’Things as bad as that massacre are happening all the time in this pleasant country,’ he wrote.  ’It doesn’t matter what the political convictions, if any, of a Russian are—­he’s a barbarian whether he’s on a soviet or in the anti-Bolshevik armies.  Not always, of course; there are a few who have escaped the prevalent lust of cruelty—­but only a few.  Love of pain (as experienced by others) for its own sake—­as one loves good food, or beautiful women—­it’s a queer disease.  It goes along, often, with other strong sensual desires.  The Russians, for instance, are the worst gluttons and profligates of Europe.  With it all, they have, often, an extraordinary generous good-heartedness; with one hand they will give away what they can’t spare to some one in need, while with the other they torture an animal or a human being to death.  The women seldomer do either; like women everywhere, they are less given both to sensual desire and to generous open-handedness....  That’s a curious thing, how seldom you find physical cruelty in a woman of any nationality.  Even the most spiteful and morally unkindest little girl will shudder away while her brother tears the wings off a fly or the legs off a frog, or impales a worm on a hook.  Weak nerves, partly, and partly the sort of high-strung fastidiousness women have.  When you come across cruelty in a woman—­physical cruelty, of course—­you think of her as a monster; just as when you come on a stingy man, you think of him (but probably inaccurately) as a Jew.  Russians are very male, except in their inchoate, confused thinking.  Their special brand of humour and of sentimentality are male; their exuberant strength and aliveness, their sensuality, and their savage cruelty....  If ever women come to count in Russia as a force, not merely as mates for the men, queer things will happen....  Here in this town things are, for the moment, tidy and ordered, as if seven Germans with seven mops had swept it for half a year.  The local soviet is a gang of ruffians, but they do keep things more or less ship-shape.  And they make people work.  And they torture dogs....’

Later he wrote, ’You were right as to one thing; every one I meet, including my relations, is persuaded that I am either a newspaper correspondent or writing a book, or, more probably, both.  These taints cling so.  I feel like a reformed drunkard, who has taken the pledge but still carries about with him a red nose and shaky hands, so that he gets no credit for his new sobriety.  What’s the good of my telling people here that I don’t write, when I suppose I’ve the mark of the beast stamped all over me?  And they play up; they talk for me to record it....

’I find all kinds of odd things here.  Among others, an English doctor, in the local lunatic asylum.  Mad as a hatter, poor devil—­now—­whatever he was when they shut him up.  I dare say he’d been through enough even then to turn his brain.  I can’t find out who his friends in England are....’