then lived in England.  He had served in the war, belonged to several secret societies of a harmless sort, painted pictures that had attracted a good deal of critical notice, and professed Bolshevik sympathies, of a purely academic nature (as so many of these sympathies are) on the grounds that Bolshevism was a Jewish movement.  He and I differed on the subject of Bolshevism.  I have never seen any signs either of constructive ability or sound principles in any Bolshevik leader; nothing but enterprise, driving-power, vindictiveness, Hebrew cunning, and a criminal ruthlessness.  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.