‘Come on! Let’s make hay of Bolshevism!’ said Dukes.

‘I’m afraid Bolshevism is a large question,’ said Hammond, shaking his head seriously.

‘Bolshevism, it seems to me,’ said Charlie, ‘is just a superlative hatred of the thing they call the bourgeois; and what the bourgeois is, isn’t quite defined. It is Capitalism, among other things. Feelings and emotions are also so decidedly bourgeois that you have to invent a man without them.

‘Then the individual, especially the PERSONAL man, is bourgeois: so he must be suppressed. You must submerge yourselves in the greater thing, the Soviet–social thing. Even an organism is bourgeois: so the ideal must be mechanical. The only thing that is a unit, non–organic, composed of many different, yet equally essential parts, is the machine. Each man a machine–part, and the driving power of the machine, hate...hate of the bourgeois. That, to me, is Bolshevism.’

‘Absolutely!’ said Tommy. ‘But also, it seems to me a perfect description of the whole of the industrial ideal. It’s the factory–owner’s ideal in a nut–shell; except that he would deny that the driving power was hate. Hate it is, all the same; hate of life itself. Just look at these Midlands, if it isn’t plainly written up...but it’s all part of the life of the mind, it’s a logical development.’

‘I deny deny that Bolshevism is logical, it rejects the major part of the premisses,’ said Hammond.

‘My dear man, it allows the material premiss; so does the pure mind...exclusively.’

‘At least Bolshevism has got down to rock bottom,’ said Charlie.

‘Rock bottom! The bottom that has no bottom! The Bolshevists will have the finest army in the world in a very short time, with the finest mechanical equipment.

‘But this thing can’t go on...this hate business. There must be a reaction...’ said Hammond.

‘Well, we’ve been waiting for years...we wait longer. Hate’s a growing thing like anything else. It’s the inevitable outcome of forcing ideas on to life, of forcing one’s deepest instincts; our deepest feelings we force according to certain ideas. We drive ourselves with a formula, like a machine. The logical mind pretends to rule the roost, and the roost turns into pure hate. We’re all Bolshevists, only we are hypocrites. The Russians are Bolshevists without hypocrisy.’

‘But there are many other ways,’ said Hammond, ‘than the Soviet way. The Bolshevists aren’t really intelligent.’

‘Of course not. But sometimes it’s intelligent to be half–witted: if you want to make your end. Personally, I consider Bolshevism half–witted; but so do I consider our social life in the west half–witted. So I even consider our far–famed mental life half–witted. We’re all as cold as cretins, we’re all as passionless as idiots. We’re all of us Bolshevists, only we give it another name. We think we’re gods...men like gods! It’s just the same as Bolshevism. One has to be human, and have a heart and a penis if one is going to escape being either a god or a Bolshevist...for they are the same thing: they’re both too good to be true.’

To Holmes I wrote showing how rapidly and surely I had got down to the roots of the matter. In reply I had a telegram asking for a description of Dr. Shlessinger’s left ear. Holmes’s ideas of humour are strange and occasionally offensive, so I took no notice of his ill-timed jest — indeed, I had already reached Montpellier in my pursuit of the maid, Marie, before his message came.

I had no difficulty in finding the ex-servant and in learning all that she could tell me. She was a devoted creature, who had only left her mistress because she was sure that she was in good hands, and because her own approaching marriage made a separation inevitable in any case. Her mistress had, as she confessed with distress, shown some irritability of temper towards her during their stay in Baden, and had even questioned her once as if she had suspicions of her honesty, and this had made the parting easier than it would otherwise have been. Lady Frances had given her fifty pounds as a wedding-present. Like me, Marie viewed with deep distrust the stranger who had driven her mistress from Lausanne. With her own eyes she had seen him seize the lady’s wrist with great violence on the public promenade by the lake. He was a fierce and terrible man. She believed that it was out of dread of him that Lady Frances had accepted the escort of the Shlessingers to London. She had never spoken to Marie about it, but many little signs had convinced the maid that her mistress lived in a state of continual nervous apprehension. So far she had got in her narrative, when suddenly she sprang from her chair and her face was convulsed with surprise and fear. “See!” she cried. “The miscreant follows still! There is the very man of whom I speak.”

Through the open sitting-room window I saw a huge, swarthy man with a bristling black beard walking slowly down the centre of the street and staring eagerly at the numbers of the houses. It was clear that, like myself, he was on the track of the maid. Acting upon the impulse of the moment, I rushed out and accosted him.

“You are an Englishman,” I said.

“What if I am?” he asked with a most villainous scowl.

“May I ask what your name is?”

“No, you may not,” said he with decision.

The situation was awkward, but the most direct way is often the best.

“Where is the Lady Frances Carfax?” I asked.

He stared at me in amazement.

“What have you done with her? Why have you pursued her? I insist upon an answer!” said I.

The fellow gave a bellow of anger and sprang upon me like a tiger. I have held my own in many a struggle, but the man had a grip of iron and the fury of a fiend. His hand was on my throat and my senses were nearly gone before an unshaven French ouvrier in a blue blouse darted out from a cabaret opposite, with a cudgel in his hand, and struck my assailant a sharp crack over the forearm, which made him leave go his hold. He stood for an instant fuming with rage and uncertain whether he should not renew his attack. Then, with a snarl of anger, he left me and entered the cottage from which I had just come. I turned to thank my preserver, who stood beside me in the roadway.