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.”