It was a Sunday afternoon, and the nurse had picked up the worn ward Bible and was reading from it, aloud.  In their rocking chairs in a semi-circle around her were the women, some with sleeping babies in their arms, others with tense, expectant faces.

“Let not your heart be troubled,” read the nurse, in a grave young voice.  “Ye believe in God.  Believe also in Me.  In my Father’s house—­”

There was always God.

Edith Boyd saw her mother in the Father’s house, pottering about some small celestial duty, and eagerly seeking and receiving approval.  She saw her, in some celestial rocking chair, her tired hands folded, slowly rocking and resting.  And perhaps, as she sat there, she held Edith’s child on her knee, like the mothers in the group around the nurse.  Held it and understood at last.

CHAPTER XLII

It was at this time that Doyle showed his hand, with his customary fearlessness.  He made a series of incendiary speeches, the general theme being that the hour was close at hand for putting the fear of God into the exploiting classes for all time to come.  His impassioned oratory, coming at the psychological moment, when the long strike had brought its train of debt and evictions, made a profound impression.  Had he asked for a general strike vote then, he would have secured it.

As it was, it was some time before all the unions had voted for it.  And the day was not set.  Doyle was holding off, and for a reason.  Day by day he saw a growth of the theory of Bolshevism among the so-called intellectual groups of the country.  Almost every university had its radicals, men who saw emerging from Russia the beginning of a new earth.  Every class now had its Bolshevists.  They found a ready market for their propaganda, intelligent and insidious as it was, among a certain liberal element of the nation, disgruntled with the autocracy imposed upon them by the war.

The reaction from that autocracy was a swinging to the other extreme, and, as if to work into the hands of the revolutionary party, living costs remained at the maximum.  The cry of the revolutionists, to all enough and to none too much, found a response not only in the anxious minds of honest workmen, but among an underpaid intelligentsia.  Neither political party offered any relief; the old lines no longer held, and new lines of cleavage had come.  Progressive Republicans and Democrats had united against reactionary members of both parties.  There were no great leaders, no men of the hour.

The old vicious cycle of empires threatened to repeat itself, the old story of the many led by the few.  Always it had come, autocracy, the too great power of one man; then anarchy, the overthrow of that power by the angry mob.  Out of that anarchy the gradual restoration of order by the people themselves, into democracy.  And then in time again, by that steady gravitation of the strong up and the weak down, some one man who emerged from the mass and crowned himself, or was crowned.  And there was autocracy again, and again the vicious circle.