The Beauty and the Bolshevist | Page 3

something about the book page. Get me a culture-hound--get one of these Pater specialists from Harvard. Or," he added, with sudden inspiration when his hand was already on the door, "get a woman--she'd have a sense of beauty and would know how to jolly Green into agreeing with her." And with this the editor was gone.
It was the end of one of those burning weeks in August that New York often knows. The sun went down as red as blood every evening behind the Palisades, and before the streets and roofs had ceased to radiate heat the sun was up again above Long Island Sound, as hot and red as ever. As Ben went uptown in the Sixth Avenue Elevated he could see pale children hanging over the railings of fire escapes, and behind them catch glimpses of dark, crowded rooms which had all the disadvantages of caves without the coolness. But to-day he was too concentrated on his own problem to notice.
Since Ben's sixteenth year his brother David had been dependent on him. Their father had been professor of economics in a college in that part of the United States which Easterners describe as the "Middle West." In the gay days when muck-raking was at its height Professor Moreton had lost his chair because he had denounced in his lecture room financial operations which to-day would be against the law. At that time they were well thought of, and even practiced by the eminent philanthropist who had endowed the very chair which Moreton occupied. The trustees felt that it was unkind and unnecessary to complicate their already difficult duties by such tactlessness, and their hearts began to turn against Moreton, as most of our hearts turn against those who make life too hard for us. Before long they asked him to resign on account of his age--he was just sixty and extremely vigorous; but immediately afterward, having been deeply surprised and hurt, he did what Goldsmith recommends to lovely woman under not dissimilar circumstances--he died. He left his two young sons--he had married late in life--absolutely unprovided for. Ben, the elder of the two, was sixteen, and just ready for college; but he could not give four precious years to an academic degree. He went to work. With the background of an educated environment and a very sound knowledge of economic questions, breathed in from his earliest days, he found a place at once on a new paper--or, rather, on an old paper just being converted into a new organ of 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