Don Stevens

Don Stevens is a South Dakota journalist and committed radical whose predictions of war, revolution, and state repression repeatedly bring political crisis into Eveline Hutchins’s personal life. A practiced speaker with a red membership card and a taste for wine, food, and sudden intimacy, he is both an advocate of collective upheaval and an unpredictable private presence. His arrest after the war makes the danger he has described at length immediate: Eveline learns that he may be executed for the very political commitments he has spent years voicing.

Identity and Political Formation

Stevens comes from South Dakota and has worked on small-town newspapers since high school. He has also labored as a harvest hand and taken part in several clashes involving the Industrial Workers of the World. He displays his red card with pride, presenting his working-class experience and organizational affiliation as credentials for his politics rather than as abstract convictions. In New York City, he writes for magazines and speaks at antiwar meetings; after resigning from a socialist newspaper whose editors he considers timid, he continues to use both journalism and public speech to challenge the country’s drift toward war.

His political analysis links international conflict to money and class power. At a crowded pacifist gathering, he tells Eveline that the United States will not stay out of the war, that the European working class is close to revolt, and that the Russian Revolution may inaugurate a worldwide social revolution. He argues that bankers and President Woodrow Wilson understand the stakes, while the decisive question is whether workers and farmers in the United States will accept intervention. He sees the press as purchased and silenced and financial interests as bound to the war effort. The scale of the conspiracy he imagines gives his talk its urgency, but the novel also places it amid the talk, wine, and self-dramatization of a young man who can turn political analysis into performance.

Eveline Hutchins and Private Intimacy

Stevens first meets Eveline at a pacifist tea after Freddy Seargeant leaves for a rehearsal. When the gathering breaks up, he catches up with her on the street and asks where she will eat. Before long they are sharing supper at an Italian restaurant, where he eats spaghetti quickly, drinks red wine, and introduces her to Giovanni, the waiter, as a philosophical anarchist he intends to convert. Eveline listens to Stevens’s account of politics alongside Giovanni, who keeps glancing around as if customers might be detectives. Stevens’s intensity makes her laugh; when he complains that women cannot understand political ideas, she answers that she does understand and finds the situation terrible.

After supper, Stevens admits that he cannot decide whether to fight in the war, go to jail, or become a war correspondent. He pays the restaurant bill on credit and asks Eveline to lend him money for Giovanni’s tip, saying he has no cash. They continue to a shabby room on Patchin Place. When he makes advances, Eveline objects that they have known each other only seven hours. He dismisses her objection as a bourgeois idea, but when she asks about birth control, he sits down and talks at length about Margaret Sanger and the importance of contraception. He then resumes his advances, and Eveline lets him undress her. She returns to the Brevoort at three in the morning, takes a large dose of castor oil, and lies awake worried about what to tell Freddy. Her fear that she may be pregnant passes, but the episode establishes the mixture of desire, political argument, impulsiveness, and anxiety that marks their association.

Later, when Stevens comes to Paris on leave in the gray uniform of a Quaker relief organization, Eveline is relieved to see him and wonders whether she may have been in love with him after all. She tells Yvonne that he is her cousin, claims they were raised like brother and sister, and lodges him in Eleanor Stoddard’s room. The disguise allows Eveline to shelter him while concealing their connection from the people around her. Stevens, meanwhile, arrives full of news and revolutionary expectation, not as a settled romantic partner but as a force who can briefly displace the isolation of her life in Paris.

Revolutionary Expectations and Wartime Paris

Stevens is exhilarated by the success of the Bolsheviks in Russia. He eats heavily, drinks the wine in the house, and speaks of underground forces with which he claims contact. He predicts mutiny throughout the armies and a wider revolt by German soldiers; he recounts mutinies at Verdun and soldiers heading toward an attack crying against the war and shooting at gendarmes. He argues that a new socialist civilization might make the war almost worth its cost. As he kisses Eveline across the table, Yvonne enters with pancakes topped with burning brandy. The political forecast, the intimate gesture, and the ordinary domestic meal occupy the same moment: revolutionary expectation is not separate from the household but presses into it.

The surrounding spring and summer give some force to Stevens’s forecasts without confirming them. Eveline hears guns in continuous barrage and encounters rumors of retreat, mutiny, sabotage, and another Italian breakthrough at the Red Cross office. Staff are repeatedly told to prepare the records for evacuation from Paris. Yet the city fills with American personnel and supplies, and J.W. Moorehouse returns with an account of the fighting at Château-Thierry and a confident prediction that the war will end within a year. Stevens’s apocalyptic reading of events thus coexists with the reassuring language of official work and American arrival. His predictions make him a countervoice to that reassurance, though the novel does not treat every rumor he repeats as established fact.

