The Spider's Web

by Reginald Wright Kauffman

He was beginning to find out at last the logic that he had sought.

Betty was lost to him, and if she were not lost he must give her up. All that was vital in what he had all along felt for her was only one of the forces that go to make up complete love—right enough, he told himself, when combined with its fellow elements; right enough upon occasion when frankly acknowledged between a free woman and a free man; but, he determined, disastrously insufficient to be made the sole element of anything more than the briefest union between two individuals, and criminal when it was the only motive of but one of the individuals in any union. About what Betty had felt for him he was equally clear; it was another of the forces that compose real love; it was the element of Romance, just as insufficient and just as wrong, when it was alone, or when it existed on the one side only, as was the merely physical. Real love was the fusion of the physical, the romantic, the spiritual and the comradely, the fusion of two people for whom there was but one means of salvation. He knew now, beyond all questioning, that, however they had deceived themselves, Betty's thoughts and his, her hopes and his, her aims and his, her work and his, were and had always been divided beyond the possibility of junction. No marriage service that might have been performed between them could have married but the least of their outlying selves. Not Church and State together could have joined their true selves that, living where there was no church and no state, had yet no natural relationship to each other. Some day real love might come to him; some day it would surely come to Betty. To-day, though it tore his heart, though it was as if he were ripping the heart out of his breast, he must, for Betty's sake—since she was the weaker—even more than for his own, tear her out of his life. His desire for her would long remain; the moments would be full of her when he sank from waking into sleep, or climbed from sleep to waking; but though he might regain the power to enslave her soul and make a servant of the self of which he could not make a work-fellow, to use that power would be to sin against what was best in her. He must not see her again, even were she willing to see him, and he must leave her thinking the worst of him in order that she might the sooner want to forget him.

He tossed the gilt pin out of the window. Following its flight, his glance came again to the worker's necktie, lying in the street.

What right had he over the man who had worn that? What right that he did not have over Betty?

His reason answered: None.

There, he tremendously realized, was the key to his credentials. He leaned heavily against the window-sill. He understood. It was a bitter lesson, but he learned it, there and then.

What he had done to these men was what he had tried to do to Betty, not in the riot only, but in accepting the position that society had offered him in relation to them; it was what every employer, from the actual boss to the smallest shareholder, everywhere was doing. It was living upon the work of others, profiting by values for the creation of which the pay had to be low enough to permit of profit. It was compulsion. If he sold dear what he bought cheap, what was it that he bought cheap but their labor? If he wanted pay for executive ability, what executive ability did he, or any shareholder in any company, exercise? If he claimed a return for the risk of his investment, what return did these men get, who invested that labor-power which was their whole capital? If any stockbuyer talked of profits as the reward of previous years of saving, how could he explain the fact that his savings would secure no profit until they employed labor to produce it? He had been fighting against his own ideals. It was the workers that had been right and he that had been wrong. What the man in russet brown had been to him, that he and all who directly or indirectly employed labor for profit, had been and were to the employed.

So, quite as suddenly as he had come to see life in the new light, he came now, in the little office of the lonely factory, to see the reason from which the light proceeded; there was only one evil in the world and that was Compulsion; only one good, and that was power over one's self.

The awful thing, he said to himself as one who reads what is written, was not to have too little power over others; it was to have too much. To have the means of oppression was to go mad and use them; it was to confuse the means with the right. Too much power over others and too little over himself, both states a result of a system based upon compulsion, had made the man in russet brown all that the man in russet brown had been; it made Luke a potential murderer and ravisher. He saw all life as endlessly creating and no two hours the same. Seeing this, he understood why it was that, when authority was laid upon any one, that one rebelled in proportion to his vitality. He saw the present wrong and the future impotence of churches and laws, of politics, governments, and property. To believe in any one of them, to traffic with any of them, was now to exercise compulsion over his fellows and now to delegate to his fellows his power over himself.

He must give up everything that was easy and comfortable—the easy thought and faith as freely as the easy food and lodging. He must join the oppressed.