THE SPIDER
The passing of a year added immensely to the fame of the pastor
of the Pilgrim Church. His sermons now reached twenty millions of
people through the daily press every Monday morning. It had become
necessary to issue tickets of admission to the members and admit
them by a small door that was cut beside the large ones.
Van Meter had ceased to be of sufficient importance for serious
notice. The growth of Gordon's influence within the year had been
so rapid, he found he had set out to fight a flea with artillery.
The old man felt his eclipse with bitterness. He had quit talking
much, but writhed in silent fury at the sight of this tall athlete
with his conquering gray eyes and smooth, serious face. Yet he was
a regular attendant. The preacher's eloquence, the vibrant tones
of his voice, full of passion, or trembling with prophetic zeal,
and the whole drama of a living militant church with this daring
revolutionist at its head, risen from the grave of the old, fascinated
him in spite of his hatred.
In the local development of the church Kate Ransom had become,
next to the pastor, the most important factor. She had shown strong
administrative talent, had organized kindergartens, night-schools
for teaching domestic science to girls, established a reading-room,
and opened a coffee house on the corner near the church, fitting
it up with the magnificence of a saloon, with free lunch counter,
music and singing. It was crowded with working-men and women every
night.
Her work had brought her in daily contact with Gordon, and their
comradeship had become so constant and so sweet that neither of
them dared face the problem of its meaning.
To the woman the man had become little less than her God. Their
daily life, its hopes, its poetry, its dreams of social and civic
salvation, were enough in themselves: she did not analyse or
question.
For the man, this fair woman, beautiful in face and form beyond the
flight of his fancy, and loyal in the worship of his strength, as
the soul of the strong man ever desires of his ideal woman, she had
become a daily inspiration. And yet he had not acknowledged this
even in a whisper of his soul.
In the meanwhile, his wife's interest in music had ceased, and she
was rarely seen at the church on Sundays or at its weekday functions.
She had withdrawn from its life and had settled into a state of
somber resentment.
She would frequently sit through a meal eating little, speaking in
monosyllables, her black eyes staring, wide open, and yet seeing
nothing, looking past the things that bound her, back into the
sunlit years of girlhood, or forward into the future whose shadow's
chill she felt already on her soul. Often he found her at night
seated by the window in the dark alone, looking down on the city
below.
She had ceased to ask him of his work or plans and he no longer
troubled her with their discussion. Their lives were separated by
an ever-widening gulf.
Stimulated by a sermon he had preached in August of the previous
summer, when the death-rate was at its highest, a wave of reform
had swept over New York. In his sermon he had arraigned the city
government in terms so trenchant and terrible the people had rallied
as to a trumpet call to battle.
A resistless movement for the overthrow of a corrupt administration
took the city by storm. Day and night with voice and pen, with all
the fire and passion of his magnetic personality, he had led these
assaults.
Complete success crowned the movement. The reform Mayor was elected
by a large majority.
Ten months had passed and the net results were discouraging. Police
scandals ran riot as of yore; gambling, drinking and the social
evil flourished as before; and the press, that had valiantly and
almost unanimously championed Reform, now exhausted upon it the
vocabulary of abuse.
Gordon was disgusted and sickened and felt that one of his fairest
dreams had been shattered forever.
The reaction from this reform programme had thrown him more than
ever back upon his ideas of a Socialistic revolution which should
destroy Commercialism itself, and he had become its enthusiastic
champion.
Kate Ransom had followed his change of views with keenest sympathy.
She had read every book after him and had responded to his every
mood.
"No; we're on the wrong tack, with our half-way measures and our
fitful charities," he said to her.
"We must go deeper. We must make the Fatherhood of God and the
Brotherhood of Man our daily life, not merely a poetic theory.
"We have hundreds of beautiful-souled men and women giving their
lives in sacrifice for the city's poor and fallen. They seem to
make little impression on its ocean of misery. We are bailing out
the sea with teaspoons."
"I feel you are right, as you always are," she responded, unconscious
of the contradiction.
"The Brotherhood of Man and the Solidarity of the Race we must
make vital realities. Greed, commercialism, competition and the
monopolistic instincts are the cause of all this crime and misery
and confusion. Love, not force, must rule the world."
"And you are the prophet to lead humanity into this Kingdom of
Love," she said, her eyes enfolding him with their soft blue light.
"I fear I'm too great a coward for such a task. The man who does
it must break with the past, become accursed for the truth's sake,
defy social law and convention, breast the storm of the world's
hate, die despised, and wait for a nobler generation to place his
name on the roll of the world's heroes."
"It is your work," she cried with elation.
"It's a lonely way for the soul to travel."
"You will have one loyal follower the blackest hour of the darkest
night that comes."
A curious smile played around her full lips, and he looked away,
afraid to say anything.
"Yes, I know that," he softly answered. "And I'm more afraid for
that very reason."
"I'm not afraid." Her voice rang clear and thrilling.
"I wonder if you know the meaning of such words; or if you are
thinking of one thing and I of another?" he slowly asked.
