  The chiral invariant QHD-III model of Serot and Walecka is applied in the
calculation of some meson properties. The electromagnetic interaction is
included by extending the symmetry of the model to the local U(1) \times
SU(2)_{R} \times SU(2)_{L} group. The minimal and nonminimal contributions to
the electromagnetic Lagrangian are obtained in a new representation of QHD-III.
Strong decays of the axial-vector meson, a_{1} \to \pi \rho, a_{1} \to \pi
\sigma, and the electromagnetic decays \rho \to \pi \pi \gamma, a_{1} \to \pi
\gamma and \rho \to \pi \gamma are calculated. The low-energy parameters for
the \pi-\pi scattering are calculated in the tree-level approximation. The
effect of the auxiliary Higgs bosons, introduced in QHD-III in order to
generate masses of the vector and axial-vector mesons via the Higgs mechanism,
is studied as well. This is done on the tree level for \pi-\pi scattering and
on the level of one-loop diagrams for the a_{1} \to \pi \gamma decay. It is
demonstrated that the model successfully describes some features of meson
phenomenology in the non-strange sector.
