Downing an Uprising

In a drawing-room where revolution is the season’s must-have accessory, Eddie—equal parts flâneur and fixer—engineers a coup more surgical than any October manifesto. Bolshevism, reduced to parlor game and parlor pink, has infiltrated the lace curtains of his beloved’s manse; slogans replace soirée chatter, crimson banners flutter where chintz once preened. To purge the contagion, Eddie imports a living caricature: Lee’s ragged platoon of hobos, whiskers matted with railroad soot, overcoats exhaling the perfume of freight-car straw. Introduced to the hostesses as “the vanguard,” these scarecrow philosophers upend crystal, gnaw petits-fours like trench rats, and recite manifestos in burp Morse. Yet their anarchy is only skin-deep; mention soap and suds and the entire red menace evaporates, leaving only damp footprints and the faint whiff of turpentine on parquet. The fad is annihilated not by bayonet but by bathwater—an ideological rout as absurd as it is immaculate.