The Beauty and the Bolshevist

								

liberalism—Liberty. It was independent in politics, and was supposed
to be independent in economic questions, but by the time Ben worked up
to the editorship it was well recognized to be an anticapitalist sheet.
The salary of its editor, though not large, was sufficient to enable
him to send his younger brother through college, with the result that
David, a little weak, a little self-indulgent, a little—partly through
physical causes—disinclined to effort, was now a poet, a classicist and
an instructor in a fresh-water college. Ben made him an allowance to
enable him to live—the college not thinking this necessary for its
instructors. But during the war Ben had not been able to manage the
allowance, because, to the surprise of many of his friends, Ben had
volunteered early.
Although the reasons for doing this seemed absurdly simple to him, the
decision had been a difficult one. He was a pacifist—saw no virtue in
war whatsoever. He wished to convert others to his opinion—unlike many
reformers who prefer to discuss questions only with those who already
agree with them. He argued that the speeches of a man who had been
through war, or, better still, the posthumous writings of one who has
been killed in war, would have more weight with the public than the
best logic of one who had held aloof. But his radical friends felt that
he was using this argument merely as an excuse for choosing the easy
path of conformity, while the few ultraconservatives who mentioned the
matter at all assumed that he had been drafted against his will.
Afterward, when the war was over and his terrible book, War,
appeared, no one was pleased, for the excellent reason that it was
published at a moment when the whole world wanted to forget war
entirely. The pay of a private, however, had not allowed him to
continue David’s allowance, and so David, displaying unusual energy,
had found a job for himself as tutor for the summer to William Cord’s
son. Ben had not quite approved of a life that seemed to him slightly
parasitical, but it was healthy and quiet and, above everything, David
had found it for himself, and initiative was so rare in the younger man
that Ben could not bear to crush it with disapproval.
Increasingly, during the two years he was in France, Ben was displeased
by David’s letters. The Cords were described as kindly, well-educated
people, fond one of another, considerate of the tutor, with
old-fashioned traditions of American liberties. Ben asked himself if he
would have been better pleased if David’s employers had been cruel,
vulgar, and blatant, and found the answer was in the affirmative. It
would, he thought, have been a good deal safer for David’s integrity if
he had not been so comfortable.
For two summers Ben had made no protest, but the third summer, when the
war was over and the allowance again possible, he urged David not to go
back to Newport. David flatly refused to yield. He said he saw no