Gideon wrote long letters to Jane from the Russian towns and villages in which he sojourned. But none of them were suitable for propaganda purposes; they were critical but dispassionate. He had found some cousins of his father's, fur merchants living in a small town on the edge of a forest. 'Clever, cringing, nerve-ridden people,' he said. The older generation remembered his grandparents, and his father as a bright-eyed infant. They remembered that pogrom fifty years ago, and described it. 'They'll describe anything,' wrote Gideon. 'The more horrible it is, the more they'll talk. That's Russian, not Jewish specially. Or is it just human?'… Gideon didn't repeat to Jane the details he heard of his grandparents' murder by Russian police—details which his father, in whose memory they burned like a disease, had never told him.

'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….'

5

Gideon stopped writing, and took Jane's last letter out of his pocket. It occurred to him that he was in no sense answering it. Not that Jane would mind; that wasn't the sort of thing she did mind. But it struck him suddenly how difficult it had grown to him to answer Jane's letters—or, indeed, any one else's. He could not flatter himself that he was already contracting the inarticulate habit, because he could pour forth fluently enough about his own experiences; but to Jane's news of London he had nothing to say. A new paper had been started; another paper had died; some one they knew had deserted from one literary côterie to another; some one else had turned from a dowdy into a nut; Jane had been seeing a lot of bad plays; her novel—'my confused mass of self-expression,' she called it to him—was coming out next week. All the familiar personal, literary, political, and social gossip, which he too had dealt in once; Jane was in the thick of it still, and he was turning stupid, like a man living in the country; he could not answer her. Or, perhaps, would not; because the thing that absorbed him at present was how people lived and thought, and what could be made of them—not the conscious, intellectual, writing, discussing, semi-civilised people (semi-civilised—what an absurd word! What is complete civilisation, that we should bisect it and say we have half, or any other exact fraction? Partly civilised, Gideon amended it to), but the great unconscious masses, hardly civilised at all, who shape things, for good or evil, in the long run.

Gideon folded up Jane's letter and put it away, and to his own added nothing but his love.

6

Jane got that letter in Easter week. It was a fine warm day, and she, walking across Green Park, met Juke, who had been lunching with a bishop to meet an elderly princess who had read his book.

'She said, "I'm afraid you're sadly satirical, Mr. Juke,'" he told Jane. 'She did really. And I'm to preach at Sandringham one Sunday. Yes, to the Family. Tell Gideon that, will you. He'll be so disgusted. But what a chance! Life at St. Anne's is going to be full of chances of slanging the rich, that's one thing about it.'