“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 other about the Legion. If he had shown more interest he might perhaps, in view of his record, have been elected commander of the post; but this is doubtful. He was a wealthy son of a wealthy father, and class antagonisms were not absent from the Legion.
Up to now he had attended only one meeting, but he had learned that to-night a protest was to be presented against the engagement of Fritz Kreisler to play in Vernon in the coming autumn; and Stacey, disgusted, was out to see if there was anything he could do to head off such nonsense.
It was a full meeting. There were several hundred men in the large hall when Stacey entered, and tobacco smoke hung over them in a dull blue mist. The commander of the post was already in the chair, and the business of reading minutes was under way. Stacey dropped into a seat and waited abstractedly.
He did not have long to wait. Excitement buzzed in a group near the centre of the room, and a young captain sprang up. Stacey knew him by sight. His unit was that to which Jimmy Prout had belonged. It had never left Camp Grant.
“Mr. Commander and Comrades!” he began tensely. “You know what I want to say. It’s about this business of letting an enemy come here and take our money, just as if nothing had ever happened. You know who I mean. I mean Kreisler. Kreisler was our enemy in the war. It doesn’t make any difference that he didn’t happen to fight against Americans or that he was out of it before we went in. He was on the wrong side. He supported the side that did all the—the atrocities you know about. And what I want to say is that if we’re asked to give him our support and our money it’s an outrage. And so,” he added, unfolding a paper, “I propose the following motion:
“We, the members of the John Harton Post of the American Legion, hereby express our amazement and strong disapproval of the action of the manager of the Park Street Theatre in engaging Fritz Kreisler, recently a soldier in the Austrian army, to play at a concert in the city of Vernon less than one year after the conclusion of a great war during which thousands of American lives were sacrificed to defeat the very principles that Herr Kreisler supported. And we hereby request the manager of said theatre to cancel Herr Kreisler’s engagement, and notify him that failure to do so will result in an attitude of marked disinclination to patronize said theatre on the part of the members of this post.”
And the young captain sat down amid applause, during which half a dozen voices seconded the motion.