They're not statesmen. And Bolshevism, as so far manifested, isn't a statesmanlike system; it holds the reins too tight. I don't condemn it for the cruelties committed in its name, because whenever Russians get excited there'll be fiendish cruelties; Russians are like that--the most cruel devils in earth or hell. Bolshevist Russians are no worse in that way than Czarist Russians. Except when I am listening to their music I loathe the whole race; great stupid, brutal, immoral, sentimental savages.... When I think of them I feel a kind of nausea, oddly touched with fear, that must be hereditary, I suppose. After all, my father, as a child of five, saw his mother outraged and murdered by Russian police. Anyhow, Bolshevism, in Russian hands, has become a kind of stupid, crazy, devil's game, as everything always has. But I don't want to discuss Bolshevism here. Boris Stefan hadn't really anything to do with it. He wasn't a politician. He was a dreamy, simple, untidy, rather childlike person, with a wonderful gift for painting. Rosalind and I had got to know him at the Club. They were both beautiful, and it hadn't taken them long to fall in love. One Russian-Jewish exile marrying another--that was the bitterness of it to our very Gentile mother and our Sidneyfied father, who had spent fifty years living down his origin. So I was called in to assist in averting the catastrophe. I wouldn't say anything except that it seemed very suitable, and that annoyed my mother. I remember that she and I and Rosalind argued round and round it for an hour one hot evening in the drawing-room at Queen's Gate. Finally my mother said, 'Oh, very well. If Rosalind wants a lot of fat Yid babies with hooked noses and oily hair, all lending money on usury instead of getting into debt like Christians, let her have them. I wash my hands of the lot of you. I don't know what I've done to deserve two Sheenies for children.' That made Rosalind giggle, and eased the acrimony of the discussion. My mother was a little fair woman, sharp-tongued and quick-tempered, but with a sense of fun. My father had no sense of fun. I think it had been crushed out of him in his cradle. He was a silent man (though he could, like all Jews, be eloquent), with a thin face and melancholy dark eyes. I am supposed to look like him, I believe. He, too, spoke to me that evening about Rosalind's engagement. I remember how he walked up and down the dining-room, with his hands behind him and his head bent forward, and his quick, nervous, jerky movements. 'I don't like it, Arthur. I feel as if we had all climbed up out of a very horrible pit into a place of safety and prosperity and honour, and as if the child was preparing to leap down into the pit again. She doesn't know what it's like to be a Jew. I do, and I've saved you both from it, and you both seem bent on returning to the pit whence you were digged. We're an outcast people, my dear; an outcast people....'