Potterism eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 258 pages of information about Potterism.

Potterism eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 258 pages of information about Potterism.
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.

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Potterism from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.