When Eveline and Moorehouse return to her apartment after dinner, they encounter Stevens walking along the street with Paul Johnson. The men go upstairs, and the evening becomes awkward: Eveline and Moorehouse talk mostly about Eleanor, while Stevens and Johnson sit embarrassed. After Moorehouse leaves, Stevens erupts against a Red Cross major. The incident joins his hostility to respectable institutions with his suspicion of Moorehouse’s position, while showing how Eveline’s social and romantic worlds collide with his political loyalties.

Separation, May Day, and Departure

After returning to Paris in civilian clothes, Stevens has resigned from a reconstruction unit and is broke. Eveline is anxious about what her concierge, Eleanor, or Moorehouse would think if she put him up, but she is also bitter and desperate enough to agree, on condition that he not reveal where he is staying. He teases her for bourgeois scruples and insists that such distinctions will not matter after the revolution; he treats May Day as an imminent test of political strength. He gives her L’Humanité to read and takes her to the small restaurant on the rue du Croissant where Jean Jaurès was assassinated. His politics therefore reach Eveline not only through forecasts but through newspapers and specific sites of political memory.

Stevens eventually sells articles and obtains work going to Vienna for the Daily Herald of London. When Eveline returns from a gloomy day trip to Chartres with a cold, he cares for her, tucks her into bed, and makes hot lemonade with cognac. He tells her that he will leave as soon after May Day as possible unless something breaks in Paris. That evening he goes to a hotel, thanking her for sheltering him as a comrade even though she no longer loves him. His departure leaves her feeling the room’s emptiness; she almost wishes she had asked him to stay. The exchange registers both their attachment and its limit: care and comradeship remain, but they do not amount to a secure relationship.

On May Day, Stevens encounters Eveline and Paul after spending the morning at the telegraph office. Tired and angry that a possible riot has not happened in time for him to file the cables, he reports seeing Anatole France dispersed at the Place d’Alma and complains that censorship obstructs the story. He has heard that youths attacked tree guards and that barricades may stand near the Place de la Bastille, but he is too exhausted and hungry to investigate, and doubts the report. His impatience with censorship is thus paired with the practical limits of a reporter who has been working since five in the morning. He describes the situation in Germany as serious and suspects that something is about to happen there, but remains uncertain about what will occur in Paris.

Stevens and Eveline walk together afterward. He describes Paul as an unformed young man from a small town whose father owns a grain elevator, and faults him for lacking social ideas and having no knowledge of Marx. He extends the criticism to Eveline, whom he calls ornamental rather than useful, but she tells him his ideas are tiresome. He breaks off the conversation to board a bus rather than walk all the way to the Bastille, despite his objection to riding a vehicle operated by strikebreakers. He kisses her, asks her not to be angry, and leaves for Vienna. The scene makes visible the gap between his revolutionary judgments and his ordinary needs, while Eveline’s dismissal shows that his political authority over her is no longer assured.

Arrest and Narrative Significance

Stevens’s fate returns as a life-and-death crisis when Eveline hears that the Army of Occupation has arrested him, apparently on suspicion of Bolshevik propaganda. At dinner, she is agitated and insists that he is a newspaper man, not a propagandist, and that a man should not be shot for wanting a better world. She presses Mr. Barrow to approach the President and, above all, to secure a stay of execution. Barrow calls Stevens foolish and says he lacked the proper spirit, but reluctantly agrees to do what he can. Eveline’s anger sharpens as she asks him to imagine that he himself faced execution. In this moment, the radical whom respectable company has treated as noisy and impractical becomes the absent person whose life their influence might save.

The narrative does not establish whether Stevens is released or executed. It leaves his immediate outcome unresolved while making the threat plain, and in doing so turns his earlier arguments about censorship, political repression, and the coercive power of the state into a personal emergency. His importance lies in that movement between scales: he argues that institutions and financial power determine the prospects of workers and nations, yet the final crisis depends on whether individuals will act when one dissident is in danger. His restless mixture of conviction, appetite, tenderness, and abrasive certainty prevents him from being only a mouthpiece for revolution. He remains a journalist whose analysis is bound to the conditions of reporting, a lover and comrade whose closeness to Eveline is real but unstable, and a political speaker whose predicted repression becomes a possibility that the people around him must confront.