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.
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.