"I dare to think many things I've never dared to say," she replied.
"A break must come sooner or later," he went on. "No man of my
temperament and brain can live under the conditions here, feel the
grip of this cruelty on the throat of humanity, read and think,
and endure it."
"It seems to me a social revolution must come quickly."
"I wondered if you had felt that?" Gordon asked, as he leaned back
in his chair and locked his powerful hands behind his head. "This
presentiment of overwhelming change haunts me day and night and
makes many things seem childish and futile.
"Ill and feverish from overwork one day last week, I stood by my
window, looking down on the city, dreaming and listening to its
cries for help, watching the sweep of the elevated trains coming
and going, and I was overwhelmed with the immensity of its complex
life. Our hurrying cars carry within the corporate limits daily
more passengers than all the railroads of the western hemisphere.
I thought of the rivers of human flesh that flow unceasingly through
its streets and flood its market places. And these millions are
but one wave of the ocean forever breaking on the shores of time,
its tides everlasting, insistent, resistless, never pausing, behind
them the pressure of the heaped centuries, and over them the lowering
clouds of fresh storms soon to burst and add their tons."
He paused and closed his eyes as though to shut out the roar, while
she listened with half-parted lips.
"And as I looked out the window I had a startling experience. I
saw a huge dragon-like beast begin to crawl slowly down from the
hills and stretch his big claws over the housetops of the city below.
I was not asleep or in a trance, but wide awake, only a little
feverish. With increasing horror I watched this monster stretch his
enormous body, covered with scales, and short hair growing between
the scales, on and on, until he covered the city and gathered its
thousands of houses within his huge paws. His eyes were enormous
and blood-red, his breath hot.
"I moved back, gasping with surprise and horror, to find it was
only a spider crawling down his slender thread on the window close
to my eye. It was a fevered delusion, but it haunted me for days,
and haunts me still.
"I am growing in the conviction that the very foundations of morals
are shifting, and that Religion, Society and Civilisation must
readjust themselves or humanity sink into unspeakable degradation.
"Belief in the old religious authority is gone. Our church is thronged
because of a peculiar personal power with which I am endowed. I
could wield that power without a church, society, creed or Bible.
Esthetic forces now draw people to non-ritualistic churches that
once came for prayer and preaching. The preacher must secularise
his sermon or talk to vacant pews. Historic Christianity has been
destroyed by Criticism. A thousand wild Isms nourish in the twilight
of this eclipse of Faith, while Materialism and the Pursuit of
Pleasure strangle out spiritual hopes."
"And you are the seer called to lead out of this chaos," the woman
whispered. "I know this from my own life. But for you I would be
listening to idiotic platitudes, cultivating sham, my very soul
'crucified between a whimper and a smile.' I owe it to you that I
am a woman--not a cross between an angel and an idiot."
The passion with which she said this, bending her beautiful face,
flushed with emotion, so close to his that he caught the perfume
of her mass of waving hair, went to the man's head like wine.
"Why not spring our building scheme on the people at once, without
authority from the Board of Trustees, and make it the rallying cry
of the new Humanity?" he cried eagerly.
"I believe it will succeed," she answered, her heart glowing with
the consciousness of the intimacy of that little word "our" he had
used.
She got pad and pencil, and Gordon dictated to her a plan for
engaging every force of the church and its congregation and various
societies in the project.
He fixed the Sunday on which to make the effort of his life
in his appeal to the people of his congregation and the world for
the million-dollar fund needed. It was eleven o'clock before they
finished the discussion of the scheme, and aglow with enthusiasm
he left for his home.
As he sat down in the car and lived over again his happiness of the
past hours in this woman's companionship the paradox of his return
in a few minutes to the arms of his wife struck him squarely in
the face for the first time.
He could not plead a mistake in his first love. His romance was
genuine. He had loved with all the fire of his youth. The passion
which drew him to Ruth was mutual and resistless. Yet its ardour
had cooled. He could not say it was his fault, not altogether hers.
It seemed as inevitable in its decline as its onrush was resistless.
Yet at the thought of this new woman he felt his heart beat with
quicker stroke. He was older and stronger than the youth of the
past, and the woman more mature in the ripened glory of beauty.
Yet he began to recall with infinite tenderness the love life with
Ruth. Its memories were very real and very sweet. And the faces of
his children haunted him with strange power. The idea of a divorce
from Ruth and the loss of these children cut him with sharp pain.
Had he outgrown his first love? Could he continue to live with one
woman if he loved another? Was not this the one unpardonable sin
and shame? And yet to break that bond and form the other if he could
meant the end of associations in which the fibers of his very life
were wrought.
But was not this one of the burning problems of the new humanity,
this freedom of the soul and body, this new birth into the liberty
and love of a great Brotherhood? Was not sham and hypocrisy now
the law of life, and was not Society perishing because of it?
Thus wrestling with the tragic dilemma he felt closing about him,
he went past his station to the end of the line and had to take
the down train back. It was past midnight when he reached his home.