she said wistfully, “and generosity. I’ve met them both.”
“Yes,” Stacey assented somberly, “there is—in sudden impulses, more frequent, I’ll even concede, than these passing gusts of bestiality. But, so far as I can see, there’s only one real force, one motive, in life, that stays on and on and never dies. Greed!” he concluded fiercely.
Mrs. Latimer gazed at him for a moment in silence.
“And still you don’t see it all,” she said at last very gently. “You won’t look deeply enough into yourself. If you did you’d see the splendid spectacle of the human soul fighting all this that you describe—and without quarter, dear Stacey, as long as you have breath in you. Has your hatred of greed and lies no significance?”
“I don’t know,” he replied, drawing his hand across his forehead. “And I don’t see that I’m doing any splendid fighting. I don’t know what to fight. I merely fume impotently.” But the wild look of pain had disappeared from his eyes.
He fell to wondering about his companion. No optimist, surely. Doubtful of most things, but sweet and mellow in her skepticism. How had she attained such serenity?
“You must know Catherine, my friend Philip Blair’s wife,” he said suddenly. “You will like her, and she you. There’s truth in the hearts of both of you, and yet you’re different, somehow.”
“When you do say pretty things, they’re pleasant to hear, Stacey,” Mrs. Latimer replied, with a faint girlish blush, “because you seem not ever to be saying them for effect.”
Soon they rose to go. Neither of them had so much as alluded to the fact that Marian was to be married to Ames Price in a few weeks.
That same evening Stacey attended a meeting of the American Legion. His life was like that now, inconsequential. He went pointlessly from one unrelated fact to another.
Being in a far from constructive frame of mind, he had nothing against the Legion and nothing in favor of it. It had indeed occurred to him that if an organization founded on no common conviction, but on the mere fact that its members had all been in the army, should come to exert political influence, that influence would certainly be confusing and might be harmful; on the contrary, if the young men who had been soldiers wanted to play together, why not? But these were idle thoughts. At heart he did not care one way or the............