ANTHONY: Had a protracted dispute with a scared
young couple we thought were in our seats.
DICK: (As though talking to himself) I
think—that when I’ve done another
novel and a play, and maybe a book of short stories,
I’ll do a musical comedy.
MAURY: I know—with intellectual lyrics
that no one will listen to. And all the critics
will groan and grunt about “Dear old Pinafore.”
And I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless
figure in a meaningless world.
DICK: (Pompously) Art isn’t meaningless.
MAURY: It is in itself. It isn’t in
that it tries to make life less so.
ANTHONY: In other words, Dick, you’re playing
before a grand stand peopled with ghosts.
MAURY: Give a good show anyhow.
ANTHONY:(To MAURY) On the contrary, I’d feel
that it being a meaningless world, why write?
The very attempt to give it purpose is purposeless.
DICK: Well, even admitting all that, be a decent
pragmatist and grant a poor man the instinct to live.
Would you want every one to accept that sophistic
rot?
ANTHONY: Yeah, I suppose so.
MAURY: No, sir! I believe that every one
in America but a selected thousand should be compelled
to accept a very rigid system of morals—Roman
Catholicism, for instance. I don’t complain
of conventional morality. I complain rather of
the mediocre heretics who seize upon the findings
of sophistication and adopt the pose of a moral freedom
to which they are by no means entitled by their intelligences.
(Here the soup arrives and what MAURY might have
gone on to say is lost for all time.)
Afterward they visited a ticket speculator and, at
a price, obtained seats for a new musical comedy called
“High Jinks.” In the foyer of the
theatre they waited a few moments to see the first-night
crowd come in. There were opera cloaks stitched
of myriad, many-colored silks and furs; there were
jewels dripping from arms and throats and ear-tips
of white and rose; there were innumerable broad shimmers
down the middles of innumerable silk hats; there were
shoes of gold and bronze and red and shining black;
there were the high-piled, tight-packed coiffures of
many women and the slick, watered hair of well-kept
men—most of all there was the ebbing, flowing,
chattering, chuckling, foaming, slow-rolling wave
effect of this cheerful sea of people as to-night it
poured its glittering torrent into the artificial
lake of laughter....
After the play they parted—Maury was going
to a dance at Sherry’s, Anthony homeward and
to bed.
